On May 1, the City College of New York will introduce acclaimed urban planner Toni L. Griffin as the director of the school’s new center: the Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City.
Griffin is known for her contributions to projects for the Delaware River Waterfront Corp. and in cities including Newark, Detroit, Manhattan, and Washington, D.C., and she also began teaching at CCNY’s Spitzer School of Architecture in 2011. In leading the new center, which is named after the late architect J. Max Bond, Griffin says that she hopes to continue tackling some of the issues that influential black architect Bond took on in his lifetime. And advocating for equity, inclusion, and activism, she says, are still necessary in the American city today.
"We want the center to be a leader in thinking on how design can become more central to the policies aimed at making American cities more just and inclusive places to live," Griffin says. "Max Bond believed that social uplift and social inclusion should be an inherent part of the design goal, so we want to build a program agenda for the center that tackles that aspiration."
