Assistant Professor of Race, Social Justice, and the Built Environment
College of Social Sciences and Humanities, College of Arts, Media and Design
Lily Song is an Assistant Professor of Race and Social Justice in the Built Environment at Northeastern University. She holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of California — Los Angeles, and BA in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.
Song’s research interests lie at the nexus of race, class, and gender politics of space; infrastructure-based mobilizations and experiments; and reparative planning and design in American cities and other decolonizing contexts.
Prior to coming to Northeastern, Song was a Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she was Founding Coordinator of Harvard CoDesign.
From 2013-2015, Song was a Provost Fellow at University College London, where her postdoc research informed urban infrastructure planning and governance with “informality” in the decolonizing, multiethnic, climate vulnerable Indonesian context.
- Two-time winner of Urban Planning & Design Faculty Award, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Student Forum, 2017-2018 & 2018-2019
- Nomination for AESOP Best Published Paper Prize (2017), Planning Theory and Practice
- University College London Provost Fellow, 2013-2015
- Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations Beyster Graduate Fellow, 2011-2012
- MIT Martin Family Society Fellow for Urban Sustainability, 2010-2011
- Lily Song. 2015. “Race, transformative planning, and the just city.” Planning Theory, 14(2), 152-173.
- Lily Song. 2016. “Enabling transformative agency: community-based green economic and workforce development in LA and Cleveland.” Planning Theory & Practice, 17(2), 227-243.
- Lily Song. 2016. “Planning with urban informality: A case for inclusion, co-production, and re-iteration.” International Development Planning Review, 38(4), 359-381.
- John Taylor & Lily Song. 2016. “Return to the Streets.” Cityscape, 18(1), 71-88.
- Lily Song, Mariel Kirschen, and John Taylor. “Women on wheels: Gender and cycling in Solo, Indonesia,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography.
- “Race and Place.” Future of the American City Podcast, June 13, 2019.
- “Keeping On: Planner Lily Song on continuing the push for anti-racist design,” The Architect’s Newspaper, 2 August 2021.
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Education
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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