Akira Drake Rodriguez

Background and Research
Akira Drake Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design.  Her research examines the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. She is the author of Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing (UGA Press, 2021), which explores how both the politics of public housing planning and race in Atlanta created a politics of resistance within public housing developments. She is also the lead author of A Green New Deal for K-12 Schools, through her work with the climate + community project. She has received funding from the Spencer Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania’s Environmental Innovation Initiative and Projects for Progress to support her work around school facilities planning in Philadelphia public schools. Her next book manuscript examines the role of Black women community organizers in producing collective care in the built environment with the absence of capital and presence of harm over the 20^th century. 

Education
PhD, Urban Planning and Policy, Rutgers University
MPA, Public Administration, University of Pennsylvania
BS, Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Courses Taught at the Weitzman School