Resilience as Resistance Symposium

Jha D Amazi believes that the narratives upheld in our public realm should be expanded to represent, honor, and celebrate the experiences, histories, and cultures of people who have been historically denied representation in our memorial landscape. As a principal at MASS Design Group, Amazi leads the Public Memory and Memorials Lab, engaging communities to design projects such as the Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument Project (Chicago, Ill.), the Gun Violence Memorial Project (Chicago, Ill; Washington, D.C.; Boston, Mass; Detroit, Mich.), and the Sugar Land 95 Cemetery Revitalization Project (Sugar Land, Texas). Beyond her contributions at MASS, Amazi is a spoken word artist, event producer, and SpaceMaker for LGBTQ+ communities of color. In 2023, she was appointed to the Governor’s Advisory Council on Black Empowerment by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. Amazi earned an undergraduate architecture degree with honors from Northeastern University and a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining MASS, she worked as a designer at Sasaki and taught studio at the Boston Architectural College. 

Alicia Olushola Ajayi is an architectural designer, researcher, and writer based in New York City. After earning dual master’s degrees in architecture and social work from WashU, Ajayi worked as an associate designer at MASS Design Group. There she contributed to the Equal Justice Initiatives Soil Collection exhibition and the ground-breaking Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, a site dedicated to the racial terror and lynching throughout U.S. history. 

Ajayi’s practice incorporates multiple writing forms from scholarly to commentary to experimental. Her work is featured in The New York Architecture in Review, PIN-UP Magazine, Metropolis, Architectural Record, The Architectural Review, Dear Friend, and The Funambulist. Ajayi is currently documenting and researching Brooklyn, Ill., the first Black American town to be incorporated by 1829. Situated along the Mason-Dixon line, Brooklyn’s past offers a rich history of the external ideologies and internal motivations that created radical Black spatial conditions.

Reverend Rodrick Burton is the senior pastor of the historic New Northside Missionary Baptist Church. Pastor Burton attended Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, where he earned a master’s in educational ministry. Burton is an airport chaplain and president of the St. Louis Airport Interfaith Chaplaincy, the vice president of the Ecumenical Leadership Council, and is a member of several regional ministerial alliances such as the St. Louis Metropolitan Clergy Coalition, Baptist Ministers Union of St. Louis and Vicinity, the Jennings Clergy Coalition, The 27th Ward Clergy Alliance, The Interfaith Partnership of St. Louis, and The Pastoral Fellowship of St. Louis. 

Burton works to address environmental justice as a member of the Sierra Club of Eastern Missouri and with The Nature Conservancy, Metropolitan Congregations United, and St. Louis’s Clean Energy Advisory Board. Burton is also a board member of A Caring Plus, a nonprofit organization that builds low-income housing throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area. 

Dana Cuff engages spatial justice and cultural studies of architecture as a teacher, scholar, practitioner, and activist. Her leadership in urban innovation is widely recognized in the U.S. and abroad. In 2006, Cuff founded cityLAB, a research and design center that initiates experimental projects to explore metropolitan possibilities. The lab’s “housing first” research demonstrates that affordable, well-designed housing and neighborhoods are attainable foundations of equitable cities. In 2017, after a decade of research that included a full-scale demonstration house built on the University of California, Los Angeles campus, Cuff co-authored California State legislation, effectively opening 8.1 million single-family lots for secondary rental units. 

Since 2013, Cuff has led an initiative at UCLA offering students from architecture, urban studies, and the humanities a radical platform for cross-disciplinary, impactful urban scholarship and action. Cuff’s books include “Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City,” Architects’ People,” “Architecture: The Story of Practice,” “The Provisional City,” and “Fast Forward Urbanism.”

The former director of research at SWA Group, Anya Domlesky has extensive experience in infrastructure planning and urban design. Her work investigates the future of the built environment across scales, with a focus on urbanized landscape systems. A registered landscape architect in California, she is the Lifchez Professor of Practice in Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley and has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Boston Architectural College. Domlesky holds master’s degrees from Harvard University and McGill University. 

Gibron Jones is executive director of HOSCO Shift (Holistic Organic Sustainable Cooperatives), a nonprofit farming and food business incubator he founded with his father in 2010. His work has expanded to include North Sarah Food Hub — a food hub with a commercial kitchen, CSA, and online grocery — and partnerships with a variety of organizations including St. Louis Public Schools, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Missouri Foundation For Health, and St. Louis County. A pilot project with BJC Healthcare introduced him to the importance of nutrition education as the key to better long-term health outcomes. HOSCO Shift has delivered more than two million meals and two million pounds of produce to community members in need, along with education on nutrition as a way to control diseases like diabetes.

Zachary Lamb is an assistant professor in the department of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the role of urban planning and design in shaping uneven vulnerability and resilience in the face of climate change.His dissertation focused on the role of design in shaping urban flood infrastructure and the changing spatial politics of urban flooding through two case study cities, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Dhaka, Bangladesh. His current book project, “Making and Unmaking the Dry City,” focuses on the historical evolution and contemporary problems of flood mitigation in these two cities. Lamb was selected as a Princeton Mellon Fellow in Urbanism and the Environment. Lamb is also the co-founder of Crookedworks, a design-build firm that uses collaborative design and building projects to tackle complex urban challenges, including food security, cross-species living, and climate-change hazards. Lamb earned his Master of Architecture at MIT and his undergraduate degree in art history and practice and environmental studies from Williams College. 

Laura Marett, RLA, LEED AP, is a principal at SCAPE. Her practice includes landscape design and systems planning with an emphasis on resiliency. Marett’s work encompasses a range of scales and project types, from the design of public parks, streetscapes and waterfronts to large-scale landscape planning and campus framework planning. She has particular interest in the design of vibrant urban public spaces through an engaged public process and resilience planning with communities.

Marett maintains a close connection to academia and research. In recent years, she has served as an adjunct faculty member at the Rhode Island School of Design, Northeastern University, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). She holds a Master’s in Landscape Architecture from GSD and a Bachelor’s in literature from Harvard College. Marett is a member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the National Climate and Biodiversity Action Committee, and the Boston Society of Landscape Architects, her local chapter.

Heather Navarro is the director of the Midwest Climate Collaborative. She served as an alderperson in the City of St. Louis from 2017-2022, where she sponsored the first building energy performance standard in the Midwest, solar-ready requirements, and an EV-ready building code. Navarro previously served from 2013-2020 as the executive director of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, a state-wide environmental advocacy organization. In that role, she actively engaged with the Mississippi River Collaborative, the Missouri Clean Energy Coalition, and many other collaborative efforts.

Navarro earned both a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies and a juris doctor at WashU. Her legal practice was primarily with a public interest law firm representing clients in racial and disability discrimination matters. Navarro was a fellow with the Public Leaders for Inclusion Council in 2021 and has served on the Missouri Municipal League Board as well as a variety of other local, state, and national boards.