July 26, 2023 • 49 mins
This week, Ben and Khalil are talking about the future of cities. Their guest, Toni Griffin, is an architect, urban planner, and artist. She teaches at the Harvard School of Design, where she leads the Just City Lab, a team focused on community revitalization in city planning. Toni joins Ben and Khalil to talk about centering people in urban design, and her new show at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale that imagines "fantastic futures.”
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushing it. I'm Khalil Jabron Muhammad.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I'm Ben Austin. We are two best friends, one black,
one white.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is
some of my best friends.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Are some of my best friends? Are some of my
best friends? Are you?
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Khalil?
Speaker 2 (00:46):
On this show, we wrestle with the challenges and the
absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
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
(01:37):
re envision cities in America.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Yes, we're talking about the future, folks, that still a.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Future is now the future is now so Tony. Thank
(02:06):
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
(02:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
My uncle Willy. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Like it turned out that we were related through marriage.
Speaker 5 (02:56):
We're like cousins, sort of cousins by marriage.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
I love that.
Speaker 6 (03:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Because he's so tall.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
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
(03:42):
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
(04:02):
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?
Speaker 5 (04:19):
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
(04:40):
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
(05:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
The Renaissance is a hotel, I'm not a Renaissance center.
Speaker 5 (05:17):
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
(05:42):
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
(06:04):
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
(06:26):
designing the city. And it was the first time I
realized the makers of cities.
Speaker 6 (06:31):
Are not just architects.
Speaker 5 (06:33):
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
(06:53):
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.
(07:14):
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,
(07:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
This is about a decade ago, right, this.
Speaker 6 (07:53):
Is this is ten years exactly.
Speaker 5 (07:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
That's down from two million at its peak.
Speaker 6 (08:15):
That's right, one point eight at its peak.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Then I wanted to ask you. You wrote this amazing
New York Times magazine piece.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Really proud of you.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
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
(08:45):
you seeing happening?
Speaker 2 (08:46):
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
(09:07):
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
(09:28):
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,
(09:49):
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.
Speaker 5 (10:09):
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
(10:30):
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
(10:51):
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
(11:15):
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
(11:35):
showing up.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
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.
Speaker 5 (11:46):
Yeah yeah, So we had really had to lean into well,
what is Detroit's new economy?
Speaker 6 (11:53):
What does the new neighborhood need to look like?
Speaker 5 (11:55):
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
(12:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
So what does that mean to sort of change the
actual sort of infrastructure and think about land reclaiming a
lot of the city.
Speaker 5 (12:48):
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
(13:10):
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
(13:33):
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
(13:53):
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
(14:16):
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
(14:38):
city such that maybe in fifty years it becomes the
place where we all want to migrate to because it
has been climate adapted.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Asphalt place.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
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.
(15:23):
So we'll come back and we're going to talk about
some other places and what's going on there.
Speaker 7 (15:28):
We'll be right back after the break.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Didn't take us long to get to Chicago.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Was this a stunt or were people going one hundred
miles an hour on these.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Streets two hundred miles an hour?
Speaker 3 (16:41):
You're lying, I didn't see any of this. That sounds bananas.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
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,
(17:07):
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
(17:28):
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
(17:50):
to these neighborhoods far from downtown. Come on, I'm not
buying it.
Speaker 5 (17:54):
Yeah, well, just to touch on NASCAR for a second,
I mean, it's totally bizarre.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
I can't get over it either. I'm still like what
the hell.
Speaker 6 (18:04):
Like what?
Speaker 5 (18:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
I mean it was it was an advertisement for NASCAR
and an advertisement at least Chicago, at least as it
exists as downtown Chicago.
Speaker 6 (18:20):
Yeah, and you know, and I guess that.
Speaker 5 (18:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Well, now they had Bubba Wallace out there, the black.
Speaker 6 (18:43):
NASCAR sponsify Bubba. So there you go.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
There you go, all right, Bubba, good good work, Bubba.
Speaker 5 (18:49):
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?
(19:12):
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
(19:33):
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
(19:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
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.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
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
(20:52):
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
(21:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
Yeah, you mean, like the taxes are going up, maintenance
costs go up, and the house becomes unaffordable.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
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
(21:56):
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,
(22:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
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,
(23:01):
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,
(23:25):
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?
Speaker 5 (23:43):
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
(24:06):
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.
Speaker 6 (24:25):
For example, no.
Speaker 5 (24:28):
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.
Speaker 6 (24:39):
When it's open and when it's running.
Speaker 5 (24:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
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.
Speaker 6 (25:02):
So let's go off site for a second. Off site.
Speaker 5 (25:05):
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
(25:29):
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,
(25:51):
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
(26:12):
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
(26:33):
when the Obama Presidential Center opens in twenty twenty five,
there's going to be a intentional campaign to push visitors
into those businesses.
Speaker 6 (26:44):
Right.
Speaker 5 (26:44):
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
(27:07):
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
(27:29):
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
(27:51):
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
(28:16):
decision making of future development that happens around them.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
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
(28:42):
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
(29:03):
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
(29:24):
right by you this time.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
Help us, help us see some promise, some future, some
help our imaginations grow to believe that this is all possible.
Speaker 5 (29:33):
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.
(29:56):
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
(30:19):
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
(30:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (31:16):
All right, we'll be right back after the break.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
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
(31:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:27):
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
(32:51):
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.
Speaker 5 (33:12):
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
(33:32):
to ask me to explain anything. I didn't want to
go into rooms to heal.
Speaker 6 (33:41):
I didn't want to.
Speaker 5 (33:44):
And I didn't want to regurgitate a history that has
already been articulated.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
That's right, You're like, like, we didn't know what's going on.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Oh my gosh, yes, I get it.
Speaker 6 (33:56):
Yes, I didn't want to give you the biography.
Speaker 5 (34:00):
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
(34:22):
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
(34:47):
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
(35:09):
needed to escape to a future that black people controlled.
I needed to escape.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Futurism in a way.
Speaker 5 (35:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Okay, I love that.
Speaker 6 (35:41):
And it always makes the cheer up. Everyone is rooting
for me.
Speaker 5 (35:45):
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
(36:09):
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?
Speaker 2 (36:30):
Okay?
Speaker 5 (36:31):
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
(36:52):
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
(37:13):
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,
(37:34):
I saw men go to work and suit it. There
was very low unemployment when I.
Speaker 6 (37:40):
Was a kid.
Speaker 5 (37:40):
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
(38:01):
fifty two.
Speaker 6 (38:02):
Isn't that insane, right, Tony?
Speaker 2 (38:07):
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
(38:29):
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
(38:51):
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?
Speaker 5 (39:07):
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
(39:28):
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
(39:49):
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.
(40:11):
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
(40:34):
doing all of this fantastical shit that often black people
have to do just to prove that.
Speaker 6 (40:41):
They can do what the average person can do, right, so.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
That it is both literal and figurative.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
These boys, these young men, really can can do the
impossible by flying people.
Speaker 5 (40:52):
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.
(41:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
That the universe is speaking, yeah, oh yes.
Speaker 6 (41:35):
Thanks for speaking to me.
Speaker 5 (41:36):
And this moment of writer's block, these images emerged.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
And so these collages now at the Venice Biennale appeared
instead of a written essay in the Harvard magazine.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
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
(42:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
In the future.
Speaker 3 (42:29):
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
(42:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Life that whites have.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
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.
Speaker 6 (43:32):
I think they can look different.
Speaker 5 (43:34):
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
(43:57):
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,
(44:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
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
(44:52):
opening for you?
Speaker 5 (44:53):
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
(45:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
Need new tools, you need new tools.
Speaker 3 (45:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
That Center's black Life. It's just it's just uplifting.
Speaker 3 (45:54):
So thank you so much, cousin Tony for joining us today.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
We love you, guys.
Speaker 5 (46:00):
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
(46:23):
the game because we need the fight.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
Yeah, right on, Tony, see you at the next family reunion.
Speaker 6 (46:29):
We need to like sync that up for real.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
We'll figure it out.
Speaker 6 (46:33):
Yeah, you'll figure.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
Oh, I didn't know about this. This was for that
story you wrote years ago.
Speaker 2 (46:55):
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
(47:17):
all this time later, you know, trying to make these
inroads and doing it here in.
Speaker 3 (47:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Man, this was in Bristol, Tennessee, exactly, Tennessee.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Now that has worked. Now they're in Chicago exactly.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
Now, they're at the Sapple Museum. Listen, the world is changing.
Speaker 3 (47:39):
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.
(48:06):
So that's that's my goal.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (48:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
At Pushkin thanks to Leital Mollat, Julia Barton, Heather Fain,
Carly Migliori, John Schnarz, Retta Cone, and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at Pushkin Pods,
and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin
dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
And if you like our show, please give us a
five star rating and a review and listen. Even if
you don't like it, give it a five star rating
and a review, and please tell all of your best
friends about it. Thank you,
Pushing it. I'm Khalil Jabron Muhammad.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I'm Ben Austin. We are two best friends, one black,
one white.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is
some of my best friends.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Are some of my best friends? Are some of my
best friends? Are you?
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Khalil?
Speaker 2 (00:46):
On this show, we wrestle with the challenges and the
absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
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
(01:37):
re envision cities in America.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Yes, we're talking about the future, folks, that still a.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Future is now the future is now so Tony. Thank
(02:06):
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
(02:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
My uncle Willy. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Like it turned out that we were related through marriage.
Speaker 5 (02:56):
We're like cousins, sort of cousins by marriage.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
I love that.
Speaker 6 (03:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Because he's so tall.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
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
(03:42):
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
(04:02):
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?
Speaker 5 (04:19):
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
(04:40):
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
(05:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
The Renaissance is a hotel, I'm not a Renaissance center.
Speaker 5 (05:17):
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
(05:42):
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
(06:04):
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
(06:26):
designing the city. And it was the first time I
realized the makers of cities.
Speaker 6 (06:31):
Are not just architects.
Speaker 5 (06:33):
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
(06:53):
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.
(07:14):
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,
(07:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
This is about a decade ago, right, this.
Speaker 6 (07:53):
Is this is ten years exactly.
Speaker 5 (07:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
That's down from two million at its peak.
Speaker 6 (08:15):
That's right, one point eight at its peak.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Then I wanted to ask you. You wrote this amazing
New York Times magazine piece.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Really proud of you.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
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
(08:45):
you seeing happening?
Speaker 2 (08:46):
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
(09:07):
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
(09:28):
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,
(09:49):
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.
Speaker 5 (10:09):
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
(10:30):
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
(10:51):
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
(11:15):
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
(11:35):
showing up.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
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.
Speaker 5 (11:46):
Yeah yeah, So we had really had to lean into well,
what is Detroit's new economy?
Speaker 6 (11:53):
What does the new neighborhood need to look like?
Speaker 5 (11:55):
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
(12:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
So what does that mean to sort of change the
actual sort of infrastructure and think about land reclaiming a
lot of the city.
Speaker 5 (12:48):
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
(13:10):
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
(13:33):
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
(13:53):
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
(14:16):
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
(14:38):
city such that maybe in fifty years it becomes the
place where we all want to migrate to because it
has been climate adapted.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Asphalt place.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
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.
(15:23):
So we'll come back and we're going to talk about
some other places and what's going on there.
Speaker 7 (15:28):
We'll be right back after the break.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Didn't take us long to get to Chicago.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Was this a stunt or were people going one hundred
miles an hour on these.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Streets two hundred miles an hour?
Speaker 3 (16:41):
You're lying, I didn't see any of this. That sounds bananas.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
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,
(17:07):
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
(17:28):
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
(17:50):
to these neighborhoods far from downtown. Come on, I'm not
buying it.
Speaker 5 (17:54):
Yeah, well, just to touch on NASCAR for a second,
I mean, it's totally bizarre.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
I can't get over it either. I'm still like what
the hell.
Speaker 6 (18:04):
Like what?
Speaker 5 (18:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
I mean it was it was an advertisement for NASCAR
and an advertisement at least Chicago, at least as it
exists as downtown Chicago.
Speaker 6 (18:20):
Yeah, and you know, and I guess that.
Speaker 5 (18:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Well, now they had Bubba Wallace out there, the black.
Speaker 6 (18:43):
NASCAR sponsify Bubba. So there you go.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
There you go, all right, Bubba, good good work, Bubba.
Speaker 5 (18:49):
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?
(19:12):
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
(19:33):
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
(19:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
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.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
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
(20:52):
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
(21:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
Yeah, you mean, like the taxes are going up, maintenance
costs go up, and the house becomes unaffordable.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
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
(21:56):
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,
(22:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
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,
(23:01):
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,
(23:25):
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?
Speaker 5 (23:43):
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
(24:06):
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.
Speaker 6 (24:25):
For example, no.
Speaker 5 (24:28):
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.
Speaker 6 (24:39):
When it's open and when it's running.
Speaker 5 (24:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
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.
Speaker 6 (25:02):
So let's go off site for a second. Off site.
Speaker 5 (25:05):
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
(25:29):
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,
(25:51):
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
(26:12):
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
(26:33):
when the Obama Presidential Center opens in twenty twenty five,
there's going to be a intentional campaign to push visitors
into those businesses.
Speaker 6 (26:44):
Right.
Speaker 5 (26:44):
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
(27:07):
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
(27:29):
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
(27:51):
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
(28:16):
decision making of future development that happens around them.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
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
(28:42):
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
(29:03):
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
(29:24):
right by you this time.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
Help us, help us see some promise, some future, some
help our imaginations grow to believe that this is all possible.
Speaker 5 (29:33):
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.
(29:56):
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
(30:19):
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
(30:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (31:16):
All right, we'll be right back after the break.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
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
(31:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:27):
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
(32:51):
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.
Speaker 5 (33:12):
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
(33:32):
to ask me to explain anything. I didn't want to
go into rooms to heal.
Speaker 6 (33:41):
I didn't want to.
Speaker 5 (33:44):
And I didn't want to regurgitate a history that has
already been articulated.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
That's right, You're like, like, we didn't know what's going on.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Oh my gosh, yes, I get it.
Speaker 6 (33:56):
Yes, I didn't want to give you the biography.
Speaker 5 (34:00):
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
(34:22):
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
(34:47):
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
(35:09):
needed to escape to a future that black people controlled.
I needed to escape.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Futurism in a way.
Speaker 5 (35:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Okay, I love that.
Speaker 6 (35:41):
And it always makes the cheer up. Everyone is rooting
for me.
Speaker 5 (35:45):
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
(36:09):
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?
Speaker 2 (36:30):
Okay?
Speaker 5 (36:31):
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
(36:52):
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
(37:13):
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,
(37:34):
I saw men go to work and suit it. There
was very low unemployment when I.
Speaker 6 (37:40):
Was a kid.
Speaker 5 (37:40):
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
(38:01):
fifty two.
Speaker 6 (38:02):
Isn't that insane, right, Tony?
Speaker 2 (38:07):
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
(38:29):
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
(38:51):
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?
Speaker 5 (39:07):
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
(39:28):
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
(39:49):
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.
(40:11):
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
(40:34):
doing all of this fantastical shit that often black people
have to do just to prove that.
Speaker 6 (40:41):
They can do what the average person can do, right, so.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
That it is both literal and figurative.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
These boys, these young men, really can can do the
impossible by flying people.
Speaker 5 (40:52):
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.
(41:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
That the universe is speaking, yeah, oh yes.
Speaker 6 (41:35):
Thanks for speaking to me.
Speaker 5 (41:36):
And this moment of writer's block, these images emerged.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
And so these collages now at the Venice Biennale appeared
instead of a written essay in the Harvard magazine.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
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
(42:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
In the future.
Speaker 3 (42:29):
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
(42:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Life that whites have.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
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.
Speaker 6 (43:32):
I think they can look different.
Speaker 5 (43:34):
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
(43:57):
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,
(44:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
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
(44:52):
opening for you?
Speaker 5 (44:53):
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
(45:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
Need new tools, you need new tools.
Speaker 3 (45:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
That Center's black Life. It's just it's just uplifting.
Speaker 3 (45:54):
So thank you so much, cousin Tony for joining us today.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
We love you, guys.
Speaker 5 (46:00):
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
(46:23):
the game because we need the fight.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
Yeah, right on, Tony, see you at the next family reunion.
Speaker 6 (46:29):
We need to like sync that up for real.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
We'll figure it out.
Speaker 6 (46:33):
Yeah, you'll figure.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
Oh, I didn't know about this. This was for that
story you wrote years ago.
Speaker 2 (46:55):
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
(47:17):
all this time later, you know, trying to make these
inroads and doing it here in.
Speaker 3 (47:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Man, this was in Bristol, Tennessee, exactly, Tennessee.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Now that has worked. Now they're in Chicago exactly.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
Now, they're at the Sapple Museum. Listen, the world is changing.
Speaker 3 (47:39):
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.
(48:06):
So that's that's my goal.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (48:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
At Pushkin thanks to Leital Mollat, Julia Barton, Heather Fain,
Carly Migliori, John Schnarz, Retta Cone, and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at Pushkin Pods,
and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin
dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
And if you like our show, please give us a
five star rating and a review and listen. Even if
you don't like it, give it a five star rating
and a review, and please tell all of your best
friends about it. Thank you,
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.