The 2021 mayoral election has many residents wondering how to make a better city and who can play a part. On the heels of this period brimming with potential comes this symposium, hosted in partnership with BosNOMA and WiD Boston during the week of November 6.

The first day of the symposium will feature a virtual keynote presentation, where the three speakers will discuss their work as it relates to 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.

A recent Visiting Scholar in collaboration with the University of Tasmania and an MFA candidate at Bennington College, Kenneth Bailey is also the co-founder of the Design Studio for Social Intervention. He'll bring his more than three decades of experience in community practice and his interest in developing design tools through which marginalized communities can address social issues to the keynote conversation. Bailey's new book, co authored with DS4SI, is titled Ideas—Arrangements—Effects: Systems Design and Social Justice (Minor Compositions, 2020.)

Billy Fleming is the Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. As a senior fellow with Data for Progress, Fleming focuses on the built environment impacts of climate change. Prior to joining Penn, Fleming worked as a landscape architect, city planner, organizer, and in the Obama Administration’s White House Domestic Policy Council. Fleming is the author of the forthcoming Drowning America: The Nature and Politics of Adaptation (Penn Press, expected 2021).

An architect and writer, Kelly Easterling is the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale University. To the keynote conversation, Easterling brings her unique experience examining global infrastructure and "the relationship between architecture and the largersystems that dictate where and when architecture might exist" (Pin-Up Magazine.) Her recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure as a medium of polity.

Participants will have the opportunity to take part in an invigorating conversation that will see each speaker apply their diverging knowledge sets and experiences towards the same topics. The presentation will set the tone for a symposium posed to meaningfully and thoughtfully address issues that impact how we all live, work, and convene with one another.

The Intersections symposium is free for BSA and BosNOMA members. Each session offers 1.5 LU HSW AIA credits to those who qualify. View the full session schedule, register, and learn more at Intersections: Equity, Environment + The City.