 Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the first session of G-STAP, Structure and Planning Series for the Screams and Express. Today, we have the pleasure to listen to Miguel Agustrán, Associate Professor of Urbanism at the Person School of Design and University School. Professor Agustrán is also co-founder of Co-Meditation Strategies of International Non-Facted Cooperative for Social Spatial Research and Developmental Practice, based in Bracadale and New York City, which focuses on conditions of urban decline and equality and degradation within the context of the city. Parallel to its works at Co-Meditation Strategies, Professor Agustrán's main research is centered on the strategic definition and coordination of trends with similar urban projects, as well as on the developmental or tactical design strategies and engagement platforms that confront the contradictions of neoliberal organizations such as homelessness, housing prices, transportation, education, the effects of financialization on the real estate industry, inter-urban competition, and urban social movements. During today's talk, Professor Agustrán will share with us some of these complete projects that he's been involved in, and help us think about what it means to have a radical urban practice for today. And he's certainly welcoming this evening. Okay, so now, thank you very much for the invitation. It's always a pleasure for me to, when I'm about to speak, to apply to an architecture faculty. Simply because a lot of the things that I do, I'm a percent, but I have a percent in a way that my lifetime has had a certain degree of controversy for its position and its view of all of the current forms of practice or the practice that exists today. And so, I'm doing today something, a presentation that I haven't done before. So this is a new thing for me in the sense of even the software that I use to make a presentation all the way. I need something that I could send very easily, and I said this for a number of different softwares, and I found this one. So it looks weird, just testing it, but it's kind of fine. But also, it's the first lecture I ever give where I'm trying to get an overview of a lot of the projects that we have been working on over the last 10 years. Normally, when I do my lectures at it, I do something highly theoretical and I simplify something that's very simple, examples of projects, and other times I choose one or two projects and I try to focus on those projects to go a little more detail. But the reason that I decided to choose on showing just seven projects out of the 16 projects that we've been working on developed, it's because we are at the moment finishing a monographic book about our practice celebrating the 10 years that we have, but also because we are aiming to a very different direction after these projects. So to be short, what you're about to see is a lecture that unifies what we thought was a radical urban practice for 10 years, and well, we can have later questions, perhaps, as some of you think, so where are you heading after this? So these are projects that I don't think we will ever repeat for many reasons, but that helped us understand a little bit what it means to be radical in their conditions, of capitalism and all these things that we see today, which I'm going to be talking a lot on. So I hope that, yeah, that I know it, and it's plenty, all of this. I will start basically by dissenting who we are and how we started. I'm using myself there, obviously, and there are other three members of the organization. The person that you see on my left, yes, right, where is Emiliano Landonfi, the curator, and he has worked a lot in the spaces of social design. He's to be there just on the very, he's the director of the Caristo Design Prize. And Emiliano and I, somehow, so we are discussing all of these, and she have a email, which is the person next to Emiliano. She is a cultural producer. She is primarily focused on community development, community work, working with a lot of broad number of artists, mostly in Europe, but also in America, North America, including by Tito Paltrych, our collaborator that will always be on the case line and so forth. And the person at the extreme is Gabriela Landon, which she's an urban planner, and she's a hard core researcher that she's being quite, I don't mention completely to the organization. Now, the talk today was about a period and hour of discussing certain contributions that appear under our intent of this practice and this project through some of the projects. I put here, 10 years ago, the reason that we existed, whether we managed to come together is that I was exhibiting a project at the Venice Biennale in 2008, and Emiliano was a curator, together with Alveschi, all the Biennale in general, so Emiliano was taking care of the Italian poet even at that time. And we somehow met at that point of that intersection where we couldn't figure out, mostly we were a whole by what we were seeing in 2008, the main exhibitions, which basically were what we call, and sorry, I will use some languages that my friend people could really sorry, what we call somehow these time observations of extreme excess, of extreme luxury, of extreme cost, and that only simplified any institutions, the views of what the millionaires and millionaires that were becoming wanted out of this, and how the industry in general was so condescending into this. I mean, we're talking about 2008 here, right, which it was still not enraged as it was today against a lot of designers, and obviously I'm talking that since we started in the 40s, we've always pushed ourselves very much against the criticism of the superstar regime. I had the pleasure, not pleasure, of working as a professor in the University of Delft, and there, and I was also in charge of thinking about the Bellar Institute, and the China Bellar Institute existed, as such in the Netherlands, as well as I was teaching in Switzerland. And one of the things that I decided to do because of the constant confrontation with all of these super superstar regimes was it actually helped me build, or start building a position that was very anti-monist today. For example, the Bellar Institute, we constantly had people like Renfellas, and I was teaching together, not together, but side-to-side in the studio with people like D-Mass and so forth at that time or so anyway, if today didn't matter to these people anymore, because I have been so distant from that discourse, thankfully, but at the time that we're developing the project of qualification strategies, we were not, they were the enemy for us. Right now, we don't care about it, but at that time it was, and so it all started there at the Venice Biennale, when we said like, you know, this cannot continue anymore, how is it possible that 95% of the exhibition deals only with demonstrations of wealth and power, or basically representations of wealth and power, and how this establishment is just going purely into, you know, all of this. And so, as we were talking about this, suddenly we received a notification. I did receive a notification from a friend, which has become my greatest mentor and one of my biggest collaborator, which is an urban theorist, he's named David Harvey, and David Harvey sends me a text saying, yeah, did you see the news? I mean, living brothers just collapsed, and then we look at living brothers, and then, yes, everything just collapsed, and so for us it was one of those incredible moments, right, right in the middle of the journey, you know, in the Venice Biennale, right, seeing all this profusion and exhibition of luxury items and luxury goods and so forth, at the same time understanding that this Christ had been creating pretty much my organization, I mean, as we understand it as such. And so, this is how we, yeah, at the moment we have developed CC projects as an entity of collection strategies. We're finishing with one project right now in Calderon, which might be our last project of the sky, right? I'm quite sure, right, and within this essay I'm gonna try to explain very, very fast because I know I haven't limited time. As I mentioned, I mean, one of our biggest inspirations is an image that has many representations always since I started giving lectures around, which is, and the image that I took at Amsterdam Airport skip over when I was living there, and now, now the Financial Times, so I think the Financial Times is the best newspaper today, for many reasons. I mean, I'm not giving a promotion to it, but it's the most serious newspaper that Calderon is likely to look like in respect. And so, I think the other newspapers have gone too much into ideological issues, especially, you know, what they want, what they want advice, Catholicism, they do it the way they do. But it's incredibly expensive, so I'm not subscribed to it, I get the news from one of the people, because it really is super expensive newspaper. Anyway, but as I'm strong to the airport, I find this, I think at that time, remember, 2008, this was like, probably like the absolute hours representation of what's happening to scenes in general. And I think it's very close to what's happening now, not long ago I went to give a tour to a friend that visited of Hudson Yards, and you don't know all of these things, and we can still see those most representation as we come here. But these had the incredible incaniability of representing all of that as an island, you know, as its own sort of like unit. And together, of course, they made a representation, even though we're talking about financial kinds of world business, it was always the architecture, right, the architecture and the planning that comes out of architecture that represented this. Until today, I have not found a better image that represents this, and I'm working on another book, and this will be a cover, hopefully, because I'm trying to convince the authors to do so. But with that in mind, so this was for us like our contingent, you know, the thing that we were pushing ourselves against. And we decided that we will start an organization that would do something quite different than that. First of all, it was a hard thing to do, which was the rejection of the built form. And that is one of the issues that has always made us very unpopular, or controversial, or no one gives them about us in architecture schools or in urban climate schools that stand from architecture or urban science school, which is clearly standing from architecture too. Which is that we don't believe that any form of built form, I mean, the materiality of things is anything will give anything substantial to the reconstruction of a new world, or the construction of a world that we want to see, which is not the world that we are. Now, on the contrary, we believe that the production of materiality, of form, of buildings, of concrete designs contributes to exacerbating differences at the moment where we are. So it's basically a very historicized concept, right? In the other moments, for example, during the welfare state in the 50s and 60s, we have, we can some articles that we claim that that building was actually currently relevant for the construction of better building of humanities. But right now, we actually think it's not. And so with that in mind, the practice was constructed on the following points that I'm going to show you. One of them was we're interested in figuring out how we could design systems, operate the levels of economy and so forth and working with anti-speculative development proposals. What does this mean? It's basically, let's say you look at the realm of housing. Well, you basically kind of make profit out of it, right? And how is that possible? What it sees, what mechanism it sees? What kind of mechanisms it sees worldwide that actually allow that anti-speculative forms of development and how can we promote it and support organizations in the development of such things? Together with that, of course, is the creation of alternative property models. These have been quite popularizing the last four or five years, although we've been working with them for some time, which we're not as popular as they're now, such as in New York, specifically community land trust and that I will stop collectives, operatives, housing co-ops, living technology co-ops and so forth. We also believe that many of those models are not translatable to today. They're very old. And I always put the example of something like a community land trust. The only reference we have is the Cooper Square Community Land Trust, which has been going on since the 70s. And tons, I mean, not hundreds, but certainly dozens of organizations have tried to replicate such a thing and they have not been successful. So clearly, you know, it's not translatable. Nevertheless, we put a lot of resources in trying to replicate systems that are not feasible to replicate today. But we'll discuss perhaps some community land trust later. Another very important thing that we decided to work on was in the politics of scale. I mean, controversial from an architectural, for an architecture school, or also planning school, is that we believe that the city matters less and less. We don't think that the power and the might of the city is, or urbanization is the city's work. So the power of urbanization is not the city. And for us to comprehend that and to theorize that and to exemplify that, we have to work in the politics of scale, which means we have to look at regional governments, we have to look at national governments, and the interests of mine over the last years have been in a super national organizations and governments that drive urbanization. So for us, urbanization, and let me put it as clear as I can, is the absolute representation of capitalism in space. The city is capitalism represented in space. That is for us, the community. And therefore, our main point of interest was not per se the city, but how capitalism is represented in space. And for that, the representation of space is the city. So the fetish, or the fetishization of the city, of the skyline, and so on, sees to be the common fetish that we normally have when we study architecture, and so on. And that would be very important for us. The common collective, shared infrastructure, every time more and more, we're more suspicious of that, but already in 2000, they were talking about the commons and all that kind of stuff, that everybody likes to talk more and more and more on it. And we have tried to practice on this, and of course, found out a lot of contradictions that come into these collectives, shared infrastructure, communities, community development, and so forth. Development of urban unions, I might actually go in the next, in the first part, everyone present, a little bit on that, but that's a concept that we have been developing. Hopefully, we'll be presenting this in an exhibition or sort of a whole concept of urban review, which is basically, we use a metaphor of what would be a labor union and translating what could it be that's easy to take over the production of their space and so on through some kind of organizational formation against the forces of capitalism. Economists of use value, which is the sixth point, I am trained as a Marxist thinker, and as you said, my main mentor has been David Harvey, and he's one of the primary Marxist thinkers in the world. And so they, but I totally dig it. I mean, I completely follow, and we have to discuss this a lot. And therefore, for me, the distinction between what is two basic Marxist concepts, which is called exchange value and use value, which are ways that he determines what a commodity is. Exchange meaning what you get in exchange out of that, and use value what you get to use. And again, I always like to use the concept of housing for audience to understand what that means. A housing use it for leading, which is what it should be for, or you use it for speculating, which is what is being used now more. So the greater majority of the buildings that are built now in New York City are built for speculation, not for the use. So one of the questions was how to also push the idea some economics of use value to emphasize the use rather than the exchange condition. The spaces for political implementation, I think that speaks by itself. And then right for representation strategies, which is my fantasy, because I like to draw a lot. And this one, a few things that remain from my education as a designer. And an article sometimes I play the role of that. And we like to really play with representations, and you'll see that a lot in this. So I'm not sure if I'm actually gonna achieve this. I'm not ready, I don't have any time. Okay, so our first basis was to construct the theoretical body that sustained the practice. And a lot of people helped produce these. At that time that we were doing these, we had open source from friends, from feminist, right, from feminist, from Marxist thinkers, from philosophers, and so on. We were trying to figure out lawyers, and so on. The forms of research that we wanted to structure in the base of these. And what we did, what you call these, based a lot on the actual research that you've been, that you spoke a lot to me, and we called it intellectual research. It also influences by concepts of the FED, I'll be the FED, which it's one or the other of people that influenced us. I think I have to point out here that this is a 10-year constant iteration of the theoretical position of what we think should be the methods in which urbanization should be spread today. And our main inspiration side would hear these, which is very important. It's the international research that I use have influenced a lot of our situations as internationals. Certain parts of the Roche Maiman Garde, as well as reference in the 19th century on the fingers of Franco-Nall, writing of feminisms like Cedric Venici, we also consider her one of our mentors. We work also with her closely. And in the 1970s, of course, the Latin American of writings and the writing of some more afraid of the pedagogy of the press. And a lot of things have also been grabbed by an amazing figure, Xenis Orlando Osvola, which in my point of view is the main source if you guys want to know about participatory research, which is not something that is well understood here in the US because participatory research in the US comes from a very different space. The Latin American space is certainly much more rich on this. So this will be basically our constructions. And what I mentioned rather than focusing on these kind of buildings or urban infrastructure are practices that are to intervene in the value of social organizations, tenement movements of the 60s, of the 70s, Europe and the United States. And learn from basically all of that. We have been creating many iterations of our methodology, but just to give you an idea, we wanted to have a consmetric perception of what the city was. If you see, this is part of one of the first projects we ever did, we started to look at the city not into its surface appearance, which will be the thing on top, which is the plan view and so on. But all sort of processes that mix into it, which will be there in this case, it was all about the space, so many inequalities, the policy, social housing, regeneration, and so on. We build these crazy methodologies that I don't even have time to explain now. But I'm showing this to present to you the process of building the practice, which took us some time and time to know what it's in that as such. Now, we've done many publications and also at the fringe, sometimes we're surprised that we're getting by it to present this stuff at different fancy venues, such as the MoMA and so forth, which were a part of the exhibition because we don't think it corresponds to the ideological basis of, you know, these sort of sensations. Nevertheless, we like to take advantage of the possibility to show this work, you know, where it is and so on. So we're presenting seven projects, I'm presenting seven projects, and these projects are the following. I chose the seven projects out of the 16 because they deal with very specific issues. First of all, you will be able to stay in that displacement in the south of Rotomac, which is a super important thing for us, or by arts under French conservative governance. Second project, the possibility of urban interventions in a Canadian and private art foundation. Developing an urban campaign in a neo-futile city in southern Italy. Deciding an alternative housing model for a university in a record crisis and housing crisis. Restructuring the urban operations of a public arts agency in Philadelphia, which is the largest public arts agency in the United States. And supporting the development of a social cultural pop in migrant neighborhoods in Milan. Now, I like to put this as the basis of the project, right, to saying the titles of the project because each project dealt primarily with these issues. Now, as you can see, they're very limited. It's not like, you know, we're designing a revolution or any other sort of like, you know, greatest things. I mean, of course, we need more and more time passes that we become more and more aware of the incredible limits that we have to actually do any project. And they lock that we have had also given finance necessary for developing these projects, which is also one of the primary questions that we get asked, right? It's like, how the hell do you get money to do this, right? And to put it in perspective, the almost every project here had a working team of more than 20 people and almost every project lasted more than a year and a half, right? So they were very large research practice, community-based projects. They're not tiny, small, buy-in-a-ease and don't require a lot of resources to develop. The first one that I want to discuss on, and then this will be very fast. So I'm sorry. And then I think all the questions to pass it like this, very fast. So I was given a lot of time at that time, as I said, I was teaching over there. And we were asked to do for an analysis of my data project, which we took advantage and use these basis of the project to apply for state funds and city funds, which is they have a specific fund that's costing me a small fortune, which is a nice amount of money, right? That you could get for some crazy projects that you want. At that time, believe me, there was no anti-capitalist, anti-neoliberal display of anything in the Netherlands on the opposite. Everybody was still on the neoliberal honeymoon, right? Like the European Union is like the thing and best. I assume the Netherlands right now is in the similar one because they're taking all the exiles, corporate exiles from Brexit, but that's a totally different thing. But whatever the case it is, it was very difficult for us to write this proposal. We're asking for close to 400,000 euros. So that's not a cheap amount, but it's not a little money here. But for some reason, we might as to get this, right? I mean, and so we use this VNL as a propeller for it. It's something that we use a lot that arts, exhibitions, places and so on because I think it just worked propeller. But here we've got this idea of which is the metaphor and traditional labor unions, which improve the average political and social and economic system condition without displacements was a main condition. Now, the site that we were working at, if you have been in Rotterdam, which I don't know why would you be in Rotterdam, but if you would be in Rotterdam, you would see at the moment that there is this island, literal island, or with projects of fancy architects, cultural achievements. So it's that you have a race of piano, you have a lot of CSAN or REN poster, REN collage, we suddenly finish a hotel at our orchestra over there. It's an island that's called the Linenbier. And the Linenbier was not totally built when we started working there. On the opposite, it was starting to be built. And in order for that to be built, they needed to also provide housing for people that would be supported by that new development. And therefore, it was a massive plan of displacement every neighborhood around it. And for that project, we decided, okay, let's get together with Antille community. And certain, a Muslim community was working there, but colonial subjects of the Netherlands, which a few of them leave in there. We had, through other projects before, good relationships with the Antille community, especially the Antille women, which had been displaced since some still live in there, and started to work with them to figure out how we can produce this urban union. Now, the urban union, let me see where to go, okay, structured, and I really like this schema because it tells you a lot on how we operated as an organization. So on the top, you will see the academic institutions that were somehow supporting the project. These academic institutions were academic institutions where I was teaching, so it's kind of easy, right? And it was not complicated. I went to the people that they're supported and I say, are you willing to put student support and so on? They said, yes, fine, we do it. And it's very interesting because if you manipulate things and it's about human rights and all of that, they basically, almost everyone says yes. So it's also a teaching of that. And then we started to create a team composed of two very different units of research and action. We call one unit or there's a strategic research unit. And then another one, which we will see that further down, which is called Action Research Unit or Action or something like that, I don't know if you remember. And in the research unit, you had these people, you see my name there, that were taking care of researching these specific issues of working with the community and from a very serious research perspective. In patient models, democratic participation in the urban field, that was myself. And then governance and general policy. We had a lawyer out working with us, and even a graphic designer working with us to develop all the representations on that. Now, the issue that we address of this project were the private decision of housing, continuous displacement of Antigua and the Muslim communities, home at risk of demolition, red lining and urban insulation, engineering these investments, long lords are developing pressure with the neighborhood of the generation project. The work that I'm doing is something like steemaxes, which is crazy, if you're Turkish and want to live in a Turkish neighborhood, you have class permission to live in there because they don't like concentrations of certain ethnicities. This is totally against any violation of anything you write, but nevertheless that happens. And created class politics, which was a big time in 2008, Richard Fiorida, that was idiot, was the main sponsor of, not sponsor, it was an advisor of the mayor brought up at that time. So, all these things were very present. The governance of all private partnerships happened like crazy at that time. The privatization of the internet was just absolutely insane. They're more privatized in the US, obviously, but just to give you an idea, even the mail is private, right? I mean, the post was privatized just a little bit of it. And so, and this happened, of course, nobody noticed. It just happened because that was part of the European policies and so on, okay? And micro labor and so on, I don't have time. Another project that I wanted to show was the issue of the Bordeaux Protocol, which is a project that started really, really, right? I mean, each of us had kind of like our own idols, let's say, in certain practices. And one person that I respected a lot in the art world was the Art de Provera, which was an avant-garde, kind of pseudo, kind of an avant-garde movement of Italy in the 60s and 70s. And one of the main artists that proceeded this was Michelangelo Pistoletto. One day, we received a call from Michelangelo Pistoletto, and he was just like, what the hell is happening? He's one of these people that you think you're never gonna meet in your life. Actually, I think he, I thought he was there, perhaps. And Pistoletto calls us and invites us to help him produce an event that he was called to be the director of, which was a big thing happening in the city of Bordeaux. But the weird part about this is that Michelangelo Pistoletto was hired by Alain Juppet. And Alain Juppet, in those of you that are not in the French politics, he's one of the oldest establishment figures of the right of France. He's almost like a dictator of Bordeaux. He has been the mayor of Bordeaux, I think right now he's not there anymore, but we were there almost 30 years, right? And he was, he had two ministerial positions on the sacrosanct. He was a minister of interior and a minister of foreign affairs, I think, of interior. Oh, I don't remember which of the ministry, but he's like a really high-end sort of personality. And so that person invites this radical, left-leaning artist named Michelangelo Pistoletto to help them develop this huge project of intergovernment competition because they're trying, every city in Europe at that is still built today. It's competing against each other to see who can bring the better and the best and so forth. And so, and then Michelangelo Pistoletto invites this young sort of Marxist to basically help him produce this. So it's a very weird sort of structure on this. Anyway, that happens and he saw it as an idea. He's just like, okay, why don't we play into this game and see how much we can play into it? And we, too, basically the challenge is to see how far can we push this project until a long-term break, or someone in this break. So our goal in this project, amongst many others, but one of the main goals was to see how far can we push Michelangelo. And while spending that as much as I can relate to it, the project was organized in the following way. So Michelangelo Pistoletto needed the methodology in which to develop this project, but also asked us to help him find certain areas within the city where more social needs were present or something like that. And so we started with a very strong mapping project where, well, we decided to focus on two areas in the city. One of them was San Michel. Most of you have been in Bordeaux. San Michel is where you both find the most beautiful tower cathedral on Bordeaux. And there's a plaza with a market. But the thing there is that the market, and everything around this beautiful, absolutely beautiful site, it's just much in population. Everything. You have to be taking over numbers in population. Now, in the side to that, you cross the street and it was the hub of the creative class. So it was the downtown Bordeaux where the creative class was beginning to come up, all of them white, obviously non-Muslim, and they started to work in that specific area. And so part of the main plan of Alangipé was to use this event as an excuse to expel the population and in their week's work to take over back again to the French people, to be the French people. This beautiful, original site of San Michel, right? And to this place. And you start to see the renders and the amount of architects, including very fancy architects that were working with this guy. And the renders, of course, you know, like sushi bars, cafes, and you know, and the classes, and so on. And so we said, okay, that's a challenge, let's work there. And another area that we work were the abandoned sites of the France Ensemble, which is this big 1950s, 60s, 70s housing projects, mostly populated by old, white, French working class, which have also been abandoned. And so within these two projects, we worked in the Consulate House and interweb competition. And these were basically the remaining age, and we noticed that can be translated to certain artists, sort of offline, as well as general intercontrollations that have been in Mordeaux. I also look here at the main team, which is at the center. And what we were working on, Constitutional Social Relations, you know, I mean, so it's just a colloquial social, every layer, like, all of that. I'm not, I think, it's just a lot of love about it. For this project, we invited also a bunch of friends that we had at that time. We still have, some of them less than ours, but we have a steeper view. You might recall a person named Damon Breach. Damon, 10-year-old, so I'm sure you've heard of him, sorry, it's a potterage and so forth. As we invited a bunch of friends to collaborate, and this is gonna pop, this is the dance ensemble site, to develop a series of many projects guided by us, right, within that site. Now, the budget here was insane. It was several millions of euros, so it was, we had like insane budget. At the end, we didn't, because we got kicked out, but that's the difference, the story. Now, there were many events that happened here. This was the takeover of an abandoned market in Sanichel. We developed a lot of workshops, but the main product that we had, at least in Sanichel, and also in Grand Park, was to create another urban union, right? Now, this has been, I think, the most successful urban unions that we have attempted ever to create. With the help of Jean-Épain Hayes-Weidt, which again is this artist that I'm telling you about, so on, contacted eight plus Muslim organizations in Sanichel, and managed to put them together. Organizations that had never actually worked together ever again, I mean, ever before, sorry. And put them together in one single room, and began to show them what the municipality wanted to do with their environment, basically to clean them up. And then basically, mobilized them, and telling them, like, you guys are gonna end up like this, basically living somewhere else if you don't unite now, and create the union, and so forth. And so, basically, the project itself was the creation of this union. Until today, that union sees that they have not been able to displace so much. They have done some damage, obviously, but not the type of damage that we're trying to create in terms of this placement. So the union still functions, and lovely, you know, we have, we receive not every year, every year, more or less, those from this organization who are saying that this is how we're doing now, et cetera, and so forth. Now, there were many projects within this, and this was one of the main assemblies, for example, that there was a much bigger booster than there would be those. Again, this program was a year and a half in the making. And this is how we're pulling the calling posters of ideas, and then this was named as an association, which was created for this project, for migrant workers, the association for migrant workers, all of it referring to the German unions, and so forth. And this is what put us to stop for the projects. We're doing fantastically well, but pushing really the boundaries of these. And then an organization, an art organization from Russia, they're the main, they call it the Stode Lat, which is a very radical group of nice people who invited to paint a mural in an area in Grand Park. And so they said, fine, they did this mural in a collective, things where people, that's what we want to put in a big mural, and so forth. And the mural depicting a lot of Ukraine sent us an octopus debowering all the things we did. And this, against the fraternity, quality, that Francis, we were asked to leave and the project was eliminated. So we managed actually to push it back to the unions. And this still remains like that because it's in a project role. So it's still there. It should be sunwashed by now, but we couldn't finish this, right? And that's how the project ended in general, but with a lot of successes. So that's part of our coming process on how modality. The issue that we've addressed here in this internal competition, concentrating investment for the creative class, how we're going to grab a major, major, sorry, and urban cleansing and history districts, et cetera. Now, I'm going to skip this one very fast because I don't want to, I think I better go over to one of these further. This break, what it was very important for us, it was the first project that we worked with parts of the reaction of research influences from Oswald. And we're working with Spanish sociologists that was one of the main ideologues together with Superman Lantemaco since in Chapa, with Sanatistas, they were very close and he helped produce a lot of a community or management source, Carpolis in Mexico. And so these five sociologists started to work together with us and we develop a lot of things based on participatory research stuff over here. And it was fantastic. So for some of these, he's the one, he's Angela, and that was doing a sociogram, so he makes examples of that. But just to put it here, what teaches the way of addressing this project were suburbanization and sprawl, political cultural institutions, the cultural industrial complex, because we were hired by a foundation, a large foundation that is owned by the ex-owner of Blackberry and he sold Blackberry before it went down. So it's a Canadian millionaire and has this foundation. And then this art foundation is supposed to do good and then for some reason the curator liked us and started to connect. So crazy stuff happened. The Campania Urbana, it's again, into that repetition of developing campaigns and projects that bring together people. We mimic the way that this is in the south of Italy. We mimic a lot the urban campaigns that politicians do. These are our posters. We work a lot in graphic designers and this is what I mean by representations and start to plaster walls around the ceiling with something I call Campania Urbana and people start to confuse this whether it was disability campaign or not a political campaign really that was doing this because we're not by 10% in ourselves with this project. And then I'm not gonna go, so this is again what we were trying to do but it consisted on these projects here. This one involved a lot of writing and theater and some other communities because we're working with a cultural institution. And this is a few images, all the different manifestations that we created. So at the end, it was a final image of posters that were also all around collected works of serigraphy with different parts of the community and different organized manifestations, local markets, local economies, functionally trained, a lot of bargaining stuff that we'd like to work with, et cetera. And then evening performances, which was also fairly important for us. Key issues here, along with the production and marginalization of working trans-native groups, culture for me, for us, and extreme permanence investments, especially in south of Italy, it's really the important outside extreme. Co-operative housing for us moment in New York City, I'm gonna jump very fast. And this was our proposal for what should housing be here in New York City. Another crazy thing, we saw in contact by the moment, they wanted to be part of this crazy exhibition and it's like, moment, what should we not? And then we decided, yes, and we, with the specific terminologies, ultimately building a documentary that I would give you an interest in this, I would totally recommend you to look into it, which is called The New World of New York. It's a 24-minute documentary on the housing crisis in New York City with a lot of people, we surveyed a lot of stuff. And this was the most popular part of the whole exhibition, so we're very happy of at least what we could do there. And which goes against, again, the architecture establishment, the financial establishment, so on. And then we also did series of invasions. We did the speculation of politics. These factors allowed investors to raise the risk to unseen lives, leaving more than half of all New Yorkers unable to pay the rent. Housing in New York is a state of emergency for a growth such as the inclusion of housing in New York, a tough disaster. So we researched a lot of the, we know a lot of the housing situation here in New York, and so we use that knowledge to, to work with different groups to the right to see lives and so on. So here part, the first part of the animations is explaining what is going on with housing here. We try to go in for a moment, I think it's basically, I think it might be too sophisticated even for a moment, I guess, but because most people don't know and this is too complicated. Anyway, we explained this, and then we built up a whole sum of the ways of doing this animation and so on, which is the small corporate housing that we trust. So what happened with my money? Okay, let me use this. And so this is a documentary and then a lot of the drawings that I told you about explain what the project is about. This is one of the very few projects that we have actually managed to try to show, especially imaginary, because one was insisting, you have to bring some architecture because some architecture, you know? And so this is as much like a venture we want to do, we can do because some of us are trained as that, but this was a co-pousing arrangement that we decided to work on. But we, I think this is the only one that we don't even seem to start an organization. Most of them are processes and, okay, so issues, cloud-perspectivation, pan-sensitization, and grassroots movements. I still think it's the main enemy today, right? I mean, the main enemy is capitalism by any means, but if we want to see capitalism represented in the city, it's without doubt you can see these in housing, right? I mean, housing represents almost everything. Some people are in that it's right now passing the crisis into the retail industry and there are certain areas that we're seeing which you see is just empty, empty, empty, right? But we can, we have more time to talk about this. Thank you guys for your useful knowledge. This was the greatest start to key loss because it's too much energy. Largest public arts organization in the United States hired us to create their new program, a new program for the organization. And so we have to develop these together with violence, right? Crazy, absolutely crazy project. And what we did is, similar to the difference of the human union, we started to contact all of these constituencies. All of these are organizations where we decided to operate it from Mexican community to Asian American community to Cambodian Vietnamese, et cetera, and then started to work on the different areas that each of these organizations work. And of course, you get a picture of the American non-profit establishment which is they work only on that, right? The music. If you're a non-profit, it's health on that or food on that. And so part of the idea we worked on this project was how to create an intersection between all of these organizations. So this is one of the main, what's one of the main premises of this project. And then these were the spaces of intersection that we're looking to create here in this space. And we did a number of actions. And we took over certain vacant lands and so forth. Let me show, for example, parts of it. Again, this is all the idea, I'm having fun. I'm not wearable for most of it. This was the last thing I said. They had a price of very little. It was like, you know. A lot of people are like, you know, we probably are moving forward. And we engage in the neighborhood in the long term. The idea is to create a project that comes from outside, from the neighbors, from the individuals in the neighborhood to get activated, to come together, you know. Is it a part of it for us? Because it's really, in a way, essentially, it is paid. So it was, we worked there for a previous, I don't think it's going to school, the theater of the oppressed in Philadelphia. Just a theater group that helped us do a lot of community work and so on. It was fascinating, really fascinating. So this was, I mean, one, I'm going to go for others. Sadly, I don't have time to show everything, but at least this is a savings. And this was a huge event that they organized in one of the biggest public spaces around, which we called the Action 3. And this happened to be a multi-generational event with, yes, elderly kids. And a part of this project came as an idea of all of these, these are people from the local organizations. So workshops of a regional public space and so on. And this pretty continuous until today. So we basically finished the project. We gave a series of methods and agendas for the large service of the institute to follow. And they decided, I mean, we recommended a few people to continue working in different projects with them. And most of them, they don't reach us working or finishing, just finish one of these projects. And ex students of mine, I also young people I use. And so they continue working with the organization under this project. But again, I don't have, you know, but oh, this woman was beautiful. It's a food contest. That's why I got so fat. Yeah, I was one of the judges, that's me. And it was just like, yeah, anyway. The whole point of the food contest, for example, was that you presented, you played, we had to talk about your culture, where you came from, and everybody had to taste it, and so forth. So they're just elements that allows us to talk on more radical issues with the community. And, yes, I am on, oh, thank you very much. The last one, and I'm done with it here, okay? Italy, I knew it was not gonna be possible. Yes, yes, we're gonna start here. I'm not sure I should just let everybody, another project I had to do with this investment in urban areas hides investment and the marginalization of Muslim communities. And this was, again, a cultural urban kind of project, which was a grant that we got from the European Union. And the way that we got this grant is that there was the Expo, World Expo happening in Milan at that time, and the European Union gave money for projects that somehow worked with the World Expo. And they had a grant to work with sustainability projects. We need my own means, focus on sustainability, with the sustainability, with the capitalists, and blah, blah, blah, blah. But so we decided to draft the grant, saying that we were super sustainable, with cement, and so on, and we got the grant, right? And so we started to use the grant for working in the development of different kind of projects with the Muslim community specifically. But it ended up being a fantastic project of working with kids. And we also did a talent show, it was called Fucking Vitality and so on. The brain continues until today, but the kids became the main drivers of this project. So we started to work with a school that was hyper-marginalized. And the reason we did this, because most of the adults living in this neighborhood, they have absolutely no desire to talk to white or even Latino persons or so on. They're afraid and swayed in their own sort of exploitation, exploitation of, et cetera. That for us, Australia, was to work with their kids. And their kids started to do workshops on imagining what their neighborhood could be, and also what is the need to create a new republic, and the kids started to write a new constitution for the neighborhood in different workshops. And then after the constitution, workshops of dressing for the future of that neighborhood. And so the kids started to have these special, what is it, the, yeah, the costumes, right, like this is one. Which they, Lucia, for example, was working on Futurism. All of these was inspired by Sandra and our knowledge in Philadelphia of Afro-Futurism. Sandra is a musician that started Afro-Futurism in Philadelphia. And they had all kinds of works about thinking about a better future. So once we had the kids involved in this, it was so easy to work with the parents, right? And then, now the parents got in and then started to develop a very interesting process of doing today. I mean, this process continued. And just to give you a sense of, yeah, this is a cultural center. And the red name of the community is Toto de Maestal. This was the development of the first flag. So it was a collective, a lot of the women there that were unemployed knew how to weave. And so they were commissioned the flag for the neighborhood, and the flag for the neighborhood. It was not easy to see a flag for, that's what I mean, yeah. So that's the main thing of the flag. The flag ended up being this huge thing. Thankfully, we have a lot of material. So if you are interested in this, it was a fucking little talent show. At least you can see parts of the flag here. And issues with students, investment and education. By the way, the principal of the school were working on fire because the issue was working on us. And then it was absolutely horrific for me. So you got fired, you put these totally right wing. Things didn't go well with that one. I mean, like we managed to get the keys and the words should be needed, but then this principal was fired. And, all right, let me finish. So I have a question. You mentioned so many projects of transportation strategies. So what are the soul thoughts among these projects? What is mine? The soul thoughts. So the most important issue that we combine these projects into an integrated thought. It's our struggle to figure out how could we have a radical human practice in the conditions of the, it's trying to find directions in ways which managed to create a bit of friction or push the limits of capitalists and their understanding of what urbanization sees and what living environments are. We definitely are an anti-capitalist organization for our heads, I mean, that's, I've said it already, it's our main enemy with these kind of things. And so we're just trying to experiment with ways of organizing that differ from the main ideas of what capitalism would do without it. By these, I said I was gonna talk about the contradictions period, I wrote contradictions and none of these projects have changed the world by means, right? And that's the reason why we have decided to work at a different level after this perhaps calorie problem we're finishing up. But that would be the main thread for our problems. And again, it's 10 years of my incredibly intense work. And one thing that I did not mention which I think is very unfair that I should have mentioned is that the main premise of our organization was that we would not make money out of it. We're actually structured as a non-proper organization but in the Netherlands, which is very different than the non-proper here. And we said that if we really wanted to write in practice, we needed to have our main source of income so that we could not depend on this product. Because what happens is if you depend on your activities and survive, obviously you would be compromised from there. I mean, because you have to eat, right? We didn't want to do that. So we could afford the luxury of being fired out of the care. I mean, it's actually what's like, I mean, we made it, you know, we made a larger group of fires. But it's a luxury that we have. So in my case, it was for the game, it was strategized as how would the academy would be managed in Spain for a million dollars for the practice, for the GFEs and so on. So we all have, what I said in the beginning as a part of your own practice, that's what I think we all should be thinking of. I honestly believe that it's not possible to have alternative writing in practice as a main source of income. And that is something that is not so much a skull, it would not be possible to have experiment on this, right? A few friends that I have that have tried to do a variety of sort of like more anti-capitalist directions, they end up either incredibly broke or just compromising too much. So that's something I have to mention. I don't know if I answered it, but yeah. Yes? You mentioned earlier that you think that housing is a key engine point. Yeah. Capitalism in terms of, I guess your position now in academia and or maybe it's a potential project or a ideal project, what does that look like? What is the meaningful way that housing could be, could it also like in your eyes? I think the real, I have two main projects and then both of them are incredibly important. To support the destruction of academia I know myself I can't do it, right? But I think it's absolutely insane that we continue to exacerbate on the disciplinary process. Like the ceiling is not produced by, I mean the worst part is I've been in conferences where architects literally speaking front and say like we are the ones that love space, I mean architects love shit, love space, right? And neither, I mean I'm a discipline because we are not educated to collaborate, right? And we always feel that our knowledge is better than the others. And so for example, when you talk about architect work with multi-disciplinary, they hire others to consult on certain things but they are like, you know, you guys that come up front without humbling to other forms of knowledge. And that is the same for anthropologists and sociologists and geographers that begin geography conferences where the same happens, right? Geographers feel like they are the masters and architects are just there. Actually most people think that architects are the game, right? I think some of us as being very supreme beings. But that's the same with all the other students. So I feel that there needs to be a way, a big utopia of students, right? Demanding a radical, radical reconfiguration of what actually is relevant to it. Because today's conditions are very different than in the modernist times where we have all these curriculums right now. And a lot of the curriculums that are invented today that we have today are at a complete service of millions, you know? Architects planners, they're people that are gonna serve, you know, the Dubai magnets, the Russian magnets, the American magnets, you know, and so forth, which it's against people. I mean, they're destroying a free group, I mean. I don't have to tell you, but the situation of today is absolutely extreme. And these separatists who are charged with producing the difference, the other idea, are doing the opposite, they're just as conservative. I mean, it's also my university, I mean, I'm saying this university specifically, although it has a lot to do with it. But in general, and so if I don't see an upright is coming from below, of course, a professor like me, you're too comfortable to say these things or whatever, I'd say that. But that's been a struggle in my life. And it doesn't pick up because we all like to preserve our own safety nets, right? I mean, so to get all people to launch this idea, it's basically to destroy your own career. And so who's gonna do it? So the only people that could actually do that are the young generation. But it seems that the young generation just want to reproduce their own careers on the basis of the old ones, right? And there's no radical change that's totally needed. I mean, if you guys believe that today is fine, by any means containing what we have now. So that's one of my names for like, I think teaching is a political act, right? And I do it because of that, not because of anything else. I love knowledge, definitely, right? But it's a political act. But sometimes I can be surprised that a lot of the student body just wants to reproduce themselves into the initial, what is destroying their own path, right? Because most of them will go out in the worst conditions that humanity has ever seen, right? In terms of moral humanity, because there were, no, in reality, in general, because the planet is about to collapse, you know, in terms of its environmental issues, right? When you see all the issues that are happening, disparities, polarities, et cetera. And then, I have to say this calls the artificial intelligence wave, right? That it's coming, which you all know it's coming, but we don't wanna understand that it's coming, right? Or the social media wave, you know, that China right now has this absence beginning to, like, in black Europe, but to rate people. That's the reality, as we speak. And so, there's so many things that, what's happened, how are we, in academic environments, reacting to that? We just continue to say, oh, let's do it. He was the next, whatever, do it, right? Which was the same, right, as the others. And don't do anything. So that's what happened. On the other hand, I really think that, with that in mind, that will, in a few years, perhaps come up with a very different kind of a practice, which is trans-economic in its nature, meaning that there's no single discipline that rules, right? And begins to look at the systemic reconfiguration of what exists, right? And this is a slow process. As Samaritan's one learns that everything's process is not like an instant revolution or anything like that. And I would like, in my practice, to have a little bit of influence in that future scenario, just tiny micro influence, like, oh, there was a practice in the implementation strategies at some point, you know, these kind of projects that you look at that. That's actually my main goal. Because I know that alone I can do it. And sadly, my generation sucks, right? And so my generation is still very much embedded in the neoliberal race. I mean, most of it, right? My sense is that the future is the old generation. So I mean, the generations that aren't really struggling and aren't going to struggle like crazy to do this. And so the dream project would be to create a new disciplinary, a new practice, a new disciplinary, an anti-disciplinary practice. And how to do it is, well, this is what you have to answer, right? But it's not one thing, which is, again, what capitalism teaches you, right? It's like, the superstars, what are they, they're individuals. They have teams of 500 people, but it's just like being by that person doing the lecture, right? And so it's that mindset also, you know, that you're competing against each other. That means, you know, we cannot do this by ourselves. It's impossible, because we're just gonna work ourselves. But when I invite you to the lecture, I'd like to re-create that consciousness that the world is an absolute man, right? I'm not sure if you understand what's happening around, but I think you do. You feel it. Every time I wake up psychologically, I'm not okay with that. And every day it works, right? I mean, and we know that even if Trump goes out or whatever, things are not gonna change because it's not Trump per se. It's absolute systemic apparatus, but inequality is different. And so, yeah, that's why I position myself as an anti-capitalist and so on, but hopefully there will be many like me and better and much better, right? Yeah, and my current practice, I think that's part of the thing, has been mostly to work with, and I've never said about this, but I've worked with many governments, left-leaning governments in advising different left-leaning governments around the world, including Chavez and the time of Chavez to give you an idea of that was a crazy thing too. But I think part of the role of people like me that have already these kind of experiences and that I'm tired and very consumed about with these type of projects, is to work together with different organizations to support the construction of new magnetism that would be government, right? Or that would be more of an organization. So my role right now is mostly in the, we want to orient this into a large international agency for right development. Yes? Or do you have a question? Yes? In the example that you present, it's like most of them got started by, do you think like a new ideal future, how would the urban practice actually get started? I mean financially. Yeah. I think we've been very lucky, we were very lucky that we never looked for one single project, which is crazy. The project kind of fell from the sky. It was, I have to say, it was never like, oh, we don't have to work with a proposed project, right? And that's the reason, because we don't need the income from this, we were just like completely passing on this. And then we just got invitations of people that heard that or needed support for doing this. And I still, yes, despite having grants, right? But the grants came after the invitation, right? It's like this organization in Italy said, let's put this thing together and they actually helped to lose most of the grant. The Philadelphia project, it was the city of Philadelphia and by us and they helped to lose this grant, right? And so forth. And so it has never been like us searching for this. I mentioned this because I really believe that the future of any urban practitioner should be dual. You have to eat. You have to eat. And we have to find a kind of practice that gives us to eat, that we feel the less ethically so compromised. But we will eat, I mean, I work for a new school, right? The Parsons has everyday luxury branding courses and inviting the CEO of Gucci and LDMA to own and host people, right? And so yes, they probably decide department and work with that for you to decide fancy watches and so on. So yes, that's my compromise. I'm very aware of it and I hate it but I'm willing to be inside of that space. And so each of you or the ones that wants to follow that is not content with it should follow a path where you find something that gives you to eat but you dedicate half of your time or more to something else that you know that you might not get something to eat. Again, the compromising by eating by activism, this is one of the worst things that happened under the last year or even before the professionalization of activism, right? Like activists can live out being activists and of course that kind of is contradictory to my point of view. If you look at different revolution, 60s, 70s and so on, activism was a commitment. It was not like I wanna live by being an activist. So yeah, the future is a parallel practice. And yeah, let's see. Yes. So my question is about, so I'm curious about the role of how you and your collaborators work in the process with differences in cultural norms and institutional modes and even in the semologies. And I think it's hard for me to know about this question but where I come from with this question is like, I'm dealing with some people on housing cooperative and these people don't run in the same institutions that I've been through and so I'm aware of the ways that instituted, like being educated from a particular institution sort of like barred into a type of discourse that isn't always available to other people. And so I'm wondering is what is the strategy that you and your collaborators look towards in terms of hope being able to bring some of that discourse into bringing other people into that discourse but also like being able to challenge some of the organizations in institutional modes and the semologies that come out of institutions that you speak to. I mean, the first thing I have to do is just rely on people for this. And I think it becomes very complicated because when you would buy even friends, I mean, they might get paid, you know? It's always like a huge problem, right? But for us, we've been incredibly fortunate to have amazing people to support these types of things. And the most amazing crowd that we have worked with, without that, has been artists. Artists have kind of the inter-sensitivity to artists. I mean, to help bring together things in a way that you normally wouldn't be able to see or come to. And a lot of the projects that I show, I emphasize they should play of fun, of things that, you know, after all, there are few ones that believe that, right? And a lot of people have happened in the past I've been trying extremes in ways in this direction that everything has to be a lot of fun or it can have to be a lot of Easter. But you told me, you know that too. So it's like, how can you make it less serious at the same time that it becomes super serious, right? We're all burnout. We expect as a community organizer, we're community organizers, people that go into a meeting, a community meeting, the majority have had two jobs already, have left their kids at school at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m., have, especially the women who are working in Sunset Park, now, have cook for their husbands because that's what they're supposed to do. They clean the house and then they have the energy to go at 8 p.m. on a Friday to be in a two, three hour meeting, right? I mean, like, this has to be a different kind of meeting. But in most cases, they're not. If you go to a CV, a community board meeting, oh my God, it's up to yourself, right? They're the worst, the worst. So my advice would be just trying to figure out how other people, right, that are more fun, a little bit more, you know, it could help to bring all these things, all these differences together. Because I'm wrapping me from this, that, like, having, like, for example, for me, having the Marxist framework should think about besides exchange value, it's really useful, but I know somebody who's a Jew that has a temperature of 3 degrees. And I don't always feel like it's, I'm always complaining because I grew in an environment where the library provided a kind of solace and escape that was very important to me intellectually, but I recognize that not everybody else gets that. Sure, but you don't try to. I mean, I could kind of push these things to anyone. I mean, hopefully we're not stalling or anything like that, right, or we're mauling in that form. I mean, it's, like, I teach, for example, like a course voluntarily on the pay that the people support, which is this fantastic place that we're not in a mauling. And most of the people that I get in that course are people that understand Marx and so forth, and I talk at that level, right? But when we're doing these committees, imagine talking with many of the people that work with them, with the kids, of course. We're not gonna talk about exchange value, use value, or any other Marxist concept, but we're gonna try to bring it forward with examples. And this is where the play comes, right? To make people aware of those things without making it heavy, right? And those of you, I assume the majority of those who don't have any Marxist training, I always suggest you reach out for that, okay? And forget about Stalin and Mao and Rocky Balboa against Russia, and I think it's bullshit in terms of what Marxism is. Marxism is the most analytical way of understanding capitalism. And if you don't understand capitalism, you don't understand the city, because what produces the city is capitalism, right? And so you have to understand capitalism, right? And so, but that's you, and then you might be able to work around this, right? But yes, with most of this community, we don't even bring it up, why would we? Most of them do not bring it up, why would we? Yeah, do you think that the Russian revolution of the revolution, very, very selective and a few red marks, right? They were just totally appeased and fed up with the issues of inequality and time, right? With their temporary government that Russia had a time, so to. So anyway, yeah, thanks a lot.