 Hi, everyone. I think a lot of people are stuck in the snow, but I think we should get started anyway. So I'm not going to give the big formal introduction today because it's more seminar-style, but just to let Sheri know that this is a collaboration of two different Mellon-funded grants. One is architecture, urbanism, and humanities, where we're tasked with bustering digital methods in urbanism across architecture, urbanism, and humanities. And so some of our collaborators and people who took the boot camps are here in the room. And then the research theme is conflict urbanism. So last year we did a seminar on Aleppo, which was more traditionally what people think of as conflict, but the grant actually defines conflict urbanism as much more every day. So inequalities from rural urban migration or police surveillance or any kind of inequity or racial inequity, any racial structures, anything that could be considered conflict in a city, which extends also to broader regions. And so the second seminar is a collaboration with Lydia where their proposal was on language justice and you can say a few words. And so now we're putting the two together, conflict urbanism, language justice. And today actually the students have all submitted their proposals, but we're kind of shifting from more learning mapping and learning methods in the class to submitting proposals. And the students have all submitted really interesting sounding things. And the seminar is going to sort of turn over to them after spring break. So maybe Michelle, you can say a few words. So it is my honor to get to introduce Professor Sherry Simon. She teaches comparative literature and translation studies in the French department at Concordia University. And she's one of the leading scholars in what I would call critical translation studies. She's published cultural histories of linguistically divided cities and the multilingual cities of the former Hasburg Empire, a subject that's closely related to our conflict urbanism and language justice course semester. Professor Simon is the author of Translating Montreal, episodes in the life of a divided city, cities in translation, intersections of language and memory. Her recent co-edited books include translation effects, the shaping of modern Canadian culture, and speaking memory, how translation shapes city life. She's a fellow in the Royal Society of Canada, and please join me in welcoming Professor Sherry Simon. Thank you so much. Well, I want to say very warm thanks for this invitation, which I especially appreciate, as it brings me to reflect in new ways on a topic that I've been working on for many years. And I'm quoting from the description of your seminar, which is the subject being the way that language is a major force in shaping cities, the ways that urban spaces are physically shaped, bi-linguistic diversity, and the results of language coming into contact and conflict. So the description of your seminar is the description of what I've been doing. Anyway, I hope one way I've approached the topic has been to look at cities that have experienced in the past periods or episodes of translation, which were culturally and politically decisive for their identities. And I'll start by giving a few historical examples before turning to a more contemporary look at the cities of Montreal and, briefly, New York, proposing a framework for what I call the translational city. I will argue this, that understanding cities not only as multilingual, but as translational, allows us to track language flows across the city and to determine which languages count in the civic conversation. To look at translation is to take into account the direction, intensity, and affect of language traffic in city space, and the relations of conflict or convergence, which result. The period following the First World War is rich in examples of the transformation of cities from cosmopolitan and imperial to national cities. By this, I mean the linguistic remakes of cities like Trieste, the city I think you read about today, for today, but also many other cities, which were part of the Habsburg or Ottoman empires, which were translated out of their messy and unruly multilingualism into increasingly monolingual cities. So consider the city of Thessaloniki, an Ottoman city called Salonica until 1912. In few cities can one see such a radical renewal of the city's identity and the realignment in parallel of both language and built heritage. The city was translated out of its oriental messiness in two ways. Thessaloniki's emancipation from the Ottoman Empire and the creation of its new Greek identity was forged through military victory on the one hand, the defeat of the Ottoman forces in 1912, but also in the early 1920s by population transfers, which saw hundreds of thousands of Christians from Asia Minor fill the city and many hundreds of thousands of Muslims leave. This was the first diplomatically negotiated population transfer to be imitated some 30 years later when India and Pakistan were separated. The transfer was based on a religious and not a linguistic basis as Christians were taken from Asia Minor and Muslims from the Greek mainland. So this is the main story. In 1913 in the city of Salonica, becoming Thessaloniki, Greeks had been a small minority of the city's 157,000 inhabitants. By 1928, I think they were 12 or 13% in 1913. By 1928, they were 75% of its population. So Turkish, Ladino and the other languages of the Ottoman world were gradually replaced by the sounds of Greek. The linguistic makeover was accompanied by a new urban plan. During the Great War, the city had been forced to accommodate many, many soldiers and refugees. Possibly as a result of this presence, a great fire destroyed the city center in 1917, destroying its eastern visage and traditional layout. The houseman-like transformation of the city, which took place immediately afterwards, has been called the first great work of European urban planning in the 20th century. And its goal was to imprint the city with a new modern Greek identity. The new urban plan eliminated the old spatial organization, Ottoman Salonica, whose core had been a densely packed Jewish quarter. Not even the layout of the city's streets today betrays exactly where the numerous synagogues were once situated. A modern and rational city plan was proposed by the French urbanist Ernest Ebrard based on a neo-Byzantine style, a style which reached back beyond the Ottoman years to remake the city in the image of the desired Byzantine past. So this city is twice translated, it's translated linguistically from Ottoman and Ladino into Greek, and its city space is entirely transformed into this new modern pseudo-Byzantine style. Or consider another city, the city of Czernowitz, which had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the very eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the very west of Ukraine. Hard to get your mind around that. So consider the city of Czernowitz, which had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Examining photographs of the city of Czernowitz from the 1930s, Marion Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, who have written an important book on the city, which I show you there, try to imagine which language the men and women are speaking as they stride confidently down the main street. Would it have been Romanian, the language of the nation which took over the city in 1918, or German, the language of the former Habsburg rulers, or Yiddish, the language spoken by some of the city's Jewish population. The city was known for its exuberant mixture of languages, a feature noted by history books and tourist brochures alike. Each of these little balloons which you can't see is a different language. By the time the authors accompanied their parents in 1998 on a first return visit to the city since the Second World War, the only language they heard was Ukrainian. The ethnic and linguistic mix of store signs, shop names, placards and advertising billboards in Romanian, Jewish, Polish or Ukrainian had disappeared. And the Café d'Europe and the Café Habsburg had become ghostly presences in a city where informal trade and barter among Ukrainians was the most prevalent forms of commerce. Although the built environment of the city was largely the same in contrast to Thessaloniki, which I just showed you, the meaning and function of those urban spaces had been transformed. The language that linked them to the original center of cultural authority, the German place names and streets, consciously replicating the street names and street patterns of Vienna, had been replaced and cultural ties severed. First the Herr in the Atgasa became the Romanian strada Janco Flondor. After the Second World War, it was renamed for the Ukrainian writer Olha Kubilienska. Advancing through states of translation, the city has become a reproduction of itself, a replica both the same and different. Statues were replaced, the statue of Shiller gone, Kubilienska in his place. Buildings repurposed, the synagogue turned into a movie theater. And additional narratives layered over previous strata of urban memory. One city with three names, three different versions of a city. Each Chernivts, the multicultural Habsburg city, the Romanian city between the two wars, which was the birthplace of Paul Celan and Aaron Appelfeld. The post-war Ukrainian city is a variation on a theme. The city is like a film that gets a new soundtrack. The images are the same, but the words are different. Creating a kind of dissonance and disconnect from which the city can never fully recover. Those are just some of the images of the, that's Aaron Appelfeld, Paul Celan, and a few images of the city. So what I'd like to emphasize in the examples I've just given of Fesloniki and Chernivts is the way that language literally becomes a cipher of memory, representing a moment in the historical evolution of the city. Inscriptions are written over, symbolic sites infused with a new imaginary. And the past becomes a heritage which will be received only in translation. This includes the architectural heritage of the city. The 19th century was particularly rich in movements of linguistic reclamation, which were intended to imprint cities with a single national identity, reshaping urban space in the image of the nation, and which at the same time made significant demands on translation to rehabilitate and stimulate national literatures. The Czech Renaissance, the Finnish, the Breton, the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish, the Catalan, but also the Bengali Renaissance were moments when national languages were revived and re-legitimated, and these movements were imprinted in public space through architecture in particular. The Palau de la Musica in Barcelona, which you may know, the Czech National Theatre in Prague, these are buildings that bear a linguistic message. When the city is translated away from this heritage, as it happened in Trieste, and this is a picture of Trieste, it leaves a sense of sensory dissonance. The massive German Habsburg buildings of Trieste are the backdrop of a city celebrating its Italianness, creating a clash of visual images that are the signature of the city today, its hybrid identity. Language makeovers transform the soundscape of the city, its distinctive interplay of idioms and accents, along with the ways in which knowledge in and of the city is shaped. Languages are not only part of the experiential feel of a city, they are modes of representation of the urban, the vehicle through which poems and novels, essays and letters, films and biographies are connected to the city. These narratives contribute to the aura and mythology of any city shaping and preserving its cultural memory. Scholars seeking to write about linguistically sedimented cities have an obligation to translate. If they read the literature of one language only, they'll provide only partial understandings of the urban culture of say, colonial Calcutta or Bratislava or Prague. For instance, during a period of some 40 years from 1880 to 1920, Prague was read through three very different lenses, a narrative which defined the city as German or as Czech or according to a third narrative as a German Czech Jewish city. These separate narratives were generated through a variety of sources that name, caption and contextualize the city. Historical lore but also postcards with accompanying legends, travel guides to the city, novels, public events. To read a city in one language is to know one layer of the city text, one version. How is it different to read New Orleans in French, Spanish or English? Chernovich as I mentioned in German, Yiddish, Romanian or Ukrainian. Thessaloniki in Greek, Ladino or Turkish. This is true not only in relation to the cities of the past but to the multiple languages of the cities in the present. So here is where I move from historical examples to contemporary ones. How is it different to read Johannesburg in English, Africans or Jose? Manila in Spanish or Tagalog? Barcelona in Castilian or Catalan? Montreal in French or English? New York in English, Spanish, Somali or Arabic. Citizens living side by side may be experiencing separate, even contradictory versions of the urban imaginary. Each of these language constellations brings into being a tension of political forces and poses the question of conditions of translatability. How does one narrative enter into dialogue with the other? How does it enter into a new frame of interpretation? How do these narratives occupy public space and leave their imprint on the physical experience of the urban? To pursue these questions it's useful to see cities not simply as multilingual but as translational. To speak of the multilingual city is to point to a space of pure diversity, of parallel languages each occupying their respective spaces. To speak of the translational city is to emphasize connections among these languages, the conversations that are enabled or impeded, the interactions and convergences but also the tensions and rivalries among them. The translational city also supposes a mapping of transactions across urban space, paths of circulation, specific sites of exchange. To track translations can be a key to understanding the dynamic nature of culture making in the city. Through an understanding of these are the factors through which I define the translational city. The direction of cultural transactions. Translation always implies a from and a to. That may seem obvious but it's useful. It gives you a beginning, it gives you a tracking direction. Translation almost always implies also an up and a down, so from a stronger to a less stronger language. The intensity of interactions, what is the cultural relevance of a language at any given moment. The zones in which these interactions take place, so this is specifically the idea that the translational city is a city in which the spaces of the city are absolutely crucial. The meeting places, symbolic sites, the scenes that animate the city at a particular time and I like this notion of scenes because it means that these cultural movements are always moving. They're hot or they're not hot. So a scene, what's happening that makes a language attractive at a certain moment, that it's carrying a certain kind of cultural weight. And of course the affects that sustain interactions. Is translation cool or warm and I'll explain that in a moment. Forced, is it forced translation or rather a gesture of benevolent curiosity? So I'm going to try to give some examples from the city I know best and that's Montreal. But perhaps as I speak you might try to relate some of these aspects to your own projects and to New York and I'd be interested in your comments. While some aspects of language rivalry in Montreal might seem to place the city in a special category and that's the category of cities where there is a dispute as to which language is most powerful. Montreal is what I call a dual city in the sense that like Barcelona for instance or like colonial Calcutta at a certain time or like Trieste again during a certain period two languages dispute dominance. Institutions are dispute whereas in New York there is no dispute. There's one language, that's it. The other languages are all in competition with one another but there's only one dominant language. So while some aspects of language rivalry in Montreal might seem to place the city in a special category there are many other ways in which language traffic in all metropolitan cities might be seen to follow similar patterns. So I would encourage you to try to make these connections. So Montreal is sometimes called a bilingual city but the term is misleading implying symmetry and equality. In fact Montreal is now a francophone city but until the 1980s there was a sense of entitlement among English speaking institutions in making claims to civic space. The period from 1960 to 1990 saw profound transformation in the Montreal cityscape. Mediation, the transporting of language from one zone to another takes on particular importance of course at a time when the city is experiencing such a moment of historical transition. Montreal was for most of its life a spatially divided city making it part of a series which includes on the one hand the colonial segregated city on the white hand on the model of white town, black town which was the central model of Calcutta or Chaba or Dakar or Johannesburg. It's also on the model of the politically divided city Nicosia in Cyprus, Berlin, Gorizia in Italy Mostar, Belfast, Jerusalem. Like these cities Montreal's divisions were alterately tested, reinforced and frayed through acts of translation. But as a cosmopolitan and multilingual city whose sidewalks are loud with the voices of migrants where conversations on cell phones are shouted in all the languages of the world Montreal reproduces on a smaller scale the diversities of London, Paris or New York. I'm just going to give you a very short capsule of the history of, I just like that image that's from Doris Salcedo's chiboulette and I, this is translating in Montreal crossing these fractures. The history of Montreal since the 1960s and what is known as the Criot Revolution when Quebec became a modern state has been one of progressive translation from English into French. This fact gives direction to Montreal's language shift a movement away from English and towards French. Quebec society began a new life in the 1960s this was the moment when the repressive regime of Maurice de Plessis finally came to an end a secular and progressive government acted vigorously to allow Quebec to catch up with the rest of the world. Montreal, the city was greatly affected by these changes with extensive changes to the infrastructure especially in preparation for the 1967 World's Exhibition 1967 of which this year, so I keep leaning on this of which this year is the 50th there's going to be some commemorations this year Montreal celebrating this year a whole bunch of things including Yes, yes 150 years of confederation 375 because there's a lot of things going on most of them quite positive and 50 years of expo so all those three things are lined up this year so we get a lot of light shows especially light shows are really really in there and they're beautiful, they're wonderful a lot of you know well we've got also we've got big time you've heard of Moment Factory we've got all the big we do light shows all over the world a lot of the technology of light shows actually comes from Montreal so there is a renewal Montreal changes in the 60s what was possible in 1955 the Canadian National Railway could ignore the press of protests of Francophone nationalists and put a hotel up called Queen Elizabeth that was possible in 1955 it was no longer they've sort of conceded to Le Raine Elizabeth and only with the other one and here Fairmount Fairmount Le Raine Elizabeth but that's as far as I'll go to you know to francicide that otherwise however Montreal has been significantly pardon well that's the point it's La Raine is the name of the queen that's why this is such a funny it's the hotel is Le Hotel but you can't even say that it's Hotel Raine Elizabeth Le Hotel Le Hotel Raine Elizabeth Le Raine Elizabeth yeah which makes it even stranger exactly so the main story in brief the main story is how an economically disadvantaged and culturally threatened linguistic community in 30 years mobilized culturally and politically to change the character of the city it is no longer primarily English has not disappeared however it has changed in character it is no longer primarily the language of a historically entitled community but rather the language of North American mass culture and globalization the Anglo the historic Anglo of which I am a representative no longer exists the English is now an international language the divide between the two Montreal's has been replaced by much more complex map of multilingual exchanges many languages okay so here is where I would need your seminar on map baking to propose images of the cultural flows which have sustained this process of urban redefinition I'm going to propose a series of five maps I'm going to describe them rather than to you know in this context how could I actually dare to try to actually propose you know draw them I'm just going to talk about them I'm going to talk about five maps and this is what these five maps are so again I would be very interested knowing to see if these could be useful for you in talking about New York but these five maps correspond to those these the movements which created the the cultural flows of the last 30 years so re-territorializing so I'll go through them one by one so the resurgence of so re-territorializing the resurgence of French language culture during the 1960s onward was consciously framed as a movement of resistance to English and to the kind of impoverished schizophrenia forced on francophones so cross-city traffic into French was effectively blocked or when undertaken it was undertaken tongue-in-cheek and as a process of non-translation or as appropriation but from roughly the 1940s onwards there's a regular program of translations from French into English from East to West two translators are emblematic of the cultural dynamics of these times both motivated by excitement over the francophone cultural edbullience but different in temper so these are the two F. R. Scott Malcolm Reed Malcolm Reed's book is called The Shouting Sign Painters a literary and political account of Quebec revolutionary nationalism F. R. Scott dialogue on translation which he did in conjunction with Anné Baer these two works of translation these two translators are representative of a whole movement of translation of francophone Montreal towards English and a movement of French across the city so a re-territorialization I just want to draw attention I better do this a little bit quicker than I was going to do it but to the difference in affect between these two translators so Scott is a poet and a constitutional lawyer he translates the work of Anné Baer who's a lyrical poet in a literalist mode the more volatile Malcolm Reed is the author of what became a classic The Shouting Sign Painters which reporting on a movement called Parti Prix which promoted the aggressive use of joie as a literary language and defended the ideal of a socialist in independent Quebec Reed's translation were a symptom of the cultural forces at play and an instrument in promoting them so I differentiate between what I call the distancing of Scott which is a very more reverential mode of translation and the furthering of Reed which is a more interactional mode of translation so distancing is what happens when translation serves to underscore the differences that prevail among cultural and languages even when that gap may be the small distances of urban space distancing occurs when authors are treated as representatives of their origins of their national or religious traditions when translation is undertaken for ideological reasons either in a mode of antagonism or in a mode of generosity so to me distancing is inevitably the affect that underlines translation in conflict zones so translations across Nicosia will be distancing translations across Jerusalem will be distancing because there will be inevitably attention drawn to the national identity of the person who is being translated furthering by contrast is a warmer form of interaction involving intermixing and adulteration textual alterations and recombinations which alter the translator as well introducing a shift in the terms of engagement between communities both these affects were at play in movements across the city that I call re-territorialization and I just wanted to point that this is a wonderful novel of the period which I think might give you an idea of the kinds of feelings that prevailed across the city so the division between Montreal referred to as the Berlin Wall it says somewhere in small you're about to enter Montreal West what's interesting in Montreal is that these divisions are referred in architecture ecclesiastical architecture sorry for these tiny ones the colonial tradition of francophone Montreal the second colonization of Victorian British architecture which is separated only by a couple of blocks rivalry in university architecture McGill on the one hand University of Montreal on the other the idea is to make it as different as possible first international skyscraper associated with the Anglophone community followed by complex des jardins which is the response by the francophone commercial community is not only a site of competing languages it's competing architecture and architectural heritage and those sites are marked by language but of course those sites can also be translated through kind of symbolic kinds of translation and I use to me one site of Montreal that has been translated is the cross which was originally a sign of francophone religious character today is much more a kind of a bedside lamp that the whole city shares as a shared symbol this was only up for about a month it's a kind of a contestatory it was a sculpture from the 60s but I think shows that very well okay back to my maps so the first map this map of re-territorialization which show progressive spread of French westward in the form of translations also in the form of re-territorialization and public language so the city is rebranded in French and this is this happens all over because we had a signage law that said that signage had to be in French except for the Queen Elizabeth that seems to be an exception okay so that's my first map is re-territorialization my second map is re-routing so the map of translation flows would have to be augmented by translations across other axes and across other languages and this the center of Montreal was people by many immigrants who speak Portuguese and Italian which were traditionally translated into the dominant language English but this pattern began to change immigrant languages and imaginations came to find a new home in French in part through the effect of the language laws which made French the compulsory language so while the languages of immigration Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek have progressively therefore made links with French and there is a very interesting kind of retroactive translation in the case of Yiddish so the French, Canadian and Jewish populations during the first half of the 20th century had very few contacts and their cultural universes had remained quite separate though Yiddish was the third most important literary language translation from this language into French represents a process of re-routing so that's because this, because of the time difference so as the time passes there has been an effort to kind of reclaim this Yiddish language heritage which came to being in an English language largely English language city or English language dominant city has now been reclaimed, reappropriated in French so that's a re-routing I see the time is going so I'll be more brief with the my other maps so hiding is the third how to create a map of absent translation the non-connection to an inaudible world that of First Nations languages a recent piece, Mary Lee's Pratt tells of a talk she heard in Montreal by First Nations playwright Thompson Highway where he exposed with humor and irony the richness of the world he had learned in Cree and predicted the impending loss of that language Montreal has few sites marked as indigenous if we discount the disputed marker which is supposed to indicate the site of the original hush-a-lag of the encampment that the first explorers were supposed to have found the Belvedere on Mount Royal has been renamed for in honour of the great piece of 1702 but basically the hiding map will just show the absence the inaudibility the submerged world of First Nations culture in Montreal second, I mean fourth map, sorry, mixing this is I think probably one of the more important ones so the maps that show the border zones the kinds of activities that sociolinguists call trans-languaging referring to the uneven patterns of speech which involve listening in one language replying in another the whole repertoire of devices through which one speaks across languages taking place in such sites as markets or corner stores Alistair Pennycock refers to these language activities as metrolingualism I envy him the term I think it's a great word he found a good word in response to increasing discomfort of sociolinguists with notions like bilingualism, multilingualism that maintain the premise of a unilingual norm the term refers rather to the ordinary multi-languaging activities of the city and which take place in specific sites of urban space so I will skip the examples I have of creative interference and what I call unfinished translation which were found in experimental theater which are found in cinema which are found in certain kinds of Montreal novels and which are attached to certain border zones and I refer to Sandro Medzadra's notion of border ring which I think is a very useful way of thinking of border zones as always in movement so borders are not at the edge of the territory, they are not stuck there they move all the time so border zones move and where the languages come into contact these zones are also moving as well so my last kind of map would be a map of refusing refusing translation so this view of the translational city my view would not be complete without the inclusion of sites of resistance to translation zones of non-translation despite the comforting declarations of our justifiably popular prime minister Justin Trudeau of which I believe you may have heard in the last while we finally made it into the news Canada and Quebec do see acts of violence against minorities the most terrifying of these being the recent killing of five Muslims in Quebec City three years ago the Quebec government proposed a ban on religious clothing that was aimed at Muslim women and was thankfully voted out of office because of it the government was Montreal despite having accepted the largest proportion of Syrian migrants admitted to Canada is nevertheless hardly free of sites of intolerance and bigotry refugees and migrants have particularly fragile connections to language in particular the refugee is a kind of intruder reduced to the role of formulating requests whose words become involved in a circuit of international generosity but are not necessarily heard unless aligned and translated into the terms required by the host society here translation is not a connective process but a more constraining activity which was cross the differences of language in order to attain the desired goal so a pressing question becomes for instance how is Arabic and Arabic imaginary translated into the city and this is a subject that I am currently trying to work on and I just leaned on my and this I think is exceptionally interesting example of a form of cultural translation of the Arabic imaginary this is you may have heard of him now because of the film Arrival he's a Quebec filmmaker and he made this very beautiful film Ascendi on the basis of a that is him on the basis of a play by Wajdi Mawad who's Lebanese and who actually added a great deal more of Arabic into the movie than was in the play to begin with so I'm going to conclude so in conclusion these mappings of Montreal translational flows and they marks they leave on urban space are a way of beginning to reveal which languages count in civic dialogue and how the city is marked by public languages to bring New York into the conversation I'd like to quote Esther Allen who's a translator and professor at CUNY who recently offered a course called Mapping New York in Translation and she sent me the following message and I'm quoting Esther Allen we all came to feel by this semester's end that as what is now the largest Hispanic city in the United States New York can be placed among the world's dual cities however extraordinary rich its third spaces may be the students identified some interesting contact zones she says one student did a study of the Soho McNally Roberts and Bookshop which due to the efforts of Javier Molea its Spanish manager a lone employee has become a major site for translation and interaction among Latin American and U.S. authors in many ways more significant than government sponsored institutions such as the Instituto Cervantes another student looked into the United Palace House of Inspiration a glorious former movie theater that has become both a space for multilingual mingling primarily via music an important showcase of specifically Dominican music and culture in New York another reflected on the making and reception of a multilingual publication called Cuentos Stories by Latinas published in New York in 1983 and she continues what seemed to us to make it unique among such dual cities is the perpetual invisibility of that duality while the 30% of the current population that is Hispanic is intensely aware of the city's dual nature much of the city's non-Hispanic population remains oblivious to it the city's Hispanic past and present has not penetrated its sense of itself or the way it recounts its own history towards the end of the class one of the students wandered into an art gallery and found the attached image of the monument to José Martí on Central Park South edited by the artist Andrés Durán it seemed to all of us to be a perfect representation of that invisibility so it's the monument with kind of a house put on his head you may know that in 1945 I checked it out 6th Avenue was renamed Avenue of the Americas at the suggestion of Mayor LaGuardia who by the way was an interpreter did you know that LaGuardia was an interpreter at Ellis Island to honor Pan American ideals and principles so the statue of Bolívar erected in 1921 was moved and it joined the statues of 18 General José de San Martín and Cuban José Martí so Durán's photographic project questions the real presence the real presence of Latin American memory in the city the paradoxical presence absence of language in public space the reality of language flows which leave only fleeting marks of their presence so final final conclusion the translational city questions the potential effects of language traffic it's inequalities and the new connections it impedes or enables the city does not exist outside of language and access to the city's many worlds is a voyage across tongues translations bring into dialogue languages which are states of memory in the history of the city layers in successive periods of conquest and reconquest and languages which are vehicles of memory in the making conveying the narratives of long standing inhabitants and newcomers alike it is through translation that a space of generalized public discourse can emerge a space vital to urban citizenship where the convergence of languages can be the source for new conversations thank you well I don't have a strictly formulated question I was curious how population and the law interact I don't know if you have a general response or maybe an example of Montreal versus some of these population exchange cities in the end of the empire period but there's people moving that changes the language but there's also laws in Montreal it seems to me the laws were actually quite effective in changing the dynamic of the city and I was wondering what how you view law as an element in this question of language change in cities that's actually a good question I guess law so if we're talking about population exchanges we're talking about a kind of a violence we're talking about forcing bringing in laws a good problematic term in relation to the language to the population exchanges as well because they were done under diplomatic auspices with some sort of international agreement but they were in fact moments of political violence in the same way as Czernowitz was quite simply occupied by the Romanians who said like now you're a Romanian city and you're right there's an aspect of constraint in the language laws which was considered such by the Anglophone population some of which a large number of which left the city something like 100,000 Anglophones actually left Montreal that was also a time of economic difficulties so there were questions of that and the sea board during that period was kind of a mess New York and Boston and these were sort of sinking cities at the time so people moved west so whether it was constraint that moved them or economic opportunity or the combination of the two so you're right I don't have a real answer except to think of these moments of change as moments related to both violence and legislation to me because I believe in Montreal as a Francophone city and because I believe that that moment was an important and necessary one I see that legislation as enabling more than as violent but there's a fine line so English is an international language and the increase of globalization so is there really any monolingual city now with everyone using English online or even learning it so I'm just wondering is really the monolingual and dual bilingual cities are these terms still relevant or shall we look for new terms or I don't know that's a great city in fact a great city comment because I used to I mean there is no such thing as a monolingual city in my mind there is no such thing as a monolingual city that's a contradiction in terms as soon as cities came into existence they were multilingual because cities are places of encounter cities are places of commerce so they are by definition multilingual and I've always I keep forgetting to look it up but I think there are counter examples like I think Sparta or something where other languages were forbidden but of course it only simply proves the rule which is that you have to forbid other languages if you want your city to be monolingual so all languages are all cities excuse me multilingual they are however multilingual in different ways and they are multilingual on the basis of their specific histories and their specific spaces too so to me that is so obvious in Montreal because of the spatial configuration of Montreal which was historically a colonial configuration the larger kind of indigenous it wasn't indigenous in that terrible it was European indigeneity if you like so a different kind of indigeneity but you had francophone neighborhoods but you had an enclave like feeling to the English language community and that made for a spatially marked city everybody knew that when they went from here to here you changed language configurations so yes all cities are multilingual but the histories of cities mark them in different ways colonial histories Barcelona as a city where Catalan and Spanish have been in dispute for centuries makes Montreal look like a newcomer Barcelona disputes go back even farther and so this has been a problem for me am I going to give a special category to those languages where the primary language is in dispute that's the only thing I'm saying that all languages all cities sorry for that all cities have the kind of multilingualism you absolutely are right and there's but different intensities different patterns I mean that's what's interesting about mapping them and looking at what makes them different and also the fact of whether the primary language is in dispute or not I think that's Spanish has no chance does it? I mean do you think? because actually in her email if I Esther Allen does use that term she seems to think that it is a dual city that Spanish is a contender thank you for your talk which I found very interesting I was wondering to what degree the mother culture and other languages in Montreal after the 70's for example served as a bridge to allow the two solitudes that never met to actually start talking to each other thank you for the question yes I would say emphatically yes because those things happened kind of at the same time the rigidly divided city starts to crumble by the 80's for sure and obliging both languages to rethink themselves too so for instance French which it had an attitude of a minority kind of resistance and self defense was obliged to consider itself a language that enabled translation and which welcomed all kinds of identities into itself so it was no longer an ethnic or I did vegetarian language it had to rethink itself as a majority language and that was a kind of a wrenching thing and it's still happening today so both languages had to rethink themselves French as a language welcoming minorities English as a new minority language and one with fewer rights and yes and then so many other languages coming in so but not assuming the role of languages into which one translates I guess that's probably the definer of of the dominant language the language into which how much are you translating into Spanish in New York and how much you're translating Spanish into English so that's the directionality thing again that's going to tell you a lot about the status of the language its cultural power the cultural power of the language would be enhanced I think if you bolster it with translations if you give it translations and I'm not sure that's what happens in Spanish rather Spanish is the language that's going to nourish English so that might be something to think about this talk was so fascinating and it reminded me of quote that José Salamago a Portuguese writer once said that there isn't a Portuguese language but there are languages in Portuguese so I'm wondering about all of these variations and I mean not just creolization but within a dominant language there are these you know because of colonial paths and just variations in that space itself and how that kind of works into these translations as well yeah that's where the boundaries speaking of bordering that's it becomes very interesting in terms of translation because you no longer have an English to translate into French you have a kind of English or a variety of English or a zone of English to translate into a zone of French and the very idea of a language starts to break down because they are they are different so English has changed in Montreal the English I grew up with was the English of the historically enabled Anglophone minority of Montreal that had its schools and its institutions of all kinds and its literature and which has progressively lost those things so has them to some extent but progressively losing them and that English now becomes more like an international English and French is changing as well and then you have all these very interesting activities that happen at the border where you have both literature in French and English are of course affected by these by the spaces they occupy there is a very interesting writer called Heather O'Neill who is becoming quite prominent in Montreal she is an English language writer in Montreal but she writes she uses English words she kind of hints that it is a French language city she one of her novels is even supposed to be written in French even though it is in English so there is a lot of play across languages within cultural productions at the border if you like between languages and they become increasingly prominent as these barriers break down I have a bit clarified a question at this point because of the language laws I am interested in language and public spaces you are too so I think about the metro systems or advertisements and things like that and in Montreal there is a very status approach to language originally it came from that fear of extinction that need to protect it but in some ways if you look at the other 20th century histories like a status approach is a way that you was the way in many other places where you instituted monolingualism legally and so in Montreal right now it is a different history definitely but there is an institution of monolingualism legally in public space in New York for instance paradoxically we don't really recognize New York as a bilingual city but in the public space it is not legally mandated that it needs to be in English and there is metro construction science it is mostly down below I would say down below in the metro that is why I am wondering and it depends on what neighborhood you are into so in certain neighborhoods in New York things will be in Spanish or different languages well in Montreal you have to say cafe Starbucks by law so what is that cafe Starbucks you are not allowed the apostrophe s I want to have a museum of apostrophe s's that is because they are banned in Montreal how do you think the approaches to how people think about language in Montreal and New York vary in New York it is much more loose and so therefore unrecognized but in some ways allows more kind of nuance or freedom to communities to use language how they want that is a really good question one thing I didn't get around to talking about was the digital world of course the importance of the digital dimension of language use I just want to mention this because it reflects on what you are saying Michael Cronin who has written about something he calls presencing and the way in which languages are present in different ways in the city now because of the digital divide and the fact that migrants are no longer obliged to consider themselves translated once and for all into their new environments but can keep up the two and he is kind of wondering whether the kinds of spaces that you are talking about the kinds of public language and ethnic neighborhoods are going to persist or maybe they are going to disappear because migrants now live so much between worlds and are able to connect so much through digital means that they perhaps won't need that kind of public identification with specific neighborhoods so that's kind of something that would be interesting to look at as the time goes on Montreal lost a lot with this stupid sign thing even though I agree with it in many ways Montreal lost what was really sad about Montreal's language is the suppression of other languages there was absolutely no reason to suppress the Yiddish lettering on the corner stores the Greek lettering on the corner stores the stuff that was there and yet for some reason that was considered that it had to you know go out with the bath water I don't I don't quite know why that happened because we would have had a more variegated linguistic landscape had there not been that obligation and you know I just don't know why it is the case I would like to find out there's absolutely no reason you do have some neighborhoods where you see I mean you do see Hindi and Urdu and Devanagri script and Dravidian scripts but much less than you do in other countries so that's an impoverishment for sure and there's no reason for it thank you for your conference it was really interesting and thanks for bringing my dear friends Andres Durand's from New York I just want to point out he's from Chile and he came to New York in order to do the edited monuments like this all across the avenues of the Americas Avenida de las Americas Avenida of the Americas in 16th avenue so well thanks for bringing this up here it's very nice to see it to bring into the conversation I have a question about something you just point out about the translation that you said that we need to pay attention to how many books are translated into Spanish in order to I mean from English to Spanish in order to be able to say or argue if this is not a dual city so I was wondering why would it be important or very important and also because I'm taking in consideration the fact that only 3% of books are translated in another language in the United States so that's my question yeah thank you book translation is yes we know that it's quite limited and perhaps the idea of concentrating on books is not sufficient or should be just a part of it maybe we could talk about translation in a much broader way of what kinds of cultural activities take place in Spanish or what kinds of performances or films or I mean I think probably broaden it because you're right to concentrate on book translation is perhaps very limiting and in relation to my own experience of Montreal and the data that I was thinking about for this mapping I think book translations would be a good indication the other things I didn't mention is where translators live too I think that would be that's an important thing in terms of cultural movements in the city where the translators live and how do they carry things across the city actually literally but I think you're right to say that it's not simply book translation but I think we understand the idea that of cultural creation taking place in a language in a space and the idea of translating in a very broad sense rather than simply the text so my work and the translational city really involves not only textual translation but in a more broad sense thank you professor for your talk sorry just had a quick question I just wanted to note that I feel this really interesting tension at work especially with the linguistic approach to and the mapping involved with as a way to study urbanism I think specifically which is that through the framework and the questions that you have about language there is a strong I think move towards a local history like there's a granularity you're bringing to the material the specificity of the physical space and that seems to be in tension with all the ways that language explodes into a global network into the kind of the geopolitical shifts that are happening and that becomes the very specific link between the material immediacy of things and these larger networks that people are involved with as well and I guess I'm trying to understand how how arguments about the city made through language can can navigate that in a way what happens when you end up focusing on one scale over the other I think maybe for instance when you were talking about you mentioned the terrorist attack on the mosque in Quebec and I didn't I didn't research as much as I should have on to that but it seemed that the terrorist involved was a young man who was very interested in like French, Canadian national identity at the same time I recently learned that I didn't know this that Canada is one of the only countries I think that is actually a part of two commonwealths it's not just a part of the English-British commonwealth it's also economically politically tied to the French commonwealth and so the same time that there's language and nationalism which you presented early on in your talk as a move away from the kind of empire model it also seems like there's that involved as well in some ways in that the French is not just specific to French Canada but is attached to this particular moment of what's happening in France and what's happening in France is therefore creating this kind of imperial network again it's interesting I'm not sure I'm for I'm not sure exactly were you talking in relation of the tensions between Muslims and Francophones or what's happening in France in that sense just in terms I think of the yes symbolically right exactly it's a part of this yeah there's a domestic population but it is attached also to these yeah it's a very confused question I tend to forget that Quebec and Canada are involved in not a Commonwealth but Francophonie it's a kind of a looser kind of attempt to be a Commonwealth I think and attempt to bring together all the non-hexagonal French there's always been a tension between France and Francophone so if you're French you're really French Francophone you're like from one of those other countries Algeria or Quebec not quite as good but now of course with the decreasing power of France France is really losing its place in the world then we kind of think so yeah a little bit about the whether you can read the changes of language in Quebec at the very local level of the dynamics of demographics in the neighborhood but also how can you maybe look at it on a more kind of like languages power empire level of maybe how you know the Québécois movement has also looked at connections with France and kind of moving looking towards France and even the headscarf or the hijab talk is being a kind of imperial connection to France in a way that isn't really a local level question but it's still tied to language that's a good okay I get that that makes a lot of sense yes that is a tension and the reason why it is a tension is because it is a tension is because for nationalist reasons Quebec has always tried to differentiate itself from English Canada so it's all about whose enemy is your enemy is my friend is your enemy etc so English Canada having been for a long time the enemy Quebec turns to it's an ancient you know cousin enemy France to sort of make alliances at times so yeah but let me just explain what happened this might help if I just explain what happened three years ago because it was a very very very painful episode in Quebec history and it explained some of those alliances so there was a nationalist party called the Parti Québécois who used to be left wing, secular progressive good stuff in the 1980s turned gradually towards the not so good stuff and is now more like a populist party and three years ago thought it could win an election by proposing something called the Quebec Charter of Values and the Quebec Charter of Values was sustained by the idea that of French laicité secularism and very much a French import because the French had a tradition of prohibiting what were called outward signs of religious affiliation, headscarf a large cross anything but basically the target everybody was aware the target was the headscarf it sort of it fell onto the Jewish kippah and that became a little bit of a problem so they tried to squirm out of that it was a very very very uncomfortable moment and for a moment it seemed like it was very popular so very populist taking exactly taking inspiration from the French model saying we're really French we're not North Americans we don't believe in this stuff because Canada had become very well known for getting accepted the idea that you could be in the RCMP and wear a turban that was a big victory the RCMP has a very fancy uniform and you could be in the RCMP and wear a turban and that was accepted so if the English Canadians did that the Quebecers were not going to do that they were going to go the opposite way so it was very much a populist movement sustained by the idea and and with very very negative consequences in Quebec so there are those mixtures and French is tethered to international French but less and less and less so all the time it used to be that a Quebec writer to really make it had to be published in France it's no longer the case it used to be that a student to get a proper PhD to go to France that's really really over so the whole French Francophone the hexagonal power of French is I would say decreasing how that relates to the granular histories of Montreal yes French from France is still an element what's interesting I was going to show a picture which I didn't one of the in the neighborhood of between Montreal between the two Montreal's there's Saint Lawrence Boulevard what used to be sweatshops for immigrants is now high tech video game companies and they employ many many French migrants they bring them in as high skilled labor for reasons again I don't understand but that's has added a kind of a French element to Montreal so you're right it's a good it's a point to be taken into consideration thank you sorry for the long answer Sherry thank you so much that was a wonderful lecture and also the interactions I think I knew that you have to say would inspire a lot of us but you give us more than that even and we've been talking about multilingual cities and we've been talking about diversity but then what you said about translational city provides a methodological intervention in the conversation so that adds a dimension and we need to think about what we've been doing in that sense as well so the five maps you provided I thought these maps will challenge the projects of some of our students I mean the projects are still evolving I think what you just offered us really gave us some new ideas as to how we would go about it for instance directionality that we thought about it you know translation really provides that a very effective way of thinking about that right and well and other things like affect how do you map effect right in terms of mapping we're also learning the tools for digital mapping visualizing data all of that and as you were speaking I was thinking how do we map zones of interaction I suppose there must be a way of doing that if we are inventive enough and then or directionality certain dynamic interactions how do we build these movements into the maps it would take a lot of technical expertise maybe Laura has the answer so I'm totally intrigued by these challenges that your methodological intervention presents to us so that it will lead to very interesting work I think one of the things that you said that struck me was about the obliteration of historical memory both in the beginning of your talk in terms of Solanica fascinating histories languages that sort of disappeared and then you also later toward the end of your talk you talk about Mia LaGuardia and the Latin American traces of the city which we don't see if we don't look closely so again the invisible traditions invisible signposts monuments sculptures they are there but we don't discover them what's wrong with us so we don't see sometimes they are obliterated like a mosque would be turned into a movie house completely the building is still there so you have like palimpsed palimpsed so then how do you map that that would be a challenge the layers that you point us to layers of historical memories things that we really wanted to make visible so how then would we build this into our project the invisibility and then you also use a very interesting cinematic language the city what is a translational city like a movie with a soundtrack and that's the other side like audio aspect of it if we don't understand the language it sounds like noise so then it's almost like a program to exclude noise from our usual communication so what does it say about that soundtrack as we walk through the streets of the city a lot of these issues I think you have raised it's just wonderful so do you think you could elaborate a bit more on the possibility of bringing the invisible to the realm of the visible the layers of historical memories if we wanted to do a project on some areas districts of New York boroughs of New York City you're really asking me suggestions how do you think yeah yeah that's the that that's you know to me that because I brought up that example precisely with relation to First Nations languages in in Montreal poses this extremely interesting question of how to bring into being something that was not necessarily already there because the presence of First Nations in I don't know how you you know how you think of it in New York and in the western cities of Canada for instance there's a much more visible and audible First Nations presence you see First Nations people and you see First Nations monuments and you see First Nations art whereas on the east coast in Montreal that's it's really just beginning and because there's a reserve called Ganawagi not far from Montreal you have a population that lives there has always historically lived there but don't necessarily are not necessarily present in the city that's a big invisibility that's going to have to that's that's a process of kind of cultural reaffirmation that is going to have to happen from First Nations groups and through publishing performance through cinema through a kind of a process of cultural revitalization that's one sort of translating into emergence you could say as an emergence you're talking more about translating from the past you know there's these great visual projects that have been done so much in Europe inspired by Walter Benjamin about traces and fragments and you've had this kind of stuff I think that's been so effective and marvelous the kind of things like there's a I think he's an Israeli photographer who in Berlin would project onto modern day buildings the image of the old building that sort of thing you know I don't know if you want to have so that was very effective in reconstituting Jewish history in Berlin and you have of course in Berlin so many projects of memorialization that are one more imaginative and creative than the last the project that does that there's a project called Sights of Conscience and so for example in Soweto in Johannesburg they they have you know museums for sites of resistance and apartheid from pre-apartheid South Africa for example there's an example in Berlin where they put up the anti-Semitic signs as a memory of what was there as an artist did that but I think that's memory and replacing memory that's I think monumentalizing something and I think that's very different for example the language map that we've been looking at of New York City is when you take away English and Spanish suddenly you have 800 languages to think about in 200 to 800 languages in New York City and then you can go you can be directed or you can navigate right through the census data you can go to that neighborhood and see are there signs are there not signs are there languages you know signs in different languages but so I think what was great about your talk is that you when you said there were linguistic map covers and urban makeovers that was such a great idea and I love the way that you said it first the first language then the city but that was so often the case with colonialization so in New York you might say the equivalent well there's lots of equivalents over time in history but maybe slum clearance you know who knows what will I think they probably are archives of what was demolished and right ethnic neighborhoods that were really demolished during those times and then I don't know Alex is doing a project about Portuguese neighborhood in New Jersey and then that gets the Portuguese in you know the late 1800s but then how that gets now it's Brazil and now it's people coming from South America but the language is Portuguese but it's a completely different population right so the language is the same but the population you know even race is different so there's those I don't know there's those kinds of invisibilities that are easy to draw yeah very prominent right now Halal food carts and but within the boundaries of that food cart it's not just Arabic it's a lot of different dialects of Arabic itself and when you talked about the maps of mixing and hiding we thought about how these are cuisines that are sort of known in very different languages different Arabic but somehow within that sign post on a food cart they find a way to be translated into something anyone could say in English for example or even hiding where they can't really advertise in Arabic for example or can't put up Arabic signs they have to translate all of that into something people find easy to understand so we're trying to read the food carts and the dialects within them in that way but also in how these dialects correspond to sort of the commercial or the social relationships that are formed are they strictly related to the dialects speaking the same dialect means you can get a job easier in one of those carts so is it more related to for example territorial commercial and you can sell this place so really interesting that aspect of how even variations within the language itself within a larger entity like New York City can create very different networks there is this tendency of really lumping Arabic Arabic is like in 20 different 25 how many Arab nations I mean we're all from Arabic Arab countries we speak Arabic we understand each other but we're different and I think there is this tendency especially with global media to put us all under the same paint us all under the same brush and so what we're interested in is you know understanding the details of language like dialect is you know going into the detail of it and I also thought of your yes yes it's not really well known well we know we know because we speak different dialects but I'm not sure everyone understands this like this language does not because the census map is like where people live and the fact is like where people work is also like a whole different map and that's like what's also interesting to us like finding okay this is a Chinese neighborhood but then someone speaking Arabic or maybe speaking Spanish in there that's where the circulation aspect can be really interesting you know how moving from one neighborhood to the other and what they do move yeah that's interesting oh where's this oh really and how does this physically take place what have they figured out what they're going to do with it or no because that's what I mean that's what I was going to get to next in terms of you know how to restore memory of language but that it's a very for instance the neighborhood that I I I I I I neighborhood that I well so many neighborhoods I live near a neighborhood where you know 50 years ago the primary language you would have heard on the street was Yiddish that's all very interesting and I can say oh that I can hear it in my mind's ear but how do you enact that how do you make that a kind of a site of memory the site you know what they do in museums is they give you earphones but you're talking about sound in space I think that's and historic sound too just another little project I had in Montreal a couple of years ago I was with downtown I don't know how this happened but it was a bunch of booths that were just downtown and you'd walk from one to the other and you'd hear historic speeches so it was with languages but sounds people speaking in 1920 and you had a sound recording and oh that's such a different language it's such a you hear someone who you've read about in history that you have to hear them saying that speech so but how do you constitute those were little like booths that you could walk from one to the other and hear them but just how to situate sound in space it's a really big problem yeah so so sort of thinking about this like idea of like sound within spaces the project that I'm working on now has to do with markets for like pirated materials in New York and one of the things that I've sort of been like hitting against thinking about this project is the fact that like a lot of these like markets have been disappearing partially because of like finding everything on the internet and also because of like Bloomberg's crackdown on these markets in 2003 they disappeared and I have like a like some strong memories of like walking down like Roosevelt Avenue Queens or walking down Canal Street before when like they sold like these videos often and like hearing languages that now like there's like a silence of in those areas because people no longer have access to those materials and I was sort of thinking about you were mentioning I don't remember in reference to what the author but how a lot of like immigrant communities have like moved online to find certain materials or to find like access to each other right so like in the sort of like breakdown of these markets obviously there's not necessarily an absence now but like the groundwork for like a new new pathways to like develop different relationships with each other and I was interested when you were talking about I think it was Chernowitz how you reference I think it's like Marion Hirsch's piece how like a city can like insist can exist in its like infrastructure in the same way and like I mean Hirsch sort of speaks in this language of like ghostly presences like inhabiting that cities things that aren't being recognized the invisible right and I'm sort of curious as to like how in mapping we can talk about things like materially high hiding something so let's say like in the case of these markets like the fact that these markets still stand but like their material their material existence obscures the fact that there's something that's been like drastically changed let's say for me I will walk through and I will no longer hear the languages that were once there and perhaps it's like that absence that is like felt and it's not the actual like material absence of the space itself so in terms of like thinking about like mapping like things that are invisible or things that are hiding like I guess I'm like interested in how that can be done when certain structures are still in place that will like actively like will obscure the fact that a thing that has been lost and has to be salvaged in a sense so about the so about the pirated videos and like no longer hearing those languages one this is the hope of the internet right is that like we can make things interactive and not the hope of the internet as in like languages going online because I have a lot more to say about that but in terms of mapping making something that isn't there appear there and then disappear again and appear and disappear like this was our hope with interactivity on the internet so I think that we should sit down and really talk about like push boundaries in terms of interactivity but in terms of um so speaking to something that you said earlier Sherry and something that you're saying right now in terms of these languages like pushing towards the internet so this is something that we've been thinking about for a while now that people only learn their languages through contact so as much as we see um community is moving towards an online sphere um babies will not pick up their home language without interaction without a response from their interlocutor so babies don't learn language from the television period babies don't learn language from the internet the exception might be video chat with someone they're familiar with and that it starts to get murky and at what point let's not go down that rabbit hole so putting that rabbit hole aside there's a certain there's a certain physical permanence to language communities because we are only able to learn our first language not our second not our third not whatever but our first language from somebody who's going to respond to us the internet doesn't respond to us the internet doesn't react to you saying go get me the dow the internet doesn't react to your face lighting up or your face going down so in those things are required to learn our first languages so there's a certain tie to physical proximity in terms of language acquisition so that language isn't happening on the street because there's no market for that language to be attached to when you're talking about the pirated videos there's no street market for it to be attached to but I think we could look for it more the loss of language knowledge because those locations have disappeared because of the internet so there's a loss that should be documented there used to be lots of those places I remember also like the stores where you could get videos from I don't know Nairobi and from Seoul and from all these soap operas which people used to listen to and you'd go so I think you're talking about I wonder if somebody made a map of them 10 years ago I have no idea I've been looking online at different maps made specifically for the police to locate these places and yeah they don't speak all the languages but people will go and will find things that are of their language so that's the difference so one of the fascinating things about this is that let's say there'll be one person who orders all of these different cassettes and DVDs and they'll they might speak more languages than the people who are working there but they'll sort of be intermediaries between so many different communities and different markets so like there's like those I mean now like those places let's say like on Canal Street they'll still exist right but what's being sold is instead of DVDs or CDs that are now accessible like online they'll be selling handbags umbrellas all these things that have like moved in the place and that aren't objects like particular communities right so that's why it becomes like one thing will be like obscuring the other in a way that's really like drastic because there's still like these like illegal markets that they're like like some yeah like they're hiding each other yeah yeah there's a parallel condition maybe it was studied in the Netherlands when people used to still have to go somewhere so immigrants would go to phone call center they would all go there absolutely but then to cater to all these nationalities there used to be that everyone had a tacit agreement to meet there but now with Skype and I guess whatever is on your phone internet cafes internet cafes yeah great great