A note from the Executive Director

This year, the Mayors’ Institute on City Design turns 40.

When Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. founded MICD in 1986, the program began with a powerful idea: mayors are the chief urban designers of their cities. They may not draw the plans or design the buildings, but the decisions they make every day shape how their cities look, feel, and work for generations.

Forty years later, more than 1,300 mayors have come to MICD with a challenge facing their city and a willingness to think differently about it. They have brought us downtowns and waterfronts, neighborhoods and highways, civic buildings and public spaces. They have wrestled with growth and disinvestment, connection and displacement, and the difficult work of turning ambitious ideas into reality.

And through it all, some questions have endured: Who is the city for? What makes a place worth caring about? How can public investment create greater public value? What can a mayor do to make good design not the exception, but the expectation?

Over the coming months, we’re going to use our 40th anniversary as an opportunity to explore those questions and many more. We’ll dig into four decades of MICD cases, revisit projects and people who have shaped the program, share stories from mayors and resource team members, and look at how the challenges facing cities—and the role of mayors in shaping them—have evolved. We’ll also ask what the next 40 years might demand of cities, designers, and the people who lead them.

None of these forty years would have been possible without the mayors, resource team members, session partners, and friends who have contributed their ideas, experience, and time to MICD, or without the enduring partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts and the United States Conference of Mayors.

As we begin looking back, we’d love to hear from you: What is one idea from MICD that has stayed with you? Send us a few words, a story, a photo, or whatever comes to mind. We may share some of your reflections as we celebrate 40 years of MICD over the months ahead.