Hacking the Archive: The Quest for More Just Urban Futures with Karilyn Crockett

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0:00:08.8 Tom Lewellen: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Bar Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:41.9 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman, and together with my research assistant Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partners, Shareable and the Bar Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative, which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning, and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University Medford campus is located on colonized, Wampanoag, and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we’re delighted to host Dr. Karilyn Crockett. She’s a professor of urban history, public policy, and planning at MIT and currently leads the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce in partnership with the Boston Federal Reserve Bank to assess the regional racial wealth gap. Her research focuses on large scale land use changes in the 20th century in American cities, and examines the social and geographical implications of structural poverty, racial formations, and memory.

0:01:45.2 Julian Agyeman: Karilyn’s book include the excellent, and people, I mean, excellent. You need to read this book, People before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making published by UMass Press in 2018. And the Boston Public Library Association in 2019 named it as one of the 10 best books of the decade. She’s previously served in Boston City Government, first as Director of Economic Policy and research in Marty Walsh’s Office of Economic Development and later as the city of Boston’s first Chief of Equity, which was a cabinet level position. Karilyn’s talk today is Hacking the Archive, the quest for more just urban futures. Karilyn a Zoomtastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:02:33.8 Karilyn Crockett: Julian, thank you so much for such a lovely and warm introduction. I feel like I am in community at Tufts, even though I’m down the street on Mass Ave. So it’s really great to be here and really happy to just be in conversation and looking forward, especially to the chance to have some Q&A. So for today, I have already humbled myself into the title being, Hacking the Archive, a Quest and Not the Quest for more just urban Futures, assuming there are multiple ways to get here. But for today, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna share a few thoughts and reflections on work I’ve been doing since my last big research project, which you mentioned. Thank you for the shout out to the People Before Highways. That book really documented Boston’s 1960s era anti-war movement and all the things that we’ve learned since then.

0:03:20.9 Karilyn Crockett: And one of the findings for me from that work that I’ll be drawing on today is some of the many connections between the civil rights, Black Power student and anti-war movements, and the way that those movements become very spatialized and also become reformist in nature in terms of how they’re thinking about what’s going on in cities, what’s not happening in cities, and point some ways forward towards new kinds of plans. And so for me, the civil rights, the Black Power, and to war and student movements, particularly in this era between 1965 and 1969, are fundamentally urban movements and again, spatial. And so these movements began to catalyze national and local fights for a more inclusive practice of democracy for sure, but also are really critiquing this urban expression of democratic practice. And I’m arguing today a bit that the Civil Rights movement is offering also not just a stinging indictment of US law and its failures, but also failures are waging a critique of the failures of cities.

0:04:28.3 Karilyn Crockett: And so wanting to us to think about the ways that these kinds of promises, opportunities for thinking about grassroots, authored histories that were really bubbling up through the ’60s, give us a chance to think about alternative futures. So I’ll talk a little bit about how these movements are coming together. I’ll talk a little bit about some of the alternative futures that are being evoked and then spend some time sharing on some work that I had been working for through on this idea of Hacking the Archive, which is a project to bring intergenerational groups together to imagine what these histories, what these memories can mean for plans for today, but also far into the future. A through line here is also some attempts by me to reframe public and scholarly understanding of how macroeconomic wealth is generated and how household wealth is gained or extracted in that process.

0:05:27.2 Karilyn Crockett: So this larger kind of movement around changing space, changing macroeconomic agendas is also a through line here. So let’s look at it a little bit. And so for me the story of this highway fight and from the 1960s is really instructive and grounds us in a particular moment. We’re looking at on the screen this map of I-95, this highway that goes from Maine to Florida in a pretty much continuous stretch for 1300 miles. And then next to that map is an insert of looking at this highway that was proposed for Boston. This loop that you see before you was really running its way through Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville, and meant to suggest a kind of expansion of I-95 into the urban fabric of the greater Boston region. And so spoiler alert, this road was never built.

0:06:24.6 Karilyn Crockett: It was defeated by grassroots organizing and a very powerful series of campaigns that began in the ’60s, stopped the road in the ’70s, and then bring us to this glorious new mass transit future in the ’80s and beyond. But what we’re looking at here is a set of converging ideas, a set of converging moments of activism, but also a real contest and conflict between local and national visions of the future. So wanting to take our attention to the map itself. And so what before you is this articulation of this 1940s vision of what the interstates expansion would look like into Boston. And so the dotted lines in many ways suggest the state of Massachusetts and the federal vision of interstate highways really nestled into the middle of urban region but in this way very much connecting, as we can see meant to connect Boston. Boston. You can see there Brookline, Somerville.

0:07:36.8 Karilyn Crockett: And so the inner belt imagined as a hub and spoke construction that was really going to connect. So the state imagining this as something that’s bringing a connection, connecting capital, connecting people, particularly white suburban car owners from the suburbs who are hoped to be drawn back into the city to shop and to work. If you’re living on the ground at this time in the ’50s and then certainly in the ’60s when this planning gets heated up, you are not seeing connectivity. You are seeing a map of disconnection, a map of erasure, a map of displacement, also looking at a moment of tremendous change. Again in the 1960s Boston is beginning to lose population, but also is changing it’s macroeconomic plan from something that’s focused on an industrial manufacturing story to something that’s looking forward into services, into finance, into insurance, into healthcare.

0:08:35.3 Karilyn Crockett: And so this proposal of the highway is also giving the city a way to in some ways reorganize itself and its functions toward that new service-based economy. And so for residents, again, this is not a story of connection, it is a story of disconnection. And then we also see these dotted lines. So the dotted lines are offering us the proposed plan, but in many ways, they also represent fault lines for activism. And so every place that you see a dotted line represents a road that was proposed but defeated by on the ground activism. And so this map is showing us a bit of a strategizing focus for resistance and organizing that would really begin in 1964 and ’65 as residents in Cambridge began to mobilize around saying No, and then their folks across the river in Boston would join suit.

0:09:29.5 Karilyn Crockett: The map is another vision on top of that. For us it’s also giving us a sense of the spatial architecture, I would say for our fossil fuel driven future. And so as an expression of modernist planning, this road, this proposed vision for the future was really imagining automobility as an essential part of the urban fabric of the Boston region. And so I’m asking you to hold multiple visions of this map at once again, the state federal government imagining connectivity, people on the ground seeing tea leaves for themselves that are articulating displacement, erasure, and then also a call to action for folks to mobilize around and defeat a modernist vision of a city that did not include them and prioritize cars. So all of that is there and would absolutely bubble up into a huge urban social movement. And so this is an image of folks protesting the road.

0:10:34.5 Karilyn Crockett: It’s January 25th, 1969, when all of folks from across all of this region come together to the Massachusetts State House to let the governor know that they do not support this road. They do not support this vision of what the future of the city could be. And so from their signs and from just the people assembled, you can note a mass coalition of students from all over, from Cambridge, certainly residents and moms who were really involved in this, some older chain smoking moms and grandmas that are there, some clergy, some residents from the neighborhoods, all converging in this social movement to say, “No, absolutely not. We reject it.” And so what is phenomenal about thinking about this particular time is again, the way that not only are you having a rejection of this road in 1969, but you’re also converging on or renewal, and people really aren’t saying, we don’t want these kinds of changes in our neighborhoods.

0:11:36.6 Karilyn Crockett: The student movement, the Civil War, I’m sorry, the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and all of these actors co-mingling and thinking about what’s happening across the country in cities like LA and Watts, which this is an image from Watts. There are all of these eruptions that were also noting at the same time, insurrections happening in previously in Rochester. We know there are uprisings there, there are uprisings in Chicago. We know about the Detroit uprisings here in Watts, a very fiery a set of protests and rejections of the modernist city ideal. That’s also being articulated based on the arrest of a young man, Marquette Frye, a 21-year-old black man who had failed a sobriety test. He pulled over by police and got really nervous and in the encounter and started to resist, and started to just get concerned about his wellbeing, and his brother and it escalates very quickly into what would be known as the Watts uprising. And historically, we know that this is significant, not just because of the six days of rioting that resulted in the deaths. Many deaths, about 34 deaths happened, an incredible amount of property damage and injury. What a lot of conversation between Los Angeles police, local elected officials and people talking about what is the state of LA, what is the state of Watts in this moment? 

0:13:12.0 Karilyn Crockett: We know that this is information that traveled across the country a few days later. Martin Luther King, you see here is sitting in Birmingham reading about the Watts uprising. This would actually be essential for King’s decision to move so much of the civil rights organizing that had been happening in the South to move it West. Six days later, he would show up in Watts and make the decision that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference would need to really take a larger account for what’s happening, not just in the South, but for in the North, and certainly in on the West coast in Watts.

0:13:55.3 Karilyn Crockett: And so incredible how this protesting this critique of what’s happening in cities and not just around police encounters or police brutality, but this larger critique of the city is pushing forward into civil rights organizing, civil rights strategizing, and affecting Martin Luther King’s strategic decisions himself. Going back in time again now to thinking about this moment in Boston where the folks are coming together to protest the highway, it’s significant for us that just a few months later, Dr. King, previously Dr. King was assassinated. A few months prior, people would show up on the same steps of the State House to have a silent vigil, to say that they’re protesting the fact that, that his appeals, that the civil rights vision of racial integration and nonviolent civil disobedience cannot be the only strategy for thinking about what a new generation needs.

0:14:56.6 Karilyn Crockett: But you see there on your left, this articulation of black is beautiful by a more militant or a group of organizers and activists who were speaking to the state just a few months later is when protestors would show up again on the state, on the steps of the State House to proclaim that they reject this highway that we’ve been talking about and also want to raise up this conversation specifically about community control. Community control, as it’s an articulation of a Black Power movement, similar to black is beautiful, really thinking about space, thinking about what is possible on the ground, not an appeal to racial integration, but an appeal to what the modernist city can be, not including highways, but thinking about local demands for what community control and new kinds of visions of the city might be.

0:15:51.9 Karilyn Crockett: And then in the wake of this very consequential reorganization of the Civil Rights movement, reorganization of what Civil rights exactly is demanding as expressed through the poor people’s movement, which is certainly something that we know many of us know, that the Poor People’s movement was something that Dr. King was working on right before he was assassinated. And so the decision for organizers, including Ralph Abernathy to move forward with the Poor People’s movement converging on Washington DC in May of 1968, just a few weeks after Dr. King’s death and presenting this vision of Resurrection City, an incredible encampment, an incredible opportunity to express a set of demands to Congress and executive branch of the government demanding a $12 billion economic bill of rights, hoping to guarantee employment for those who are able to work and to secure income for people not able to work. 3000 dwellings were built on the mall.

0:16:57.8 Karilyn Crockett: There, you see the monument in the distance, and a set of buildings that included community buildings, a city hall, medical facilities and a dining hall. And so an entire city was imagined as a staging ground for folks who were assembled from all over the country to protest daily over about five weeks, and to again make these appeals and this advocacy for an economic bill of rights. And so a very powerful opportunity for us to see again that the way that civil rights was being articulated, not just as a reform of a set of laws, also thinking about the economic and material reality of that, but as a spatial articulation of what even a future city could be or a recovered city, a rehabilitated city, a resurrected city as rendered here. A powerful story and a powerful statement in a moment of, again, incredible change and even grieving as a nation thinks about its future in the wake of Dr. King’s death, but the movement presses its way forward.

0:18:09.3 Karilyn Crockett: And so these kinds of relationships between multiple organizers, multiple movements are moving back and forth through these stories in some of the research that I was able to uncover. I was able to talk to Chuck Turner, a local leader in Boston, former city counselor and beloved organizer, someone who was a leader in the anti highway movement, but also has a really important role in an organization called The Black United Front, which would be essential for helping the Boston Anti Highway movement find its footing and ground on the other side of Dr. King’s assassination, which becomes a really important political marker.

0:18:46.1 Karilyn Crockett: Here, Chuck Turner is talking a little bit about his relationship with Stokely Carmichael. It turns out that the two of these leaders had developed a bit of a friendship based on some voter registration work that they were doing in Selma that Turner is pointing to here. Turner and Carmichael developed this relationship that helps them think about some strategizing they’re doing in the South, but is really expressed through a mobilization that Turner would lead in the North in Boston. And so here, he is essentially, Stokely Carmichael is telling Chuck Turner that he needs to think about organizing people in a different way, creating an umbrella organization and bringing that back to Boston as a way to shore up some of the civil rights organizing that is happening on the ground. There had been several leaders who’ve been meeting more in an underground sort of secret way prior to Dr. King’s assassination.

0:19:45.5 Karilyn Crockett: When Dr. King is assassinated, this is when this Black United Front, an underground organization would emerge. Chuck Turner here is important for us because he was leading at the time, quite a bit of the anti-highway organizing in Boston. And he also is leading, begins to lead this group, an underground organization that will become above ground, the Black United Front. Here, Stokely is giving him some guidance on what this organization could be and should be. And so for me, it’s instructive of the kinds of ways that these multiple geographies, North and South, these multiple movements, the anti-highway movement, the Black Power movement as expressed through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee become linked and webbed. And that would be consequential for what’s happening in terms of the articulation of the revitalization of the city of Boston, and even the stopping of this highway. And so here are some of the demands that were released following the conversation between Chuck and Stokely. And for us here, it’s really the demand number 19, which I like to bring attention to that talks about stopping this road and what that would mean for the Black community in Boston.

0:20:57.6 Karilyn Crockett: So here again, you see some of the demands around schools, around parks and recreation, a very clear material critique, but articulation of what this new kind of more radical Black politics would look like, the other side of Dr. King’s assassination, but also making this foray into space and planning. And so here is where the work of Hacking the Archive, which is the project or research and action project I’ve been leading, takes its cue from thinking about the ways that these movements in the 1960s were really giving us not only a critique of space and movements, but often a different kind of embodied and lived knowledge, and also thinking about other ways to imagine the future. Hacking the Archive is articulated as a kind of method, a way of bringing groups of people together to consider the past, particularly the past 50 years of community mobilizing and organizing history, a mode of knowing that’s also paying attention to the materiality of archival traces through ephemera, through stories, through embodied materials, but also through paper, through photographs. What can we do to understand all of these different kinds of stories that are giving us a way to imagine what alternative futures could be? 

0:22:16.0 Karilyn Crockett: And so one of the first things that we did is we thought a lot about this anti-highway work, and we tried to think about ways of bringing people together, people who were actually involved in the anti-highway movement in Boston in particular, and bringing some of those movement makers back, in fact, to the scene of the crime, to the Massachusetts Statehouse 50 years later in 2019. And so what you have before you are images of these activists and organizers who are having an opportunity to re-enter the Statehouse and reflect. And on this day, on this anniversary day, we were able to just have an opportunity to think about not only what happened, and in many ways certainly a success story of organizers coming from multiple different movements, from the student movement, from the civil rights movement, from the Black Power movement, again, folks also drawing from the women’s movement into this conversation about this road and asking them, what could you see for the future? What are your wishes for the region or your wishes for this idea of intergenerational movement making? 

0:23:23.1 Karilyn Crockett: And a lot of what folks shared was the desire to repair these plans, think about what it means to take seriously the damage that’s been caused often by urban transformation and planning. And so we call out the fragmentation of social networks and the need to bring cross-generational movement makers and knowledge together, and to think about the rewriting of those urban planning’s history from the perspective of folks who were engaged there. We also call out the archive, the archive itself from institutional archives, specifically as sites of containment, erasure, and exclusion, and the need to be able to have an intentional effort to bring activist histories and stories together. And we really also, through this work, want to disrupt many of the knowledge hierarchies that exist within the archive. The idea of ephemera that many of you may know, ephemera as buttons, as flyers, as t-shirts, these are really important kinds of materials for being able to document and tell movement stories.

0:24:25.9 Karilyn Crockett: In the archive and in the Library of Congress’s classification systems, ephemera is something that sort of, these are items that tend to exist at the bottom of the epistemological food chain, and so how can we re-center the meaning and the necessity of ephemera as we really work to document stories that are undocumented and often go missing. And so the offering here is an approach that will allow us to think through collective memory, and how collective memory can be the basis for social research that is really driven into thinking about things in a local way, local knowledge. How do we think about a new form of planning? How do we think about actually reparative archiving? So realizing the colonial nature and extractive nature of many kinds of archives, can we offer social movements and their embodied knowledges as a way to repair what we’re finding in the archive? And using that approach by bringing people together through hacking, through accelerating knowledge sharing, and problem solving.

0:25:31.7 Karilyn Crockett: And a few of my next slides will talk to you a little bit about that, and the way that we use co-design, which actually is not showing up on this slide, but co-design as the way to really bring out the actionable opportunities for designing new kinds of plans, for bringing people together across generations, residents, activists, students, educators, and everyday folks that just really want to ask the question. So for the last couple years, we have brought together about 30 different partners from across the city. On the right-hand side, you can see that some of the universities that are engaged here, very grateful to my department here, and DUSP, and the School of Architecture and Planning, as well as MIT Libraries, that have been really instrumental in anchoring the work, as we’ve been able to reach out to multiple universities and have them in partnership to help us support many community-based groups and faith-based organizations that are on your left-hand side, who are trying to think through. Again, what are these past stories, what are these past mobilization efforts that can help communities think about addressing how to close the racial wealth gap, but also think through economic mobility on the ground.

0:26:47.3 Karilyn Crockett: So we’ve been focusing, last year we focused on housing, this year we focused on education, and next year we focused on jobs and entrepreneurship, bringing people together, asking them what are their questions related to understanding housing as a pathway to wealth building, housing as a way to understand some of what have been very predatory processes from banks and even the federal government to actually hollow out wealth in community. So by bringing people together to ask these questions, we’ve been able to reveal new kinds of strategies and opportunities for research, but also action. We’ve also tried to make sure to include young people. This is Zoe, a high school student who spent her Hacking the Archives summer thinking through, again, housing approaches to work. This is Zoe, who’s preparing to do a podcast with longtime housing, community organizer Lew Finfer, and Zoe was able to use her interview with Lew and some of her work in the archive to make a zine, which was then shared. And so some of the work with young people has been really helpful for us to make our way of building audiences for the Hackathon.

0:27:53.0 Karilyn Crockett: This is another event from this past year where we focused on education, where high school students were invited by some of their teachers, guidance counselors, some were recommended by their parents to come to MIT for a day of learning about their freedom school stay-out movement. And for those of you that are familiar with the desegregation history of Boston’s parents and organizers who were fighting for racial integration, freedom stay-outs were a day, a few days, but a day on February 26th where 10,000 students stayed out of school and in 35 different locations all over the city were able to give their own curriculums of what they felt like should be going on in school. Instead of the political battles that they were experiencing, what they wrote their own curriculum with their own teachers and sometimes teaching themselves what would they offer.

0:28:48.1 Karilyn Crockett: And so this is… There was an image, a large image of the day and we use that as an opportunity to blow up the image, to cut it up, to allow high school students to put the image together as a way of starting to have a conversation about what was happening in schools across the city in 1964 and what that means for them today. So these kinds of engagement opportunities, again, building audiences around reclaiming histories, but also helping us move our way toward the hackathon. Some people do ask, why a hackathon? And what is it about this kind of activity that can be useful for educational purposes? You all know that I’m at MIT, there are hackathons that happen all the time, but it is unusual to think about a hackathon as a way to approach the archive. And so it is a fast pace approach to problem solving. We like the fact that it prioritizes this kind of sharing, but it also eschews hierarchies around who gets to make decisions about solutions or who gets to participate or lead a discussion. And so we think about this as a way to allow cross-generational sharing that’s centered on the archive, but really focused on the future and future plannings.

0:30:00.2 Karilyn Crockett: And so the way that it works for us is typically an organization will work for three or four months with myself and some grad students to come up with one research question. Here, you can see these are questions that were focused on our housing hackathon, where the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, Teen Empowerment, the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, for example, all of these organizations share one question, which you can hear and which you can see on the slide. Those questions become the center point for the hackathon. And then we invite the public to come. We organize them into teams and they get to spend a day, essentially a Saturday for eight hours, really attacking the question. We give them archival materials. You can see a couple of teams here. They’ll meet up in the morning. They start to brainstorm right away based on some of the conversations around the questions and the materials around what a response could be to give back to a community leader.

0:30:56.6 Karilyn Crockett: By the end of the day, as you can see on the right, teams are then invited back to pitch to a panel of judges who are community members, who will evaluate the pitch based on the ability of the team to integrate the archive, the ability of the team to address the question, the ability of the team to use an intergenerational approach that’s future focused. And then folks are awarded prizes. But the real prize, we hope, is the idea that an executive director or an organization now has a plan that has some legs on it and has some footing based on social memory and archival research. Here’s an example just really quickly to give you a flavor of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization’s question from 2003, where they’re trying to interrogate this understanding of home ownership and whether or not these kinds of strategies can be used to help keep money in the neighborhood. We massaged the question a little bit so that they were able to think about whether or not it was a question of home ownership, if that was the way to think through building economic strength and shared financial benefits in a neighborhood. And their team spent some time looking at all kinds of spreadsheets. You can’t see this. It’s okay. Just to give you a sense of what’s happening in the back.

0:32:16.0 Karilyn Crockett: Lots of crowds doing research. We have a panel of archivists from a bunch of the schools that you’ve seen, including Northeastern and BU and Harvard and MIT, who are creating documents that are helping to respond to the question. So they’re creating spreadsheets that are actually populated with existing documents from archives. Those things are then shared with the team. This was a part of the materials that were shared with the GBIO team, which was showing them efforts by organizers and actually residents in Lowell who are working really hard to try to save the Julian Steele housing complex. This housing complex, which many folks lived in, was slated for demolition and residents were trying to save it and trying to think about collective strategies of not only saving the building, but potentially co-owning it through a co-op. And so this was some of the materials that were shared with the team. They also looked at information related to… Sorry, let’s say the Roxbury homeowners program that was showing the way that homeowners in Roxbury in the ’80s were trying to create their own programs as a way to address some predatory lending practices that were prevalent in the community.

0:33:30.5 Karilyn Crockett: So again, these are examples of things and ways that the GBIO team is moving its way through the archive to answer the question of the organization around homeownership. And in the end, the team, which is shown here, they were the second prize winners for that day. And then they basically decided to decenter homeownership as a way for thinking about neighborhood stabilization. And they were pushing the GBIO to consider conversations around land trusts, around limited equity, housing cooperatives as a way to put on top of a plan around homeownership that they felt like would provide the GBIO and its 1,300 members a way to push forward and strategically through their, basically their citywide housing campaign that many of you may be familiar with.

0:34:25.1 Karilyn Crockett: So a very intense day is what the hackathon offers for a team of people to come together to be in service to a set of questions that the community has from some of the content here in my showing of the spreadsheets. You can see the way that archival partners and archivists who are at the table are feeding content to a team who may or may not be housing specialists, probably not, who may or may not be research specialists, probably not, but it’s a way to allow the community to get up to speed really quickly to think quite a lot about the future. And so some of what we’re doing and trying to move our way through the information, we’re trying to move through themes and understanding the ways that particular kinds of battles, rather on housing or economic justice and education, become rooted through multiple, not only activists and actors, but also are connecting webs of organizations.

0:35:25.6 Karilyn Crockett: Here is just showing some of the organizations that we had worked with initially from the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, the Boston Ujima Project. There was a filmmaker who was working on a film around telling the stories of Chuck Turner and Mel King, who were both alive and well when this work began. And we really pause and are grateful for all of their work now that they join us as ancestors here. But there’s a way to map some of these relationships. On the left there is Ruth Batson, of course, who is so seminal to education justice organizing in the city. So all of this content and stories are things that have been surfaced through these hackathons and surfaced through us really interrogating what 1960s era struggles have meant for articulating future plans of the city. And so a lot of what we’re trying to do is to show the relationships between multiple movements and multiple people. And the vision is to be able to turn this into an archive that we will be able to share back to the public on the other side of this last hackathon round, which will be this coming May.

0:36:36.4 Karilyn Crockett: There’s a lot that’s here, but I think that what I’m trying to offer is a reframing of how we understand civil rights organizing, and certainly many of the student movements that are linked, and not just understanding them as fights for democracy or law in a sort of an abstract notion. But when you bring that down to the ground to think about very particular sets of demands that are being made on cities, that are being made on planners, and how these movements actually inform new kinds of plans, some plans which were not fully expressed, which are hinted at through something like a resurrection city, or that we could take note of in terms of the reforms that are made in terms of highway planning, or even police action and police brutality.

0:37:25.7 Karilyn Crockett: But there’s something that these movements are telling us and informing us about how we should be proceeding and thinking about sharing space and creating it. So through Hacking the Archive, we are inviting community into a full-blown new partnership to think about a new mode of planning that can absolutely be informed by social memory and a collective yearning for something that’s quite different from what was imagined in terms of modernist yearning for automobility, modernist yearning for fossil fuel future, and modernist yearning for a doubling down of a deadly form of racial segregation, but also wealth extraction. And so with that, I just lift up that we have been able to create a course around Hacking the Archive, which I am in the midst of offering. It’s been really exciting to bring students into the classroom now, not just in the hackathon, but in the classroom to think about some of this work or the courses now being offered.

0:38:26.0 Karilyn Crockett: I’m co-teaching with, textile Artist, the Merchant Frayer. You can see her work front and center there, and really exploring the way that textiles are also a way of gathering and sharing knowledge and information. And these are some of the partners that are along the edges there. We can talk about that, but really happy to have a chance to be in conversation and to share some of these thoughts with you. Thank you.

0:38:50.1 Julian Agyeman: Thank you so much, Karilyn. That was fascinating. And, did you ask us to be part of that, academic grouping? 

0:39:01.1 Karilyn Crockett: I was so hoping you would say that, Julian, I would love to be in partnership with Tufts and to debate. Have a chance to work with you. So let’s talk about it. Love it.

0:39:08.5 Julian Agyeman: Let’s do it. Absolutely. Okay. So let me start with a question, and it’s one that I’ve had since reading your book, but I’ve also thought about it a lot. Look, I study social movements and I’ve, at the time of the highways movement, there was the largely white environmental movement and the largely people of color environmental justice movement, yet distinctively in those pictures of the highway protests, this was a multiracial interracial movement. Why was that? 

0:39:41.0 Karilyn Crockett: I think again, because it was cutting across so many of the issues of every day and the moment that the highway activists and organizers, folks like Fred Salvucci and Tony Lee decided to draw maps that showed, where the road would hit. It showed specifically not just this kind of spaghetti line, floating in space, but said, no, this is gonna cross Brookline Street. This is gonna cross Vassar. All of a sudden residents realized that that meant their house or their school or their job. And so it’s interesting to me how this map making and the reality of where it would specifically hit starts to electrify people. And then people were having these meetings and conversations in basements, in homes on the street, and over time, and as I’m mentioning, there are so many movements that are happening at this exact same moment, Civil Rights movement, the student movement, and people got the word and started coming together separately, and then together, your right to note a multi0-racial, multi-class, multi-generational movement that was really bringing people from all of these different corners and all of these other social movements that by 1969 had been full-blown and in some ways start fracturing.

0:41:00.0 Julian Agyeman: Thank you. There’s a statement from Billy Smith here, but I wanna read it to you because I’d just like to get your take on it. Billy says, remember that archiving is a political process as well. After the Ferguson protest, the organizers were killed over the next two to three years, and the 80-year-old curator of the Black History Museum was murdered as she’d been one of the inspirations behind their protests. What’s your thoughts on that? 

0:41:27.2 Karilyn Crockett: That is news here. I did not know that particular story and then understand what was happening in Ferguson, but absolutely the act of archiving is a political act and quite frankly, often an imperial and colonial act. So the question for us is how do you read against the grain of the archive to create or actually to be able to identify and gather information that is of use to communities that are living, and organizing right now. So much of what Hacking the Archive is about is a critique, but also, equipping communities with data and information to sustain and maintain life. Today, ou have to enter it with that critique. It’s terrifying to think that could be something that could cost you your very life. But it, if anything, it raises the stakes even more so for why, the work is important for all of us, to be engaged in.

0:42:26.6 Julian Agyeman: Great. Thanks. Lee Anderson says, I’ve been researching the Frank Lynch Free People’s Clinic at Northeastern. And a question I’m wondering about right now, what does it mean to work on restoring, repairing connection in a system that many see as being beyond repair? 

0:42:44.0 Karilyn Crockett: Absolutely. I think for some of the archivists that we work with, the notion of radical archiving is something I didn’t know anything about is a thing for archivists who are our partners at institutions. I’m thinking like Giordana Mecagni at Northeastern University, Claudia Fridel at Boston University archivists who recognize that it is too important to think about saving these stories and making a way to do that. It’s too important to let that just sit. You can’t just throw up your hands. You have to think about ways to hold archiving accountable as white supremacist tools and also make space for them to be liberatory for communities that have these archives. We all have photographs, papers, letters in our own homes. So it’s not just the domain of, an institutional archive or a university. How do we think about what we save and how can we make sure that not only the materials that we’re saving, but the stories, the information gets passed on. And so for us, this is a conversation that has to do with circulation. And a a way to really open up how do we think very deliberately about sharing stories that promote life sharing stories that are very much waged on the price and limitation of democracy. How do you make that a real thing? And I don’t think it’s okay just to leave that on the table for someone else to figure out where for so many of us, again, the stakes are too high.

0:44:21.5 Julian Agyeman: Thank you. Eddy Voltaire says, in your work, do you envisage, or envision the archive as a means of preserving these histories due to urbanization and erasure of spaces and the physical body? And who owns these databases, where these archives live, and how can they be tapped into inform future political and urban development? 

0:44:43.3 Karilyn Crockett: Sure. I think it’s important to note that the work and the research that we’ve been doing through Hacking the Archive are based on, and I shared those briefly questions that have been articulated by community, by residents, by local leaders, by grassroots activists. That becomes important for understanding how, what we’re responding to and what’s being determined for the topic of research, but also to be saved. And so for right now, the idea is that the work is shared with the archive that we are building is a post custodial archive. And so there is no ownership of the information, but it’s information that often that most of which is already in the public domain. And so we’re not gathering new things to package and do something else with, but recognizing some materials that are already available, making them more available. But honestly, a big part of this work has been revealing, at least our partners have set in terms of an organization.

0:45:44.7 Karilyn Crockett: For example, METCO or even Reverend Ron Bell has talked to us about Dunk the Vote where he says, “I never even thought about the materials that we have been gathering for more than 20 years as archival materials.” And so there’s something to be said for organizations that have been doing the work day in and day out for years to understand that their newsletters, their photos, their minutes, their flyers are very important information. And so that is a part of what we’re bringing, what we hope to bring into the conversation as well. Because as we’re looking tactically for not only things to research, but actions to take, many organizations that are in business right now may be surprised and delighted to realize that what they actually have in house can be further anchoring their work.

0:46:33.3 Julian Agyeman: Okay, thank you. Alex says, if the road proposal had been for a large rapid transit line instead, do you think that the resistance would’ve been different? 

0:46:47.5 Karilyn Crockett: I wonder about, I do think it would’ve been different. I think the challenge that people had was there were, there was no means, there was no federal money for mass transit up until, 1973. And part of the inner belt, at least one of the renderings, did show an eight to 10 lane highway that’s coming down through Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. And there’s a train in the middle, not unlike the big road that comes right into downtown Chicago, right? You have a highway and there’s a train on it. So in some articulations of this plan, there is this inclusion of mass transit. The problem is scale. As in 1956, when Eisenhower signs off on the Federal Aid Highway Act, it would allow for 90% funding of any new highways. There was no equivalent funding for mass transit. In fact, it’s a result of the Boston anti highway movement that folks after sergeant cancels the road in 1972, folks, he commits to lobbying Congress.

0:47:49.9 Karilyn Crockett: And so folks from here get on a caravan, go with Sergeant Lobby Congress, and it leads to the 1973 Federal Aid Highway Act, which is the first federal legislation that would make available public dollars for mass transit. So I appreciate the question, and it’s prophetic in the sense that once mass transit becomes available, it changes really the layout of the city here. But it also creates transformation all over the country where for the first time, governors and state highway departments can cancel highways and essentially now get federal funding to create mass transit. And so we benefit, we got a new orange line, we got expansion of the red line to Alewife and then to Braintree. I live on the red line, so I’m happy to say that it is now working again, this week. But those investments were really important for us in the ’70s and ’80s here. But the mass transit fight is a fight that continues, but we should be proud of ourselves of what we were able to put on the map in terms of funding for that.

0:48:58.6 Julian Agyeman: I’m glad you specified the, red line is working this week. I thought you were gonna take this hour or a little bit more precise.

0:49:04.8 Karilyn Crockett: There’s a struggle, but it’s the right idea.

0:49:06.0 Julian Agyeman: Steve’s got a long but very pertinent question here. Steve, are you still around? 

0:49:10.9 Steve: Thank you very much. Great presentation. We’re in Cleveland. We’re seeing a trend towards, black suburbanization, which I think is the next great migration. This phenomenon is not widely studied. Black families seeking, economic prosperity are using the automobile pathways of the 1960s commuting on these routes to new jobs in our sprawling region. And I’m wondering if that phenomenon is occurring in the greater Boston area, and is this a topic of concern, something people are studying there? 

0:49:42.4 Karilyn Crockett: Yeah, thanks Steve. What’s interesting is this overall trend of people, more and more people expecting to live in cities and expecting to live in cities for more, if not all of their lifespans. And so nationally, we can talk about the shift to the majority of people moving to cities. When I was in the city of Boston, we were dealing with this all the time where on a previous generation, you’d talk about maybe you live in the city for a while when you’re in school or you’re working and then you expect to live in the suburb or surrounding area. And so what this has meant is more people in the city and then more competition over space and affordability and driving up the cost of housing as people who are being displaced are folks who are just balking at like most of us, about what it costs to live here.

0:50:38.8 Karilyn Crockett: And so that has racial implications, particularly as we think about the racial wealth gap and what it means to live in a country where the median, I think the median income is sitting around, let me just try to pull this. It goes like a 200, I think the US median income is what, $199,000 or so, right? And so about $250,000 is the median for white families. And then when you move into metropolitan areas like Boston that has a sticker shock in terms of who does not have that wealth for a black family, I think you’re looking at a median wealth of $24,000. So a 10x factor. So all of a sudden you can tell a racialized story around space in terms of who can afford what, and then who does then move out into suburbs. And if there is an older rail system, whether it’s through commuter rail or some kind of mass transit line that supports that, you have a better story to tell. We don’t have that great story to tell here. So you have a mismatch between opportunities, transportation and jobs, and that’s some of what you are actually describing, Steve. So I appreciate the question.

0:51:50.2 Steve: Thank you.

0:51:51.1 Julian Agyeman: We could go on, I’m sure a lot longer, but Karilyn, thank you so much for opening up the archive in so many different ways. It’s been eyeopening. Can we give Karilyn a Zoomtastic round of applause.

0:52:07.2 Karilyn Crockett: Thank you so much.0:52:08.9 Tom Lewellen: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video transcript and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities at Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable with support from the Bar Foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Aman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark By Cultivate Beats is our theme song. And the graph recording was created by Anke Dregnat. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones, and Candice Spivey. And the series is Co-produced and presented by me, Tom Lewellen. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others. So this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.