Reclaim Your Community with Majora Carter

To live in a better neighbourhood, you don’t need to move. You need to get active.

Urban revitalisation expert and speaker at major TED Talks, Majora Carter was born and raised in the South Bronx, New York, where she still lives and activises today. She arrives at the festival with her latest book, Reclaiming Your Community, in which she gathers her personal experience in building more just and inclusive places.

The book, released this year, is an invitation to a sense of belonging and a recipe for improving conditions in poorer communities. Carter’s strategy revolves around the concept of talent: just like companies and universities, neighbourhoods must focus on keeping their talented people in the local area. Talent-stickiness, in other words.

Majora Carter effectively subverts one of the conventions of North American culture, where leaving one’s local area for a more affluent one is typically a symbol of success. Her philosophy is the exact opposite, as recounted in one of her most famous phrases, quoted on the walls of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington: ‘No one should have to leave their neighbourhood to live in a better one’.