Student-organized Design Yard Sale raises $126,000 to benefit anti-racism organizations

With Design Yard Sale , a cohort of five Harvard Graduate School of Design students and recent graduates aims to both raise awareness of social and racial justice in design, and directly support anti-racism organizations.

Officially launched on July 1, Design Yard Sale has operated like a virtual auction and gift shop. Its catalog has included a curated range of original sketches, paintings, furniture, books, and apparel, many of which have been both donated and autographed by their designers—among them, Virgil Abloh, Denise Scott Brown, and Frank Gehry.

Design Yard Sale raised $126,000 through its four weeks of sales, with all proceeds benefiting a pair of non-profit organizations dedicated to anti-racist efforts.

Design Yard Sale’s organizers—Grace Chee (MArch ’21), Tessa Crespo (MDes ’20), Edward Han (MArch ’21), Izzy Kornblatt (MDes ’19), and Yaxuan Liu (MArch ’21)—first began conversing via GSD community emails and listservs in late May. Motivated by ongoing social-justice conversations, and catalyzed by the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer, the team felt driven to rewire design’s agency amid a national reckoning on race and justice, one in which the design fields have been directly implicated.

The Design Yard Sale cohort set up the project with no prior fundraising experience, learning and organizing on the fly. Proceeds of Design Yard Sale will benefit two organizations: nonprofit The Bail Project and New Orleans-based architecture and design justice practice Colloqate Design , each of which is dedicated to fighting systemic racism.

“In the face of such deeply rooted violence and oppression, we questioned what role we could play, and as minority designers and students ourselves, we wanted to contribute to the movement in whatever small way we could,” says Chee. “As Jerome Byron, one of our contributors, put it, Design Yard Sale is about promoting strategies for personal spending and redirecting cash to where it matters most.”

The auction’s final lot, which closed last Saturday, August 1, included a signed X-Rocker stool from Herzog & de Meuron and a print of Simone by Farshid Moussavi. Individual works of particular interest have included a a sketch of Queens Public Library by Craig Dykers; photographs of 1960s Las Vegas by Denise Scott Brown; and a sketch of Beekman Street Housing by Frank Gehry, each framed and signed by their respective designer. Jerome Byron offered a glass-fiber-reinforced concrete stool, infused with pink pigment. Other standout items included a Virgil Abloh™ x IKEA MARKERAD Chair from Abloh’s personal archive, to be illustrated on and signed by Abloh with the purchaser’s name, as well as Perry Kulper prints and Harvard GSD’s Womxn in Design Takeout Tote.

Among other ideas, the concept of offering distinctive design items—including furniture and other consumer goods, but also books, sketches, and other works that evoke design’s pedagogical and conceptual undercurrents—arose as a constructive way to celebrate both design’s tangible fruits, and its potential for social agency.

“It was a call to action with a direct, tangible way to help, and that really appealed,” says Crespo. “We all felt a strong obligation to fight against systemic racism and we wanted to do so in a way that provided immediate assistance to leaders on the front lines of the movement.”

For Design Yard Sale’s five organizers, the month of June was a warp-speed crash course in establishing a non-profit organization. Liu initiated e-mail conversations in May; as the team took shape, Han began establishing and deepening an online presence for the growing effort. A first public call for donations went out on the Design Yard Sale Instagram on June 18.

Before and following this first activation, the team strategized Design Yard Sale’s entire scope, from establishing an e-commerce platform to sourcing design objects—not to mention pricing, marketing, and shipping them—as well as studying the relevant international laws and policies governing commercial transactions.

The group secured fiscal sponsorship from the Architectural League of New York with less than 24 hours to spare before the July 1 launch; they set up a bank account that morning, and by that afternoon were starting to ship orders.

Sourcing the auction’s exquisite, unique wares was a similarly collaborative process, if less manic: organizers both tapped into professional and academic networks in order to solicit donated works, but also were approached by various members of the Harvard GSD community as word spread. Among Harvard GSD faculty efforts, Toshiko Mori and Oana Stănescu provided mentorship to the organizers, as well as connections to other designers; Jerold Kayden and colleagues at Harvard’s Transactional Law Clinic helped guide the team through legal considerations; and a variety of faculty—among them Jennifer Bonner, Sean Canty, Jon Lott, Chris Reed, Jeannette Kuo, Malkit Shoshan, Jenny French, Sara Zewde, and Zeina Koreitem—donated works of their own. A full list of Design Yard Sale contributors is on view at the project’s homepage .

At the project’s roots, foregrounding student work was a cornerstone of the cohort’s organizing vision. First batches of donations included models and drawings from fellow Harvard GSD students, while faculty grew involved as word spread. While early conversations among organizers involved questions of which types and mediums of items to include, the team ultimately chose an open approach, inviting works from a range of designers and at a range of price points, enhancing the auction’s accessibility.

“For us, it has always been really important to have student and young-practitioner work be presented on an equal footing with that of better known designers, because so often student work goes unnoticed,” says Kornblatt. “We know of the high caliber of work that happens at the GSD and other design schools, but so much of it ends up just gathering dust. Design Yard Sale allows students to use what they’ve already created to make a difference.”

In serving anti-racist priorities and missions, the team wanted to support both smaller, grassroots work, and broader efforts tackling systemic, anti-Black racism in the criminal justice system. Amid conversations with social-justice-minded colleagues, as well as a poll among Harvard GSD students, organizations the Bail Project and Colloqate Design emerged.

Beyond the July auctions, Design Yard Sale aims to educate and inspire awareness of social justice and systemic racism, especially within but also beyond design. The organizers are considering the project’s future, whether that involves making it an annual tradition, extending it into the Fall 2020 term, or other avenues toward expansion. And, individually, each is conceptualizing other projects geared toward promoting racial justice and equality within the field; Chee recently began developing an Instagram-based storytelling and archival project to chronicle designers of color and their work.

“While the DYS store is closing today, the fight does not end here,” the project’s website reads. “We hope that we can all continue to take part in the long-term battle against racism, both within the design field and in the wider society. In the face of such deep-rooted, systemic violence and oppression, we should never forget the implications that our everyday choices—be it what we read, where we spend, or who we hire—have on creating a better and more equitable future.”

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 … 

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 … 

Martin Bechthold and Collaborators Earn University Climate Change Solutions Fund Grant

The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Martin Bechthold has been honored with a research grant in the sixth round of Harvard’s Climate Change Solutions Fund (CCSF) , established in 2014 by President Emerita Drew Gilpin Faust to encourage multidisciplinary discovery around climate change. Bechthold and his three co-investigators, including the GSD’s Jonathan Grinham, were recognized for their project “Cold-SNAP: Cooling Your Building Without Heating Our World,” an effort toward designing better, more sustainable air conditioning for residential and commercial buildings.

Bechthold currently serves as director of the Doctor of Design Studies program and the Master in Design Engineering program, as well as the Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology, while Grinham is a Lecturer in Architecture and Research Associate. With “Cold-SNAP,” Bechthold and Grinham are collaborating with Joanna Aizenberg, Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science and Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (FAS/SEAS); Jack Alvarenga, research scientist at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

As the Gazette observes, Bechthold and his collaborators aim to design build a better air conditioner, with a focus on developing co-extrusion ceramic manufacturing methods with a high-efficiency, retrofittable indirect evaporative cooling (IEC) system. The team intends their design to serve residential and commercial buildings in hot-dry and hot-humid climates.

Early-stage research has shown that cold-SNAP IEC systems “can achieve high cooling capacity with no added moisture and low system energy,” the Gazette writes. “The funding from the CCSF will help enable next-generation IEC systems and facilitate a full-scale pilot program with a ceramic manufacturer and potential industry stakeholders.”

Among the other projects supported by this year’s CCSF cycle include how the timing of clean-technology research and development interacts with the shapes and timing of policy-making and policy scenarios; efforts toward accelerating data science and data access on climate-change exposures in order to mitigate climate change’s health consequences; and new, more-accurate methods of quantifying forest canopy structure in order to support forest preservation and restoration projects.

CCSF aims to support and inspire the University’s transition from nonrenewable energy sources to a more-sustainable system. To date, 50 CCSF projects have received more than $6 million in University support; this year’s cycle awarded $1 million to eight projects.

“Harvard has made significant progress toward reducing emissions, improving health in the built environment, and shaping policies and industries in pursuit of a more sustainable future,” Harvard President Larry Bacow said on July 10, when the grants were announced. “Our goals — a fossil-fuel-neutral campus by 2026 and fossil-fuel-free campus by 2050 — are within our reach because our dedicated researchers and scholars are advancing knowledge and driving progress that connects and amplifies all of our sustainability efforts.”

Awarded just before Harvard closed its doors and gates in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s CCSF grants enabled recipients to begin their research and work in advance of camps closures. As the Harvard Gazette describes , CCSF’s review committee “targets innovative research projects at each of Harvard’s 12 Schools, giving special consideration to those that use the campus as a living laboratory. Eligible projects test ideas that address global sustainability challenges and align with the priorities in the with the priorities in the University’s Sustainability Plan  and the climate goals outlined by Harvard’s Presidential Committee on Sustainability  and the Office for Sustainability .”

At the GSD, Bechthold teaches courses in design robotics and material systems, building structures, as well as life cycle design. Bechthold’s research broadly looks at material and fabrication technology as a catalyst of innovation for design practice. In 2010 he founded the GSD’s Design Robotics Group and recently merged it into the Material Processes and Systems (MaPS) Group , a collaboration of faculty, research associates, and students that pursues sponsored and other research projects. Bechthold has also served as a key University faculty member in the development, launch, and advancement of Harvard’s collaborative Master in Engineering (MDE) degree program.

As Lecturer in Architecture and Research Associate, Grinham’s work asks how the design of conventional and emerging material technologies can address the question of energy and where we get it. This question has led to the development of novel technologies and publications around vascular-thin-film heat exchange, nano-scale thermal tuning, and the coupling of breathable materials to buoyancy-driven ventilation. These topics are complemented by Grinham’s other research interests that track themes in robotics, kinematic structures, embedded computation, and automated fabrication workflows.

Learn more about this year’s eight Harvard CCSF awardees via the Harvard Gazette .

Ron Witte appointed Professor in Residence of Architecture

Ron Witte has been appointed as Professor in Residence of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) effective July 1, 2020. Witte served as Visiting Professor in the Department of Architecture this past academic year, and prior to that was Professor of Architecture and Baker Institute Scholar at Rice University. He has also held previous faculty appointments at Princeton University, the University of Kentucky, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of Florida. Witte received his Bachelor of Architecture from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and his Master of Architecture from Princeton University.

Witte is no stranger to the GSD, having taught here for some years before taking on an appointment at Princeton. He has taught studio and seminar courses throughout his pedagogical career, in addition to redesigning the core curriculum at Rice. Likewise, in his new role at the GSD, Witte will help shape the Master in Architecture programs’ core-studio curriculum in response to a rapidly changing world. His approach to pedagogy holds that design and reflective writing are inextricably linked, and should represent two embodiments of a singular intellectual passion.

Witte is widely known for his contributions to the practice and theory of architecture, and for his dedication to teaching that has involved numerous innovations in architectural pedagogy. A co-founder of WW Architecture, alongside Dean Sarah M. Whiting, Witte holds primary responsibility for the practice, developed and integrated with a sophisticated theoretical base since its founding in 1999. WW’s work coheres under the concept of the architectural “figure”: an organizational and spatial instrument that balances specificity and open-endedness of spaces and programs. WW’s reflective practice model focuses on designing one project at a time, centering around the core values of architecture: plan, figure, and façade, both in buildings as well at the urban scale. The result has been highly original designs that have become recognized benchmarks, with work that has ranged across types from residential to institutional, and across scales from a single-family house to airfield-scale infrastructure.

Internationally recognized for its originality and accessibility, Witte’s work has been exhibited at the Roca Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Building Museum, Harvard University, UCLA, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Graham Foundation, the International Center for Reflection on the Future in France, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the AIA Gallery in Houston.

In addition to the creativity and energy of his practice, Witte has written and published extensively for a variety of international audiences, in periodicals as notable and diverse as Assemblage, SeeSaw, Fresh Meat, Log, the Washington Post, Archplus, Scroope, Harvard Design Magazine , Architecture magazine, Dialogue, Architectural Design Profiles, and Polygraph. The drawings for WW’s “X House” were acquired by the architecture collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Witte has edited several books including CASE: Toyo Ito: Sendai Mediatheque; Counting; and Judgment, and his essays have been included in influential overview collections. His writing serves both as a reflection of earlier work as well as a platform from which new work and ideas are being launched.

Witte’s public roles have included service on the Board of the Houston Arts Alliance and on the Houston Independent School District Task Force for School Design, and his work has been acclaimed in international competitions for public buildings and garnered a range of awards.

Prior to WW, Witte’s professional experience includes working with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam; Jacques Couëlle in Paris, France; and Reid & Tarics in San Francisco. Witte is a registered architect in Massachusetts, California, and Texas. He holds National Council of Architectural Review Boards certification, and is a member of the American Institute of Architects.

Witte received his Bachelor of Architecture from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and his Master of Architecture from Princeton University.

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 …