Excerpt: An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, by Mindy Thompson Fullilove

“Five years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab published The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity. The questions it posed were deceptively simple: What would a just city look like? And what could be the strategies to get there? These questions were posed to mayors, architects, artists, philanthropists, educators and journalists in 22 cities, who told stories of global injustice and their dreams for reparative and restorative justice in the city.

These essays were meant as a provocation, a call to action. Now, during these times of dissonance, unrest, and uncertainty, their contents have become ever more important. For the next 26 weeks [starting June 15, 2020], the GSD and the Just City Lab will republish one essay a week here and at designforthejustcity.org . We hope they may continue conversations of our shared responsibility for the just city.

We believe design can repair injustice. We believe design must restore justice, especially that produced by its own hand. We believe in justice for Black Americans. We believe in justice for all marginalized people. We believe in a Just City.”

—Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, founder of the Just City Lab , and editor of The Just City Essays

An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay

By Mindy Thompson Fullilove

In 1993 or thereabouts I entered a contest for women to depict what they did on a particular day. That day, I went to meetings early in the morning at Harlem Hospital. I took photos of the abandoned buildings on West 136th, where I parked my car, and photos of a huge plastic bag in one of the stunted trees. Later, on my way back to my office on W. 166th Street, I stopped to take a photo of man who was selling nuts on the street in front of a burned-out building. He smiled with tremendous pride—when I took him a copy of the photo a few weeks later, he grinned and said he’d send it to his mother so she would know he was trying to make something of himself. There were photos of the Stuyvesant High School students that I was mentoring for the Westinghouse Science Competition, and photos at home in Hoboken with my daughter Molly and some chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the oven. We were reading Ian Frazier’s New Yorker article about plastic bags in trees. I didn’t win the contest, but the exercise etched what I saw in memory.

Harlem had been devastated by decades of policies of disinvestment. Walking the streets was a painful experience because so many of the buildings had been burned out, and garbage blew in the courtyards and rats ran in and out. Working people were struggling to control the neighborhood, but drugs and violence were the order of the day. Most of my research was focused on describing the problems in front of me—filling out our understanding of a terrible statistic reported in 1990 by Drs. Harold Freeman and Colin McCord: that a black man living in Harlem had a shorter life expectancy than a man in Bangladesh, at that time the poorest country on earth. Some of what I wanted to describe was the historical process that had stripped this neighborhood of its life-giving qualities. I was describing an unjust city. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org … 

Work in Progress: Edgar Rodriguez’s Cross-Laminated Timber Experiments

Edgar Rodriguez (MArch ’20) describes his final project for the option studio “Mass Timber and the Scandinavian Effect” led by Jeniffer Bonner and Hanif Kara, spring 2020.

Excerpt: Resistance, Education and the Collective Will of the Just City, by Jack Travis

“Five years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab published The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity. The questions it posed were deceptively simple: What would a just city look like? And what could be the strategies to get there? These questions were posed to mayors, architects, artists, philanthropists, educators and journalists in 22 cities, who told stories of global injustice and their dreams for reparative and restorative justice in the city.

These essays were meant as a provocation, a call to action. Now, during these times of dissonance, unrest, and uncertainty, their contents have become ever more important. For the next 26 weeks [starting June 15, 2020], the GSD and the Just City Lab will republish one essay a week here and at designforthejustcity.org . We hope they may continue conversations of our shared responsibility for the just city.

We believe design can repair injustice. We believe design must restore justice, especially that produced by its own hand. We believe in justice for Black Americans. We believe in justice for all marginalized people. We believe in a Just City.”

—Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, founder of the Just City Lab , and editor of The Just City Essays

Resistance, Education and the Collective Will of the Just City

By Jack Travis

“What has happened is that in the last 20 years, America has changed from a producer to a consumer. And all consumers know that when the producer names the tune, the consumer has got to dance. That’s the way it is. We used to be a producer—very inflexible at that, and now we are consumers and, finding it difficult to understand. Natural resources and minerals will change your world. The Arabs used to be in the third world. They have bought the second world and put a firm down payment on the first one. Controlling your resources will control your world. This country has been surprised by the way the world looks now. They don’t know if they want to be Matt Dillon or Bob Dylan. They don’t know if they want to be diplomats or continue the same policy—of nuclear nightmare diplomacy. John Foster Dulles ain’t nothing but the name of an airport now… . The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can—even if it’s only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards. And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment. The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white horse—or the man who always came to save America at the last moment— someone always came to save America at the last moment—especially in “B” movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future, they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan and it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at like a ‘B’ movie.”—Gil Scot Heron, “B-Movie,” 1981 “If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it. Ultimately it will do us very little good to simply get more opportunities in the Global South or elsewhere if we do not ask ourselves and resolve the question, ‘Do we really want to continue to design while mimicking the kinds of socio-political society that marginalized us in the first place?” —Marcus Garvey

What makes great buildings, spaces and places? It is when those structures or spaces reflect and serve the people of the community for which they are intended. It is when they lift the spirit while providing shelter and functional use; when they foster positive aesthetic and tactile relationships between the buildings, spaces and/ or places themselves and the people they are intended to serve.

I penned that statement more than 20 years ago at a moment when I was striving to define my practice as an architect and interior designer. It was relevant then and remains so today as we struggle to imagine a just city being born out of the troubled world we occupy today. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org … 

Alumni cohort among finalists in “Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge” competition

A team of Harvard Graduate School of Design alumni is among the six finalists in a competition being held by the New York City Council and the Van Alen Institute to reimagine New York’s Brooklyn Bridge as a friendlier experience for cyclists and pedestrians, entitled “Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge .” The team comprises GSD alumni Wendy Wang (MLA ’14), Cy Zhang (MLA/MLAUD ’20), Vita Wang (MArch ’19), Jeremy Pi (MUP ’19), and Minzi Long (MAUD/MDes ’20), as well as designers Shannon Hasenfratz and Andrew Nash.

“The Brooklyn Bridge has the potential to serve as a testing ground for designs that serve our communities in need — not just in an imagined, idealistic future — but now,” writes the Van Alen Institute. “With these considerations at heart, the six finalist proposals are a compelling and optimistic set of ideas for responsive short-term interventions and longer-term, large-scale reconfigurations of the Brooklyn Bridge.”

According to the competition website, the team’s proposal, “Bridge X,” reimagines the upper and lower decks to reclaim space for greater pedestrian and cyclist access, to make room for vendors and small businesses, and to offer new modes of engagement with the bridge. Digital tools and design interventions enable visitors to more easily access, explore, and reflect on their experiences of the bridge, while the bridge itself evolves in response to public feedback and adapts from a pandemic to a post-pandemic era. The team submitted their proposal via Wang’s ScenesLab, which she founded as a platform for experimentation and research.

“Bridge X” was named one of three finalists in the competition’s Professional category, alongside collaborative entries from Bjarke Ingels Group and Arup Group, and from Pilot Projects Design Collective, Cities4Forests, Wildlife Conservation Society, Grimshaw and Silman. A second category, Young Adults, sought designers under the age of 21 to propose their “wildest dreams,” and also named three finalist projects. The competition jury named these six finalists from among 250 collective submissions.

“Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge” was launched in February 2020, and the ensuing Covid-19 pandemic recast the competition’s mission, though not fundamentally. “As made even more clear by the pandemic, the design of our streets and shared spaces must be responsive to the present moment and work to correct past injustices,” the Van Alen Institute writes. “They must foster equitable, accessible, and sustainable transportation options, create a healthy and safe environment for all New Yorkers, and opportunities for small businesses and vendors to flourish.”

According to the Van Alen Institute, the competition’s finalists were selected by an interdisciplinary jury representing a wide-ranging set of perspectives on the Brooklyn Bridge. The jury considered the following factors: team composition; accessibility and safety; environmental benefit and security; respect for the bridge’s landmark status; feasibility; and “magic”—i.e. new ideas that surprise, delight, and fascinate.

The three Professional category finalist teams present their proposals during a public, virtual “Design Showdown” on Thursday, July 23, when the jury and viewers will have an opportunity to offer feedback on each design. Each project is also available online , and viewers can cast votes for their favorite proposals between July 23 and 30. A winner will be announced in late summer.

 The New York City Council said the city’s Department of Transportation would review these proposals as part of a planned assessment of the bridge.

“As we undertake our own engineering inspection this year to help assess the capacity for changes to the promenade, we welcome new and innovative ideas on how to reimagine the Brooklyn Bridge Promenade to create more space for pedestrians and cyclists,” Margaret Forgione, the chief operations officer of the city’s Transportation Department, told the Wall Street Journal .

Excerpt: The Case for All-In Cities, by Angela Glover Blackwell

“Five years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab published The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity. The questions it posed were deceptively simple: What would a just city look like? And what could be the strategies to get there? These questions were posed to mayors, architects, artists, philanthropists, educators and journalists in 22 cities, who told stories of global injustice and their dreams for reparative and restorative justice in the city.

These essays were meant as a provocation, a call to action. Now, during these times of dissonance, unrest, and uncertainty, their contents have become ever more important. For the next 26 weeks [starting June 15, 2020], the GSD and the Just City Lab will republish one essay a week here and at designforthejustcity.org . We hope they may continue conversations of our shared responsibility for the just city.

We believe design can repair injustice. We believe design must restore justice, especially that produced by its own hand. We believe in justice for Black Americans. We believe in justice for all marginalized people. We believe in a Just City.”

—Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, founder of the Just City Lab , and editor of The Just City Essays

The Case for All-In Cities

By Angela Glover Blackwell

People of color are at the center of a demographic shift that will fundamentally change the global urban landscape. From the growing proportions of Latino, Asian, and African American residents in resurgent cities of the United States, to the diversifying capitals of Europe and the booming metropolises of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, cities populated by people of color are emerging as the new global centers of the 21st century.

Full inclusion is a challenge in nearly all of these urban communities, as local leaders struggle to both address the needs and harness the talents of their diversifying populations. The challenge may stem from rural to urban relocation, historical and continuing prejudice, migration within countries, or immigration. In the United States, this challenge is characterized most noticeably by race and ethnicity.

Before the middle of this century, the United States will become majority people of color; many American cities have already crossed that mark. This seismic shift requires a redefinition of the meaning of success for cities. How will cities reflect and advance the world we want to live in? How will they foster health and allow all residents to reach their full potential? Fundamental to these questions is the issue of inclusion: how will cities engage those who have traditionally been marginalized, excluded, ignored, or reviled because of race, religion, ethnicity, caste, gender or national origin? Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org … 

The Nexus Podcast

As countless industries and sectors reckon with the aims articulated by the Movement for Black Lives and other aligned groups, the African American Design Nexus is on a mission to elevate the work and roles of Black designers. Founded in the wake of the GSD’s first Black in Design Conference in 2015, the Design Nexus is a collaboration between the school’s African American Student Union and the Frances Loeb Library. It’s a preeminent resource for those interested in the intersection of Blackness and design practices throughout the built environment as well as those represented in “public art, fashion, music, movies and other media.”  

Now, its mission will be further animated by a new podcast featuring Black scholars, writers, designers, and educators. As hosts of The Nexus , GSD students Tara Oluwafemi and Caleb Negash aim to ensure that the podcast records and preserves the legacy of Black designers working today, and they plan to push the understandings of the boundaries of design in the most expansive ways possible. They anticipate that The Nexus will introduce listeners to designers who represent exciting interventions within the field, but who may not be household names yet. For Oluwafemi, for example, dream guests include Nigerian designer Mowalola Ogunlesi and acclaimed artists Toyin Ojih Odutola and Jacolby Satterwhite.   

The Nexus’s inaugural episode features Boston-based architect, filmmaker, illustrator, and children’s book author Aisha Densmore-Bey . It is a conversation that ranges from what it means to be a polymath, to Densmore-Bey’s personal influences, to her relationship to art, joy, and beauty. The mood of this dialogue—an intimate, nuanced inquiry that critically traverses the geographies of design—is illustrative of what Oluwafemi and Negash seek to capture throughout the entire series. As the two continue to assemble a dynamic roster of interviewees, including Stephen Gray, De Nichols, and Bryan Lee Jr., they are looking forward to playing, experimenting, and sharpening their own skills as storytellers.  

Ultimately, The Nexus will add to the broader intellectual ecology that is the African American Design Nexus and will contribute to the Loeb’s ongoing open access bibliography that makes available key texts related to “the intersection of race and design.” This effort of documentation, historicization, and preservation, as Oluwafemi and Negash explain to me, will be strengthened by the voices they plan to amplify and celebrate. 

Excerpt: Home-Grown Justice In a Legacy City, by Karen Freeman-Wilson

“Five years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab published The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity. The questions it posed were deceptively simple: What would a just city look like? And what could be the strategies to get there? These questions were posed to mayors, architects, artists, philanthropists, educators and journalists in 22 cities, who told stories of global injustice and their dreams for reparative and restorative justice in the city.

These essays were meant as a provocation, a call to action. Now, during these times of dissonance, unrest, and uncertainty, their contents have become ever more important. For the next 26 weeks [starting June 15, 2020], the GSD and the Just City Lab will republish one essay a week here and at designforthejustcity.org . We hope they may continue conversations of our shared responsibility for the just city.

We believe design can repair injustice. We believe design must restore justice, especially that produced by its own hand. We believe in justice for Black Americans. We believe in justice for all marginalized people. We believe in a Just City.”

—Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, founder of the Just City Lab , and editor of The Just City Essays

Home-Grown Justice In a Legacy City

By Karen Freeman-Wilson

I am the mayor of a legacy city, a city that rose and fell on the fluctuations of an industrial marketplace. Like Detroit, Cleveland, and dozens of other cities that have experienced continuous population and job loss since their peak, my hometown of Gary, Indiana, once provided the backbone of the nation’s economy. These cities led the way in educational innovation, architectural design and cultural development. In the 1920s, Gary earned the nickname of Magic City because of its exponential growth. Seventy years later, one half of the city’s population is gone, leaving an overwhelming inventory of vacant and abandoned buildings, a nearly 40 percent unemployment rate and a 35 percent poverty rate in the rear view mirror.

Despite the devastating statistics, Gary is home to people who continue to remain faithful after others left. These individuals are raising children, purchasing and maintaining homes, pursuing business opportunities and continuing to invest their time, talent and treasure in a city that some said was not worth the energy. These individuals are my neighbors, fellow church members, former teachers and classmates. My just city is dedicated to these legacy residents. Together, we must retool Gary into a city that better serves all of us. This is undoubtedly a complex proposition that requires vision, planning, faith, resilience and cheerleading. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org … 

Andreina Seijas charts the emergence of the “night mayor”—an advocate, mediator, and policy-maker for a city’s nocturnal life

Cities don’t close when mayors sign out of their email accounts and City Hall turns its lights off. As more and more urban residents spend more of their time in cities after dark and seek more expansive definitions of “nightlife”—and, as that nightlife increasingly extends beyond the urban bull’s-eye—a new type of “shadow mayor” is emerging in cities around the world, a liaison who serves as an advocate, mediator, policy-maker, and point-of-contact for a city’s nocturnal life. These so-called “night mayors” represent a modern and hybrid role, intended to deliver urban governance and advocacy around the powerful and still-growing economic sector of nighttime activity. Night mayors’ purviews transcend bars and nightclubs to include restaurants, theaters, hotels, and creative spaces, as well as the night-shift workers who keep these operations functional and the Uber, taxi, and delivery drivers who keep products and services moving. In short, night mayors guide policy and mediate relations around a city’s nocturnal vibrancy. It’s no small task, and one in increasing demand. Given both the novelty and the fast propagation of the night mayor, Harvard Graduate School of Design Doctor of Design candidate Andreina Seijas embarked on a qualitative study that gathered data from 35 night mayors and night-time advocacy organizations from around the world. In January, the journal Urban Studies published results of Seijas’s study (co-authored by Mirik Milan Gelders), offering the first comprehensive analyses of the relevance of this new form of urban governance. Seijas found that, while the urban night has traditionally been relegated to strict policing and surveillance, and while cities differ greatly in their approach towards night-time infrastructure and regulation, a growing consensus has emerged around the need for permanent nocturnal governance structures. By encouraging greater dialogue and experimentation, Seijas continues, these governance structures are challenging traditional approaches to urban authority and paving the way for a new wave of studies on the urban night. For instance, while most local authorities are organized spatially into wards, districts, or boroughs, night mayors respond instead to a “time-based” constituency, Seijas indicates—a framework that may help cohere city functions and infrastructure across neighborhoods and districts. Today, more than 45 cities around the world have formally appointed “night mayors” to improve quality of life at night. Inspired by Amsterdam, the first city to create such a role, many other city governments have adopted this model to mediate between citizens who want to work, party, or sleep after dark. “Nocturnal governance is not a one-size-fits-all approach, but a platform for cities to reexamine and handle new urban challenges,” Seijas says. Night mayors and night-time advocacy organizations proceed from their local political and regulatory structures, Seijas continues, which accounts for geographic differences in the way the role has been adopted: while European night mayors are independent advocates who help mediate between nightlife operators and citizens, their American counterparts—often titled as “managers” or “directors”—are government-appointed representatives responsible for overseeing their cities’ night-time economies. A handful of cities in the United States, including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Orlando, and Washington D.C., have introduced some form of the “night mayor” role: Pittsburgh and Orlando each have a “nighttime economy manager”; there’s a “nightlife business advocate” in Seattle and a “24-hour economy ambassador” in Detroit; New York and Washington, D.C. each have created a specialized “Office of Nightlife.” Seijas observes a few shared motivations that have fueled the rise of the night mayor around the world. One dynamic at play is the disappearance of traditional nightlife venues, and the reduction of available creative space, resulting from factors including gentrification and the reconfiguration of certain neighborhoods into mixed-use areas; another is the need to create safer, more inclusive, and more dignified spaces for people of different preferences and social groups who are socially or professionally active after dark, and to provide support, training, and other resources for those who work at night. As Seijas explains, the question of the “urban night” is a relatively new field of study. Investigations of cities’ nighttime functions have been growing since the 1990s, when revitalization strategies in post-industrial cities began using terms like “nighttime economy” and “24-hour city” as they worked to create more vibrant, safer, and more competitive environments regardless of time of day. Seijas points, too, to three previous waves of study of the urban night, as categorized by British scholar Phil Hadfield. Hadfield surveyed studies that posited nightlife as a way to revitalize post-industrial city centers (a first wave of studies), as well as studies about the negative impacts and subsequent surveillance of nightlife (a second wave), followed by studies about new practices and mechanisms to manage life at night more proactively (third wave). As the “night mayor” actor emerges, Seijas sees the potential for a fourth wave of urban-nightlife study, one that takes up how this specific form of nocturnal governance can influence urban authority more generally and provide new platforms to deal with both ongoing and unforeseen urban issues. “Night mayors are the latest and, perhaps, the most exciting addition to a growing cast of actors involved in governing the city at night,” Seijas says. “Along with the police, neighborhood watches, Business Improvement Districts, and other groups, night mayors help keep streets safe and vibrant at night, but they do so from mediation rather than from regulation. While they are still are relatively new figure, and while their scope and influence vary significantly from city to city, night mayors’ visibility and journalistic appeal has helped situate the night in urban agendas and is raising awareness of the need for more research and experimentation in this largely unexplored time frame.” Thus far, Seijas observes night mayors’ impacts have extended across policy-making, mediation, advocacy, and infrastructure- and capacity-building. Orlando’s “Night-Time Economy Manager” has been instrumental in encouraging public-private partnerships to improve safety and mobility in the city’s downtown entertainment district, Seijas notes, including introduction of a pilot program to create two rideshare hubs that help manage crowds efficiently and streamline transit downtown. Night mayors have become key mouthpieces for the LGBTQ+ community, she adds, leading World Pride celebrations and awareness efforts in cities like New York and London. The night mayor is not always intended to amplify nightlife, though. Seijas points to cities like Prague, where the noční starosta or night mayor has led information campaigns to prevent people from drinking in the street and is encouraging the city to move away from its reputation as a party destination by promoting higher culture such as local museums and galleries. In Washington, D.C., the director of the Mayor’s Office of Nightlife and Culture is equipping nocturnal employees with tools and technology to handle recurring issues such as sexual harassment, drug use, and underage drinking, one effort to optimize police resources and encourage law enforcement as a last resort only. (While night mayors generally lack formal law-enforcement authority, their position as mediator between businesses and residents can free-up police and other law enforcement from routine noise and behavior complaints.) The world’s ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has, without question, disturbed cities’ functioning, especially in terms of residents’ ability to make use of their cities’ offerings. During a crisis in which large crowds of people are a potential danger, nightlife, cultural offerings, and hospitality are some of the sectors most affected by lockdowns and restricted movement. Despite this condition, or perhaps because of it, the role of a night mayor may actually emerge as more valuable than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic has raised or stoked questions about the way leisure and entertainment are distributed in urban areas. Most cities already have strict restrictions concerning the times and locations in which night-time activity can occur, segregating nightlife and entertainment to specialized districts with strict closing hours and surveillance; the further restrictions imposed by the current pandemic intensify questions and dilemmas around how to organize and govern nighttime activities. Meanwhile, cities like Amsterdam have embarked on innovative experiments to enable greater flexibility in night-time regulations. Led by its Nachtburgemeester, or night mayor, the city introduced in 2013 a 24-hour-licensing pilot scheme that allowed establishments located outside of the highly saturated city center to operate around the clock. The initiative—which became a permanent program—has enabled the expansion of nightlife in a way that it is not disproportionately concentrated in a single area or time frame, helping reduce problematic crowding and decrease binge drinking in one of the most popular nightlife destinations in the world. If implemented carefully, by conducting feasibility studies and trials, Seijas believes that similar schemes that allow new spatio-temporal distributions of nightlife and entertainment can be a useful tactic to help these sectors as well as cultural scenes bounce back from this unprecedented crisis. As of May 2020, more than 45 cities around the world had appointed a “night mayor” or similar role to think more strategically about the urban night. While regional groups and partnerships dedicated to nighttime activities had already been in place, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought night mayors together creating a global platform to share ideas and best practices on how to manage the crisis at hand. Through WhatsApp chat groups, online seminars, and working papers, these individuals are currently discussing the feasibility of reopening local bars and restaurants, while considering future scenarios to help these businesses recover and adjust to the “new normal.” “While it is too soon to tell the extent to which these actors will help manage the current crisis and its aftermath,” Seijas says, “these new nocturnal governance networks are already providing new spaces for cities to manage proactively one of the most devastating disasters of our time.”

Excerpt: Up From the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, by Theaster Gates

“Five years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab published The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity. The questions it posed were deceptively simple: What would a just city look like? And what could be the strategies to get there? These questions were posed to mayors, architects, artists, philanthropists, educators and journalists in 22 cities, who told stories of global injustice and their dreams for reparative and restorative justice in the city.

These essays were meant as a provocation, a call to action. Now, during these times of dissonance, unrest, and uncertainty, their contents have become ever more important. For the next 26 weeks [starting June 15, 2020], the GSD and the Just City Lab will republish one essay a week here and at designforthejustcity.org . We hope they may continue conversations of our shared responsibility for the just city.

We believe design can repair injustice. We believe design must restore justice, especially that produced by its own hand. We believe in justice for Black Americans. We believe in justice for all marginalized people. We believe in a Just City.”

—Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, founder of the Just City Lab , and editor of The Just City Essays

Up From the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City

By Theaster Gates

Governance, despite its own hopes for a universality of exclusion, is for the inducted, for those who know how to articulate interests disinterestedly, those who vote and know why they vote (not because someone is black or female but because he or she is smart), who have opinions and want to be taken seriously by serious people. In the mean time, policy must still pursue the quotidian sphere of open secret plans. Policy posits curriculum against study, child development against play, human capital against work. It posits having a voice against hearing voices, networked friending against contractual friendship. Policy posits the public sphere, or the counter public sphere, or the black public sphere, against the illegal occupation of the illegitimately privatized.—Stephano Harney and Fred Moten, the Undercommons, Fugitive Planning and Black Study

0. I understand fully the role of planner and their potential to offer more to the city than ever before. The situation at the level of the city and state is such that insider information, a history of connections within the system and traditional “good old boy” engagements work somewhat effectively at shaping the city and are perceived as a status quo that can’t be changed. In many of our cities, the opportunity for certain kinds of ascension into leadership works to create a caste system of entitlement and apathy. Art adds the potential for a critique from within, a critique that exists as a para-institutional engagement harnessing similar power structures and potentially even mimicking structures in order to advance the possibilities that exist for our city’s futures.

1. A just city requires counter-balance. It requires clear knowing of how governance works with an understanding that power corrupts and power constantly needs to be checked by other powers (people power, political power, ethical persuasion, public outcry). A just city requires that those who do not understand their power and feel cheated out of the right to publicly demonstrate their power are given channels and platforms by which to engage. The constant non-engagement between classes, races, political camps and social structures and the intentional separations that happen in micro-units of cities—and, in some cases, whole cities—will not only work against the possibility of a just city, it will signify the concretization unjust, uneven, unethical city

2. The possibility that artists would contribute in the substantial transformation of major cities throughout the world is not radical news. What feels radical is the level at which artists rarely benefit from their side. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org … 

Summer Scholarship at the GSD

The GSD introduces new summer opportunities and recharges long-standing ones, aiming to foster a productive summer despite pandemic-induced complications.

Cooperative farm organizations for BIPOC communities. Pandemic-proofed parks, offices, sidewalks, and restrooms. New strategies to ensure accuracy of census and GIS data in African cities.

While varied, these topics are united by design’s potential to intervene in precise ways, as well as by a fresh urgency given the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. They are among the 227 investigations that students and recent graduates will pursue this summer as the GSD introduces new avenues for academic and professional enrichment, and continues to consider the direction and process of design research in an altered global environment. 

Amid office closures and precipitous unemployment levels, traditional summer work and learning opportunities have evaporated—especially for students and recent graduates. This dynamic introduces a double-headed challenge: how might students continue to advance their ideas while also gaining professional experience?

“Students have always used summer months to expand on what they’ve learned, by working in offices, partnering with peers on design competitions, traveling to see projects in situ, or advancing research,” says Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. “The pandemic has eliminated many of these valuable opportunities, so we felt that it was critical to support our students, including those graduating into this difficult moment.” 

At the heart of the GSD’s effort is the new Student Emergency Fund (SEF), launched on March 10, which provides summer research grants for GSD students and 2020 graduates, and ameliorates some of the logistical and practical complications stemming from travel restrictions. SEF’s research grants offer latitude and elasticity for students: there are no grades or credits to be pursued, no formal supervision required—though each recipient will offer a written summary of their research at its conclusion. In order to assist students in advancing their individual research, the Office of the Dean bolstered the research funds raised via SEF efforts with a matching donation.

“This was an opportunity, as a GSD family, to wrap our arms around our current students and take a specific action in the unprecedented moment of a global pandemic,” says Peggy Burns, Associate Dean for Development and Alumni Relations. “SEF highlights that the GSD is very much a community: alumni taking action to help support students, with our own faculty among those alumni who have so generously offered various forms of support.” The school’s community of alumni and friends has contributed directly to the SEF while also responding with enthusiasm to requests for increased internship opportunities for GSD students.

The GSD is also reshaping traditional summer offerings in order to pave new pathways toward students’ professional enrichment. Irving Innovation Fellows, selected annually, will collaborate with the GSD’s Innovation Task Force over the summer in order to conceptualize a digital learning environment more nuanced than the one generated this past spring. The school is also providing additional funding to enable teaching assistants to begin their Fall 2020 work during the summer, so they can provide support for courses pivoting to remote teaching and learning in the fall. And it is encouraging faculty to continue hiring students for summer research and design work.

The 227 students and recent graduates who will pursue research this summer are covering a range of topics and perspectives, many of which have been influenced by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. A snapshot of some of these projects and their early-stage germination reveals what GSD students have been pondering over the past few months, how they hope to make use of this unconventional summer, and why they consider their research essential given today’s conditions.

The future of co-working spaces

For years, Francisco Brown (MDes CC ’20) has been studying the real-estate models behind co-working spaces, as well as the broader implications of the so-called sharing economy. As more and more businesses shifted to remote-work arrangements this spring, Brown’s question suddenly transformed: instead of “How do co-working spaces work?,” he was asking, “Will they work at all?” And, if they can’t: What happens to all of that real estate?

“Even though co-working has evolved in a variety of operational and business models, co-working is, in principle, about the community, and its host spaces are about collaboration and proximity,” Brown observes. “The current conditions beg the questions: How can a business model that revolves around renting dense shared-office space stay afloat with social distancing rules and in the advent of what may be the worst economic crisis in a century? How can design research explore new ways to reuse, adapt, and speculate about these spaces in the face of the most significant cultural and economic shift in our times?”

To address these questions, Brown will work alongside research advisor Jacob Reidel, Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture and a senior director at co-working start-up WeWork. Brown aims to first collect relevant news and data around regulations, analysis, and ideas on design responses to social distancing rules. He then plans to interview academics, co-working-space managers and designers, and organizational scientists to discuss the opportunities and challenges that co-working spaces are facing. Ultimately, he will consider design adaptation and typological hybridization for the millions of unused square footage of space that co-working chains currently hold.

Adapting Hawaii’s comfort stations in the face of COVID-19

Like offices, public restrooms are a cornerstone of urban and civic space, and they, too, have been stress-tested by the COVID pandemic. Kaoru Lovett (MArch ’20) had been researching Hawaii’s so-called comfort stations as a design expression of utilitarianism, one upon which architectural identities have been constructed. The comfort stations, which were conceived during the postwar boom years of the 1950s and 1960s, offered local designers an opportunity to bring regional materials and era-specific aesthetics into what would otherwise be generic, utilitarian public bathrooms. 

“The public comfort stations of Hawaii are an interesting precedent, as the scale and timeline of the public project was immense, nearly 200 pavilions over the span of 30 years,” Lovett says. “These pavilions were affiliated with a larger effort to shed light on the budding island destination, establishing some of the foundational work upon which the architectural identity of Hawaii is built.”

While Lovett had initially researched the relationship between the identity and the construction of comfort stations, now he’s wondering whether their inherent utilitarianism can satisfy today’s newly charged public-health concerns. Like Brown, Lovett has watched his original research interests reshape and gain dimension in light of COVID, though not fundamentally transform. This summer, he will examine—from afar—how to adapt Hawaii’s comfort stations to accommodate post-COVID standards of sanitation and social distancing. 

“My earlier interest with these public facilities as architectural ‘image’ models has coincided with the attention brought on by recent events,” Lovett says. “This creates an opportunity to approach these pavilions with a particular interest: construction logic and building imagery as strategies for resolving issues of public health.” Given Hawaii’s current plans for phased reopening of public spaces, the attendant need for safely designed public restrooms is growing in urgency. 

Lovett anticipates that strategies revealed through his research process—whether they be methods of organization, construction, or technology—will find application in public restroom facilities more broadly. “My aspirations are that the specificity of this precedent will act as a platform to engaging in a larger discourse on public health and sanitation through our post–COVID-19 society,” he says.

Reimagining online space

For Emma Ogiemwanye (MUP ’20), a long-standing research interest in virtual presence has been supercharged in recent months. After a five-year stint at Google, Ogiemwanye arrived at the GSD aiming to explore how urban planning theory and practices might be applied to the Internet in order to help make digital spaces safer, more just, and more equitable. In other words, she wanted to consider how the skill sets of an urban planner, trained in analyzing complex issues of policy and governance and in addressing needs of communities, might be applied to the design of online spaces.

As part of her GSD thesis, Ogiemwanye created a taxonomy of strategies that some Instagram influencers invoke to subvert the normative performances featured on the platform. Her research centers on Black women influencers and explores the myriad ways they navigate and reimagine online space. She has taken particular interest in how these influencers have pulled digital levers to elevate joy, activism, and access to social capital and art through their content. 

Ogiemwanye observed that COVID has pushed much of cultural life online. And it has simultaneously revealed health disparities across race, especially as Black Americans are suffering and dying in disproportionately high numbers. In that complex tangle, Ogiemwanye saw the dual narrative so familiar to Black America, queer people of color, and other multiply oppressed communities: creativity and ingenuity emerge in the face of danger and pain.

“Inequalities in access to safety and well-being are now plainly seen and are finally being decried in our physical world. My work stands to point out how dominant online platforms perpetuate these same extractive logics to maximize profit,” Ogiemwanye says. “I hope this transformative moment will result in us reimagining many systems, from housing to healthcare.”

With the support of faculty advisor Lily Song, Ogiemwanye plans to continue descriptively mapping social-media activity by observing how people move and interact online. She believes that she can help encourage what she describes as “more liberatory possibilities” for digital spaces. “This is, in part, a project to build better digital ecosystems as we increasingly spend more time online, while also capturing a snapshot of this unique moment in human history,” Ogiemwanye says. “Online platforms should be included in any list of structures requiring reinvention.”

New forms of food sovereignty

The pandemic has revealed numerous social structures and behaviors that require such reinvention, or at least reconsideration. Throughout the world’s food systems and networks, for example, changes in both work and consumption patterns introduced logistical logjams and supply shortages, highlighting ongoing concerns over labor, supply, equity, and security. Over the course of her GSD studies, Adriana David Ortiz Monasterio (MDes ADPD ’21) has been investigating food sovereignty—explained broadly as the right of a community or a people to define and control the systems and policies that produce the food they eat. She has focused especially on the diversity and conservation of heirloom seeds.  

A Fall 2019 GSD course, “The Landscape We Eat” with Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, had inspired David to assess the full network of food chains and their inherent social and environmental impacts.  And Malkit Shoshan’s Spring 2020 studio, “Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices,” motivated David to apply design in order to engage social issues. 

As COVID brought about food instability and other problems throughout global food systems, David saw her ongoing interests come into sharper relief. “This is a crucial moment to delve further into the relationship between food supply chains and food sovereignty for a nation,” she says. “The security of our food sources and availability is critical for the future of our communities. Understanding our food chains means understanding the origins of our food, the seeds used, chemicals, soil, water, field ownership, the architecture of the system, transport, storage, and human labor. I am interested in speculating on new forms of food networks for the city that can result in food sovereignty for communities in danger of famine, and allow for better ways of dwelling with care in the future.”

Based in Mexico City, David will engage that city of 22 million people as a sort of research site while she consolidates previous quantitative research and begins applying it to case studies. She aims to organize her summer research according to the different food-supply spaces of Mexico City—including supermarkets, temporary markets, and organic farmers’ markets—while layering in a COVID-specific frame: food systems before, during, and after a pandemic condition. She hopes to produce a booklet cataloging methods of ensuring food sovereignty for Mexico City, and ideally for other cities and regions around the world. Bonvehi and Shoshan will advise David throughout her study.

Courtyard typology in the Italian countryside

Meanwhile, other students are taking up the holistic urban development process itself as a question worth interrogating. Nicolás Delgado Alcega (MArch ’20) has spent much of his last three semesters at the GSD researching cities and towns that dot the Italian countryside, with their medieval urban cores and attendant issues of agricultural land abandonment, soil erosion, depopulation, and disinvestment. Seeking adaptation strategies for these communities, he has seen a rising interest among younger generations in agriculture, motivated by economic downturns in cities, environmental degradation, and the loss of cultural heritage.

The research that Delgado Alcega develops over the summer will offer a detailed analysis of specific architectural and urban issues that his previous work revealed to be important in the socioeconomic transformations of the site of study. Aiming for concrete solutions, he will test whether the courtyard typology, as an intervention, might resolve or address issues of accessibility, structural stabilization, and sustainability that have emerged over his research thus far.

In particular, Alcega will take up the Italian town of Vallecorsa as a case study, in which he will propose employing the urban medieval block to accommodate emerging ways of life, programs, and pragmatic needs. Alcega benefits from testimonies and other research he gathered during a two-week site visit to Vallecorsa last winter, and he is grateful for the time and space in which to carefully process and strategize the research he has in hand. 

Alongside his collaborator, Ginevra D’Agostino, a student at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, Delgado Alcega plans to continue a partnership with Vallecorsa’s Cooperativa Agricola La Carboncella, a local organization dedicated to rethinking the future of the area’s historic landscapes. With D’Agostino, he also hopes to incubate a related start-up venture through the Harvard Innovation Lab. Jorge Silvetti, the Nelson Robinson Jr. Professor of Architecture, will remain involved in Delgado Alcega’s work over the summer, having advised the project over several semesters.

With the SEF’s support, these threads of inquiry may extend from Delgado Alcega’s previous coursework and into tangible plans and strategies for local communities. “These research grants have offered a great opportunity to further some of the work we’ve undertaken at the GSD, and begin to transition it toward applications that could have a place in addressing specific challenges through practice,” Delgado Alcega says. “The research grant will give me the unique opportunity to transition from academia to practice in a more meaningful way in the midst of today’s uncertainty.”

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