Intersections: Keynote Panel

Intersections: Equity, Environment + the City

This event is part of Intersections: Equity, Environment + the City, a multi-day symposium November 6–13, 2021 brought to you by BosNOMA and Women in Design on intersectional and participatory design processes in Boston. View the full symposium schedule here.

About the Session

This Keynote Panel features Keller Easterling, Kenneth Bailey, and Billy Fleming. The three speakers will discuss their work as it relates to the process of crafting spaces and places situated within one of this century's most pressing issues: the threat of climate change and its inequitable impact. Bailey, Easterling, and Fleming bring decades of experience examining the implications of these threats in the built environment. This keynote panel will bring their diverse yet often converging practices into conversation, setting the stage for a week-long symposium highlighting the roles of architects and designers in building a climate-resilient and socially inclusive cityscape.

Speakers

Kenneth Bailey
Co-Founder, Design Studio for Social Intervention (ds4si)

Bailey is the co-founder of the Design Studio for Social Intervention. His interests focus on the research and development of design tools for marginalized communities to address complex social issues. With over three decades of experience in community practice, Bailey brings a unique perspective on the ethics of design in relation to community engagement, the arts and cultural action. Projects he has produced at ds4si include Action Lab (2012- 2014), Public Kitchen (2011-2018), Social Emergency Response Center (SERC, 2017), People’s Redevelopment Authority (2018) and inPUBLIC (2019). Bailey was recently a Visiting Scholar in collaboration with University of Tasmania and also a founding member of Theatrum Mundi NYC with Richard Sennett. He is currently pursuing his MFA at Bennington College. His new book (co-authored with DS4SI) is entitled “Ideas—Arrangements--Effects: Systems Design and Social Justice” (Minor Compositions, 2020).

Billy Fleming
Wilks Family Director, Ian L. McHarg Center, University of Pennsylvania

Billy Fleming is the Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center in the Weitzman School of Design, a senior fellow with Data for Progress, and co-director of the "climate + community project." His fellowship with Data for Progress has focused on the built environment impacts of climate change, and resulted most prominently in the publication of low-carbon public housing policy briefs tied to the “Green New Deal for Public Housing Act” introduced in 2019. In his role at the McHarg Center, Billy is co-editor of the forthcoming book An Adaptation Blueprint (Island Press, 2020), co-editor and co-curator of the book and now internationally-traveling exhibit Design With Nature Now (Lincoln, 2019), and author of the forthcoming Drowning America: The Nature and Politics of Adaptation (Penn Press, expected 2021). Billy is also the lead author of the recently published and widely acclaimed “The 2100 Project: An Atlas for the Green New Deal.” He is also a co-author of the Indivisible Guide (2016).

Prior to joining Penn, he worked as a landscape architect, city planner, organizer, and, later, in the Obama Administration’s White House Domestic Policy Council. He holds a bachelor of landscape architecture (University of Arkansas), master of community and regional planning (University of Texas), and a doctorate of city and regional planning (University of Pennsylvania).

Keller Easterling
Enid Storm Dwyer Professor, Director of MED Program, Yale University

Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale. Her most recent book Medium Design: Knowing How To Work on the World (Verso, 2021) inverts an emphasis on object and figure to prompt innovative thought about both spatial and non-spatial problems. Another recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure as a medium of polity.

Easterling is a 2019 United States Artist Fellow in Architecture and Design. She was also the recipient of the 2019 Blueprint Award for Critical Thinking. Her MANY project, an online platform facilitating migration through an exchange of needs, was exhibited at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Her research and writing on the floor comprised one of the elements in Rem Koolhaas's Elements exhibition for the 2014 Venice Biennale.