FOREWORD
After twenty years of practice in the design and planning professions, working in a dozen different US cities, I realized these cities all shared the same urban challenges – blight, vacancy, concentrated poverty, inefficient infrastructure, health disparities, public safety, affordability and rapid neighborhood change. These challenges were also negatively affecting the same population – the poor, people of color, children and single-female headed households. These conditions seemed wholly unjust and I began to question my role as a designer and planner to dismantle these conditions. In response, over the last eight years, I created a research agenda to investigate this question. In 2011, as director of the J. Max Bond Center at City College of New York, we launched an initiative on Design for the Just City. When our work first began by asking people to complete a simple statement, “The Just City must have…” Using simple postcards distributed at events held on and off campus, we asked people to describe their vision for a just city. Over a year’s time, we received over 400 postcards from a racially diverse demographic including designers and non-designers, young and old, wealthy and lower income. The responses fell into three categories – basic human rights (food, education), physical elements of the city (transportation, housing) and values (equity, trust, inclusion). Overall, people’s instincts were to imagine outcomes that benefitted society at large. There was an overwhelming sense that “everyone” deserved “everything”. This “concern for all” led our team to believe that the aspirations for shared values could become the basis for problematizing the challenges of our cities, as well
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as the designing solutions to solve them – values-driven approach to design. Since 2016, the research has advanced at the Just City Lab at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Here, through a series of course assignments and public events, we first asked people to identify the conditions of injustice in the cities before asking them to imagine a more just future. Similar to the initial exercise, people articulated challenges related to basic human needs and rights, as well as challenges within the build and natural environment. Respondents also described the absence of positive values including conditions of exclusion, disparity, inequality and intolerance to name a few. But depending on the city or neighborhood, the combination of injustices described was different. People were able to think more specifically about the spaces they inhabit and describe what wasn’t working. We then asked the same people to describe their values for a Just City. This time, the aspirations for justice directly related to eradicating social and spatial injustices in a specific location, and therefore the values were different each time we conducted the experiment in a different city or neighborhood. These engagement experiments taught us valuable lessons about what defined the Just City. First, our aspirations for a Just City are more clearly articulated when we imagine its values as an action required to address a condition of injustice. For example, if a community identifies a lack of public transportation and lack of interaction between rich and poor populations, they then seek a Just City that demands the values of increased access and social and spatial connectivity.
Veldacademie
