“I had a clear picture that all of the traditions about neighborhood planning and neighborhood design…” -Carl Anthony, “Book Launch: The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race”
In Episode 4, Molly Esteve describes the life and work of the architect and environmental justice advocate Carl Anthony. Using Anthony’s own words and commentary from Jah Sayers, the episode demonstrates how the Black radical tradition pushed designers and planners beyond the neighborhood to a metropolitan approach to community liberation.
Download“I had a clear picture that all of the traditions about neighborhood planning and neighborhood design…” -Carl Anthony, “Book Launch: The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race”
“I was born in Philadelphia in 1939. Our family lived in a cold water flat in a place called ‘the bottom’…” -Carl Anthony, “Carl Anthony Legacy”
“I remember particularly my third grade teacher, Mrs. Akens. One day she took our class to the Gimbel Brothers department store…” -Carl Anthony, “Carl Anthony Legacy”
“At that time I was 8 years old and I was very much drawn to the ability to sort of see these things graphically…” -Carl Anthony, “Carl Anthony Legacy”
“Karl [Linn] and I used to travel through the streets of North Philadelphia and he would point out to me…” -Carl Anthony, The New Village Press Interview 2016
“I was an architect at the architect’s renewal committee in Harlem and began to work with many of the community groups to…” -Carl Anthony, The New Village Press Interview 2016
“The idea of a community design center was basically an idea that had been initiated around ideas and creative impulse of Paul Davidoff.” -Carl Anthony, The New Village Press Interview 2016
“I had actually gone to Africa to recover my sense of sanity and connectedness by trying to find the roots of my own experience…” -Carl Anthony, “Rising Up with Sonali”
“As the environmental justice movement was beginning to take off in the late 1980s and early 1990s there was an emphasis on the negative impacts of…” -Carl Anthony, The New Village Press Interview 2016
“The crisis for me was whether I would go forward and try to establish myself as a successful urban planner…” -Carl Anthony, The New Village Press Interview 2016
“The way that he [Carl Anthony] was navigating institutions stood out. It was like here are all of the navigations, and negotiations, and struggles, and challenges…” -Jah Sayers
“We had, at that time, an African American mayor. We had an African American city manager…” -Carl Anthony, “Book Launch: The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race”
“The mission of Urban Habitat was to build multiracial leadership for sustainable communities in the San Francisco Bay Area…” -Carl Anthony, The New Village Press Interview 2016
“There’s power in the institution that should be distributed more evenly but that distribution has to happen somehow…” -Jah Sayers
“I recently was picking the book up again and one of these reflections later was how separatism really drew him in the 60s…” -Jah Sayers
“It became an opportunity for us to really intervene and say what kind of social and economic policies would…” -Carl Anthony, The New Village Press Interview 2016
“In experiencing displacement you learn that everyone needs and has community and it’s not going to be able to be, you know for a lot of people, in that nice childhood home…” -Jah Sayers
“Some of the themes about the, kind of, challenges on the path toward a sort of conventional architect and urban planning trajectory…” -Carl Anthony, The New Village Press Interview 2016
Writer and Producer
Molly Esteve
Issue Editor
Anna Goodman
Senior Editors
Joseph Bedford and Curt Gambetta
Production Assistant
Ethan Curtis
Announcer
Trudy Watt
Interview
Jah Elyse Sayers
Special Thanks
Jah Elyse Sayers, Erasmis Gorla, The New Village Press, The New School, Sonali Kolhatkar, and Portland State University’s College of the Arts