Overview
Charisma Acey is associate professor of city and regional planning and Arcus Chair of Social Justice and the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. She delivers the Jammal Lecture, hosted by the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo. The lecture sits within the fields of urban planning, environmental justice, and
cities and community governance.
Focus
The lecture examines how infrastructure systems — water, food, and land use — become the terrain on which rights are either secured or denied for marginalized communities. Drawing on fieldwork in Lagos, Nigeria and the San Francisco Bay Area, Acey traces how communities facing displacement, toxic exposure, and climate pressure have built their own governance structures and driven policy change.
The talk challenges top-down approaches to climate adaptation and green redevelopment by centering community-led governance as an alternative model. This connects to broader debates documented in
architectural and urban research on who planning systems serve and who they exclude.
What makes belonging durable in cities under pressure?
Charisma Acey, Lecture Abstract 2026
Program
Lecture: Infrastructures of Belonging
The lecture draws on two case studies. In Lagos, the Otodo Gbame waterfront community — a longstanding fishing settlement — was forcibly evicted and replaced by landfill redevelopment. In West Oakland, the Environmental Indicators Project documents cumulative environmental burdens on residents near the Port of Oakland.
Acey connects these cases to questions about extractive capital, climate adaptation, and the right to remain in place. The session concludes with implications for planning practice. These themes run through current debates on
urban transformation and displacement across global cities.
The event carries AIA CES registration and is approved for 1.5 Learning Units including Health Safety and Welfare credit.
Speaker Background
Acey’s research spans environmental justice and urban governance across Africa and the Americas. Her work has appeared in World Development, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Landscape and Urban Planning, and The Lancet Global Health.
She is co-lead author of the Racial Equity and Climate Justice synthesis report for California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment and is developing a book titled “Extractive Utopias: Blackness, Eco-Politics, and Democracy.” She serves as faculty director of the Berkeley Food Institute. Her trajectory reflects how
architecture and planning increasingly intersect with social and environmental policy.
Audience
The lecture is directed at urban planning students, architecture faculty, and practicing planners seeking AIA continuing education credit. Researchers working on environmental justice, housing, and
design and community governance will also find it relevant.
Event Details
| Date |
Wednesday, March 25, 2026 |
| Venue |
University at Buffalo, South Campus, Buffalo, NY |
| Organizer |
Department of Urban and Regional Planning, UB |
| Series |
The Jammal Lecture |
| Event Type |
Academic Lecture |
| AIA Credit |
1.5 LU / HSW |
| Access |
Registration required |
| Fees |
Not specified |
✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight
Acey’s lecture addresses a structural tension that planning institutions rarely resolve: the gap between community-led governance and the policy frameworks that determine land use outcomes. The Lagos and West Oakland cases are analytically useful precisely because they sit outside the dominant Euro-American planning canon. However, framing community resistance as an alternative vision risks aestheticizing survival strategies that emerge from the absence of institutional support. The lecture’s strength is its empirical grounding, not the normative conclusions it draws about planning reform.
Closing Note
The Jammal Lecture series provides a platform for scholarship at the intersection of urban planning and social justice. Acey’s work is grounded in long-term fieldwork across two geographically distinct contexts, giving the lecture a comparative dimension not common in single-city studies. Its academic setting limits immediate reach, but the AIA credit designation extends its relevance to practitioners outside the university.
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