Mayors Imagining the Just City: Volume 6
About this Event
Kicking off the sixth annual Just City Mayoral Fellowship—a program of the United States Conference of Mayors
and the GSD’s Just City Lab
, in partnership with the Mayors’ Institute on City Design
At the Just City Lab, we ask: would we design better places if we put the values of equality, inclusion, and equity first? If a community articulated what it stood for, what it believed in, what it aspired to be—as a city, as a neighborhood—would it have a better chance of creating and sustaining a healthier, more vibrant place, with positive economic, health, civic, cultural, and environmental conditions? Imagine that the issues of race, income, education, and unemployment inequality, and the resulting segregation, isolation, and fear, could be addressed by planning and designing for greater access, agency, ownership, beauty, diversity, or empowerment. Now, imagine the Just City: cities, neighborhoods, and public spaces that thrive through a value-based approach to urban stabilization, revitalization, and transformation. Imagine a set of values that would define a community’s aspiration for the Just City. Imagine we can assign metrics to measure design’s impact on justice and use these findings to deploy interventions.
Update: Mayor Aftab Pureval will be participating in this event remotely.
Speakers
Aftab Pureval is the 70th Mayor of Cincinnati. He was raised in Southwest, Ohio, the son of first-generation Americans. He is making history as Cincinnati’s first Asian-American Mayor. He has made equitable economic growth a top priority of his administration, as well as comprehensive reform and improvement of public safety, affordable housing, and environmental action. Since taking office, Mayor Pureval has guided Cincinnati through a significant economic recovery, while advancing the City’s key strategic priorities for equitable growth. Early accomplishments include establishing the City’s first-ever annual commitment to an affordable housing trust fund, leading comprehensive zoning reform to expand housing options in neighborhoods, and implementing a new policy to dispatch unarmed mental health professionals to some nonviolent 911 calls. Under his leadership, the City’s budget was balanced after multiple years of structural deficits, and the City committed for the first time to carbon neutrality by 2050. He graduated from The Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati College of Law, where he represented victims of domestic violence who could not afford an attorney.
Xavier ‘Xav’ de Souza Briggs is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. An award-winning researcher and educator, he is also an experienced leader in philanthropy and government. His recent research has focused on revitalizing regional economies by investing in advanced industries, good jobs, climate action, and tangible ways to improve effectiveness and fairness in government. He has helped catalyze public conversation about: how to reimagine and dramatically scale up the financing of climate adaptation so communities can be more resilient; how clean energy and other investments to address a changing climate can be more inclusive, scalable, and adaptive; future of work; how big, public-private bets on “industrial policy” can generate real and lasting economic benefits for the workers and their communities; the complexities of generative AI and the future of work and workers; and, the power of equity impact analysis to help government serve everyone more effectively and strengthen public trust. He has contributed to articles in the New York Times, TIME, CNN, Fortune, Fast Company, The American Prospect, Planning Magazine, and other media. He has served as vice president of the Ford Foundation, a faculty member at Harvard and MIT, and as a senior White House official. He earned an engineering degree from Stanford University, an MPA from Harvard, and a PhD from Columbia, and was a graduate fellow in Brazil.
Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy , host of the Land Matters podcast , contributing editor at Land Lines magazine, and a correspondent for Bloomberg CityLab and The Boston Globe . He is author of Mayor’s Desk : 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems; Modern Man: The Life of Le Corbusier, Architect of Tomorrow; Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City (winner of the Christopher Award ); This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America ; and co-editor of Smart Growth Policies: An Evaluation of Programs and Outcomes . He was a policy advisor on smart growth for Massachusetts state government, a visiting scholar and Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center , and the first visiting fellow at the American Library in Paris . He earned his B.A. from Middlebury College and an M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and attended the University of St. Andrews, the Salzburg Seminar, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. In 2025, he was awarded the Boston Society of Architects Honorary Membership for his journalism about architecture, urban planning, and urban design.
Moderator
Toni L. Griffin is Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at the GSD, and a faculty affiliate of the Bloomberg Center on Cities. Her teaching portfolio includes cross-disciplinary option studios, MDes open projects, and seminars devoted to gentrification, neighborhood change, and design for the just city. In addition to teaching, Toni is the founding director of the Just City Lab, a research platform that investigates how design impacts social and spatial justice in cities. Toni is also the founder of urban american city (urbanAC LLC), a planning and design practice working with public, private, and nonprofit partners to reimagine, reshape, and rebuild more just cities and communities.
Harvard University welcomes individuals with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you would like to request accommodations or have questions about the physical access provided, please contact the Public Programs Office at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected] in advance of your participation or visit. Requests for American Sign Language interpreters and/or CART providers should be made at least two weeks in advance. Please note that the University will make every effort to secure services, but that services are subject to availability.
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