Linda C. Samuels

Linda C. Samuels is professor and chair of urban design at the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis and the inaugural Director of Sustainable Design and Environmental Justice. Samuels’s research focuses on infrastructural opportunism—leveraging investment in large-scale systems to create more socially and environmentally productive public works. She teaches interdisciplinary urban design studios and seminars on infrastructural urbanism, urban history and theory, and alternative sustainability metrics. Samuels is the founder and director of Infra_OPTS, an independent consulting firm working in St. Louis and Los Angeles focused on the design, mapping, and metrics of public infrastructure to create more equitable cities. In 2023, she completed an Infrastructure Equity Scorecard Pilot Project for the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering and Mayor’s Office and a produce recovery and distribution mapping project for nonprofit Food Forward. Samuels was co-principal investigator on a grant from The Divided City initiative entitled Mobility For All By All, a multidisciplinary project aiming to increase the benefits of St. Louis MetroLink expansion for local residents living along the alignment. Emphasizing innovative challenges and real-world collaboration in her teaching, studio partners have included the Festival Trail (Los Angeles Olympics), the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) at Fly Ranch, Virgin Hyperloop One (Los Angeles/Las Vegas), and local partners Bi-State Development and Dutchtown South Community Corporation. In 2026, Samuels was named the 2026 Researcher-in-Residence by the SOM Foundation and MAK Center for Art and Architecture.

Previously, Samuels was the director of the Sustainable City Project at the University of Arizona and a Senior Research Associate at UCLA’s cityLAB where she co-developed and co-ran the WPA 2.0 design competition. Her publications include, among others, “A Case for Infrastructural Opportunism” (TAD: Technology I Architecture + Design), and “Measuring What Matters: The True Cost of St. Louis’s New National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency” (2023) with Bomin Kim in a special issue on reparations for the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). Her book, Infrastructural Optimism, is available now from Routledge.