Mayors Imagining the Just City: Volume 6

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—speakers will discuss strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial, social, and environmental injustice in our cities. 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.