Just City Mayoral Fellowship

The Just City Mayoral Fellowship is much like a graduate school course, with a small group of mayors and their staff doing a deep dive into the history and practice of design justice. Over the course of a semester, design leaders from around the country lead weekly lectures and discussions on a variety of curated topics. The semester ends with each mayor presenting a capstone project from their city and receiving expert feedback from a select group of design leaders, after which each mayor receives several months of extended advising from a personalized team of experts and graduate student interns.

Just City Mayoral Fellows are selected based on an open call for expressions of interest in the months before the Fellowship begins. The 2026 expression of interest period closed on November 17, 2025. Please note that participation is extremely limited (up to 8 participants per year) and may be geared towards different city challenges and themes each year. Invitations are extended in early December.

We also encourage you to fill out our interest form or contact Fellowship staff directly to discuss the program in more detail.

Each cohort is curated with different themes, commonalities, and city sizes in mind. Ideal participants are seeking new tools and expertise to help advance their justice goals in concrete, impactful ways, and can make the substantial time commitment to the semester-long curriculum and extended advising.

A strong expression of interest demonstrates: 1) the mayor’s commitment to creating opportunity for all and to participating in the entire Fellowship; 2) the relevance of clearly articulated opportunities and challenges in the mayor’s community; and 3) the alignment of the mayor’s proposed project with Fellowship goals.

There is no cost to participating mayors or cities; there are no registration fees and the Fellowship covers all mayoral travel expenses and provides a stipend for city staff to attend the April convening. Resource Team members receive a modest honorarium from USCM.

Typical MICD Institute Sessions are 2.5-day intensive technical assistance workshops where mayors engage leading design and development experts to find solutions to the most critical planning and design challenges facing their cities, through the exploration of specific projects.

The Just City Mayoral Fellowship instead brings together a small cohort of mayors and key staff members for both virtual and in-person gatherings over a semester-long curriculum and extended advising.

Fellowship participants can expect a similarly engaging, candid, collaborative atmosphere in which to gain new frameworks for solving their cities’ challenges. The Fellowship curriculum takes participants through a series of lectures, workshops, and extended advising which culminate in a plan of actionable, context-specific strategies for each mayor’s area of focus. The tailored follow-up brings a team of experts and graduate student interns to each city for extended advising on the mayor’s priority project.

Each mayor selects two key staff members to participate in the Just City Mayoral Fellowship virtual classes, April project workshop, and extended advising. Staff participation is a critical piece of the Fellowship experience. Participation in the opening convening is limited to mayors.

The Just City Mayoral Fellowship involves a semester-long commitment to weekly classes and ongoing project work, followed by several months of extended advising. The Fellowship team will provide detailed information about preparing for your specific cohort.

Before the Fellowship, you will select two staff members who will join the virtual classes, collaborate on your project, attend the April project workshop, and participate in extended advising. During the Fellowship, each week’s class has associated readings and may have short homework assignments as you select and work on your project. Before the project workshop, you and your staff will prepare a presentation about your project. At that workshop, you will participate in the roundtable discussion and receive recommendations for moving your project forward, before continuing with a personalized team in the months that follow.

During the first few weeks of the Fellowship, the course curators will assist you with selecting an appropriate project for the current cohort.

Past projects have addressed topics such as:

• Redeveloping industrial sites as centers of health, connection, and resiliency
• Building economic opportunity and access alongside new community centers
• Reimagining underutilized parks as welcoming community connectors
• Neighborhood-scale planning to build wealth and improve quality of life in immigrant communities
• Maximizing the impact of improved transit and mobility infrastructure
• Reconnecting across highways and other disruptive infrastructure
• Stabilizing neighborhoods experiencing rapid displacement through policy and planning
• Transforming distressed corridors through public and private investments

• The 2025 Fellowship explored what it means to house our communities, introducing planning and design frameworks (beyond housing supply and demand) that maximize all city resources to support the broad range of housing needs faced by a broad range of city populations.
• The 2023 and 2024 Fellowships helped mayors develop and strengthen approaches to embedding justice and equity goals within government policy and practices, as well as design strategies for achieving more just and equitable outcomes within the communities of each city.
• The 2022 Fellowship helped mayors navigate a just and equitable recovery from the pandemic, providing actionable ideas for city leaders rising to meet a key moment of change and exploring ways to create lasting, transformational impacts from new federal funding streams.
• The inaugural 2020 Fellowship took place as COVID-19 brought disproportionate harm to the health and economic well-being of Black residents and national protests around policing, public safety, and race continued. This virtual program focused on planning and design solutions for the neighborhoods where these injustices played out, culminating in the creation of a manifesto of action for a historically under-invested neighborhood in each mayor’s city.

While participation is extremely limited, MICD is always looking for new design leaders to fit various programs throughout the year, including the Just City Mayoral Fellowship. Ideal candidates have a deep commitment to using the allied design fields to promote justice in the built environment, through architecture, arts & culture, city planning, community engagement, economic development, housing, landscape architecture, real estate development, transportation, and/or urban design. Design leaders may be invited to serve as a lecturer during the weekly classes and/or as a Resource Team member providing project recommendations at the closing session. Learn more about getting involved in MICD as a design leader.