 Good afternoon, everybody, and good evening for those of us in India, like myself. I'm Paru Sharma. I'm an MSAUD alum from 2015, and I currently live in New Delhi, India. Today I'm going to be talking about the project that I submitted for the GSAP incubator prize. It's called City Scanner, and just a little bit of background about myself. I am an urban designer with about 11 to 12 years of experience, and having worked in the field of urban design and road safety and urban mobility, I realized there was a gap between infrastructure and behavior. So in complex societies like in the Indian context, we see a big divide between the infrastructure that exists and then the actual mobility behaviors. And I'm going to go into that in the next few slides, but trying to dive into the complexities of urban mobility and how navigational systems and information can sort of bridge the gap and empower vulnerable road users, including non-motorized transport users. Right, so just to give a bit of the gist of what I'm going to be talking about today. The idea and the intention and sort of the hypothesis is that more people may walk and cycle if they have tailored navigation that suits their mobility needs for pedestrians and cyclists, and makes their mobility experience safer and more enjoyable on roads in India. So looking at the context of road safety in India and why this is such a complex topic. And just to give you a background, India is unfortunately the road crash fatalities capital of the world, according to the World Health Organization. And that means that not only are there high number of conflicts, the number of deaths is tops the countries around the world. And the majority of those are vulnerable road users that include pedestrians and cyclists. Amongst all the Indian cities, Delhi, the capital has the highest number of fatalities amongst all other cities. In terms of the number of users and the mobility, the gravity of the situation in terms of these road users. The fatalities are disproportionately high amongst non motorized transport users, which includes pedestrians and cyclists. So amongst the commuter population in India, 140 million people commute to work every day according to slightly outdated data but the only legitimate data set that we have which is the 2011 census of India. So amongst those 140 million people 33% cycle and 10% sorry 33% walk to work and 10% cycle. So amongst this population, the number of fatalities is extremely high, like I mentioned earlier. What it means is on a daily basis, 62 pedestrians die per day. And just as of 2016, there was approximately 2500 fatalities of cyclists in one year. So 48% of all road crash deaths are amongst this road, road user population. So what does that mean okay road crash fatalities is one thing but what is the general day to day urban mobility conditions. As we know, and we must have heard I am sure many of you may have heard already. Indian streets are complex and daddy streets are extremely complex, which means that there's a continuous jostle for road space, and even when the interest infrastructure exists. It's usually a very very dynamic situation where anything could be different at any particular given moment of time. So the consequence of what this road safety scenario is, is that not only are family members breadwinners getting affected. It's also affecting the economic aspect of urban development and growth, especially GDP and overall economic wealth of the country. So non motorized transport users are often the least addressed population, because typically they belong to the weakest socio economic sections of society in India. Within the road trips, the within the daily commuter trips, about 35% of vehicle trips in Indian cities are short trips, and most medium and large Indian cities have 56 to 72% trips which are short trips which are less than five kilometers. So, what can we do with this information. I conducted a survey to surveys two rounds. The first survey was a global survey of about 115 people, and the second survey was an India specific Delhi NCR region focused survey, in which there was an entire assessment of the mobility behavior and habits. So, amongst these questions was was a question about, would people be inclined to walk more if situations and conditions on Indian streets were different. And overwhelmingly, over, you know, over 78% people said, yes, they would like to walk more. And if, and, and similarly for citing, they also had an overwhelming response to, to having the ability to cycle more if they could, if situations were different. Similarly, the, the assessment in terms of, would people change their route in case there were obstructions in terms of physical obstructions or even human led incidences on the on the street. And would that be a factor for them and and and if so, would they be open to tech that would actually help them and aid them in this approach. And again, 77% people said they would be interested in using navigation services for either cycling or walking, or both 97% said they would change their cycling route if there was a physical obstruction or disruptive incident, or both on the intended route, and 80% said the same for cycling. The idea is that there is an overarching inclination and and and desire to walk more amongst a large population of deliites. Many of them have the choice and the means to take multiple modes of transportation, and ultimately end up with taking the motorized vehicle and their private vehicle which could include cars or or to motorized vehicles, scooters, motorcycles, etc. However, even with education and inclination knowledge of sustainable practices. There is a huge disconnect between how people are moving and what they would be willing to do if they had the choice. So, so we looked at one pilot area in Delhi. So, this is the overall map of Delhi NCR so Delhi is Delhi NCR the national capital region comprises of Delhi and a lot of satellite towns around within that. So this is the northern region, East of Gilash which was taken for this pilot survey for number for numerous factors, because it is a high density mixed use neighborhood and district, and it includes multiple scales of activity, including the neighborhood scale, the district scale, the city scale and even the national scale, because there are certain markets and office hubs that attract people from around the country let alone the neighborhood and the city. So, you know, looking at the street and and how people are behaving, especially when there is times of high congestion and put traffic. We looked, I say we because me and some volunteers came with me. We, we looked at this particular stretch, if I just go back, and you can see in purple the government school one and two right in the heart. So, this is the stretch in East of Gilash which was taken. So, on this stretch, there are two large government schools, which function as girls schools and then they double up as boy schools afterwards. And this was the time around 1230 when school was out and they started leaving for their home. And to play this video so you can get a sense of what it means. So, as we can see there is infrastructure in place there is a sidewalk there are, you know, it seems pretty pleasant. However, is it enough. Does it seem like it's adequate infrastructure and is it catering to the needs of this, this massive flow of pedestrians and cyclists and all sorts of road users all at once. So, so as we can see, you know, even when there is infrastructure. You know, this is what on the left side this is what's kind of resulting the cyclist unfortunately is on the footpath, and the kids and the students are on the road jostling for space with all sorts of road users. So, just another just to give you a sense of quite noisy as well just back down. So, as we can see here, similar situation where, even when there are footpaths, they are either obstructed or encroached, or just not sufficient. Right, and then what happens when there are people with special needs and, you know, additional requirements for mobility, what happens then. So this is one crossing where sort of students are just left to sort of fend for themselves, even though there's one guard that helps them cross the street. There's just, it's just pretty much chaos as you can see here. All right, and this is the school itself which doubles up as the boys school. Right, so what I what we did next was basically see how mobility affects the infrastructure and the navigation services might be applicable to somebody who is traveling across the city. And, you know, visits east of galash this pilot area on a daily basis. So this is Nugma. This is Nugma and she has she is 22 she works as a caregiver. She lives in a household of six and lives in Sangam Vihar, which is a sort of urban slum informal settlement, and then travels about 1215 kilometers a day. And then one way and then back again next on her way back and so what she primarily uses is the bus and she walks or takes an auto rickshaw as first last mile connectivity. She has access to a phone and she has mobile internet services. So that is sort of a plus. Right, so her activity mapping is such that at the bottom as you can see that's her origin Sangam Vihar, and then she travels by foot to the bus stop the bus, she takes the bus, and then commutes about an hour and a half. And then, overall, and reaches east of galash where she then takes. She walks the rest of the way. And, as we can see in these photos, even on the best days, you know, there are things that happen, like in any city but in India, there are lots more additional sort of layers of obstruction and sort of inconveniences. So as on the bottom right when there's a monsoon, you know, there's oftentimes as flooding on the left side you can see that there are even when there are footpaths, a lot of times scaffolding and construction work takes up blocks those those spaces. So people are again forced to move on to the street, and then even, you know, occasionally on a rare occasion a tree might have fallen and then there'll be a detour for hours. So occasional things like that too. Aside from crossings and sort of just a lack of cohesiveness in terms of of where people are walking. So the question is, can mobility as a service and urban information services ameliorate inequities in public urban space, particularly amongst underserved vulnerable populations. And can information be the bridge that makes the experience for these vulnerable road users, better safer and more secure. So, so coming to what the idea behind city scanner is is to take navigation services like we have already and create crowdsourced database of urban hyper local information and create a community driven approach of not only information and and and and pain point mapping, but also smarter navigation services and trip recommendations based on whatever dynamics situations are happening on ground right now. So sort of like a ways and and a next door combined to to suit specifically the pedestrian and cyclist. Usually, you know, even when there is a disruption in and whether it's, you know, a protest, unfortunately, or a, you know, rally in India we also have a lot of marriage ceremonies which are called bad arts. And those are very, very frequent and think this is a wedding season now so we should be seeing them now any day. And, you know, we have multiple incidences like that on a daily basis. So how can we create quicker smarter efficient routes that are primarily based on the comfort and the satisfaction and convenience of the end user and and these experts vulnerable road users. So the idea is to basically take your data upload it be part of a crowdsourced database view that accessibility heat map plan smarter efficient trips with sustainable active transportation in mind and receive navigation guidance and alerts in real time. Based on things that are more particularly suited for cyclists and pedestrians and by no means is this sort of a sort of be all and all for, you know, intended as a be all and all for travel and commuter experiences. This is supposed to be an additive commute community based tool that can provide value over time. So, these are some mock ups. I'm just going to skip through those. And the idea is basically to tie up with not only businesses and organizations, but also create value for governments and real estate agencies to create better. Hyper local planning, which is based on existing activity and behavior, which can ultimately create safer public spaces and more valuable interventions in terms of amenities. So, at the end of the day I just want to say that, you know, we know that there are existing navigation services available right there's Google maps as ways and even a next door gives you sort of real time dynamic information about your, your locality. But the in India specifically Google maps and ways are primarily focused on the motorized vehicle. They completely miss the opportunity of tailoring their services for what specific needs that the pedestrians and cyclists have. So, city scanner is sort of a hopes to be a bridge between what is existing and what can be and adapt with time over what the needs of people are. So just quickly, I, you know, there's a quick mock up here which I'd like to play if there's time and it's sort of very work in progress, but similar to how other navigation apps work. The idea is to basically create a system where you can, where you can choose the experience you want, rather than just rely on the quickest shortest, or the, you know, least traffic route. And a lot of parameters for cyclists and pedestrians include things like, you know, thermal comfort, noise pollution, topography, and avoiding dangerous intersections, etc. And do those are the kind of miniscule nuanced parameters that we focus on that city scanner. And that's all and please if you have any questions, comments, I would love to hear from you. Please reach out at city scanner app at gmail.com and www.cityscanner.net. Thank you so much, Perule. I also want to, did you mention how you have you're also connected now to the Columbia University entrepreneurship ecosystem. I did not. I, yeah, I have a sort of, I've had a few good relationships as Columbia entrepreneurship. I was part of, it started off with applying to the Columbia venture competition last year. And was it last year. Yeah, okay. 2021, where I was a finalist for the urban works India challenge. And then I was, I was part of the start me up boot camp, which is a really awesome sort of incubator type. Really fast paced. I don't know how to call it cohort led by the Columbia engineering team. And then I was also part of project 2.8, which is an amazing incubator by Columbia for women founders, and I highly recommend people apply. We've got very supportive team and we just, we're we're growing and I think it's the third year now. So do apply for the fourth year next year and I'd love to help or answer any questions, or hear from anybody. Great rule. I love that you've been able to take advantage of all your alumni resources, including the incubator prize but also making that connection between school based alumni communities and also the university level. And speaking of female recent specific resources, we do have a question from Luciana about whether there's research looking at gender issues in the urban space, in particular, and maybe specific to India might be a little more poignant. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a lot of research now that is coming up about how women move in in society and in cities, different cities kind of have like slight variations of course because there are cultural shifts, but there's a lot of great work happening by some of my colleagues and peers as well. So one, there isn't, I mean, ITDP is a great organization which is doing a lot of mobility and gender oriented mobility studies in India. And there is multiple consultants. I know that there is an organization called Safe City, which is amazing because it is an app, but also an organization led by, I mean the organization is red dot foundation. Basically, they basically track, you know, things like all, you know, gender related violence and harassment, and it's anonymous, and people can track, and just sort of its location based so you can track, and it tracks the coordinates. And basically they're trying to like quantify the sort of negative experiences on Indian roads, which we all know about but we've never really kind of quantified that so I think it's really interesting and it's also in other countries. So there's something, some in, I think Columbia is, it's also in Columbia I might be mistaken. I do look them up. And gender related work is really, I've actually worked on a report where we hired consultants at the UN Habitat India, where we were working on sustainable cities for tier two cities, you know, improving and then sort of envisioning their, envisioning their growth in the next five to 10 years. And there was a huge focus on gender related gender oriented sustainable strategies so that the UN Habitat is also doing work in that space here. Okay, that's, that's great and just sorry in the interest of time if anyone else has questions for Perule please reach out to her. But unfortunately we need to go on to the next next project, but thank you so much Perule that was incredible. Thank you so much. Thank you everybody. Thanks Leslie. Hello, my name is Luciana Varkuja. I'm an architect, research and educator. And first I would like to thank Columbia just set for the opportunity and a number of people who were essential for this research development. And this is Reforest searching beyond the material catalog. As material specifiers, we have to acknowledge that our work as architects and designers has a direct impact on forests. Could we develop our sense of awareness and potentially connects our projects to restoration initiatives that are already happening those extraction sites. We see forests as commodity producers, but they are also places of territorial instability, which leads to food insecurity connecting people with issues of deforestation, forest degradation and illegal activities in the search for income increase. We will be traveling now to the state of Sao Paulo in Brazil. This research is identifying strategies that help the communities grow economically while preserving the forest, associating the knowledge of indigenous peoples and traditional communities in the state of Sao Paulo, connecting with sites where agroforestry and regenerative agriculture systems have been carried out in the sparse regions where remnants of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil. The goal is to investigate and document those efforts in order to inspire projects more integrated to the forest and its peoples. The Atlantic Forest nearly in Guarini's people's language where the souls bathe and sorry for mispronouncing it was the first biome encountered by the colonizers and the first to be exploited due to its richness and a strategic location. It has extended along almost the entire Brazilian coast. From its original 129 million hectares of native forest cover studies estimate that about 12.4% is left in a highly fragmented landscape with 90% of those remnants being private properties. 149 million people living this biome, which is a 72% of Brazil's population, and it concentrates 70% of the country's GDP. There are 400 species in the Atlantic Forest, 14 that are at high risk are endemic to the biome, the golden lion tamarin, the jaguar, the giant anteater, the howler monkey, the just Sarah palm, the power Brazil, the Jack Tiba Rosa, the Peroba. The impacts of the forest station and climate crisis make this biome the protagonist of several restoration initiatives. Looking back at the forest history, it's important to acknowledge that the forest was already managed by its original inhabitants. The isolation burn system established by the Amerindians was a less invasive process, consequently, the damage to be to the forest was not irreversible. The process happened every 20 to 40 years, only when the forest had grown back to a certain high, and the secondary or substantial forest would end up recovering the abandoned fields. In contrast to this logic, the process imposed by the Europeans denied such care, generating ecological damage. A native tree species that would inspire Brazil's name the Pal, Brazil was one of the first commodities to be exploited by the Portuguese invaders. The volumes of tones were extracted by enslaved indigenous peoples. The Portuguese also introduced cultures with high commodity value, accelerating the process of forest destruction. Forest diversity was replaced by monoculture crops through a cycle that left to no time for the forest to recover. In the past, as dozens of indigenous villages were destroyed, their inhabitants killed, captured or eliminated by infectious disease. Warren Dean in his book with products and firebrand the destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, writes that the conservation of natural resources would prove irrelevant in a society in which conservation of the human life was irrelevant. Despite the Brazilian captaincies in 1532, the presence and the rights of indigenous inhabitants were completely ignored. Turning indigenous people into slaves was a deliberate attempt to destroy a culture and create a subordinate caste. The society began to form, defined by land tenure, who lives in the cities and who lives in villages, plus their rights, depending on origin and race. The city was synonymous with civilization, villagers and the western idea of nature were considered wild, a concept that had separation and segregation as its foundation. That is the portrait here and it's called the civilized Guarani. The current biome situation is a result of the direct ecological and social impacts of a series of economic cycles that were established in the region by the invaders, and carried out with the slave enslaved the work throughout centuries. Brazil's political transitions from colonial to imperial and to republican government accelerated the forest devastation. In the past 30 years croplands doubled and monocled three plantations credible. Plant crops grown in the Atlantic Forest sugar cane eucalyptus soybean maize and coffee are commodities produced in highly intensive and mechanized systems that rely mainly on flatter terrain, pushing the forest station to those areas. In the 1960s, federal laws established taxing tax incentives for eucalyptus reforestation, the planting of a single speech tree native or exotic as large monoculture areas for wood, paper or pope. That included the cheap low ones to the companies with pope operations becoming widespread in the region. Errors of native forests were replaced by large extensions of homogeneous eucalyptus plantations, which are constantly bombarded with pesticides. Most of the states of the spirit son and by a rapidly heading towards the desertification. And here we see in dark brown, the eucalyptus monoculture area increased from 1985 in the top image and 2020 in the lower image both in the states of spirit son to and by him. Communities and smaller farmers who live surrounded by those plantations denounce the situation countless times. Popo companies and are pressuring land issues community's exposure and promote serious health impacts. The main companies operating the region are fsc certified. A quote from Eliani Brun journalists from El Pais. We have to look at what was the pattern that created what we are experiencing this thought of Western origin, white patriarchal binary that created this emergence that we are living in. We should look at the people who planted the parts of the forest and their ancestors and learn from them. The direction of current strategies has to come from these groups. The research is currently mapping five case studies in the state of Sao Paulo, where we present two of those cases studies corrupt to the farm in valley to Paraíba and the quacalli patch in 10 on that put a indigenous land in the city of Sao Paulo. The map shows both areas location together with the city of Sao Paulo. From 1985 to 2021 we can see the expansion of the urban areas in the region in dark red. Agriculture crop landing pink and silver culture, which is eucalyptus monoculture in dark brown. In valley to Paraíba, large cloth farms were divided the result in a region punctuated by small properties. With the expansion of the eucalyptus plantations in the sixties, many landowners replaced traditional agriculture and existing forests in their properties by eucalyptus monoculture. Patrick Assunção inherited the 200 hectares farm from his great grandfather, Cicero da Silva Prado. The farm was once the largest rice paper mill from Latin America. It also had eucalyptus plantations during the 20th century, but the factory was sold to a pope company after its decline in the 70s. Since 2008, Patrick invested in the monoculture of a native species, the guanandi, calofilum brasilianici, for wood purposes. He then created agroforest systems areas to have other sources of income within this 20 year wait for the guanandi forest to grow. Before implementing the agroforest systems in the farm, due to the previous monocultures impact, the degraded soil had to be recovered, which happened with the use of specific plants for that purpose. The practice of green manuring does not harm or contaminate the environment as conventional agriculture. Currently Patrick grows rice, kombu sea, palm hearts, cherries, turmeric bananas and intended to sell wood in the future. He believes the hardwood silver culture, which is three monoculture applied to agroforest will lessen the timber pressure in the Amazon rainforest. He also supplies main restaurants in Sao Paulo and he sees the need to open a market for the production. Agroforest products can be a way to generate income to producers cultivating food of high nutritional value he adds. The search is also mapping initiatives where forest restoration can deliver economic benefits, not only at a large scale, but for local communities. The forest find support for its recovery in these communities who develop their way of living in parallel with environmental conservation. They preserve, restore and protect the biome against predatory exploitation. One of these peoples are the Guarani India, who have inhabited the Atlantic Forest for thousands of years. The Guarani qualitative way of living implies the relationship and management of the forest in balance with nature. In the first decades of the 20th century, Sao Paulo State imposed the limit spaces and fixed the borders on them. The restriction of areas for planting traditional crops contributed to a greater dependence on processed food, threatening Guarani's food autonomy, and the continuity of their traditions and affecting their mental and physical health. Suicide numbers and child mortality are increasing among indigenous groups. Finding a minimum quality of life is directly related to land demarcation. In 2012, the National Indigenous Peoples Foundation, FUNAI, recognized what is known as the Puran indigenous land with approximately 16,000 hectares, which was officially demarcated by the federal government in 2016. Today there are 14 villages and 1500 Guarani indigenous people living in the territory. The Tecoa Calipete is one of these villages and it has its name coming from the Guarani word for eucalyptus plantation. The region still has a large presence of the tree. With the Guarani leadership and government-supported programs partners, the soil recovery process started. The indigenous trees were removed and used to build houses and structures. The community learned contemporary agriculture and permaculture techniques, as they considered those practices dialogue with their traditional knowledge. Guarani people have a remarkable practice of environmental conservation and the biodiverse restoration. They see forests as a living and complex organism inhabited by beings and spirits, what the western society understand as nature. Plants were introduced to recover the soil, making room for cultivation gardens. Some of the species are the Crotalaria, the Fornace Turnip and the Jack Bean. This last one is great for recovering the soil's nitrogen levels. At Tecoa Calipete there are 17 cultivated gardens. There are nine types of corn, 15 types of sweet potato, four types of peanuts in addition to cassava, pineapple and pumpkin. There are perennial species and other fruit trees such as Jussara, Araçá, Jaracatia, Cambusi and Pitanga, plus wood and medicinal plants. These cultures are called true food. With the youth and elders participation, four out of 10 farmers are women. Jerapua Timirim is the leader researching species and exchanging seeds with other communities. Tecoa Calipete is creating a larger impact in the region. The Guarani do not plan to sell their products, but for their own subsistence and to strengthen their own culture. Generosity is the foundation of collective life. We don't have to live with more than we need. So for us, selling breaks this rule, says Jerapua. For them, the most important thing is to guarantee the strengthening of the indigenous land. Jerá adds that they need the physical demarcation of their territory and the removal of non-indigenous people who are still in their land. Important to mention that recent increase of the violence against indigenous groups due to state absence and the dismantling of the agencies that are responsible for monitoring the region in this current government. Forests are designed projects with a variety of patterns, patterns that reflect social and economical cycles and have an ecological impact. From the forest original formation passing through deforestation, agricultural patterns, soil degradation and restoration. The research inquires with which potential patterns that combine strategies to aid the communities economically while restoring and preserving the forest may be implemented. It also identifies that food sovereignty and the conservation of cultural rituals and practices are directly related to connected to land access. A few points raised so far. In addition, initiatives must involve indigenous populations and other forest peoples, kaisaras, hebeirinhos and kilambolas, local, traditional and rural communities. Community leadership must be the initiatives managers, land security ski. In places where they have land security, communities have a vested interest in managing the resources on those lands. And a question to designers. Could we enhance our knowledge on how will work impact forests and its peoples. How could that drive a more holistic approach to the work that we do. Thank you. Well, let me take a moment in between presentations to also acknowledge some of our guests here including Laura Kurgan, professor of architecture, and now the program director for computational design practices. She was instrumental in helping create this cohort this year as one of the faculty jurors, along with Lance Freeman, who was presser of urban planning. We also want to acknowledge our alumni jurors, including Roberta Washington, former commissioner of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and past president of the National Organization of Minority Architects NOMA she has her own practice. I'm Michael Chen co founder of design advocates and principle of his own practice, as well as Jason Pugh, the principal at Gensler and number of the company of the firm's global race and diversity committee, and most recent past president of NOMA. So, let's give around of applause to to them. Thank you so much. I'm excited to hear from Mustafa for rookie who is based in Buffalo, and he's going to be the, the first to introduce his, the local interventions. I'm excited because it's based on what GSAP is, it parallels the intro to architecture and urban planning summer programs building out a pipeline to to the profession. So, Mustafa is doing that with his community in Buffalo through reimagine architecture so welcome Mustafa. Thank you for joining us. Thank you Leslie can you hear me. Yes. Awesome. Great. Thank you and I appreciate that you making this opportunity available online as well I wish I could be with you in person today. I'm actually in New York right now I'm downtown and Syracuse University Fisher Center. And because of that I think it's important just for me to sort of begin by saying that I'm you know, speaking to you from what is traditionally Lenny line up a land. And I think it's important to just sort of pull out the dispossession of these people which continues to this day I also want to acknowledge the Seneca village that was leveled in Central Park. It's a African American settlement there to make way for this park that we sort of think just was the sort of part of nature and no humans were involved in the raising of that. Thank you so much for having me I want to also just thank, thank the GSAP incubator for this opportunity which has been really life altering for me in a way just in terms of my awareness of things. And I'm sort of, it's made it's been very humbling as well so I really really thank GSAP incubator for this opportunity and I'll try to not go too long a lot of this Leslie you've seen already so apologies you kind of know the script. So, the project that I proposed and I'm working on right now is called reimagined architecture, and the way I want to set this up and Leslie had a great introduction but the way I want to set this up is to just sort of talk to you about the trajectory of months about what I've been working on and where we're at right now. So, see that. So reimagined architecture is a new free program for BIPOC high school students who might be interested in applying to architecture school. Participating BIPOC high schoolers will join a network of design students and professionals network who can offer insights and advice on how to get into architecture school. High school students will attend for meetings in person or zoom that will cover questions about who goes to architecture school and how you actually apply. And we will help these students create a portfolio that they could use for applying to architecture school one day in the near or distant future. Okay, students who attend all four meetings and completed decent portfolio will receive $175 scholarship to spend on college applications candy or anything that they want. And so, now we're at fall 2022 I'm just going to take you back on a timeline through what I've been working on or some notes. I got started in November 2021 after sort of receiving the grant from GSAP Inc. And the first sort of thing that I wanted to do in Buffalo where I'm based is to have an outreach with a school that would sort of be an appropriate candidate for this program. I narrowed in on the Buffley, the, what we call buff arts, which is the Buffalo Academy for visual and performing arts so you could say that it's similar to for those of you from New York if you're familiar with LaGuardia High School in the city it's that type of school it's a public school. But it, they do have a focus on arts programs. It's also a school in which I think 81% of the students would identify as BIPOC students. So it made it a sort of a really great and it's also in the east side of Buffalo which is a majority black community. Just so you know the Buffalo the demographics there is a 49% black or non white Hispanic. Okay, so this was the school I identified I immediately started doing some outreach with this school. This is a really cool mural that's on the outside of it I started doing some visits there. And very sort of funny odd experiences that I had when I went to go visit there one I kind of was just thrown into the middle of the cafeteria during lunch and handed a microphone. And, and it was like oh here comes most of the fun he's going to talk about this amazing program and here I am with 300 students, all like eating like throwing food whatever and I'm telling him about this really really great program where you can earn a scholarship to learn about architecture to potentially apply. And an interesting thing happened, which was that the principal principal Judy Covington, and many of the teachers as well, they're black and white. But they sort of came to me the principal came to me and said, you know, what is it. And I said to her oh well you know it's a program to help students get into architecture schools kind of teach them about architecture. And she's like hey but what is it. And I was like, well, you know it's it's a program like and I kept on explaining the program, and what she actually the principal was actually asking me is, what is architecture school, like I don't know what that is what do architects actually do. This was really sort of a moment for me where I had to stop and ask myself some questions. Take off that annoying gift. I had to ask myself some questions about this, which was how am I approaching this and what assumptions, am I actually making realizing that I'm trying to address the BIPOC community, particularly a black community, and so many people in that community have their access to architecture to the profession is so distant that they actually don't know what we do. And so that made me actually have to go back to the drawing board a little bit, rather than being like oh I have this great program, and I want to share it with all you I think I had to sort of figure out how do I teach people what this program actually is trying to do and why is it even valuable. So I was teaching a course at this time at the University of Buffalo, it's a art 404 lab. And what I did was basically I tried to get my students, there was 10 students, all undergraduates at University of Buffalo, all different races. And I tried to get them to create a game that would teach high school students what architecture actually is and why it's sort of interesting, right, why should they pursue it in the first place because it's these limits to access and and sort of limits to accessibility that I think really to be addressed. So some of the students they all came up with these different ideas one of them named Tommy lidlow came up this the idea of the Durand game which could be sort of a Tetris type thing that you know kids could play it and they would get really really interested in architecture. And then this was a board that he made for that. Another student made this thing called architect which was basically you kind of go travel all around the world and look at different sort of specimens of architecture and he thought that that could be a really really cool way to get a high school kid interested in design. And there was a sort of storytelling mode of a game. And these are some of his slides actually, and how he kind of dealt with it so there would be little pieces there'd be little a board and you would move around on it. And then there was another one by Noah called architecture seen at his take was that like students, everybody likes films. And so we can get students interested in architecture through movies. It's a really, really cool way to sort of create outreach. And then also there was a student who was from Buffalo and she's like oh maybe we can create a game that's like a scavenger hunt. And so students would go to some of these buildings buffalo is you know great architectural culture and Frederick law instead city. And so maybe that would sort of get students to get interested so we have people thinking about history, people thinking about film. This is sort of how I began to address this question of what is it right the the issue was like thinking about how to get this sort of field of make it accessible to people or make it sort of get people to sort of answer some questions about it. And so there was a bit of a wee reboot. After some of those experiments, and I started to do more targeted outreach at the school. Which was basically less of me sort of walking around with flyers in the cafeteria and me actually meeting with teachers in the arts department who would know actual students who could be really, really interested in this so I could talk to them about architecture and using some of these games from the seminar. So that was in January, February and March, I got a bunch of students to sign up. Big problem and I think I have to talk to some of you about this is these kids high schoolers do not check email. They're communicating with each other and this is was mind blowing and I'm like, you guys are going to get fired for not checking your email one day and an architecture, but I didn't actually say that but yes it's getting reaching out to the students and the way to reach them that wasn't creepy Instagram messages, which was also suggested to me to was was an issue right the kids they're they're not using, they're not using email. So I had to sort of think about using discord using go to think all of these apps that these students are using to get the instantly don't use WhatsApp either which I discovered and that was a huge failure in terms of my outreach because a lot of the students that's mainly for international people things like that so outreach was an issue contact was an issue. I also got some feedback from them about would they like a program on a weekend or a weeknight. I'm just going to move this here. So people actually preferred weekends over weeknights for a program so that was interesting to learn. Right in person versus virtual to be honest, there was a, I think, in terms of these students who I had pulled. Some of them were like actually totally fine within person, and they really really like that idea. Others really really preferred virtual I mean depending on where they were coming from. This is a school where students are not necessarily from that neighborhood they could be coming from all over so the virtual option was something that I thought okay I'm going to integrate a virtual option into the program. Portfolio seem to be more of an interest as opposed to creating a new art or architecture project. The students that I talked to said that they would rather work on something that was related to college applications then creating some brand new architecture project, which may or may not be useful to them for their college careers right there's thinking about college and they're thinking about time and budgeting that time. So that was sort of important for me to learn. And also the idea of whether or not it should be in the summertime a lot of the students in were sort of okay with the idea of maybe a summer of sort of college or high school enrichment program. Students though, particularly in this school they go visit grandma grandpa North Carolina or in Georgia over the summertime so summer wouldn't be good for a lot of the students so this these were things also making me think about the virtual element and how I would review this. What happened actually in May that you all know about were two tragedies. One was the white supremacist lynching a tops market on Jefferson Avenue, resulting in the death of 1010 people all black people who were killed there. And then that was followed very quickly as you remember by a school shooting in U of all day and which I think 23 students were murdered. These two things actually really shook up the program for me and what I was trying to do. And maybe for reasons that might be obvious and maybe not. Here is the location of my school of buff arts, there's the tops. This is the grocery store for this neighborhood for students going to the school who are living in this area. So there was a direct, you know, there was the school was reeling from this shooting. There were people whose family members were involved or were injured or were murdered at that store so that really shook things up it shook up the community and put me on sort of a weird off footing in terms of how I should proceed with this program and be respectful and sensitive right not walking into the school five days after the shooting with my flyers. How do I actually treat this with a little bit of respect. Another issue I think particularly after you've all day was that access to schools became a big big problem and it's at the point now where in Buffalo because of these two competing tragedies. You can't really enter a school unless you're a family member of a student there and I think even they it's only one family member who's allowed and there's a bunch of signatures and paperwork that has to be done. And also around Buffalo after these two tragedies have become highly guarded there's a huge police presence around the school that I think makes students uncomfortable that actually started to make me a little bit uncomfortable. And so these were things that definitely affected the program and how I wanted to proceed. I did some further reboots. What I did actually is I started to reach out to my own students, both at University of Buffalo School of Architecture and also at Cornell AAP where I was teaching last semester. And I reached out to my black and brown students or these are all black students actually, and asked them to sort of become sort of outreach for me in terms of they could get friends they could get people who are interested they could maybe start on asking about what architecture is and getting people to sort of want to participate by their own example. And so here are some of the students and the idea the way that it's working right now is that we have these sort of initial core group of students who are all being compensated for their time. And they then are reaching out to their friends their cousins things like that telling them you know this is an interesting program you may be interested in architecture here is what it is. And then the idea is that they then may tell other people and this could be sort of a way of kind of thinking about community. Right. So we're still based in Buffalo. We're still trying to attract students in Buffalo we're getting attraction from students there but we're reaching out to them in different ways maybe less to the channel of the school, which that avenue is a little bit more difficult now and more through just word of word through students who I trust and who trust each other. And so this is kind of the idea of the community that we're building right now. So in August 2022 we started with some onboarding where we're actually by word of mouth got students interested in this program interested in these four sessions, and it's their choice whether they want to do virtual or not. And that that's kind of in the process right now. What happens is in the first meeting we sort of show you what architecture is maybe through a game what architecture school is through personal experience. Right. And then in the next bit or the next meeting those students and talk to us about what their interests are and we listen and we try to figure out is this like maybe something that you would want to do. That's kind of a phase that we're in right now. And then lastly portfolio practice, thinking in particular about two schools you be our plan and Cornell AP, thinking about what those schools require and building a portfolio or getting the students to build a portfolio based on these requirements of a school. And so that's another thing we were thinking of as of July we had eight architecture mentors that I shared with you 10 core students at BAFPA and 15 associated students that are all throughout New York State I'm limiting the program to New York State right now with the idea that diversity at Buffalo, which is a SUNY school could potentially be a trajectory for some of these students who are in state and happening tomorrow actually is a big drive that we're kind of cosponsoring tops where this lynching happened has now reopened and it's very problematic what's happening there. The shop is basically just they fix some doors and windows and act as if nothing even happened the community members are saying we are terrified of going into that shop we don't want to go there we want other options. And so tomorrow we're participating in an event with our eight for students and some of the high school students from BAFPA to attend this meeting to think about how we can reimagine Jefferson Avenue and the tops there and think of something that would be better to realize than just a reopen grocery store with a new pharmacy that really was not serving the community too well, even before the lynching there. So that's kind of where we're at right now. I'm going to just, and I hope I haven't taken too much time but I wanted to thank you for this opportunity. I'm really grateful for it and I continue to learn for it so I learned from it so thank you, and I'm going to stop sharing my screen. I just had a terrible nightmare vision there Leslie that I was muted the entire time and I was really really nervous. We heard everything that was fascinating. Also for me to just think of high school students in a particular age group as its own kind of community and hearing your process of how to engage with them using the age demographic. That was really interesting. So I will we have time for one or two questions. I don't have to take any questions I'm really curious to hear what people have to say or contributions or suggestions. Hi, thank you for the presentation. My name is David and this summer I was teaching a high school architecture course through city tech called college now. It's really fascinating to hear kind of your story about how to engage with high schools how they totally are like their own community and it's in a lot of ways it's hard to bridge that gap, especially coming from such a strong like academic setting. And so I guess my question is, like, when you were beginning this program. Where you always committed to kind of being your own entity and not affiliating yourself with a certain school like. And in doing so what kind of challenges or like affordances have you come across. Okay, thank you so much for that question Jeff. And that's such an important question. I always had the plan to partner with a school I just didn't think that the partnership would be so fraught with so many failures. And there's reasons for that one thing is that, you know, you parachute in with your Ivy League degree, and you're sort of your savior complex, and people are suspicious. I don't know if you're a developer, but people in these communities are like a little bit like, what, what are you trying to do and, and, and rightfully so. So I think that Jeff that was an initial hurdle for me working with these schools was people who just were sort of like teachers who well meaning good intentions but teachers have sort of an obligation to protect their students from some stranger walking in off the street. I didn't go to that school and my family didn't go to that school and I'm not from that community so I think that that kind of became an issue and I had to really go to the school multiple times to build trust. So that was sort of a really important thing for me. There's another issue as well which is that you can't. And I should have figured this out they're not going to leave high school students alone with some random 40 year old man, there has to be educator there. Right and so that means is that teacher now they're just going to be forced basically by the principal to be with me at this program that teacher is not getting compensated for that so I could either compensate that teacher using the incubator and we believe in equity right and people should be compensated for their time. But this was an issue I think a lot of there was a little bit pushback because you know somebody at three o'clock wants to go home to their own family not spend three to four helping Mustafa with his after school program. Right so this was sort of an issue for me as well. I'm committed to working with a school I don't want to sort of be just my own entity. I need the school to give me the students and there were Jeff some frustrating moments where I was like, I got this money here, somebody take it. Like it was almost like a kind of a, I wanted to give it away and there was no there were no takers, and which is why I had to sort of reorganize a little bit and think about other networks beyond me just landing into that school. And answer those two questions stuff but thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, and it's David, but thank you. Oh, sorry. I really, I really appreciate the work that you're doing I think it's great. Thank you David. Thank you so much for the chat but there's one question from parole in the chat. If you get about urban sort of touch on it very quickly before we have to move on to the next project. Absolutely parole I see your question about the urban design. I guess what you're asking is so one it's not my area, I think and so that's something that I've kind of been a little bit distant from, but I do think that it's super important and now with this event tomorrow reimagining Jefferson Avenue that's a coincidence that we're both using the term reimagine in our titles. I think that that action there but so tomorrow, I think, at that meeting we're going to be talking very very much about urban design, but it's not something that I have addressed I think it's something that I do need to address more, but thank you for that question. Okay, thank you. I just I just wanted to say really quick, I am so fascinated by what you just presented. Thank you so much for doing this research and I mean it's just really, I mean as a person of color. I'm really intrigued to hear that you know these buffalo students did not know what architecture is. I mean, wow. You know, and, and, you know, to for you to be able to break it down and to explain to them. You know what it is. You know that that I found really fascinating so thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much. I'm sorry for going over thank you for your comment. I mean, yes, it's 2% of registered architects are black, right, meaning that 2% right which 15% of the population is now being forced to live in built environment that's not designed by that. We have to answer for that but thank you so much for your question Esther and your support. Thank you. And I think that's actually a great segue to the next presenters Nelson and Louise, who will also be talking about how to create more equity and representation and built environment through development efforts actually so welcome. Thank you so much for making time to come and join us this presentation. And thank you for one in zoom that joined us for this presentation. So, my name is not so soon and this is us Miguel, and we are very excited to introduce to give you some background on the, on the end perspective on the work that we've been doing that has emerged from our work as alumni from G sub and to explain the issues that we hope to address in surrounding communities in Harlem and the Bronx, as well as present and explain the different phases of the work that we have been doing and will continue doing the next months. So firstly we we want to tell you a little bit about us and our mission. We are Luis Miguel as Nelson put it is Luis Miguel Pizano Nelson the Jesus will be both members of the class of 2021 in the architecture and real estate development programs are critical outlook towards housing and economic development has been framed by our narratives as BIPOC first generation designers ourselves, we have developed an understanding of equity and community that is colored by our own transitions across cultural and geographic territories. Growing up in Mexico for me, I was very influenced by my experience with Spanish style architecture residential design and state housing agencies that addressed low income housing needs, like info navite equally influential where my teenage glimpses of the housing crisis in suburban Houston. As a design professional I have worked on often contrasting lines of work, such as high end homes and capital rich communities of the Northeast, as well as 10 in place rehabilitations of 60 plus nights of buildings will be commonly understand as the projects and 2600 plus units this is a project that is currently underway. And for me, having moved from the American Republic and growing up in the Bronx and Inwood serving new tenement style buildings as well as tower in the park multifamily has informed my understanding of dense cohabitation and urban leaving around shared community spaces. I'm nice and infrastructure professionally have worked New York based residential commercial and retail. And that relationship has share my, what I'm more focused on which is more economic development around New York City through the EDC so really understanding how our community is not just Manhattan which has been traditionally the hub where investment has been coming through. How can those other boroughs see more of that investment and also increase in active economic activity. Although we both came to GSAP with the purpose of training and architecture. We soon found ourselves captured by the analytical impetus of the real estate curriculum. Real estate professors in the room so they will kind of vouch for this and become we became increasingly interested in our flexibility in flexing our competency across real estate development and architecture so as to improve the conditions in multifamily and affordable housing development. Our work across these programs served as an interdisciplinary laboratory of sorts, which allowed us to work on projects that investigated conditions for underserved communities in New York City. And as part of this laboratory with a project that study the co-dependencies between housing real estate and urbanism. Really, really in the dynamic networks that connect issue this segment of the built environment. We also worked on projects serving serving the needs of marginalized workers in by reclaiming underutilized lot fragments in Sunset Park. As we started to think about the work that we wanted to do following graduation, we needed to look no further than the neighborhoods around us, which were experiencing complete upheaval. The COVID-19 pandemic was a radical transformation for many by puck individuals living in underserved communities around us. In addition to the disproportionate loss of life of black and Latino frontline workers. The ensuing health and financial pressures made them four times as likely by one count to be evicted from their homes. Many households have become extremely, extremely vulnerable to eviction. And according to the New York New York University for Long Center, one in four households in is Harlem and Central Harlem are severe rent burden, meaning that 50% or more of their income household income is dedicated to rent paying the rent. So the issue of rent burden is particularly egregious in the Bronx, and the city largest rental market, where 80% of household are renters, and this is the problem from Burton is quite exacerbated. And so here, so here we wanted to also find out that a in 10 zip codes that also primarily located in Harlem and the Bronx have the highest eviction rates and located. So these are the numbers that we focus on. And so this is something that we wanted to show as part of what this area became the focus of our research. And based on this information that we've started to learn more about and as in the, in the wake of the cover 19 cover 19 pandemic. My then partners are sampler and I develop a project called the empower, which is a body of research in sort of proposals aim at fostering a network of support, both prevent evictions and empower tenants who are in the process of being evicted. So the project as seen here, analyze systems of eviction before and during the pandemic, which were quite exacerbated by the pandemic in the fact that people needed a place to live, given what all the super systems are on the pandemic. And the heightened bolder ability of a growing number of households, relative to the impending housing crisis, this is something we, we all dread but we know is coming highlights the importance of community participation and engagement in the development process. In turn, greater community participation warrants greater capacity building among tenant associations, small community organizations and startup non for profit development companies or startups. However, community participation is hindered by limited public asset access into conventional real estate knowledge and know how we firmly believe that the democratization of industry specific development knowledge will lead to greater access into channels for generational development. At this juncture, it is very important for us to acknowledge that one of our initial folk I really centered on the analysis of alternative home ownership models. However, extensive modeling exercises and new found professional experience in private and public space in public practice excuse me have revealed to us just how hard it is to make home ownership. This is very helpful for folks in an extremely low income bracket in New York City, agency subsidy levels and institutional mortgage models, largely pencil out to serve higher income brackets. It's just the bottom line hovering around 130% am I that's 173,000 for a household of four in the lowest of cases. We're still interested in pursuing this study but we'll need to kind of reframe it in the long term. And so yeah so and therefore the focus of our work has been the creation of a pre development toolkit that can be deployed with small nonprofit, small nonprofit players that can build competency and prepare for prepare them for to interface with agencies stakeholders, as well as for profit developers that have that are impeding and tentative development ideas. And so as we deepen our understanding of the existing structures that enable development in New York City, we have been, we have broken down such processing to five distinct faces to discover possible ways to empower smaller smaller developers nonprofit developers that want to partake in, want to partake in this process to enable more community center development that be housing or, or community facilities. So as a line in this outline in this diagram. These five phrases include organization, community organization, public, public engagement, particularly, like the official numbers of chairman, which is the way in which New York City disposes of public land for public center. Then there's also the product development which is where we're also trying to come in and then there's the use of the landing what is the use of that long term on these now land leads which is the way in which the city disposes of land for users. So here we have three, we have highlighted three of the buckets that we think our skill sets can be best implemented which is that community engagement kind of looking back at our roots and having lifted in this community as well as the open procurement which is for you to develop the proposal for the use of the public land and also the actual development of the proposal that happens pre pre development and pre closing. So in the past six months we've become intimately familiar. This is through our professional practice with the major players in New York's non for profit housing space. We've worked with some of these agencies actively, and many times we'll see in in in our engagement that it's limited due to availability and capacity constraints at the tenant level. So in the first phase of our work, we have begun to reach out to several of these players, including nos cadamos and Hester street to partner in identifying smaller players, taking their first steps into the development process. Although it is challenging to identify all forms of engagement at the tenant level. We believe these three categories, able to represent the groups that have been able to that we have been able to interact with at community meetings, which are 10 groups, which are usually fewer than a dozen active tenant representatives who gather to advocate on behalf of a broader body, as well as non for profit development startups usually small team of principles supported by limited staff with limited experience, as well as mission oriented community orcs. So these tend to be groups of widely ranging sizes oriented around specific mission often based in a certain geographic domain. Yeah, and so the limited staff and resources of these small parties stand to sharp contrast with the enormous scale of many affordable housing deals that happen around the city. As part of this redevelopment redevelopment of public housing buildings in New York City capitals in the hundreds of millions is being invested into the renovation of existing housing stocks. So giving only a portion of the 355 nice development in the city have been renovated. There's still a lot of room for this lower nonprofit community organizations to come in and also do some of this work. Yeah, so in the next few slides we people dig a little deeper into the competency building pre development toolkit that we have begun to build out. The first chapter identifies 13 major design development topics, while the second identifies 10 major development finance topics, while not total in the representation of the development process. We have sought to render a comprehensive cross section that provides material for manageable building blocks. So we'll see that certain questions that come up with when a small nonprofit is trying to engage could be at the level of what is happening with underutilized spaces in your development. And is it that programming needs to be community oriented, meaning recreation meal distribution, you know, containing civic and legal services, or is it that, you know, the tenant association really needs retail dollars. And that means potentially a space that is occupied by a fresh food provider, a restaurant or a small business. Similarly with with kind of care providers. This is more oriented around retail. So you'll see mental health, daycare, elderly care and urgent care providers and and these are, you know, smaller scale endeavors or businesses that are still bringing dollars into the tenant association activities participation fund. This is something we can get into it's a discretionary type of fund. And to hear that we started to paint a picture as to what this means on a square on a per square foot basis and retail in this in this part of Manhattan and Harlem in the Bronx, you'll, you'll see that a retail partner will bring in $15 per square foot versus a community provider may bring in $5 per square foot or none at all, depending on the service being provided. Another topic we want to focus on is property management so breaking down to these tenants, you know what is needed in order to maintain your development. Is it repairs, which involves typically work order systems, vendor liability insurance and documentation as well as HPD inspection, because often when agencies come in and come in and inspect and identify an issue. The city may be compromised. So obviously this becomes a vicious cycle if repairs are not carried out with staff. Typically you see, you know, these, these roles supers porters ground keepers in terms of admin, you know, starting to get into some of these nuances of tenant participation funds discretionary funds, discretionary accounts that are set up in partnership with the developer to serve the needs of the tenant association is it a day, a day festival is it a performance, is it, you know, programming for literacy. Some of these services are typically funded through tenant participation funds and again can be worked and negotiated as long as the tenant association knows what they need. I know we're short on time so we can skip this this part, breaking down kind of essential design pillars and for the next piece we'll get into distribution. So as we move forward, see I to the toolkit will be assesses distributed in various forms, including a web based based platform, which will be which will reflect the evolving national nature of our work. As we move forward in redefining our methodology and expanding our partnerships institutional and local collaborators. We've also been looking into analog ways of distributing this information, what are the best ways for presented and make it more into the just for bikes. This is so complex and convoluted particularly since policy around the city. It's changing, making the complicated the project more complicated and also thinking through research literature and graphic and how this is presented local nonprofit organizations and meetings but also local community boards and their efforts to engage with the city and the state officials. Lastly, clinic distribution which is more on site at this either local Harlem is Harlem or wrong. Take care of a local president working with nonprofits to get people more engaging engaged in this work. Yeah, so we, we love to learn from some of the folks that have been doing this for a while now we're still very young but excited to carry out this work. Here are our email contacts and our Instagram which slowly building promise. But again, we're excited to carry out some of this work and thank you looking forward to your questions. Thank you, Louise and Nelson I'm so sorry we always were we're always feeling very tight on time with every presentation but I just want to make sure we had time for questions. I have a question, because you mentioned how how overwhelming it can be to try and enter into this development space, especially for less experience and as we all know like if you don't have role models if you're not learning from the people around you who aren't doing this. How are you thinking about engaging the stakeholders in developing this literature. Yeah, so part of the joy of kind of stepping into the first professional role following graduate school is that you are able to identify things that just happened through the work. So in doing our work, we are able to engage with a number of tenant associations. I've been at a number of town hall meetings where you know it's, we're talking to Sarah, maybe three people, you know, and there's a tamale distribution event in her case not to jump on that. You know, part of part of the, the work is kind of showing up and engaging and understanding what the pipeline is for some of these deals, such that if, if a certain cluster of buildings is going to be developed next, then we know which developments to tackle, because they're part of a building renovation effort. So there is a pipeline in the agent at the agency level that we can tap into in doing our work to engage at, you know, at the local level. Does anyone else have questions. Anyone else. Okay. Yeah, yeah, so we've, we've attended we've communicated with the North Bronx, which is so this is where we've started to communicate. The community land trust inherently is about owning land, public land that can be transferred to the community for management. But now that the city is doing more land leases. So in the long term, you will go back to the city unless the lease is extended. So working with the project to see how these languages are currently in place in the city to benefit and also work with. For many, but also other many land trusts that are happening around in the South Bronx that are either pushing to use abandoned or underutilized properties, or do we transfer to land trust to them. So definitely some communication starting how we can navigate the process to make it work for the local community. Thank you so much. And that's actually another great segue to Fabrizio and Catherine who have been attending community meetings and have will be sharing about some of their advances using that strategy for their uni Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi. Uni Wi-Fi project. Thank you. Hello everyone. My name is Fabrizio Pugliassi. I'm an architect and a graduate of the program at Columbia GSAP. I work at the intersection of design and research. I currently teach architectural history theory and design studio parts on the school of design in New York. I'm also a PhD candidate in architectural history design. At the University of Bosnia, Switzerland, where I'm studying marginalized stories urbanization in southern Italy. I'm Catherine on I'm working with Fabrizio on the uni Wi-Fi project, which we'll talk more about shortly. I'm an architect and researcher currently working at Andrew Franz architect and I was a 2020 fellow at the Institute for public architecture where I studied community engagement in industrial mass path at Newtown Creek. And I also researched about feminist pedagogies with the support of Princeton Mellon initiative. We have about 10 years of working experience in architecture firms and cultural institutions in the US and abroad. We together run distributed architecture, which is a research and design practice that we launched in 2021 to try to bring our contribution to the discipline of architecture towards a more inclusive and collaborative design practice. When we come from very different cultural backgrounds. I was born and raised in Italy, Catherine grew up in Korea, these courts and exchange are central to our collaboration. As an extension of this discursive method we are exploring participatory processes in design and teaching that are helping us to defining and recalibrating the design and research directions of our practice. We also have some pictures from a collaborative design unit that we thought this summer at the architectural association visiting school in Seoul. Today we would like to talk about our project the uni Wi-Fi that which is currently under development in Ireland was initiated one year ago, thanks to the support of the Giza pink you better price. The project aims to bring a free high quality internet access to underserved the communities in Ireland, mostly living in pre war low rise of buildings which have fallen through the cracks of several internet initiatives. We have intentionally developed the project in a slow open and discursive manner so that we are thinking. This is evolving as we engage with the communities. This made for a non linear development process about one full of discoveries and rich conversations with a growing number of residents and also architect artists and other people organizations operating in Ireland and New York City. The project during the pandemic which illuminated the particular social and infrastructural issues will learn that the lower income households and neighbors in New York, particularly with the black and Latin see demographics face the systemic lack of access to the social infrastructure, which also includes a bit built infrastructure. Specifically, the lack of access to stable internet connection severely impacted the learning of students who rely on it for school and elderly people in need of vaccines or other medical information or social services that entirely moved online. Our project began began with the desire to help these communities to bridge the digital divide which widened during the pandemic by bringing a positive changes into the built environment through design. Our initial research began with gathering the data online. We read the annual community board the statements which reported the technological upgrade and internet access are in dire need in central and east Ireland, which then led us to further research of inequity about inequities in internet access. This map shows the percentage of households without internet access in New York City, but you see the darker colors means that there is less accessibility. You can see that Eastern Central Ireland are two of Manhattan's list connected connected districts. We found the 2019 data that indicated the 25.8% of households in Eastern Central Ireland lack access to internet, which is well above Manhattan's 11.7% average. In parallel, we also read about the work of NYC MASH, which is a grassroots organization run by volunteers that in the last 10 years has brought high quality internet to over 1000 locations in New York City at very minimal cost. As shown with dots in this map, MASH has nodes mostly in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan right now. With our project, we hope that we can contribute to expand their network to the northern side of Manhattan. In more technical terms, MASH installs Wi-Fi nodes on rooftops, which receive signals from super nodes that are located in strategic sites in neighborhoods. Each new node reinforces the existing ones, so in a sense that their technology mirror the social aspiration of building a community by empowering each person one node at a time. We consider this as an important part of the project as we found a technological partner that shares our mission in a field dominated by profit driven corporations. To connect with MASH took some time, we attended one of the monthly meetups and talk with the volunteers about our project. The reception was very good, and this gave us confidence in moving forward to pursuing a collaboration with them. Through a series of referrals, we connected to Rob Johnson, who is pictured in this photo with Catherine and is also here with us today. Rob is an engineer working on various internet initiatives for New York State and is also a volunteer of NYC MASH. The project, like me, is a resident of Arlam and has already installed several nodes in the neighborhood, so working with Rob, we learned a lot about how MASH operates, and also the context of Arlam, which affected the development of the entire project. At the beginning, in fact, we imagined to install antenna structures, we called them this way on streets and sidewalks to provide the free internet for residents in contrast with other initiatives like in NYC that maybe you are familiar with, that also provide the free internet in streets, but only in commercial avenues, which fail and failing to serve residential communities in need. Now we envision a larger and diffused internet infrastructure with various types of devices to be located not only in residential streets, but also in rooftops and parks. We imagine these devices as community specific and designed together with the residents. The process is currently ongoing, but we already imagine these structures to be constructed in light metal with stabilizing plinths and clouded with structural panels and ceramic ties produced in collaboration with local artists. Through these devices, we aim to make visible signs of change in Arlam and amplify the voices of marginalized communities through constructive and creative means. One of our goals is to design sculptural and culturally grounded structures that people can actually feel ownership over. So explorations around the neighborhood became an important part of our design process, which allowed us to understand the multitude of urban conditions in Central Harlem. And through walking the streets and engaging with diverse actors in Harlem we realized that each block is a kind of city within a city with its own block association, micro communities and its own cultures. So connecting and working together with communities at multiple levels, both block by block and with Central Harlem as a whole became an important strategy for the project. We conducted several interviews and conversations with residents, activists, architects and entrepreneurs, and we also presented to Central Harlem's Community Board of Parks Committee, Economic Development Committee and Transportation Committee. We received very positive feedback and encouragement, and these conversations and presentations taught us a lot about a community specific needs and aspirations far beyond what we could learn just through online research. Our residents reached out to us during and after the presentations which led to new connections, new installation opportunities, and new insights about community dynamics. Thanks to the funds of GSAP Incubator Prize, we were able to install two test notes in Central Harlem in June and July of this year. And through these sites we're monitoring and better understanding the coverage and the strength of the internet connections provided by NYC Mesh. The first node was installed at Open Street West 120th Street, which is a designated car free area, and hosts a variety of community oriented events like meditation yoga and movie nights. The second node was installed at St. Aloysius Church on 132nd Street with much success, and we hope to install other notes to eventually cover the entire block. Recently we received additional funds from the Architectural League of New York and New York State Council on the Arts. And as our next step we'd like to install a more publicly accessible node in Jackie Robinson Park, and through this site we became aware of through interviews with activists and the community board discussions, and also through walking around in Harlem. This will be a highly visible node. So architectural will play an important role in broadening the recognition of these community owned and community based structures. The site is very close to the Sugar Hill Children's Museum, as well as the City College of New York, both of which currently host NYC Mesh Supernode. And because of the topography of the Jackie Robinson Park, we think that the site can successfully receive signals from both supernotes and be able to provide several free Wi-Fi access points throughout the park. By donating the Wi-Fi nodes in the park, both the devices and the structures to the communities for free, we're very interested in shifting internet service from major providers to low cost community owned systems. And as for the next phase, we're seeking to incorporate contributions from local artists. So we'll reach out to cultural institutions like Studio Museum in Harlem to create a brief and open call to connect with artists. We'll also be reaching out to structural engineering firms as well as fabrication shops to develop design iterations and construction details and begin a dialogue with the New York City Parks Department to obtain any required approvals. And we've also started a conversation with the Van Allen Institute about the possibility of creating public events, which we'd like to host in conjunction with the installation of new nodes sometime next year. So by demonstrating that alternative infrastructural models are possible and engaging communities along the process, we hope that the devices will serve as catalysts for expanding self sustained internet infrastructure, which centers and empowers residents and communities. And as Fabrizio mentioned, we see the project as a kind of open ended exploration, which has already evolved quite a bit through the conversations and by immersing ourselves into the urban and social contexts in Central Harlem. We've learned an incredible amount through a labyrinthine path of discovery, which we couldn't have foreseen prior to delving into the project. And lastly, we'd like to express our sincere gratitude to Columbia GSAP for supporting this project and all the wonderful people we've met along the way. And in particular, we'd like to thank Leslie Corle and her team and Rob Johnson from NYC Mesh for their generous support and efforts throughout this past year. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was, I've said to you before how impressed I am with like your, your direct engagement with the community and really, as, as Louise said previously, you know, just showing up and going to the community meetings and finding that way to work with them and figure out how to actually realize the project. And it's really exciting to just know that you guys are on and you guys have built this momentum in a short time and, you know, where you're taking it to like soul and through the other organizations that are supporting the advancement of the projects so kudos to you as well. So thank you so much for for contributing to the community like this. Are there any questions. This is really, really innovative like thinking about the structures as sculptures. I'm curious about like your design process like how you kind of translated the communities needs into into the final products. Right now, the images that you saw are only some ideas that we have, but we are still in the process of designing the structures for the community. So we imagine that maybe several iterations of the design. So, so as Kevin mentioned, we will launch a call to involve artists and local artists to continue with the design of the structures so that the people can actually see that ownership. We hope that the people could be ownership of the structures. There's one thing that could make your presentation a little clearer to the internet and how they can get it right. They can get by us to come to their house. The option is you can either pay money or else you use your system, which is much cheaper because it's a mesh network. That wasn't kind of clear for one option versus the other, like you didn't need to take things for granted everybody knows what a mesh network is. I mean, I would do that before I would care to the client. Yeah, in most cases it's just a cost issue and it's then we that's translated into an ownership and a and a sort of community issue. And so that's their, I think, approaches. No, I think that is in the interest. I think that in this transitional moment, the role of the architect. Our role, what we imagine is to make the to visualize the possibility of an alternative infrastructure. So we imagine the structures to be temporary, not necessarily like that we install something that is forever. What we discovered by interviewing the people is that a lot of people don't know about the opportunity of having a free Wi-Fi through the national system. So this is why we think that our project can be important to make the people aware about this possibility. And you want something else. Yeah. Any other questions. Thank you. We are going to start the last section on storytelling and I'm happy to introduce Cheryl, who will be talking about her reflective urbanisms in Chinatown work. Okay, so hi, I'm Cheryl Wingsy Wong and I guess I'd like to start first with a land acknowledgement. I'd like to acknowledge that Manhattan is Chinatown, which is where my project is focused on is the traditional unceded territory of the Lenape people. I'd also just like to pay respects to indigenous elders of the past, present and future who have stewarded this land for generations. So my project is called reflective urbanisms mapping New York Chinatown. It's a project I've been developing this year with major support from the laundromat project, and their create change artists residency. I'm sharing just some of my process and work in progress, a little bit about my background, I'm an artist and a trained architect, and my own creative practice is really at this intersection between the two disciplines. And in my work I'm interested in exploring how spaces can change over time and how community stories are connected to architecture. My project is an interactive multimedia website that's part of a continuing series researching Chinatown buildings across North America. Reflective urbanisms mapping New York Chinatown is really focused on telling stories about Manhattan Chinatown's community through its architecture. So I'm cataloging the changes that its buildings have undergone over time through collecting oral histories and photographing the physical structures and their community members. I'm working on creating 3D models of the buildings in order to visualize the major transformations over the past century, and then these oral histories are then tied to the buildings in a 3D map. So for me as a restorative history project, it aims to build community empowerment through sharing stories and creating an architectural archive that honors and connects these stories to the buildings. So here in New York, we happen to have no shortage of Chinatowns we have nine Chinatowns, but in this edition of the project I see big eyes from that fact. In this edition of the project I'm focusing on the oldest one the historic core of Manhattan's Chinatown. Personally, I've had a long standing connection to Chinatowns in the US. I grew up going on biweekly trips to LA's Chinatown with my parents. For years I've installed public artworks in Chinatowns in the US and in Canada, including pavilions and seating for creating new community hubs, and in New York I live in Manhattan's Chinatown. So this is my neighborhood, and this is my community. And while archival documentation helps us understand a place this past there are still large parts of Chinatown's history that remain missing. Chinatown buildings aren't just structures, they're places of resilience for generations of community members. Many of the personal stories of the people who have lived work started families, built and renovated and frequented for a connection to home far away in these Chinatown buildings, they just haven't been recorded. This is another sweet reality to the history of Chinatowns. Their enclaves founded upon a history of racism and exclusion. Yet over time, there are also places that have flourished into vibrant communities. Since the start of the pandemic though, there's been a lot of racist anti Asian rhetoric and violence that has continued to disproportionately impact our Chinatown communities. The Chinatown is shrinking as longtime businesses and residents are forced out by gentrification and rising rents. And within family associations, elders are passing away. So it's really a crucial time to remember our stories, and to rewrite our own history. The first part of my research has really been to observe the buildings by walking around and exploring them, moving around them looking at their details and documenting them from different perspectives. The building facade has so much meaning it really tells us how the building faces the city it tells us how it represents itself to the world. There's so much we can understand from the exterior of a building. And what does it say about who it's catering to. What does it say about ownership. How do we enter the building. How do we look inside it. How do materials, tell a story about the building's past. How do ornamental features communicate stories about culture. Is the signage a major feature or is it just a subtle whisper on the building. And how does the building announced that it's part of Chinatown, but it's not just about the exterior. In this project, it's also about the details of life inside these buildings. So these are photos taken inside various buildings in Manhattan Chinatown and many within family association buildings. And just explain a little bit about what those are associations are community organizations whose members are tied by a commonality, which is usually either the same ancestral village back in China or a same last name, like the Lea Association or the Lea Association, for example. There are other associations that have developed along the way to help entrepreneurs or to mediate as governing bodies over fellow associations. And the interesting thing is that many of these associations have over 100 years of history in Manhattan Chinatown, they purchased their buildings in the early 1900s, and made it a place where members could gather. Life lines historically for new Chinese immigrants and they form a deep part of Chinatown, providing support through lodging through food jobs and help with paperwork to become an American citizen. And today, with Chinatown's footprint shrinking. It's even more important that these family associations are property owners in the historic core. So for me being invited inside these buildings and being able to document them has been an emotional experience. These interiors tell us so much about Chinatown's community. They tell us about how owning a building in the city also means feeding a village. Many association buildings have an industrial kitchen where they prepare feast for special occasions. And for those who don't, every association always has a carafe of steaming tea, one of coffee and a warm pot of rice so fellow members never go hungry. They tell us how a family shrine has historically been one of the first dedicated spaces within these buildings, and how the goddess Guanyin and a legacy of ancestors are remembered and worshipped here. The guidance is given on life's mysteries through fortune telling how the instruments calligraphy and cultural arts of the past are not forgotten but displayed prominently how past leaders and predecessors are honored. How teaching is also a form of community remembrance of keeping Chinatown strong by not forgetting it's more challenging times. In this image, it's the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association Building on Mont Street, where the history of Chinese immigration in America and the founding of Chinatown is remembered in a permanent public exhibition on the second floor. On the upper floors, there are Chinese language classes held year round to keep our linguistic culture alive. They also tell us about how these interior spaces can hold stories of generations past. At Ting's gift shop today, there are ceramics stocked on these shelves, but these shelves predate the 1940s when they used to carry jars of tiger balm and herbal medicine in a doctor's office. As part of my research, I also held community engagement sessions where the public was invited to share their stories of Chinatown buildings. So over tea and snacks, memories were shared about Chinatown of the past. In this image, you see this duo of benches which was designed to host these events. And the idea is that these seats can be reconfigured for different scenarios and the nooks and corners invite us to find new ways to dialogue. During these storytelling circles, these benches were installed outdoors in historic Columbus Park and on Doyers Street. At these events, I heard stories about folks growing up in tenements now demolished on Bayard Street, about attending Chinese school for over a decade on Mott Street and partying at epic wedding banquet at restaurants no longer there, Port Arthur, China Lane. And following these events this past spring, the benches were donated to China partnership to liven up public spaces in Manhattan Chinatown. I also spent a lot of time one on one with community members to walk through their buildings together to conduct interviews and record their stories. Many of these folks have been in the neighborhood for a long time. Some have worked on major renovations of the buildings. Some have taken it over from their parents. But with each interview, I also capture a portrait of the person within their building. So these are the portraits of the caretakers, the owners, the residents and the stewards of our Chinatown buildings. So by observing the building and its current day state, we can understand a lot. But with this project, it's also about piecing together clues on what the building was like before and how it's changed over time. So this involves looking at old floor plans, old architectural drawings. And sometimes these plans existing city archives, and sometimes the building stewards were able to dig up old roles of drawings from their basements. But with a lot of buildings, there's nothing if all, you know, all that might remain is if you're lucky is just one old photograph. And while we can't always understand the three dimensional aspects of a building, we can still understand a part of the story by seeing the former footprint of a building that gives us an idea of what was there before. This is a detail from New York City's 1905 Sanborn fire insurance maps. You can see in the early 1900s that Chinatown was much more sparse than it is today, at least in its documented form. We don't really know what the reality is there are only a handful of recorded Chinese businesses spread across the area. My research is also dependent on the work of my predecessors, whether they're publications on the history of Chinese America, or archival photographs or self published catalogs put up by family associations. Currently in the project we're wrapping up the 3D modeling of today's Chinatown. And these are some work in progress renders here and in this view we're looking north on Mont Street. You know, in this process, it's been a bit sad because we're finding out that more and more businesses have been affected by the pandemic and are closing down in the last year so there's been major change happening just in the past two years. This render looks south on Mont Street and shows some of the historic restaurants that have been located here for over the last half a century. Just a little bit of an interesting fact something that I noticed from my interviews and visits to buildings that we're trying to reflect more accurately in the models is that each association strategically announces its political alliance to either Taiwan, or mainland China through the flags displayed on the street here. You'll notice this when you're walking on the street. So in this render at the far end of the image you can see that the associate association there which is the Ang Sui Sun Association has declared its allegiance to Taiwan. And sometimes associations right next door to each other will have conflicting political alliances. With research from these interviews, municipal tax photographs and architectural drawings. We're also creating models of past iterations of the building and connecting these iterations together to really try to understand how the building has changed over time. These elevations show the west side of Mont Street between Moscow and Bayard in 1940 and in current day. The project is complete in this website you'll be able to scroll through the different notable chapters that we know of at least within a building's history. And these digital models will also be incorporated into a real time 3D space online so that you can navigate and fly around the buildings and learn more about their stories. If we take a closer look at 41 Mott Street, we can see how the building's different chapters tell us a story about changes in ownership and changes in political era. I'm going to read a quote from my interview with Kerry Kulane, architectural historian. Built in the early 1920s, this building was the first new construction commissioned by a Chinatown Association. The building was powerful at the time, the on learning Tong. The building designed by white architect Richard ramen since there were no practicing Chinese architects in New York at the time was commissioned to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution in 1911. It was of the shophouse typology with a tile Chinese roof and inset galleries on the second and sixth floor. It included a restaurant for the public at the ground floor dining facilities for club members on the second and third floor, sleeping accommodations for members on floors four and five, and a meeting room and library at the top floor. The layers of history in this building demonstrated the economic and political power of the on learning in the 1920s. By the early 1940s architects reworked the pagoda like roof at the sixth floor into a highly ornamented squared off marquees that would expand the usable space for the association's top floor meeting spaces. And in the late 1940s, the on learning Chinese merchants Association commissioned their new building headquarters up the street at 83 Mott. And by the late 1970s they decided to sell off the building at 41 Mott Street to the Lee family Association, who remodeled it in the early 80s. And this remodel featured a very minimalist modernist facade by China born architect way food child, who is also the designer of Confucius Plaza. At a time when overtly Chinese architectural expression with no longer the preferred mode for Chinatown's Association buildings. Here in this photo you see at the center, Ho Q Lee, a community member who's a former president and a current elder and building steward of the Lee family Association at 41 Mott Street. And during our interview in person he really spent a while describing his journey immigrating to New York Chinatown from Hong Kong during the mid 60s. And this was the time when immigration and Nationali Act of 1965 opened up large scale Chinese immigration to the US which had previously been severely restricted by the Chinese Exclusion Act. Ho Q Lee took over his father's poultry business as soon as he came to New York, and ended up actually battling years of racist politics with the USDA that prevented him from selling chicken slaughtered in a style familiar for Chinese cooking and requested by Chinatown restaurants. He turned to both the CCBA the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, and the Lee Association to help advocate for him to help him strategize right letters and liaise with the city government on his behalf, ultimately winning the case, and this was then afterwards called a Buddhist style cut. To hear a few of his words. Since the day I immigrated to New York City in 1965. I've been a Lee Association member. My father was already a part of the association. Since the late 1990s, elderly members have been passing away so I decided that I needed to step up. I was still working on my wholesale poultry business at the time but both the poultry workers and the Lee Association told me, if you take care of your business you won't be able to properly take care of the association. I was 61 years old at the time and in the end I sold off my business in 2000 and chose to focus on the Lee Association. And in the past few years I've been doing this body of resilience work focused on North American Chinatowns I just wanted to share two links for these other projects. The top one being reflective urbanisms.com it's the predator assessor website that maps Calgary Chinatowns architecture. So you can go on that scroll through them 3D map and get a sense for what we're doing here in Manhattan is Chinatown. This is a digital publication called musings from Chinatown peri pandemic notes on resilience which is a bilingual Chinese English digital publication that features contributions from American and Canadian Chinatown community members and how to stay resilient and how to remember the stories of our Chinatowns. So reflective urbanisms back in New York Chinatown that project website is in development and expected to be live by early next year so stay tuned for that. Lastly, I thought it would be fitting to end with this image of four generations of wongs within the Wong Association and the cutest baby on the planet on the right side. That's my daughter but I'm not bias. Reflective urbanisms is just a part of this body of resilience work it responds to the hardship of that our Chinatowns have endured endured in recent years. And while it doesn't resolve all of these challenges. I do believe that we can build community resilience and further cement Chinatowns cultural legacy by documenting the histories of the systematically marginalized place and people. Thanks so much, Cheryl and personally, having grown up going to Chinatowns. This, I think is a reflection of both your architectural training, your ability to talk about place and space in a way that that in that way that you do, as well as your ability to connect with the communities. Of course you belong to this community, but I think I want to also acknowledge nationwide this trend of support to include Asian American history in public school curriculum now including New York City. I've just seen the interiors of some of these buildings is completely my first time experience. And so I opening and I hope that your project can be part of this growing body of of academic work for public school children. So, including your daughter and my children to I, we have one, we have only one question, does anyone have question. I really appreciate the kind of on the ground localist depth and interest. I did notice, and I'm wondering this maybe kind of not quite relevant but on Doyle Street, the New York City Department of Transportation I think has done the paving and the kind of pedestrianizing that they'd like to be doing. I'm wondering how you feel or how some of your neighbors feel about the relationships and what's created there. Well it's new this whole like open streets thing that doiers is permanently like a pedestrian passageway now. And I think it's wonderful. I mean I did a lot of those community engagement events right on door street. And I know, intimately, some of the business owners there and they've had their facades like literally crashed into by cars, it feels dangerous so it's really fantastic to have a place dedicated for pedestrians to just be there. I think it's great. And I think the Chinatown partnership is also doing a lot of work to activate them through floor murals which I think is also cool like bringing public art into the environment and having that activate the space in a way that's different. Sure. Yeah, this is Kemi and she is the executive director of the laundromat project. I've been really grateful to work with Kemi a few years ago on the laundromat project create change fellowship and this year on the artist residency. She's amazing and incredible and I have only positive words for her. And this is Wellington Chen, he's executive director so these are my favorite EDs in the room by the way. So Wellington is the executive director of the Chinatown partnership the Chinatown did. He has done so much to advocate for our Chinatown and actually different Chinatown across North America, been working closely with him also to host these community engagement events to deploy the benches, and to really make sure that public art is a way to bring community together within Manhattan's Chinatown. Thank you. Hey everybody, my name is Adam Susnick. I run the project segregation by design, which currently takes the form of website, where I'm trying and an Instagram account and Twitter account where I'm trying to document the 180 cities that got federal money the interstate for interstate construction as well as urban renewal and some clients. And so far, I've covered 12 cities. I'm currently working on Chicago. I'm actually speaking at Crown Hall, or at the UIC or no Illinois Institute of Technology next month about Crown Hall, which was built on top of a black neighborhood and a building called Mecca flats. But so what I'm going to do today is, I think Leslie might have just mentioned that I had an article in the New York Times recently. So, for those of you who have read it, this might be a little familiar, but I'm basically going to be going over the thesis of my project, using just examples from various cities that I've covered so far. So I'll get started. So, I'm going to start in the present. So, this is Houston. Houston is encircled by interstates, which divide the city along racial lines, the Third Ward, the historic heart of the black community in Houston is entirely surrounded by freeways. Rather than pursuing ways to lessen this divide, the city is actually currently spending $10 billion to widen the freeways. As seen here, this is the right of way. So, the Clayton Homes, which you can see right here, right here are in that right of way. It's a public housing facility that houses mostly black and Latino residents, 483 families, and they will be forcibly displaced by the Texas DOT, as well as approximately 430 more, or 430 more market rate units. So, since the mid 20th century, urban highway construction has worked as a powerful tool to segregate American cities and demolish communities of color. These roadways built on the legacy of redlining, creating walls of concrete and smog that separate black and brown communities from white, as well as Chinatowns. Absolutely, I have some examples of that as well. While the period of government-led segregation is discussed as history, projects like this one in Houston reveal that it is anything but. Actually, this, if you can see my cursor, this region here, where this intersection was, was Houston's original Chinatown, and a lot of it was taken out by this intersection, or by this interchange. So, in addition to the fact that these projects are still ongoing for the communities that are divided by these highways, considerable public health impacts persist. And that's the Bronx, the South Bronx, and the West Bronx, which is totally surrounded by freeways across Bronx coming through up there. And the noise pollution coming off of it for the thousands of people that live in the apartments is often louder than a vacuum cleaner. And then in addition, recent scholarship actually at Mailman School, the public health school, I've been working with Professor Peter Munich, and he had a paper directly linking the particulate matter from the exhaust of the traffic on the freeways that surround the Bronx, across the South Bronx, with the fact that the census tracts in the South Bronx all basically have that are in the 99 percentile for asthma prevalence, which you can see here. But moreover, this one's not my graphic, all the other ones are, but induced demand is a bit tough to explain, but moreover at this point, decades of evidence has shown that widening freeways doesn't does very little to relieve traffic that the traffic fills up very quickly. And in some cases, it can actually make it worse. Unfortunately, rather than being a rare exception, projects like Texas is fit a long standing pattern of how the United States chooses to force highways through communities with the least political power to resist. So the first of these, so now I'm going back in history, the first of these urban freeways really was the cross Bronx built in the late 40s, just started just after World War Two, designed by Robert Moses. What's what's so important about this one was this was the first urban highway built through an existing city and it wasn't just an existing city was new. And this displaced over 40,000 people in some of the most racially integrated neighborhoods in the United States. And I have a video that I can show here so this is an animation of it being built. And so for some context with these are where I get these images is these are aerial surveys undertaken by the Army Air Force in the 30s. And then compare compared with another one that was done in 80s. So what I do is I stitch it's a bunch of different plates. So I stitched them together and then colorize the water and some of the parks just for legibility the ideas to be able to really connect with Google Maps as we as we're used to viewing it today. So that's the cross Bronx presentation. Yes, so unfortunately, the cross Bronx served as a model for other cities that we're looking to develop their own highway networks after President Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956. So what this bill did was it actually provided a 90% federal match for three way construction. So what that means is if you're a city, this is really, if you're a city and you want to upgrade a road to federal highway, if you want to do a road project. If you upgrade it to federal highway standards that means the government then comes in and pays for the federal government then comes in and pays for 90%, which is an unprecedented level of federal investment in cities that has never been matched. And this that that 56 bill is really a large reason why we have such an insane amount of freeway coverage in this country. And again, the cross Bronx really cross Bronx really did serve as a model for other cities. Here's some other examples. So here's Philly, Boston, you can see the whole West End was destroyed. As well as Roxbury, Chicago, the south and west sides, as well as the near north side were particularly hardly hit. And it's not just cities that we think of as older, or cities that we think of as like, you know, as having grown up before the car. This is Houston before the freeways came in. And it also had, I don't have the map here, but it had a dense streetcar network as well. And you can see it really hollows out. Buffalo, Atlanta. So these highways sliced through downtown areas and made possible the development of new car centric suburbs on the outskirts of existing cities. And this is an advertisement for one such suburb, I mean, Levittown's very famous one. But the real estate industry is widespread use of what we're called restrictive covenants ensured that these new suburbs were closed for anybody considered non white. So what a restrictive and this this is in Long Island, but this happened in every everywhere across the country from the San Francisco Bay Area to Minneapolis to solid everywhere to Miami. And what these were is it was a clause in the deed of houses of new suburban houses that prohibited sale that anybody considered non white. And that was the language they use you can see here on the right. So, these practices encouraged and exacerbated white flight and racial segregation. And in the ensuing years, the American American cities entered a period of significant decay as tax basis dried up and cities got back on services. And thus, begins the era of urban renewal in the late 50s, also sponsored by federal legislation, which provided a two thirds match for slum clearance and urban renewal. City use the decay cities use the decay as an excuse to remake their civic course, the convenience of the suburban white commuter. This is the West End in Boston, which was totally leveled partially for parking parking facilities for mass general, as well as for large institutional buildings. Black neighborhoods were targeted with such regularity and intensity that James Baldwin famously said, urban renewal means Negro removal, that is what it means, and the federal government is accomplice to this fact. So with this chart is showing is that it's showing the disproportionate impact of urban renewal on the non white community. So for instance, because what what often gets brought up is many white people were displaced. That is true. But if you look at the fact. So, let me explain. So Philadelphia, for instance, at the time of urban renewal, about 20% of its population was non white, but about 70% of those displaced were of color. So it ends up in many cities, it, I mean up here in many cities it affects almost 100% of the non white population. So cities paved over vibrant neighborhoods and replace them with amenities focused on suburban commuters commuters. In this case a government complex. This is a new me and square used to be formerly Dudley Square in the heart of Roxbury in Boston, which is the historic heart of Boston's black community that's actually the official government motto of it. And in the 70s they tore most of it down including this church that was led that had a black congregation, and they also tore up the subway. So, here's another example in Atlanta, where the black neighborhood of mechanics bill was demolished for the fault account for this interchange here, as well as for the Fulton County stadium, which was later demolished because of course, quickly go obsolete. So, this is a bit of an aside but additionally after the government had poured so much money into freeway construction and automobile infrastructure transit agencies begin to begin to become unprofitable. And rather than have the government take over as many European and Asian countries did as well as Australia. The US actively encouraged legacy transit to fail by pouring so much into automobile infrastructure by the time municipal control did happen. Much of the local rail transit had already been dismantled. So this is an example from Philadelphia. Here's another example of urban renewal. This is you can I was actually presenting there earlier which is why there's a bunch of stuff on pen. But the yet you can with federal money, as well as Drexel. I thought most of this was able to use them in a domain to clear out this neighborhood, known as black bottom and replace it with institutional facilities. Here's some images. And this is, you know, the good moment to talk about sort of. I colorize some of these images so these are actual black and white images. And it's for the purpose of comparative play. Here's another image. And what's kind of fun. The interesting about this project is they didn't go around taking images like taking photos of non white of urban neighborhoods from the air back in the day. But they did on special occasions so often these photos will have some sort of cool nugget so for instance you see this thing here. That's actually the shadow of the Hindenburg flying over flying over Philadelphia in 1936. And you can see, this is that neighborhood that was completely destroyed. So, the urban highway network and the urban renewal projects it spawned our tools of systemic discrimination and racism they're also in terrible shape, the American society of civil engineers given that gives the network a D minus grade the interstate. Given that now is the perfect opportunity to rethink this network practice this may mean dismantling much of it wholesale. Luckily, some places have shown that change is possible. This is you checked in the Netherlands. This was a canal that circle the city that they in the 70s covered up with a freeway. And they've since removed it and invested heavily in transit and bike ability and walk ability. Here this is an example in Seoul, unfortunately it's really hard to find before pictures of this project because I don't think they want you to see them, because it was pretty bad but they. So this was an elevated highway that covered a stream in downtown like right in downtown Seoul. And they ripped it up and restored the river. And it's now one of the most and it's now a very long linear park it's one of the most popular ejections in Seoul. And in addition they constructed to parallel metro lines, which helped relieve a lot of the So one final thing I'll show is that weirdly, it's not just other countries that you know we have a good example here for once. This is Rochester, which was completely surrounded by this highway here. And they have actually taken out the highway taken out the loop and filled it in and built affordable housing so what's kind of cool is you can do you can see this on Google. Because they just did this, you can see what it was like, but you can see the freeway there, and then they didn't cap over it. They demolished it they filled it in. It's not a half measure like Boston did where you bury your highway they got rid of it. And they built some affordable housing, there could have been more. So this is a great project nearby Syracuse is also doing a similar thing. There, this freeway I think it's 61. 81 cut through the 15th Ward, which is now mostly parking lots but it was the historic heart of the black community in Syracuse it was started as a free freedman's town of people escaping from the cell. And Syracuse University wanted the land, and they got it, and the freeway divided the neighborhood, but now they're taking this out and reconnecting the grid, which is a great project so there's some. It's not all doom and gloom there's some optimism, but that is my presentation I can show you the website really quickly. And then I'll take any questions. But so yeah so this is the website so so far I've done Atlanta Boston Buffalo, the Bronx Chicago DC Minneapolis, I'm counting New York is five different as five cities it's too big to do otherwise. And I probably should have done that with the different sides of Chicago but so it went these DC Minneapolis Oakland Houston Providence Syracuse Philadelphia so far. And then I have some older ones that I haven't uploaded yet. So you can check all this stuff out here. I have more of those sort of animation those before and after animations. Here's Oakland. This is pretty bad one. Just cut right through the sort of residential heart of Oakland. And then I'll just show you this for if you haven't seen it. I was lucky enough to work with that editors at the New York Times they only put together these really awesome graphics that show what's going to happen there's the Clayton the Clayton homes. This shows that the people being displaced or primarily people of color as usual. And this is pretty fun to work on this with this is that animation but done with scrolling. They called the New York Times calls this scrollie telling Mr. Covenant so yeah check it out. There's this chart you can actually search your city. Oh, I guess. Miami, Oklahoma. Miami is not old enough but most of the cities are on the Portland main but it's pretty cool. There's more scrollie telling this was any. This is an example of a slum clearance in Chicago this was a neighborhood in Bronzeville called Aldean Square that they demolished replaced with public how many far fewer neighborhoods and it's a public housing that were very poorly designed and then they ultimately displaced these people as well, which is not great either. So, check it out. If you're interested website segregation by design calm and Instagram. Segregate at segregation by design. So cool. Yeah, let me know if you have any questions. Stop. Thank you, Adam. Does anyone have any questions. No, what's I'll ask a question before we welcome Zareth our last presenter. What's the next city and how do you choose which city to research next. The next city is going to be Miami. And that's because I live there for the time being in a moving shortly. So I want to cover it before I do. Do you want to divulge why you're moving. Oh yeah I'm starting a PhD at to Delft in the Netherlands. Although I haven't talked with work about that so I need to figure that out. Congratulations. But yes, so I want to cover Miami and get in touch is because living down here I've had the opportunity to make a lot of connections. But other than that, typically it has to do with. So the list, the full list is on the site. It's 180 cities that got money from those two bills and I mentioned the 56 freeway act and then the slum the remember to act. And it's give or take because again I'm counting New York is five cities. And within those I cover, I'm trying to go for like the low hanging fruit. First. So that's the ones that the Congress. So there's this organization called the Congress for the new urbanism enters Duane. They put out this list of freeways without futures, which are the most obvious candidates for tear down so Rochester was one of them but it's making progress. But then the other ones are like tremendous. The clear, the Claiborne Expressway and Tremay and New Orleans. The Louisville I'm doing soon. Yeah, so if there's, that's how I decided some of it. And then in addition, because I do have quite a few followers. Sometimes I just put it up to a vote. And that's how I did that's how I chose Billy. And yeah, probably going to do some Miami is next I'm hoping to do Detroit soon as well as Tulsa. But again, I mean I I'm planning on doing them all so. Right. Okay, thank you so much and I'm sure people will be following you after this. I already do. Congratulations again on your being getting accepted and looking forward to your future research. We're going to take a minute just to switch out zero. Thank you everybody. Thank you Adam. Hi everyone. Last presentation of the evening hopefully we'll have a drink soon 15 minutes ish. Thank you for sticking around on a day like today it really makes you feel that especially since we've all been like zoom saturated. This is one of my first events after a whole pandemic of zoom events that the community hearing everyone's work. Has been so special for me and in putting faces to the people that were participated in this program has been wonderful. And I am an alumni from the program class of 2017 I'm also the founder and executive director of territorial empathy, a nonprofit design collective based in Brooklyn. But before I tell you about segregation is killing us the project that I'm here to talk about today and how and why I found a territorial empathy. I think a lot of the reasons have been talked about already today. But I'll talk about some of my post professional work. Some of the guys and I were having a conversation about outside and then how your first post graduate school experience is so important in mine was working on the district 15 diversity plan. For those of you who may be listened to the New York Times and their podcast. It was the subject of the podcast nice white parents, and I was one of the lead designers on it. I don't know if anyone would venture to guess and if anyone knows in the audience, what city in the United States has the most segregated public school districts. I don't know if anyone knows. Yes, and it is New York. And it's something that we hide behind because we have this beautiful and rich diversity but we have the most segregated public school districts in this country. The first 15 diversity plan was the first plan community land plan, men was integrating one of the districts of the 33 districts that we have in New York City public schools. And this program had a little bit of a hard launch because of the designers that working on and didn't reflect the community that they were going to serve. I started working and then from where I worked. Then I started realizing that people that were working on diversity plans that were at the cutting edge or so I thought of this type of integration work. And I was just so excited to work on it that I started realizing in practice like we talked about that a lot of things aren't as they seem and I instantly became the person that was doing the analytics. All of these different things but it was a predominantly Hispanic population, and they couldn't get signed on because there wasn't anyone that had really connected to community at the time. So diversity, especially in Latino communities could really mean anything it could mean LGBTQ issues. And so people were really nervous to come to community meetings it was after the Trump administration to team and engage and so the work hadn't been done to connect with the community. So I started working as a fresh out of grad school, and doing all this analytics work doing some architecture work, as well as my job on the firm, and then they're like, well, you're the brown girl, you know, go to the community and figure it out as I'm sure a lot of the people of color here can know, which is really problematic because I realized that even though there was well intended, it was well intended work. It was really problematic because the work to create the trust that many of the projects here have done was non existent so we talked about, you know, going to community meetings during all these different things but are so many barriers of entry, and specifically Adam's work and so much of the work that's been talked about here tonight has connections to this past of intentional segregation and systemic racism that has been done very deliberately to horde privilege from some at the expense of others, and who are the others, I think Adam answers his questions pretty well and a lot of the work here. And through many initiatives like redlining so and felt like a lot of performative allyship it didn't feel genuine and I felt like I had to stand for this firm in this place, and essentially lie to my community and my people because no one was doing the work. And then it fell on me to do that work to connect. And then I started thinking, if this is true, there has to be a better way it just had to be because, as some folks talked about today Mustafa only 2% of licensed architects or people of color or black people that you know, Latin people and it's 1% for women. And then when you have these, you know, capitalism everyone has to make a profit when you're in a firm scenario, and you're dependent on a bottom line, then there's different decisions that you take as I experienced throughout this process. And so I thought, well, I was very, very taken by the work of Audrey Lord and about dismantling you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools and really thinking about how do I do my own thing. And then really recognizes the humanity and the people that I work with. And mad brought me to the creation of territorial empathy in 2018. It's a nonprofit design collective and I'll read a little bit of a mission statement. So because of what I talked about segregation being so intentional, we think that that same level of care has to come with the undoing of unharm. So here it goes. And centering the historically oppressed through empathetic community based design is necessary for overcoming systemic inequities at territorial empathy we work with people in places often overlooked to co create just in resilient places. Our team of urbanist architects and researchers commit to are committed to engaging in culturally sensitive anti racist and anti bias practices. So anyone that comes on board to work with us, me and interns or anyone at all people donate their time. And what we do is we have serious conversations about the biases and racism that we all experienced the micro aggressions that we experienced the privilege that we experienced, and we make that a forefront. So we do and we take anti racism and anti bias training before we work with any communities to really question our privilege to question all these different assumptions that we may or may not have before engaging in the work. And so as I mentioned, through working in that space with my desegregation of schools and finding that the work was being was really performative, but also having some understanding from that. After Territoryland with you was created. One of the first main projects that we worked on, which is what I'm talking to you about today as segregation is killing us. So from my understanding and my work with the Department of Education, the New York City. DOE has a million point one students in 70, 70% of those students are low income students. And so that means that essentially what's happening now as gentrification happens. And the reason that our schools are so segregated is because of the admissions metrics that we allow to let people into middle schools and high schools. So, some of you may not know because this is a very diverse group in New York City students have to apply to go to certain middle schools and high schools public public schools. And so this system of screening, which is what is called, and I'll show you a little video about it that was co produced with some of the student activists that we work with from this phenomenal organization called integrate NYC that I encourage you to look at. Just breathe out. There we go. So this, this video will quickly talk about how we got to be so segregated in our public schools. We help co producing and it's a part of segregation is killing us but before I tell you a story of segregation is killing us. Because I think many of you aren't parents and haven't had to deal with the public school system. This is a little video and more enlightened kind of what this process is like. These are the students of New York City public schools. There are one point where they are racially diverse economically diverse. They speak hundreds of different languages, come from different countries, and lead different lives. Every year, eighth graders go through the high school admissions process to discover which school they will attend in the fall. Like this school here, it looks like it has a lot of opportunities. A swimming pool, a baseball field, advanced classes, there's so much. Wouldn't you think a lot of kids would want to go there? Well, yes, a lot of students do want to attend, but decisions are based on screens. They can't just walk in there. This school screen is that it accepts students who can afford a tutor, have sports teams in their middle and elementary school, and live in the wealthier part of the city. With all that, I don't think this school is for you. Back on the admissions bus, everyone. Hopefully the next school will be a bit more attainable for you. Here's the next school coming up ahead, and look, no screens. There may not be a field, pool, or that many advanced classes, but in this one, the teachers are amazing and the cafeteria has windows. Those seats are going to fill up quickly. Quickly, everyone, back on the admissions bus. We saw some great students looking to learn. Where will they go? This is our last school. Driver, is this a school? It is? Okay. Let's take a look at all the students we enrolled along our journey. These screens select, sort, and separate us, and not just in high school. There are middle school screens that select, sort, and separate 10-year-olds, and make New York City one of the most segregated school systems in our country. These screens make it easier for students with privilege to access more resources. The students who are screened out are often low-income students and students of color. The same students are filling the most impact on COVID-19 right now. But students from these schools across the city have been joining together to form and mobilize a movement for real integration and real youth power. Our integration isn't about movement of bodies, but movement of minds. We are those students. In 2020, 66 years after Brownview Board of Ed, our schools are still segregated. We can change that. Join us in calling for an end to discriminatory screens. Our future is integrated. These phenomenal students are essentially the clients where segregation is killing us. Segregation is killing us was born from what was happening during the pandemic. So essentially very early on, there was no data as to how communities of color were being impacted because these mapping tools are always very dependent on privilege in some ways. And so what we started doing was working with different folks and the students to map what was happening in the pandemic and to see which communities were more affected. And as I've been working in New York City systemic issues for the last seven years, I found that the map tends to look the same. The same areas are disproportionately affected and connecting to Adam's work. I had an inkling that it was related to redlining. But what the data found in our work, which was kind of guerrilla mapping and guerrilla activism connecting to a drive stream. The health department to map this information before anyone was mapping it was how disproportionately the impact of the pandemic was on communities of color. If you're a prison of color in New York City or two times more likely to catch COVID and three times more likely to die. And we went on a fact finding mission to figure out why that was the case. And I think one of the most important animations and I and again, I encourage you to look at the work on our website. When you look at the cases by race, you start to see all these different patterns, predominantly white communities worn as as affected, and that comes from generational wealth and comes from access to different issues. And we started essentially going off of clues of what the students were telling us and eventually segregation is telling us leads to a policy proposal. I don't know if we'll have time to get into it today, but I'll just show you one of the most, I think to me during this work, one of the most telling animations. And so during the pandemic, everyone was talking about flattening the curve, but no one had studied the curve by median income. And so I'll show you all also all of the work that is that happens here is narrated and animated and designed by students from integrated and I see they're all young people from middle school to college years who came to us with these issues. And so the way that we talk about territorial empathy is that we're really doulas that have a skill set that allow people to manifest the work and the curiosities that they have. So I'll show you a little bit of this animation, which I think is very telling and it's narrated by Secura Mustafa, a phenomenal young student at the time, and now she's a freshman at Columbia, which is really great. Contrary to popular belief, COVID-19 does not impact every New Yorker the same. It is in no way an equalizer. There is troubling inequity when it comes to the virus passing through New York City and who it affects. The phase one COVID-19 data showcases that communities of color and lower income communities have been hit the hardest by this pandemic. The data clearly shows that wealthier, less diverse neighborhoods of our city were less impacted by the pandemic. While slow income communities of color were devastated, leaving hundreds dead and thousands infected, we can clearly see these discrepancies. They are due to income, economic standing, the ability to quarantine and preserve social distancing, privilege and wealth play an important part in the ability to isolate and therefore be less exposed to infection. Communities of color and lower income communities have been hit the hardest by this pandemic. Whilst wealthier, less diverse neighborhoods of our city were less impacted. The inequity is clear. Essentially the curve is applying to everyone else, except hiring from New Yorkers, which let us down this other road of inquiry, which is really about, all right, so what's happening with these wealthy New Yorkers? And that led us to a collaboration with this company called Terralytics, who is telecom adjacent and they do some phenomenal, well, they do essentially, I mean, everyone knows that our data from our phones is sold to marketers and, you know, when you say something, like two minutes later you're getting an ad for it, but instead of using this data for evil and Terralytics sometimes have has these partnership programs. And we essentially went to them and we're like, look, could you donate this data to us so we could see what happened and why these people weren't getting infected in the same ways. And that started a series of conversations that led to this animation. Essentially, that is asking where did the wealthier and white New Yorkers go, and why weren't they affected as much. So this is a timeline and as you can see, it's from the, from the time that we started recording data. And, and this is all the first phase of the pandemic. So it was the first series lockdown. This is a time-lapse showing where wealthier New Yorkers went during phase one of quarantine. The privilege of a mobility during the peak of this pandemic left neighborhoods empty and facilitated the spread of COVID across this country. The empty neighborhoods house 68% white residents. 55% of the neighborhoods left empty have a median income over $100,000 per year. 29% of these neighborhoods have a median income over $200,000 per year. The median rent of the apartments left empty is $2,223 per month. Work, we found out that there was some unsavory decisions being made about social distancing and some were a privilege. And so then we started looking into our city's essential workforce because we heard the story of this woman who was a cleaner who was part of our community. She's an undocumented person. Then went to clean a home while the owners were away. And then the neighbors asked her, Clara, what are you doing here? And she was like, well, I'm just doing the regular cleaning. And they say this family all has COVID in their second home in Connecticut. And so they literally sent her in to clean up after them so that everything could be nice and tidy by the time they came back, not giving any window for anything. And so that's what we left. And the next station was in there. And so this is when we talk about the privilege of being able to social distance, trying to expose essentially why we have these disparate metrics. So 62% of the city's essential workforce is black and Latino. So that's something that we forgot about in the ability to social distance, who is available to get the PPP loans, who is available to get the $1,000, you know, different credits that some folks got at different points. And what is really important is that not only a 77% of our essential workforce people of color, but a lot of them are foreign born and 19% are citizens. And we try to estimate to the best of our abilities, because this work has been used time and time again to support different undocumented organizations. But it comes also with a with a danger that we don't want to be able to pinpoint people too much because that information can be used to harm people. And so, with that, I will quickly show you a video of the admissions proposal that we came up with. Because during the pandemic, and because of our communities don't really have the backing to think about spatial information to change policy. We knew that the DOE would fall asleep at the wheel and we said, All right, there's already screens that are used like attendance, test scores, all these different other metrics like portfolios to get into middle school and a high school. And what the research shows is that those metrics are a reflection of privilege, because if you have three jobs, and you have many kids, and the ability for them to get to school on time changes completely radically differently. You have a nanny or you're a two prison household. So all these metrics that are used to allow kids into the different middle schools and high schools reflect privilege and what we said is, at least during the pandemic, let's give these families a break because they've been going through so much. And they are the backbone that keeps the lights of the city on an isolated issue. Let's understand the system. Rather than looking at COVID as an isolated issue. Let's understand the systemic inequalities that made COVID worse for some communities. Our proposal addresses identified variables that are based on hardships exacerbated by the pandemic. COVID score, household size, linguistic isolation, child poverty, lack of medical insurance and computer access are all hardships that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Each of these variables was assigned a weight that reflects its urgency and magnitude, delivering us a composite map that shows which communities lack the resources to bounce back from COVID. The resulting map has a corresponding priority score that uses the students home address to determine the admissions priority based on community impact. Additionally, we consider individual student circumstances that may also increase the need for priority consideration in the admissions process. This way, both community impact and individual burdens are taken into consideration to allocate each student on a priority admission scale from one to three that best reflects its particular needs. In response to the deep impacts of COVID-19 on our communities, the admissions impact score heavily weighs COVID-19 data. Because the pandemic is exposing and exacerbating long existing inequities, we propose that over time the weight of the COVID-19 specific criteria changes as the other criteria may increase, maintaining a system-wide priority for those who have been historically marginalized. We aim to support resilience for all through equitable policies. Rather than looking at COVID as an isolated issue. We created a metric that essentially instead of looking at test scores, attendance, all of these different things that during the pandemic became so impossible to track is we had all of these community meetings with students and they designed their new educational policy. They said, we don't have access to internet. We can't socially distance because there's 10 people living in a one bedroom apartment in Queens. We, our parents are not native English speakers. And so we took all of the burdens that the students had, and then we had workshops with them and they assigned weights to different, to the different categories. And we created this core that essentially operates by census tract that allows them for that community score to be more indicative of what they're going through to that be used in the admissions process instead of these screens that are kind of arbitrary. And so right now the policy is in the process of being studied. We essentially the way that admissions works is I don't know if anyone's familiar with medical school, the stable match process that links the residents to the hospitals. It's a similar process that we use here. So the simulation of that is being done right now by MIT and hopefully we'll be able to implement this policy in three pilot schools the next academic year. But this would be the first of us kind to look at community impacts and the burdens of systemic issues like redlining like community impacts and be used in an admissions policy instead of these metrics that essentially reflect the ability of a family to hire a tutor or So I welcome everyone to take a look at it segregation is killing us right now we're in a big fight because this research was used to remove middle school screens, which were halted during the pandemic and then you administration would like to bring them back. So this work keeps coming up and I've been I just want to thank Leslie and the incubator staff and Esther and everyone that made this happen because a lot of the funding from the GSAP incubator grant went to the outreach and to the mobilization of community organizing to use this research to fight for equity in our public schools. Thank you. Um, Zareth, I, you know, I, I thank you so much I love this tangible like solution that you are able to propose and put forth to the DOE. And I will be rooting for you as a parent of children in the DOE, but I was able to join the zoom launch of the website, where you presented alongside integrate NYC and I can testify to the amazingness of these children, the children, young, young people that you are working with, I mean, even over zoom their energy and compassion was palpable it was it was amazing and just so happy that GSAP can be a part of supporting this work and I encourage people to go on territorial empathy because Zareth has a way of working with each community that she partners with in a very unique way unique to to to that project. Before we open the reception I'd love to open the floor to anyone with a question for Zareth, just in awe of your work. Um, and I, okay, so I, you know, Zareth will be in the reception so please say hi to her as well as Cheryl and Nelson Louise, Fabrizio Catherine and did I miss anyone else who presented in person. But also the next incubator before we wrap as we're wrapping up I just want to say that the next cohort will be announced, hopefully in a matter of weeks. So you'll be hearing from us about that and really excited to to work with the next cohort, as much as I've enjoyed working with this one so please say hi to everybody and enjoy the reception. Thank you.