David de la Peña, PhD, Architect

Architect, PhD, Associate Professor at UC Davis

Barcelona Summer Abroad 2026

We’re headed back to Barcelona in July, 2026 to learn about housing and urbanism in this great city. This is…

Designers and planners need new frameworks and better tools for engaging with communities. Simply going to a community and holding…

Welcome to Barcelona, I hope this helps you get around easily. Barcelona is a city I first fell in love…

In October, Professor de la Peña traveled to Mexico to deliver a keynote talk on participatory design and to facilitate…

Since 2015, I have been involved with the Sustainable Living and Learning Communities at UC Davis. In 2018, I led a year-long…

Project Summary and Letter of Support Since the mid 1990s, gardeners in the River Garden Estates neighborhood of north Sacramento…

I’ve been to my fair share of community meetings. To be fair, I’ve organized too many to count. And honestly,…

Update: Check out some of the work from our class: grassrootsbarcelona.wordpress.com Look up from your tapas and watch the flow of…

Last week I strolled through an experiment happening in the industrial Poble Nou neighborhood of Barcelona—a “Superilla” or “Super-island” where…

by James Rojas and David de la Peña Envisioning a Region It’s not easy for people to envision the region…