January 2025 – WASHINGTON, DC – The Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) and the Just City Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Design are pleased to announce the launch of the 2025 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship, taking place in a hybrid virtual and in-person format in Spring 2025.
In the face of a nationwide housing crisis, the 2025 Fellowship – now in its fifth year – will explore what it means to house our communities. The curriculum will introduce mayors and their staff to planning and design frameworks – beyond housing supply and demand – that maximize all city resources to support the broad range of housing needs faced by a broad range of city populations. Over a semester-long program, the Lab’s Just City Index will frame dynamic presentations and dialogues with experts in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, art activism, housing, and public policy. Throughout the Fellowship, mayors and their staff will identify how injustices manifest in the social, economic, and physical infrastructures of their cities and develop manifestos of action for their communities.
The 2025 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellows are: Bloomington, IN Mayor Kerry Thomson; Gainesville, FL Mayor Harvey Ward; Jackson, TN Mayor Scott Conger; Portsmouth, VA Mayor Shannon Glover; Flagstaff, AZ Mayor Becky Daggett; Montgomery, AL Mayor Steven L. Reed; San Bernardino, CA Mayor Helen Tran; and Suisun City, CA Mayor Alma Hernandez.
The Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD), the nation’s preeminent forum for mayors to address city design and development issues, is a leadership initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the United States Conference of Mayors. Since 1986, MICD has helped transform communities through design by preparing mayors to be the chief urban designers of their cities.
The Just City Lab is a design lab located within the Harvard Graduate School of Design led by architect and urban planner Toni L. Griffin. The Lab has developed nearly 10 years of publications, case studies, convening tools and exhibitions that examine how design and planning can have a positive impact of addressing the long-standing conditions of social and spatial injustice in cities.
“Arts and design are critical elements of healthy, thriving communities that feel like home,” said Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD, Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. “The 2025 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellows have a unique and valuable opportunity to deepen their understanding and knowledge about how communities work, how change happens, and the roles of arts and design as they address real challenges and opportunities in housing people in a wide range of communities.”
“Mayors are at the forefront of the nation’s housing crisis, and it remains at the top of their mandates for the year ahead. Across the country, mayors are looking for ways to unite their communities around real solutions to this crisis,” said Tom Cochran, CEO and Executive Director of the United States Conference of Mayors. “Mayors are always seeking concrete ways to bring greater stability, opportunity, and community to their constituents, and MICD’s candid, small-group format and access to national design justice experts provides just that. With 30 mayors already having gone through this Fellowship in its first four years, the value of this program is clear, and the United States Conference of Mayors is proud to partner with the Just City Lab to continue guiding mayors through today’s challenges.”
“This year’s participants in the MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship come from very different contexts and represent cities from across the country, yet they share a common commitment to facing the urgent challenges of urban life today,” said Sarah Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). “We welcome them all to the GSD to talk with members of our community, learn from our justice-centered curriculum and research, and leave with new ideas about how to deepen equity and opportunity in each of their cities.”
MICD and the Just City Lab are thrilled to continue this fellowship to help mayors shape more just cities. Learn more about the host organizations at www.micd.org and www.designforthejustcity.org.