Mayors Imagining the Just City: Volume 5

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Event Description

Kicking off the fifth annual Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) Just City Mayoral Fellowship—a collaboration between MICD and Harvard GSD’s Just City Lab—speakers will discuss strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial, social, and environmental injustice in our cities.

Speakers

Jake Day Secretary Jacob R. (Jake) Day leads the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development and serves as a member of Governor Wes Moore’s Cabinet. As a member of the Governor’s Executive Council, Secretary Day is the Governor’s senior advisor on housing and place-based economic development. He is also the chief executive officer of the State’s housing finance agency, managing $2.5 Billion in annual spending, $9 Billion in assets, and more than 500 staff members. Prior to his nomination to lead the Department, Secretary Day served as the 28th Mayor of Salisbury, Maryland. Born and raised in Salisbury, he previously served as City Council President.

Tiffany Chu Tiffany Chu is the Chief of Staff to Mayor Michelle Wu. Tiffany comes from a background in design, urban planning, and entrepreneurship. Prior to joining the City of Boston, she was the CEO & Co-founder of Remix, a collaborative software platform for transportation planning used by 500+cities around the world. Previously, Tiffany was at Code for America, Y Combinator, Zipcar, and Continuum. She’s been named in Forbes’ 30 Under 30, LinkedIn’s Next Wave of Leaders Under 35, and featured at SXSW, Helsinki Design Week, the New York Times Cities for Tomorrow Conference, and more.

“D.C” Reeves D.C. Reeves has been mayor of Pensacola since November 2022. His focus is on public safety, economic development and maintenance of city assets. Previously, Reeves was a sports journalist, author, community builder and entrepreneur. He also served as the CEO at The Spring Entrepreneur Hub advocating for small businesses in Pensacola. In 2017, Reeves founded Perfect Plain Brewing Co., which quickly became a staple of downtown Pensacola and one of Florida’s busiest craft beer taprooms. The business expanded to four locations and had over 40 employees before. sold to New Orleans-based Urban South Brewery. D.C.’s community focus led him to serve as board chairman of Visit Pensacola, Pensacola’s tourism marketing organization, in 2021. He was named 2021 Emerging Leader of the Year by the Greater Pensacola Chamber of Commerce.

Moderator

Katie Swenson A nationally recognized design leader, researcher, writer, and educator, Katie Swenson has served as a Senior Principal of MASS Design Group since 2020. Katie has over 20 years of experience in the theoretical and practical application of design thinking and is a talented global public speaker and thought leader. A prolific writer, she authored Design with Love: At Home in America, and In Bohemia: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Kindness, and co-authored Growing Urban Habitats: Seeking a Housing Development Model. Katie was awarded the AIA Award for Excellence in Public Architecture in 2021. Prior to joining MASS, Katie was the vice president of Design & Sustainability at Enterprise Community Partners, where, as a member of the second class, she led the Enterprise Rose Fellowship. Katie lives in New York City, where she serves on the board of the Van Alen Institute and teaches at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design.

Partners

At the Just City Lab, we ask: Would we design better places if we put the values of equality, inclusion, or equity first? If a community articulated what it stood for, what it believed in, what it aspired to be — as a city, as a neighborhood — would it have a better chance of creating and sustaining a more healthy, vibrant place with positive economic, health, civic, cultural, and environmental conditions? Imagine that the issues of race, income, education, and unemployment inequality, and the resulting segregation, isolation, and fear, could be addressed by planning and designing for greater access, agency, ownership, beauty, diversity, or empowerment. Now, imagine the Just City: the cities, neighborhoods, and public spaces that thrive using a value-based approach to urban stabilization, revitalization, and transformation. Imagine a set of values that would define a community’s aspiration for the Just City. Imagine we can assign metrics to measure design’s impact on justice. Imagine we can use these findings to deploy interventions that minimize conditions of injustice.

With a belief in the power of city design to transform communities, the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) educates mayors to be the chief urban designers of their cities. Since 1986, we’ve offered collaborative learning programs and resources to mayors in order to make a purposeful, positive impact on America.

Announcing the Harvard GSD Spring 2024 Public Program

Mayors Imagining the Just City: Volume 4

 

Event Description

Concluding the fourth annual Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) Just City Mayoral Fellowship–a collaboration between MICD and Harvard GSD’s Just City Lab –the Fellows discuss strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial, social, and environmental injustice in each of their cities.

Speakers

Mayor Matt Tuerk, Allentown, PA As Allentown’s 43rd Mayor and its inaugural Latino leader, Matt Tuerk, armed with an International Business degree and an MBA, leverages his expertise in economic development. His governance emphasizes strategic planning, budget management, and cross-disciplinary collaboration, resulting in notable enhancements to public safety, public works, and public health. Beyond leadership, Tuerk, an enthusiastic runner, language lover, and family man, truly embodies the commitment of a leader devoted to shaping his community’s future.

 

Mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud, Dearborn, MI Abdullah H. Hammoud, serving as Dearborn, MI’s seventh Mayor since January 2021, prioritizes co-governance with the public to foster a multiethnic democracy. As an epidemiologist deeply engaged in environmental advocacy, he passionately safeguards Michigan’s land, air, and water, advocating for healthier environments for children. A three-time University of Michigan graduate with MBA, MPH, and Bachelor of Science degrees, Hammoud, a proud son of immigrants, alongside his wife, Dr. Fatima Beydoun, is dedicated to raising their family in Dearborn while advocating for families citywide.

 

Mayor Sharetta Smith, Lima, OH Sharetta Smith, Lima’s 59th Mayor and the first woman and African American in the role, previously served as Chief of Staff, focusing on housing, afterschool programs, and modernizing city operations. In her mayoral role, she prioritizes citizen engagement, supports small businesses, promotes homeownership, and tackles crime comprehensively. With degrees from the University of Toledo and Ohio Northern University, Smith actively contributes to community betterment through involvement in various boards and committees.

 

Mayor Rex Richardson, Long Beach, CA Rex Richardson, Long Beach’s 29th Mayor, is dedicated to community empowerment. The first African American Mayor in the city’s history and a former City Councilmember, he advocates positive change, collaborating with neighborhood leaders on public safety, economic, and community investments. Nationally, he advises the United States Conference of Mayors, while regionally, he serves on the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency. As the leader of the 42nd most populous city, Richardson focuses on his “Opportunity Beach” Agenda, addressing homelessness, economic recovery, public safety, youth development, and environmental sustainability.

 

Mayor Remy Drabkin, McMinnville, Oregon Mayor Remy Drabkin of McMinnville, Oregon, a dedicated public servant for over 12 years, is the city’s first female, Jewish, and queer-identified Mayor. Serving on the City Council and Planning Commission, she established the Affordable Housing Commission and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) Advisory Committee. As a housing advocate, her policies have provided shelter and aided in transitioning people out of homelessness. Remy actively engages in state-level advocacy, appointed by Governor Brown as a Director on the Oregon Wine Board. Co-founder of Wine Country Pride, she promotes LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations and established the world’s first Queer Wine Fest through her winery, Remy Wines, emphasizing sustainability and carbon sequestration.

 

Mayor Cory Mason, Racine, WI Cory Mason, a fifth-generation Racine, Wisconsin resident, has dedicated over 17 years to serving his hometown as both a Wisconsin State Legislature member and its 61st Mayor. Re-elected six times to the State Assembly, he secured the Mayor’s office in a 2017 special election. Focused on rebuilding the middle class and promoting economic growth through technology and public-private partnerships, Mayor Mason recently started his second full four-year term. A Racine Case High School graduate, he holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and is a devoted family man.

 

Mayor Kate Colin, San Rafael, CA In 2020, Kate Colin made history as the first female Mayor of San Rafael since its incorporation in 1847. Serving on the City Council since 2013 and previously as a Planning Commissioner for 8 years, she has repositioned city goals to prioritize economic growth, homelessness/housing, sustainability, and social justice. Mayor Kate fosters community engagement through initiatives like the Public Arts Review Board and Police Advisory Accountability Committee. As Chair of the San Rafael Sanitation Agency, she represents the city on various regional boards, advocating for gun safety and leading the city’s first Economic Strategic Plan.

 

 

Moderator

Toni L. Griffin is Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and the founder of Urban Planning and Design for the American City , based in New York.  Through the practice, Toni served as Project Director the long-range planning initiative of the Detroit Work Project, and in 2013 completed and released Detroit Future City, a comprehensive citywide framework plan for urban transformation. Most recent clients include working with the cities of Memphis, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh.

Ms. Griffin was recently a Professor of Architecture and the founding Director of the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York.  Founded in 2011, the Bond Center is dedicated to the advancement of design practice, education, research, and advocacy in ways that build and sustain resilient and just communities, cities, and regions. Currently, the Center is focused on several design research initiatives including the Legacy City Design Initiative, that explores innovative design solutions for cities that have lost greater than 20% population lost since their peak;  “Just City Design Indicators Project” that seeks to define the core values of a just city and offer a performance measure tool to assist cities and communities with evaluating how design facilitates urban justice in the built environment; and “Inclusion in Architecture” that examines the participation of people of color in architecture and related design fields.

 

 

 

Partners

The Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) is a leadership initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the United States Conference of Mayors. Since 1986, the Mayors’ Institute has helped transform communities through design by preparing mayors to be the chief urban designers of their cities.

 

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is the independent federal agency, established by Congress in 1965, whose funding and support gives Americans the opportunity to participate in the arts, exercise their imaginations, and develop their creative capacities. Through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector, the NEA supports arts learning, affirms and celebrates America’s rich and diverse cultural heritage, and extends its work to promote equal access to the arts in every community across America.

 

The United States Conference of Mayors (USCM) is the official nonpartisan organization of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. USCM promotes effective national urban/suburban policy, strengthens federal/city relationships, ensures that federal policy meets urban needs, provides mayors with leadership and management tools, and creates a forum in which mayors can share ideas and information.

 

At the Just City Lab, we ask: Would we design better places if we put the values of equality, inclusion or equity first? If a community articulated what it stood for, what it believed in, what it aspired to be — as a city, as a neighborhood — would it have a better chance of creating and sustaining more healthy, vibrant place with positive, economic, health, civic, cultural and environmental conditions? Imagine that the issues of race, income, education and unemployment inequality, and the resulting segregation, isolation and fear, could be addressed by planning and designing for greater access, agency, ownership, beauty, diversity or empowerment. Now imagine the Just City: the cities, neighborhoods and public spaces that thrive using a value-based approach to urban stabilization, revitalization and transformation. Imagine a set of values that would define a community’s aspiration for the Just City. Imagine we can assign metrics to measure design’s impact on justice. Imagine we can use these findings to deploy interventions that minimize conditions of injustice.

 

Announcing the Harvard GSD Fall 2023 Public Program

The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) announces its Fall 2023 schedule of public programs and exhibitions. Many of the season’s initiatives reflect on the relationship between design and the public good. Pritzker Architecture Prize recipient Shigeru Ban will present a lecture on balancing architectural practice and social engagement (September 19). Angela D. Brooks, housing justice advocate and president of the American Planning Association, will deliver the Rachel Dorothy Tanur Memorial Lecture (November 1). Featuring keynote speakers Germane Barnes, Renata Cherlise, Nina Cooke John, and Bryan Mason, the fifth biannual Black in Design conference (September 22–24), explores the multidimensionality of “The Black Home.” Rethinking the space of law and punishment is the focus of the Carceral Landscapes symposium (October 12–13), co-organized by the GSD and the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard Law School.

The program launches on September 12 with a release event for Harvard Design Magazine #51: “Multihyphenate,”  featuring guest editors Sean Canty, Assistant Professor of Architecture, and John May, Associate Professor of Architecture, both from the GSD, and Zeina Koreitem, design faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). The associated exhibition Multihyphenation will be on display at the Druker Design Gallery August 30 through October 9, 2023.

The climate emergency provides an urgent touchstone for other programs, including the exhibition Our Artificial Nature: Perspectives on Design for an Era of Environmental Change (opening October 26). The presentation will spotlight research conducted at the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities . In tandem with the exhibition, the GSD will host Carson Chan, curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who will engage GSD faculty in a conversation about past design speculations, current research, and practice. Kongjian Yu, Professor and Dean, College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Peking University, will lecture on ecological urbanism (September 14), and Tomás Folch, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture at the GSD, will discuss water in Andean cities (November 3).

The complete public program calendar appears below and can be viewed on Harvard GSD’s events calendar. Please visit Harvard GSD’s home page to sign up to receive periodic emails about the School’s public programs, exhibitions, and other news.

Fall 2023 Public Program

Multihyphenation
Exhibition associated with Harvard Design Magazine #51: “Multihyphenate”
Druker Design Gallery
August 30–October 9

Harvard Design Magazine #51: “Multihyphenate,” issue launch with editors Sean Canty, Zeina Koreitem, and John May
Frances Loeb Library
September 12, 12:30pm

Kongjian Yu
Sylvester Baxter Lecture
September 14, 6:30pm

Shigeru Ban, “Balancing Architectural Works and Public Contributions”
September 19, 6:30pm

Black in Design 2023: The Black Home
September 22–24
Tickets available through the conference website

Irma Boom and Remment Koolhaas, “Bookmaking”
September 27, 6:30pm

Michele De Lucchi, “Earth Stations: Future Sharing Architecture”
September 28, 6:30pm

Anita Berrizbeitia, “The Blue Hills: Charles Eliot’s Design Experiment (1893–1897)”
Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture
October 10, 6:30pm

Carceral Landscapes 
Symposium
October 12–13
This event is co-organized by the GSD and the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard Law School

David Gissen in conversation with Sara Hendren
Loeb Lecture
October 17, 6:30pm

Manuel Salgado, “City Making”
Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture
October 24, 6:30pm

Our Artificial Nature: Perspectives on Design for an Era of Environmental Change 
Exhibition
Druker Design Gallery
October 26–December 21

Angela D. Brooks
Rachel Dorothy Tanur Memorial Lecture
November 1, 6:30pm

Tomás Folch, “Hydraulic Geographies: Atlas of the Urban Water in the Andean Region”
Kiley Fellow Lecture, Room 112 Stubbins
November 3, 12:30pm

Lina Ghotmeh, “Living in Symbiosis–an Archeology of the Future”
November 6, 6:30pm

Pier Vittorio Aureli, “The Longhouse”
November 9, 6:30pm

Catherine Mosbach, “Design is a Language being Receptive being in Motion”
Aga Khan Program Lecture
November 14, 6:30pm

Opening of Our Artificial Nature: Perspectives on Design for an Era of Environmental Change
Thursday, November 16, 6:30pm
Conversation co-organized by the GSD and the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities and moderated by Carson Chan, Director, Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment, MoMA

All programs take place in Piper Auditorium, are open to the public, and will be simultaneously streamed to the GSD’s website, unless otherwise noted.

Registration is not required, unless otherwise noted. Please see individual event pages for full details and the most up-to-date information.

 

Interview with Toni Griffin: A Spotlight on the MDes Degree Publics Domain

How is a public constituted, both spatially and socially? How does the public become legible and desirable? For whom does it exist? These are some of the questions that animate Toni Griffin’s proseminar “Of the Public. In the Public. By the Public” at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Toni Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at Harvard GSD, specializes in leading complex, transdisciplinary planning, and urban design projects for multi-sector clients in cities with long histories of spatial and social injustice. The proseminar course draws from scholars, practitioners, and urban planners to build foundational intelligence and provocative interpretations of the plural meanings of public.

Griffin is Domain Head for Publics, one of four concentrations in the Master in Design Studies (MDes) at GSD. The program challenges conventional ways of learning and prepares students to understand how design shapes and influences the underlying processes of contemporary life. The program is uniquely situated at the GSD to draw on insights from a multitude of fields and expertise to break down the silos between disciplines and develop a holistic understanding of complex issues. Through fieldwork, fabrication, collaboration, and dissemination, the program is aimed at those who want to develop expertise in design practice while gaining tools to enable a wide range of career paths. Students select one of four domains of study—Ecologies, Narratives, Publics, and Mediums—and undertake a core set of courses, including labs, seminars, workshops, initiatives, publications, and ongoing projects that connect advanced research methods and related topical courses. Uniquely, trajectories within each domain allow students to construct their own interdisciplinary tracks and take part in course offerings across the GSD, as well as other schools and departments at Harvard.

Many of these core concepts resonate with Grffin’s practice. She is founder of urbanAC , based in New York, and leads the Just City Lab , a research platform for developing values-based planning methodologies and tools, including the Just City Index and a framework of indicators and metrics for evaluating public life and urban justice in public plazas.

Harvard GSD’s Joshua Machat spoke with Toni Griffin about the MDes program, open projects, and how the Publics domain set out to explore the socio-spatial design, planning, implementation, and advocacy.

Joshua Machat: Why do you think the Publics domain is of interest to architects who are still in the early parts of their professional careers?

Toni Griffin: They appear to be architects who are no longer satisfied with traditional modes of architecture, which tend to focus on the building and the outcome. They’re more interested in the forces that shape architecture and the built environment. And they’re interested in the impact of that architecture on society, people, and place. Architecture, particularly in its pedagogy in undergraduate and graduate programs—and sometimes even in practice—doesn’t address those issues sufficiently. I’m finding that applicants are looking to round out their understanding of how the built world is produced through architecture and/or other disciplines. Who is involved in that work, who’s impacted in that work, who does that work benefit, and who gets to decide, are all part of their curiosities.

Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thinking is a critical part of contemporary problem-solving in design. Can you explain how this approach is integrated into the Publics domain?

I do it perhaps in a couple of ways in the proseminar, which is divided into six modules. “To be Public”, which is about how we bring our individual identities, cultures, and backgrounds into the public realm. “Of the Public”, which is about the data, knowledge, memories, that we place into the public realm. “By the Public”, which is about public governance. “For the Public”, which is about the things that the public sector provides for society, cities, and neighborhoods. “With the Public” is about engagement, participation, and power. “In the Public” is about how creatives and designers place things in the public realm.

We have two guest speakers who come and speak on each of those modules. They tend to come from two disciplinary perspectives: two different disciplines are in dialogue about a particular topic every other week. Secondly, the students are put into teams, and they have to co-facilitate a class where they lead the discussion, not me. This requires them to work together. Because the students come from different backgrounds and experiences—whether different genders, ethnicities, nationalities, or disciplines—they often forge a cross-identity and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

The advance of the just city is at the core of your Publics proseminar. The Mayors Imagining the Just City Symposium was held in April and MICD Fellows discussed strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial injustice in each of their respective cities. How did this conversation support the Publics proseminar learning objectives?   

The Mayors Imagining the Just City public event is a part of the Mayor’s Institute on City Design (MICD) Just City Mayoral Fellowship program, which I lead through the Just City Lab. This is the third year of the fellowship in which eight mayors participate in an eleven-week online curriculum centered on best practices and examples of how urban planning, design, and development—the work that mayors lead—can achieve greater social and spatial justice.

During the closing session, when the mayors come back to Cambridge to present their projects and get feedback from eight resource experts, we end the program with a public program and presentation to give the GSD community exposure and access to city leaders and the roles that they play in building cities in collaboration with practitioners of the disciplines we offer at the GSD.

The learning objective is to create greater understanding around how public government, and specifically mayors, lead and shape this type of work. The event exposes students and the rest of the GSD community to the complexity of decision making around resources, choices, policies, and priorities that are helping to address issues in chronically disinvested neighborhoods and/or populations that have historically been marginalized through racially exclusionary and discriminatory practices.

It’s always my interest to expose students to other modes of practice, like the public sector, and the ways in which architects, landscape architects, and urban planners might find themselves situated in a public sector role—even running for mayor—and the ways in which their expertise can be useful within government, and not always as a consultant to government.

What do you think are the most distinguishing qualities of the MDes degree program at the GSD?

What makes the MDes program so attractive to students, and to me, is that it’s the most entrepreneurial design degree that we offer. Being a part of the program requires students to be comfortable with self-directing their journey through the four semesters. Students’ ability to choose a substantial number of your courses, across the departments at the GSD, across Harvard, and even some at MIT, is just amazing. It parallels how you might do a doctorate. It’s very self-directed. The beauty is in all the choices you get to make to inform your own intellectual curiosity. The challenge of that is all the courses on offer that you just won’t have time to do. It’s an embarrassment of riches and an extraordinary luxury students have that sometimes causes them a little bit of angst. But ultimately, they end up quite satisfied with the volume of choices.

I also like that the program includes students who have been out in the world working for some time alongside some students who are just coming out of their undergrad. I think that world experience, whether it’s two years or fourteen years, adds a lot to the depth of conversation. Students don’t realize that we as teachers are just as engaged in what they bring to the discussion as we give to them; in fact, it is a reciprocal relationship that makes for the best classroom environment.

The GSD is one of the most student-engaged design programs that I’ve ever been a part of. Students are very proactive through clubs, volunteer efforts, the production of their own events, and discussion groups. That brings a unique energy to the school and can drive change within the school. Students have a level of agency that allows them to feel very connected to each other and the GSD community, both during their time in the program and even after as alumni.

Announcing the Harvard GSD Spring 2023 Public Program

The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) launches its spring 2023 public program with the opening of the exhibition Grand Paris Express: Reconfiguring the City through Radical Infrastructure, on display through March 31, 2023. A lecture and reception are scheduled for March 2, and an afternoon of workshops surrounding the large-scale transit project will follow on March 3. The Grand Paris Express is the winner of the 2023 Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design .

Other highlights include: Kotchakorn Voraakhom, who will present a lecture on the challenges that water-based cities face when addressing climate change (January 31). Adèle Naudé Santos will deliver the Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture entitled “Narrative Maps: A Design Process” (February 14). For the John Hejduk Soundings Lecture, Stan Allen will discuss his recent book Situated Objects (February 7). Kofi Boone will speak on environmental injustice in landscape architecture and urban planning for the Sylvester Baxter Lecture (February 16).  Andrew Bernheimer will present the annual John T. Dunlop Lecture (March 28), with a talk titled “Where is the Architecture? Finding Design and Community Amidst Constraints,” followed by a discussion with Jill Crawford, Marc Norman, and Daniel, D’Oca. And Rouse Visiting Artist Abraham Cruzvillegas will present a lecture titled “Centring: A Definitely Unfinished and Temporary Structure for Art Making” (April 13).

The complete public program calendar appears below and can be viewed on Harvard GSD’s events calendar. Please visit Harvard GSD’s home page to sign up to receive periodic emails about the School’s public programs, exhibitions, and other news.

Spring 2023 Public Program

Kotchakorn Voraakhom, “LANDPROCESS: The Global and Local Climate Adaptation Design”
Lecture
January 31, 6:30pm

Yung Ho Chang, “Form, Content, and Total Design”
Lecture
February 2, 6:30pm

Stan Allen, “Situated Objects”
John Hejduk Soundings Lecture
February 7, 6:30pm

Ana María Durán Calisto, “The Deep History of Amazonian Agroecological Urban Forests: Why Do They Matter Today?”
Lecture
February 9, 6:30pm

Adèle Naudé Santos, “Narrative Maps: A Design Process”
Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture
February 14, 6:30pm

Kofi Boone, “Recognition, Reconciliation, Reparation”
Sylvester Baxter Lecture
February 16, 6:30pm

Grand Paris Express: Reconfiguring the City through Radical Infrastructure
Celebration for the 14th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design
March 2, 6:30pm

High Performance Public Transportation: Models and Strategies
Green Prize Workshop, Gund 112 (Stubbins)
March 3, 12:30pm

New Stations as Urban Projects: Multiple Dimensions
Green Prize Workshop, Gund 112 (Stubbins)
March 3, 3:00pm

International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address
March 7, 6:30pm

Bas Smets, “Biospheric Urbanism”
Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture
March 23, 6:30pm

Andrew Bernheimer, “Where is the Architecture? Finding Design and Community Amidst Constraints”
John T. Dunlop Lecture
March 28, 6:30pm

Mark Lee, “Five Footnotes Toward an Architecture”
Walter Gropius Lecture
April 4, 6:30pm

Rachel Meltzer, “What We Miss When We Look at Everything: Global Shocks and Local Impacts”
Lecture
April 11, 6:30pm

Abraham Cruzvillegas, “Centring: A Definitely Unfinished and Temporary Structure for Art Making”
Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture
April 13, 6:30pm

Tosin Oshinowo, “Aṣẹ: Intentional Contextuality and Adaptability in Design”
Aga Khan Program Lecture
April 18, 6:30pm

“Mayors Imagining the Just City: Volume 3”
Symposium
April 21, 1:00pm

All programs take place in Piper Auditorium, are open to the public, and will be simultaneously streamed to the GSD’s website, unless otherwise noted. Registration is not required.

Closed captioning will be available for livestreamed events. CART captioning is available for in-person attendees. To request other accessibility accommodations, please contact the Public Programs Office at [email protected].

 

Mayors Imagining the Just City: Volume 3

Event Description

Concluding the third annual Mayors Institute on City Design (MICD) Just City Mayoral Fellowship–a collaboration between the MICD  and Harvard GSD’s Just City Lab –the Fellows discuss strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial injustice in each of their cities.

Speakers

Mayor Friday Ellis was born in rural Rayville, Louisiana. Friday decided to settle in Monroe and that’s where he met his wife, Ashley. They married in 2001 and like many Americans, their lives were greatly impacted by the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Just two months later, Friday enlisted in the United States Marine Corps to serve his country in its time of need.

With a deep personal commitment, a wealth of experience, and a proven record of leadership, Mayor Tishaura O. Jones started her career as a public servant in 2002 when she was appointed as Democratic Committeewoman of the 8th Ward in the City of St. Louis. She served two terms in the Missouri House of Representatives and became the first African-American woman in state history to hold the position of Assistant Minority Floor Leader. From financial empowerment to the modernizing of services, Jones has worked to make city government easier to navigate, easier to participate in, and easier to understand.

After a successful business career, Mayor Tim Keller refocused his professional life on tackling some of the biggest issues facing Albuquerque and New Mexico. Throughout his public service, from State Senator for the International District to New Mexico State Auditor to Mayor of Albuquerque, Tim has consistently challenged the status quo and developed a track record of real impact. Tim became Mayor in 2017 and was re-elected in 2021. He serves as the city’s 82nd selected leader and 31st Mayor of Albuquerque, dating back to its founding 1706. Mayor Tim focuses on making Albuquerque a more safe, innovative, and inclusive city.

Mayor Quinton Lucas was sworn in on August 1, 2019 as the 55th mayor of Kansas City, the youngest elected Kansas City mayor in more than a generation. Known affectionately as “Mayor Q” to Kansas Citians, he prioritizes making Kansas City’s neighborhoods safer, creating more accessible and affordable housing and public transportation, maintaining efficiency and transparency in governance, and improving basic services.

Mayor D.C. Reeves was sworn in as Mayor of his hometown, Pensacola, on Nov. 22, 2022, becoming the youngest person (38) in 101 years to be elected Mayor. Reeves spent his professional career as a sports journalist, author, community builder and entrepreneur. After a decade covering college football at Florida State University (Warchant.com) and the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa News), D.C. returned home in 2015 to make an impact on his community.

Mayor Jim Ross was elected to the office of Mayor at the City of Arlington in June 2021. Jim Ross has spent decades serving his community and his country.  As a proud resident of Arlington for nearly forty years he has witnessed the growth, and growing pains, this community has endured. From 1979 to 1983, Jim served this country as a United States Marine. With assignments at home and abroad, Jim served the Marines in numerous capacities.  Having received his Honorable Discharge in 1983, Jim moved to Texas where he was soon hired by the Arlington Police Department.

Mayor Kathy Sheehan is in her third term as Albany’s 75th mayor. Mayor Sheehan has dedicated her administration to creating a city of opportunity, leading with a commitment to equity and responsive government that includes diverse community voices. Under Kathy’s leadership, the City has invested more than $100 million in new parks, streets, sidewalks, and water and sewer infrastructure across the city, with a focus on neighborhoods impacted by redlining and other historically discriminatory practices. Kathy worked with the Common Council to enact groundbreaking equity legislation and policing reform initiatives and has led a multi-year effort to eliminate blight and sub-standard housing in the City.

Mayor Alan Webber serves as Santa Fe’s 43rd Mayor and the City’s first full-time executive. He first elected in March of 2018 to his first term and re-elected to a second four-year term in November of 2021. In his time in office Mayor Webber has put an emphasis on making City government work for all parts of Santa Fe, improving the overall level of service to the city’s 85,000 residents. His policy agenda has focused on meeting the city’s critical need for additional housing in all parts of the housing spectrum and in very part of the community. The housing agenda includes bringing chronic and veteran homelessness to functional zero and addressing the shortage in affordable and workforce housing.

Moderator

Toni L. Griffin is Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and the founder of Urban Planning and Design for the American City, based in New York.  Through the practice, Toni served as Project Director the long range planning initiative of the Detroit Work Project, and in 2013 completed and released Detroit Future City, a comprehensive citywide framework plan for urban transformation. Most recent clients include working with the cities of Memphis, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh.

Ms. Griffin was recently a Professor of Architecture and the founding Director of the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York.  Founded in 2011, the Bond Center is dedicated to the advancement of design practice, education, research and advocacy in ways that build and sustain resilient and just communities, cities and regions. Currently the Center is focused on several design research initiatives including the Legacy City Design Initiative, that explores innovative design solutions for cities that have lost greater than 20% population lost since their peak;  “Just City Design Indicators Project” that seeks to define the core values of a just city and offer a performance measure tool to assist cities and communities with evaluating how design facilitates urban justice in the built environment; and “Inclusion in Architecture” that examines the participation of people of color in architecture and related design fields. (Read more)

Partners

The Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) is a leadership initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the United States Conference of Mayors. Since 1986, the Mayors’ Institute has helped transform communities through design by preparing mayors to be the chief urban designers of their cities.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is the independent federal agency, established by Congress in 1965, whose funding and support gives Americans the opportunity to participate in the arts, exercise their imaginations, and develop their creative capacities. Through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector, the NEA supports arts learning, affirms and celebrates America’s rich and diverse cultural heritage, and extends its work to promote equal access to the arts in every community across America.

The United States Conference of Mayors (USCM) is the official nonpartisan organization of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. USCM promotes effective national urban/suburban policy, strengthens federal/city relationships, ensures that federal policy meets urban needs, provides mayors with leadership and management tools, and creates a forum in which mayors can share ideas and information.

At the Just City Lab, we ask: Would we design better places if we put the values of equality, inclusion or equity first? If a community articulated what it stood for, what it believed in, what it aspired to be — as a city, as a neighborhood — would it have a better chance of creating and sustaining more healthy, vibrant place with positive, economic, health, civic, cultural and environmental conditions? Imagine that the issues of race, income, education and unemployment inequality, and the resulting segregation, isolation and fear, could be addressed by planning and designing for greater access, agency, ownership, beauty, diversity or empowerment. Now imagine the Just City: the cities, neighborhoods and public spaces that thrive using a value-based approach to urban stabilization, revitalization and transformation. Imagine a set of values that would define a community’s aspiration for the Just City. Imagine we can assign metrics to measure design’s impact on justice. Imagine we can use these findings to deploy interventions that minimize conditions of injustice. 

A Call to Action: Just City Mayoral Fellows Discuss Design Interventions to Address Racial Injustice in America

“Everything we do at the GSD,” Dean Sarah Whiting said, “is affected by or affects cities.” On Friday, April 22, the GSD hosted the concluding event of the 2022 Just City Mayoral Fellowship, a collaboration between the Mayors Institute on City Design (MICD) and the Harvard GSD’s Just City Lab, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The event brought seven mayors together for a discussion on how design and planning interventions can promote racial and infrastructural justice. In her opening remarks, Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, the chair of the NEA and the first urban planner to hold the role, said: “It’s in this kind of forum that one can see the critically important role that arts, culture, creativity, and design have in advancing healthy communities and cities.” Trinity Simons, the executive director of the MICD, shared the MICD’s ambition to “equip mayors to be the chief urban designers of their cities.” She said that following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, “We saw mayors asking: What does it mean to achieve racial justice in the built environment?” To address this, Simons reached out to Toni L. Griffin, the founder of the Just City Lab and a professor in practice of urban planning at the GSD. Now in its second year, the fellowship involves an 11-week curriculum of “readings, lectures, and open and honest discussion.” Mayors also proposed projects for their city, with design and development professionals performing “design jury duty” to share their expertise and feedback.

Just Cities, Infrastructures, and Community Building

Griffin then invited the first panel of mayors onto the stage: Jacob R. Day (Salisbury, MD), Emily Larson (Duluth, MN), Jamael Tito Brown (Youngstown, OH), and John T. Tecklenberg (Charleston, SC). Mayor Tecklenberg began by describing the importance of reconciliation in Charleston, given its history: “We are the city where almost 50 percent of enslaved Africans were brought to North America. Our city, in the early 1800s, derived its budget from the sale, the rental, and the possession of enslaved persons.” His project proposal for the fellowship was a linear park to “knit together” a historically African American neighborhood that was ripped apart by a highway project 70 years ago. “We’e going to reconnect those neighborhoods and achieve some social justice.” A native of Youngstown, Mayor Brown noted that the city was a former steel mill town that saw a sharp decline in population after the Great Depression. Those who moved away often had more education and socioeconomic capital than those who stayed, and Brown is attentive to the inequities that still exist today, especially in infant mortality and life expectancy: “It’s not fair that if you live on one side of the tracks, you’re at 71 years,” and “just half a mile down the tracks . . . they’re at 76 or 75.” As mayor, Brown relies on citizen organizations within the city, as well as his own background as a former organizer to “get people to the table.” Mayor Larson shared her aspirations for Duluth: “How can we use the physical public infrastructure to create a sense of radical belonging for our community?” She emphasized the importance of making intentional investments to redress historical harms. “Justice takes fundamental investment, and we have built centuries of systems with great intention and investment to make them unfair. We know budgets are moral documents.” As Larson invests in new systems and approaches, she is committed to a thoughtful approach: “You can go fast and get things done, or you can go slow and embed the work.” According to Mayor Day, symbolic and concrete work must be done to address a history of injustice in Salisbury. His administration pushed to replace a Confederate monument at a county court with a monument to three men who were lynched there. This was Salisbury’s way of “recognizing that we must tell the truth about our past.” But Day also acknowledged the incompleteness of this gesture. “Symbols matter, but symbols are fairly easy. So what comes next? . . . Decisions about paving, housing, access, and proximity to jobs are the tougher work.” Day encouraged GSD students to become involved: “The beauty of design and policy is not only that you appreciate the making of these spaces, but you’ve also gone through an education that has taught you [when] to stop the planning and start making, doing. At some point you have to build that final model, right?”

Just Cities, Infrastructures, and the College Town

Griffin then invited the next panel of mayors to discuss how infrastructural justice concerns intersect with the needs and conflicts of college towns: Satya Rhodes-Conway (Madison, WI), Mayor Levar M. Stoney (Richmond, VA), and Patrick L. Wojahn (College Park, MD). Mayor Wojahn noted, “The conditions of injustice in [College Park] . . . [are] things that communities all over the United States have dealt with: the legacies of redlining, segregation, centuries of discrimination, occasionally brutal violence against people of color.” He focused on Lakeland, a historically Black neighborhood that suffered disinvestment, flooding, and harsh urban renewal policies. “Two-thirds of the residents were displaced by urban renewal in the 1970s and 1980s,” he noted, and student housing placed there instead. In 2020, Wojahn and his administration “committed . . . [to] pursuing restorative justice for the residents of Lakeland—the current residents as well as the people who were displaced.” Mayor Rhodes-Conway shared that “Madison and the community is deeply committed to justice, and deeply conflicted about what justice means.” She encouraged GSD students to consider the different ways that city staff can promote justice: “The racial equity work started, and is still primarily led by, city staff . . . people in public health, planning, finance.” These staff members, Rhodes-Conway stressed, are essential in “carrying [the work] through political transitions.” Addressing the enormous influence of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the disparities in which students choose to remain in the city after graduation, she explained, “There are marked differences in the demographics of who stays and who doesn’t.” She said the city needs to attract and retain Black professionals. Richmond’s history as the capital of the Confederacy, and its enduring legacy in the disparities between Black and white residents was highlighted by Mayor Stoney. “I have neighborhoods in my city that haven’t seen paving for 40 or 50 years. . . . That’s wrong, that’s not fair, and no one should have to live this way. . . . We could touch on so many topics: the lack of parks, the lack of trees, the lack of sidewalks.” Although Richmond’s five institutions of higher education have contributed to neighborhood change, they have also been integral to advocating for and pushing forward equity and justice conversations. “We are more intertwined as a community than we used to be,” Stoney explained.

A Call to Action

Community, justice, repair, and investment: these themes were central to how all seven mayors spoke of their cities. Their commitment reflects a quote from 2019 Loeb Fellow and former Vancouver City Council member Andrea Reimer that Griffin shared with the audience: “We may all have an identity that demands justice, but we also have an identity that demands participating in justice for others.” Griffin said, “This is the call to action that each of us can step into [and that] has motivated the mayors to be here.” Watch a recording of the event.

Toni L. Griffin Honored with Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award from Center for Architecture and Design

Toni L. Griffin, professor in practice of Urban Planning and Publics Domain head, is the 2022 recipient of the Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award . Given by Philadelphia’s Center for Architecture and Design , the award recognizes professionals who have made significant contributions to the field of urban planning through expert articulation of vision, communication, and improvement in their communities. Griffin joins an impressive legacy of Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award recipients, including Theaster Gates (LF ‘11), Denise Scott Brown, and Paul Goldberger.

Griffin was selected as this year’s recipient for her focus on design justice in the built environment. A central question in her work asks, “Would we design better places if we put the values of equality, inclusion, or equity first?” A press release from the Center also acknowledged Griffin’s alignment with “conversations the Center is having about the future of our student design competition and how we can use it to help students become better designers with an ubiquitous lens of equity, inclusion and justice in their approach to urban design, planning and architecture.”

Griffin’s firm, New York-based urbanAC , consults on planning and design revitalization projects with a focus on “historical and current disparities involving race, class, and generation.” Cities Griffin and urbanAC have had their hand in include Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Memphis, and Detroit.

A graduate of the Loeb Fellowship Class of 1998, Griffin’s work to address, define, and stimulate the just city carry over to her engagements at the GSD. This semester, you can find her teaching “The Gentrification Debates: Perceptions and Realities of Neighborhood Change,” a seminar exploring the causes and effects of gentrification on national and city-specific scales. She is also the founder and director of the Just City Lab , a Harvard-based research center investigating the ways design can have a positive impact on addressing the conditions of injustice in cities.

Griffin will be honored in person and online and will give a talk at the Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award ceremony on March 24, 2022, in Philadelphia. Registration for the Zoom and in-person ceremony is required.

Announcing the 2022 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship

The Just City Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) are pleased to announce the launch of the 2022 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship, taking place in Spring 2022.

The 2022 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship will help mayors navigate a just and equitable recovery from the pandemic, providing actionable ideas for city leaders rising to meet this moment of change. Building on the inaugural 2020 Fellowship , this program will explore ways to create lasting, transformational impacts from new federal funding streams such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the American Rescue Plan Act. The Lab’s Just City Index  will frame dynamic presentations and dialogues with experts in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, art activism, housing, and public policy. Over the semester-long program, mayors will identify how racial injustices manifest in the social, economic, and physical infrastructures of their cities and develop manifestos of action for their communities.

The 2022 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellows include Charleston, SC Mayor John J. Tecklenburg ; College Park, MD Mayor Patrick L. Wojahn ; Duluth, MN Mayor Emily Larson ; Madison, WI Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway ; Providence, RI Mayor Jorge O. Elorza; Richmond, VA Mayor Levar M. Stoney; Salisbury, MD Mayor Jacob R. Day ; and Youngstown, OH Mayor Jamael Tito Brown .

The Just City Lab is a design lab located within the GSD and led by architect and urban planner Toni L. Griffin. The Lab has developed nearly 10 years of publications, case studies, convening tools and exhibitions that examine how design and planning can have a positive impact of addressing the long-standing conditions of social and spatial injustice in cities. The Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD), the nation’s preeminent forum for mayors to address city design and development issues, is a leadership initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the United States Conference of Mayors . Since 1986, MICD has helped transform communities through design by preparing mayors to be the chief urban designers of their cities.

“I’m delighted to see this powerful collaboration between the Just City Lab and the Mayors’ Institute on City Design continue,” says Sarah Whiting, dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. “This year’s cohort of mayors come from many cities that are particularly interesting to our students as they consider their future plans. These are mostly middle-sized cities that are transforming quickly as a response to the skyrocketing costs of our nation’s largest urban centers. The Mayoral Fellowship is well-timed to help these eight mayors lead in terms of equity and opportunity. Our aspiration is that ‘just cities’ will become the standard for what we expect in this country, not the exception to what so many experience today.”

“Mayors have led our communities through a series of unrelenting challenges over the past two years. With new federal funding streams, we have a unique opportunity for once-in-a-generation change,” said Tom Cochran , CEO and executive director of the United States Conference of Mayors. “Mayors are now tasked with uniting their communities around real solutions and making transformational investments. The traditional MICD experience, with its candid, small-group format and access to national design experts, is so often transformative for mayors. There is no better model for empowering mayors to find solutions in our nation’s cities, and the United States Conference of Mayors is proud to partner with the Just City Lab to help guide mayors through this important chapter of American history.”

“Building on the National Endowment for the Arts’ vision to heal, unite, and lift up communities with compassion and creativity, we are proud and humbled to continue this important collaboration between MICD and the Just City Lab,” said Jennifer Hughes, NEA director of design and creative placemaking. “This program will take the transformative power of MICD, which illuminates the power of design to tackle complex problems, and apply it to the defining challenge of our time: ensuring equity and justice for everyone.”

On April 22, the 2022 Fellows will come together to discuss strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial injustice in each of their cities at a GSD event hosted by Griffin. The program will be free and open to the public.

The Just City Lab and MICD are thrilled to continue this fellowship to help mayors shape more just cities. Learn more about the host organizations at www.micd.org and www.designforthejustcity.org .

Parts of this press release also appeared on the MICD website .