Reimagining Urban Planning is a talk based on the monthly webinar series of the same name hosted by the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. This talk openly critiques the ways in which Urban Planners have been trained and the impacts it has had in the ways Planners approach the Land, and the People that inhabit the land. This talk will share the key highlights from the series while also providing examples, shared by the speakers, that get us to an alternative approach to...

Urban Environmental Marronage: Connecting Black Ecologies from Coastal Nigeria to the American South explores how marginalized communities in coastal Nigeria and the American South draw upon historical practices of marronage to create autonomous spaces and combat environmental degradation within cities. Marronage refers to the practices of enslaved Africans who escaped to form free communities in inaccessible terrains. By connecting Black ecologies from Lagos and the Niger Delta to New...

Hacking the Archive: The Quest for More Just Urban Futures with Karilyn Crockett explores a Boston-based project that gamifies collective memory-driven social research and local knowledge sharing to anchor the intergenerational creation of future urban plans. Hacking the Archive (HTA) is a coalition of two dozen civic, faith-based and archival institutions advancing a novel data gathering and dissemination approach for populations underrepresented in the archive yet overrepresented in...

Measured by distance and speed, today North Americans move more than ever. Movement, however, is but a means to an end; more movement is not in itself beneficial. Movement is a cost of meeting daily needs, and provided these needs are met, less movement is generally advantageous. Nevertheless, since the 1930s traffic engineers have pursued movement maximization in North American cities as if movement is an end in itself, and even as if movement is in itself freedom. The human costs have...

Cities@Tufts is still on our summer break, but we have a special offering for you this month. For the past eight weeks, Shareable has co-hosted the Social Cooperative Academy with the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center and several other partners. Social cooperatives remain relatively obscure in the United States, despite thriving in various countries for over 30 years. Social coops blending the principles of cooperatives with a dedicated social purpose.  Today, we're sharing a...

Professor Esther Charlesworth’s talk for the Boston Salon on May 1, 2024 focused on her nomadic design journey across the last three decades. In trying to move from just theorizing about disaster architecture to designing and delivering projects for at-risk communities globally, Esther started both Architects Without Frontiers (Australia) and ASF (International); an umbrella coalition of 41 other architect groups across Europe, Asia and Africa. Architects Without Frontiers asks, how do we go...

Scholars have recently coined the term “gastrodevelopment” to refer to the leveraging of food culture as a resource and strategy of economic development. Drawing on a case study of Tucson, Arizona – the United States’ first UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy – Kinkaid uses the lens of gastrodevelopment to examine how food culture is transformed into a form of symbolic capital that animates a broader project of urban development. Kinkaid shows how this transformation encodes differentials of...

In cities across the world grassroots initiatives organize alternative forms of provisioning, e.g. food sharing networks, energy cooperatives and repair cafés. Some of these are recognized by local governments as engines in sustainability transitions. In this talk, I will discuss different ways that local governments interact with, and use, such grassroots initiatives, drawing from case studies in Berlin and Gothenburg. An argument will be made for that we need to reconsider what municipal...

Minorities in cities worldwide confront disparities, advocating for rights within a dynamic interplay of urban planning and constitutional legal frameworks. How does the coevolution between planning and legal frameworks shape the status of minorities?  This lecture will dissect the coevolution of British constitutional rights and the status of minorities in the urban planning of London, post-WWII. It will explore how planning practices embed minority rights, shedding light on the...

Contemporary planning approaches often fall short in addressing the cascading environmental, economic, and social issues planners and their communities face. Planners need comprehensive, forward-thinking approaches that prioritize sustainability, equity, and inclusivity. Mark Roseland’s new book, Toward Sustainable Communities: Solutions for Citizens and Their Governments, is the definitive guide to the why, the what, and most importantly, the how of creating resilient, healthy, equitable,...

In 2017, New York City committed to a plan to close Rikers Island Jail Complex and build four smaller jails around the city in Manhattan’s Chinatown, Downtown Brooklyn, Mott Haven in the Bronx, and Kew Gardens in Queens. The Chinatown jail is planned to be built on the site of the current jail in the neighborhood, but rather than repurposing or remodeling the building, the city plans to demolish it and build a 300-foot mega-jail, which would be the tallest jail in the world. The fight against...

In this Cities@Tufts episode, Myers discusses her eight years working on the research, design, and production of the urbanism podcast Here There Be Dragons. HTBD starts with residents first and seeks to forefront methods from the social sciences as crucial techniques in the analysis of the built environment. The podcast covers one city per season. Myers has sat down with residents in New York, Paris, and Stockholm to discuss what inspires their feelings of belonging and tension in their...

What is co-design, and what does it look like in global initiatives that produce data about development indicators? Projects that strive for inclusivity might hold well-designed multi-stakeholder engagement workshops throughout a project but still see limited local uptake of their data in the end. Why are multi-stakeholder workshops usually not enough? How might global data initiatives find grounding in the multitude of realities that exist across and even within, communities? This...

"Infrastructure Apartheid to Liberatory Infrastructures" - this phrase highlights a fundamental shift in our framing of both harms and solutions, respectively, from individual and direct, to systemic and distributed. Dr. Carrasquillo and the Liberatory Infrastructures Labs' aim, as they continue to not only challenge the theoretical framings but also engineering approaches, is to research and pilot fieldwork that ultimately brings us closer to an envisioned future where liberation can be...

Welcome to the second episode of the Imaginal Cells of the Solidarity Economy: Democratizing Power. This a special series of episodes that we've been sharing over the summer until Cities@Tufts officially resumes for our fourth season in the Fall. Over the course of our lecture series, we’ve talked a lot about the crucial role that community plays in building alternatives to capitalistic models of access, resource distribution and social equity. We are living through a historic moment where...

Urban agriculture has a long and diverse history throughout the world. Its health, social, and economic benefits for communities have been the subject of many studies and advocacy efforts seeking recognition of urban food production as a legitimate use of city space and as “real” agriculture. In the US, the past decade has seen policy support for urban food production expand at multiple scales of governance. At the same time, new forms of high-tech, commercial urban agriculture have emerged,...

Welcome to the third episode of the Imaginal Cells of the Solidarity Economy: Democratizing Power. This a special series of episodes that we've been sharing over the summer until Cities@Tufts officially resumes for our fourth season in the Fall. We are living through an historic moment where a number of crises-- climate change, growing economic and cultural divide, virulent racism, and the slide toward fascism--are converging. This makes for scary times but also times that are ripe with...

We have a special series of episodes that we’ll be sharing over the next few months between now and when Cities@Tufts officially resumes for our fourth season in the Fall. Over the course of our lecture series, we’ve talked a lot about the crucial role that community plays in building alternatives to capitalistic models of access, resource distribution and social equity. We are living through a historic moment where the common crises - from climate change to the erosion of democracy,...

Globally, contemporary cities face seemingly insurmountable challenges such as urban inequality, inadequate infrastructure, climate crisis, and increasingly, threats to democracy. In the face of such challenges, the Dr. Aseem Inam introduces the concept of "co-designing publics" by examining what lies at the potent intersection of the public realm and informal urbanisms. He defines the public realm as interconnected spatial and political networks of public spaces that weave a city together,...

Distilled into a four-step framework, Results is the much-needed implementation guide for anyone in public service, as well as for leaders and managers in large organizations hamstrung by bureaucracy and politics. With a broad range of examples, Baker, a Republican, and Kadish, a Democrat, show how to move from identifying problems to achieving results in a way that bridges divides instead of exacerbating them. They show how government can be an engine of positive change and an example of...

European cities have increasingly highlighted diversity as a marker of their progressive status. A growing field of research argues that “super-diverse” neighborhoods exemplify a normalization of ethnic and racial difference as a positive facet of everyday life. However, contemporary manifestations of urban diversity cannot be disentangled easily from the European colonial legacy that underlies a series of racial and spatial imaginaries. In this talk Yasminah Beebeejaun argues that the...

Public spaces are symbolic urban icons. Cities compete with their public spaces, often using them as tools for commodification to attract capital and labor. At the same time, public space is an expansive common social and material realm and the past decades have erased any doubts of the resurgence of public space in its political form. This is a good time to focus our attention on public space. The climate crisis, the systemic social injustices, and the COVID-19 pandemic demand a rethinking...

On Today's show we explore how communities respond to extreme weather with Rev. Vernon K. Walker. Research has shown, over and over, how communities that are more connected fare much better doing periods of acute disaster. The more robust relationships and networks of solidarity that exist within communities, the more likely they are to weather the figurative and literal storms that are only increasing in frequency and severity with climate change. In other words, one of the best strategies...

In the decades following the Civil War, recently emancipated people created freedom colonies through intentional and tactical design, ensuring refuge from political repression and violence. However, most freedom colonies were founded in ecologically vulnerable landscapes, making them disproportionately susceptible to flooding and other natural disasters in the present day. This talk tracks the history of displacement and dispossession that has led to the destruction, neglect, or dismantling...