Governing for Design Excellence: Unlocking Better City Design through Mayoral Leadership
This webinar introduces MICD’s Principles for City Design Leadership and offers behind-the-scenes look at one of our first associated resources designed to help city leaders put the principles into action.
The Principles for City Design Leadership are here to help mayors center design, the built environment, and the well-being of their residents in everyday decision making and processes. The Principles help you navigate complex choices that align policy, investment, and implementation around long-term public benefit rather than short-term pressures.
Building on the Principles, Governing for Design Excellence offers concrete advice for structuring your administration and city processes to get the results you want from planning and development projects. Through our work with cities across the country, we have identified three primary ways mayors can strengthen their ecosystem of design excellence: building internal capacity, extending that capacity through partnerships, and improving the processes that shape how decisions are made.
Watch Recording (20:48)
Speakers
Trinity Simons Wagner
Executive Director
Mayors’ Institute on City Design
Trinity Simons Wagner has served as the Executive Director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) since 2012. She’s dedicated to helping mayors lead with design, move boldly, and foster equitable outcomes through policy. At MICD, she’s worked directly with 500+ mayors and lead 75+ Institute Sessions, the Institute’s flagship program connecting mayors with design leaders on the nation’s most pressing urban planning and design challenges.
Trinity’s leadership has been instrumental in building MICD programs to better support America’s mayors. She recently led the development of Mayors’ Virtual Seminars, MICD Alumni Advising, and the Just City Mayoral Fellowship in partnership with the Just City Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Under her watch in 2021, MICD was awarded the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s Founders’ Award, its highest honor for organizations.
Gerardo Garcia
Founder
The Urbanism Bureau
Gerardo Garcia is a licensed Architect and Urban Designer focused on driving equitable development in communities that need it most. Gerardo’s professional training and leadership in public interest design have allowed him to spearhead Chicago’s most innovative planning and urban design efforts.
In his prior leadership roles in city government, he was responsible for ensuring that Chicago’s economic development goals were supported by thoughtfully designed buildings that enhance neighborhoods where it matters most: on the streets and sidewalks where people live and work. Gerardo’s planning and design leadership has supported over $14B in economic development for the City of Chicago – characterized by community-driven engagement and the use of design excellence as an economic development tool.
Key Takeaways
Mayors shape the systems, culture, and decision-making processes that determine what gets built and how well it serves their communities. Through our work with cities across the country, we have identified three primary ways mayors can strengthen their administration’s ability to lead with design, detailed in Governing for Design Excellence.
- Mayors can put MICD’s Principles for City Design Leadership into practice by building internal capacity, extending that capacity through partnerships, and improving the processes that shape how decisions are made.
- The Guide’s self-assessments lets you evaluate your city’s starting point in terms of authority, capacity, and partnerships to identify where you have leverage and what kinds of moves are most likely to succeed.
- Last, a series of case studies explores how eight cities have built capacity and improved processes in order to bring out the best in design and development projects.