Just City Mayoral Fellowship
Promoting design justice leadership
“The Just City Mayoral Fellowship is a unique, highly interactive program that brings together a small group of mayors and their staff for a semester-long course and extended advising, helping them to directly tackle injustices in each of their cities through planning and design interventions.
The Just City Mayoral Fellowship is a program of the United States Conference of Mayors and the Just City Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in partnership with the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, and with support from The Kresge Foundation.
Through a combination of virtual learning and in-person convenings at Harvard, the Just City Mayoral Fellowship takes a cohort of eight mayors and their staff through a semester of dynamic presentations and dialogues with experts in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, art activism, housing, and public policy. After the semester, each mayor may continue to advance their priority project over the next several months with personalized consultation from a team of leading experts and graduate student interns.
Throughout the Fellowship, mayors and their staff identify how injustices manifest in the social, economic, and physical infrastructures of their cities and develop manifestos of action for a priority project in each of their communities. Framed by the Lab’s Just City Index, the curriculum is adjusted for each cohort in response to the most pressing issues of the time.
In its first five cohorts, 38 mayors and 77 city staff from 24 states have joined the Just City Mayoral Fellowship. Each cohort is curated with different themes, commonalities, and city sizes in mind.
As part of the Fellowship curriculum, mayors attend the annual “Mayors Imagining the Just City” public program, which brings speakers to the GSD to discuss strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial injustice in cities.
2026 Just City Mayoral Fellowship
The 2026 Just City Mayoral Fellowship will focus on moving local projects forward in a time of constant change and uncertainty — specifically, how cities can maintain a vision of equity, address injustice, and advance the design and development of more just cities while responding to shifting resources, capacities, and constraints. Over a semester-long program, the Just City Lab’s Just City Index frames 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 identify how injustices manifest in the social, economic, and physical infrastructures of their own cities and develop manifestos of action for their communities. The 2026 cohort in particular will explore reparative development: embedding justice and equity goals within efforts to repair economic disinvestment and restore the cultural identity of neighborhoods through just city design and development strategies.
The 2026 Just City Mayoral Fellows are: Broadview, IL Mayor Katrina Thompson; Columbia, MO Mayor Barbara Buffaloe; Durham, NC Mayor Leonardo Williams; Fairbanks, AK Mayor Mindy O'Neall; Gresham, OR Mayor Travis Stovall; Moline, IL Mayor Sangeetha Rayapati; Salem, MA Mayor Dominick Pangallo; and Santa Monica, CA Mayor Caroline Torosis.
2025 Just City Mayoral Fellowship
The MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship is a program of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design in partnership with the Just City Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. This unique and highly interactive program brings together a small group of mayors to directly tackle injustices in each of their cities through planning and design interventions.
In the face of a nationwide housing crisis, the 2025 Fellowship explored what it means to house our communities. The curriculum introduced 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.
The 2025 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellows were 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; Suisun City, CA Mayor Alma Hernandez.
2024 Just City Mayoral Fellowship
The 2024 Just City Mayoral Fellowship followed a hybrid in-person and virtual format between February and April of 2024. TheFellowship introduced mayors and their staff to the concepts of social impact and justice-centered design, equity framework measurement tools, and innovative design practices that increase just and equitable outcomes. Each mayor also explored conditions of injustice in their own community, culminating in a manifesto of action.
The 2024 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellows were Allentown, PA Mayor Matthew Tuerk; Dearborn, MI Mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud; Lima, OH Mayor Sharetta Smith; Long Beach, CA Mayor Rex Richardson; McMinnville, OR Mayor Remy Drabkin; Racine, WI Mayor Cory Mason; and San Rafael, CA Mayor Kate Colin.
2023 Just City Mayoral Fellowship
The 2023 Just City Mayoral Fellowship helped mayors develop and strengthen approaches to embedding justice and equity goals within government policy and practices, as well as help mayors design strategies for achieving more just and equitable outcomes within their communities. This cohort of mayors was introduced to the concepts of social impact and justice-centered design, equity framework measurement tools, and innovative design practices that increase just and equitable outcomes. Building from past Fellowships,the program continued to explore ways to create lasting, transformational impacts from new federal funding streams such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the American Rescue Plan Act.
The 2023 Just City Mayoral Fellows were Albany, NY Mayor Kathy Sheehan; Albuquerque, NM Mayor Tim Keller; Arlington, TX Mayor Jim Ross; Kansas City, MO Mayor Quinton Lucas;
2022 Just City Mayoral Fellowship
The 2022 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship helped mayors navigate a just and equitable recovery from the pandemic, providing actionable ideas for city leaders rising to meet this moment of change. Building on the inaugural 2020 Fellowship, this program explored ways to create lasting, transformational impacts from new federal funding streams such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the American Rescue Plan Act. The Lab’s Just City Index framed dynamic presentations and dialogues with experts in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, art activism, housing, and public policy.
The 2022 Just City Mayoral Fellows included Charleston, SC Mayor John J. Tecklenburg; Duluth, MN Mayor Emily Larson; Madison, WI Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway; Providence, RI Mayor Jorge O. Elorza; Richmond, VA Mayor Levar M. Stoney; Salisbury, MD Mayor Jacob R. Day; and Youngstown, OH Mayor Jamael Tito Brown.
2020 Just City Mayoral Fellowship
The inaugural MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship took place virtually in Fall 2020 and focused on planning and design solutions for neighborhoods in which injustice plays out. During the program, each mayor selected a neighborhood in their city that had historically seen under-investment and received expert feedback on applying the language and tactics of justice to the neighborhood’s future.
The online Fellowship was divided into three modules—Conditions of Injustice, Neighborhood Change, and Design for Justice—which were further divided into nine sessions. Together, they took seven mayors and their staffs through time demonstrating how the combination of politics and design have caused lasting harm in communities. Yet, the modules also made apparent how these same tools may be used to subvert injustice to create the alternative futures for which cities strive.
Seven mayors participated in the inaugural Fellowship: Birmingham, AL Mayor Randall L. Woodfin; Columbia, SC Mayor Stephen K. Benjamin; Framingham, MA Mayor Yvonne Spicer; Greenville, MS Mayor Errick D. Simmons; Jackson, MS Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba; Mount Vernon, NY Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard; and Union City, GA Mayor Vince R. Williams.