Diane E. Davis was recently named chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University. Hoping to get a glimpse at the direction she plans to take that essential department in the university’s prestigious Graduate School of Design — which counts influencers from Shaun Donovan to Michael Graves among its alums — I asked Davis about her vision for training tomorrow’s urban leaders. We also talked about her background as an urban sociologist, improving design competitions, opportunities that might arise from Habitat III and more.

Diane E. Davis
Diane E. Davis

The GSD recently hosted, with the Van Alen Institute, a conversation about design competitions. If you were to rewrite the rules on design competitions, what would be your priority?

At MIT I ran what we originally thought would be advertised as a design competition, although we ended up calling it an ideas competition. The project was called Jerusalem 2050, Visions for a Place for Peace. Our task was to generate a global design competition that would generate planning or design entries focused on the task of creating a more prosperous, sustainable, peaceful Jerusalem. When we began, we had Palestinians and Israelis, political scientists, urban planners, architects, designers, meeting at MIT and thinking more about how to lay out the specifications for what we originally thought would be a design competition.

One of the challenges, however, was that there wasn’t enough consensus in our steering committee about the nature of the space we were designing for. What were the boundaries, for example, of Jerusalem? Who should be involved in designing? People who live there, or outside? This made us think more about being flexible and intellectually creative about laying out a competition that allowed people to give us the parameters for design, not just to use a design competition to solicit responses to someone else’s parameters.

What I am saying here is that often in design competitions, the design objectives are set in a very fixed way, with others laying out the nature of the problem to be solved. In contrast, I think there is scope for learning more about problem identification in planning and design competitions. One of the things I’m constantly telling my students is that they need to think long and hard about the problem they are choosing to solve. Sometimes students come into the program thinking they already know the principal problem, and that their task should just be to find the solution. Sometimes we can jump into action modes too quickly, and planning can, in its worst form, be a solution in search of a problem. Problem identification must be on the top of the agenda for planners and designers.

Another recent GSD forum explored the role of design in building equitable communities. Is there any advice you would offer to urban planners and designers who are actively seeking equitable outcomes with their work? How do you get there?

That’s the holy grail question in planning, isn’t it? But first of all, let’s think a little more critically about which equities we’re looking at — is it class, is it race, income, mobility equities, environmental justice, and so on? There are multiple issues of equity that have to be dealt with, although they all can’t be dealt with equally [through] design or with traditional planning solutions. So I think it’s really important to move beyond the general mantra of thinking about equity and start focusing on particular equity issues that might best match up with design or planning skills or strategies, and vice versa. One has to have an idea of the interconnectivity between various inequities, think strategically about where and how to intervene first, hopefully with the fact that such actions might loosen the Gordian knot of interconnected inequities, and at the same time recognize that there are some problems that planning and design are better able to tackle. In short, it is important to teach students how to leverage design and planning to make the most progress with the most focused interventions, understanding that although many urban problems will remain beyond the reach of our collective toolkit, some are so pressing that they must be addressed in any way we can.

I am discussing with colleagues here the thought of having an event in the spring focused on St. Louis. I grew up in St. Louis, so when everything happened in Ferguson it was literally and figuratively close to home for me. I had long been thinking about working more on that city, and in fact when I wrote my statement for promotion to full professor at MIT, I proposed that I wanted my next project to be a social and spatial history of St. Louis, because I was so intrigued with not just the conventional problems of racial and spatial disparity — but also because St. Louis, like Boston, is one of the cities in the U.S. that has a very small metro area and a very large suburban area, so that creates all sorts of spatial, financial, social, racial tensions.

As an urban sociologist, I also had been thinking that the historical development of St. Louis told us something about the nation’s larger legacies of racial exclusion. This occurred to me most starkly after I produced a book called Cities and Sovereignty, Identity Politics in Urban Spaces. I started wondering whether the questions usually focused on the world’s most known divided or conflicted cities could be applied to a place like St. Louis. Not everyone knows that the state of Missouri became formally divided between North and South during the Civil War, and St. Louis physically and politically straddled the two divides.

For the past several years I have been researching police corruption and targeted violence in Latin American cities, so when I saw similar things unfolding, first in St. Louis and then in Baltimore, NYC and other places, I started thinking I wanted to take the questions I’d been looking at in Latin American cities and then apply them to American cities. Starting with St. Louis seems to make a lot of sense. So we are hoping to have a big event in the spring at the GSD that brings together experts in design, planning, history, and politics to start a serious discussion about design, race, and inequality.

You’ve done a lot of work on urbanization in the “global south.” What do you think are the most pressing issues facing the global south today?

There are many different “global souths.”...