DETROIT-When Lauren Hood wanted to know how to improve the quality of life for Black Detroiters, she looked to people who were already thriving.
Hood, assistant professor of practice at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, is the founder of the Institute for AfroUrbanism-a think tank that studies how thriving is experienced, sustained and spatialized.
Hood, a Detroit native, comes to this work from a career in planning. She's the former chairwoman of the Detroit Planning Commission, co-chair of the city's Reparations Task Force and trustee for the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.
"Instead of locking myself away with other planning practitioners, I decided to talk to Black people who had mastered the art of good living and see if we could reverse engineer those sets of conditions for other people," she said. "So the first piece of research that I did, I called the Black Thriving Index, and I identified people who were exhibiting some degree of agency, abundance and audacity."
Tell us more about what you mean by agency, abundance and audacity.
Agency, abundance and audacity emerged as recurring qualities in the people and places I was most drawn to through the research.
For me, agency is about people recognizing their capacity to shape the world around them. I was interested in individuals who saw a need, possibility or challenge and responded by creating something of their own, whether that was an initiative, a space, a practice or a new way of thinking.
Abundance is less about wealth or status and more about orientation. I was drawn to people who seemed deeply connected to community, who cultivated meaningful relationships and who moved through the world with generosity, openness and a sense of possibility.
And audacity was about imagination. After years of community engagement work, I became interested in conversations beyond immediate survival needs and into expansive visions for the future. I wanted to speak with people who were centering culture, experimenting boldly and pursuing ideas that stretched conventional expectations of what a city, a community or a life could become.
Since 2021, I've conducted about 75 interviews across Detroit, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Berlin and London, along with group dialogues in Paris and Ghana. One of the principles that emerged through the process is that the conversation itself is as important as the final research output. The interviews are designed to help people reconnect with moments of meaning, creativity, transcendence and possibility in their own lives, not simply recount hardship.
That idea also shaped the fellowship program I led last year. We brought together an intergenerational group of Detroiters, ages 19 to 70, to explore embodied thriving together. Every other month, we traveled to cities connected to the research and gathered with interview participants in person, listening to their stories collectively and reflecting on what thriving can look and feel like across different contexts.
What is thriving to you? How would you describe it?
To me, thriving is rooted in agency, abundance and audacity. It is not merely the pursuit of conventional success as it is often defined in American culture-through productivity, accumulation or constant striving. Rather, thriving is about having the sovereignty to shape one's life in alignment with deeper values, the capacity to experience fullness beyond scarcity, and the courage to imagine and inhabit ways of being that transcend inherited limitations.
I think many of us have been conditioned to equate busyness with worth, to normalize urgency, overextension and perpetual motion. But thriving invites a different orientation. I remember during my first visit to Paris, I tried to order a coffee to go, and the café owner responded, "Where are you going? You're on holiday. Sit and enjoy your coffee." That simple interaction illuminated how deeply ingrained our culture of haste is in the United States. It made me realize how often we move through life disconnected from presence, pleasure and intentionality.
And how does that translate in Detroit though? I mean, it feels like a lot of people are probably thriving, but then there is another group of people who are maybe walking around in circles trying to figure out how they get to that?
I think we often define thriving through external markers like professional success, income or status. But I've become increasingly interested in a deeper question: Do people feel fully able to be themselves in the spaces they occupy? Do they feel connected, grounded and able to speak honestly about what they value and envision?
In many professional and civic spaces, there can be a difference between what is expressed publicly and what is shared privately afterward. To me, that signals an opportunity for us to create environments where people feel more trust, openness and alignment. Thriving is not just about achievement. It's also about authenticity, belonging and meaningful connection.
Some of the people I've encountered who seem most grounded and fulfilled are people with strong community ties, deep relationships and a sense of purpose beyond conventional measures of success.
When did you join the faculty at U-M and what are you teaching?
I joined U-M in 2023. From the beginning, both the dean and my department chair have been genuinely supportive and curious about the direction of my work. They would often ask what was emerging through my research or introduce me to colleagues by highlighting my work around thriving in cities. That kind of institutional encouragement has mattered. It has given me both advocates and the freedom to experiment, which is important because my teaching is not rooted in conventional planning frameworks.
My courses explore AfroUrbanism, spatial justice, and the cultural and metaphysical dimensions of place. I encourage students to think critically about the assumptions embedded in planning practice and to examine the ways our field can reproduce extractive, top down approaches to community development. More than anything, I want students to develop a critical consciousness about the systems they are participating in, the methods they use and the kinds of futures their work is helping to create.
So, how can planning address some of the imbalance in our culture?
Planning can begin to address cultural imbalance by first becoming conscious of the assumptions and constraints shaping decision making. Too often, planning operates within timelines tied to election cycles, where urgency, limited funding and political expediency dictate outcomes. But the impacts of these decisions can shape people's lives for generations.
If the systems guiding planning consistently produce inequitable or disconnected outcomes, then the answer is not simply better projects within the same framework. We have to reconsider the framework itself. That means shifting from short term, scarcity-driven thinking toward approaches that prioritize long-term human thriving, cultural coherence and collective well being.
