Friends of MICD,
Earlier this spring, the Mayors Imagining the Just City panel at the Harvard GSD offered a rare public glimpse behind the scenes at MICD. We are excited to share the recording, featuring all seven of the MICD Just City Mayoral Fellows describing how they are tackling racial injustices in their cities, and how those conversations fit into the context of design and the built environment. We were especially honored to be welcomed by Ra Joy, the new Chief of Staff at the National Endowment for the Arts, who emphasized the NEA's commitment to supporting mayors and designers as they work towards justice and equity.
We hope you'll join another one of our Just City Mayoral Fellowship participants, architect Deanna Van Buren, next Thursday at 2pm ET for our newest Mayors' Virtual Seminar. Deanna will lead a bold conversation on designing for restorative justice, sharing how cities can reimagine traditional "justice cores" like Atlanta's City Jail into community assets. We can't wait for you to learn about this imaginative model for what "just cities" can look like.
Register below, and as always, send me your comments and thoughts: trinity@micd.org.
Trinity Simons
Executive Director
Mayors' Institute on City Design
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REGISTER NOW
Mayors' Virtual Seminar: Designing for Restorative Justice
Thursday, May 13 | 2:00 - 3:00pm ET
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In this seminar, architect Deanna Van Buren will explore how cities can create spaces of restoration rather than spaces that encourage mass incarceration. As co-founder of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, an architecture and real estate development nonprofit, Deanna creates spaces and buildings for restorative justice, community building, and housing for people coming out of incarceration. This seminar will explore the ways city leaders can reimagine traditional “justice cores” as community assets, through examples in Atlanta, Los Angeles County, and more. Participating mayors will have the opportunity to discuss how to reshape spaces for justice in each of their communities.
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MICD Virtual Seminars feature a deep-dive presentation on a single timely topic from a design expert followed by a moderated group discussion among the attending mayors. Like conversations at MICD, discussions in virtual seminars are “off the record” and designed to promote candid conversation and the open exchange of ideas.
Mayors and city staff are invited to register below. A recording of the presentation portion will be available publicly after the seminar.
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Deanna Van Buren is the Executive Director, Design Director, and Co-Founder of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces. She is a nationally-known advocate for magnifying the role of design for ending mass incarceration, and her work includes the creation of multi-use hubs for restorative justice and workforce development across the country. Van Buren was profiled by The New York Times in March 2020, and her TEDWomen talk on what a world without prisons could look like has been viewed more than one million times. She is the only architect to have been awarded the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist fellowship, and she is also the recipient of UC Berkeley’s Berkeley-Rupp Architecture Prize and Professorship. Deanna received her BS in architecture from the University of Virginia and her MArch from Columbia University, and she is an alumna of the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
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WATCH RECORDING
Mayors Discuss Urban Planning for Racial Justice
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As part of the Spring 2021 Public Programs series at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), the seven inaugural MICD Just City Mayoral Fellows recently discussed how to tackle racial injustices in each of their cities through planning and design interventions. The inaugural MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship, a collaboration between the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) and Harvard GSD's Just City Lab, took place in Fall 2020. During the fellowship, mayors learned best practices from the nation’s leading experts on the intersection of urban design, planning, and racial justice while creating a manifesto of action for each of their cities.
Over two panels, the mayors discussed how their administrations are enacting values of justice in each of their cities. They were by distinguished MICD Resource Team alumni to contextualize their efforts within larger conversations taking place in the city design fields today.
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Opening Remarks
Sarah Whiting, Dean, Harvard GSD
Ra Joy, Chief of Staff, National Endowment for the Arts
Trinity Simons, Executive Director, Mayors' Institute on City Design
Panel 1: Memory, Place Narratives and the Just City
Moderator: Toni L. Griffin, Founder and Director, Just City Lab, Harvard GSD
Mayor Stephen K. Benjamin, Columbia, SC
Mayor Errick D. Simmons, Greenville, MS
Mayor Yvonne Spicer, Framingham, MA
Mayor Vince Williams, Union City, GA
Respondent: Brent Leggs, Executive Director, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund
Panel 2: Restorative Justice through a Dignity Economy
Moderator: Toni L. Griffin, Founder and Director, Just City Lab, Harvard GSD
Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Jackson, MS
Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard, Mount Vernon, NY
Mayor Randall Woodfin, Birmingham, AL
Respondent: Michael Murphy, Founding Principal and Executive Director, MASS Design Group
Closing Remarks
Bryan C. Lee, Jr., Founder/Design Director, Colloqate Design
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The Mayors’ Institute on City Design is a leadership initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Since 1986, the Mayors’ Institute has helped transform communities through design by preparing mayors to be the chief urban designers of their cities.
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