Podcast Spotlight: Garnette Cadogan
In the first of our Spotlight Series, The Move co-hosts Ceasar McDowell and Ayushi Roy interview essayist Garnette Cadogan. We talk about his upcoming book on walking, the vitality and inequities of urban life, and keeping ourselves grounded in the process.
Ayushi: [00:00:00] Hey. Welcome to the Spotlight. This is a special edition of The Move, where we get to highlight some of the work we came across in the process of recording our current season. I hope you enjoy these conversations as much as we did. Hey, Ceasar.
Ceasar: [00:00:20] Hey, Ayushi. I am so excited, you know we are getting to dig through some of the interviews we’ve had in the past with some great people.
Ayushi: [00:00:26] Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Ceasar: [00:00:27] And, this opportunity to kind of highlight some of those, and today we’re gonna be able to highlight the work we did with Garnette Cadogan.
Ayushi: [00:00:35] He’s so great.
Ceasar: [00:00:36] Yeah, he really is. You know, I’ve just recently met him a couple years ago, I guess it’s not recent.
Ayushi: [00:00:41] You know, whatever you’d like.
Ceasar: [00:00:43] In the scheme of things it’s recent, but he’s become a dear, dear friend. But, it’s not because he’s a dear friend that we, decided to sit down and talk with him right?
Ayushi: [00:00:54] Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Ceasar: [00:00:54] We sat down and talked with him because he’s an incredible writer.
Ayushi: [00:00:58] He has a way with words.
Ceasar: [00:00:58] And just an incredible way with words. And, one of the things he does is he walks, he walks through cities and through spaces, to understand them and then is able to bring that beautiful voice he has, through writing, to actually let us see these places in a different way.
Ayushi: [00:01:15] I mean he’s writing an entire book about walking. And it’s something that we do every single day but take for granted. And, we have him, breaking up his audio again, to kind of go through it with us.
Ceasar: [00:01:27] Yeah, and I don’t know if you remember, when we had him into the studio, we started out by just sitting down, taking a couple of deep breaths, we were all rushing,
Ayushi: [00:01:36] Yeah
Ceasar: [00:01:36] And just like let’s ground ourselves.
Ayushi: [00:01:38] Yep, and he actually even shared a poem with us, which was so incredible. It was I think the first time we started off a recording with a poem. And we’ll share that poem with you all today.
Garnette: [00:01:49] It was supposed to be better than the others, our 20th century. But it won’t have time to prove it. Its years are numbered, its step unsteady, its breath short. Already to much has happened that was not supposed to happen. What was to come about, has not. Spring was to be on its way, and happiness, among other things. Fear was to leave the mountains and valleys. The truth was supposed to finish before the lie. Certain misfortunes were never to happen again, such as war and hunger and so forth. These were to be respected: the defenselessness of the defenseless, trust and the like. Whoever wanted to enjoy the world faces an impossible task. Stupidity is not funny. Wisdom isn’t jolly. Hope is no longer the same young girl, et cetera. Alas. God was at last to believe in man: good and strong, but good and strong are still two different people. How to live — someone asked me this in a letter, someone I had wanted to ask that very thing. Again and as always and as seen above, there are no questions more urgent than the naïve ones.
Ayushi: [00:03:01] Listening to that poem just made me feel like I need to take a deeper breath.
Ceasar: [00:03:06] Yeah, and one of the things for me in that poem that was just, I think illuminating, particularly that last word, the naivety. Is… Our work is all about this stuff of, how do we bring out public voice. How do we create an opportunity for a broader civic space? And, because were fighting the system, right, were struggling over something that we think can be better
Ayushi: [00:03:34] Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Ceasar: [00:03:35] We’re always talking about the strength and the wisdom of the public. But, it’s interesting to realize, and to also accept, there’s naivety there that has to be embraced, just as much.
Ayushi: [00:03:47] Right. I mean the other part of the poem that stood out to me was, the mention of the word dignity. Right, and you think a big part of the work for me is about bringing dignity back to folks that have had it taken away
Ceasar: [00:04:06] Yes
Ayushi: [00:04:07] And I think in a lot of ways, that is a naïve question. Right? It’s this sort of basic, it’s like, how do you live? Was the question that the poet talks about, and I think another part of that is how do you let live with dignity.
Ceasar: [00:04:24] Yeah.
Ayushi: [00:04:26] I’m so glad that we had Garnette continue to talk with us, after sharing that poem and tie it back to his incredible work on walking through this world; and walking through in ways about living differently.
Ceasar: [00:04:40] Yeah, and with the questions and with the eyes of naivety.
Ayushi: [00:04:50] We’ve been talking a lot in our first series, and now moving forward, about how you can conscientiously design, with a certain value in mind. And if here the value we’re looking at is encounter, especially encounter among those that, like the poem, in Wilbur’s poem, may not seem like you, or are not rumored to be like you, if that’s what we’re going for, then it requires a very different kind of, conscientious design, more than just one that’s true to a public space, or accessible for all. Because, I think some of the best encounters I’ve had, completely random, spontaneous encounters, have been not in public spaces. Have been maybe in other forms of space that is, yes, accessible. But, accessible, that’s the lowest sort of bar here.
Garnette: [00:05:39] Yeah, I think for instance, of… I’m a lover of plazas. I’m a lover of what they did with Times Square for instance, when they shut off these lanes. I’m a lover of… Accessibility (crosstalk)
Ayushi: [00:05:54] I think you’re the first resident New Yorker that has, liked Times Square.
Garnette: [00:05:59] Here’s why I like Times Square, there’s a lot not to like about Times Square, but, here’s what’s to like about Times Square. I’m Jamaican, your very wealthy Jamaican, coming to New York, is unlikely to be walking around looking at those bright shiny, inane advertisements in the middle of Times Square. Your wealthy Nigerian, your wealthy Indian, your wealthy Singaporean, your wealthy Colombian, your wealthy Vietnamese, your wealthy French person, is not coming to walk around Times Square. They’re all going to different pockets in New York, cordoned off, many times in hotels, which feel like vertical gated communities. Times Square invites an openness, it has a range of people, and many of them, working class, middle class, poor, all bumping in with each other, and they’re also bumping into each other in a certain, delightful naivety.
There’s an innocence of the city, there’s this curiosity about the city. “Why does this look like this? And why is this called this? And where do I find this? And how is this?” And, there are all these questions in which they’re looking at the city and seeing the city afresh. And the mixing and the intermingling that happens there, is like few other places in the entire city, few other places where you see as many countries of working class, middle class people, all intermingling and bumping in with each other. And having this shared experience, even if sometimes you think, “Why is that even interesting to them?”
Ceasar: [00:07:59] Right
Garnette: [00:07:59] “This seems inane to me,” but it also, in that kind of experience, many times if you’re choosing just to slow your pace and rhythm a bit, and not rush and grumble passed them, it turns your mind back onto the city and to make you start asking important questions about the city. To make you start wondering, well, why is this like this, and to make you slowly begin to start seeing the city anew. And, so I, time and again, love that tourist point of view, because it’s a point of view of curiosity, and is a point of view of this common curiosity. But, there’s something else that I like, and in the midst of all this talk about walking and common space and accessible, I like the possibilities of protest. I’m bothered by how more and more cities are designed to shut down protest to make protests a lot more difficult.
Ceasar: [00:08:47] Yes.
Garnette: [00:08:47] If you want to think about the way, the best way, to have shared experience, and a common experience, and to experience the commons from different people, from different walks of life, coming together, it’s protest. There are few things that have happened like that, and there’s no act, no public act that I know of, that’s as potent and as effective, and as rich, as walking. It made a difference, that you’re making a move in between Montgomery and Selma, and you’re not doing it by motorcade.
Ceasar: [00:09:20] Right.
Garnette: [00:09:20] And you’re not doing it by critical mass, like on bicycle, but there’s walking. There’s something about the act of moving together, step by step, in rhythm, in solidarity, that itself reinforces solidarity, that deepens solidarity, that creates an even stronger solidarity. Talking to your neighbor, listen to your neighbor, and seeing this happen together.
I saw it in New York after, the spate of shootings that had happened a few years ago, and Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Garner, and you kept hearing one after another, after another. And people said, there’s a really serious problem with the relationship of police departments and police officers and black people in public space. And I stood observing a lot of wealthy and middle class and poor New Yorkers, marching together in these streets; and I saw people who were Korean, alongside people who were African American, alongside people who were Jamaican, alongside people who were Argentinian, moving together.
And as they’re moving together in solidarity, they start speaking to each other and recognizing that they’re coming from variety of walks of life, and with various opinions. People who, if they worked together they couldn’t stand each other, but for that moment, organized around that common goal that they wanted to bring attention to the levels of injustices that were happening in public space, and asking, “Why is it that police departments can’t have a level of police that is commiserate with the offenses that they’re encountering? Why is it that they’re over policed in communities of color?” And organized around that and for those goals, it was a beautiful thing to behold, and to see the ways in which people were encountering and deepening their relationship with each other and treat that like commons. And so part of what I’m thinking when I say, well how can places be designed, I sometimes make the mistake of having almost a lowest common denominator, or we should create the space where everyone could feel welcome.
Times Square’s already pluralistic. You’re asking how to make these spaces more pluralistic, and one of the answers I have is to already find places that are pluralistic or that are hinging on pluralism, and to create public spaces, to create designs, that harness that.
Ayushi: [00:11:54] That could unify
Garnette: [00:11:55] So Times Square, they remove all these driving lanes, and they removed automobile, and opened it up. That there’s already a place in which there are working class, and middle class people, from so many different cultures coming, there are tons of tourists along with tons of locals who are working there. And suddenly it became a place, in which people were sitting, there were all these seats, where people were sitting and interacting with each other, engaging with each other. There are places in which people of different politics are standing and staring at screens, and I remember being part of an event once, with the Van Alen Institute, that brought me and a few other people to interview and to speak with people, but they had to be from different political opinions. That was during an election period, and Republicans, and Democrats were speaking to each other. People who were really sharp differences, but they already were gathered in the space with common sentiments, looking at Times Square, and enjoying Times Square, and having a shared experience of being people who want to see New York and discover New York afresh.
Ayushi: [00:12:57] Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Garnette: [00:12:57] And suddenly they begin talking, and expressing differences, and you had people who were surprised by all the ways in which they had common commitments in other areas, though they had sharp differences in their political opinion. And it was a delight, and something very refreshing to see the ways in which they could, at once, grasp their common humanity, without letting go of their different political commitments. So, they took what was already a pluralistic space, and opened it up to create a deeper pluralism.
The same thing happened in Madison Square, you had the park that park was there, Madison Square Park. And why create a plaza right beside a park. A park was there, you already had a common space, but they discovered there were people who wanted to be in the plaza, and there’s something about being on a plaza, to have all of the traffic going by. There’s people who want to be in the center of movement and energy, rather than to be removed from it, which was partially what the park does.
Ayushi: [00:13:57] Right.
Garnette: [00:13:58] And there’s also a way in which a plaza sometimes invites more of an engagement, because you often go to a park to escape. Whereas a plaza, you go to a plaza to encounter. So there are different ways to walk. You walk to escape, you walk to encounter, you walk to arrive, and a plaza tilts more towards encounter than escape, much more so than a park. And there’s a plaza right beside Madison Square Park, which one would’ve thought had been useless, but it gets used to no end, and encounters, and I’ve gone there sometimes to sit and watch and to see just how much encounter happens. And it’s refreshing, a sort of breath of life to see, and sometimes the pure fact of numerical pluralism,
Ayushi: [00:14:43] Yeah.
Garnette: [00:14:44] Even if it’s still a far thing from actual pluralism of engaging with each other, does something of being a person. And you see that especially with children, who’s continually around difference, begins to shift your way of thinking and dealing with the world. If you keep thinking of people as them, but you’re in a scenario in which you’re always surrounded by “them,” there is a possibility, not a guarantee, but a possibility that “them” could start inching closer to “us.” And so, the biggest problem I have, it’s not so much knowledge, you know, the homogeneity, is not really a failure, it’s not really a shortage of knowledge, time and again, these ways in which we’ve segregated ourselves, it’s really a problem of imagination.
I think of the Starbucks event, for example, the ways in which, what I sometimes call semi-public spaces, in a coffee shop space or in the isles of a grocery store, these different places where you sometimes see segregation and bias working its way out. The way, for example, in a grocery store, if you’re black, time and again, somebody will assume that, oh, you have to work here, you couldn’t possibly be a customer. And, that same person might see you, twelve hours later, on the street and cross the street, clutching their belongings. Suggesting that you can only be someone who is there to assist or to accost, and there’s nothing outside of those two. What it really is, is less a shortage of knowledge and more a deep lack of imagination. And so we walk more than anything else, to inscribe our imagination onto the world, but also to have the world inscribe itself on our imagination and see that shift on our imagination.
And so to design things, which itself are a function of a very wide and expansive imagination, but one that also allows our imaginations to be worked on and to work, and if they’re corrupted imaginations, that need to be scrubbed, that need to be expanded, to work against it.
Ayushi: [00:17:00] Or if there are fields that don’t allow for imagination.
Garnette: [00:17:02] Yes
Ayushi: [00:17:03] Right, ’cause the thing you said about the temporality of it, is so beautiful, because I think a lot of planning assumes if you build a plaza, people will come. Right, it’s kind of like The Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come. Doesn’t work that way. And what you’re implying is the opposite, is to take the plaza to where people already are
Garnette: [00:17:19] Yes
Ayushi: [00:17:19] By blocking off a street or creating even that, Flat Iron or you know Madison Square Park intersection
Garnette: [00:17:25] Or, what they do, sometimes, these temporary spaces, it’s hot, it’s summer now, what is out and about in New York City, and they said, we are shutting down these streets so you can ride your bicycle, and you can walk, or we have a bunch of different stalls.
Ayushi: [00:17:40] Or you have the Fifth Avenue market, right.
Garnette: [00:17:40] And these things, sometimes there’s a danger in suddenly thinking, oh well, people are not thinking enough about immigrants, we’re going to shut down the streets and have a bunch of stalls from foods all over the world. And it’s oh, send me your cooks, send me your dancers, send me your singers. The way suddenly the immigrant becomes a service of labor, a service of leisure.
But in spite of that danger, there is still also the possibility of encountering people from elsewhere, people who are increasingly being demonized, or thought it’s best that they be kept out, and you’re encountering them and recognizing, and you’re imagination is confronting it’s blind spots, or confronting it’s corruptions and the possibility that you might have a more expansive imagination, and so what is the rhythm of the city? And what are the ways in which you can have permanent or temporary things, that draws in those rhythms and that undercuts rhythms that are not conducive to civic engagement and civic culture, so shut down a bunch of streets and then suddenly have everyone encountering each other, and interacting.
And sometimes you may not have the strongest sense of what it means to be somebody from another neighborhood, but you may have a stronger sense of what it means to love and feel that this city is a part of you. And then, fight for its thriving, fight for its survival, fight for its mixing and its multitudinous, which is so crucial to its health. But I actually think, what is even more imperative, is to design places, so people don’t feel unwelcome, which is a tougher thing. And one way to do that, one thing I’m thinking about is the way cities are more and more, trying to make plazas, and parks, and different public spaces, more deterrent to collective organizing, to collective gathering. You saw even the way, rules had to change, and at Zuccotti Park, how instead of having hours, after
Ayushi: [00:19:40] Occupy
Garnette: [00:19:42] Occupy Wall Street, and you see more and more laws being passed, against collective walking and organizing. These… So for example, quite a few politicians, and if I remember correctly, I think they were all Republican politicians. I’m not trying to hammer down on one party versus another, but at least, where these laws were concerned, in a lot of laws against protesting and against marching.
Ceasar: [00:20:07] Exactly.
Garnette: [00:20:07] At one point I forgot, this is a politician whose name I should remember, because he deserves to be reminded and called out in public, time and again. Where he was trying to effectively pass a law that is equivalent of standing your ground, with a car, where if a group of protestors were in front of your car…
Ceasar: [00:20:23] Oh yeah, I remember this.
Garnette: [00:20:24] You could hit them and effectively argue that it was like stand your ground, you felt under threat. And so, your vehicle would be, your way of protecting yourself. And so, to go after those laws, and to go after people who try to make public space, and design parks, plazas, squares, and the like, so that it’s hard to organize, its hard to protest, it’s hard to get it together. So, I think it’s also really a powerful thing to think about walking, that time and again where civic participation is concerned, we should at least have a basic right to protest. And so, we should make sure that our public spaces are spaces that are not excluding protest. So, Watertown and Cambridge, as much as your experience have been very different, from both of them. What should be important while we are thinking how to make these spaces more pluralistic that verily is, how to ensure that these places, when it’s time to protest, it allows pluralistic engagement. And a movement for a pluralistic group.
Ceasar: [00:21:35] Right. So, I know we’ve had the last question, but I just want to make one point to you, which you can respond to in 30 seconds if you want to. But, it dawned on me as you were talking about walking, and walking across different spaces, and particularly homogeneous spaces that are abutted each other. That I wonder what the conversations are that go on in these kind of walks, like Walk for Hunger. Do people stay, do they stay in their groups? Do people mix and do the conversations flow from there? It’d be an interesting thing to kind of walk in one of those, and just listen to the conversations. ’Cause it might be very interesting to see what happens. It may be another form if you thought about this is really spaces for civic connection, not just for fundraising. It might even be some way you could prompt them, to have something really interesting happen.
Garnette: [00:22:32] And even within a homogenous group, there’s that group called Girl Trek, which is a group of black women, from city, to city, to city, town to town, state, to state, to state, who are all walking together as a way of developing unity and community and it’s aimed at public health, but it also has big and broader aims. It is of real political import, but also, of deep emotional resonance, and various people walking, developing friendships and cementing, and solidifying civic bonds. And out of these walks, these regular walks, black women walking, and finding, and discovering, and developing, new public aims, that deeply affect the community. But also has resonance well beyond it.
Ceasar: [00:23:26] Garnette this was great.
Ayushi: [00:23:26] This was incredible. Thank you.
Ceasar: [00:23:28] Yeah, thank you so much for coming in and talking with us, I hope you’ve enjoyed it.
Garnette: [00:23:31] Oh, very much so. Makes me want to leave here and go walking even though it’s in the mid eighties.
Ceasar: [00:23:39] Yeah, I could go on, but I’m not going to. But I was just thinking about this whole thing about, as I was listening to you, I was thinking about yeah, it’s really interesting if we actually had more activities that were really about engaging issues but walking while doing it, and talking about it, and then, I said, “oh, we’re in New England, which means we’ll only do it four months out of the year.”
Garnette: [00:24:04] Even that is important. Walking as a diagnostic. What does it mean to walk around a city, when it’s very cold? Who’s sheltered, who’s not? Who’s vulnerable, who’s not? So walking becomes a way of looking at vulnerability. And so, there are ways in which walking becomes a way to see the possibilities, but walking becomes a way to expose limitations. And so there are different ways to walk, and different ways to see. It’s very much about seeing, about encounter, about arrival. For example, Harlem, that increasingly is finding its public life affected by gentrification, and you worry about the coffee shop in the middle of the block, but a coffee shop is not the thing to worry about.
The thing to worry about more than anything else, is for me, where I see it affecting public life, are banks on the corners, that people sit on these properties on the corners, and then they eventually lease them to banks. They access so much in terms of assets, and land of lease, that a bank will sit on it and be there for the next decade or two. And you think of a place like 117th Street and Lennox, and on the corner there’s a bank. Now, what happens, you look at Harlem and how much corner, to corner life is so crucial to the rhythm of that place. Now the one place a group black men don’t want to be standing is outside a collection of ATM machines. They’re happy enough to stand on the corner in front of a coffee shop, that doesn’t affect them as much, but, in a city that has a problem with over policing, and for a group, that increasingly feels vulnerable, because of the fear of others of them, the banks have a profound affect on street life. So in an instance, one of the things to do with planning and even granting things is to monitor more, how can we slow down, cause there’s no stopping. How can we slow down or find ways to deal with the constant shifting that is happening because of the way the corners are being replaced.
But, second, is to say okay we get to have different things, shutting down the streets, or different things that we allow barbecues on the corner, or different things that allow some kind of civic life on the corner to recognize that we’re losing the corners, and in losing the corners, were losing a lot. How can we restore some life to the corners, if even temporary, but just knowing that a group of black men, are not going to be hanging around a group of ATM machines knowing how people will fear them. Increasingly white publics moving to Harlem will start saying, “oh I don’t feel comfortable, there’s 3 guys standing outside the ATM machine.” And these are ways, in which walking will show that, and in making designs sometimes permanent, and temporary, or even in Harlem, one way I see the fight in Harlem, people keep saying “oh, gentrification. And it’s a new wealthier group, displacing an older wealthier group.” They always see it in terms of economics, rather than in terms of the way public space is shaped. And the way I look at it in Harlem is, is their challenge to stoop culture. Here’s a neighborhood that the stoop defines a neighborhood much more so than just about any other social arrangement. And we have more and more buildings being built with the stoop removed. Or a stoop is there, but a stoop isn’t used. And it feels almost like a back lane of café culture versus stoop culture. With café culture, and I’m being reductionistic, or over simplifying, but in café culture your back is turned to the public, whereas stoop culture, you face the public, and invite. And there’s a different way of thinking of the private and the public. In stoop culture, there’s this scrubbing away of the line between private and public.
The stoop, which is a dutch invention, which is a way of giving you privacy away from public space that got transformed in Harlem and it became a way of inviting public space into private space, and seeing public spaces as an extension of private space. So it gave public space a certain warmth, intimacy, conviviality, and then to suddenly have Harlem shift that, and in many ways we’ve seen stoop culture changing. How can you even design things, that even has the echo of a stoop, if the stoop isn’t there. So it’s no surprise, that new design of the Studio Museum of Harlem actually has, in the design, built in, that of a stoop.
Ceasar: [00:28:38] Okay, I could just go off forever on this one, because it’s just making me think about how the intentionality of that, cause the intentionality of moving to a café kind of society, versus a stoop society, and a stoop society as you were saying, those lines were, you know, they’re blurred between the private and the public. And then if you don’t like what the public has to offer, the café society, allows you to create a space where you don’t have to confront it, as you transform it.
Garnette: [00:29:05] Yeah, and it feels especially harsh because you’re doing it in public. You turn your back in public and said, “I am shutting out the public.” And one of the big problems that we find more and more, especially in cities, is the privatization of public space.
Ceasar: [00:29:23] Exactly.
Garnette: [00:29:24] The way public space is made to feel like private, in a purview, and of a small select group. And so people are made to feel unwelcome in public space.
Ayushi: [00:29:37] Thank you so much for being here, Garnette.
Garnette: [00:29:39] Thank you so much for inviting me.
Ceasar: [00:29:44] Thank you for listening to our Spotlight Series, on The Move.
Ayushi: [00:29:47] We are really excited to share in mid July, our Season 2, coming up.
Ceasar: [00:29:51] We are production of the department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. With support from MIT’s office of Open Learning.
Ayushi: [00:29:57] Our sound is produced by Dave Lishansky, our content by Julia Curbera, and Misael Galdamez. I am Ayushi Roy,
Ceasar: [00:30:04] I’m Ceasar McDowell.
Ayushi: [00:30:05] And you can find us online at themove.mit.edu
Ceasar: [00:30:10] And on our Medium site
Ayushi: [00:30:11] Medium.com/themovemit as well as our twitter and Facebook. Thanks so much!
Ceasar: [00:30:21] Goodbye.
