Toni L. Griffin
Professor in Practice of Urban Planning
- Design & Social Equity
- Risk & Resilience
Toni L. Griffin is Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and faculty affiliate of the Bloomberg Center on Cities. Her teaching portfolio includes cross-disciplinary option studios, MDes open projects, and seminars devoted to gentrification, neighborhood change and design for the just city. Toni also served as coordinator for the first semester MUP core studio and was founding domain head for the MDes Publics domain.
In addition to teaching, Toni is the founding director of the Just City Lab, a research platform that investigates how design’s impact on social and spatial justice in cities. In 2020, the Lab launched the Just City Mayoral Fellowship program, a partnership with the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, NEA, and US Conference of Mayors. Each year, eight mayors are selected to engage in an 11-week hybrid course designed to elevate their knowledge of design, planning and development through the lens of reparative social and justice.
Ms. Griffin is also founder of urban american city (urbanAC LLC), a planning and design practice working with public, private, and nonprofit partners to reimage, reshape, and rebuild more just cities and communities. urbanAC leads transformative projects rooted in addressing historic and current disparities involving race, class, and culture. The firm collaborates with cities on the cusp of just social and economic recovery that seek reparative approaches to public policy, land use, urban design, development and program design and evaluation. Toni has also served as strategic advisor to several philanthropic organizations including The Heinz Endowments, the Williams Penn Foundation, Surdna Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Kresge Foundation, each looking to more deeply embed principles of just and equitable impact into their grant making and evaluation criteria for investing in urban development, wealth creation and capacity building.
urbanAC and the Just City Lab together function as exploratory platforms, where we work with city stakeholders across all sectors to push the boundaries of design intervention in ways that get closer to our intentions and desired outcomes for justice. We pushed the physical boundaries of the Chouteau Greenway project in St. Louis to include historically excluded neighborhoods. We pushed the boundaries of identity in Rochester, NY by designing a new public space that unearths multiple cultural histories – shared and contested. We are pushing the boundaries of collective land ownership in Chicago and Detroit as a portfolio of community-controlled land and building assets. We are pushing boundaries in Pittsburgh to develop a groundbreaking comprehensive plan for the city rooted in new land use typologies that confront both current and historic economic, environmental and discriminatory harms. We view our work as movement-building, modeling a different form of practice and research, experimenting with tools we hope others will use and adapt, and by convening designers, policy makers and civic leaders to enact the disruptive change required to achieve more just cities.
Toni’s current practice is built upon her early expertise and experience as a licensed architect and Associate Partner at Skidmore Owings & Merrill, and later as a public official serving in senior planning and community development director roles in Washington, DC and Newark, New Jersey working to shape equitable growth and design excellence. She has authored articles on design justice, including co-editor of The Just City Essays and has received numerous awards, including the Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award and the Architectural Record 2024 Women in Architecture award. She has lectured extensively in the US, Netherlands, South Africa, and South America, and served as an Obama Presidential appointee to the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts 2016-2020.
Courses
Projects
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Urban Planning and Mental Wellness in Black Communities
Mary Louise Chatters Taylor (MUP '21), Toni L. Griffin
