The Innovative Urbanist

Kimberly Driggins, MPP’95, was planning to be a lawyer. That is, until she had a White House internship that opened up the possibilities of a career in public policy.

She explains, “During my internship doing law legislative histories, I saw so many disgruntled and unhappy lawyers in DC. And, on the flip side, I saw high performers working on domestic policy issues. Those people had a degree in public policy or public administration. I had never realized that was an option for me.”

Around the same time, Driggins was the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in Public Policy and International Affairs. The award funded her graduate degree when she chose the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy as the place that was going to best accelerate her career.

Today, Driggins is an urban planner. She is also a creative place-maker. That means she reimagines and revitalizes communities using art and culture as a tool or catalyst for neighborhood change.  

Driggins has had an impressive career since she graduated from Harris in 1995. She recently moved to Detroit, but spent 20 years in Washington, DC. In her last job there, she was Director of Citywide Planning and managed housing, economic development strategy, capital improvement facilities planning, and transportation. She also spent a lot of time intimately involved in creative place-making projects, many of which have earned national acclaim.

One of those award-winning projects was the launch of a three-month arts festival in the underserved area of Anacostia with the money from an ArtPlace America grant. Though, Driggins explains, the neighborhood had been “synonymous with a lot of negative things, there is a wonderfully creative community in Anacostia.” To launch the arts festival, Driggins built on the abundance already present in Anacostia, helped develop its strengths, and involved the community in the process from beginning to end.

She partnered with the Arch Development Corporation, a community-based organization in Anacostia that specializes in neighborhood revitalization using arts and culture and the creative economy. Hand-in-hand, Driggins and the Arch Development Corporation activated vacant buildings and showcased the work of local artists. They also brought in a major DC restaurant chain, Busboys and Poets, to do a pop-up event, introducing people from different parts of the city to one another.

Driggins describes the festival as a “community-building event that changed the way people felt about living in Anacostia” and exposed others to the vibrancy of that community. In fact, Busboys and Poets are now slated to open a restaurant in the area in 2018.

The career path to urban planning and place-making was not direct, but Driggins believes that having a public policy degree has been an asset to her at every step. She started in housing and community development, but soon moved to economic development and real estate consulting because “those are the areas that really control wealth in communities.” She worked for Ernst and Young's real estate advisory services group, which had a Washington, DC office with a government focus. Her clients were the federal government, HUD, the Department of Defense, and state and local governments, which is how she ended up working for DC city government.

She says, “My Harris policy degree and training, particularly the quantitative focus there, gave me a tremendous amount of flexibility to pursue different areas. That skillset made me very attractive to employers and I was ultimately hired to do urban planning without an urban planning degree because of my rigorous, interdisciplinary preparation at Harris and the fact that I understood data. Some people may not realize this, but policy drives so much of planning work, especially the desired outcomes of neighborhood master plans.”

A couple of years ago, Driggins applied for and received a prestigious Loeb Fellowship from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, a one-year fellowship for high-performing professionals to reflect on their work thus far, explore new ways of thinking, and accelerate the revitalization of communities. During her fellowship, she participated in a conference called Black in Design organized by students at the GSD, where she met her current boss, Maurice Cox, who was rebuilding the Planning and Development Department in the City of Detroit.

Inspired by Cox’s vision to revitalize Detroit, Driggins moved to the city and joined the Planning and Development Department as the Director of Strategic Planning/Arts and Culture. In this role, she leads all the strategic planning activities for the entire city.  This includes plans for the reuse of vacant land, historic preservation, arts and culture, and updating the city’s Master Plan. In addition, she is tasked with helping to define what inclusive planning, design, and development means for the City of Detroit.

As Driggins explains, though there's been planning at the community level and from philanthropy for Detroit, “there’s been no planning done by the city in almost two decades.”

“I am part of the first wave who are literally rebuilding the planning department,” she says. “It’s been an amazing experience. Detroit is the best city in the US right now to do the work of urban planning and development. That’s a big statement, but it's really true in terms of the opportunity and just the amount of work that's here. We have the massive responsibility of shaping the city for the next 50 years after its financial troubles and collapse. There's very few jobs where you have that type of impact.”

In her role today, Driggins actively seeks out public policy graduates to join her team.

She says, “Public Policy is a great interdisciplinary degree. It gives you a great skill set for analyzing issues and problems and an excellent framework for how to think about solutions. You need to have public policy people in planning departments.”