The Beerline Trail Neighborhood Development Project hosted this webinar celebrating the Beerline Trail and the Black Landscapes Matter book release on March 30, 2021. Keynote speaker Walter Hood has designed a concept plan for the creation of a Linear Park on the Beerline Trail. Hood, a nationally known landscape architect and artist, engaged with the community and used that input in his design of the Beerline Trail Lifeways Plan, an ambitious vision for this important community asset. Walter Hood is the Creative Director and founder of Hood Design Studio and a MacArthur Fellow. He is co-editor of a recently released collection of essays, “Black Landscapes Matter.” The book includes an essay about the Beerline Trail, written by longtime Beerline Trail project leader Sara Daleiden, director of MKE-LAX. The event featured Darryl Johnson, executive director of Riverworks, who shared Beerline Trail updates and a virtual “walk-through” of the Lifeways Plan. A local panel, including Sara Daleiden, discussed Black landscapes and why they are important for Milwaukee.

University of Virginia Press release book co-edited by Beerline Trail landscape artist and architect Walter Hood, along with Grace Mitchell Tada. Book includes essay about the Beerline Trail in Milwaukee by Sara Daleiden of MKE<->LAX.

The question “Do black landscapes matter?” cuts deep to the core of American history. From the plantations of slavery to contemporary segregated cities, from freedman villages to northern migrations for freedom, the nation’s landscape bears the detritus of diverse origins. Black landscapes matter because they tell the truth. In this vital new collection, acclaimed landscape designer and public artist Walter Hood assembles a group of notable landscape architecture and planning professionals and scholars to probe how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape.

Essayists examine a variety of U.S. places—ranging from New Orleans and Charlotte to Milwaukee and Detroit—exposing racism endemic in the built environment and acknowledging the widespread erasure of black geographies and cultural landscapes. Through a combination of case studies, critiques, and calls to action, contributors reveal the deficient, normative portrayals of landscape that affect communities of color and question how public design and preservation efforts can support people in these places. In a culture in which historical omissions and specious narratives routinely provoke disinvestment in minority communities, creative solutions by designers, planners, artists, and residents are necessary to activate them in novel ways. Black people have built and shaped the American landscape in ways that can never be fully known. Black Landscapes Matter is a timely and necessary reminder that without recognizing and reconciling these histories and spaces, America’s past and future cannot be understood.

Rural Urban FLOW is a growing network of cultural and agricultural producers across Wisconsin’s rural-urban continuum. We look beyond neighborhoods and news feeds to cultivate common ground.

Racial Radical: Generating New “Woke” Words focuses on recognizing familiar but so far unnamed racial experiences and generating new vocabulary from those experiences. Co-produced by Freewaves and MKE<->LAX. Featuring Milwaukee artists Dasha Kelly, Fondé Bridges and Mikal Floyd-Pruitt.

Racial Radical: Generating

New “Woke” Words

April – October 2019

Los Angeles, California

Milwaukee, Wisconsin Racial

Radical Collaborators:

Anne Bray, Freewaves

Fondé Bridges, Healthy Words

Sara Daleiden, MKE<->LAX

Mikal Floyd-Pruitt

Taj Frazier

Lanita Jacobs

Dasha Kelly

LaVonna Lewis

David Sloane

Wes Tank, Tankthink

Diversity in the Creative Occupations of Greater Milwaukee: A Labor Analysis

Sara Daleiden of MKE<->LAX served as a key advisor along with other Designing Equity leaders on this recently released Greater Together and University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee Center for Economic Development report.

Milwaukee has been, for decades, one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States, a place where racial inequality is entrenched and pervasive. These disparities are particularly pronounced in the region’s labor market, where racial gaps in employment, earnings, and mobility are among the widest in the nation.

This study, prepared for the Greater Together “designing diversity” initiative, presents the first systematic overview of racial disparities in a part of Milwaukee’s labor market that has attracted increased attention in recent years: occupations in the “creative sector.” After developing a working definition of creative sector occupations, we examine three key questions. First, is employment in creative sector occupations in metro Milwaukee marked by racial disparities and, if so, how wide are those gaps? Specifically, are African Americans and Latinos underrepresented in Milwaukee’s creative occupations, compared to their percentage of the overall metro area labor force? Second, are there differences in the level of racial disparity found in different sub-sectors of creative sector jobs? For example, are persons of color in Milwaukee more or less likely to be underrepresented in jobs as, say, musicians or photographers, as opposed to, say, artists or designers? Finally, the study puts Milwaukee in national perspective. We compare the levels of racial disparity in selected creative occupations in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, including Milwaukee, by presenting an “index of concentration” that measures the extent to which a given racial group is “underrepresented” or “overrepresented” in a particular occupation, in relation to their share of the metro area’s labor force. As we shall see, although racial disparities in creative occupations are quite evident in Milwaukee, these gaps are not especially out of line with trends in metro areas across the country. Racial disparities in creative sector employment are indeed a common challenge in metropolitan areas across the United States.