Wednesday March 25, 2026
Charisma Acey, associate professor, University of California, Berkeley
The Jammal Lecture, sponsored by the Department of Urban and Regional Planning
6:00 pm to 7:30 pm • Hayes Hall - Room 403
Staff from Justice and Empowerment Initiatives and activists from the Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlements Federation demonstrate counter-mapping methods used for community advocacy. Lagos, Nigeria. Photo: Charisma Acey.
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, where she also serves as faculty director of the Berkeley Food Institute. Her research examines how marginalized communities secure access to basic needs, political voice, and the right to remain in place amid urban transformation and the climate crisis.
Infrastructures of Belonging: Environmental Justice and the Right to Stay Put
What makes belonging durable in cities under pressure? This lecture draws on research and community-engaged work in Lagos, Nigeria and the San Francisco Bay Area to examine how infrastructure systems (water, food, land use) become sites where rights are realized or denied. Exploring how communities facing displacement pressure, toxic exposure and cumulative environmental burdens from extractive capital, "green" redevelopment and top-down climate adaptation, have built their own governance systems and led policy transformation, the talk offers an alternative vision for planning grounded in collective care, accountability, and the right to stay put. The lecture concludes with implications for planning practice and what community-led governance offers for rethinking urban futures under the climate crisis.
Left: Satellite imagery showing the Otodo Gbame waterfront community in Lagos, Nigeria before (2017) and after (2020) its demolition. A longstanding fishing settlement, Otodo Gbame was illegally evicted and replaced by landfill redevelopment. Photo: Charisma Acey / Planet Labs. Right: West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project toxic tour at the Port of Oakland, led by Ms. Margaret Gordon. The tour educates students, researchers, and state agency staff about cumulative environmental burdens facing West Oakland residents. Photo: Charisma Acey.
Acey's scholarly trajectory was shaped by nearly a decade in international development, experiences that deepened her questions about how power and inequality shape "systems of material provision" (water, food, land, infrastructure) and why some communities are systematically denied resources, rights, and recognition while others are not.
Image of Charisma Acey.
Her work spans environmental justice and urban governance across Africa and the Americas, with a sustained focus on Lagos, Nigeria, and the San Francisco Bay Area. She examines how communities facing displacement and cumulative environmental burdens develop their own infrastructures, governance practices, and pathways to policy change. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including World Development, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Landscape and Urban Planning, and The Lancet Global Health. Current projects include a Mastercard Foundation-funded collaboration with the University of Lagos and service as co-lead author of the "Racial Equity and Climate Justice" synthesis report for California's Fifth Climate Change Assessment. She is developing a book project, "Extractive Utopias: Blackness, Eco-Politics, and Democracy," on Black ecological resistance and democratic alternatives to extractive development.
The School of Architecture and Planning is an AIA CES Approved Provider. This course is AIA CES Registered and approved for 1.5 Learning Unit (LU) | Health Safety and Welfare Unit (HSW)