Toni L. Griffin
Toni L. Griffin is Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and 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. Toni also served as coordinator for the first semester MUP core studio and was founding domain head for the MDes Publics domain.
In addition to teaching, Toni is the founding director of the Just City Lab , a research platform that investigates how design’s impact on social and spatial justice in cities. In 2020, the Lab launched the Just City Mayoral Fellowship program, a partnership with the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, NEA, and US Conference of Mayors. Each year, eight mayors are selected to engage in an 11-week hybrid course designed to elevate their knowledge of design, planning and development through the lens of reparative social and justice.
Toni is also founder of urban american city (urbanAC LLC), a planning and design practice working with public, private, and nonprofit partners to reimage, reshape, and rebuild more just cities and communities. urbanAC leads transformative projects rooted in addressing historic and current disparities involving race, class, and culture. The firm collaborates with cities on the cusp of just social and economic recovery that seek reparative approaches to public policy, land use, urban design, development and program design and evaluation. Toni has also served as strategic advisor to several philanthropic organizations including The Heinz Endowments, the Williams Penn Foundation, Surdna Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Kresge Foundation, each looking to more deeply embed principles of just and equitable impact into their grant making and evaluation criteria for investing in urban development, wealth creation and capacity building.
urbanAC and the Just City Lab together function as exploratory platforms, working with city stakeholders across all sectors to push the boundaries of design intervention in ways that get closer to intentions and desired outcomes for justice: pushing the physical boundaries of the Chouteau Greenway project in St. Louis to include historically excluded neighborhoods; bushing the boundaries of identity in Rochester, NY by designing a new public space that unearths multiple cultural histories – shared and contested; pushing the boundaries of collective land ownership in Chicago and Detroit as a portfolio of community-controlled land and building assets; pushing boundaries in Pittsburgh to develop a groundbreaking comprehensive plan for the city rooted in new land use typologies that confront both current and historic economic, environmental and discriminatory harms. Toni views both platforms’ work as movement-building, modeling a different form of practice and research, experimenting with tools we hope others will use and adapt, and by convening designers, policy makers and civic leaders to enact the disruptive change required to achieve more just cities.
Toni’s current practice is built upon her early expertise and experience as a licensed architect and Associate Partner at Skidmore Owings & Merrill, and later as a public official serving in senior planning and community development director roles in Washington, DC and Newark, New Jersey working to shape equitable growth and design excellence. She has authored articles on design justice, including co-editor of The Just City Essays and has received numerous awards, including the Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award and the Architectural Record 2024 Women in Architecture award. She has lectured extensively in the US, Netherlands, South Africa, and South America, and served as an Obama Presidential appointee to the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts 2016-2020.
Stephen Gray
On leave for Spring 2026
Stephen Gray is an urban designer, educator, and principal of Grayscale Collaborative , a research and design firm focused on spatial justice and equitable development. He is an Associate Professor of Urban Design and Director of the Urban Design Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Stephen’s research, teaching, and practice examine how race, capital, and infrastructure intersect to shape cities—and are anchored by two core commitments: (1) foregrounding the systems and ideologies of power that have historically and continuously shaped the field of urban design; and (2) developing principles and methods for a practice that not only engages power more critically, but also envisions cities as places where more people can exercise agency over their own futures. His work connects theory to practice, linking design to the political and economic systems that structure urban life, and has been nationally recognized by the AIA and ASLA, professional associations in both architecture and landscape architecture.
Through his practice, Stephen leads and collaborates on community-engaged urban design projects across the country, with particular focus on Boston. His writing and advocacy which are more contextually broad, reject the notion of space as a neutral backdrop to political life, arguing instead that it is actively produced through power-laden social relations—often manifesting as racialized territorial inequality. Whether co-leading World Bank–sponsored research on resilience in the Philippines; co-founding the Global Design Initiative for Refugee Children (GDIRC) to support displaced youth in Lebanon; co-leading the Boston Race and Space project as part of the Harvard Mellon Initiative Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative; or developing the widely used Community First Toolkit with the Urban Institute—Stephen’s work surfaces embedded power dynamics and advances strategies to expand access, agency, and opportunity for those most often excluded. He writes regularly for public audiences, including op-eds in Next City and The Boston Globe, and is a founding member of Dark Matter University , a decentralized network advancing equity in design education.
Notable academic and professional service includes appointments to the President’s Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery (H&LS); the Legacy of Slavery Memorial Project Committee; the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA); the Asia Center Council; and the University Design Advisory Pool. He serves on the board of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy and has advised initiatives such as the Just City Mayoral Fellowship and Boston’s Radical Imagination for Racial Justice grant program. Previously, he was Associate Director of the Boston Society of Architects (BSA), co-chaired Boston’s 100 Resilient Cities Resilience Collaborative, and contributed to several Urban Land Institute (ULI) Technical Assistance Panels.
Stephen has held teaching appointments at MIT-DUSP and Northeastern University and holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Cincinnati and a Master of Architecture in Urban Design (MAUD) with distinction from Harvard University, where he received both the Thesis Prize and the Award for Outstanding Leadership in Urban Design.
Ann Forsyth
On leave for Fall 2025 & Spring 2026
Ann Forsyth is the Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Planning.
Trained in planning and architecture, Forsyth works mainly on the social aspects of physical planning and urban development. The big issue behind her research and practice is how to make more sustainable and healthy cities. Forsyth’s current research focuses on developing healthier places in a suburbanizing world, with overlapping emphases on aging and planned communities.
She has contributed to three main areas of research and practice. First is documenting and assessing innovative and high-density planning and design in suburban/metropolitan areas. This includes research examining new towns as a whole and specific challenging issues: achieving walkability, planning higher density and affordable housing, supporting social diversity, and balancing social and ecological values. Second is work evaluating and proposing how the physical environment can improve health. She has explored physical activity and food environments, processes of densification, and the needs of different age groups, as well as translating research on health and environments into tools for practice. Forsyth has been active in developing and evaluating new instruments and measures using GIS, fieldwork, surveys, impact assessments, public participation processes, and evidence-based practice guidelines. Finally, she has been active examining how to connect research and practice. This includes understanding the different forms of research and investigation, and how research can inform the process and substance of planning.
Her education includes a B.Sc. in architecture from the University of Sydney, M.A. in urban planning from UCLA, and Ph.D. in city and regional planning from Cornell.
At Harvard, Forsyth is affiliated with the Joint Center for Housing Studies , Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies , Harvard University Center for the Environment , Weatherhead Center for International Affairs , the Harvard-China Project and the Harvard Global Health Institute .
She is a co-leader of the Healthy Places Design Lab and the New Towns Initiative .
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Rosetta S. Elkin
on leave Spring 2020
GARDEN CLUB OF AMERICA ROME PRIZE
Rosetta S. Elkin is Principal of RSE Landscape, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and Faculty Associate at Harvard Arnold Arboretum. Her research and teaching consider living environments with a particular focus on plant morphology, behavior, and intelligence. She is committed to design as a means to address the risk, injustice, and instability brought about by planetary climate disintegration. Her practice prioritizes public exhibitions, open access publishing, and collaborative research to promote a more thoughtful and accountable design agenda. She is currently the recipient of the 2018 Garden Club of America Rome Prize in landscape architecture.
As a registered landscape architect in the Netherlands, Elkin founded RSE Landscape in 2007. Current projects include the study of root systems in coastal defense strategies, an investigation of state-scale ecological transformation in Rhode Island, and design research for sea-level adaptation on barrier islands in Florida. RSE Landscape is also currently working on a commission from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation concerning landscape adaptation on Captiva Island, Florida, and a Harvard Climate Change Fund-supported project that documents climate-induced retreat case studies worldwide.
Elkin is the author of Tiny Taxonomy (Actar 2017), a publication which reflects on the scale of individual plants in practice through a reading of three design installations. With support from the Graham Foundation, Dutch Fonds BKVB, and Canada Council for the Arts, she is currently working on a monograph publication about the geo-political ambitions of continental tree planting programs. Elkin’s work has been exhibited at the Victory and Albert Museum, Les Jardins de Metis, Chelsea Festival, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and featured in publications including Journal of Landscape Architecture, New Geographies, Harvard Design Magazine and Lotus International. Before joining the GSD as the Daniel Urban Kiley Fellow, she was a Senior Designer and Project Manager at Inside/Outside in Amsterdam and taught at the Academie Bouwkunst and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy.
Diane Davis
Diane E. Davis is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism and former Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). She also is the director of the Mexican Cities Initiative at the GSD, and faculty chair of the committee on Mexico at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. Before moving to Harvard in 2012, Davis served as the head of the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where she also was Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. Trained as a sociologist with an interest in cities in Latin America (BA in Geography, Northwestern University; Ph.D. in sociology, UCLA) Davis’s research interests include the relations between urbanization and national development, urban governance, urban social movements, and informality, with a special emphasis on Mexico.
Books include Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Conflicts in the Urban Realm (Indiana University Press, 2011); Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Temple University Press 1994; Spanish translation 1999). Her recent research has focused on urban violence as well as spatial strategies to minimize risk and foster resilience in the face of these and other vulnerabilities.
She teaches classes on Urbanization and Development; Urban Governance and the Politics of Planning, SDGs in Theory and Practice; and Planning Theory and Praxis: Comparative and Historical Approaches. This April Davis was named a CIFAR Fellow and co-director (along with Simon Goldhill, Secretary of the British Academy and professor of History at Cambridge) of a five-year project titled “Humanity’s Urban Future.” With a focus on six cities around the world (Kolkata, Mexico City, Shanghai, Kinshasa, Naples, Toronto), and with the participation of historians, planners, anthropologists, geographers, and architects, this initiative interrogates how a `good urban life’ is conceptualized and produced.
Faculty Coordinator, Mexican Cities Initiative
Co-Chair, Faculty Committee on Mexico, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
Executive Committee Member, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Advisory Board Member, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative
CIFAR Fellow and Project Co-Director, 2023-2028, “Humanity’s Urban Future”
Faculty Affiliate, Bloomberg Center for Cities, Harvard University