Resilience as Resistance Symposium

Jha D Amazi believes that the narratives upheld in our public realm should be expanded to represent, honor, and celebrate the experiences, histories, and cultures of people who have been historically denied representation in our memorial landscape. As a principal at MASS Design Group, Amazi leads the Public Memory and Memorials Lab, engaging communities to design projects such as the Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument Project (Chicago, Ill.), the Gun Violence Memorial Project (Chicago, Ill; Washington, D.C.; Boston, Mass; Detroit, Mich.), and the Sugar Land 95 Cemetery Revitalization Project (Sugar Land, Texas). Beyond her contributions at MASS, Amazi is a spoken word artist, event producer, and SpaceMaker for LGBTQ+ communities of color. In 2023, she was appointed to the Governor’s Advisory Council on Black Empowerment by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. Amazi earned an undergraduate architecture degree with honors from Northeastern University and a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining MASS, she worked as a designer at Sasaki and taught studio at the Boston Architectural College. 

Alicia Olushola Ajayi is an architectural designer, researcher, and writer based in New York City. After earning dual master’s degrees in architecture and social work from WashU, Ajayi worked as an associate designer at MASS Design Group. There she contributed to the Equal Justice Initiatives Soil Collection exhibition and the ground-breaking Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, a site dedicated to the racial terror and lynching throughout U.S. history. 

Ajayi’s practice incorporates multiple writing forms from scholarly to commentary to experimental. Her work is featured in The New York Architecture in Review, PIN-UP Magazine, Metropolis, Architectural Record, The Architectural Review, Dear Friend, and The Funambulist. Ajayi is currently documenting and researching Brooklyn, Ill., the first Black American town to be incorporated by 1829. Situated along the Mason-Dixon line, Brooklyn’s past offers a rich history of the external ideologies and internal motivations that created radical Black spatial conditions.

The Rev. Rodrick Burton has led the New Northside Baptist Church to be a regional leader in environmental justice and sustainability issues in partnership with the City of St. Louis, Green the Church, the Sierra Club of Eastern Mo, The Nature Conservancy, WashU, Missouri Coalition for the Environment, U.S. Green Building Council, Earthjustice, and others. New Northside was the first African American congregation to install solar panels on their church and community center in St. Louis. Currently, New Northside is working with Resource Environmental Solutions and Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District on stormwater mitigation.

Burton is an airport chaplain, president of the St. Louis Airport Interfaith Chaplaincy, and a member of several regional ministerial alliances such as the St. Louis Metropolitan Clergy Coalition, Connecting the Connectors, The Interfaith Partnership of St. Louis, and The Pastoral Fellowship of St. Louis. Burton earned a master’s degree in educational ministry from Covenant Theological Seminary, where he is currently a visiting instructor in practical theology.

Dana Cuff engages spatial justice and cultural studies of architecture as a teacher, scholar, practitioner, and activist. Her leadership in urban innovation is widely recognized in the U.S. and abroad. In 2006, Cuff founded cityLAB, a research and design center that initiates experimental projects to explore metropolitan possibilities. The lab’s “housing first” research demonstrates that affordable, well-designed housing and neighborhoods are attainable foundations of equitable cities. In 2017, after a decade of research that included a full-scale demonstration house built on the University of California, Los Angeles campus, Cuff co-authored California State legislation, effectively opening 8.1 million single-family lots for secondary rental units. 

Since 2013, Cuff has led an initiative at UCLA offering students from architecture, urban studies, and the humanities a radical platform for cross-disciplinary, impactful urban scholarship and action. Cuff’s books include “Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City,” Architects’ People,” “Architecture: The Story of Practice,” “The Provisional City,” and “Fast Forward Urbanism.”

Anya Domlesky is the Lifchez Professor of Practice in Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley, and the former director of research at SWA Group, where she founded XL Lab, the firm’s research and innovation platform. A registered landscape architect with a background in architecture and planning, her work focuses on impact at larger scales, including urban design. Through practice-based research, Domlesky has advanced a future-focused approach within professional design services — focusing on three major drivers of change in the built environment: climate change, technology, and urbanization. Her research has filled knowledge gaps, interpreted scientific research for spatial and material actionability, analyzed the environmental, social, and economic performance of designed sites, and created tools for designers. Domlesky holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Master of Architectural History and Theory from McGill University.  

Gibron Jones is the founder and executive director of HOSCO SHIFT, Inc. (Holistic Organic Sustainable Cooperatives), a nonprofit farming and food business incubator he launched with his father in 2010. He also leads Confluence Farm and helped develop the North Sarah Food Hub, a St. Louis food hub with a commercial kitchen, CSA program, and online grocery that supports farmers and emerging food businesses. Jones is a systems designer, technologist, and historian whose work explores the intersection of food systems, health, and community infrastructure. He has built partnerships with organizations including St. Louis Public Schools, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Missouri Foundation for Health, St. Louis County, and BJC Healthcare, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and Tuskegee University. Through HOSCO SHIFT’s programs, his team has delivered more than two million meals and two million pounds of produce while advancing food-as-medicine initiatives, AI-driven tools for farmers and entrepreneurs, and education on nutrition and chronic disease prevention.

Zachary Lamb is an assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on the role of urban planning and design in shaping uneven vulnerability and resilience in the face of climate change. His research includes investigations of changing flood infrastructures in the river delta cities of New Orleans and Dhaka, Bangladesh and ongoing work on how property and land governance shapes climate change vulnerability and adaptation in a range of settings, including manufactured home parks. His first book, “The Equitably Resilient City: Solidarities and Struggles in the Face of Climate Crises,” co-authored with Lawrence J. Vale of MIT, was published by MIT Press in 2024 and won the Urban Affairs Association’s award for the Best Book of 2025. Lamb earned his Master of Architecture at MIT and his PhD from MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He was a Princeton Mellon Fellow in Urbanism and the Environment.

Laura Marett, RLA, LEED AP, is a principal at SCAPE. Her practice includes landscape design and systems planning with an emphasis on resiliency. Marett’s work encompasses a range of scales and project types, from the design of public parks, streetscapes and waterfronts to large-scale landscape planning and campus framework planning. She has particular interest in the design of vibrant urban public spaces through an engaged public process and resilience planning with communities.

Marett maintains a close connection to academia and research. In recent years, she has served as an adjunct faculty member at the Rhode Island School of Design, Northeastern University, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). She holds a Master’s in Landscape Architecture from GSD and a Bachelor’s in literature from Harvard College. Marett is a member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the National Climate and Biodiversity Action Committee, and the Boston Society of Landscape Architects, her local chapter.

Heather Navarro is the director of the Midwest Climate Collaborative. She served as an alderperson in the City of St. Louis from 2017-2022, where she sponsored the first building energy performance standard in the Midwest, solar-ready requirements, and an EV-ready building code. Navarro previously served from 2013-2020 as the executive director of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, a state-wide environmental advocacy organization. In that role, she actively engaged with the Mississippi River Collaborative, the Missouri Clean Energy Coalition, and many other collaborative efforts.

Navarro earned both a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies and a juris doctor at WashU. Her legal practice was primarily with a public interest law firm representing clients in racial and disability discrimination matters. Navarro was a fellow with the Public Leaders for Inclusion Council in 2021 and has served on the Missouri Municipal League Board as well as a variety of other local, state, and national boards.