Cities and the Environment Symposium

Thursday, November 20, 2025
8:00 a.m. — 5:00 p.m.
University Hall, Ahmanson Auditorium

The LMU Center for Urban Resilience (CURes) is delighted to invite you to join us at our inaugural Cities and the Environment symposium!

For 18 years, the CATE Journal has provided an international forum for urban researchers and practitioners to explore social-ecological theories, share relevant data, and exchange best practices. Peer-reviewed articles are open access for readers and include no page charges for contributing author. This has allowed for broad participation from academics and community-based practitioners from across the Global North and Global South—Volume 17 (2024) included 14 papers featuring cities from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. At the same time, the journal has promoted communities of practice with special issues focusing on topics such as urban rewilding, urban ecosystem management, urban forestry, and many more.

Founded in 2011, LMU CURes partners with communities to promote resilience by providing social-ecological research, nature-based solutions, and education services. We pursue this mission in collaboration with inspirational, innovative, and impactful organizations across sectors and scales that work to build a better world in the face of many challenges. We often find this work is not shared widely; perhaps because those doing it are focused on tackling the next challenge, rather than highlighting past successes. Yet we know we are stronger when we “stand on the shoulders of giants,” learning from and uplifting the experiences of others.

As we approach two decades of the publication and 15 years of operation for CURes, we are convening researchers, practitioners, and community members in Los Angeles on November 20, 2025 to celebrate past successes and future growth and collaboration.

This is a free, public symposium featuring opening remarks, an afternoon poster session, and a day filled with 19 talks from speakers representing local-global universities, community-based environmental organizations, public agencies, and the private sector. The final program schedule will be posted here once finalized. Talks will be grouped into four sessions around the following topics:

Biodiversity / Greening
Biodiversity / Wildlife
Environmental Equity and Community Stewardship
Urban Forestry and Wildfire

Following the symposium, all presenters will be invited to submit their poster or a paper to a special issue of the Cities and the Environment Journal showcasing the conference proceedings.

Meals and free parking will be provided to all attendees, thanks to the support of sponsors including Edison International and TreePeople, and we are able to provide a limited number of travel scholarships for attendees who do not live locally and do not have institutional funding. We will share more information about this upon request.

The symposium is free and open to the public. Registration is now closed; please contact Roya.Shahnazari@lmu.edu with any questions.