José L.S. Gámez

José L.S. Gamez is a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design in the School of Architecture at UNC Charlotte. He has served as the Interim Director and as the Associate Director of the School as well as a Research Fellow with both UNC Charlotte’s Institute for Social Capital and Urban Institute. He also served as an Interim Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs in the College of Arts and Architecture at UNC Charlotte and as a Provost’s Faculty Fellow and he was the 2015 recipient of the Provost’s Award for Community Engagement. His research explores questions of culture in architecture and urbanism through action-based research and public scholarship. His work has been published in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Places: A Forum of Environmental Design, The Journal of Urbanism, The Journal of Applied Geography, and The Plan Journal. He is the co-editor/author of the Vertical Urbanism: Designing Compact Cities in China and Rio de Janeiro: Urban Expansion and Environment and he has contributed essays to books such as Writing Urbanism: A Design Reader, Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism, Charlotte, NC: The Global Rise of a New South City, and Latino Urbanism: The Politics of Planning, Policy and Redevelopment. His design contributions to the work of assemblageSTUDIO have been featured in New Museums: Contemporary Museum Architecture Around the World, Models: Architecture and the Miniature and Architectural Record. Prior to joining the faculty at UNC Charlotte, he taught at Portland State University and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He received his Bachelor of Environmental Design from Texas A&M, his Master of Architecture from UC Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of California at Los Angeles.