Getting to Know You Series: Meet Daniel McPhee of Urban Design Forum

Editor’s Note: We’re back with a new installment in our occasional Getting to Know You series, where we introduce you to our grantee partners, network members, and philanthropy colleagues who have interesting stories to tell. Today we’re chatting with Daniel McPhee, Executive Director of Urban Design Forum.

Elisabeth Rapport (ER): Tell me a bit about your professional background and what led you to the Urban Design Forum.

Daniel McPhee (DM): I’ve worked with the Urban Design Forum for over a decade, but my fascination with urban design started early. I grew up in San Francisco, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, a place where people who are brilliant and different and enterprising have migrated for over a century. And yet, in spite of all its merits, you also see what happens when we don’t get public policy right – dwindling diversity, deep unaffordability, widening inequality. I became really interested in understanding how the city could better plan for its future while preserving all its charm.

I studied architecture and political science, worked briefly with a community design organization, Urban Ecology, before moving to New York City and starting with the Forum. What initially attracted me to the Forum was our accomplished Board of Directors– architects, developers and public officials that had worked through really difficult moments in our city’s history, from the fiscal crisis to the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. The organization had splintered into two, so our first task was bringing both parties back together. We merged about seven years ago and I was appointed the director right after.

ER: Urban Design Forum gathers designers, planners, developers and civic leaders to debate the defining issues facing our cities. What are your current most pressing organizational goals, and how are you going about achieving them?

DM: New York City is entering an important new chapter, with a new mayor, new governor, and elected leadership at every level. We have to meet this moment and make the case that every New Yorker deserves a healthy home, a dignified workplace, a safe commute and a beautiful neighborhood. It’s going to require long-term planning, a recognition that racial justice and climate change need to inform development like never before, and a whole new set of tools to get New Yorkers excited about change in their neighborhoods. To date, we’ve rallied fifty of our members to write a political agenda focused on urban planning and developed voter resource guides to prove there’s a real constituency that votes on these issues. Now it’s time to meet and inspire our city’s incoming leaders to get moving.

Another interesting project we’re working on with the Architectural League is New City Critics, a new fellowship for emerging writers and critics. If we want to shift public opinion on the future of the city, we’ll need a new generation of diverse, fearless and persuasive writers. It’s a tough thing to achieve – local media is strapped and short-staffed – but we think with the right mix of mentors and skills and meaningful compensation, we might be able to help.

ER: The past year-and-a-half has changed the way all of us live and work in so many ways. How have the pandemic and our nation's reckoning with racial justice affected your work?

DM: In spring 2020, after months of lockdown, we realized that safely reopening the city was fundamentally a question of space. How can we either operate outdoors, or else indoors with greater space and ventilation? And how could we center reopening efforts in the neighborhoods that were hardest hit by the pandemic?

With our partners at Van Alen Institute, we started to reach out to small business improvement districts and community development corporations in Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development’s membership to ask if we could put designers and engineers to work on reopening plans. We activated our networks and recruited 200 architects, engineers, lawyers, and financial experts to support amazing organizations in Bed-Stuy, Chinatown, Jackson Heights, Longwood, the Lower East Side, the Northwest Bronx, and Washington Heights. Our community partners were at the helm, defining priorities and connecting teams with small businesses and cultural organizations. They built outdoor operations, reconfigured social service spaces, upgraded ventilation, hosted PPP loan workshops, negotiated leases, reactivated public spaces, and more.

It still amazes me that it was originally planned as a six week project, but many teams are still working together on even longer-term projects nearly two years later! We’re still working on new outdoor markets, storefront upgrades, improved public spaces – and trying to figure out how to make community design work sustainable long beyond the pandemic.

ER: Just like the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, your organization is big on leadership development. Tell me about your Forefront Fellowship program.

DM: The Forefront Fellowship is about leadership in action. We build cohorts of rising leaders working in design, development and public policy that resemble the city we serve. And then we put them to work in two ways. First, we partner with a government agency to research an emerging challenge – like what we can do to our buildings, streets, and public spaces to make them healthier and more comfortable as our summers get hotter. And then, once our fellows are equipped with insider knowledge, we invest in them as they lead their own independent projects with community organizations around the city.

This year, we’re thrilled to partner with the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy and Department of City Planning on strengthening community-led food infrastructure. The pandemic highlighted just how many New Yorkers don't have access to healthy, fresh food. In many corners of our city, local leaders are building a food system that will better nourish their communities in community gardens and farmers markets, support food entrepreneurship in industrial kitchens, and make fresh food far more accessible in bodegas. We've been looking at what kind of infrastructure it will take to support and spread these efforts. It’s been a fascinating year.

ER: Urban Design Forum is focused on bold solutions to urban challenges. What bold solutions do you hope take hold in America's cities within the next year? Five years?

DM: When it comes to housing, it’s time to center public health. If we start with the idea that every New Yorker has a healthy home, then we’ll finally stop caring about which agency does what. And we’ll get to work building new and supportive housing to end homelessness, accelerating fixing up our aging and deteriorating public housing, and start using healthy building materials in all new construction and retrofit projects.

We’re also really just beginning to brave the climate crisis. We’ve concentrated on big coastal infrastructure projects, and focused less on other enormous challenges – like how to deal with major rainfall events like Hurricane Ida or worsening heat waves, which are the deadliest extreme weather events. Let’s rewrite the building codes to add building shading, improve ventilation, safeguard basement apartments, and deploy green infrastructure wherever possible. And let’s get creative about lowering our carbon emissions by retrofitting aging buildings, electrifying new construction, making public transit free and improving our bus and bike networks.

Finally, let’s draw strength from the racial reckoning and confront the racist history of urban planning. We need to recognize that low-income communities of color face the worst air pollution, lack of shade, inundation risk, and other infrastructure burdens. We need to focus on improving Black and Latino homeownership. We need to focus on building job centers, libraries, health centers and schools in every neighborhood of the city. And we need to demand wealthier, whiter neighborhoods carry their fair share of deeply affordable housing and difficult infrastructure.

It’s all possible and happening elsewhere – let’s ask New York to lead again.