Anna Livia Brand

Dr. Anna Livia Brand is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

Her work focuses on the intersection of race and space, specifically looking at historic black mecca neighborhoods and how they change through processes of redevelopment and resistance. Her comparative research focuses on cities in the American North and South, including New Orleans and Chicago. This work highlights the ongoing spatial impacts and shifting spatial logics of racial processes, while simultaneously tracing resistance to these processes over time. Within this work, she is concerned with the role that urban planning and design might play in liberatory geographies. Brand is interested in everyday landscapes and built environments, from the materiality and local geography that supports and sustains us to the ways that people shape and create a place for themselves, including the ways that that people are imagining more socially just places and communities. Her background is in urban planning and design and she has worked professionally as both a planner and designer. She lives with her two sons, Luka and Artie, in the Bay Area.