About us

Dorraine is a city planner, policy analyst, and researcher dedicated to reimagining and decolonizing Caribbean infrastructures. Through community engagement, historical analysis, mapping, and systems thinking, she critically analyses urban infrastructure, and supports communities in their efforts to recreate more resilient and just infrastructures.

Jhordan engages with urban issues across multiple scales by borrowing a set of tools from planners, policy analysts, urban designers, and architects. He is interested in the socio-economic dynamics of communities and the role cooperative economic systems can play in building resilient communities.

Rica G. is a multi-hyphenate cultural practitioner and educator on a mission to serve as a catalyst for liberation throughout the Diaspora using fellowship, technology, and the arts. As an “analog girl in a digital world,” she explores the use of technology as a tool for facilitating more synergy between people and the environment.

Charles ‘Val’ Carnegie is an anthropologist, Professor Emeritus at Bates College, and author of the book, Postnationalism Prefigured, Caribbean Borderlands. Val has become increasingly concerned in recent years about the damaging effects of Kingston’s changing physical and social fabric: the ways in which these changes impede the building of a more unified, happier, healthier, more beautiful and climate-resilient urban community. He has been involved with the advocacy group, Citizens Rights to the City, and has published various articles about Kingston’s misaligned priorities including: “Walk-Foot People Matter,” and “The Loss of the Verandah: Kingston’s Constricted Post-Colonial Geographies.”

Kimberly Burrowes is a senior manager of training and technical assistance in the Research to Action Lab at the Urban Institute. Burrowes’s research has focused on advancing racial equity in parks and public spaces, practices and policies for affordable housing solutions, and participatory engagement. Burrowes thinks about how to provide an equity framing to local policy solutions for the built environment, using placemaking and community engagement tools. Before joining Urban, Burrowes worked with the urban development and disaster risk management unit at the World Bank, focusing on projects in the Caribbean and East Asia. Before that, she worked on affordable housing policy at the Massachusetts Housing Partnership in Boston and the Island Housing Trust on Martha’s Vineyard. Burrowes has a BA in geography and international development and an MA in community development and urban planning from Clark University

Norman Garrick is a Professor Emeritus in Civil Engineering and co-Director of the Sustainable Cities Research Group at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on street networks and their impact on traffic safety, the negative impacts of parking on cities, and factors contributing to traffic fatalities in the USA and other countries. He also studies the societal impacts of autonomous vehicles, street design for pedestrian and bicyclist safety, and transportation costs and their implications for equity. His research features in forums such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic CityLab (now Bloomberg), and The Guardian (UK). He has twice been invited to serve as a visiting professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich and taught classes at MIT, Oxford University (UK), and The University of the West Indies (Jamaica). Dr. Garrick has consulted on various urban projects, that includes the Hurricane Katrina reconstruction, re-development in Freetown, Sierra Leone, urban infill projects, and transportation assessments. He was a lead contributor to the Institute of Congress for the New Urbanisms' Street Design Manual (CNU). He is a Fellow of the Congress for New Urbanism, where he also served on its national board for eight years.

Rachel Goffe is a geographer and architect. Her work is concerned with place-making and livelihood and how these are negotiated with, through, and against postcolonial state formation. She has done research on the conflict between emerging public policy to curtail squatting and radical traditions linked to durable yet insecure relationships to land in Jamaica, where she is from originally. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Geography (Scarborough) and the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto.