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 … 

Excerpt: In It Together, by Lesley Lokko

“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

In It Together

Lesley Lokko

“[A city where] everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the trans-disciplinary, everyday life and unending history.” —Edward Soja No other city that I know of piques the imagination quite like The African City, wherever in Africa that is. I live in Johannesburg; I grew up in Accra: two African cities that have as little—or as much—in common as Chicago or Shanghai, but whose broad geography binds them together in ways that are both entirely fictitious and entirely real. By their very nature, cities are both generic and astoundingly, endlessly specific. The same broad categories of infrastructure, environment, equality and access to amenities apply to all urban centres, almost irrespective of scale. Yet there’s something in—or of/about—The African City that defies easy categorisation. African cities, to paraphrase Soja above, are places where “everything comes together,” in an almost dizzying panoply of contradictory binaries. Black/white; rich/poor; chaotic/controlled; hi-tech/lo-tech, as though there is no space or appetite for the nuance, the in-between, or the subtleties that make up any urban narrative in which most citizens somehow locate, negotiate and recognise themselves. When the invitation to contribute to the Just City essays project arrived in my Inbox, I was struck by its timing. It’s probably just over ten years ago that I met Max Bond in Accra, sadly for the last time, as it turned out. He was visiting the Ghanaian architect Joe Osae-Addo, and the three of us had dinner at the Golden Tulip Hotel on Independence Avenue whilst waiting for Accra’s terrible, gridlocked in a physical sense) of African cities. What could African American architects and urban designers bring to the table? What had Americans learned about race, class and culture that might prove useful to a new generation of African architects, planners, city-makers? Bond was better placed than most to answer the question: Ghana had been his home in the 1960s, in the first heady decade after independence. He’d seen more of the country than many Ghanaians, myself included, and his views were wide-ranging and broadly cosmopolitan, yet at the same time deeply personal and intuitive. We were joined a little later by another African American architect, Jack Travis, also a close friend of Bond’s. Four architects, two continents, one-and-a-half generations between us and many, many questions, though perhaps fewer answers. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org… 

Redlining, Green Books, Gray Towns, High Yellow

Architect and artist Amanda Williams is best known for her bold public art project, Color(ed) Theory , produced for the 2015 architecture biennial in her native Chicago. Williams and a team of volunteers painted seven houses that were slated for demolition in the city’s predominantly Black Englewood neighborhood. Each building was coated in one color chosen from a palette Williams developed of culturally resonant hues for the surrounding community: Pink Oil Moisturizer, Ultrasheen, Harold’s Chicken Shack, Flamin’ Red Hots, Currency Exchange, Safe Passage, Crown Royal Bag. The vibrant paint conferred new life and meaning to each house, even as the dilapidated structure remained underneath.

A graduate of Cornell’s “extremely theoretical and conceptual” architecture program, Williams practiced for several years before yielding to a lifelong desire to pursue visual art full-time. After experimenting with abstract art, she eventually made her way to the intersection of art and architecture with projects like Color(ed) Theory that explore color and race and their relationship to space and value. Here, in lieu of her Open House Lecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design on April 2, 2020 that was cancelled due to the Covid-19 outbreak, Williams takes a moment to reflect on her work, purpose, and path, each of which has straddled multiple divides.

What drew you to architecture?

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago; the city is historically very segregated and continues to be. Before I had language for what was going on, I understood that there were inequities in space as we would move daily from Auburn Gresham—a predominantly Black and working/lower class neighborhood at the time—to Hyde Park, where I went to a private school. Seeing that shift piqued my interest about why and what was possible. I knew something wasn’t quite right.

At the same time, I loved art, drawing, color. There was a love of making things, of imagining people and how they would interact. I would draw houses or structures as a way to narrate stories. As I progressed, architecture seemed like the vehicle for exploring both. And when I told my parents I wanted to be an artist, my mother said, “Artists who can make a living are called architects.”

What prompted your move away from architecture in a strict sense of the discipline into visual art?

There was a long moment where my love of theory and the conceptual, and of thinking about architecture speculatively felt like a luxury I didn’t have because there was a need to actually change things. There was a bit of guilt that I could make these beautiful things and have these conversations with classmates and colleagues that I knew would be completely foreign to the environment that I had grown up in. So I practiced for about six and a half years in San Francisco during the height of the dot-com boom. We did interesting industrial projects, schools, and other civic buildings in addition to large-scale master plans for corporations. But I asked myself: Is this what you’re supposed to be doing? That transition into art full-time was that ideal moment when you could go from something you love to something you love more. Also, I really wanted to come back to Chicago and reinterrogate those early thoughts about my relationship to my creative self in the city that I love.

You’ve said that color, race, space, and value are the four things you’re constantly preoccupied with in your work. Are there patterns to how these four things interplay?

Yes. I would say that recently the idea that I can always lead with a color—and that it will have a spatial and racialized spatial corollary—is really strong. I didn’t see that early on. Color(ed) Theory led me to that: redlining, green books, gray towns, high yellow. Now I can see a whole kind of color palette that’s synchronous with color theory.

Is your exploration of color as a medium a way to get around gridlocked discussions about race? Or is it another way into those conversations?

My interest in the color gray is potentially a way to explode the kind of dead ends that we tend to fall into [around race], especially in Chicago. But the idea of race as just Black and white, for example, completely ignores the Asian community, Latinos.

When I was an artist-in-residence at Smith, I took much of the summer to think about this. What came to the fore is this idea that black and white can be combined into gray, but I also thought about other ways that you can get to gray. Another way is this tertiary—or what they call chroma—gray, where you make three colors turn into gray. That seems very powerful also as a metaphor for complicating the ways we tend to want to talk about race: if gray is not black and white but actually at least three things, then it not only expands how we have to position it, it also opens the door for trans and immigrant and others. You won’t end at the same place because now you’ve introduced a new element. People won’t be able to do what they usually do in discussions about race—ignore it and reduce the conversation. And it can help bring about potential strategies for getting out of this never-ending system that exists.

You bring art and architecture together to talk about larger social and economic and political issues. How do they serve one another?

In my mind, the art is leading. But I would say that in most people’s minds—both the everyday person and also those in the contemporary art and architectural worlds—the architecture is leading. There tends to be much more interest in the spatial implications of my work or the fact that this is a very different way of talking about space than people are accustomed to. And the artistic realm is not used to architecture being a medium as opposed to a functional thing. (I’m being very general and broad.)

Personally, I find agency in the art; there doesn’t always have to be a rationale. There’s room to think through it, to not have a conclusive answer, whatever the final product. Whereas there is an expectation that traditional architecture writ large actually needs to function: it has to stand up. People have to be able occupy it. There are rules about how it needs to operate.

There is a very distinct kind of discourse around contemporary architecture and art. They have their overlaps and there are people who have straddled those before me. But there’s not a synergy in the way one might imagine. So I’m always leading with the question, and the question is always spiraling around those four elements. I’m not thinking ahead of time what that matrix is, but it always seems to end up with those. And then if there were some kind of spectrum, you could think about whether one would initially label the final work art or architecture.

Amanda Williams was invited to lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on April 2, 2020. Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, public programs at the GSD were cancelled, including Williams’s Open House Lecture. 

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