One of four cultural leaders serving on a panel for DesignPhiladelphia 2024 discussing our visions for attracting people to the city while maintaining respect for local value and visions.
At the NFD MLK Freedom Now Mural Paint Day, Dr. Matthew Kenyatta secured support through the Netter Center for Community Partnerships and actively contributed by painting a panel of the newly replaced mural at 40th and Lancaster. The event, hosted at 3952 Lancaster Ave, featured a community cleanup, mural painting, and a lively happy hour celebration. Organized by Nova Commons and supported by partners like Mural Arts Philadelphia, Penn Community Bank, and Mosaic Commercial, the dedication celebrated both the mural and the community’s collective spirit.
I had the honor of attending the Vice President’s 2024 Pride Month celebration at the historic Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. The event brought together LGBTQ+ leaders and advocates to celebrate the community's contributions. I reconnected with icons like Lee Daniels, Chasten Buttigieg, Billy Porter, Everton Blair Jr., Andrea Jenkins, and Becky George. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff gave a speech, and RuPaul's Drag Race winner Nymphia Wind also joined the celebration.
Toni L. Griffin of Harvard delivers the inaugural Abele Lecture in Design & Policy. Named for the trailblazing 20th-century architect Julian Francis Abele, the first Black graduate of what is today the Weitzman School of Design, the Abele Lecture is moderated by Matthew Kenyatta and organized by the Black Planners Society. Griffin will discuss connecting design with spatial and social (in)justices across American legacy cities. A reception will follow.
The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation awarded me two grants - the 2024 Community Partnerships Award and the 2024 Independent Creative Production Grant.
The "Build Baby Build" event, part of The Philadelphia Citizen's Development for Good series, focused on solving Philadelphia’s affordable housing crisis through inclusive real estate development. Experts discussed sustainable solutions to uplift underserved communities while increasing housing availability.
This interdisciplinary symposium will bring together scholars, activists, and designers dedicated to amplifying the history of Africatown, Alabama through ensuring community-led processes for racial, environmental, and economic justice. Africatown, also known as Plateau, is a community north of downtown Mobile that was founded in 1866 by formerly enslaved West Africans who were brought to Alabama in 1860 on the Clotilda, the last documented slave ship to arrive to the United States. The journey and the life of one of those founders, Cudjo (Kossula) Lewis is the subject matter of Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.”
The discovery of the Clotilda remains in 2018 and the recent release of the Netflix documentary Descendant has led to increased media attention and economic opportunity for local heritage tourism, yet questions persist about who is to benefit and how descendants can maintain authority and autonomy over these developments. The symposium aims to focus attention on the growth and continuous encroachment of heavy industry, including paper mills and chemical refineries, around Africatown that have created public health crises for the descendant community.
Featuring three panels that will focus on storytelling, activism, and design, this convening seeks to answer questions related to memory work and environmental and spatial justice, including:
In what ways can our knowledge of the past help inform our vision for the future?
How do we amplify the diasporic links between West Africa and modern-day Africa Town USA?
How can descendant communities shape policy decisions around reparations?
What role does historic preservation have in design, especially when much of the physical fabric of what we wish to honor and celebrate has vanished or been purposefully erased?
Ann Cuss, World Monuments Fund Regional Director of North America
Kwesi Daniels, Department Head and Associate Professor of Architecture, The Robert R. Taylor School of Architecture and Construction Science, Tuskegee University
Joycelyn Davis, Organizer, Spirit of our Ancestors Festival; Member, Clotilda Descendants Association
Sylviane Diouf, Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, and Lloyd International Honors College, University of North Carolina Greensboro
Mario Gooden, Professor of Professional Practice and Director of the Master of Architecture Program, Columbia GSAPP; Principal, Mario Gooden Studio: Architecture + Design
Jerome Haferd, Architect, public artist, activist, educator, and co-founder, BRANDT : HAFERD; winning team, Africatown International Idea Competition
Renee Kemp-Rotan, Urban designer, planner, and CEO; studio| rotan; Co-organizer, Africatown International Design Idea Competition
Matt Kenyatta, Director of Justice and Belonging (JxB), Stuart Weitzman School of Design
Rashida Ng, Presidential Associate Professor of Architecture and Chair, Undergraduate Architecture, Stuart Weitzman School of Design
Deborah Plant, African American and Africana Studies independent scholar, writer, and literary critic; Editor, Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo”
Veda Robbins, Descendant and Community Organizer; The BIG We
Nick Tabor, Freelance journalist (New York Times, Washington Post, and others); Author, Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created
Joe Womack, President, Clean, Healthy Educated, Safe & Sustainable Community, Inc.; Co-founder, Africatown Heritage Preservation Foundation
9:15-10:30 am
Widener Hall
Moderator: Matt Kenyatta
Panelists: Sylviane Diouf, Deborah Plant, Nick Tabor
Myth. Legend. Lore.
History. Facts. Truth.
These terms are often deployed in the process of telling, retelling, searching, and excavating the archives for the history of Africatown and the Clotilda. This panel will serve as an opportunity to discuss the art and science of storytelling, the process of discovery – convergences, divisions, contradictions – and what we do with the space in between. We will hear from storytellers within a range of academic and professional fields including social history, literary criticism, and journalism.
I joined a global conversation with leaders at Syracuse University School of Information Studies and the Internet Society on the sidelines of the 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly to discuss the role that smart cities, artificial intelligence (Al), and community Internet technologies can play in accelerating the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) across Africa:
This Hidden Histories Tour was debuted at the Weitzman School of Design New Student Orientation and attracted over 90 students in a span of 2 hours.
For the first time, the City and Regional Planning Department invited me to create an orientation session for all incoming graduate students to learn about design justice. I structure these as a curiosity-driven multi-hour contact zone for exploring topics students read about prior to the event. Three graduate students act as teaching assistants and production support for the gathering itself.
For the second year in a row, the City and Regional Planning Department invited me to create an orientation session for all incoming graduate students to learn about design justice.
This was both the last time the Promise Zone would meet and the first time all three original collaborators - myself (University of Penn), Dante Leonard (commercial corridor), Naim Mitchell (Mosaic Development Partners), and Mr. Abdul-Rahim Muhammad (New Africa Center) - presented our work together.
To help launch the legendary planning scholar and filmmaker Leonie Sandercock's anthology of articles and revised works - Mapping Possibility: Finding Purpose and Hope in Community Planning - I was invited as a special guest for the June Joy Symposium at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
This live series explores the relationship between developers and public sector managers, the role the public sector plays in promoting equitable development, and how the public sector can attract and successfully collaborate with developers.
A series of speakers with your moderator, Professor Ways, will address the following key questions:
Week 1 - Equitable Development
What makes development equitable?
Who is responsible for equitable development?
How can the public sector help facilitate equitable development?
The unveiling of the Lex Street Garden in May was the culmination of nearly two years of dedicated work I spearheaded through academically-based community service. It all began when community visionary Mr. Muhammad invited me to bring my longstanding placemaking class (CPLN6290 or 5820) in City and Regional Planning to the New Freedom District.
At the request of the Penn Planning Alumni and the Department of City and Regional Planning, I collaborated with City Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier to give a mobile tour of West Philadelphia that began at the Weitzman School of Design where I gave a dozen professional planners all over the country a version of my Hidden Histories Tour. With Marc DeLewis Grace, we lead them toward Market Street toward 40th street where we were joined by Gauthier, a trained planner and graduate of Weitzman. We concluded the day with a lunch at a local business.
A design charrette and planning discussion featuring food and prototypes, organized by PennPraxis and Dr. Matt. While students came with six or seven different prototypes, this was the first time they would meet the community members I invited and solicit written feedback. They also would give suggestions on alternative locations to do streetscape interventions. This meeting is how the Lex Street block was lifted up as a prime opportunity for making a "gateway" design intervention.
Planning for fun, love, abundance, and joy in times of despair
Authors: Kian Goh (Moderator), Lily Pollans (Organizer), Ariel Bierbaum (Participant), Gabriella Carolini (Participant), C.N.E. Corbin (Participant), Nina Flores (Participant), Matthew Kenyatta (Participant), Annette Koh (Participant)
I drew upon my forthcoming book chapter published in the edited volume The Black Geographic (Duke University Press, 2023) on the geographies of Black joy.
Whose history are preserving and why? I ask this question in a seminar examining how to preserve Pan-African heritage when crafting cities of the future amidst urban gentrification. Sponsored by Spectrum at the University of Chicago.
In recognition of public grants from the City of Philadelphia's Department of Commerce and State Senator Vincent Hughes, I was invited as the University of Pennsylvania partner to actively participate in the $2.5 million check presentation to the New Africa Center. This funding supports the effort to rebrand West Philadelphia as the New Freedom District, with the center serving as the hub of this transformative initiative.
This session for the Landscape Architecture Department was the first time Experiential Reality (VR/XR) technology had been used for a required course in any department.
I pioneered the Hidden Histories Tour, a condensed version of a broader initiative aimed at revealing the untold narratives behind some of Penn’s most iconic symbols. Through a lens of design justice, I focus on architecture, urban policy, and urban landscape design, categorizing the monuments and memories into three key themes: Countericons of Dignity—shedding light on diverse figures beyond the white, male narrative; Displacemaking—uncovering the urban renewal and campus planning efforts that erased communities; and Othered Diasporas—highlighting hidden populations marginalized by these processes. Debuting at the Weitzman School of Design New Student Orientation, the tour attracted over 90 students within two hours.
This session for the Department of Historic Preservation was the first time Experiential Reality (VR/XR) technology had been used for an orientation in any department and it occurred during their Summer Institute.
Join us for the third in a series of Re:Generation Roundtables with artists, educators, storytellers, and organizers centered around the question: Which stories belong in public? Through the theme of Reimagine, our panel will explore creatings spaces and means for healing through an intentional commitment to remember.
# Join us for the second in a series of Re:Generation Roundtables with artists, educators, storytellers, and organizers centered around the question: Which stories belong in public? Through the theme of Reclaim, our panel will explore creatings spaces and means for healing through an intentional commitment to remember. This talk will take place at 7pm Eastern / 6pm Central / 5pm Mountain / 4pm Pacific.
Join us for the first in a series of Re:Generation Roundtables with artists, educators, storytellers, and organizers centered around the question: Which stories belong in public? Through the theme of Reassess, our panel will explore how and where we tell our stories against the grain, in order to create the spaces that hold different ways of knowing.
On behalf of the Urban Institute and the Sheffield Institute for International Development-Cities, I was invited to participate in a consultative forum on Black Urbanism to be held on March 24th 2021 at 16:00 GMT. the Sheffield research centers that are initiating this--Urban Institute, and the Sheffield Institute for International Development. But the aim is for Victoria to convene, Dr. Patricia Noxolo, Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis, and Dr. Paul Goodwin to steer the discussion. The initiative seeks to further the discussion for urban studies in general, and to continue to work against the lack of inclusion at the UK's top urban research institutions.
I delivered a “Master Lecture” for Associate Professor and architect Principal of Immersive Kinematics Simon Kim’s Public Commons and Worldbuilding Studio (ARCH602) on the question of Afro/BIPOC/Queer Futurism by asking and answering: “How do marginalized peoples manifest wonder in space, time, and spacetime?” My answer hinges on a new metaphor that has shaped my personal praxis since 2019.
Still Image from Solange’s When I Get Home (2019)
While a great honor to be invited for this talk, I requested it to be a private audience of the 80 students and four professors; the concepts are very fresh and potentially transformative.
In coming weeks, I will share the recorded lecture on my platforms when the new ideas are ready to become public scholarship.
until then,
🖤💎✨🌈
