PARTICIPANTS – Egalitarian Metropolis

SESSION 1: FROM A DIVIDED TO AN INCLUSIVE METROPOLIS

Craig Wilkins

Moderator

Craig Wilkins is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. A recipient of the 2017 National Design Award from the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Wilkins is a hip-hop architectural theorist, architect, artist, academic, and activist. His creative practice specializes in engaging communities in collaborative and participatory design processes.

The former director of the Detroit Community Design Center, he currently is creative director of the Wilkins Project, a social justice and strategic design alliance that provides architectural, urban design and planning services, public interest design solutions, and expertise in engaged public discourse. His practice includes both written and built work. Wilkins is particularly interested in the field of public interest design and the production of various forms of space; understanding publically accessible and responsive design can radically transform the trajectory of lives and environments, especially for those on the margins of society. Awarded the 2014 A’ Design International Competition Silver Award for Social Design, Wilkins’s designs have been featured in such publications as The Washington Post, Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, The Atlantic, and Fast Company.

A leading scholar of African Americans in the field of architecture, his books, essays, articles, and public talks explore the rich social, cultural, political, historical, and aesthetic contributions of often-ignored practitioners of color. His essays have been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, International Review of African American Art, Art South Africa, Volume, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and The Detroit News, among others. He is a recipient of a 2008 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s Collaborative Practice Award and a 2010 Kresge Fellow, and is the winner of the 2015 “Dear Architecture” International Ideas Competition sponsored by Blank Space. Wilkins also has authored the award-winning The Aesthetics of Equity: Notes on Race, Space, Architecture, and Music (University of Minnesota, 2007), Ruffneck Constructivist (Dancing Foxes Press/ICA, 2014), and Diversity Among Architects: From Margin to Center (Routledge, 2016), and co-edited Activist Architecture: A Field Guide to Community-Based Practice (DCDC Publications, 2015).

Wilkins received his PhD from the University of Minnesota, his Master of Science in real estate and urban development from Columbia University, and his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Detroit.

Robert Fishman

Robert Fishman is Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. An internationally recognized expert in the areas of urban history and urban policy and planning, he has authored several books that are regarded as seminal texts on the history of cities and urbanism, including Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1987) and Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1977). His honors include the 2009 Laurence Gerckens Prize for lifetime achievement from the Society for City and Regional Planning History; the 201 Walker Ames Lectureship at the University of Washington; the Emil Lorch Professorship at Taubman College from 2006 to 2009; the Public Policy Scholars Program at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. in 1999; and the Cass Gilbert Professorship at the University of Minnesota in 1998. Fishman has held visiting professorships at the Paris Nanterre University; the University of Pennsylvania; and Columbia University. He is currently working on a history of sustainability.

He received his Ph.D. and Master of Arts in History from Harvard University and his Bachelor of Arts in History from Stanford University.

Fishman has served as a Principal Investigator of the Michigan-Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis since 2017.

Larissa Larsen

Larissa Larsen is the Chair of the Urban and Regional Planning Program and an Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan. She teaches graduate classes in environmental planning, land use planning, and planning practice. Larsen’s research focuses on environmental planning, urban sustainability, and advancing environmental justice for marginalized communities.

Anika Goss

Anika Goss is the Chief Executive Officer of Detroit Future City (DFC), a think-and-do tank focused on land use and sustainability, community and economic development, and economic equity in Detroit. Anika leads a team of experts to implement the DFC Strategic Framework, a comprehensive 50-year guide to decision making and investment in Detroit. Anika is a leading force and visionary in Detroit’s revitalization, playing a crucial role in Detroit as an advocate for an equitable and sustainable future for the city.

Since taking the helm of DFC, Anika has repositioned the organization to be laser-focused on the equitable implementation of its community and economic development and land use and sustainability departments and launched the Center for Equity, Engagement, and Research. Anika has led the development of several significant research studies, including the 2019 release of “Growing Detroit’s African-American Middle Class” and the 2021 release of “The State of Economic Equity in Detroit” along with a web-based dashboard that tracks overtime six indicators that illustrate the deep disparities that exist in Detroit and the region. She also has helped bolster the future of Detroit’s land use and sustainability through awarding over $330,000 in grants aimed at accelerating vacant land revitalization in Detroit and developing a dynamic community educational network of nearly 50 neighborhood leaders and nonprofits to develop standardized green stormwater infrastructure practices.

Jamon Jordan

Jamon Jordan is the first City Historian for the City of Detroit and founder of the Black Scroll Network History & Tours. An elementary and middle school teacher for 16 years, Jordan has strived to educate his students about history in a way that is inclusive and engaging. In 2013, Jordan founded the Black Scroll Network, which gives walking history tours to people looking to learn more about the history of Detroit. He also teaches a course in the University of Michigan’s Semester in Detroit Program called “From the Underground to Motown: A Course on Detroit’s History.”

June Manning Thomas

Thomas served as president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning from 2013 to 2015 and was immediate past president from 2015 to 2016. Thomas writes about diversification of the planning profession, planning history, and social equity in neighborhoods and urban revitalization. Recent research explored the relationship between the concept of social equity and the civil rights movement, and examined the land-use reactions of community organizations to vacant land in Detroit. Her books include the co-edited Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows (Sage, 1996); Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997; second edition, Wayne State University Press, 2013); Planning Progress: Lessons from Shoghi Effendi (Association for Baha’i Studies, 1999); the co-edited The City after Abandonment (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); and the co-edited Mapping Detroit: Evolving Land Use Patterns and Connections (Wayne State University Press, 2015). Her latest book is the semi-autobiographical Struggling to Learn: An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina (University of So. Carolina Press, 2022). She is the recipient of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s 1999 Paul Davidoff Award for her book, Redevelopment and Race. She received a PhD in urban and regional planning from the University of Michigan.

SESSION 2: CONFRONTING THE PRODUCTION OF DECLINE

Rita Chin

Moderator

Rita Chin is Professor of History at the University of Michigan and Associate Dean for the Social Sciences at the Rackham Graduate School. A historian of post-1945 Europe, she focuses on issues of immigration, race, and cultural diversity. Her books include The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany, and After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Beyond. Her current project is Original Sin, Race, and Reparations in the US and Germany, a comparative analysis of US and German attempts to grapple with the “original sins” of slavery and the Holocaust. It argues that each society’s way of dealing with this past has shaped its contemporary race relations. Her research has been supported by the SSRC, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, ACLS, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her academic leadership work includes establishing the Rackham Doctoral Internship Program, designing a model to engage faculty in the reform of doctoral training, and developing a cross-disciplinary teaching and research pilot program that focuses on complex societal challenges.

Alexa Eisenberg

Alexa Eisenberg, PhD, MPH, is a Detroit-based housing activist-scholar and a postdoctoral research fellow with Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan. Their research focuses on the injustice of racialized housing policies, financialization, and austerity as these structures manifest through mass tax foreclosures, evictions, speculation, and slum-lording. Their current work provides evidence on the implementation and enforcement of pandemic-era eviction policies to advocate for stronger tenant protections. Eisenberg co-created the Eviction Machine (evictionmachine.org), an online platform that houses research, interactive data tools, and resources for tenants, organizers, and advocates to resist evictions and fight for housing justice.

Matt Lassiter

Matt Lassiter, Professor of History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan, is a scholar of the twentieth-century United States with a research and teaching focus on political history, urban/suburban studies, racial and social inequality, and the history of policing and the carceral state. His most recent book project, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs, is forthcoming in 2023 from Princeton University Press. He is also author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton University Press, 2006); coeditor of The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Oxford University Press, 2009); and lead author of the website exhibit of Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era (U-M Carceral State Project, 2021). Lassiter is co-director of the U-M Carceral State Project and co-PI of its Documenting Criminalization, Confinement, and Resistance research initiative. He is also director of the affiliated Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, which involves undergraduate and graduate student researchers in collaborative public engagement projects.

Monica Lewis-Patrick

President and CEO of We the People of Detroit, Monica Lewis-Patrick is an educator, entrepreneur, and human rights activist. Known as “The Water Warrior,” Lewis-Patrick is actively engaged in the struggle to access safe, affordable water for all under-resourced communities. In 2022, Lewis-Patrick joined the University of Waterloo as a Jarislowsky Fellow; she has also received the honor of being selected as a Michigan State University Water Fellow and Ron McNair Scholar. Lewis-Patrick also serves as a member of several organizations, boards, and committees dedicated to the advancement of water equity, including the National Water Affordability Table, All About Water/Freshwater Future – Subcommittee, PolicyLink- Water Energy Resource Caucus (WERC), Michigan Water Unity Table, End Water Poverty, and Healing Our Waters/Equity Advocacy and Action Committee.

Lauren Hood

Lauren A. Hood (Detroit, Michigan) is a writer, city planner and community developer with a focus on the imaginative capacities of the arts. In 2021, she founded the Institute for AfroUrbanism (IAU), a research organization for strategic development focused on the ideation and enrichment of Black communities. Working at the intersection of African ancestry, Afrofuturism and civic change, the IAU seeks to identify the foundational social, structural and spiritual conditions necessary in order for Black folks to thrive. As a community consultant and equity facilitator, she holds space for otherwise difficult conversations that allow practitioners and citizen stakeholders to understand and value each other’s contributions while working toward shared transformational goals. Hood’s work as a writer, mediator, public speaker and consultant employs strategies of storytelling, placekeeping and relational address to conceive of a community’s past harms, present needs and future possibilities. An avid daydreamer and manifestor who finds inspiration in nature, Hood’s practice focuses on the powers of imagination and intention to spiritually enrich civic life.

SESSION 3: FROM THE PRODUCTION OF DECLINE TO THE PRODUCTION OF EQUITY

Sharon Haar

Moderator

Sharon Haar, FAIA, NOMA is a Professor of Architecture at Taubman College. Her research spans topics that include the history of architectural practices devoted to social activism, equitable housing and urban design, and university campuses. Haar’s publications include: The City as Campus: Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago and Schools for Cities: Urban Strategies. Her articles and book reviews appear in journals including the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of Planning Education and Research, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architect’s Newspaper, and Architectural Design. Her recent book chapters appear in: The Urban Ecologies Reader, Embodied Utopias, Shanghai Transforming and On Location: Heritage Cities and Sites. She has presented her research in conferences and lectures across the United States, Latin America, Asia, and Europe.

Haar is active at a national level as a member of the Board of the Architects Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the American Institute of Architects, and as the President of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture in the 2022-2023 academic year. She is the recipient of numerous grants from institutions including the Graham Foundation, Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Fannie Mae Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and American Architecture Foundation. She is also the former Reviews Editor for the Journal of Architectural Education.

Haar has taught at Parsons School of Design in New York and at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she was professor of architecture and the Associate Dean for Research at the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts. She served as the Architecture Program Chair at Taubman College from 2014 through 2019. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University and her Master of Architecture from Princeton University.

Sarah Carlson

Sarah Carlson is the Housing and Neighborhood Stabilization Manager at the Detroit Land Bank Authority (DLBA), where she’s worked since 2014. Her work centers around reducing structural blight, and she has been integral in analyzing, preparing, and selling nearly 13,000 vacant and blighted structures for buyers to renovate and occupy. With dual master’s degrees in Urban and Regional Planning and Social Work from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, her career focuses on working towards the goal of everyone, regardless of socioeconomic status, living in a stable, safe, opportunity-rich community. Sarah lives in Detroit with her wife and daughter, and in her free time she’s traveling down and photographing every single street in the city and documenting it on Instagram (@DetroitBlockCity).

David Walker

Design Director, City of Detroit, City Planning

Trina Shanks

Trina Shanks is currently Harold R. Johnson Collegiate Professor and Director of Community Engagement at the University of Michigan School of Social Work as well as Founding Director of the Center for Equitable Family & Community Well-Being. She has a BSBA, MSW and Ph.D. in Social Work from Washington University and a Masters in Comparative Social Research from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Her research interests include the impact of poverty and wealth on child well-being; asset-building policy and practice across the life cycle; and community and economic development. Trina Shanks has been active in the City of Detroit, including conducting multiple evaluations of its summer youth employment program—Grow Detroit’s Young Talent, and convening an employment equity learning and action collaborative among workforce development stakeholders. From 2010 to 2012 Dr. Shanks was appointed to serve on the Michigan State Commission on Community Action and Economic Opportunity. Dr. Shanks is currently a AASWSW (American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare) fellow, one of the national network co-leads for the Social Work Grand Challenge: Reversing Extreme Economic Inequality, a non-resident fellow at the Urban Institute and President of BARS (Black Administrators, Researchers, and Scholars).

Phyllis Edwards

Phyllis J. Edwards transitioned from executive director for Bridging Communities to Project Development Consultant in May 2022, a non-profit in Southwest Detroit whose primary focus is eldercare and community development. She serves as chair and member of several boards throughout the City of Detroit. She served as a member of the advisory board in developing a Strategic Housing Plan with the Michigan State Housing Development Authority. She serves as a member of Dignity Restoration Project (a housing restoration project for residents of Detroit who lost their homes due to illegal property tax foreclosures) and chair for Connect 313 Policy and Advocacy committee reducing the gaps of access to technology for all Detroit residents.

Phyllis serves as a community leader in housing & community development in Detroit. She seeks to assist in developing an inclusive and engaged community where all members thrive. She supports residents regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, size, ability, and a variety of other aspects that impedes access to housing and housing resources in Detroit. She develops personal relationships with all homeowners especially the residents from underrepresented and marginalized communities to foster a culture of belonging.

Margaret Dewar

Margaret Dewar is Professor Emerita of Urban and Regional Planning in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan. Her research focuses on American cities that have lost large shares of their peak population and employment and now have extensive blighted buildings and vacant land. With June Manning Thomas, Dewar co-edited The City After Abandonment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). She has written numerous articles on planning and policy in the context of extreme urban decline. Her current research projects look at preventing tax foreclosures and evictions, reinforcing housing stability for low-income households, reforming systems to facilitate reuse of vacant land, and explaining how residents have slowed disinvestment in their neighborhoods.

Sandra Henriquez

Sandra Henriquez is the Chief Executive Officer of the Detroit Housing Commission (DHC). As its CEO, she directs all aspects of the Commission’s administration and operation. With an annual budget of $76M, DHC provides 8,870 deeply affordable units in metro Detroit, serving 22,000 households or nearly 4% of the city’s population. She is responsible for re-positioning and upgrading its current portfolio of properties and developing integrated holistic housing communities ensuring that housing serves as the platform upon which residents build their lives. In addition, Sandra is charged with the creation of more affordable housing through innovative development, construction and property management activities.

Prior to Detroit, Sandra served as the Chief Operating Officer for Rebuilding Together, a national non-profit, whose mission is to provide free and substantially-free critical repairs to the houses of low-income veterans, seniors and families with children. She was responsible for all aspects of the organization’s administrative operation, including finance, human resources, IT, strategic planning, technology, knowledge management, data collection and procurement.

In addition, she is the Owner and Principal of SCBH Associates LLC, a Washington, DC-based consulting firm that provides services to public and affordable housing owners in the areas of strategic planning, public policy and real estate property management.

She was nominated and appointed by President Barack Obama, confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate and sworn in as an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. As part of the senior leadership team at HUD, Henriquez oversaw the nation’s public housing and Housing Choice voucher (formerly known as Section 8) rental assistance program that assist approximately 3.2 million low-income families, senior and disabled persons across the nation. She was also responsible for the Department’s Native Alaskan, Native Hawaiian programs, as well as Native American programs serving 566 federally-recognized sovereign tribes.

During her tenure, Ms. Henriquez was responsible for development, justification, oversight and administration of annual budgets in excess of $27 billion. With 1500 staff located in 46 offices nationwide, provided technical assistance to stakeholders, established or improved policy and regulatory environments and compliance, designed and implemented place-based strategies and programs that redeveloped neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, increased the number of energy-efficient/retrofitted units and increased the number of affordable units in communities of opportunity.

SESSION 4: TOWARDS A CULTURE OF INCLUSION

Harley Etienne

Moderator

Harley Etienne is an Associate Professor and Graduate Studies Chair in the City and Regional Planning Section at The Ohio State University’s Knowlton School. Dr. Etienne also holds a courtesy appointment with Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.

Etienne’s research focuses on the confluence of institutions, patterns of neighborhood change, and social justice. He is the author of Pushing Back the Gates: Neighborhood Perspectives on University-Driven Change in West Philadelphia (Temple University Press) and co-edited Planning Atlanta with Barbara Faga in 2014 (Planners’ Press/Routledge). His current project focuses on the spatial mapping of fatal police encounters for which he and his collaborator Frank Romo recently received a DataiKu Frontrunner Award.

Before joining Knowlton, Etienne was an Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. He was also faculty in the School of City and Regional Planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Prior to his academic career, Etienne worked in Philadelphia in the public policy and economic development sectors for Greater Philadelphia First (now merged with the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce), the Pennsylvania Economy League, and the 21st Century League, where he focused on policy issues including university-industry partnerships, K-12 school reform, health care access, and welfare policy.

Etienne was a part of the winning team for the Midtown Cultural Center Planning Initiative in Detroit, an international competition to connect several cultural and educational institutions into an interconnected set of campuses. He was previously a Senior Fellow of the University of Michigan Society of Fellows and is currently an associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association and serves on the Governing Board of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP).

He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, a Master of Arts degree from Temple University, a Doctorate in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University, and a Master of Studies in Law from Yale Law School.

Yojairo Lomeli

Yojairo Lomeli is a Mexican-American producer of architecture, drawings, welds, models, photographs, sketches, furniture.

From Detroit, Michigan, Yojairo studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and earned an M. Arch in 2015.

Yojairo started his teaching career joining the faculty at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. As a teacher he was awarded the Donna M. Salzer Award for Teaching Excellence in back-to-back years, 2017 + 2018 and again in 2021.

He directs the University of Michigan Architecture Prep Program.

Anya Sirota

Anya Sirota is an architectural designer, Associate Professor, Associate Dean of Academic Initiatives at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and founding principal of Akoaki. Her work, situated at the intersection of architecture and urban design, explores how a distinct synthesis of aesthetics, social enterprise, and cultural programming can offer contemporary and multi-disciplinary strategies for urban transformation. Her ongoing research and design efforts have received international recognition with recent projects featured at the Vitra Design Museum, the Brussels Design Museum, the Centro Pecci Prato, the Saint Etienne Design Biennale, and the Chicago Cultural Center. She is the recipient of the Architectural League Prize (2018), the ACSA Faculty Design Award (2016), the SXSW Eco Place by Design Award (2015), and the R+D Award from Architect Magazine (2013), and other honors. Sirota regularly contributes to international lectures, panels, workshops, and expositions addressing socially driven architectural practice and its impact on cities.

Sirota earned her Master in Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where she was awarded the Araldo Cossutta Prize for Design Excellence. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University.

David Porter

Trained in Comparative Literature, David Porter is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He has focused his research and teaching on the dynamics of transcultural translation, comparison, and interconnection in a variety of historical contexts. He has worked for many years on the problem of how to think of China and Europe together in the eighteenth century and early modern period. His first book explored European responses to Chinese cultural achievements in language, religion, the arts, and trade between 1600 and 1800. In its sequel, he focused more specifically on the circulation of aesthetic ideas and practices between England and China. More recently, he has taken up questions of transcultural comparison in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a project which has involved excursions into world literature, translation theory, comparative political and economic history, and Ming dynasty philosophy. Tracing the Jesuit role in the early modern processes of globalization led him inevitably to the Great Lakes, another major center of their early missionary activity. He has been increasingly involved in public-facing projects designed to engage students and local communities with the rich literary, environmental, and sociocultural history of the Great Lakes region, such as the Detroit River Story Lab, the Great Lakes Writers Corps, the Great Lakes Arts, Cultures, and Environments Summer Program, and LSA’s Great Lakes Theme Semester.

María Arquero de Alarcón

María Arquero de Alarcón is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan Taubman College. Her work advances urban strategies promoting cultural and environmental values in territories under conditions of scarcity. María leads MAde Studio, a research-based, collaborative design practice that offers integrated expertise in architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Through a combination of grant-funded research initiatives, urban design experimentation, and site-specific interventions, MAde Studio focuses on the co-generation of socio-spatial strategies addressing urban transformation in collaboration with local partners and residents. Her design and research has been recognized with an ACSA Collaborative Practice Award (2019), AIA Michigan Design Awards (2013-2015), BSA Award Citations (2013-2014) and an ACSA Faculty Design Award (2012).

Her work is published in the edited volumes The Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan of the Great Lakes Region and Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City; Sustainability; the Michigan Journal of Sustainability; Architect Magazine’s Next Progressives; PLOT; Green and Building Design; and other publications. She has exhibited work in the 2017 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, the University of Tennessee and the University of Minnesota. María holds an architecture professional degree from Madrid Polytechnic University, a master of advanced studies in landscape architecture from E.T.H. Zurich, and a master of landscape architecture in urban design from Harvard University, where she received the award for Urban Design Academic Excellence. The Fellowship for Postgraduate Studies “Obra Social La Caixa” made possible her academic journey in the US.

Ryan Myers-Johnson

Ryan Myers-Johnson, Director and Founder of Sidewalk Detroit, is a curator of place-based performance and installation art, specializing in community engagement. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Dance and Film from the University of Michigan. Ryan has extensive experience in event planning, arts administration, management and leadership, stemming from her many years working as production manager in the film industry and company manager in dance production. Ryan is dedicated to creating opportunities for independent and alternative artists in Detroit, her leadership in this area grew through her role as Assistant Director of Kresge Arts in Detroit where she worked extensively in outreach, promotion and skill building for metro-Detroit artists. Her passion for community led her to found Sidewalk Detroit in 2012 as a means to celebrate Detroit landscape and culture through the lens of art and creative place-making.

Torri Smith

Torri Smith is a Detroit based designer, artist and educator; her investigations span from environmental justice and design biology to storytelling and urban placemaking. Smith will serve as a Lecturer I faculty member at Taubman College for the 2022-2023 year. In addition, she currently serves as the Principal + Founder of ARC BAE; a Detroit-based art and design based practice that focuses on the promotion of kinship between the natural and built environment for all its inhabitants. This past year, Smith served as the 2021-2022 Michigan Mellon Design Fellow in Egalitarianism and the Metropolis. Smith holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Lawrence Technological University and a Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan. Smith currently conducts research related to her interests at the intersection of environmental justice, urban activism and design while simultaneously exploring the ways in which ecological regeneration can address systemic racial inequity, tangentially sharing this passion by teaching high schoolers from Detroit Public Schools through ArcPrep. In 2021, Smith was awarded the Burton L. Kampner Memorial Award for the most outstanding thesis by Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, as well as a Program Distinction Award. Smith was co-creator of Design Justice Actions, co-lead of the Taubman College Community Engagement Working Group, an executive board member of NOMAS, and a contributor to Design Futures Forum. In Spring of 2022, Smith was awarded the Jason Pettigrew Memorial ARE scholarship; a full scholarship towards emerging architects pursuing licensure. Additionally, Smith has worked as an architectural designer at ROSSETTI Architects in Detroit, Economic Development & Design Manager for East Jefferson Development Corporation, has volunteered teaching art and architecture at Denby High School, and has worked as a designer and muralist within the city of Detroit for the past several years. Smith’s work has been featured in the Metrotimes, Michigan Chronicle and Detroit Free Press.

SESSION 5: CLOSING CONVERSATION

Angela Dillard

Moderator

Professor Angela D. Dillard is the Richard A. Meisler Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican & African Studies, History, and in the Residential College where she is part of the Social Theory & Practice program. In August 2021 she was appointed as Chair of the U-M Department of History. Dillard specializes in American and African-American intellectual history, particularly around issues of race, religion and politics — on both the Left and the Right sides of the political spectrum, and maintains an active interest in urban studies. Her first book, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now?: Multicultural Conservatism in America (NYU Press, 2001) was among the first critical studies of conservative political thought among African Americans, Latinos, women and homosexuals. Her second book, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (U of Michigan Press, 2007), focuses on the interconnections of religion and political radicalism in Detroit from the 1930s to the 1960s. Both books reflect Professor Dillard’s interests in the study of political ideologies — how they emerge, how they get deployed in the context of political movements, and how they change over the course of time. Her current manuscript-in-process, tentatively titled A Different Shade of Freedom, is an attempt to write an “ideologically wide history situated at the intersection of the post-World War II civil rights movement and the rise of the New Right. Pieces of this work have been presented under the banner of “civil rights conservatism.”

She is a faculty advisor of the Detroit School of Urban Studies and Co-PI on the Michigan-Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis.