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