Sacred Groves and Secret Parks: A two-day colloquium focused on the landscapes of Orisha

Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi traveled from Osogbo, Nigeria, to address the 2019 “Sacred Groves & Secret Parks” colloquium at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The high priestess ceremoniously clanged a handbell as she called out to the audience: “To Osun, the Orisha of the waters of life, we pay homage. We say ‘asé.’” Those in the room—practitioners, scholars, and students alike—joined in chanting “asé,” which served as both the call and the response. “Let she clear the path of this conference. Let she clear the path of everyone. And may we have the successful outcome…and let the knowledge and wisdom that we share be useful for everyone.” The two-day colloquium focused on the landscapes of Orisha, a pantheon of spiritual figures originally worshipped by the Yoruba people of what is now Nigeria. Despite taking place at the GSD, the first presenter was Professor Jacob Olupona of Harvard Divinity School. Olupona—while pushing back against the notion that the spectrum of African spirituality can be categorized monolithically—introduced the audience to common ties that religions of the continent do share: to the spatial and material environment, to the Earth’s processes, and to human culture and community. Faith in Orisha has endured in Yorubaland despite the violence of colonization. It also crossed the ocean to the Americas during the four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, when as many as 15 million West Africans were kidnapped and forced into labor in the colonies of the New World. Santería, for example, traces its roots through the enslaved people of Cuba, and Candomblé is the most pervasive Orisha-based religion in Brazil. Following Olupona’s overview, the chief organizer of the colloquium, Associate Professor Gareth Doherty, explained that speakers from Nigeria, Brazil, France, and the US would compare and contrast those “landscape traditions that fall outside of the normal Western practices.” Scales of both design and disturbance would range from the global to that of site and details. From Doherty’s own fieldwork in Yoruba and Candomblé landscapes, he presented on the intriguing dimensions of an entrance stairway—with 134.5 risers—at Casa de Oxumarê, a terreiro [shrine] in Salvador, Brazil. When Doherty had questioned the worshippers about the curious half step, they acknowledged that the dimensionality had significance but didn’t give a reason. During a field visit in Nigeria, Doherty noticed a similar stairway condition; the explanation that was offered related to a generosity engrained in Yoruba culture. Demonstrating those strong transatlantic bonds among Yoruba-rooted religious spaces, Moisés Lino e Silva, assistant professor of anthropological theory at Federal University of Bahia, introduced the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in Osogbo, Nigeria. Reflecting on his own experiences with Candomblé in Brazil, Silva revealed the “combination of art, religion, and ecological concern” that came to guide the creation of this rich sculptural place. Not only is the Osun Grove a landscape of beautiful sacred forms and cultural space for the Yoruba people, but with its recent listing as a UNESCO Heritage Site, it has helped secure the legal protection of ecosystem benefits. The Grove is one of the largest swaths of urban forest remaining in Nigeria. Vilma Patricia Santana Silva, an architect training in Salvador, discussed her work volunteering with terreiro community projects. In designing and assisting in the construction of her works, Silva communicates directly with the Ilê Àse deities for guidance. Her discussion of a spiritual conflict between one specific tree and a terreiro structure prompted Gary Hilderbrand, GSD professor in landscape architecture and principal at Reed Hilderbrand, to pose a question to Silva and the panel regarding the “larger responsibility” of designers on urban sites, especially in development-intense Salvador, where Candomblé terreiros are some of the last patches of green. Another speaker, Vilson Caetano de Sousa, Jr., a priest and a professor at the Federal University of Bahia, gave the audience an in-depth analysis of plants. Discussing the continental origins of multiple plant species, Sousa demonstrated strong ties between Latin American and African culture and spirituality. Like the Yoruba faith, plants were carried with the enslaved people from Africa to the Americas. Condomblé, Yoruba, and other Afro-diasporic, syncretic religions are united by more than just their respect for Orishas. Their practices and rituals are inherently land-based, often taking place outdoors, and, due to urban development pressures, are increasingly being forced into public-realm landscapes. Religions of the African continent also experience violent persecution. As Olupona described in his overview, “there are millions who fear it…millions across the world” who exert “time and energy trying to destroy it.” In fact, until 1977, the public practice of Condomblé was illegal in Brazil. Like all human activities, worship shapes both the space and the materiality of the land. But the sacred landscapes of Orisha and the religious practices that take place within them are vulnerable: even as legal and social tolerance may be slowly improving, urban development and scarcity are an ever-increasing threat. The colloquium fostered productive and revelatory conversations about the complexities and richness of spiritual culture and its relationship to the landscape. But, as Doherty said at the beginning, the program was about more than just educating and informing; it was also about subverting and “decentering Western canons of knowledge.” The Sacred Groves & Secret Parks colloquium and exhibition was hosted by the Department of Landscape Architecture in collaboration with the Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Brazil Studies Program, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Center for African Studies, Center for the Study of World Religions, Frances Loeb Design Library, Provost’s Fund for Interfaculty Collaboration, and Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Sacred Groves and Secret Parks: An interview with Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi and Moises Lino e Silva

The Graduate School of Design’s colloquium “Sacred Groves and Secret Parks” brought together scholars, architects, and practitioners to discuss the materiality and spatiality of Afro-religious diasporic practices, decentering Western canons of knowledge and new design possibilities for Brazilian and West African cities. Two of the key participants were Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi and Moises Lino e Silva. Princess Faniyi is a Yoruba high priestess and the principal caretaker of The Adunni Olorisha Trust at the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in Nigeria. The grove is famous for its incredibly lush lands and grand, artistic shrines, restored by Susanne Wenger and declared one of the two World Heritage sites in Nigeria by UNESCO in 2005. Lino e Silva is assistant professor of anthropological theory at the Federal University of Bahia and is an initiate of Candomblé (an Afro-Brazilian spiritual tradition) in Brazil. He met Princess Faniyi when he was initiated in the Yoruba tradition in Nigeria. Their research and partnership helped inspire the colloquium with the goal of expanding the international conversation to include an African spiritual perspective and informing future architectural practices. I spoke with Princess Faniyi, Lino e Silva, and Gareth Doherty, associate professor of landscape architecture at the GSD, about the cross over in their work and the themes of sacred spaces and architecture that were explored during the colloquium. Princess Faniyi, your talk was “The Politics of Orishas: How Osun Saved the Grove,” referring to the goddess Osun, to whom the Osogbo Shrine is dedicated. How did the colloquium expand knowledge and conversation around African spiritual traditions in terms of designing and building in landscapes? Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi: The story of how the Osogbo sacred grove was made is that Osun told the people how to build on—and with—the land. The grove has preserved that land in a way that you do not often see. If there is more awareness in the preservation of the landscape of sacred groves, people can know the value of the land. And people will make the effort not to destroy the landscape that has been here for a long, long time—before the existence of any community. The spirit and the connection to the land is vital to the life of humanity. Gareth Doherty: The conference was very much based on landscape architecture. For example, we looked at the redesigning of Brazilian terreiros [shrines/ritual spaces] from three different architectural perspectives. On one panel, a Brazilian architect—Vilma Patricia Santana Silva from the Federal University of Bahia—was an initiate of Candomblé. In the process of doing her master’s thesis, through each of the design stages, she would consult with the Orisha. In a sense, she was listening to the landscape. You could take that perspective a step further and say she’s listening to the spirit of the land through the Orisha. That challenges our preconceptions of how designers and architects go about designing. In Nigeria, sacred groves have decreased in number, yet in Brazil, terreiros continue to multiply. What was the discussion surrounding sacred parks? Moises Lino e Silva: Terreiros are growing in number. Some of them are very small, but officially there are eleven hundred—and unofficially there may be 2,000 in cities. It’s not just about a collection of buildings; it’s also the spaces in between the buildings that are public space. Sacred parks are within the infrastructure and the greener areas of their urban forests. What came up in the conference was the concern regarding not just the internal aspects of the terreiros but their relationship to the outside and to the public domain. Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi: The conference was crucial in raising awareness of the importance of the African spirit and Orisha tradition and the future of sacred spaces in these communities. With this partnership with Brazil and Nigeria, we are putting together a team so everyone can work together to preserve the landscape of sacred groves. What was the conversation around environmental perspectives and the need to recover natural landscapes and preserve existing ones? Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi: There are major challenges in some places. UNESCO is there to protect the people and the places they are trying restore or preserve for sacred groves. My hope is that this conference will bring awareness and positive action with more ideas of how to protect and preserve the landscape. Moises Lino e Silva: In Brazil, our organizations collectively advocate for the city and its ecological value. Part of our agenda is considering the preservation of those spaces within the cities, which are getting increasingly dense. Nature within the city and landscape is at the root of the spiritual traditions. I think that’s an important dimension to conserve. Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi: Sacred groves can be seen as a model for building in natural landscapes. So the example is the sacred groves and the connection to the Orisha and spirit of the land—but it needs to be a larger conversation. Every culture finds its own meaning and purpose in the land; and that also informs—and decides—the future of the landscape.

Excerpt: Turning to the Flip Side, by Maruxa Cardama

“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

Turning to the Flip Side

By Maruxa Cardama

On the flipside you can do anything (…) the flipside bring a second wind to change your world. Encrypted recipes to reconfigure easily the mess we made on world, side B

– Song Flipside, written by Nitin Sawhney and S. Duncan

My brainstorming for this essay started me thinking about the comprehensive list that follows the affirmation of “a just city is a city that…” But my brain fell to the temptation of looking at the task from the reverse angle. What are the key ingredients of the perfect recipe for the mess of injustice in a city? For me, in a nutshell, the key ingredients for injustice are poor, inadequate, or opaque or simply noninexistent frameworks, spatial planning, management, financing and governance. All these inefficiencies put together, we get a city that is trapped in, or inexorably marching towards, injustice.

The main point I would like to make is that frameworks, spatial planning, management financing and governance are essential foundations and enablers for a multidimensional conception of justice in a city. Why? Because justice in a city is about social, political, economic and environmental justice. Once more, why these enablers? Because not only they can, but actually in many cases will, deliver better results if conceived and operationalized with the city-region scale as their wider framework. Justice in a city goes beyond its administrative boundaries. Ultimately a city will not be just if it is triggering injustice in the peri-urban or metropolitan areas or the wider region it relates to.

Frameworks, Spatial Planning and Management

Today cities are home to half of the world’s population and three quarters of its economic output, and these figures will rise dramatically over the next couple of decades. Urban development, with its power to trigger transformative change, can and must be at the front line of human development.

We seem to forget, though, that urban development is a complex process. It is a social process, and one that develops over time. To avoid getting trapped in morally abhorrent injustice, it is about time we collectively realize that urban development, like any other complex social process, needs to be soundly and sufficiently framed, planned and managed. City and regional spatial planning—territorial planning—can be an essential enabler of justice. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org … 

Just City Lab collaborates with Mayors’ Institute on City Design to introduce inaugural MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship

Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab announces, in collaboration with the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD ), the inaugural MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship, which kicked off in late September 2020 and continues virtually through December 2020. The Fellowship convenes seven city mayors from around the United States to directly tackle racial injustices in each of their cities through planning and design interventions.

Especially as COVID-19 disproportionately harms the health and economic well-being of Black residents, and as national protests around policing and public safety affecting African-Americans continue, the MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship focuses on planning and design solutions for the neighborhoods where these injustices play out. During the program, each mayor selects a predominantly Black neighborhood in their respective city that has historically experienced under-investment, and receives feedback on applying the language and tactics of racial justice to the neighborhood’s future.

Relatedly, the MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship will utilize the Just City Lab’s Just City Index and lessons from the Lab’s 2019 convening, the Just City Assembly, which challenged design practitioners to create a more visible agenda for disrupting injustice through design. These resources will frame dynamic presentations and dialogues by and with experts in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, art activism, housing and public policy. Mayors will learn best practices from the nation’s leading experts on the intersection of urban design, planning, and racial justice while working toward creating a manifesto of action for the neighborhood they selected.

“This collaboration between the Just City Lab and the Mayors’ Institute on City Design could not be more timely, nor more important,” said Sarah M. Whiting, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “We all know that our cities need help in recognizing the forces behind racial injustices—particularly in predominantly Black neighborhoods—and in finding vocabularies and strategies for transforming them into places of equity and opportunity. I’m excited to see the impact that this program will have and hope only that it’s the beginning of a broader network of collaborations that will make ‘just cities’ the standard for what we expect, not the exception to what so many experience.”

The GSD’s Just City Lab is led by architect and urban planner Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and founder of Urban Planning and Design for the American City.

The inaugural cohort of MICD Just City Mayoral Fellows is:

Mayor Stephen K. Benjamin (Columbia, South Carolina); Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba (Jackson, Mississippi); Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard (Mount Vernon, New York); Mayor Errick D. Simmons (Greenville, Mississippi); Mayor Yvonne Spicer (Framingham, Massachusetts); Mayor Vince R. Williams (Union City, Georgia); and Mayor Randall L. Woodfin (Birmingham, Alabama).

“Mayors are on the front lines of every difficult conversation our communities are having right now,” says Tom Cochran, CEO and Executive Director of the United States Conference of Mayors. “They have the power to seize this moment of reckoning with racial injustices and unite their communities around real solutions. 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 we are proud to partner with the Just City Lab to launch this new program.”

“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 regardless of their race or zip code,” said Jennifer Hughes, Director of Design and Creative Placemaking at the National Endowment for the Arts. “Building on the Arts Endowment’s vision to heal, unite, and lift up communities with compassion and creativity, we look forward to this collaboration between MICD and the Just City Lab.”

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. The Just City Lab is a GSD-based design lab led by 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.

From Times Square to the Grand Central, Jerold S. Kayden leads New York Times architecture critic on a virtual walking tour of Midtown

Jerold S. Kayden, Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design, recently led architecture critic Michael Kimmelman on a virtual tour of Midtown Manhattan for the New York Times. The conversation is part of an ongoing series featuring virtual walks around New York City. Kayden, who received degrees in law and city and regional planning from Harvard, focused his tour on the legal history behind 42nd Street.

Experience the tour in the article “Times Square, Grand Central and the Laws That Build the City ,” in the New York Times.

The Architecture of Waste

A linear economy conceives of waste as an end. It presumes that refuse cast off, flushed, or buried terminates the processes of consumption. The world’s dominant understanding of capital depends on this view, an idea that begins with resource extraction and leads eventually to disposal—what Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace, refers to as “Take, Make, Waste.” Conceptually, “waste” represents a fundamental redesignation of value by separating out material that no longer seems to have potential. This conversion of material to waste results in the burial of more than 200 million of tons of detritus each year in the US.

An additional 100 million tons or so of disposed material feeds back into the consumption stream, but this happens almost invisibly. Sorted and repurposed for recycling and composting, divided waste streams merely hint at an inflection from “Take, Make, Waste” thinking. As far as most people can tell, different waste bins direct material to different trucks, which carry it to different ends. Even with effective recycling, it is difficult for people to conceive of the consumption process as other than linear, because used material still goes “away.” And virtually everything we use seems to start out as new. Even things made from reconstituted material, such as recycled or partially recycled paper, plastic, and metal, are essentially indistinguishable from the same items made from new materials. Compost is not much different: for most consumers it comes as soil, freshly packaged in branded, brightly printed plastic bags. So, crucial as it is, an effective recycling system disguises itself, for consumers, as waste disposal.

Huge changes in the linear consumption stream have developed since the 1970s, but they are hard to discern. In their 2015 Harvard Design Magazine essay, “The Missing Link: Architecture and Waste Management ,” Hanif Kara, Andreas Georgoulias, and Leire Asensio Villoria point out that “drastic efficiency leaps, environmental impact improvements, and technological innovations all happen far from the public eye.” They argue that architects should be more deeply involved in making these visible by creating better-designed waste facilities. These would not merely soften the harsher aspects of waste infrastructure, they also could help turn public attention toward the multiple ways we dispose of material. “With their innovative programming, and welcoming and transparent architecture,” they emphasize, “these buildings help to promote healthier communities.” This is one important way to elucidate the problem of waste, but it doesn’t fundamentally challenge the system of consumption that creates it. Waste is still an end product.

Designers can also reconceive the consumption system in more subtle ways. As a circular economy develops, its goal of disposing of no material moves the challenge of waste more deeply into the system. Waste becomes as much a beginning as an end. In their book Building from Waste: Recovered Materials in Architecture and Construction , Dirk E. Hebel, Marta H. Wisniewska, and Felix Heisel question “whether the consideration of the waste state of a product should not become the starting point of its design proper.” In this view, waste becomes an essential concept in design, since the depleted value state of the material informs the process from the beginning.

Alternatively, designers could focus their attention on utilizing materials that have already been used. For now, however, designing with reused building materials can be challenging because they are not widely available. As Alejandro Bahamón and Maria Camila Sanjinés point out in Rematerial: From Waste to Architecture , “The design process for a building that incorporates recycled materials and products differs significantly from the conventional way of conceiving architecture…. The design team must first identify the sources of materials suitable for reutilization and then start to define the details.” While this shift in design process can drive creativity, the limited market for reused material can constrain innovation. As a circular consumption system develops, designers must continue to question conventional design processes, but they must also shift the ways they think about waste.

Over the past year, a number of GSD courses have directly addressed this challenge. Waste in its many manifestations was the central theme of the first-year courses in the Masters of Design Engineering program. In Architecture, the spring semester studio “Making Next to Forest” confronted the concept of a circular economy in Japan’s wood production industry. And several Landscape Architecture courses have focused on how urban sewage can support agricultural production and food systems.

Waste “is on some level unappealing,” points out GSD instructor Jock Herron. So, while waste may not necessarily be the big idea designers first turn to, it presents “lots of different design solutions,” difficult engineering challenges, and “big behavior elements.” Consequently, as a theme for the first-year course sequence in the MDE program, “it worked extraordinarily well.” Twenty-two students worked in multidisciplinary teams to unearth the huge challenges waste presents. Herron says that the program structure lends itself to broad investigations—“We give them the theme, and they figure out what the problem is”—but the research teams moved, over the course of the year, toward tightly focused and very specific design solutions.

During the fall semester, students worked with the faculty team of Andrew Witt, Joanna Aizenberg, Elizabeth Christoforetti, and Cesar Hidalgo to investigate multiple different kinds of waste—electrical, medical, nuclear, and so on—and the systems associated with them. Naturally, these intersect, and their interactions point out how waste occupies the complex interfaces between human and natural systems. Continuing with the theme into the spring semester, student teams worked with Jock Herron, Stephen Burks, Luba Greenwood, and Julia Lee on developing specific products to help contend with waste-related challenges.

Groups addressed a wide range of topics including noncompliance in medical regimens (which results in wasted medicine, economic resources, and human capital); waste of ink and paper in book publishing; furniture disposal by large and very mobile student populations; sources of food waste in agricultural production and at points of sale; efficiency in the complex timeline for liver transplants; the use of algae for carbon sequestration; and identification and disposal of trash in national parks. Each team designed a tangible product to deal with the challenge.

Coming at waste from a very different angle, Toshiko Mori’s “Making Next to Forest” spring semester studio started with the idea that waste “is a completely wrong notion.” “We really should not have any waste,” Mori emphasizes. Her studio focused on “a global approach to proposing alternative forest economies,” using wood production in Hokkaido, Japan as a model. Japanese resource usage is highly effective, in part because it balances natural forest management with industrial wood production that produces little waste. “In Hokkaido when they harvest trees,” Mori explains, “there’s only 10 percent waste. Ninety percent of everything they harvest is being used, even the small branches… they’ll be used for chopsticks, which makes sense. Even though the last 10 percent is unused, it could be used for biofuels.”

Students studied the processes that contribute to this highly efficient system, including natural resource preservation, timber harvesting, furniture building, and material reuse—both in Boston and while visiting Hokkaido for two weeks in February. Their first design included a masterplan for a forest research center on an abandoned university campus in the city of Asahikawa. The center’s primary purpose would be to promote a circular economic model—finding ways to make use of otherwise wasted wood, particularly byproducts of industrial processes. Their final project, a chair museum in the township of Higashikawa (a partner and sponsor of the studio), sought to connect the research on forest ecology with design at all scales, using regionally sourced materials.

Waste of another kind is the central focus of a GSD faculty team studying the complex interactions between Mexico City and the agricultural Mezquital Valley, about 37 miles northeast of the city. A massive pipe connects the city and the valley, pumping an almost incomprehensible volume of raw sewage into its highly productive soil. Wastewater nutrients support a rich agricultural economy, but modern sanitary standards of sewage treatment threaten the balance.

In their research proposal, “The Right to the Sewage: Digesting Mexico City in the Mezquital Valley,” which recently won a major prize from the SOM Foundation, Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich, Seth Denizen, and David Moreno Mateos propose to undertake a systems-based multidisciplinary study that includes the whole waste-production cycle, with the goal of better understanding and supporting its productivity. Their 2019-2020 courses on food systems, ecosystem restoration, and soil formation offered a prelude to a future research and design studio that will address the challenges of waste disposal and reuse in Mexico City, and, more broadly, the future of the urban water cycle in cities throughout the world.

In multiple ways GSD faculty and students are challenging fundamental presumptions about waste and the economic models that make it necessary. By incorporating waste deeply into their thinking, and the products they envision, they are questioning design processes, reconceiving consumption, and finding new value in refuse. 

Excerpt: The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food by Marcus Samuelsson

Born in Ethiopia, raised and trained as a chef in Sweden, and now living and cooking in Harlem, Marcus Samuelsson understands food’s power in placemaking and reclaiming histories. His new cookbook, The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food , co-authored with Osayi Endolyn, addresses the history of Black cooking and its significance in shaping the American identity. Along with Toni L. Griffin, professor in practice of urban planning, Thelma Golden and Mark Raymond, Samuelsson will present a guest lecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design on October 15.

The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food

By Marcus Samuelsson

“It’s the last week of February, and I’m in Miami setting up my new restaurant, Red Rooster Overtown. I’m talking to chefs, cooks, dishwashers, investors, all part of the frantic setup before we open.

Fast forward to a week later and this coronavirus is real. Twenty-five years of work, from coming to the US as an immigrant in the mid-90s to growing up as a chef at Aquavit to opening Red Rooster in Harlem and expanding to Overtown, is falling apart.

It only took ten days.

My phone rings. I speak with my business partner in Miami. The opening is not going to happen. We let go of the staff we’ve been training for weeks. Marcus B&P in Newark, New Jersey, follows, and then Red Rooster in Harlem. I don’t want to shut down. I want to hold on.

The next day, everything is still. The first time in years.

I gather with my team and we pivot. Who can help us out of this—knowing that Covid-19 will live very differently in Harlem, Newark, and Overtown compared to the rest of America? One thing about being Black and an immigrant is that I never really trust the system—you learn to go through a lot of adversity on your own. I think about my father, a leader in a small Ethiopian village.
How he led his people to build a well out of nothing. How every night they prayed and held themselves with dignity. Now is the time to pull from that side of me.

The first call is to Jos. Andr.s and World Central Kitchen. In two weeks, Jos.’s team helps transform Red Rooster Harlem into a community kitchen to feed hundreds of people a day. The next question is who will stay in Harlem to help? Robert, our greeter, is in. Jamie, our server, says, “I can.” Nicolette, our hostess, says to count her in as well.

I don’t know what to expect from our first days of service. Would there be nurses on the line? Firemen? Teachers? Or the folks who most of the time we ignore? The homeless. Folks from the nearby methadone center. They become our new regulars. The daily number rises to five hundred, and more.

Chicken one day, gumbo the next. Then rice and beans. Chile con carne after that.

We start a new routine I never learned in cooking school. Instead of yelling “Behind you! Hot pan!” we yell “Six feet apart! Please stay in line.” Robert coaches the line on social distancing. But how do you instruct someone who is high or mentally ill and appears unstable, next to a mother trying to get food for her family?

At the beginning of April, the folks who make up the food line shift again—the working class is now joining in. People start to arrive early. Jamie and Robert hold back portions for the elderly who can’t make the line, do an extra run to Ms. Johnson in 4B, to aunties and uncles who cannot stand for hours to receive a nourishing meal.

The worst calls have begun to come in. The virus is more than just numbers in the news. We lost my friend Chef Floyd Cardoz. Samuel Hargess Jr., from the iconic Paris Blues, is dead—a veteran of an incredible juke joint where the best musicians in the world have performed. Gary Samuels, who played in our band for nine years every single Sunday, is now gone. Kerby, another door greeter, and Reggie, a manager, have each lost a parent. Customers are also dying.

We reach twenty thousand meals served, with kitchens firing away in Harlem, Newark, and Overtown. I never thought of cooks and servers as first responders. In this moment in America, once again, the immigrants are helping. The guy at the deli. The lady delivering your package. These people are the first to not get health insurance. The first to be looked down upon or pushed aside. They are my heroes.

Through this, we are survivors. Our heritage has long shown how we continue to prevail even when the light seems dim and fades to black. A cultural experience of healing that we must all go through now.

But Covid-19 is not the only disease infecting America. The pandemic will eventually be overcome, though its effects will stay in the Black community for longer than elsewhere.

The bigger disease we must fight is the virus of systemic racism.

Alongside the rise of the coronavirus this year, we saw the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd by police. David McAtee, who ran YaYa’s BBQ Shack in Louisville, often served food at no cost to struggling members of his neighborhood and police officers, yet he was killed by the Kentucky National Guard in the aftermath of Black Lives Matter protests. In these and too many other violent tragedies we have seen the ugliest and worst of America.

We have also seen the bravest and best in response. Some of the most important work in fighting back against racism has happened during this pandemic. Although John Lewis passed during this time, his legacy has never been stronger. The changes we are a part of now are having a ripple effect—not only in America’s Black communities and communities of people of color, but in marginalized and Black communities throughout the world.

It will also have a tremendous impact on the food industry.

Food has always been part of the movement for racial justice. Change has often come from ordinary people doing extraordinary things through food, and changing our table. Take Georgia Gilmore, a mother of six in Alabama who fed and funded the Montgomery bus boycott for more than a year in the 1950s. Her cooking and efforts to organize the “Club from Nowhere” raised hundreds of dollars a week for the civil rights movement. Or Zephyr Wright, the chef for Lyndon B. Johnson, who was constantly in the President’s ear about injustice and how America needed to change, and who later was invited by the President to personally witness the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Sometimes leaders are famous and widely documented. Sometimes they are not as well-known. The contributions of Black people in this country have always been underdocumented and undervalued. We can change that narrative. And we must.

We have to get rid of our biggest wound in America: racism. I hope that feeding each other, learning about our food and who makes it, is part of what will help us heal.

The Rise was created to highlight the incredible talent and journey of Black chefs, culinarians, and writers at work today, and to show how the stories we tell can help make a more equitable, just industry. I hope this work, and this moment, leads to us raising up Black winemakers, authors, and farmers. I hope it leads to us supporting the next generation of Black chefs and hospitality workers who will change our industry forever.

And I hope that this movement becomes a part of a permanent and much broader social change.

So much beauty and achievement has come out of tough times throughout history, and it is inspiring to see communities across the globe coming together to care for one another. We also know that the road “back” from the current crisis will be harder for Black people because of the systemic challenges that disproportionately affect Black restaurateurs and creators of all kinds. That’s why it’s so important for everyone to help bring more equity to this industry. See the Resources section on page 301 for a few starting points to take this message and turn it into action in your own life.

We are the Black Food Community: Black chefs, Black servers, Black bartenders, Black food writers, Black culinary historians, Black recipe developers. Our food stems from challenged communities and challenged times. It comprises enslavement, poverty, and war, yet our food has soul, and has inspired and fed many. We will rise, we will shine, we are survivors.

Black Food Matters.

Marcus Samuelsson
July 2020

Marcus Samuelsson is the acclaimed chef behind many restaurants worldwide, including Red Rooster Harlem, Marcus Restaurant + Terrace in Montreal, and Marcus B&P in Newark. Samuelsson was the youngest person to receive a three-star review from the New York Times and was the guest chef for the Obama Administration’s first state dinner. He has won multiple James Beard Foundation awards including Best Chef: New York City and Outstanding Personality for No Passport Required, his television series with VOX/Eater. 

Excerpt: Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, by Lorena Zárate

“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

Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century

By Lorena Zárate

[The Right to the City is] the right to change ourselves, by changing the city.—David Harvey, 2008

The Cities We Have

The cities we have in the world today are far from being places of justice. Whether in the South, the North, the West or the East, the cities we are living in are a clear expression of the increasing inequalities and violence from which our societies suffer, as a direct result of putting capital gains and economic calculations—greed!— before people and nature´s well-being, dignity, needs and rights.

The concentration of economic and political power is a phenomenon of exploitation, dispossession, exclusion and discrimination whose spatial dimensions are clearly visible: dual cities of luxury and misery; gentrification processes that displace and evict traditional and low-income populations; millions of empty buildings and millions of people without a decent place to live; campesinos without land and land without campesinos, subjected to abuses by agro-businesses, mining and other extractive industries and large scale projects.

In other words, injustice emerges from destruction of public and community´s goods and assets, and the weakening of regulation, redistribution and welfare policies in States that instead facilitate private appropriation and accumulation of the commons, the resources and the collectively-created wealth. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org … 

Urban Planning alum Justin Rose on community organizing in Baltimore: “Often the people who hold the knowledge or insight that can unlock a creative solution are overlooked.”

Excerpted from the Harvard Gazette series, To Serve Better .

Whenever Justin Rose (MUP ’18)  sits in a community meeting, he takes note of the people who aren’t speaking. They are generally the ones who haven’t yet been invited to offer their opinions — and they are the ones Rose wants to hear from most.

“Often the people who hold the knowledge or insight that can unlock a creative solution are overlooked,” said Rose, who works as a performance analyst in the Baltimore mayor’s office of Performance and Innovation. “I seek out those people and bring them into the process; their experiences are essential.”

That interest in engaging residents and finding ways to bring them into the conversation sits at the heart of the way Rose views his work. The North Carolina native spent time in Boston working as a community organizer with low-income and elderly populations, and the path to his current job began at the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative while studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

“There can be a big disconnect between policymakers, the decisions they make, and the lived experiences of the people who are most impacted by those decisions,” said Rose. Because of this, he spends his time in the community working to bridge that disconnect by helping residents track the efforts of city departments in their neighborhoods.

Rose emphasizes that his role is equal parts organizing and data analysis. Relationship building, both in the community and with his government colleagues, is what he points to as keys to success.

Often the people who hold the knowledge or insight that can unlock a creative solution are overlooked.

Rose is using his love of data and his skills in urban planning to help Baltimore manage some of its most pressing issues.

Rose’s Performance and Innovation team just launched CleanStat , a component of Mayor Jack Young’s “Clean It Up!” campaign to tackle the city’s persistent trash and litter problem. CleanStat takes the trove of data the city has and turns it into visual representations of targets and successes, and it allows residents to easily sort through that data to see progress in their own neighborhoods.

“The dashboard [we developed] has to serve multiple purposes: inform the public; help departments manage their business, and serve as a quality check,” Rose said. “We have so much [data] that can be used to communicate how, where, and why we deliver services.”

Something he appreciates about the people who serve in city government is their passion and commitment; they live the issues that they go to work each day to address, he noted.

It is a personal connection he not only admires but tries to emulate by getting out into the community, asking questions, and listening.

“With every data set I work with, I try to pop the hood and find out specifically how the data is generated and what the story behind it is,” he said. “Doing this, you get to the truth of the matter really quickly.”

As he continues working on the mayor’s ambitious agenda and the essential priorities of the community, Rose says his goal is to help city government slow down and recognize the knowledge that exists in the community as they work to implement change.

Justin Rose (MUP ’18) is using his skills as a community organizer and his experience working with complex data sets to help Baltimore solve their most pressing problems, all while preserving the city’s rich history.

MUP program’s Andriani Atmadja, Cecley Hill, Whytne Stevens among six recipients nationwide of the 2020 APA Foundation Scholarship

Harvard Graduate School of Design degree candidates Andriani Atmadja (MUP ’21), Cecley Hill (MUP ’21), and Whytne Stevens (MUP ’22) are among the six recipients of the American Planning Association’s (APA) 2020 APA Foundation Scholarship , one of the highest student honors in the field. According to the APA’s mission statement, the foundation and its scholarship help make planning education more accessible, attract the most talented individuals to the profession, and work toward making the profession more diverse. Each of this year’s scholarship recipients is motivated by their personal experience and their desire to create stronger futures for their communities through equity, environmental stewardship, and economic development.

Atmadja, Hill, and Stevens are each enrolled in the GSD’s Master in Urban Planning program, where they study and research a variety of topics. See below for a gallery of select work from the honorees.

“I am truly honored to get this award from APA,” Atmadja says. “It helps me to further my mission of enhancing resilience planning for vulnerable communities that seek social justice and equity in its practice.”

“It’s an honor to receive this award alongside two other fantastic women from the GSD,” says Hill. “I’m incredibly thankful for the APA Foundation’s support in this critical period and look forward to joining in work towards building more equitable cities around the world.”

“I’m honored and very grateful to have received this scholarship from the APA Foundation and see it as one of many ways to support students of color in urban planning, especially given our current sociopolitical climate,” Stevens says. “Receiving this scholarship helps me to continue exploring topics through a social equity framework such as participatory planning, community development, and people centric urban design while studying urban planning at the GSD.”

APA and its professional institute, the American Institute of Certified Planners, are dedicated to advancing the profession of planning, offering better choices for where and how people work and live. The more than 40,000 APA members work in concert with community residents, civic leaders, and business interests to create communities that enrich people’s lives. Through its philanthropic work, APA’s Foundation helps to reduce economic and social barriers to good planning.

Learn more about the 2020 APA Foundation honorees at the APA’s website .