The Just City Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) are pleased to announce the launch of the 2022 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship, taking place in Spring 2022.
The 2022 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship will help mayors navigate a just and equitable recovery from the pandemic, providing actionable ideas for city leaders rising to meet this moment of change. Building on the inaugural 2020 Fellowship, this program will explore ways to create lasting, transformational impacts from new federal funding streams such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the American Rescue Plan Act. The Lab’s Just City Index will frame dynamic presentations and dialogues with experts in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, art activism, housing, and public policy. Over the semester-long program, mayors will identify how racial injustices manifest in the social, economic, and physical infrastructures of their cities and develop manifestos of action for their communities.
The Just City Lab is a design lab located within the GSD and led by architect and urban planner Toni L. Griffin. The Lab has developed nearly 10 years of publications, case studies, convening tools and exhibitions that examine how design and planning can have a positive impact of addressing the long-standing conditions of social and spatial injustice in cities. The Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD), the nation’s preeminent forum for mayors to address city design and development issues, is a leadership initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the United States Conference of Mayors. Since 1986, MICD has helped transform communities through design by preparing mayors to be the chief urban designers of their cities.
“I’m delighted to see this powerful collaboration between the Just City Lab and the Mayors’ Institute on City Design continue,” says Sarah Whiting, dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. “This year’s cohort of mayors come from many cities that are particularly interesting to our students as they consider their future plans. These are mostly middle-sized cities that are transforming quickly as a response to the skyrocketing costs of our nation’s largest urban centers. The Mayoral Fellowship is well-timed to help these eight mayors lead in terms of equity and opportunity. Our aspiration is that ‘just cities’ will become the standard for what we expect in this country, not the exception to what so many experience today.”
“Mayors have led our communities through a series of unrelenting challenges over the past two years. With new federal funding streams, we have a unique opportunity for once-in-a-generation change,” said Tom Cochran, CEO and executive director of the United States Conference of Mayors. “Mayors are now tasked with uniting their communities around real solutions and making transformational investments. The traditional MICD experience, with its candid, small-group format and access to national design experts, is so often transformative for mayors. There is no better model for empowering mayors to find solutions in our nation’s cities, and the United States Conference of Mayors is proud to partner with the Just City Lab to help guide mayors through this important chapter of American history.”
“Building on the National Endowment for the Arts’ vision to heal, unite, and lift up communities with compassion and creativity, we are proud and humbled to continue this important collaboration between MICD and the Just City Lab,” said Jennifer Hughes, NEA director of design and creative placemaking. “This program will take the transformative power of MICD, which illuminates the power of design to tackle complex problems, and apply it to the defining challenge of our time: ensuring equity and justice for everyone.”
On April 22, the 2022 Fellows will come together to discuss strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial injustice in each of their cities at a GSD event hosted by Griffin. The program will be free and open to the public.
The Just City Lab and MICD are thrilled to continue this fellowship to help mayors shape more just cities. Learn more about the host organizations at www.micd.org and www.designforthejustcity.org.
Parts of this press release also appeared on the MICD website.
Rahul Mehrotra appointed Chair of Department of Urban Planning and Design and John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization
Rahul Mehrotra appointed Chair of Department of Urban Planning and Design and John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization
Rahul Mehrotra has been appointed Chair of Department of Urban Planning and Design and John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization
Harvard Graduate School of Design announces the appointment of Rahul Mehrotra (MAUD ’87) as the Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, effective July 1, 2020. Mehrotra joined Harvard GSD’s faculty in 2010, serving as Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design from 2010 until 2015. He most recently served as the Director of the Master of Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program and Co-Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program. He has also been a Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the School.
“While our world continues to urbanize, while questions of housing intensify in their urgency and complexity, and as India’s population and role on the world stage both increase dramatically, the GSD’s ability to address these interconnected issues so successfully has been due to Rahul’s unique perspective, as well as his engagements on the ground,” says Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. “As we look toward our collective ‘near future,’ Rahulbrings an unmatched depth of insight to this contemporary moment. His extraordinary synthesis of pedagogy, practice, and a generous ethos will continue to guide us into challenging but essential debates and discoveries.”
As Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, Mehrotra will set the vision and agenda for Harvard GSD’s renowned urban planning and design programs, advancing the department’s ability to take on urgent, global questions and projects. It was at Harvard that the first North American programs in city planning (1923) and urban design (1960) were formally established; since then, the Department of Urban Planning and Design has graduated some of the world’s preeminent urban designers, policy-makers, and leaders. Its biannual Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design is considered the foremost award recognizing achievement in the field. In this role, Mehrotra succeeds Diane E. Davis, who led the department since 2015.
“The pace and nature of urbanization are challenging how we define and teach planning and design,” Mehrotra says. “Today, the world is in a period of extreme transitions, triggered in large part by the inequities caused by globalization as well as climate change and its mark on people’s daily lives. This state of flux is obvious in the changing rhythms of nature and its impact on human settlements. Design and planning have crucial roles to play in using this condition of flux to create solutions to endemic inequalities, from conceiving innovative housing solutions to imagining entirely new urban formations.”
As the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, Mehrotra will lead Harvard GSD’s efforts to study and advance discourse on housing, especially as pressures of widespread housing shortages and unaffordability continue to mount. In this role, Mehrotra succeeds Professor Emeritus Gerald McCue, who has held that title since 1996.
“During his time as Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and as U.S. Labor Secretary, John Dunlop trained and inspired generations of students to tackle complex questions of housing and urbanization,” says Chris Herbert, Managing Director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, the research center that led the campaign to establish the Dunlop professorship. “With this appointment, Rahul will carry on John’s legacy and continue to elevate the importance of housing in the national conversation.”
With a distinguished career as a practitioner and as an academic, Mehrotra’s practice, teaching, and prodigious writing focus primarily on housing and urbanization, particularly in Mumbai and India. Mehrotra taught at the University of Michigan from 2002 to 2006, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2006 until joining Harvard GSD in 2010. He founded his Mumbai- and Boston-based firm, RMA Architects, in 1990. RMA Architects has designed and executed projects around the world, including government and private institutions, corporate workplaces, private homes, and other projects, among them a Library for the School of Architecture at CEPT in Ahmedabad, a software campus for Hewlett Packard in Bengaluru, and a conservation master plan for the Taj Mahal with the Taj Mahal Conservation Collaborative. Mehrotra has also collaborated with NGOs to improve conditions for people living in informal settlements in Mumbai.
Among other recent achievements, in 2015 RMA Architects completed the “Lab of the Future” on the Novartis Campus in Basel, Switzerland, and were finalists in an international design competition for the Museum of Modern Art in Sydney. In 2018, RMA Architects was awarded the Venice Architecture Biennale Jury’s Special Mention for “three projects that address issues of intimacy and empathy, gently diffusing social boundaries and hierarchies.”
Mehrotra’s research on urbanism is focused on evolving a theoretical framework for designing in conditions of informal growth—what he refers to as the “Kinetic City.” From 2012 to 2015, Mehrotra led a Harvard University-wide research project with Professor Diana Eck called The Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Mega City. This work was published as a book in 2014, was extended in 2017 in the form of a book titled Does Permanence Matter?, and led to an invited exhibition at the 2016 Venice Architectural Biennale. His latest co-authored book is titled Taj Mahal: Multiple Narratives (December 2017).
Mehrotra studied at the School of Architecture at CEPT in Ahmedabad, where he received the gold medal for his undergraduate thesis, and graduated with a master’s degree, with distinction, in urban design from Harvard GSD.
