 I just want to introduce Reinhold Martin. Reinhold Martin is a professor of architecture here at Columbia, where he directs the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. He has published widely on the history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture, and he directs the history theory sequence here at Gisev. The Buell Center's work on housing in real estate includes the multi-year project, House Housing, an untimely history of architecture and real estate, the publication The Art of Inequality, Architecture Housing, and Real Estate, a Provisional Report, the exhibitions Living in America, Frank Lloyd Wright, Harlem, and Modern Housing, as well as foreclosed Rehousing the American Dream and the workshop's Public Housing Public Sphere. So it's my pleasure to bring everyone together. Leave it to you, Reinhold. Thank you. Yes, it's quite a responsibility. Thank you, Hillary. Hi. How's everybody doing? How are you guys doing? What do you want to talk about? I have some thoughts. I mean, I feel a little bit of a responsibility towards the larger themes of the conference since we're the kind of wrap-up panel, and maybe we can step back. But here, I mean, actually, I'm interested to know, there's really just an open question about the paradigm part. Because if one of the functions of a conference like this is to assess, I don't know, in the last decade or so, maybe more of housing design in North America, there are three components. The design component, which I'd like to try to articulate as succinctly but also as deeply as possible the North American element, which is interesting in its own way and just the various practices represented here, I think, speak to that, and then the paradigm. So if I were to answer the question under what paradigm do we live and work and design act, in other words, today, I think I wouldn't be alone in calling that paradigm neoliberal. In other words, if there is a consensus about something like a paradigm shift, that has occurred over normally in the last 40, 50 years, depending on how you date this, the early 70s is usually where the inflection point is located. We'd be saying that's the real shift. The real paradigm shift has been the neoliberal turn, the turn towards a neoliberal city, neoliberal policies, and so on. So that's a way of asking, first of all, the question to you broadly about whether you think that's a reasonable or accurate way to describe the world that we're living and working and acting in, and secondly, to think whether that could be changed. Because paradigm shifts are usually narrated, more traditionally narrated as revolutions. It's like positive change in some way or another. This has been a revolution. But I think most of us would agree that this has not been a revolution that has benefited the vast majority of the people who live in the world in which we live and act, including in the housing that you own design. So how architecture as design, but also as a kind of public act, can address the revolution in which we are living and working, the neoliberal revolution would be my first question. I have other more specific architecture-specific questions about typology after that. But maybe we could start with this sort of paradigm part. I also want to talk about North America. Anybody have any thoughts about neoliberalism? I mean, I would say the shift is radical, because, I mean, from a Canadian perspective, in 1867, 80% of Canadians lived in rural settings and 20% of Canadians lived in cities. So the entire structure, the legislation, the kind of acts that created cities, they were really the child of the federal and provincial government. Now, 85% of Canadians live in cities, but we are governed by that same framework from 1867. So it's a kind of problematic condition that doesn't actually understand that right now cities are the economic engine of our country anyhow and that the kind of growth that's taken place, the migration from rural to urban is the paradigm shift. And that's taken place over a long time period, but it's been accelerated since the 70s. So in a way, it's kind of this mass migration that's taken place has meant that cities have a role and an importance and a need for housing that I think is actually more pressing than it was in 1867. I'll just add a little footnote because I don't want to get into others. 1872 was when Fridjik Engels published the housing question, von unsfrage, which is all about the problem of rural to urban migration, specifically what he called bourgeois solutions, which is to say usually architect solutions to the housing question, as preventing proletarianization in cities and thereby preventing the organization of labour that Michael mentioned or other political acts. So the rural to urban thing is part of this story for sure, I think, but that's a longer time span that is associated with other political economic paradigms or models of the sort that you described. So I'm curious and maybe we can come back about what the specifically neoliberal, which is usually associated with deregulation, privatization and so on, so we could ask how that plays into the urban, you know, identification but others? Well, I think that for me the real paradigm would be to understand that we are in a moment where we need to reverse the situation where right now housing, it's a financial act and this is why I'd like this title of this conference because I think it should become a design act needing a financial sustainability to become a solution for the masses but with no doubt like putting design as a first necessity to fulfill really the possibilities of doing a house, you know, making housing and not only as an operation, you know, as a physical representation of it. So I think that the neoliberalization of the economy like prohibited that thing to happen and I think that it is not only the task of everybody to do that but it's also the architects that we should start like really pushing towards that direction. I agree with Tatiana completely but what I think is that even the architects are proposing these things we have like the codes or the normative or I don't know how to say that it's a long process, no? First we're thinking which is legal to think and then we need to legalize what we think with the codes and the government and the developers because we are like a little seed in the whole process, no? I think. Maurice, because of your perspective. No, I would just frame it as growth obviously is one of the things that Detroit is trying to induce which means we are in many instances deregulating a lot of red tape and hurdles to development. So the parking question that Lorcan brought up, we got that, the developments that you're seeing are vastly under parked and that's by regulation but the inclusion part is highly regulated because there is an affordable housing inclusionary component. We own the land so we dictate the terms. That's again pretty present but I think that cities like Detroit have to be about growth. I think what is important about the experiment is that there is a desire to have zero displacement so we don't accept that in order to regenerate the city you have to displace one people for another people and so I don't know where that sets us but I know when I think about regulations we are regulating, we are actually setting forth a clear vision of what design is supposed to be which means there are guidelines, there's expectations and at the same time we're trying to unleash innovation by removing the red tape that allows for a multitude of other players to participate in the regeneration of the city. How about the privatization part? Where do you sit on that one? We're not doing large federally sponsored housing. What you saw was a commitment to develop affordable housing by grafting it on and into every market rate housing development that goes on in the city. I think that's a very apt in a sense description of neoliberal policy that is still trying to effect change. In other words, you're working within these economic structures that are more or less there's no budget to do a large scale project even if you wanted to and seem to effect change. There's this other very traditional role that's ascribed to design specifically and I mean like the design of a building not just the spreadsheets. I mean Mark was very eloquent I think about the spreadsheets and we can get back to that. But the design of the building to in a sense elicit the imagination to think the world differently. In other words to invite the imagination is to say to think differently, to speak to the imagination not just to the bottom line. So now it's possible to say that housing, the thing that we call housing that we're discussing is housing was kind of invented as a type, a building type maybe 50 years ago. Not that long ago. It didn't exist really in the modern sense until maybe 100 years ago. And so it's a relatively new building type. It's not like so many of the archetypes that architectural designers, students and so on are familiar with like churches or other religious buildings, temples or even public squares. Of course residential architecture has been around forever but you know and we have primitive huts and all of that. But here I think I'm trying to in a sense test a little bit about where we are today in the spirit of evaluating paradigms on the more or less strictly modernist claim that you know you mentioned Catherine Bauer would be a good example. That housing can help change the world. By housing in a sense bearing down, bringing all of the tools of the architectural imagination and the urbanist imagination onto this type can help us reimagine the world. Not just work within it, within its givens, its constraints but change it. So this is a short way of saying like if you were, what would have to change about the type that we call housing in order for the world to change? Is that still on the table? Is that kind of thinking still on the table? Anybody here willing to stand with Catherine Bauer and another modernist and say yes, the world has to change and changing the imagination, addressing the imagination through the design of a building might make some small contribution towards that kind of a change. What do you think? Well, I absolutely believe in that because I believe that if you think a human being needs health first, second necessity is a refugee and that's there. It's there. It's a basic necessity for a human being to be, it is full. And it needs then the collectivity to become these social human beings. So I do absolutely believe that there is a huge responsibility within designing a house, within designing housing as well. How do we translate that idea of designing a house and becoming a firm housing and not lose the meaning of the act of design in the way, in between. And I believe that part of it is not reducing into a function or to a number. And I believe that maybe we've tested already the function, the number. Now what is next? What come next? And I think it goes back to understanding the individual and the individual necessity of each of us of being individual and then being collected. It is not an easy operation. It's more a question on how to do it than an answer. So in that sense, you're sort of reversing the more classic modernist equation in which the collective is first. You know, as sort of the German Ziedlungen or something like that. In which the units are all pretty much the same. Individuality is not absent but suppressed in favor of some sort of greater social whole. So the individual comes first. I'm curious. It's a balance. Am I being unfair? I would say part of my position is that housing is not enough at this point. And that we need other programs embedded with housing to really rethink our cities because the motto doesn't really answer the questions that are needed in the contemporary city. I did not describe the last project that I showed actually fits that model very nicely. The adaptive reuse of the stone soap building with additional housing. What I didn't mention was the Shakespeare in Detroit, an African-American Shakespearean theater, was grafted on to what was otherwise a mixed-use development project. And in many ways it kind of found its soul. So I couldn't agree with you more because one of the ways of making housing express more collective desires is to graft other things on it that we love and hold dear, whether it's an early childhood learning center or locally-owned shops, something that forces it to be external because inherently if you're thinking about the private realm you get into kind of a uniformity of the housing expression. It's really only the public, I think the public realm and encouraging buildings to make place for people to gather. So one of the things that was a common thread through all of the residential developments was this component of public space and when folks said, wow, you all in Detroit have so much space it must be developing a new paradigm between how the private and the semi-private and the public end to mingle. Well, in the end it hasn't emerged that the public, the private space, that outdoor space has radically changed. It's still, I was like envious of all those incredible balconies in real estate and studio gang project. What I found was that we can encourage developers to give more of their space over to the public and then begin to shape it in plazas and courtyards in parks. So I'm seeing, it's not so much that because we have more space people are having more outdoor private space. Actually they're having more public space so it's at the service of something a little larger than a domestic scale. I would like to say only, that you say imagination to the housing and I think it would be nice imagination but intelligence to the housing and reason to the housing. Reason. Intelligence or something. And I just wanted to clarify that I didn't meant that I, it is talking from the private that's what I wanted to try to ban. It's about coming from the individual and the individual needs which are private and collective. And it is, as I said, not coming from a spatial operation like a functional operation as in the modern times or a financial operation as in the last decades of the last century but as an act of fulfilling like an individual social necessity. It's interesting how difficult it is once you start really looking at this question to specify what the problem is almost. Because another way, again just using very traditional architectural vocabularies to say this would be the housing is not a type in let's say the 1970s it's not a Rossian archetype in the way that at least some of you have described the mixing of things. If anything you're militating to some extent in a rather technical way, very specific way against the purification of the type as a sort of whether or not timeless but at least legible building type. And that speaks to design because not just to the planning of the building but to virtually all of its formal characteristics because the legibility of that type was one of the great projects of the sort of middle to late 20th century wasn't the only one but it was certainly one of the more influential ones. And as we tend paradigmatically maybe towards mixture, I mean in other words the question is whether mixture is a key characteristic of this new paradigm we might have to then ask because one of Rossi's and company's efforts was to hold back what they saw coming using the tools of architecture to hold back the commercialization of architecture by real estate development that began with the project of mixing programs in order to optimize the potential returns on investment under different investment conditions. So the distillation of this archetype into a kind of singular sort of abstraction was seen by some at least to resist commercialization kind of development formulas, spreadsheets and that sort of thing. Do you think that that's an available strategy or useful strategy is it naive or meaningless to think along those lines to in a sense to rethink typology to put it more straightforwardly as a design problem for housing? I think that the variability not only goes to the type as you're saying I think it's intrinsically in the type as Anna was mentioning this morning we're designing for a very like the type is trying to create a space for a family that described that it doesn't exist in the majority of the cases. So I think as I said it goes already from in there how to really specifically house and allow for more diversity like bringing in the diversity instead of just bringing it out or in a combination. I will say it's always interesting. The issue of typology in Detroit is is not something that we're asked to reflect on so much because we have it already there. We have literally thousands of buildings. We have banks, churches, schools, recreation centers, small factories that are a typology and they're empty. So we are trying to understand how you re-inhabit that not which requires a level of reinvention because we don't have the program pieces to fill them up. We don't have the financial resources to rehab them all. So it's a fundamentally different question. It's more about allocation of resources tactical ways to re-inhabit. Well you know if you can't inhabit 10,000 square feet of a former school of which we have 65 vacant schools, can you occupy 10,000 square feet and can you get that financed and can you program it? If you can't finance 10,000 can you finance 1,000 and put the other 99,000 mothball it for another day. So the types are there. It's the innovation that's going to attack the problem in the exact same way that historically we have to go into a neighborhood like the Fitzgerald neighborhood that has a hundred vacant homes it's nonsensical to think about building new single family houses. So the strategy was how to create 230 gardens in the neighborhood. So I think the circumstance kind of requires a level of work in Mexico. I mean there was clearly invention happening because of the circumstances the resources available for the groups that they were working and so I actually think that kind of mother invention are these kind of areas that have necessitate other strategies. I also think that the purity of solely housing which I think is a kind of has been the way that we have seen housing traditionally. I guess I feel like it needs some rethinking and that this hybrid condition is not a bad thing. I actually think that it has the capacity to have a level of dexterity a level of connection to specific programs that help to create identity for certain areas and I think that it also offers architects really interesting combinations. It's a kind of challenge to imagine all kinds of programs that are normally seen as singular objects viewed as their own being and then if they're embedded with housing how would that allow us to reimagine where our cities could be? I think it's an interesting problem to be thinking about and then each climatic zone and local condition has to rethink what that is in their own way. I don't think there's such any of these problems. So do we have time for one more scale of this? One more iteration is the North America part which is to me very interesting for this reason. This is you will recognize as a provocation but I hope one that produces a certain amount of thought that it seems to me that assembling the question of housing articulating the question of housing at the scale of something like a continent across borders asks the question of the border and specifically housing because housing in its different phases across the 20th century has been a function to a large extent of national and then municipal policy and so I'm tempted to ask it in this way can there be a North American housing policy? And so what would that look like in the words of Maurice if you were to rewrite North American housing policy at the continental scale what would have to happen for that to be a plausible thought? It's another way of asking us to think the continent on which we live together and work together by erasing its borders rather than building walls erasing now of course that has all kinds of consequences so maybe we could use architecture to test those consequences a kind of corollary to that since this part of North America is currently being governed by a real estate developer and the real estate developer in our corner of neoliberal life of the neoliberal city can you imagine a North America without border walls and guards and all of that can you imagine a North American city without a real estate developer in it? Can you imagine what a city would be that was not designed, financed, produced and governed by real estate developers? Well first of all I do think the importance of calling it this North America is amazing because I was just 10 days ago in a conference where Mexico was South America and I was going to ask you where would you prefer? Mexico is North America so I would say let's start like really stating that this is North America and that and what are the pros and cons of being North or South? Well there's North America and there's Central American South it's just a geographic thing that exists I don't know I think they're both pros and cons of being this part of that part but what is truth and it's real is that it is we are a region in many many many ways the only way we're not a region is politically but economically, culturally and socially we are one region Economically yes we have been integrated economically okay but what does that mean for housing? What does that mean for housing? Socially we were almost like and culturally more and more every day so I do not imagine it exists in New York has a neighborhood Enver's Queens which is Puebla York I mean it has a substantial amount of Mexicans living there so I can already imagine a city that it is a mixture of places because it already exists How would that city be governed? I think it's also interesting you made a study in Yale I think or I don't know where Mexicans that used to live here and then go to Mexico one day start doing like American niche type houses so you have Puebla York but you also have like Brooklyn houses in Michoacán and I also like that it's Mexico can be Latin America North America or South America it's amazing I have a lot of opportunities At the same time I think latitude matters building questions that we ask ourselves we're going from plus 40 to minus 40 Celsius our envelope issues the cost of square foot construction is so related to our climatic zone the kind of issue and that impacts housing because it has the financial kind of so I would say that what's so interesting is at one level the cultural issues are so similar in many ways the kind of different relationships actually create a richer North America and yet the kind of specificity of the local condition related to construction is actually very different and I like that play between what is actually kind of more common and what is actually specific at the same time and I feel like these kinds of conversations make us aware more aware of what those the sort of enormous similarities simultaneously I was intrigued by the Mexicans national policy of people's right to housing what a phenomenal aspiration and I can only think that imagine the concept where everyone felt they had a democratic right to live in a socially, economically environmentally healthy community to take it to the scale of community and how a policy I mean it's a national policy where you could assure a long tenure in housing so that the pressures of urbanization were not a force for displacement and so thinking about how that plays out on a local level city of Detroit has surveyed every federally regulated affordable housing in the city and has made a commitment to retain to not allow them to expire and so it's 10,000 units that have to be protected over the next five years and to raise the finances to assure that so that's on a local city level imagine that as a national policy for these cities that have been rapidly displacing poor people I think in the end it has to be a set of policies that can be implemented I suspect that the laboratory is probably cities before it becomes a national more and more we leave that there are the cities that are the next countries and I think that what you say comes to that there's not a possibility of applying any more these nationalistic or regionalistic operations and more and more we need to go from the individual operations to the more than one I think the lesson from Mexico if you were to do something in erasing the borders you would actually apply that and apply it all across North America and then you would also the right to housing for everyone is a fundamental condition and there are countries like Singapore where in effect they see the housing of their citizens as the biggest resource because the people are their kind of economy human capital yet another neoliberal gem I can't resist this does that mean that this is the NAFTA panel? I mean is anybody here against NAFTA? NAFTA? I mean NAFTA was not perfect even from Detroit because there have been very persuasive arguments made that NAFTA was responsible for the deindustrialization into some degree of the auto industry so I mean I think the single economic driver of a city a singular one is the death of any city so I think cars happen to be Detroit's but I would agree that kind of monolithic, monoculture is the real challenge Hillary has stood up so I think we're getting a signal actually have to conclude for the day with a really amazing intense panel and I want to thank everyone all the speakers across the day and for many of you who travel through a blizzard maybe have not even slept I really appreciate you being here thank you Reinhold for the last session thank you so much