The Urban Works Agency (UWA) is a research lab at California College of the Arts in San Francisco that leverages architectural design to affect social justice, ecological vitality, and economic resilience at the urban scale.

UWA believes that complex and often invisible forces shaping cities today require that designers test new strategies of engaging laws, markets, and publics. In this spirit, the lab is dedicated to shaping both the spaces and protocols of the built environment, from the scale of furniture to cities and territories at large, and across private practice, municipal agencies, and entrepreneurial ventures.

UWA works with interdisciplinary partners to produce original research and design projects disseminated through books, exhibitions, and interactive media. The lab also runs symposia, design studios, seminars, and a post-professional degree program, which engage students as active agents in dialog with the entrepreneurial and counter-cultural legacies of the Bay Area. UWA's current investigations include housing affordability and collective living, climate risk, pop-up urbanism, and the politics of energy, water and resource management.