Mary Rowe

Connector, Idea generator, Writer/Editor

Mary W. Rowe was appointed in October 2010 as Urban Fellow at the Municipal Arts Society of New York, where she is charged with advancing the Society's thought leadership work around urban livability and resilience. Most recently she coordinated the New Orleans Institute for Resilience and Innovation, a loose alliance of initiatives that emerged in response to the systemic collapses of 2005. Her initial engagement was as part of a fellowship awarded to her by the blue moon fund of Charlottesville, Virginia, to focus on self-organization in cities as the underpinning of urban and regional social, economic and environmental resilience. With the support of the fund, Mary developed a community investment program to support various self-organizing initiatives that crossed race, class, neighborhoods and sectors. New Orleans and its region are addressing challenges and opportunities common to cities around the continent and beyond, and the Institute is now focused on harvesting the lessons and creating opportunities for urban practitioners to build communities of practice in resilience across the country. Her work in New Orleans included supporting a broad array of local, connected initiatives that include building the local economy, creating more open governance and data collection and sharing, fostering entrepreneurship, creating a culture of planning that supports transparent decision making and land-use, the emerging role of social media, and creating peer-to-peer learning in the emerging civil society-led innovation in the Region. The Institute’s most recent engagements including convening across sectors to develop local, strategic responses to the BP Oil Drilling disaster, and co-hosting a regional TEDxNOLA event held in conjunction with the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, with the theme “Creativity in Crisis”. Mary was recently awarded a Bellagio residency from the Rockefeller Foundation, to develop her writing on New Orleans as a prophetic city. She is a contributor to several volumes on urban life, most recently having written the Epilogue to What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs ((New Village Press). Prior to joining the blue moon fun, Mary coordinated a variety of multi-stakeholder projects in Canada and the US, including Ideas that Matter, a convening and publishing program based on the work of Jane Jacobs.

Cities