Earlier this year, Villa Albertine, a cultural institution that works through the French Embassy in the United States, selected 30 American post-graduate students from 3,400 applications to take part in the inaugural class of the Lafayette Fellowship, which funds a one-year master’s program in France in STEM, the humanities, social sciences and the arts.
One of those students is a Smith College alum who has a passion for urban planning.
“We’ve been brought into this program being told that we are the next generation of young leaders, which is a big statement, but I think it is also motivating in a very important way, so I want to keep talking with [the other fellows], keep collaborating, and see what we’re all excited and motivated about,” said AC Manning, the Smith graduate selected for the fellowship.
Manning, 23, graduated from Smith last year, where she majored in comparative world literature with a focus on the literature of France and other Francophone countries. She also minored in engineering.
“I think my time at Smith gave me the opportunities to bring together very many fields,” she said. “I studied comparative literature and engineering — that’s about as inter- and multidisciplinary as it gets, and I really loved studying both of those disciplines. I don’t feel like I was a literature student with a dash of engineering [or] engineering with a dash of literature.”
Manning went into Smith intending to study physics, but she realized during her sophomore year that she wanted to pursue urban planning. Smith has majors in urban studies and landscape design, but not urban planning specifically, so Manning had to work with her professors to put together a course of study that met her needs.
“On paper, you’ll say, ‘Comparative literature, engineering, urban planning — where does that come from?’ But I feel like there’s actually a really well-constructed argument there,” she said. “I think Smith prepared me to make that argument, but also gave me the resources to experiment on my own and, I think, that independence within the system to test things out and go after what I wanted.”
While at Smith, she interned at the Campus Planning office, contributing directly to the college’s Campus Use Plan. She brought that experience full circle over the past year in Boston, working with Sasaki — the architecture, planning and design firm hired by Smith to help shape that vision.
The field of urban planning, she said, “is about facilitation. It’s about how you allow different groups of people — entities, stakeholders, businesses — to work together to create change in the built environment. Whether it’s building physical infrastructure or determining investments in neighborhoods or communities, urban planning is involved in all of it.”
Urban planning, she explained, is about facilitation. “It’s about how you allow different groups of people — entities, stakeholders and businesses — to work together to create change in the built environment,” she said. “Whether it’s building physical infrastructure or determining investments in neighborhoods or communities, urban planning is involved in all of it.”
Manning grew up in Brooklyn, where she spent a lot of time in public libraries. Growing up in New York City initially inspired her interest in urban studies, but being in Northampton was a whole other experience, she said.
“Smith as a campus, in a way, is its own urban planning system,” she said.
In her campus planning internship, she spent two years working on a project to bring accessible seating to campus, and it required her to think of the school with the mindset of, “There are different stakeholders, there are different needs, there are different desires. How do you facilitate conversation between all the necessary people to make change to include all voices?”
That work, she noted, is a good example of why she prefers to use the term “planner” rather than “urban planner” to describe her career path.
“The profession isn’t just about city spaces. People are always interacting with built infrastructure. That’s the human world we live in,” she said. “I think it’s important that we understand systems whether or not they’re incredibly dense in a … ‘city center.’”
Manning arrived in Paris on July 4, and she kicked off her program with three weeks of professional development classes with the other Lafayette Fellows. That period was “a lot about learning and absorbing and getting to know the French academic and professional and cultural environment, all of it, across disciplines at once,” she said.
Now, she has some time off before she starts her master’s program in urban development at the Université Grenoble Alpes in September.
Manning was drawn back to France by its vibrant public life and café culture, a fascination sparked during her junior year studying abroad in Paris. She was captivated by the sight of “people out in the streets spending time together, but in this very visible face-to-face way,” she recalled.
When she lived in Paris, “I was in a tiny apartment like everyone else, but it’s okay that the apartment was tiny because we had so many things and places to go to spend time together outside of the home,” she said. “So, I’m really interested in and I really enjoy that aspect of coming together with people, whether that’s at cafés and bars or cultural institutions that really put an effort into being accessible for young people.”
At this point, Manning doesn’t know yet whether she’ll come back to the U.S. or stay in France to continue her work after the fellowship ends. In the meantime, she’s excited to get to know Grenoble and its approach to infrastructure and urbanism.
“Urban planning is a lot about action, and I think there is so much value in going to school, but there’s so much practical information that’s needed,” she said. Grenoble is “many steps ahead” in certain ways, she added, and she wants to learn “whether it’s for climate resilience or housing infrastructure or other urban interventions, what can happen next.”
For more information about the Lafayette Fellowship, visit lafayette.villa-albertine.org. Applications for the next cycle open on Friday, Sept. 4.
