Panel: Cities as Ancestors

Explore how our relationships with cities, parks, and the more-than-human world can shape our future. Inspired by Susanna Kwan’s Awake in the Floating City, the 2026 One City One Book selection, this conversation brings together local community leaders working on place-based environmental justice to consider what it means to be an ancestor and how the places we inhabit become part of our collective legacy. 

Drawing on five years of the Parks as Ancestors series, inspired by the book, What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?, the discussion expands the conversation beyond protected parklands to consider urban spaces as living legacies. The panel will take place during the convergence of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Día de los Muertos, and Diwali, and invites us to reflect on memory, loss, connection, and responsibility across generations and cultures. 

This interactive program invites participants to consider what we inherit from the places and people who came before us—and what we will leave behind for those who come after. Attendees are welcome to bring a photograph or a sentimental object honoring someone they have lost, if they wish to incorporate it into the program. 

Moderator Yakuta Poonawalla of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy has initiated and led the Parks as Ancestors series, inviting Bay Area communities to explore relationships between people, place, and the more-than-human world. 

Tere Almaguer is the Environmental Justice Organizer for PODER, a San Francisco based organization that focuses on locally based, community led, and environmentally just improvements in Latinx immigrant communities. Tere is working on urban farming in San Francisco. She wants to bring traditional plants back into the community, both for food and traditional medicine.

Kieran Tran is the Healthy Homes Organizer at APEN. They work on electrifying low income households to prevent displacement and energy price hikes as fossil fuels are phased out while improving home health. Prior to APEN, they worked in affordable housing and community development and environmental funding campaigns.