The Larger Landscape Conversation

Kate Aronoff is a Brooklyn-based journalist who writes on American politics and climate change. She is a staff writer at The New Republic, and a former fellow at the Type Media Center. Her work has appeared in The Intercept, The Nation, Dissent, Jacobin, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Aronoff is the co-editor of We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style; co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal; and author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet—and How We Fight Back.

Billy Fleming is the founding Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Fleming is co-editor of A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation and Design With Nature Now. He is also the lead author of "The 2100 Project: An Atlas for the Green New Deal”, “Field Notes toward An Internationalist Green New Deal,” and “The Indivisible Guide.” Fleming has led a range of Green New Deal-related policy projects, including the policy analysis that led to the introduction of the “Green New Deal for Public Housing Act” by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “A Green New Deal for K-12 Education Act” by Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

Stephen Gray is an Associate Professor of Urban Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and founder of the Boston-based design firm Grayscale Collaborative. Gray’s research and practice center on political and cultural justice in cities, socio-ecological urban design approaches to resilience, and the intersectionality of humanitarian aid and design. His work acknowledges the relationship between race, class, and the production of space, interrogates design’s contribution to and complicity with structural and infrastructural racism. He develops methodologies and interventions that address inequity, exclusion, social justice, and precarity across a range of scales.