Carl Anthony is currently a Ford Foundation Program Officer and Director of the Foundation’s Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative. He has served as President of the Earth Island Institute and was co-founder, with Karl Linn, of Urban Habitat. He was interviewed for A Lot in Common at his home in Berkeley in September, 1999.

Here are some excerpts:

"The big problem is that we have acres and acres of concrete, which destroys the microclimate and is an assault on the senses.

...about urban barnraising.

...this concept of cooperation to meet not only the needs of individuals but also the needs of the community was really a very important concept for the Mennonites, when they had a big task that could not be done by individual families. When they were ready to build a barn, they would invite all the neighboring families from miles around and they would have this huge celebration and they would raise the barn together.

And as we looked around the world, in fact one of the things that I found, this tradition is alive and well in Africa. I traveled, for example, to Mali, and I saw this very same tradition operating when people had to rebuild the mosques to meet their shared needs, so the whole community came together.

The notion of urban barnraising is to try restore or reclaim these traditions for people who are living in cities."