Speaker 1: Pushing it. I'm Khalil Jabron Muhammad.
Speaker 2: I'm Ben Austin. We are two best friends, one black,
Speaker 2: one white.
Speaker 3: I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is
Speaker 3: some of my best friends.
Speaker 2: Are some of my best friends? Are some of my
Speaker 2: best friends? Are you?
Speaker 4: Khalil?
Speaker 2: On this show, we wrestle with the challenges and the
Speaker 2: absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country.
Speaker 3: And today we're talking with Tony Griffin. She's an architect
Speaker 3: and urban planner who teaches at the Harvard School of Design.
Speaker 3: She's the founder of the design firm urban ac and
Speaker 3: leads a research team called Just City Lab, both of
Speaker 3: which center spatial and social justice at the heart of
Speaker 3: urban planning and design for community revitalization.
Speaker 2: Man Tony is family, and she has been reimagining cities
Speaker 2: more creatively and even more artistically lately. In fact, she
Speaker 2: has a show right now at the Venice Architecture BIONALI
Speaker 2: called Land Narratives Fantastic Futures. And we're going to talk
Speaker 2: with her about her show and really about how to
Speaker 2: re envision cities in America.
Speaker 1: Yes, we're talking about the future, folks, that still a.
Speaker 2: Future is now the future is now so Tony. Thank
Speaker 2: you so much for being on Some of my best
Speaker 2: friends are I just want to start by saying, you
Speaker 2: and Khalil obviously know each other from Harvard, where you're
Speaker 2: both on faculty. I met you several years ago. I
Speaker 2: was writing a story for the New York Times magazine
Speaker 2: about Detroit and you know, the kind of remaking the
Speaker 2: building up of Detroit again. And I heard about you
Speaker 2: because you wrote the master plan for this redesign and
Speaker 2: I interviewed you, this brilliant person. And then like two
Speaker 2: or three years later, I go to my uncle's house
Speaker 2: with my wife's uncle on the far South Side to
Speaker 2: watch some football, and there you are. My wife's uncle
Speaker 2: is also your uncle.
Speaker 1: My uncle Willy. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Like it turned out that we were related through marriage.
Speaker 5: We're like cousins, sort of cousins by marriage.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: I love that.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: No, I mean it was like one of those bizarre
Speaker 5: like Okay, how did you get here? And of course
Speaker 5: you know, Ben stands out in the room because.
Speaker 1: Because he's so tall.
Speaker 3: Well, I've been at a few of those, Danielle extended
Speaker 3: family get togethers over the years, particularly when I was
Speaker 3: high school. But you and I actually met on campus
Speaker 3: at Harvard. You at the Design School. I'm at the
Speaker 3: Kennedy School, And actually one of the first times we
Speaker 3: kind of got to know each other. You guest lectured
Speaker 3: for a series we were doing on the history of redlining.
Speaker 3: You are our featured expert to talk about it. So
Speaker 3: let's just jump into this conversation because so much of
Speaker 3: your work gets to the heart of the themes around
Speaker 3: the absurdities of race, around systemic racism. You're an architect
Speaker 3: by education. You've made a career of urban planning and
Speaker 3: design trying to reimagine how we can make cities better,
Speaker 3: how we can create just cities. So let's start with Detroit,
Speaker 3: kind of the poster city for everything that's gone wrong
Speaker 3: in this country. What did you do in Detroit to
Speaker 3: get us back on track?
Speaker 5: Oh my gosh, you know, my first introduction to Detroit
Speaker 5: was actually as an architect. I was still working for
Speaker 5: the very large architecture firm Skidmore, Oins and Are in Chicago,
Speaker 5: and we were working with General Motors. And this is
Speaker 5: in the mid nineties. They had just purchased the Renaissance
Speaker 5: Center from the Ford Motor Company. Well, first they made
Speaker 5: this really strategic decision to keep their global headquarters in Detroit,
Speaker 5: that in of itself was huge, and to move in
Speaker 5: from the suburbs and stay in the city. And of course,
Speaker 5: in the mid nineties, Detroit was already bleeding population experiencing,
Speaker 5: you know, a trajectory of continued economic laws. So it
Speaker 5: was a very big deal for this global headquarters to
Speaker 5: be situated here. They hired our firm to help them
Speaker 5: reposition the property and transform.
Speaker 3: The Renaissance is a hotel, I'm not a Renaissance center.
Speaker 5: The Renaissance Center is one of these classic for any
Speaker 5: architects listening, John Portman Buildings, who's a famous architects in
Speaker 5: the seventies, So if you know pe Tree Towers in
Speaker 5: Atlanta or the Bonna venture in la Is, basically the
Speaker 5: same structure replicated and they were really like fortresses, and
Speaker 5: they were built in the seventies in urban areas when
Speaker 5: urban areas were declining. Long story short of that is
Speaker 5: we were hired to help with the repositioning of that
Speaker 5: property as the architects, and it was the first time
Speaker 5: that I began to understand through a project the role
Speaker 5: of the architect as a consultant designer. So we put
Speaker 5: the ideas forward, but our influence to ultimately make the
Speaker 5: decision to how to invest in this strategy, which scheme
Speaker 5: to take how as folds into the city was not
Speaker 5: ours as a consulting architect, And it was the first
Speaker 5: time I was like, you know what, I want to
Speaker 5: be on that side of the table, because no one
Speaker 5: on that side of the table at the time. You
Speaker 5: had design background, had design language, was really skilled in
Speaker 5: designing the city. And it was the first time I
Speaker 5: realized the makers of cities.
Speaker 6: Are not just architects.
Speaker 5: It's mayors, it's corporations, civic leaders, developers have really strong influence.
Speaker 5: So that grounds me in the career that I've had
Speaker 5: since that time and wanting to put my expertise, and
Speaker 5: particularly as a black woman with this expertise in design
Speaker 5: and urbanism, to be on the side of decision making
Speaker 5: and power to shape the way cities are built. So
Speaker 5: I went on to work for two mayors in Washington,
Speaker 5: d C. As a deputy planning director and then served
Speaker 5: as Corey Booker, his first planning director and his mayor Jersey.
Speaker 5: That gave me this experience of working inside the power
Speaker 5: structures that really shape and design cities. So you know,
Speaker 5: I have worked in these progressively challenged cities, Detroit and
Speaker 5: then DC that was just coming out of financial receivership,
Speaker 5: Newark that was coming through a lot of political crisis,
Speaker 5: and that was just at the time of the recession. Now,
Speaker 5: as running my own practice, how do you look at
Speaker 5: the economic trajectory of Detroit that at that time had
Speaker 5: lost a significant amount of his economic engine.
Speaker 1: This is about a decade ago, right, this.
Speaker 6: Is this is ten years exactly.
Speaker 5: How do I, as a planner and designer think about
Speaker 5: the revitalization of a city that has a significant amount
Speaker 5: of population seven hundred that people and what is the
Speaker 5: role of design and planning.
Speaker 2: That's down from two million at its peak.
Speaker 6: That's right, one point eight at its peak.
Speaker 3: Then I wanted to ask you. You wrote this amazing
Speaker 3: New York Times magazine piece.
Speaker 1: Really proud of you.
Speaker 3: It was right at the time I think that Tony
Speaker 3: was coming into the city and you had the cover
Speaker 3: story about Detroit and it was about the possibility through
Speaker 3: one of the richest men in this country, Dan Gilbert,
Speaker 3: and his business is quick and loans to come in
Speaker 3: and revitalize the city. So you know, from your vantage
Speaker 3: point when you were on the ground reporting, What were
Speaker 3: you seeing happening?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I'm actually interested in exactly what Tony
Speaker 2: is talking about. Like Dan Gilbert drew me into the
Speaker 2: city because you know, there's this phenomenon that's happening in
Speaker 2: cities all across the country where there's a kind of
Speaker 2: rebirth of the inner city and corporations are headquartering again
Speaker 2: in cities. Like Dan Gilbert, who is from Detroit. Originally
Speaker 2: he had a suburban business and he found out that
Speaker 2: he just couldn't recruit young talent if he was in
Speaker 2: the suburbs. Young people want to be in cities, and
Speaker 2: so he wanted to headquarter downtown. He had to headquarter downtown.
Speaker 2: But he's not talking about the long time citizens of
Speaker 2: cities and the peripheries, And so I was interested, like,
Speaker 2: oh my gosh, Like this guy is buying like sixty
Speaker 2: of these beautiful skyscrapers that Tony is talking about, like masterpieces.
Speaker 2: That's kind of wild. One person is owning like all
Speaker 2: these properties, and we're seeing this revitalization downtown. But then
Speaker 2: like how does that go out into the corridors, how
Speaker 2: does that reach the neighborhoods. And so my piece then
Speaker 2: like started in the center, but then tried to move
Speaker 2: out and see, Like what Tony is seeing is this,
Speaker 2: if you burnish the city center like a gem, if
Speaker 2: it radiates like the sun, is it strong enough that
Speaker 2: it actually like you know, like those rays actually actually
Speaker 2: reached the neighborhood literary right, And usually the answer is no,
Speaker 2: like not at all. Like we have a tale of
Speaker 2: two cities in most in most you know, in the
Speaker 2: inner city of Mayora.
Speaker 5: But you know what's interesting about Detroita is those acquisitions
Speaker 5: that Gilbert made downtown when the market was still depressed,
Speaker 5: you know, afforded him an opportunity to really experiment with
Speaker 5: tendancy startup businesses, black owned businesses that reflect the majority
Speaker 5: of demography of the city. How do you start to
Speaker 5: pilot that through the space that you have downtown so
Speaker 5: that it's not an either or proposition. But it's still
Speaker 5: a large city, right, so it's not going anywhere. What
Speaker 5: had to be different? There were generations of black households
Speaker 5: and businesses that were keeping that city afloat what would
Speaker 5: it look like for them and what they were doing
Speaker 5: and how they were holding on to properties that their
Speaker 5: great grandfathers had bought coming out of the great migration
Speaker 5: or legacy businesses. How do we factor that resiliency into planning,
Speaker 5: don't you downto to reflect the culture of the city.
Speaker 5: And so I think there's still this challenge of how
Speaker 5: are we intentionally cultivating pushing in black owned businesses, women
Speaker 5: owned business a diversity of businesses that are local and
Speaker 5: national that start to create a vibrancy in Detroit. And
Speaker 5: there's still a lot of space and I think a
Speaker 5: lot of play in the market where that can be
Speaker 5: showing up.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. And Detroit is sort of, you know, became
Speaker 2: this kind of place where you could experiment in the
Speaker 2: way the market's s and solo that people are like,
Speaker 2: it can't go any lower, Let me buy in and
Speaker 2: do these kind of creative things.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, So we had really had to lean into well,
Speaker 5: what is Detroit's new economy?
Speaker 6: What does the new neighborhood need to look like?
Speaker 5: When you've got all this population loss and one hundred
Speaker 5: thousand vacant properties and eighty thousand vacant homes. If you
Speaker 5: squish all that together, it was about the size of
Speaker 5: the island of Manhattan in terms of square mileage of vacancy.
Speaker 5: Maybe we had to think about a new definition of
Speaker 5: what a neighborhood looked like, different types of uses for
Speaker 5: vacant land, blue green infrastructure, How neighbors could be stewards
Speaker 5: of that land, how you might plan for bigger lot sizes,
Speaker 5: different configurations of housing, how to invest in different neighborhoods
Speaker 5: differently given those conditions.
Speaker 2: So what does that mean to sort of change the
Speaker 2: actual sort of infrastructure and think about land reclaiming a
Speaker 2: lot of the city.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, it's still important to the narrative of
Speaker 5: that work to remember that the condition of Detroit ten
Speaker 5: years ago and even today happened over sixty years of time, right,
Speaker 5: and so for it to grow back to anywhere close
Speaker 5: to one pointy million people, well, that's not going to
Speaker 5: happen in twenty years. So the plan was a framework
Speaker 5: to plan for a vibrant, healthy city recognizing that in
Speaker 5: twenty years, all of a sudden, all of that vacant
Speaker 5: land is going to be developed in the same way. Right,
Speaker 5: So we ended up coming up with different neighborhood typologies
Speaker 5: tie to how the city should think about investments in
Speaker 5: infrastructure and investments in development so that you were strengthening
Speaker 5: in growing areas that could in ten years feel vibrant
Speaker 5: and whole. So the other thing that we had the
Speaker 5: opportunity to look at, is this the moment for a
Speaker 5: city like that to really rethink how it manages its infrastructure,
Speaker 5: you know, to accommodate the shifts in climate and water
Speaker 5: and storm and heat in a different way. Should we
Speaker 5: be rebuilding big pipes underground for stormwater management anymore? Or
Speaker 5: should we be looking at something that is more adapted
Speaker 5: to the climate moment that we're in. So I think
Speaker 5: what we were starting to do ten years ago was
Speaker 5: to think about not just vacant land and making more
Speaker 5: recreation or open space or even community gardens, but how
Speaker 5: can it actually be built into the infrastructure of the
Speaker 5: city such that maybe in fifty years it becomes the
Speaker 5: place where we all want to migrate to because it
Speaker 5: has been climate adapted.
Speaker 3: I love that in some of your work you can
Speaker 3: go online our listeners and see some of the images
Speaker 3: of surface lakes and planned reservoirs and areas that had
Speaker 3: otherwise been just a concrete.
Speaker 1: Asphalt place.
Speaker 3: And that's such a powerful image to imagine for the future.
Speaker 3: Of a place like Detroit where you are building, as
Speaker 3: you say, a sustainable infrastructure. Well, listen, we've heard a
Speaker 3: lot about what's happened in Detroit. There's some consistent themes
Speaker 3: that are going to carry forward in other places about
Speaker 3: who gets to benefit from this infrastructure in the future.
Speaker 3: So we'll come back and we're going to talk about
Speaker 3: some other places and what's going on there.
Speaker 7: We'll be right back after the break.
Speaker 2: We are back on. Some of my best friends are
Speaker 2: with Tony Griffin. All right, Tony, I want to talk
Speaker 2: about Chicago, where we're all from. We are all Southsiders.
Speaker 1: Didn't take us long to get to Chicago.
Speaker 2: No, And I want to talk about ken Wood. Kenwood,
Speaker 2: I want to talk about last weekend. We had a
Speaker 2: NASCAR race here last weekend where basically Lake Shore Drive,
Speaker 2: Michigan Avenue, and Columbus Drive in right around Millennium Park
Speaker 2: and Grant Park were turned into a NASCAR track.
Speaker 3: Was this a stunt or were people going one hundred
Speaker 3: miles an hour on these.
Speaker 2: Streets two hundred miles an hour?
Speaker 3: You're lying, I didn't see any of this. That sounds bananas.
Speaker 2: With giant bleachers set up all around it. So public
Speaker 2: land being privatized for this event, and it was stunning.
Speaker 2: These cars come around to turn, you know, from Michigan Avenue.
Speaker 2: Now they're on Columbus Drive and behind them is the
Speaker 2: skyline of Chicago in a NASCAR race, And you could
Speaker 2: think of all the ways that this could benefit a city,
Speaker 2: right like, Chicago has this really tough reputation. Outsiders think
Speaker 2: about crime and you know, is it a place to visit?
Speaker 2: And suddenly they're seeing it, you know, a NASCAR type
Speaker 2: fans are seeing them be like, oh man, this city
Speaker 2: is amazing. And again, Tony, it's one of these ideas
Speaker 2: of like, you know, funding the center, the center is
Speaker 2: going to thrive. So you have this race here. The
Speaker 2: idea is it's supposed to bring in tourist dollars and
Speaker 2: it makes downtown look beautiful. But for the rest of us,
Speaker 2: it's a hassle. It's a hassle for actual Chicagoans. And
Speaker 2: very few people away from the center, out in the
Speaker 2: neighborhoods are attending or participating in any way. So we're
Speaker 2: supposed to believe there's like some trickle down effect out
Speaker 2: to these neighborhoods far from downtown. Come on, I'm not
Speaker 2: buying it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, just to touch on NASCAR for a second,
Speaker 5: I mean, it's totally bizarre.
Speaker 1: I can't get over it either. I'm still like what
Speaker 1: the hell.
Speaker 6: Like what?
Speaker 5: But as you said, you know, I saw a couple
Speaker 5: of image of it too, and it was like, oh, well, wow,
Speaker 5: that's kind of interesting.
Speaker 2: I mean it was it was an advertisement for NASCAR
Speaker 2: and an advertisement at least Chicago, at least as it
Speaker 2: exists as downtown Chicago.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and you know, and I guess that.
Speaker 5: You know, they had some of the cars out at
Speaker 5: Disable Museum and so, and they have music on the
Speaker 5: back steps of Disable. My dad goes to every Sunday
Speaker 5: in the summer. So he was like, yeah, I'm going
Speaker 5: to see the NASCAR car.
Speaker 3: Which, by the way, is like one of the blackest
Speaker 3: museums in America. Yes, courting one of the whitest sports
Speaker 3: in America. Just for the record.
Speaker 2: Well, now they had Bubba Wallace out there, the black.
Speaker 6: NASCAR sponsify Bubba. So there you go.
Speaker 1: There you go, all right, Bubba, good good work, Bubba.
Speaker 5: So when you're doing these things that are part of
Speaker 5: the economic development schema of the city, right, do something
Speaker 5: at the center there's a ripple effect of spending hotels,
Speaker 5: stays and things like that. How are we factoring in
Speaker 5: pushing in our local business sector in that space, right?
Speaker 5: How do they directly benefit from that and not just
Speaker 5: coincidentally by hoping a tourist or a visitor goes there. So,
Speaker 5: how does the administration, how do convention and tourism bureaus
Speaker 5: become extremely and hyper proactive to match the rhetoric of
Speaker 5: economic inclusion to these type of big economic development events.
Speaker 5: They are more than one way for equitable economic participation
Speaker 5: to exist, and I think we have to pull the
Speaker 5: levers on all of them simultaneously. When you kind of
Speaker 5: push it back to the neighborhoods and you know, thinking
Speaker 5: about black population loss on the South and West sides
Speaker 5: in Chicago precipitated by public policy actions and real estate
Speaker 5: practices that intentionally push people at out in the last century, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Tony, that's totally right. The black population in Chicago
Speaker 2: has been leaving the city two hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 2: people over the last about fifteen to twenty years. That's
Speaker 2: twenty five percent of the black population from its peak
Speaker 2: in the nineteen eighties at about one million.
Speaker 5: But that's also coupled with a trajectory of the black
Speaker 5: middle class. And we all have family members who may
Speaker 5: have grown up on the South Side or the West Side,
Speaker 5: maybe gone to school or have a good job. What's
Speaker 5: the first thing they want to do? Buy a house
Speaker 5: in the south suburbs with a lawn and a yard
Speaker 5: and have cookouts and have the family over. It's not
Speaker 5: any different than other populations and their quest for the
Speaker 5: American dream and the upward mobility that America paints as
Speaker 5: urban to suburban, right, So we have to recognize some
Speaker 5: of that is pre rent and part of the ethos
Speaker 5: of the American Dream. There are others, though, who don't
Speaker 5: have the ability to have those choices, and they are
Speaker 5: rooted in place, and some of them who actually do
Speaker 5: own are now becoming, you know, house poor because they're
Speaker 5: unable to maintain the asset that they have.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you mean, like the taxes are going up, maintenance
Speaker 3: costs go up, and the house becomes unaffordable.
Speaker 5: So what we're left with are housing assets that perhaps
Speaker 5: a family a set of parents own, but the kids
Speaker 5: don't want because they don't want to live in Washington
Speaker 5: Park or Englewood anymore. Plus all of this vacancy. What
Speaker 5: my work now is really focused on is getting Black
Speaker 5: Americans to see land as an asset, not a liability
Speaker 5: in those neighborhoods, and also start to think about how
Speaker 5: land is tied to our portfolios of wealth and wealth building,
Speaker 5: and that the opportunity to accumulate wealth, also very American,
Speaker 5: is through land. So how might we begin to think
Speaker 5: about how we own control develop land individually as households
Speaker 5: and families as a part of how we build wealth,
Speaker 5: but also collectively as a community.
Speaker 3: So, Tony, I've been hearing you talk about the choices
Speaker 3: that black people make both in their leaving the city
Speaker 3: but also in search of their own peace of the
Speaker 3: American dream. And then there are these neighborhoods you mentioned Inglewood, Woodlawn.
Speaker 3: These are South side areas, some of which have experienced
Speaker 3: tremendous poverty. They never quite lived up to their promise,
Speaker 3: particularly in the wake of what happened in the nineteen
Speaker 3: seventies and nineteen eighties. They've had lots of crime in
Speaker 3: these communities. But Chicago right now, in the adjacent to
Speaker 3: the same areas you just talked about, is witnessing at
Speaker 3: least a half billion dollar development project best known for
Speaker 3: the former president, which will house his papers, a library, museum,
Speaker 3: the Albama Foundation. Here is this massive investment project half
Speaker 3: billion dollars on the South side of Chicago, surrounded by
Speaker 3: black people. What are they getting right in the way
Speaker 3: that you understand what makes a just city? And what
Speaker 3: are they getting wrong in the way that you're trying
Speaker 3: to correct for the mistakes of the past?
Speaker 5: Okay, so let's talk about the Presidential Center first. A
Speaker 5: few things that I know that I think they're getting
Speaker 5: right is as they are moving through the design and
Speaker 5: development process of the center, they have made effort to
Speaker 5: do a little bit of what I was talking about,
Speaker 5: which is how they spread their wealth amongst black women
Speaker 5: Latino businesses to be a part of the developed design
Speaker 5: and development of one of my good friends, Dina Griffin,
Speaker 5: African American women from the South Side of Chicago, is
Speaker 5: one of the primary architects.
Speaker 6: For example, no.
Speaker 5: Relation, but she was married to a college buddy of mine.
Speaker 5: The other thing that they're doing is also thinking about
Speaker 5: the businesses that they need to procure.
Speaker 6: When it's open and when it's running.
Speaker 5: So I think that work that they're beginning to do
Speaker 5: internally is exactly what they promised to do and exactly
Speaker 5: what they should be doing.
Speaker 2: So you're now you're talking about everything that's happening on
Speaker 2: the actual, the actual side of the development. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: so now we're going to talk about the periphery.
Speaker 6: So let's go off site for a second. Off site.
Speaker 5: When it was announced that the center was coming to
Speaker 5: Chicago and ultimately landed in Jackson Park, then Mayor Rama
Speaker 5: Manual the Obama Foundation in the University of Chicago determined
Speaker 5: that they needed a nonprofit, community based partner to work
Speaker 5: with to do the deep work of looking at community
Speaker 5: development and the impacts or opportunity of this center and
Speaker 5: what it can have on the adjacent neighborhood. So in
Speaker 5: twenty eighteen they created the Emerald South Economic Development Collaborative,
Speaker 5: and in twenty nineteen I was called by them to
Speaker 5: help work on some strategic planning. And by the way,
Speaker 5: the catchment area for this organization is SouthShore, Woodlawn and
Speaker 5: Washington Park. So Emerald South as I'll call it, you know,
Speaker 5: their mission is to promote community wealth with a real
Speaker 5: emphasis on black wealth creation. And I've made various attempts
Speaker 5: at doing that. One was organizing the commercial business district
Speaker 5: organizations to start to think about strategies for supporting, financing,
Speaker 5: leveraging existing businesses on our local commercial corridors that have
Speaker 5: some thriving businesses in it, and that we would hope
Speaker 5: when the Obama Presidential Center opens in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 5: there's going to be a intentional campaign to push visitors
Speaker 5: into those businesses.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 5: That could be a fantastic opportunity if the projection of
Speaker 5: seven hundred thousand to a million visitors in the first
Speaker 5: year comes true. How do we get them to experience
Speaker 5: black Chicago in an authentic way that's not just Hyde Park, Right,
Speaker 5: So some of that work is beginning. The other work
Speaker 5: that's beginning is actually starting to take a real strategic
Speaker 5: look at vacant land. And most of the vacant land
Speaker 5: in those three neighborhoods is in Washington Park on the
Speaker 5: west side of Olmsted's Washington Park. The least amount is
Speaker 5: in South Shore. This is where a fear of gentrification exists,
Speaker 5: but actual gentrification has not yet happened, which gives us
Speaker 5: the sweet spot of finding ways for black folks black
Speaker 5: organizations to control that asset so that they are in
Speaker 5: a position to reap the market economic capitalist system benefits
Speaker 5: of the valuation of land, which by the way, has
Speaker 5: been devalued on the South Side and West Side of
Speaker 5: Chicago for decades. So we are looking at strategies that
Speaker 5: are really intentionally about wealth, and some of that is
Speaker 5: about the actual ownership of material assets like land, in
Speaker 5: addition to growing the capacities of black with organizations to
Speaker 5: be much more active in the stewardship and development and
Speaker 5: decision making of future development that happens around them.
Speaker 2: And I just want to say, Tony that the Obama
Speaker 2: Center and the city have been resistant for the kind
Speaker 2: of guarantees that you're talking about, that the community would
Speaker 2: be assured a kind of benefit as development and prices
Speaker 2: go up. You know, it's called the Community Benefits Agreement.
Speaker 2: They have not wanted to sign this, and critics of
Speaker 2: a community benefits agreement say that it raises the cost
Speaker 2: of entry for developers. And so if you're a developer
Speaker 2: of any kind and you could choose between a neighborhood
Speaker 2: on the north side or the South Side, and suddenly
Speaker 2: there this community benefits agreement that you also have to
Speaker 2: contend with you're like, ah, I'll go somewhere else. That
Speaker 2: criticism also feels ahistorical to me. It's like we only
Speaker 2: exist in the present, because if you're in these neighborhoods
Speaker 2: and you've been like, you know, duped and cheated, like
Speaker 2: you said, all these ways for over a century, it's
Speaker 2: like falling for the okie doke again. You know, like
Speaker 2: this time we really mean it that you don't need
Speaker 2: you don't need a promise, you know, a contract in
Speaker 2: some way, because we promise it's going to be due
Speaker 2: right by you this time.
Speaker 3: Help us, help us see some promise, some future, some
Speaker 3: help our imaginations grow to believe that this is all possible.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I'm a designers, so I'm trained to imagine,
Speaker 5: and so I've decided to figure out, well, what's another
Speaker 5: tool while that work is going on. And one of
Speaker 5: the tools that I've become interested in is community ownership.
Speaker 5: So there are these things tools called community land trust.
Speaker 5: It's actually a tool that's used in certain cities to
Speaker 5: help lock in affordability against the escalation of land values. Right, So,
Speaker 5: the benef fit of a land trust allows a group
Speaker 5: of people to stay within a certain range of the
Speaker 5: market never to exceed the market. So that's a tool
Speaker 5: that can be used, for example, if you grant vacant land.
Speaker 5: I also want to think about another tool because I
Speaker 5: think the issue we ultimately want to talk about in
Speaker 5: black neighborhoods is affordability, yes, but we also want to
Speaker 5: talk about wealth creation, right. I want to see black
Speaker 5: folks on the trajectory of getting to a state of
Speaker 5: wealth where in their words when I've interviewed people, is
Speaker 5: I just don't want to have to worry about how
Speaker 5: I'm fed, how I'm housed, how I'm closed my healthcare.
Speaker 5: Wealth is not being a billionaire. Wealth is not having
Speaker 5: to worry enough money to not have to worry.
Speaker 3: That is the perfect moment to take us to a break,
Speaker 3: because we are to talk about the future. We're going
Speaker 3: to talk about what is possible to create wealth and
Speaker 3: ownership and control.
Speaker 4: All right, we'll be right back after the break.
Speaker 3: It's so wonderful to hear your passion and commitment to
Speaker 3: a multiplicity of tools, because in some ways we only
Speaker 3: have the tools that are designed to do the thing
Speaker 3: we want them to do. And so we know that
Speaker 3: tools have been designed to extract from black communities to
Speaker 3: create white wealth on the backs of black people literally
Speaker 3: as well as through the exploitation of black homeowners contract lending.
Speaker 3: Chicago is, you know, just a poster city for the
Speaker 3: exploitative post slavery Jim Crow South during the migration into
Speaker 3: the nineteen sixties and seventies and eighties, just taking taking
Speaker 3: from Black people the twenty tens.
Speaker 2: Don't forget the twenty tens. Black communities were hit the
Speaker 2: hardest by the foreclosure crisis, by the thanks and they're
Speaker 2: really suffering from it. Still. This isn't back then.
Speaker 3: That's just super super super relevant. So you've taken on
Speaker 3: another tool. You've taken on creativity in a way that
Speaker 3: goes beyond design and planning and architecture. You're now moving
Speaker 3: into the space of visual art. You currently have a
Speaker 3: show in Venice at the Venice Bienale called Land Narratives
Speaker 3: Fantastic Futures. So let's take a look at one of
Speaker 3: the pieces that explores this idea about black land and wealth.
Speaker 3: So we want to look at the one where we
Speaker 3: think it features your father, It's called Loyal. Could you
Speaker 3: help us understand what's happening in this image? What exactly
Speaker 3: are we looking at.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, thank you so much for wanting to talk
Speaker 5: about this work. It was inspired after the murder of
Speaker 5: George Floyd and I was supposed to write an article
Speaker 5: for the Harvard Design magazine and I was just pissed,
Speaker 5: Like I just pissed and depleted. I didn't want people
Speaker 5: to ask me to explain anything. I didn't want to
Speaker 5: go into rooms to heal.
Speaker 6: I didn't want to.
Speaker 5: And I didn't want to regurgitate a history that has
Speaker 5: already been articulated.
Speaker 3: That's right, You're like, like, we didn't know what's going on.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, yes, I get it.
Speaker 6: Yes, I didn't want to give you the biography.
Speaker 5: I didn't want to do shit right, But I had
Speaker 5: to write this article and I was just literally stuck.
Speaker 5: And one day I just pulled out paper and scissors
Speaker 5: and I just in an hour, I had made five
Speaker 5: collages that were the mashup of here's the shit you
Speaker 5: should know, and it was all imagery, right, So the
Speaker 5: historic map of the South Side of Chicago with the
Speaker 5: black image of the Black Belt superimposed, and I started
Speaker 5: thinking about people that I engaged in neighborhoods like Woodlawn
Speaker 5: and Washington Parker and just observing them go through their neighborhoods,
Speaker 5: not knowing how that neighborhood came to be. Their mother
Speaker 5: may not know, their grandmother may not know. But this
Speaker 5: is the home of black Metropolis, first black insurance company,
Speaker 5: first black newspaper, black doctors, black wealth, and these questions
Speaker 5: that you know you have asked me about the insufficiency
Speaker 5: of tools, and me being really frustrated and skeptical too
Speaker 5: sometimes and not knowing what to do. And I I
Speaker 5: needed to escape to a future that black people controlled.
Speaker 5: I needed to escape.
Speaker 1: Futurism in a way.
Speaker 5: I went to a place of pro topia, right, which
Speaker 5: is a tool and experimenting with in some of my
Speaker 5: design classes, which has been described by the gentleman's name
Speaker 5: is Kevin Kelly as the exuberant feeling that everyone is
Speaker 5: rooting for you.
Speaker 1: Okay, I love that.
Speaker 6: And it always makes the cheer up. Everyone is rooting
Speaker 6: for me.
Speaker 5: So Land Narratives for a Taxi Futures was about kind
Speaker 5: of going back to that vacant land in Washington Park, which,
Speaker 5: by the way, my dad grew up fifty six twelve
Speaker 5: South Caliumet. I spent the first two years of my
Speaker 5: life there. What if black people controlled that, what if
Speaker 5: they imagined their own future for so loyal The first
Speaker 5: in the exhibition are a series of collages where I
Speaker 5: interviewed eight Chicagoans from both the South and West Side,
Speaker 5: asked them about their memories of their neighborhood. I asked
Speaker 5: them questions about, well, what is wealth to you? What
Speaker 5: is community wealth? How much money do you think you
Speaker 5: would need to buy land in that neighborhood?
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 5: I then asked them what they love about being black,
Speaker 5: and then I asked them what their superpower is now
Speaker 5: and if they could have an additional superpower, what would
Speaker 5: it be. So in the interview with my dad, who
Speaker 5: grew up in Washington Park, went to Burke School, and
Speaker 5: so he talked about walking to school with his buddies
Speaker 5: to Burke School, and then after school they would hang
Speaker 5: out on Garfields Boulevard, which is part of the Burnham
Speaker 5: Street and open space system that has a huge median.
Speaker 5: But he says, yeah, you know, they were all black businesses.
Speaker 5: Then he and his buddies would just hang out and
Speaker 5: watch the older men in the neighborhood. And there was
Speaker 5: a point where he said, you know, one of my
Speaker 5: buddies his dad was a pullman porter, and I was
Speaker 5: always so fascinated by him because he would have on
Speaker 5: this crisp white shirt with buttons and a jacket and
Speaker 5: a satchel and a hat, and I wod watch him
Speaker 5: go to work. And it was a moment in the
Speaker 5: interview and I said, so, Dad, you saw men go
Speaker 5: to work when you were a kid. He said, yeah,
Speaker 5: I saw men go to work and suit it. There
Speaker 5: was very low unemployment when I.
Speaker 6: Was a kid.
Speaker 5: This is the fifties, right late forties, early into the fifties.
Speaker 5: And it was like, that's so interesting because kids in
Speaker 5: this neighborhood have probably some of them have probably never
Speaker 5: seen the image that you saw as a young black
Speaker 5: boy on the South Side of Chicago in nineteen fifty
Speaker 5: fifty two.
Speaker 6: Isn't that insane, right, Tony?
Speaker 2: Can I interject in here for a second, Tony? Yeah,
Speaker 2: I just want to I want to describe actually what
Speaker 2: I'm looking at here, and then I ask you a
Speaker 2: question about it. So on this canvas, this collage, it's
Speaker 2: sort of in black space, and there is your dad
Speaker 2: present day. He's wearing this shiny sort of gold le
Speaker 2: may sports coat. He's holding his lapels. He's wearing a
Speaker 2: beautiful gold hat and he's standing on land with the
Speaker 2: letters p r ide, so pride being spelled out in
Speaker 2: little sort of like, you know, claims of the land.
Speaker 2: And he almost has a cape, and it looks like
Speaker 2: it's made up of Jesse White Tumblers, which is a
Speaker 2: high flying tumbling team that started on the North side
Speaker 2: of Chicago and was led by this amazing person who
Speaker 2: also became an elected official, Jesse White. Yes, that's a
Speaker 2: it's a wild image. And what's up with the cape
Speaker 2: and the Jesse White Tumblers And how does this sort
Speaker 2: of present even like superpowers perfect?
Speaker 5: So when I asked my dad what his superpower was,
Speaker 5: he said he was he could fly like Superman, that
Speaker 5: he can leap over tall buildings with a single bound.
Speaker 5: So the collages situate the person I interview on vacant land,
Speaker 5: so they're rooted, standing firmly on vacant land as a
Speaker 5: representation of them claiming land. So the imagery in the
Speaker 5: collages representative of their imaginary for their neighborhood. But I'm
Speaker 5: also pulling from references that are very rooted in Chicago.
Speaker 5: So the Pride sign, the Pride that you see kind
Speaker 5: of rooted in the ground is actually a mid century
Speaker 5: Modernists sign for Pride Dry Cleaners that's on eighty third
Speaker 5: and Saint Lawrence. So that's reference to a black owned business,
Speaker 5: which my dad sort of talked about. Was something that
Speaker 5: all he frequented on in his neighborhood on fifty fifth
Speaker 5: Street were black owned businesses, and there were lots of them.
Speaker 5: And the Jesse White Tumbers show up and a number
Speaker 5: of different collages, and to me, those black boys and
Speaker 5: bodies flying through the air in this bright red was
Speaker 5: to me representative of liberation, freedom. They're suspended from the
Speaker 5: earth and they're tumbling with just this ease and just
Speaker 5: doing all of this fantastical shit that often black people
Speaker 5: have to do just to prove that.
Speaker 6: They can do what the average person can do, right, so.
Speaker 1: That it is both literal and figurative.
Speaker 3: These boys, these young men, really can can do the
Speaker 3: impossible by flying people.
Speaker 5: And guess what, I could do this exceptional thing too
Speaker 5: with ease. And so after I did the collage and
Speaker 5: I showed it to my dad and I had to
Speaker 5: explain it to him. He's like so that he understood,
Speaker 5: like how I used his story. And you'll notice on
Speaker 5: the collage that I kept from the photograph, which is
Speaker 5: actually by photographer and architecture critical Lee Bay, who's the Chicagoan.
Speaker 5: I kept the sign, the street sign of Saint Lawrence.
Speaker 5: And my dad goes, this is really cool. It's like
Speaker 5: you even kept Saint Lawrence. I was like, what do
Speaker 5: you mean. He goes, well, you know I was born
Speaker 5: on fifty third in Saint Lawrence. As a key word wow,
Speaker 5: And so just the irony of that just meant.
Speaker 1: That the universe is speaking, yeah, oh yes.
Speaker 6: Thanks for speaking to me.
Speaker 5: And this moment of writer's block, these images emerged.
Speaker 3: And so these collages now at the Venice Biennale appeared
Speaker 3: instead of a written essay in the Harvard magazine.
Speaker 1: I love that.
Speaker 3: I love the idea of breaking it down for our
Speaker 3: Harvard colleagues whose whose brains are too big to understand
Speaker 3: the basics. Like so, so this art is so powerful
Speaker 3: both in its ability to communicate these stories, these histories,
Speaker 3: to use symbols to that message to life, and also
Speaker 3: it really does capture a central theme of what you're
Speaker 3: trying to get at, which is that black people not
Speaker 3: only have the capacity to control their futures they want
Speaker 3: to do that. They are not helpless. They have agency,
Speaker 3: They've had it in the past, and we are fighting
Speaker 3: for them to have.
Speaker 1: In the future.
Speaker 3: Which brings me to our sort of final question. When
Speaker 3: I look at the body of your work, the Just
Speaker 3: Cities Lab, which indexes how cities are doing on this
Speaker 3: question of equity, I kept thinking about a really basic
Speaker 3: question because I think it would help me understand how
Speaker 3: to anticipate the future. So I've often made the comparison
Speaker 3: that white people have what they need in cities and
Speaker 3: in suburbs. We see in the evidence of the quality
Speaker 3: of life that a lot of middle to upper income
Speaker 3: white people have the cities and suburbs work for them,
Speaker 3: but black people generally don't have this. They've been the
Speaker 3: victims of the very policies that created the quality of.
Speaker 1: Life that whites have.
Speaker 3: So is the idea that black people will get to
Speaker 3: a form of spatial justice a term you use, too
Speaker 3: could kind of encapsulate a lot of what we've talked
Speaker 3: about that already looks like what middle class and white
Speaker 3: people have. Or does a just city or a fantastic
Speaker 3: future look different for white people too.
Speaker 6: I think they can look different.
Speaker 5: And I think part of what I was trying to
Speaker 5: explore through art with land narratives fantastic futures is that
Speaker 5: a just city, just neighborhood that's black controlled and owned
Speaker 5: does not have to look like the conventional American, white
Speaker 5: middle class construct. Black folks are looking for a quality
Speaker 5: of life that's meaningful to their cultural norms of quality.
Speaker 5: And sure some of that is mainstream and what everyone
Speaker 5: else wants, but some of its and looks very different
Speaker 5: than what we're taught in design school. If I want
Speaker 5: to throw off a house party, a mini old school picnic,
Speaker 5: I want to be able to do that on my
Speaker 5: block that is now part of the new cultural esthetic
Speaker 5: of a black neighborhood that is thriving. Right, So this
Speaker 5: is the kind of design work I want to explore.
Speaker 2: I was really interested to hear how this fantastical work,
Speaker 2: this imaginative creative work is feeding back into your practical work,
Speaker 2: and to think of like they're going to be, you know,
Speaker 2: pro topic urban planners that you're going to be teaching,
Speaker 2: and they're going to do this work in some way,
Speaker 2: And was this a kind of epiphany, like a new
Speaker 2: opening for you?
Speaker 5: It definitely became a different mode of design method for
Speaker 5: me right that I intend to keep in my work,
Speaker 5: pushing it into the pedagogy of classes that I teach,
Speaker 5: and then pushing that back out into practice. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's why I wanted to be both an academic and
Speaker 5: a practitioner, right to keep that cycle of innovation and
Speaker 5: imagination in play for me as a practitioner. So they
Speaker 5: didn't get bogged down with trying to, you know, crack
Speaker 5: open a tool that doesn't avail itself to a different approach.
Speaker 1: Need new tools, you need new tools.
Speaker 3: I love that this has been such a really enriching experience,
Speaker 3: both looking at the past and the ways that we
Speaker 3: often do, but also taking this journey with you through
Speaker 3: your art to think about what a future looks like.
Speaker 1: That Center's black Life. It's just it's just uplifting.
Speaker 3: So thank you so much, cousin Tony for joining us today.
Speaker 1: We love you, guys.
Speaker 5: We all need to find our sort of outlets of
Speaker 5: uplift if we're going to continue to stay in this
Speaker 5: deeply problematic and heavy work. So it was really about
Speaker 5: my mental health as well as trying to find ways
Speaker 5: to help and be productive in this work. So I
Speaker 5: encourage everyone to find that venue that keeps you in
Speaker 5: the game because we need the fight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right on, Tony, see you at the next family reunion.
Speaker 6: We need to like sync that up for real.
Speaker 1: We'll figure it out.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you'll figure.
Speaker 2: It out, yo, Khalil. I got to tell you, I
Speaker 2: was once on a NASCAR track driving like one hundred
Speaker 2: miles an hour. I was a passenger.
Speaker 3: Oh, I didn't know about this. This was for that
Speaker 3: story you wrote years ago.
Speaker 2: I wrote a story for Harper's magazine, and I was
Speaker 2: like holding the back of the seat and basically like crying.
Speaker 2: I was scared. And even back then, like fifteen years ago,
Speaker 2: I think there's a ten twelve. Fifteen years ago, NASCAR
Speaker 2: was like, hey, we need to reach a broader, more
Speaker 2: diverse audience. So it's funny that they're still doing this
Speaker 2: all this time later, you know, trying to make these
Speaker 2: inroads and doing it here in.
Speaker 3: I mean, you could say this is this is a
Speaker 3: lot of progress that that race was where when you
Speaker 3: when you went down there to do this.
Speaker 2: Man, this was in Bristol, Tennessee, exactly, Tennessee.
Speaker 1: Now that has worked. Now they're in Chicago exactly.
Speaker 2: Now, they're at the Sapple Museum. Listen, the world is changing.
Speaker 3: I want to there's a takeaway I have from this
Speaker 3: episode with Tony. I want to lean into this innovation
Speaker 3: and imagination and I want to imagine my own protopic
Speaker 3: future where I get to be at the center of
Speaker 3: the transformation of all the shittiest neighborhoods all over this
Speaker 3: country to turn them into beautiful, environmentally sound, community thriving places.
Speaker 3: So that's that's my goal.
Speaker 2: I'm with you, although Protopic sounds like one of those
Speaker 2: ads that you hear on television that if you use this,
Speaker 2: all right, man, all right, I love you, Love me too.
Speaker 3: Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of
Speaker 3: Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me
Speaker 3: Khalil Dubron Muhammad and my best friend Ben Austin.
Speaker 2: It's produced by Lucy Sullivan. Our associate producer is Rachel Yang.
Speaker 2: It's edited by Sarah Nix with help from Keishel Williams.
Speaker 2: Our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our managing producer
Speaker 2: is Constanza Guyardo.
Speaker 3: At Pushkin thanks to Leital Mollat, Julia Barton, Heather Fain,
Speaker 3: Carly Migliori, John Schnarz, Retta Cone, and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 2: Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan the
Speaker 2: brilliant Avery R. Young, from his album Pubman. You definitely
Speaker 2: want to check out his music at his website, Averyaryong
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