Design for the Just City
As cities grow and proliferate around the world, there's a tension around who cities are built for. As issues of human rights are increasingly entangled with urbanization, design needs to address the question: cities for people or profit?
We sourced existing research on urban justice and the philosophy of justice, as well as a design thinking approach to developing the metric so that it can be used in a useful, action-oriented way.
As part of the project, we also helped developed a public-facing website to share the work of the project and allow others to access resources and learn more.
In 2014, we worked with the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City, at City College of New York, to develop an indicator metric to measure design and policy actions along values of justice. There are many indicator frameworks that measure places and communities in a number of ways - sustainability, efficiency, livability - but none that explicitly measured urban justice.
