Learning to Listen: How a university project to document Milwaukee neighborhood stories has created a 'network of hope.'(University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Washington Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin)

• Author: Haynes, Douglas

Along the rail corridor that runs through the mostly vanished industries of Milwaukee's north side lies a sloping garden larger than a city block. Here, Hmong families grow lush stands of sweet corn, rhubarb, and lemongrass, with pole beans twined around teepees of tree branches.

A chain-link fence along the alley on the garden's west side is covered with a hodgepodge of overlapping wood scraps, fabric, and linoleum. A boarded-up two-story house looms across the alley.

There, on an overcast morning in July 2021, Arijit Sen stopped his class of nine urban planning, architecture, and history students from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to admire the makeshift fence covering.

"Architects always think of art as specialized, the definition of beauty," said Sen, an architect and vernacular architecture historian. "That very definition of beauty is about inequality. But there's another definition of art--which is, basically, you're putting in effort and skills in order to change your environment. Somebody took skills, materials, bricolage, to actually tie those things to the chain-link fence."

The students clustered around Sen, scribbling notes and snapping photos. Sen, a native of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India, spoke with an uncanny combination of authority and empathy: "Look at the care they have taken! To overlook it is to overlook human beings' potential to make a difference to their own world."

Since 2012, Sen and his students in UW-Milwau-kee's Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School have collaborated with local residents and leaders to offer a five-week summer course that documents the importance of people, places, and histories in some of Milwaukee's most underserved neighborhoods. This kind of "immersive learning," as Sen calls it, offers a model for reinventing higher education as a collaborative, community-based effort to imagine a more equitable and sustainable future.

After observing the Hmong garden, the class gathered in the community room of the United Methodist Children's Services of Wisconsin building that served as the Field School's 2021 base in the Washington Park neighborhood. Sen talked about how "we were like children" walking through the neighborhood. Indeed, child-like wonder often widened the students' eyes, whether discovering a garter snake curled through the garden fence or the exposed underbelly of a street where workers were replacing lead water pipes.

"Who talks about this neighborhood with marveling?" Sen asked his students. "It's always about death and destruction. But we have seen it."

Washington Park is a neighborhood of detached houses built for mostly German middle-...