From METROPOLIS

Last Thursday night, a crowd gathered at the Center for Architecture (CFA) in New York City for the opening of Design and the Just City in NYC, a small but dense exhibition tucked into a corner of the space’s ground level. Curated and presented by the Just City Lab at Harvard GSD, the exhibition displays five New York projects that use design and planning to address systemic racial and spatial injustice—strategies ranging from a completed charter school and mixed-use campus in East Harlem to a diversity plan for a public school district in Brooklyn.

The show, like the Just City Lab itself, approaches designing for justice as a research question. “There is such a heightened need to think about justice. Not just equity, not just equality, but justice,” says professor and planner Toni L. Griffin, who directs the multidisciplinary research group. “It was really important for us to test, and be a bit provocative about, whether or not injustice is something we can help dismantle through design. I think framing it as a question keeps it as a pursuit.”