Nearly two months after the violent and hateful events in Charlottesville, Virginia, we sit down with Elgin Cleckley — assistant professor of architecture and design thinking at the University of Virginia — to talk about his experience as a black designer in the city. We discuss his recent Next City article, I’m a Black Designer in Charlottesville. This Is What It Feels Like to Walk Through My City, about putting context to place, the optimism of design thinking, and how we can have better conversations around the future we want for our cities. 

If you like these conversations and advocating for human-scale cities, you can donate to our efforts on our Patreon page at www.patreon.com/thirdwaveurbanism. Thank you to our supporters, and thank you all for listening, sharing, and doing what you do!

As always, you can keep up with our thoughts and send us your comments on Twitter or Instagram: Katrina can be found at @think_katrinaKristen can be found at @blackurbanist

---Episode references:Main article on Next City by Elgin Cleckley - I’m a Black Designer in Charlottesville. This Is What It Feels Like to Walk Through My City: https://nextcity.org/features/view/charlottesville-black-architect-city-tour

Katrina’s GoFundMe to help kickstart the Women Led Cities Initiative meet-up at Placemaking Week this October 12th! (Every little bit helps! ❤) —  https://www.gofundme.com/women-led-cities-study-tour

---Intro and closing music is “Urban Life” by Gustavs Strazdin used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode