This Project
The City of Boston's Office of Resilience and Racial Equity (MORRE) along with the Boston Resilience Collaborative (BRC) is developing a 'timeline' of racial justice flashpoints (including local and national government and private sector policies and practices, as well as community activism). Members of MORRE's Racial Equity Working Group and area historians, archivists, educators have worked to identify key points in Boston’s history that starkly illuminate inequity and celebrate community cohesion.
As a parallel effort, the Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative is exploring the policies that have coded high level planning agendas in Boston, the people who reacted and shifted outcomes through organizing and civil disobedience, and the places that resulted from a collision of these planned and unplanned circumstances. More information about this initiative can be found here: http://mellonurbanism.harvard.edu/boston/
Convening Partners
The Mayor's Office of Resilience and Racial Equity
Our department works to to develop and implement Boston’s Resilience Strategy. The strategy is a transformative, healing journey to ensure all of us have access and support to thrive from childhood to retirement in our daily lives and during major emergencies.
We maintain a unique focus on social and economic resilience in a City affected by historic and persistent divisions of race and class. Our department also keeps an eye toward potential shocks the City may be exposed to.
City of Boston's Chief Resilience Officer, Dr. Atyia Martin.
Northeastern University Archives and Special Collection
The Archives and Special Collections at the Northeastern University Libraries houses and carefully curates a diverse and growing collection of historical records relating to Boston’s fight for social justice. Our charge is to preserve the history of Boston’s social movements, including civil and political rights, immigrant rights, homelessness, and urban and environmental justice. We focus on the history of Boston’s African American, Chinese, LGBT, Latino and other communities, as well as Boston’s public infrastructure, neighborhoods, and natural environments. The primary source materials we collect and make available are used by community members, students, faculty, scholars, journalists, and others from across the world as the evidence on which stories, histories, and biographies are built. The use of these records will lead to a deeper understanding of the past. An understanding of the past can help our society by inspiring the next generation of leaders to continue the fight for equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities.
Head of Special Collections and University Archivist, Northeastern University: Giordana Mecagni
Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative: Boston Portal
The Harvard–Mellon Urban Initiative is structured around ongoing city-based research projects in Berlin, Boston, Istanbul, and Mumbai. Each project will serve as a research ‘portal’ into specific geographies and urban issues, while opening up a broad interdisciplinary field of comparative study and research. The overarching theme for the Boston portal is Policy, Place, and Power in an Evolving City. In broad terms, this work focuses on a central challenge facing the city and region of Boston (and many other major American cities and metropolitan areas): balancing the pressure and need for continued development with legitimate concerns about how that physical growth relates to and dramatically reshapes the social and economic makeup of neighborhoods, including many communities that are home to large numbers of minorities and immigrants. This theme encompasses topics that relate to the cyclical process of urbanization in Boston. Equal attention is paid to the policies that code high level planning agendas, the people who react and shift outcomes through organizing and civil disobedience, and the places that result from a collision of these planned and unplanned circumstances.
Assistant Professor of Urban Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design: Stephen Gray
CERES: Exhibit Toolkit
This project was created on a customized WordPress instance using the CERES: Exhibit Toolkit. These tools, as well as archival, hosting, and support systems, are provided by the Northeastern University Library Digital Scholarship group. The DSG specializes in the Digital Humanities and helps faculty, staff, and students in the Northeastern community showcase their projects to the public.