Taken in Beijing at artist studio in 798 while leading a tour on art and culture for the non-profit Hardy co-founded with her husband, Melvin “Mel” Hardy, Millennium Arts Salon.
Juanita Hardy
Juanita Hardy’s role as a champion of art and culture traces back three decades to her days as an IBM executive. Four years ago, she was recognized as an art advocate and collector by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Her business acumen and penchant for real estate development led her to the Urban Land Institute a decade ago. As vice chair of its Placemaking Council, she advocates for best practices that aid in creating inclusive, sustainable communities. She began her tenure as ULI Senior Visiting Fellow for Creative Placemaking in 2016. Through her work, Hardy helps define ULI’s approach to blending arts and culture into urban planning and community projects.
Hardy’s contributions include serving as a co-author of ULI’s influential 2020 publication Creative Placemaking: Sparking Development with Arts and Culture, which examined the ways that integrating culture and design can illumine engaging, dynamic development, and which explored the financial, social, and environmental advantages of such practices. She also wrote the 2022 report Creative Placemaking: Recommendations from and Impact of Six Advisory Services Panels, which applies case studies to underscore practical strategies and key lessons learned for driving real estate developers, communities, and stakeholders toward future success.
Beyond ULI, Hardy is the founder and managing principal of Silver Spring, Maryland–based Tiger Management Consulting Group, where she excels as a consultant and executive coach. That role won her recognition as a “Minority Business Leader” from the Washington Business Journal. She also served as executive director of the nonprofit CulturalDC. A recent inductee into the George Washington Chapter of Lambda Alpha Economics, Hardy blends corporate leadership, nonprofit arts management, and placemaking expertise to make her insights especially compelling.
In this Q&A, Hardy shares poignant aspects of her journey, valuable takeaways from ULI reports, practical advice for developers embracing creative placemaking, and her vision for more equitable and thriving communities.
Tiger Management Consulting Group CEO Juanita Hardy with the late/great artist Richard Mayhew, who lived to be 100.
(Juanita Hardy)
Urban Land: What are current market trends you are seeing, and how do they affect your work? Can you share insights on how these trends align with ULI’s mission?
Juanita Hardy: I’ve been trying to keep up with what is happening in the real estate industry post-Covid. With the huge impact Covid had on real estate, the changing dynamics of office space and of professionals w
orking at home, and what impact that has had on the economy, especially in urban areas that rely heavily on business traffic. To see breakfast and lunch places, happy hours, and retail, and what that impact has been. Often, I look at how creative placemaking can play a role in helping the real estate industry recover.
For example: You have vacant office space. How can you make that into something usable, at least short term? Think about pop-up exhibitions or pop-up culinary places. Think about changing the office into maker spaces where artists and small businesses can establish successful businesses and grow. So, thinking creatively about how artists can be involved, and so can the execution of ways that revitalize communities and business districts.
UL: Can you talk about some of your work with creative placemaking, and how it is aligned with ULI’s mission priorities?
Hardy: Creative placemaking in real estate development is about bringing artists into the equation. It’s about bringing art and culture in tandem with great design. The distinction is to lead with art and culture. Imagine artists and architects, or artists and designers, working together in the development of a project. There are great examples of artist and developer collaborations, such as Confluence Park in San Antonio, Texas, or Crosstown Concourse in Memphis, Tennessee.
I did a survey, in 2016, of ULI members. We reached out to about 6,000. I don’t remember the exact number of responses, but it was statistically significant. I was seeking to understand the level of knowledge of creative placemaking and the demand for it or interest in it. I learned there is a great deal of value placed on creative placemaking, but the understanding of how to do it could be far improved. That was our aim, to raise awareness and educate, working with ULI and, specifically, the Creative Placemaking project within the Building Healthy Places Initiative. Creative placemaking is very much aligned with the goals of BHPI under the leadership of Rachel MacCleery.
ULI launched a program called FutureScape 2035 that views the future of cities through four lenses: belonging, convening, impact, and knowledge. Creative placemaking appears in all four, but the most pronounced is impact. Increasingly, creative placemaking is having an impact in real estate development, as evidenced by growing audiences at ULI Fall and Spring meeting panel sessions and events. The fact that Michael Spies, a prominent real estate developer and ULI member, invested in a two-year project, Art in Place, to explore forging better artist and developer collaborations, is illuminating. Spies once asserted that the reason developers engage artists from the start is to enhance value creation.
The greatest impact of creative placemaking will come through the application of best practices and its integration . . . into the fabric of ULI and real estate development. This includes the real estate development process, ULI Learning modules, business cases, and more. An outcome of the Art in Place project is a guide on best practices in artist and developer collaboration that I am honored to have co-authored with Matt Norris. The guide, to be released in second quarter 2026, is an excellent tool to enable this integration and better prepare developers and other real estate professionals to implement creative placemaking and optimize the social and economic gains that are sure to follow.
UL: How do you see the Black community’s level of representation evolving in the commercial real estate industry?
Hardy: I’m very encouraged about the things ULI has done—is doing—to improve that. The Institute is very serious about inclusion and increasing Black representation, and recognizing that it was deficient. It is beginning to change. I go to Spring and Fall meetings—I have since 2016—and I see more and more Black faces. I’m encouraged by that. I see the results of the investment ULI has made.
UL: What does Black History Month mean to you, and why do you think it should be celebrated?
Hardy: We must not forget the history of all Americans. The ones often overlooked are the minority populations. We must not forget, especially when we see a government doing everything it can to erase history, to not tell the truth, to not tell the important stories of how we have come to be the great country that we are. There hasn’t been one set of people who have done it all on their own. I think it’s extremely important that we tell these stories. There are so many of us, especially the younger population, who don’t have a context. Many don’t remember or know the civil rights era of the 1960s. I grew up in the Jim Crow South. I know what it feels like to go to a filthy bathroom marked, “For Coloreds Only.” Black History Month is important to healing this country, because until we tell the truth about who we are, we will not get to that healing place we all would like to see.
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