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PhD candidate Caroline Filice Smith receives 2022 Carter Manny Award Citation of Special Recognition

Caroline Filice Smith (MAUD ’17), a doctoral candidate in urban planning and the 2022–2023 Democracy Doctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, was recently honored with a Carter Manny Award citation of special recognition from the Graham Foundation. Established in 1996, the Carter Manny Award program supports the completion of outstanding doctoral dissertations on architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The only pre-doctoral award dedicated exclusively to architectural scholarship, it recognizes emerging scholars whose work promises to challenge and reshape contemporary discourse and impact the field at large.

Smith’s work focuses on racialized histories of urban design across the US and its empire, histories of activist planner-architects, and reparative and abolitionist models of urban design. Smith teaches and conducts research as part of the GSD’s Urban Design and the Color Line project and has recently completed an open-source anti-racist planning toolkit with the High Line Network and the Urban Institute, and a report for the Architectural League of New York on landscape and community-led, post-coal futures for Appalachia. A 2022–2023 Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative doctoral fellow and former Irving Innovations Fellow, Smith has received funding from the Knight Foundation, the Warren Center for American Studies, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. They hold a master of architecture in urban design from the GSD and a bachelor of architecture from Virginia Tech. Smith spent five years in professional architectural practice—most of which was spent working for UNStudio at their Shanghai office.

The 2022 Carter Manny Awards, along with the seven citations of special recognition, were selected by an external panel of scholars: Lawrence Chua (associate professor, School of Architecture, Syracuse University); Pamela Karimi (professor of art history and interim chair, College of Visual and Performing Arts, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth); and Jamila Moore Pewu (assistant professor of digital humanities and new media in history, Department of History, California State University, Fullerton).

Learn more about the full list of grants to organizations and individuals on the Graham Foundation website.