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Speaker Information

Toni L. Griffin is founder of urbanAC LLC, based in New York, a planning and design management practice that works with public, private, and nonprofit partnerships to reimage, reshape, and rebuild just cities and communities. The practice designs and leads complex and transformative social and spatial urban revitalization projects rooted in addressing historic and current disparities involving race, class, and generation. Over the past ten years, they have successfully collaborated with several major US cities on the cusp of just social and economic recovery. Recent cities include Chicago, Indianapolis, Rochester, and St. Louis. Griffin is also a professor of practice in urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she teaches design studios and seminars also rooted in issues of social and spatial justice.  She is founder and director of the Just City Lab, an applied research platform that investigates the ways design can have a positive impact on addressing the conditions of injustice in cities.

Griffin is the author of multiple articles on design justice, and co-editor of The Just City Essays (2015) and the upcoming publication The Just City Dialogues: Disruptive Design. She has lectured extensively in the US, Netherlands, South Africa, and South America, and between 2016 and 2020 served as an Obama Presidential appointee to the US Commission on Fine Arts.