Season 2: Episode 5 – Chandra Christmas-Rouse

What do you want your community to look like? What would you like our future to be? We are all part of the problem and the solution. The future isn’t written and the climate crisis will unfold based on our collective and individual actions. It can be a terrible global catastrophe or a more managed set of problems that we can adapt to. What if we chose to restore our communities and the natural world instead of falling into despair and inaction? Urban planner and afrofuturist Chandra Christmas Rouse shares in this episode how her faith in design and humanity can create a world we want and deserve.

Chandra Christmas-Rouse joined Metropolitan Planning Council in March 2022 as Equitable and Sustainable Communities Manager. A background in community development and environmental justice informs her design approach of working with community stakeholders in a participatory process to support capacity building, achieve place-based solutions, and reimagine systems. Chandra supports MPC’s housing and water policy and equitable transit-oriented development (eTOD) programs by advancing research, policy advocacy, and outreach efforts. 

Prior to joining MPC, Chandra developed program, policy, and capital initiatives with local partners that focus on environmental resilience, equitable transit-oriented development (eTOD), and healing-centered engagement at Enterprise Community Partners. Her past experiences include integrating policy and strategy consulting with technical knowledge to advance economic mobility and sustainability for a number of organizations and firms including UN-Habitat and Jacobs Engineering Group. 

Additionally, as an interdisciplinary creative and educator, Chandra creates participatory projects that engage local Black geographies, histories, and spatial imaginaries. She has been named a 2020 Threewalls RaDLab+Outside the Walls Artist Fellow. She serves as the co-chair of Elevated Chicago and on the board of Equiticity. Chandra holds a BA in Environmental Sciences & Policy with distinction from Duke University and a Master of Urban Planning from Harvard Graduate School of Design.

maplibsproject.com

metroplanning.org

Theme music by Casual Motive

At the end of each episode, we ask our guests what their ideal climate design project would be. They have four weeks with a class full of design students. We translated their response into a project brief that you can use for your class.

« Back to episodes