Shows
Public SpacesNeighborhood public mediaWes Tank of Milwaukee and Dewey Tron of Arlington, Virginia have left traditional, corporate video directing behind in favor of showcasing their cities’ neighborhoods. As government funding for traditional public media and secondary media classes becomes uncertain, could such private media expertise at the local and micro-local levels create new means of audio and video expression in public spaces?Above: Still from Reimagine Milwaukee Day | Imagine MKE, video by Wes Tank.Our first video episode includes a ten-minute introduction highlighting Wes’s and Dewey’s community video work. The episode moves into an hour-long conversation among...
2025-08-051h 11
Public SpacesTurning tracks into public space(18-min. podcast episode.) Several American cities have done rails to trails projects. In many ways, Milwaukee’s Beerline Trail is like most of the projects. Train service through Milwaukee’s Northeast industrial corridor left, so Milwaukee has turned its tracks into an attractive trail for walking and biking, and the residents and city are still working on it. Get full access to Political Devotions at www.polidevo.com/subscribe
2025-05-0717 min
Public SpacesThe Pike: the power of humanity's kinshipThe Columbia Pike Documentary Project invites us to encounter one of the most diverse communities in the world. With people speaking over a hundred languages living together with little in the way of ethnic enclaves, Columbia Pike in Arlington offers what may be a unique experience in diversity.In this 18-minute podcast episode, I interview project team members Sushmita Mazumdar, Dewey Tron, and Lloyd Wolf about what drives them to document life on the Pike in videos, books, talks, and exhibitions. This episode has some great stories and insights about how a living diversity can make public...
2025-02-2218 min
Public SpacesListening for a place's public calling20-minute podcast episode. Our neighborhoods are most often like America’s Third Coast, a flyover region on our way to home or work. What would it take for our neighborhoods — urban, suburban, rural, small-town — to become as vital to us as our home or work?Sara Daleiden works on the Third Coast, literally and metaphorically. She facilitates Milwaukee neighborhoods that wish to transform their public landscapes. She’s actually bicoastal, splitting most of her time between Milwaukee and Los Angeles; hence the name of her media strategy and production agency, MKE LAX. Besides media production, Sara’s work invol...
2025-01-0819 min
Public SpacesLiturgy, improv & power11-minute podcast episode. What could liturgy and mutual aid have in common? Both are actions that, when done creatively, give all parties the freedom to respond in life-giving ways and to discover themselves in community.This the second of two podcast episodes about a small Arlington church that sold its building and land at a discount to make way for Gilliam Place, a six-story affordable-housing building.The first episode examines the 12-year democratic process that resulted in the sale and, at the same time, transformed Arlington Presbyterian Church from an introverted destination church to an...
2024-11-1911 min
Public SpacesFrom pews to affordable housing26-minute podcast episode. Most Arlington teachers can’t afford to live in Arlington. While Victoria and I were teaching there, we met teachers and other school staff members who were fortunate to find affordable housing at Gilliam Place, a relatively new, six-story apartment building at the corner of Columbia Pike and South Lincoln Street.The idea for Gilliam Place came at a retreat in 2009, when some members of Arlington Presbyterian celebrated the church’s centennial by seeking guidance for the future. During the retreat, they thought that they had found it: the church would sell its building and...
2024-10-1525 min
Public SpacesStatues riffing on statues: An interview with Zaq LandsbergLast year, two of my classes remixed prominent public messages in Arlington to critique them. Their model was Zaq Landsberg’s sculpture Reclining Liberty, a remix of the Statue of Liberty that has found her new site-specific home among Arlington’s permanent monuments celebrating freedom and public life.News shows in D.C. and New York City discussed why her pose resembles the reclining Buddha and why people can climb on this version of Lady Liberty. But my Arlington Tech students and I had other reasons for interviewing Landsberg. Landsberg graciously gave us two interviews (one...
2024-08-1417 min
Public SpacesThe beauty of proximity20-minute episode. In 2007, three recent college grads had no intention of starting Casa Chirilagua. But it happened. Casa now serves more than 100 families with after-school programs, mentorships, adult classes, and leadership development in Arlandria, a largely Latino community just south of Arlington that the first Salvadorian immigrants nicknamed Chirilagua.The three grads moved into one of the community’s worst apartment complexes and started learning from their new community.While they moved in to learn, they moved in also to break out of an individualistic, middle-class evangelicalism and to meet the public God. And they wa...
2024-06-1919 min
Public SpacesTense times of tentsTwo days ago, Victoria and I visited the pro-Palestinian encampment at George Washington University. Because the District of Columbia isn’t willing at this point to take down the encampment, it’s one of the few encampments in the country arising out of the war protests that amount to an extended laboratory of students’ public life together.We didn’t come to discuss the war in Gaza. Instead, we wanted to find out what life was like in something new to even the most seasoned protester in this student community—an alternative polis to what passes for one in our...
2024-05-0722 min
Public SpacesCreativity as survivalMeet Adam Henry, who creates both art and public spaces. The combination led to Adam’s appointment in January as Amazon HQ2’s first artist in residence.On our podcast, Adam shares his approaches—his literal approaches—to strangers at coffee shops, restaurants, and subways. He sketches them and then introduces himself to his subjects. He gives them the art and, quite often, hears back from them about how this artist-stranger’s gesture helped them cope with something difficult.It’s hard to keep this artist in residence in residence.Adam (right) at Innovation S...
2024-03-2111 min
Public SpacesEnvoys extraordinaryIn this more personal podcast episode, I speak with three envoys from our public God:* Bethany and I ride the bus and discuss interior design, urban planning, and her installation art.* A local paper objects to free bus service, despite its cost effectiveness, because some citizens might make buses their homes.* My neighbor admits to, on rare occasions, riding buses to keep warm. She teaches me how far we are from the new creation’s justice.* Bethany and I consider Le Corbusier’s solution to public spaces and to the spread of a...
2024-02-2516 min
Public SpacesStories & objectsBryce and Victoria move from the suburbs to the city. Bryce sells his car and tries out the bus service by heading to StudioPAUSE. There he meets Sushmita Mazumdar, an artist and a poet, whose stories and curated objects hold a mirror up to support and celebrate Columbia Pike’s multiethnic community. Format: narrative with clips from interviews of Sushmita as well as of Lloyd Wolf, Director of the Columbia Pike Documentary Project. 8 minutes.Sushmita Mazumdar (foreground, folded hands) and other community members celebrate the grand opening of StudioPAUSE’s Columbia Pike location on October 7, 2023. Photos courtesy © Lloyd...
2023-12-0307 min