The Role of a Creative Institution in Building an Equitable City

President Bronet with students on the Brooklyn Bridge.

By Frances Bronet

Frances Bronet is president of Pratt Institute in New York City. An educator and leader at the forefront of interdisciplinary learning, Bronet previously served as senior vice president and provost at Illinois Institute of Technology; acting provost and dean of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts of the University of Oregon; and architecture professor, associate dean, and acting dean at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her extensively funded work on multidisciplinary design curricula—from architecture and engineering to dance and fine arts, coupled with her own action-based installations with internationally acclaimed artists—have been highly recognized.

President Bronet holds architecture and engineering professional degrees from McGill University; she received her graduate degree from Columbia University. She was licensed by the Quebec Ordre des Architectes, and has practiced in multiple award-winning offices in New York and Canada, including her own in Montreal. Read her feature interview here.

Leading a college is heading up a think tank, engaging the most experimental, rigorous, and ambitious minds focused on the problems of our time, with the goal of creating a better world. Work in each of Pratt’s schools is individually and collectively examining how we identify and address issues of public urgency and optimistic future projection. We continue to be part of the solution in-house, as partners in the boroughs and beyond the city. We examine how we can be climate ready, how we can collaborate intentionally with neighborhoods in distress, and how we can address other critical social, economic, and political issues through art, design, and architecture models that are both analytic and synthetic. We are rooted in participatory and investigative practices where reciprocity between expert local and community knowledge and our student and faculty knowledge is key.

A positive future for New York City

Alumni from Pratt’s School of Architecture’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE) are out there using what they are learning to shape the future, specifically New York City’s future. Within GCPE, which includes four programs—Urban and Community Planning (formerly City and Regional Planning), Historic Preservation, Sustainable Environmental Systems, and Urban Placemaking and Management—there is a focus on community-based solutions to support social, economic, and environmental frameworks, building a city that is equitable and sustainable. This model is informed by the teachings of GCPE Professor Emeritus Ron Shiffman, who is also the co-founder of the Pratt Center for Community Development. These values become the core of a lifelong commitment, with all the concomitant tools of our students, to contribute to a just world and to do this work through collective action. Because of this, the GCPE network has extraordinary impact with alumni, including alumna Tiffany-Ann Taylor, MS City and Regional Planning, who has worked in numerous positions in city planning and is currently the vice president for transportation at the Regional Plan Association (RPA), and Brad Lander, who studied city and regional planning, became the second director of the Pratt Center, and is currently serving as the city comptroller. Across the five boroughs, dozens of forward-thinking and highly equipped alumni are using their expertise to partner in shaping a future city that benefits and supports all its residents.

With this focus on how we reconfigure cities post-COVID coupled with climate urgency, NYC remains a global social condenser. This spring, we participated and led side-events in the United Nations Water Conference and New York Water Week, examining how design and the built environment intersect with issues of permanent climate change and adaptation. Our events focused on archipelagos, the most dense and vulnerable areas on the planet. Significant strategic collaborations from Manila to Singapore to New York City are already being prepared.

This thinking expands into other disciplines including fine arts, which alumni and faculty such as Jean Shin and Duke Riley illustrate through their work. Shin’s temporary sculpture in Philadelphia uses freshwater mussels to clean the river water. Riley repurposes seaborne plastics found at New York City’s water’s edge for his artwork that is currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum. Artist Mary Mattingly is currently our Fine Arts Civic Engagement Fellow for 2022–24. Redesign work on Swale, the participatory research station on a barge, is part of Mattingly’s work with students at Pratt, which is looking at urban ecology and the future of cities. Additionally, this past summer, Swale Lab on Governors Island, located in one of the island’s houses, hosted work to design tools that were used in participatory research that looks into ways of seeing and being on the East River; these tools informed the Swale redesign work Mary is undertaking with Pratt students.

Expanding pathways

Continuing with the goal of building an equitable city and economy, Pratt has been researching and exploring how art, design, and policy fuel the city’s economic engine. Our mission and work align with the city’s goals. Pratt has a very long history of community engagement. We are a vibrant institution because of our Brooklyn community and the relationships we’ve built beyond our campus. For example, the Institute’s Center for Art, Design, and Community Engagement K–12, which includes the over-a-century-old Saturday Arts program, now works with 2,000 K–12 students each year. Many students, 80 percent of whom are Black, Indigenous, Latino, and people of color, receive not only an education in art and design but also college prep, mentoring, and other support to pursue a career in the creative sector or use their creative capacity to inform other disciplines.

Programs such as this, and our long-standing relationships with industry, enabled us to forge partnerships with the city’s Department of Education and Bank Street College of Education to create a new public high school opening in the fall of 2023. Design Works High School will bring together the power of design with the importance of social justice and community. It will empower high school students with tools, knowledge, techniques, and experimental methodologies to imagine and create new and inclusive ways to be in the world and the skills needed to succeed in school and in life.

Aerial view of The Exchange, showing the iconic forms designed to evoke the dramatic landscapes and hills of Governors Island. Courtesy of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Building an ecosystem for creative research

Just blocks from our Brooklyn campus, and alongside an ecosystem of over 600 businesses and entrepreneurial startups, including art and design studios and practices, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (BNY), you will find our new Research Yard on the BNY campus. Occupying a 20,000-square-foot research center, it directly supports the creative economy. It unites many of Pratt’s cutting-edge research centers, while working with high school students who are researching and addressing real-world problems. These students will be from our new Design Works High School and the BNY STEAM Center.

This is crucial for New York City and especially for the borough of Brooklyn. Our Research Yard will further enable our research leaders to work with the local community responding to today's important challenges and moving from research to tech transfer. It is exciting to imagine that one of the centers for design research will be just down the block from our main campus and what our role might be in preparing future leaders in an ecosystem with over 600 businesses and startups.

In addition to our Research Yard, Pratt has become a core partner in The New York Climate Exchange on Governors Island, which is intended to be a hub for research, teaching, and learning to advance climate solutions. The Exchange is led by a team of higher education institutions including Stony Brook University, Pratt, Pace, University of Washington, and Georgia Tech with corporate and community partners. The Exchange, in partnership with the mayor and The Trust for Governors Island, will develop the curriculum for schools, colleges, and workforce development organizations; support community groups with outreach materials, workshops, and demonstration projects; and provide technical assistance for green entrepreneurs. It will build a world-class physical, fully responsive, and accountable environment to support this work.

New York City benefits from the creative education that Pratt, and other colleges and universities like Pratt, provide. Our students, alumni, and faculty have been deeply connected with communities throughout the city for decades, working during multiple transformative times in history, with the skills and agency to make positive change. I shared just a few examples, but partnerships with other city entities, like the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and more, are underway and moving the needle on sustainability, access, beauty, and equity.

As we continue to maneuver through this post-pandemic period, we will build further collaborations amongst our students, faculty, alumni, and external partners. We will discover and accomplish foreseeable and unpredictable projects that will contribute to a more just, resilient, and equitable future.