 Welcome everyone. It's really my great pleasure to introduce Brian Seely this evening to continue the semester series of public events and discussions dedicated to fundamentally re-situating the issues of race, racial and social equity, anti-black racism and other forms of systemic racism, othering and oppression as urgently central to all of the disciplines of the built environment, their teaching and their practice. In a recent interview with Martin Peterson for Common Edge, Lee answering the question of what was different about this moment stated the following. A substantial number of medical doctors and nurses are now defining racism as a public health crisis. That's a shift and I think when we're talking about this moment we have to consider not just the murder of black people by way of acute police force but by way of ingrained systems that have for so long primed us to be the first harmed. Reflecting on why this moment might be different from past moments, Charles Davis, an assistant professor of architectural history and criticism at the University of Buffalo and co-editor of the book Race and Modern Architecture suggested during last Friday's discussion another way in which we might be living quote combinatorial consideration as Lee suggested that it is a convergence of the moment the momentum and intensity of new forms of engaged and activist practices happening in concert with decades of historical and critical scholarship that have combined to create some of the most exciting, powerful and meaningful modes of being and acting. As architects, planners, urban thinkers and actors in the world today this reading renders our time a hopeful moment of inflection. This hopeful and hopefully decisive and transformative turning of the corner for our disciplines and practices is one that Lee has tirelessly worked towards and indeed led in many ways. With an unwavering commitment to an architecture and planning practice that supports and advances social, racial and environmental justice in the built environment, Lee's practice, collocate design has uniquely and consistently reentangled architecture and planning, building and city, individual and collective action, process and product, design and advocacy, aesthetics and ethics to serve and empower communities in the co-production of spaces of racial, social and cultural equity. As we think of architecture and design as enabling forms of practice that draw together so many different ingredients and actors, what we choose to erase and what we choose to reveal, what and whom we choose to serve, what we engage in and what, where and how we draw our lines, these are the kinds of questions that Lee's positions and multifaceted form of practice urges to consider. Lee earned his Bachelor of Science in architecture from Ohio State University and a Master of Architecture from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He received a 2013 AI Diversity Recognition Award, was a 2015 Next City Vanguard Fellow and has a decade of experience in the field of architecture. He is the founding organizer of the Design Justice Platform and organized the design as protest National Day of Action, which has grown into the design as protest collective. He has led to award-winning architecture and design programs for high school students through the Arts Council of New Orleans and the National Organization of Minority Architects. In 2017, Lee was named one of the fast company most creative people, and in 2019, Colocate won the Architecture League's Emerging Voices Award. The response this evening will be given by Lee Altman, Agents Assistant Professor of Architecture in Columbus GSAP's Urban Design Program, where she coordinates the program's regional design studio in the Hudson Valley. Lee is not only an inspiring practitioner and educator, but also an inspiring speaker, and I'm really delighted to have him with us this evening. Please welcome Brian Lee. Dean, that was impressive. I'm not sure how to respond to that, but thank you again so much for having me this evening. Thanks to Columbia at Large, GSAP. Thank you, Lee, for joining us as well tonight. And yeah, thank you all for coming in and giving us your attention on this. So I'm going to kind of power through what is a pretty substantial arc of design justice as a practice, both from a historical and theory standpoint and what that looks like as we move from theory into into practice, obviously the practice component of of this work. But again, I would be remiss if I didn't say that, you know, thinking about all of the work that's happening in this moment, it is necessary for us to take these particular moments to take a step back and think about the kind of interconnected spaces and places that we are working within and working to design over time. So all of these spaces are the ones that that we can start to challenge through the work of design justice. So as we get started, I want to start with the the notion that power and place as a as a concept are historically entangled beyond beyond the kind of singular moments that we currently understand. And ultimately, we'll start to talk a little bit about what that looks like. Colocate was formed out of that notion that power is inherently entangled with it. And so we talked specifically about the sophisticated, the informal use of formal language or familiar conversation attached to place. So colloquial and locate our our firm was rooted in that notion that there is a sophisticated language of people and place that resonates in particular areas for a particular frequency. And if we can tap into that, we can actually build better spaces and places that align with our feelings and emotions and relationships of culture to those spaces. So in that, we think about the word collocated itself when we talk about the sequence of words and phrases that are habitually juxtaposed with another at a frequency greater than chance. And this to me was such a beautiful definition that we carry that one step further and started to think about the sequence of people in place habitually juxtaposed with one another at a greater frequency than chance. So the aspects of design justice that start to seek out the moments where particular interactions with space are repeated over and over and over and reproduce to a point in which privilege or or harm certain communities in the places and spaces where we can identify those allow us to again think about and build at a bigger, better pace. So the premise, the total premise of design justice starts with two kind of primal concepts, right? So our collective values are validated through the spaces and places we design. So this core concept that what we believe gets vested into the spaces that we design, that's a very simple task. But oftentimes we negate to think about architecture as a relationship or a conversation. We see it as a monologue in society rather than a dialogue. And so I reference the Cornel West quote very often that talks about justice is what love looks like in in public. And we tag that on to the other end of it and talks about design. Justice is what love looks like in public spaces. It is a deeper expression of our relationship and our beloved towards our beloved communities expressed in physical form. It is a relationship and oftentimes we don't see that. I often talk about design and architecture as we found this this small little crevice that says architecture is too big to solve the intricate complex small stuff. And it's too small to address the big overarching considerations. And we've allowed ourselves to be complicit by finding this neutral zone that says that we don't have to do anything on either side. We don't have to deal with the small and complex. We don't have to challenge the systems above us. And my kind of general statement our general statement around design justice is that that is bull our job is inherently to attack those systems in some form or fashion to build and envision a better world. And what is architecture if not the ability to envision a space of place that is better than the day it was the day before. And so with that notion, we often talk about the fact that for nearly every injustice there is in this world, there is an architecture, a plan and design that sustains it. So when we talk about the largest issues we face in society, whether it's climate change, 39 percent of carbon emissions and 40 percent of energy use is through the physical environment. The issues that we see economically are often rooted in housing, transportation and the remnants of redlining covenants. We all have seen this. We've all read bits and pieces of that. We think about the kind of unjust policing policies that permeate our history, but specifically codified this particular moment. They're rooted in the control and power of place and space. Malcolm X once said the history of all all revolutions is based in a war between the landless and the landlord. And again, our pursuit of independence of freedom is one that must challenge and we must be forced to bleed to metaphorically give ourselves in our work and in our lives to challenging that that that relationship, the landless versus the landlord. Now, as I mentioned, design justice is a way for us to radically vision a racial, social and cultural reparation through the process and outcomes of design. And now it is extremely important to recognize that the processes of design are equally as important to the outcomes here in this in this particular frame of working in large part because those who have been harmed by the processes that have existed before we come into a particular moment have to deal with the residual impacts. And if we are not careful, if we are not able to to relate to those moments, we are losing the opportunity to rectify some of the harms that have been done in the past. And so process becomes absolutely necessary to achieve the outcomes that we seek. Then additionally, design justice calls on us calls on us to challenge the privilege and power structures that use architecture and design as a means to perpetuate injustice and oppression throughout the built environment. The tools that we use are often centered in in power and power from the beginning of this country and before has always been rooted in land. And so how we mine that land, how we how we use that land and cultivate that land, whether we build on it and how we seek the outputs and the the the reap the rewards of that land. And so we have to challenge the system that use land to further power grabs and to further their own interests. And so we set our work in these kind of core principles. That means that we have to honor the griot. That means that we amplify the voice of those in the extant community that have established a history that will far exceed any supplementary research process or process projects that we might do within a community. We can sit there for months, weeks, weeks or months on end. But the person who who we call the Miss Marys on the block, the people who have lived in a particular community for years and years and years and understand where the crack in 1968 happened on the sidewalk on Smith Street. They understand precisely how a neighborhood functions because they've been there for so long and they can understand its its its nuances in a way. Design justice requires us to build power in place. So we're not necessarily or singularly in a space to to just build the building. We are always there to build community. We are always there to build power in community. Design as a as a form is a is the process of transition or manifesting power unto itself. And so how might we utilize the the the length and time of process to build community and transfer power into communities hands as much and as often as possible. Recognized, the justice calls on us to recognize that culture is both evolution and culture is revolution. It is slow paced and it is immediate. It asks us to again, lift the stories of people who have been in space over time, but also to lift the stories of those who are actively calling out the harms that are being done in the present. It also calls us to imagine a just future, as I mentioned before. It calls on us to think about how form follows fiction in specifically in communities that have been disinherited over time. This is this is one of the ones that that we all know fairly well, the form follows function as a as a as a trope. But the idea that the form of space and place follows the fiction specifically for those who have never had the opportunity or have been disenfranchised from the opportunity to shape their environments. We are we are given then the opportunity to shape our environments through stories, through narratives. And and and and thusly, we must understand whatever buildings, whatever spaces we start to design moving forward, respond to the story, not simply the current condition. We must seek to repair and liberate through this work. We must commit to being a radical in this work, and we'll talk a little bit more about what that is. And then lastly, we must commit to using design as a tool for protests, because again, we are seeking to change the space in place that we are spaces and places that we are operating within design calls on us again. It has it is to work with an unyielding faith in the power of a just society. We always talk about protests as an unyielding faith in the power and potential of just society and design at its best acts as such. And so through that process of design, and again, we'll we'll kind of unpack some of these as we move forward. We ask people to think about these just simple demands that start to get activated through the work we just talked about or through the processes we just talked about how might we start to divest from and reallocate police funding, put that towards supporting communities that have historically been dismantled through the use of power. How do we end prisons? So the design of prisons and police stations that support those oppressive states? How do we reflect a spatial injustice in the training and licensing of designers and architects? How do we think about ending sept head tactics or enhancing self determination in communities? How do we reimagine the financial models that support how design is brought to bear in our communities? What's more, how how might we think about shifting public policies to allow for just design? See, we are a part of a larger system that reproduces outcomes, regardless of whether or not we attempt to have a just design practice. And so we have to be diligent about how we are constantly challenging public challenging and shifting public policies so that it makes it removes one more barrier from us being able to do our work and others being able to do their work towards justice. How might we preserve and invest in cultural spaces, specifically culturally, black and brown spaces across this country? How might we then think about redefining the metrics for what it means to live in neighborhoods? All of these things call on us to rethink our processes and then ultimately calls on us to rethink the typology and the program that we use to create spaces moving forward. So those demands, as we talked about, as the dean mentioned a little earlier, were part of a push for the DAP Collective, which asked people to sign on to considering these as a part of their practice. And so just as a brief pause and understanding that there are so many more people doing this work than just myself in our practice, there have been over 3,000 plus letters assigned and sent there are 2,000 plus commitment or sorry, 200 plus commitments, 42 firms, 53 university representatives, a one large industry organization signed on. Then I'll pass through just a few of these just so that you get a chance to see again more than just co-locate doing this work. So to unpack that, right? How might we start to address all of these issues that again feel larger than we are generally capable of addressing through a building, right? We often, I often get the quote, well, you know, architecture doesn't really deal with policy. That's in the realm of someone else, right? And that's because we don't necessarily unpack and understand the continuum of power. And so we talk through what that continuum looks like in order for us to get to a design that challenges power. You have to know what power looks like. And so we break this down into the signal and the receiver. And the signal and the receiver really are simply these points that are sending signals back and forth. The signal pedagogy policies, procedures, the receiver practice projects and people. And if we understand what they're attempting to do through each of these mechanics or these components, we can then start to address. These are all the components are these are some of the components in which design can directly impact and ultimately we can impact. We can impact the larger so we can address the larger issues that we're dealing with in the physical environment. So pedagogy again, how are we changing how we think about this world? What's the ideology that we are left? Are we bring to the table as we move into our work? What are the policies that then get codified by way of that ideology? What we believe again, what we value is often validated through the spaces and places we design. So what we believe through pedagogy often gets tagged into our policies. There is a there is then a difference between policy and procedure. Procedure is the implementation strategy while again, policy is the ideal codification. This is how it should go. This is what we want to do to make that happen. And then on the other side of that practice projects and people. We are all receiving this input and we're saying, well, I'm going to follow that input or I'm not going to follow that input. And so I try to bring attention to one clear point here. When we talk about policies and procedures, we often look to a simple one that everyone really knows, which is is redlining. And so redlining from a policy standpoint didn't precisely call out black people from from being excluded within within the built environment. What it called black people and others within that that that the system felt needed to be disenfranchised, undesirable. So it called us undesirables. Now the procedure then called out black people or brown people in that process. But the policy itself was a different thing. And so recognizing the difference between as a design team are we addressing policies? Are we addressing procedures? Are we addressing internal practices that we have? Or are we addressing a project standard set that needs to be shifted in order to do justice to or and with a community? And so that requires us to extend our timeline and a practice up and down a scope that moves beyond the standard scope of services for a design firm. So I asked earlier that you become a radical, right? So that you think about what radical is and what it means to be a radical in this work. And really fundamentally, this is just asking us to get to the root of a meaning, right, root of a cause. And so if we as designers, as those who start to seek out problems in order to address them, can't get to the root, then we are doing a disservice to not just our clients, but the broader world as we start to do this work. So the language we use in this work is always important. And I often ask people what we are afraid of, especially when it comes to racialized systems of power. How are we? How are we moving past our fear? Often the fear is very simple. People don't want to be called a racist. No one cares. You are racist. You are in a system and you are serving a system that exists to racialize its power to the benefit of the system itself. And so our job then is to figure out how we become anti-racist. Our obligation to each other is to actively acknowledge how these racialized and socialized biases in the system exist and then seek to challenge and dismantle the privilege and power that uses that system. So your job is to seek that anti-racist lens or you will stay within that frame of supporting and reproducing the outcomes of a white supremacist or an oppressive system. It's very simple. We've seen these before. We understand that the isms are distinct in their systems themselves and the isms are really just the operants or the operators of that system. And so when we talk about racism, we are talking about systemic racism. We are not necessarily excluding bias and prejudice at the individual level, but the expectation specifically through the systems of design is really for us to address racism from a systems level. And so that means that we have to understand what it means to dismantle and unpack. What does it mean for us to seek out liberation through our work? It means that we have to understand what injustice actually is. It is an imbalanced system that denies equal distribution to access and resources throughout a system to maintain, often to maintain power. And so as we move down that spectrum and oftentimes after you see something like George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or Ahmaud Arbery, you start to understand that our responses have been woefully inadequate. From the academic level, from the professional level, from the policy level, especially as it relates to how we build out neighborhoods and communities that protect one another. So when we talk about equality, equality only requires us to make fair or to stabilize in the moment and to affirm a standard of fairness moving forward. Doesn't require us to do anything moving forward. But when we say equality, it assumes that a fairness can be achieved in a moment where we ignore all of the past injustices that have been relied upon people. So when we think about equality, we move past that and we move into equity. And equity is an acknowledgement of past inequities to make fair in the present and then to affirm a standard of fairness in the future. Does it necessarily require an action, but it requires an acknowledgement in order to move forward? You move forward with knowledge and justice then requires us to repair for that past injustice to make fair in the present and then to remove any barriers to progress moving forward. And then lastly, liberation. And this is the difficult one. People often struggle to get past the first set and move into liberation or, I'm sorry, get to justice and liberation is one step further. That means that we have to repair for our past of injustices to make fair in the present, to remove barriers to progress and then ultimately affirm, affirmatively influenced future outcomes. And this is where people get a little bit tricky is that no one wants to essentially seed power. And so as we talk about what institutions can do, there is a power dynamic that has to start to be broken up and redistributed and affirmed for those who have been historically disconnected from power over time. And so in order for us to understand that how it's placed into into the built environment, we have to understand kind of a critical path of history. And I'll go through a couple of these real quick and then show you what that looks like in a physical environment. Now quickly, again, we do a very short timeline, but we're talking about black codes, which established, again, continued control over the physical environment where and how black people could exist within physical spaces. And the slave codes that you saw in 1865 are often the same vagrancy codes that you see in current municodes across the country. They've been edited slightly to to to contemporize the the language. But often they are asking and calling on the same set of things around baby around trespassing, around loitering, quote unquote. And all of that was rooted in a lot of what we saw in the black codes in the early 1800s or the 1860s. We saw Plessy versus Ferguson to uphold segregation. We saw Bauhaus and modernism really seek to extract the kind of cultural identification of cultural communities through identifying a very precise type of architecture over time. We saw in 1921, all the way to the Supreme Court case in 1926, Euclid versus Ambler, which started to to make sure that police power was imbued into zoning at a single single use zoning. 1937, we saw the federal housing authority start to build out again the subsidies and insurances for particular communities. And that being the baseline, the foundation for so much of the injustice we see today in terms of economic well being an economic power. 1947, we saw Levittown expand 41. We saw the project houses pop up in New Orleans and across the country. We saw after that in 49, we saw slum clearances. And we saw that multiple times over time. We saw it again in the 80s. 56, we saw Federal Highways Act with often cut through black and brown neighborhoods in 65. We saw the modern housing policies affordable and kind of start to mortgage crises. And in the late 60s and early 70s, we saw this practice around SEPTED, which sought to really take a softer stance on police power within physical space by using some of Jane Jacobs' tactics to think about natural surveillance and territorial control. And the one thing that has continued to be missed over time is that natural surveillance only works when you have communities. And we've spent decades, nearly a century, building spaces that were fundamentally about the extraction of wealth through land and not about building communities. And so when we talk about how we formulate spaces to keep people safe, the way we do that is by building communities that actually care about each other and not setting up spaces in which suspicion can run wild and harm those who are often already harmed by systems. And then again, in the 80s, we saw HUD's development dollars reduced by nearly 80 percent from 1980 to 89. So these are just a few moments along the timeline that shape our physical environment and force us to operate and act in particular ways. And so that's the kind of meta, the policy side of things, but the kind of emotional human scale side of things is very clear, at least to some. When we talk about not belonging in a space, there is the acute racism that we know to be true. It's visceral. It's pictured and it's pictured throughout time and it looks the same. Today, you can look at the Charlottesville. You can you can look at that protest yesterday and see the same version of this person screaming, you do not belong here. But the same thing is being said through the buildings and spaces. I often tell you tell the story about the fact that there was there was a gentleman, a woman, a person, an artist who who decided to make a sign and to make that sign as an artist and and curve the letters and put the neon and hang the sign. And that person looked to their significant other and their children and said, look, I did something great. I made something. But they made something that was complicit in a system. And so as we start to think about how we are complicit in systems, we have to recognize that all of our actions tie back to a larger system. And they are all telling those who are marginalized that they do not belong. And so when and where we are reproducing acts that do speak that language, we have to be able and capable of challenging it and able to find new ways to address it moving forward. And that's existed throughout time and place, whether it's in buses or restaurants or in schools or in parks. The notion that it has existed and continues to exist across public spaces and such spaces requires a knowledge acknowledgement that revolutions happen to the claiming of space. It happens through challenging the way space can exist. And so we see that in present day. We've seen it in our past, in occupation of space, a shifting of how space becomes cultural and communal again. And requires us to continue to ask these core questions in all of our work. Who holds power? What are the power structures that directly impact the communities we are serving? What are the injustices that directly, that are directly a result of that power? Who is directly and disproportionately impacted? How does the built environment manifest or perpetuate that injustice or reproduce it? And then ultimately, what are the opportunities to imagine new systems to agitate, to address, to repair by way of design? Now, design is not ever going to solve anything, but literally no individual side load entity will be able to solve all of these issues. Our job is to play our part and make sure that we are not doing more harm. Because stories, the stories we tell in this are extremely important. And we have to figure out how best to acknowledge those. And we've seen it in the past. We've seen that folks thinking about what the principles or the foundational principles of design justice might look like, whether it's Tuskegee University, which saw an outgrowth from Robert Taylor and Book of T. Washington, many schools that were designed and built with the students and the community surrounding it in mind over that time. We saw W. B. Du Bois talk about the Philadelphia Negro watch and write is seminal work that really made the connection between the sociological or the social spatial conditions of Philadelphia, one of the largest enclaves for enslaved people after emancipation. We saw it through the Rosenwald schools, which I'm actually being told recently that we should again avoid calling it that because the Rosenwald was one part of a larger network in which communities of color invested so much of their time and energy, as well as some federal dollars and some philanthropic dollars. But the intention was through this process, through a design-focused community-focused process, 5,300 schools were built across the South in the early 1900s in order to supplement a problem that the larger system was continuing to reproduce. And that was against segregation and education, whether it's the museum in DC, which we saw a hundred years. And this is the other point to make just quickly, that when you're dealing with justice, when you're dealing with justice, when you're dealing with a reflection of people over time and what justice might look like in physical space, it often takes that much longer in communities of color and for communities of color. 1916 was the origin point for the African American Museum. We saw it actually be erected in 2015, a hundred years. And over that time, so many things changed from the insistence upon a memorial and a memorial building all the way through to the existing building, as you see today. We saw so many people from the AIA in 1968 change their stance in response to Whitney M. Young, but all of these reports, the Kerner Report and Whitney M. Young speech were both reflecting on stipulations from policy, from folks in politics and advocacy for so long that said the physical environment was doing harm to communities. And everyone knows that kind of you have been thunderously silent and completely irrelevant. Everyone knows that quote. So we've seen Jane Jacobs, we've talked about Max Bond and the Architectural Renew Committee of Harlem. We've talked about, again, in the past, the Black Panthers and the scope of work in which they sought to vision what new spaces that support community might look like. We've seen the Claybourne Avenue design team in New Orleans start to rethink what it might look like to reclaim a space that was torn torn apart by way of a highway. We've seen many fully love continue to speak to this work present day, seen Mass Design Group as well. So I want to quickly pivot to the way that we think about this work and the scales that we think about for this work. Our work as co-locate really starts to address the functional needs of the built environment. And we address those through shelter, health, food, mobility, education, recreation, safety, public, civic space, cultural space, mercantile and transportation. All of those are the kind of frameworks by which we work. But fundamentally, it is civic, cultural and communal spaces are the ones that we address and we address them through a continuum of design that might be small and ephemeral work all the way to collective and permanent work. But ultimately, we are doing whatever work we're doing, we're doing it to address larger systemic issues. And so I'm going to walk you through three projects that talk specifically about this work. So the first is Blights Out. So Blights Out, after Katrina, we saw an increase from around 20,000, 25,000 vacant properties across the city to about 50,000. Now it's reduced since then, but the process that the systems in our city operated by would not allow for our city to put these houses or these properties back into use. And so uncovering and thinking about what that looked like needed to be visualized because the scale and scope of that was too much. And so we went through a process of attempting to buy a house and redevelop that house. In that process, I'm sorry, we did that so that we can unpack the system as a coalition of organizations through Blights Out. For One House, these were all of the small things at the surface level that needed to be accomplished for that house to be back on the market. And so it became such a tenuous process that it was really impossible to unpack. And we recognized that nearly every house that had been demoed or every property in New Orleans that had been sitting for that long had a substantial amount of leans, had a substantial amount of debt already accruing on that property. And so no one could really buy that property without having $50,000 to $100,000 of debt associated with the property head on. And so this was much more of a design campaign that was meant to occupy small moments and small reliefs within the city. So we used a couple campaign strategies. One was a strategy that looked at kind of mayoral and presidential election cycles and started to work with community members and young people to design a series of yard signs and billboards that spoke to the issues that were specifically addressed in our community meetings. And so we work with the young design agency here in New Orleans to develop a series of posters that existed across the city. We also used the language of the community to actively create a moment in which community can address the specific issues of vacancy across the city by thinking about second lines. And so we did a lights out second line, which went from city or sorry, from house to house. We used musicians and artists to talk about the feeling, the emotion, the stories that were bound to those places. We also talked about the stats of those places. We started to bind that to the larger policy initiatives that were preventing us from actually making any headway on these issues. So looking and pointing out the Louisiana constitutional articles that prevented us from recovery at its highest level. Now we ran these when we ran for mayor as a coalition we ran for mayor in 2017 and every month we were able to again reveal a little bit more about how our communities were being disadvantaged by way of this housing crisis. We worked with again young people to talk specifically about how trauma is again planned into the architectural communities and resistance is then developed by way of our response to those traumas. We talked about what the definition of blight in neighborhood kind of debt looked like, what disaster capitalism looked like. Again, what those processes looked like were large. The second one was a planning process that was a little larger and this process was in response to the context that we've seen over more recently over the last six months but more broadly over the last five years. This is a project called paper monuments some of you may know. Again the context in the city of New Orleans we were attempting to remove four racist monuments that have stood in our city for anywhere between 80 and 120 years and on the backs of advocates and activists who have been pushing to remove racist symbology throughout our city for the last 60 some odd years current activists and organizers sought to remove those spaces. And so we saw what it looked like to occupy public space as democratic. See protest is a democratic condition. And so we sought to ask the question can we imagine new monuments from New Orleans? Can we start to set up a framework that restores the complexity of our stories and our narratives and doesn't just allow for singular white men to hold up and maintain power through the occupation of space. What does it look like for us to acknowledge the people places events and movements that shape our city and the complexity of our city rather than individuals alone? How do we leverage the systems that currently exist to pinpoint the weaknesses and deficits but also to pinpoint the assets the kind of humanity that we see across our city. So we talked to people at train stations and we talked to people in the library and at bus stations across the city. We worked with people and had public design days where we put up posters in the physical environment. We made live and large these stories, these narratives that have historically been erased through time and through history. We use civic infrastructure to tell those stories and cultural institutions to build that out. We talked to young people who are often negated from these stories and over that time we collected over 1500 proposals and talked to thousands more. We occupied and reoccupied public spaces to bring new memories and new stories to these spaces that needed remediation. Very much like a Brownfield site, these stories of these spaces of kind of racial terror needed to be remediated through the histories and stories that were present in the communities that lived there. We collected posters and proposals that told a story that was individual and not simply labeled as heroic. And we allowed those stories to be what they were whether it was young people or old people or our elders, whether it was people who were thinking about culture or family or just legacy or the kind of consistency of women throughout the history of all politics and all city building, but specifically in New Orleans. And then we reflected that back into the world. So as a planning process, what does it mean to reflect those narratives and stories back into the world, people? We asked authors from across the city, we asked our artists to work with us. We created over 50 posters that told the stories. And I'd like to tell these three stories real quick essentially the first one being that the desire standoff was the anniversary just passed, but it was a Black Panther cultural center in the Ninth Ward. And as we were posting up these signs at the scale of a monument downtown New Orleans, one of the downtown workers came over and said I was a young person during the standoff. Now the standoff was at this cultural center, 200 police officers showed up with a tank and firearms and tried to blow this building down, but nobody was hurt. No one was murdered that day, but there were young people there and some of those young people got away and got out and ultimately survived. And so those who lived to tell that story, one of them was a docent. One of them was essentially a docent for this public art piece who sat there and told the story to anybody who got off the bus because it was not only a story that represented a moment in time, but it represented a historical moment for that person and for many others across the city who had to endure that type of police violence, but also that kind of cultural trauma across the city. The second is Dorothy May Taylor, which we often talk about is helping to desegregate, did so many more things, but helped to desegregate Mardi Gras in the mid-90s. Now, I know that probably sounds weird to you, but yeah, that's what happened. And so Dorothy May Taylor, we produced these posters and these were out publicly. Her children took pictures of these and asked the family whether or not it was viable for them to, this is something that they appreciated and they did. They wanted to actually use these posters and so what you saw was the family took pictures and made T-shirts. Now they go to City Hall before the pandemic and they perform their civic duty. They show up to council meetings, they show up to events and are representatives in a way that makes them prideful of their mother. And so these things are resonating, again, not just as a singular narrative, but as a way for us to have collective conversations about the people, places, events and movements that truly shape who we are as a people. And so, and then lastly, what does it mean for us to then expand that conversation and envision a series of monuments that made real, made manifest from the thousands of stories that we were told over that time, whether they are a reflection on the history or the history of the environment in Louisiana and New Orleans proper or potentially our future, whether it's a light-hearted consideration of music playing in the city or whether it is a more solemn consideration of the many Africans who were disembarked in New Orleans as enslaved people. It all required us to listen, to hear the words and the stories of the people who live in this city and to reflect back through the tools that we have as a planning process. And so that's what you saw over and over again, the reflection of the stories, the narratives that fundamentally have been the anchor to so many things of progress, so many moments of progress throughout this city's history. And then I wanted to lastly show you one project that was speaking to the Claiborne Underpass. Now, I've spoken to you about kind of an art-based campaign that's one scale. I've spoken to you about a city-wide planning effort that's another scale. And this is a larger build that is really a means to reconnect two halves of a community that were sliced apart by highways throughout the 50s and early 60s. Now, as we mentioned a little earlier, it requires us to make sure that we honor the career, we honor the stories that people have told over time to understand how we might reflect that back into the work. And so our first step was to ask a question about Claiborne Avenue. That question was, what is, what was this place? It was a place that had, it was a bustling black metropolis. It was a bustling black community that had over 400 businesses. Nearly all of them were demolished when this highway came through. When I say demolished, nearly all of them shuttered when this highway came through. It was a space that had over 400 live oak trees that people used as a neutral ground to meet with family, to commune with neighbors. And it was eliminated. Now, marginalized people are always forced to be resilient are always forced to rebound in the face of oppression. And the city has done that. The people of this city have done that. They utilize under the bridge during Mardi Gras for festivals for all kinds of things. That does not mean that that trauma does not exist. And so we have to unpack all of those conversations. And in doing so, we started to ask again, what was here, what needs to be here and how do those stories resonate with you? And we talked to young, our youth in the city. We talked to our elders in the city and we started to reflect and build with them. So we built this small little pod that started to show up at festivals underneath the Claiborne corridor. We asked our community leaders about green infrastructure in this city over and over again. We asked our elders to tell us what was here and to kind of give us the historical framing around this place. We asked our artists to anchor us in the kind of cultural moment. We asked our business people to kind of give us some reality about the trials and tribulations that they were dealing with. We asked our youth to vision what the spaces are that would bring and hold them there in perpetuity. And so those questions became real through the conversations of anchoring and creating space underneath this highway. We started with a canopy structure that started to envelop and hold the design of the space. We started to make sure that there were levels and layers that were an opportunity to draw on a market space and outdoor market space. We wanted to start to make individualized market booths. This is critical because through all of that conversation we had over eight, nine months of community organizing and community build out. What we recognized was that there wasn't really much of a small business space. So small businesses, most 90 to 92% of black and brown businesses in New Orleans existed with one to three people throughout the entirety of their existence which means that they didn't have a growth path. They were really just trying to raise enough money to survive, feed their children, go to the next day. And so putting people in a space that they could not afford, that they could not build out, ultimately put them, put folks in a position of failure before they were even able to be in a space. And so providing a different format for people to grow into a business and giving people the opportunity to do that required us to think about space in a different component. So we went from hard and fast spaces into much more light gauge spaces. And so those also bound us to the ability to create more cultural moments throughout the architecture and meant that when we asked our cultural ambassadors what they really wanted to see, they wanted to see altars, they wanted to see ability to honor the dead and honor the living, but honor those who have done so much for this place. And so we created and designed spaces that reflect that need, those stories to be told for the craftspeople to be engaged, for the art of this place to be recognized and honored for the young people's stories to be vested in whatever new spaces were built. And again, for our elders to be heard over time. And so in closing, again, really when we think about this, we'd like to just really end on this note that language, the language we use in this work is extremely important. Architecture is a language like all languages allows us to tell a story because stories ultimately are important. Buildings tell us stories and diverse stories come from diverse cultures because ultimately culture is important. And culture is the consequence, as we mentioned earlier, a persistent circumstance and immediate condition. In our cities, our neighborhoods, our blocks incubate that culture. And so for people of color in America, there is power in the places and spaces where our culture is recognized, where our stories are told, and where our language is valued because that is not just good design that is justice. Thank you. Thank you for that, Brian. That was inspired and thought provoking as always. I'm Lee Altman, by the way. I teach here at GSAP, whatever here means. So Brian, I think this is a really great opportunity for us to kind of build on some of the conversations that took place here on Friday. So there was a book launch for race and modern architecture that was edited by Mabel Wilson, Irene Hang, and Charles Davis. And really that kind of generated a fascinating discussion around the role of race in architectural theory and history and urban studies. But I think today we have this, our responsibility is to talk about this from the perspective of practice. And I know that where I work and many architecture planning urban design practices around the country right now are struggling with this, how do we let go of our fear? How do we, how do we get rid of our fear? How do we unlearn the systems and processes that we're working within and unpack them? How do we transform the way that we do our work in order to become a just practice or kind of questioning really what that is. What is a just practice of architecture? Yeah, I mean, I think we have to move towards, when we're trying to remove ourselves from the fear that binds us to our current condition, we have to recognize that we are a conduit for power as designers, we often are not the initial power source. Doesn't mean we aren't sometimes. But in order to get to a just practice, we have to recognize what position of power we do have. So what gatekeeper are we in this process? And we have spent so much time being insular with our practice and with an academia that we very rarely make the connections back to the larger systems at play. And so I think when we talk about what a just practice looks like, it's one that extends beyond the boundaries of our existing scope, what we believe to be our kind of scope of services and reaches into the connections of sociology and politics and culture and starts to be in dialogue and not simply, again, monologue. I think that's a process for all of us to kind of gradually work through. One thing that I think is a really interesting model and that's more from the movement side than the practice side is the idea of distributed leadership. And that's something that's been really kind of beautiful to follow and see unfold both in, through design justice and design as a protest, but also through other initiatives and efforts that are going on right now from the architecture lobby to the Black Matter University or other kind of collaborations. And still there seems to be either from media or from academia or from these outside forces, there's always a search for the leader or the spokesperson, if you will. And I'm wondering, well, A, if this is something that you feel is translatable as a model to the practice side of our work, and B, do you ever feel like you're being put in a position of being a sort of spokesperson for a generation or a movement, whether you like it or not? Yeah, but I think that, yes, I do feel that quite often, but I think the key has always been for us, for paper monuments, this was a thing that happened consistently where people said, Black man likes to talk a lot, we'll put the accolade on him. And we have to essentially have a rote letter that said, it's not him, it's not me, it is all of us doing this thing. And we would send that to newspaper articles or to anybody who would write something that would forget the fact that this was a coalition of people building towards the movement. And so, yeah, it is a bit frustrating, but that is like the natural inclination of our society is to start to lionize individuals. And the whole purpose of the movement work we do, but also a depth and depth from its origins was 2014, was that we were decentralizing power. We were actively saying that, hey, this work has been done throughout the time in history, and this is not new, but just because we've now given it a name and some framing, we are now able to have conversations about it. I think that was critical to what this movement starts to look like moving forward. But I think the distributed power framing can work. It just, the struggle we always have to deal with is the necessities of capitalism often break that ability to maintain distributed power oftentimes because we're all doing so much additional work that there isn't a real easy way to make sure that compensation is justly distributed. And so that's the thing, the model that we have to answer for is one that really seeks to dismantle our binding relationships to capitalism and provides us a different way to operate and survive. We'll add that to the list. So I wanted to talk a little bit more about paper monuments, actually. And I think that's obviously something that you've been working on for quite some time, but it's in this, not a moment, but convergence of momentum and intensity, is that what you called it? I think it's something that's been becoming a bigger part of the discussion, really in a lot of other places. And we've seen monuments being taken down around the country and maybe not enough, maybe not quickly enough. Some new monuments kind of being installed. There's a recently installed statue of three suffragists in Central Park that was just mobbed last time I saw it. But I think one of the challenges or one of the questions that it raises is, for example, with the recent passing of Justice Ginsburg, it's now a race between our governor and our mayor in New York of who's gonna be the first to announce a monument to her and her native hometown of Brooklyn. So in your work and in your practice, you talk a lot about the importance of process as opposed to product. And I'm wondering to what extent that is the tool for us to work with in maintaining the publicness or the public driven or community driven character of the monument practice. Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, like the essence of working from process to outcome requires us to deal with issues and considerations that as designers, we are often negligent towards, right? And so when I say negligent, we are negligent towards most communities if it's not a direct extractive relationship, right? So if we're able to pull out data and information from you, great, we'll come, we'll sit down, we'll meet, we'll give you some food and cookies and maybe a few dollars and a gift card and we'll take your information and we'll go back and do whatever we're gonna do with it. And it requires then us to, again, de-emphasize our need to extract and re-emphasize our need to listen and hold through the kind of greater stories and narratives that exist within a community. And so even for the Justice Ginsburg kind of memorial or monument, thinking about all of the other, the impacts of the work that Justice Gameberg was able to do in the world, all the ramifications and all of the knock-on effects of that work are the things that we wanna start to see and talk about. I mean, I think ultimately, if you take a beat and stop just trying to lionize, because what will happen to Justice Gameberg is the same thing that happened to Dr. King, which is to lionize so much so that you forget the humanness of the person, right? And we already started that, right? We already started that over the last few years. We've lionized the woman so much so that we forget her humanity to some extent. And so I think the process requires us to have larger conversations so that we maintain and retain our humanity, not just our own humanity, but the respecting humanity that we have for others and those who have passed and our elders, our ancestors now, I mean, I think it's absolutely critical that that process allows us to frame and maintain our humanity through this. So I think we can start taking questions from the audience and first question from our good friend colleague and the Design Justice Summit fellow, Karen Cubie. So Karen asks, what should we know about funding for your extended model of practice? If you had your wish, who would be paying for this work? Yeah, so I think there's a couple of things. One is that when I talked about HUD losing 80% of its monies, that would be equivalent to about $132 billion a year right now. So this is the decrease from 80 to 89 went from $32 billion down to about $6 or $7 billion, I believe, give or take. And then just if we were expanding that with inflation, we would continue to see that at about $132 billion today. Now that much money invested in not just housing, but in communities and cultural spaces, that actually starts to be a framework that allows for cities and states to invest in real things. That's not determined upon the kind of extractive conditions of developers or clients that are not necessarily vested in the totality of the community, but are singularly invested in a property. And so I think one is that we should increase the amount of funds that come from our state federal and sorry, our local state and federal agencies that provide for communities to sustain themselves. I think as a second, we should be requiring the framing of design justice through all development and thus removing some of the barriers that developers put on design teams to do that work. So the funding model doesn't mean that we completely extract ourselves from how things currently get built. It means that we eventually probably need to and how that works still needs to be built out. But ultimately, there should be multiple streams that allow us to do the work that serves communities and not simply serves clients. Because ultimately, I can tell you that from the, the many buildings that I've worked on in my career, especially the ones that were done by developers, almost none of those developers actually lived in those spaces. It was always someone else, it was communities, it was, so we're besting so much power in people who don't actually care about the space in place. And so we really need to be able to control the outputs from developers who are investing dollars first and foremost. And then secondarily, I think we need to rethink our funding models from the local state federal level around housing to invest in communities and neighborhoods at a different pace in a different clip. I'm sure that resonates with a lot of the folks in our audience. I'm looking at you planning students. One thing you just said is that about the developers hardly ever living in their projects or, and really that shines a light on a much bigger problem where we are hardly ever the recipients of the projects of the work that we do at any scale from the market stall to the master plan. And part of the challenge is that we being, the design professionals, planning professionals are not reflective of the American society as it is right now. And I know some of the work that you've done has been focused on trying to change that and starting early, starting at the high school level, working with high school students and kids who may not be as familiar or may not have the same opportunities or the same access to enter into this type of work. So I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that and any other ideas that you might have that could kind of help direct attention and energy into expanding the field. Absolutely, that is one of the core beliefs we have, right? So how do we stratify the profession? How do we make sure that those who are, again, actively doing this work on the ground have the capacity and opportunity to be necessary components of the process of the built environment, right? And so the couple of things. So the first thing you mentioned, I had the opportunity to lead a program called Project Pipeline for the last decade. And through that process, we were really focused on serving strategies around diversity in the student population so that they would then be able to make their way to colleges with some, colleges and universities with some understanding of what the program might look like moving forward. That was super successful we had. Over 12,000 young people have been through that program over the last 10 years. And but one of the things we realized is that diversity is an outcome. Diversity and inclusion are outcomes. And this is for anybody in the audience who at the university level who makes any decisions. If your strategy is set specifically around just simply diversity, you are going to fail. You have to center justice and equity because diversity and inclusion is an outcome of justice and equity. It means that your programming shifts. If you want people of diverse bodies to be in space, they have to feel as though that space gives a damn about who they are as human beings. And so it is not simply enough to say we want more black and brown faces in the room. It fundamentally means that we have to rebuild the table, rebuild the space to account for that. And so that's one of the things that we looked at in relationship to DAP as, I'm sorry, to Project Pipeline as a program. Now what we are more recently thinking about is a program called Community Design Advocates. And that really is a way for us to think about how we can introduce those who have actively been doing this work over the last 15, 20 years can be invested in the outputs of the built environment through that work as they currently are doing it. So yeah, so Community Design Advocates are really a way for us to integrate those who are activists on the ground and where advocates on the ground and making sure that they are again invested in that output. We have another question from the audience here, anonymous this time. Has your work dealt with colonialism or addressed this as a foundation of systemic injustice? I'm gonna venture that the answer is yes, but you're gonna tell us how. You need me to read that again? Yeah, if you don't mind, sorry. Has your work dealt with colonialism or addressed this as a foundation of a systemic injustice? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, white supremacy and kind of colonial processes have always been at the root of what we are looking, what we are researching and understanding in order to do the work that we're doing, right? So if we don't understand the way that colonial system or colonialism as a system itself works, then we are again destined to kind of reproduce those conditions. And so I think, I may have mentioned this earlier, but Fred Hampton talked about the fact that you can't reproduce, sorry, the answer to capitalism is not black capitalism, it is socialism. The answer to colonialism is not a black colonialism or what we consider the diverse colonialism. It is actively a different system. And so we actually have to reconfigure our foundational elements in order to move that forward. Question from our very own Laila Kajalye, our director of events and programs. How do we operationalize connections to community on a larger scale? How do we increase the understanding of climbing, zoning, et cetera, in communities in general? Yeah, so I think the operationalizing of how we operationalize it is really by again, depowering ourselves. And that's tough, right? Providing and building platforms with the power we do have so that ultimately that power can then be redistributed. Because as I mentioned, the PhDs on a block have a much longer and thorough understanding of place and the nuances of place. And so we actually have to be invested and invested in systems that support their growth and learning. And that means that we may have to again, redistribute power and dollars into places where people exist, not into shepherding people from wherever they are into this confined community. And so if we're only ever trying to pull people from somewhere to exist within this isolated box that again reproduces itself, then we are always gonna get those same outputs, even if that's a diverse community, even if that's a series of people who have actively been doing that work because we're retraining them to think and do the things that we do, rather than providing the resources and power distribution to understand and to amplify the things that they already do. I think Blights Out was the perfect example for us in that that was shepherded by organizers and activists who were not designers, who were not architects and really just wanted to understand what gentrification was in our cities. So I think that's how we think about what the operationalization of that work actually looks like. What was the second part of that question, just to... I think you did answer that, but to make sure that I understand it, you're basically saying it's not about how to make zoning accessible or it's not about necessarily bringing community members into a position or a level where they can navigate the zoning system. It's about making the zoning system or other systems that we operate in that define or build their environment or redesigning those so that they are inherently accessible. Yeah, absolutely. This is an interesting one. How have you navigated or addressed potential harms that you and your process might unintentionally cause to community members or collaborators? Yeah, so that's the kind of statement that architecture is never neutral. No matter what we do, there is harm that is potentially there. And harm, in our case is often... It's a great question. Harm is often a byproduct of who you talk to and how you talk to them and when you talk to them. It's really a byproduct of a process that can only take in so much information and requires you to determine when are the moments that you should be able to be out in the world? The ways that we've tried to navigate some of that is that you have to be as a gatekeeper or as somebody who holds any level of power within the system. We have to acknowledge when we mess up. That's a huge part of this. It's always just acknowledgement. The second is to repair in whatever way you can and repair might look like an active reconciliation in which you actually are back in communities talking with people that you disagree with. So for instance, I can give you one example. During the Claybourne process, we had a constituency that was really just anti this project and they were community members and their voice was heard throughout the process and they would show up consistently to tell us about that. And we have to make sure that even in the most kind of heated situations that between community members that we were able to allow for those who were against this entire project and they still had the space and opportunity to voice that dissent, right? The ability to dissent in public is absolutely valuable. And so building out the structures to make sure that that was a safe, a continued safe environment for those who dissent to the project to speak was a part of repair because that wasn't always the way that it operated, right? Like it wasn't always the opportunity there. And so the other way that we try to get out in front of it is that for nearly every project we do, I mean, this is not everyone, but the ones that we do through Colocate, we try to have some version of a public facing now or newspapers. So we send, so for instance, for a project we're doing out West now in Portland, we send out 19,000 newspapers to the broader community, specifically in the neighborhoods that would potentially be using this project. So 19,000 newspapers that talked about who we talked to, when we talked to them, gave people more opportunities to have conversations moving forward and to lay out what decisions had been made already and what decisions will be made moving forward. And so there's a way in which, again, providing space and platform for those who we have harmed to dissent publicly and to be able to acknowledge and repair where you can. And then ultimately changing your process to make sure that that information is more globally accessible, even when it might slow the process down longer term. 19,000 is a lot. Yeah. But we, I mean, like it was 20,000 for paper monuments. So I mean, it's around that. Yeah. Yeah. Question from Lori Brown. She says, thank you so much for discussing your engagement. This work is clearly rooted in an intimate knowledge in the community you engage and collaborate with. Do you hope to bring this model to other communities outside of Louisiana? And if so, how will you go about this? For example, is it to find other organizations to collaborate with in other parts of the country? Mentor and train others to do this work? Yeah. So we run design justice trainings. We do partner with people in other communities already. So we've worked in Toronto, we've worked in DC, we've worked in Portland and Seattle and across the country. And so the way that we usually operate is that we attempt to find other, either design firms that practice in similar ways. We attempt to work with organizers, like actual organizers on the ground who understand and build out this work in very specific ways. A, because they've had established relationships, they understand the pain points in a community and then ultimately are able to simplify the process of getting in front of and talking to and building relationships with a community that we're attempting to work with for an extended period of time. So we're gonna take two more questions. But okay with you? Yeah, yeah, perfect. There is talk now about moving towards the practice of maintenance and care slash repair. What does that look like or mean for designers and architects? What does it mean for cities and communities? Yeah, it means that we have to slow down. It means that we have to acknowledge, and again, some of this is not, we are a part of a process, but it means ultimately that maintenance means that we have to respect and honor the stories and the places and spaces that exist in a community already, the culture that exists in a community already. And when we do that, we can start to, we can really start to lift the buried assets of place. And ultimately, like I said, it means we have to slow down so much so that we can actually hear those stories so that we can actually respond to them through a design that reflects and for us to be comfortable being wrong. Essentially, we're asking people, we're going into a community and asking them to learn a new language every time a new space is going up and to do that and then to be able to speak fluently about how to articulate how this language either doing harm or is not really communicating appropriately. And so in order to do that, we have to really humble ourselves and be willing to challenge our clients and officials. We have to be able to say, you're effing up, client. You need to slow down. You need to change your process. Cause in large part, the decisions that have to be made are usually on their backs. And so we have to acknowledge what roles we can play within that process. Maintenance and care. Good question. Last question for this evening. I apologize in advance if I mispronounce the name. Oreti Ugooguo is asking, how do we as design students truly decolonize our architecture curriculum within an institution with heavily colonial industrial, colonial history and system? Yeah. It's tough. It's tough. Someone who, you know, bought that good fight for a while, what you realize is that you're in school for a very short amount of time. So two things I would say is you really have to find the advocates on the staff that are willing to push a kind of anti-colonial pedagogy through this work or anti-racist pedagogy through this work and then create the moments and the opportunities in small part, building up to larger coursework over time. So we were able to bring certain lectures in when I was in school and that turned into larger coursework or tied into the NOMAS competition which allowed for us to reflect on some of these ideas at a broader level. And then ultimately expand your education, expand the spaces and places by what you get education from. Because ultimately this is one small part of your existence and you will definitely need to be able to take away from what you learn in school, the mechanics of architecture and design and planning. But you will also need the things that are left behind in design school which is the kind of socio-cultural training that's necessary moving forward. So I'd say expand your footprint of where you learn from. Go to other lectures, go to the library, go to other schools within your university and start to bring that learning back into your work. Thank you, Brian. I think that is an excellent note to end on. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, I appreciate it. I also want to thank our Dean and Laila Ketelyer, our fantastic events coordinator, director, excuse me. I have many more questions. I think we're gonna have to do that another time. We'll get back on it. I will say one thing, right? And I take this with me nearly every day. I remember we were talking, Lee, a few years back or maybe a year or so back and I was saying, an architect's job is really one of our jobs is to kind of navigate and move the water that's coming into a place and get it away from a building. And you were like, yeah, the water's supposed to be there. And so there's this thing about respecting patterns, routines and where the indigenous space is in places. And I may have translated a little bit as a metaphor, but thinking about the indigeneity of people in place and where things are supposed to exist within a particular environment and how much we as designers often harm and change that. And so I appreciate you so much for being a part of this community and for doing this with me today. I appreciate you. Thank you, Brian Lee, everyone. Yeah, thank you, appreciate it. Have a good night. Yes, you too. Thanks everybody.