Fringe Cities: Legacies of Renewal in the Small American City

Justin is a co-founder and Principal at MASS focused on expanding architectural work in the U.S. He leads the Hudson Valley Office in Poughkeepsie, NY and is dedicated to the growth of MASS’s Social Justice and Adaptive Re-use portfolios. He was the Project Architect for the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice and founder of the Fringe Cities Design Lab, which researches vulnerable American cities and follows community-engaged design practices to unlock upstream capital to transform liabilities into assets.

Prior to MASS, Justin has led award winning projects at Gensler in Washington DC, Perez APC in New Orleans, and Toshiko Mori Architect in New York. He has guest lectured in seminars at Harvard Graduate School of Design, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, University of Toronto, and Dartmouth College. He holds a Master in Architecture from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.

Morgan O’Hara is a cultural historian of cities and the built environment. She has worked at MASS Design Group since 2018, where she conducts research to support built projects and exhibitions, and crafts written work alongside strategy for business development. Her backgrounds in cultural research, public history, and collaborative design have informed her approach to socio-spatial research to develop human-centered histories of urban space and infrastructural systems. For the Fringe Cities project, Morgan conducted longitudinal analyses of small cities in the United States that participated in mid-century urban renewal, and while at the Hudson Valley Office, she was embedded in the public engagement work necessary to craft meaningful community design solutions in Poughkeepsie. Her passion lies in elevating creative and community-driven expressions of lesser-known histories in public space. Morgan studied anthropology at Reed College and graduated from Columbia with a Master's in Historic Preservation. She has served as co-faculty for Studio II in Historic Preservation at Columbia GSAPP since 2021.