Caroline Filice Smith works for the City of Boston; currently as a senior urban designer within the Planning Department, and previously as the Director of Civic Design in the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics. In their current role, Caroline leads the City’s soon to launch “Planning Academy” initiative; a people’s planning academy for Boston residents. Additionally, they are involved in a range of energy transformation studies looking at waste heat, thermal networks, and more. Using broad brush strokes, Caroline is driven by an interest in design, democracy, and the ways liberation movements have historically intersected with the allied design disciplines.

As an urban + civic + architectural designer, planner, fabricator, researcher, and historian by training, Caroline brings over 15 years of experience in private practice and academia to their work. Prior to joining the City of Boston, Caroline led research initiatives and taught courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and worked with Grayscale Collaborative on the High Line Network’s Community First Toolkit, an open-space equity-planning toolkit done in collaboration with the Urban Institute. Caroline’s architectural career was predominantly spent at UNStudio, with shorter stints at Micheal Maltzan Architects and Ball Nogues Studio, focusing on computational design and the design of large-scale, complex geometries.

Caroline is currently a doctoral candidate at Harvard University, writing (in their spare time) a dissertation on the history of Participatory Planning and its relationship to the Black Power movement and global urban rebellions in the 1960s. Additionally, they hold a Masters of Urban Design, and an AM in Urban Planning from Harvard University, and a BArch from Virginia Tech. Their research, writing, and teaching has been supported and recognized by the Graham Foundation, the Knight Foundation, Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, the Urban Land Institute, the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Architectural League of NY, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and many more.