 Welcome to the GSAP's dean's lecture on Monday evenings. And I'm Weiping Wu, the director of the urban planning program. Our dean, Amal Andres, couldn't be here with us because of other challenges. And she sent her regards. And so thank you for all of you to come. And we have a very exciting evening here, especially thanks to the event's office and the dean's office for bringing in exciting urban scholar as part of the dean's lecture on Mondays. And as you probably, those of you who come to dean's lectures a lot, usually you see architects. So it's a bit of a change of scene today. And so I hope you all enjoy that. So it's really a great pleasure to welcome Professor Ananya Roy from University of California at Los Angeles to GSAP and to the urban planning program. Ananya comes from the Lucks in School at UCLA. She is a professor of urban planning, social welfare, and geography, there and the inaugural director of the Institute of Inequality and Democracy. She holds the Meyer and Renee Laskin chair in inequality and democracy. Prior to UCLA, she was on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current research is concerned with metropolitan segregation and racial banishment, particularly in Los Angeles. With the support from the National Science Foundation, she is a convener of a global research network on housing justice in unequal cities. Her most recent book is Encountering Poverty, Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World, University of California Press. Ananya has received a number of awards, including the Paul Davidoff Book Award of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, where I can call her a dear colleague, and a distinguished teaching award, the highest teaching recognition at UC Berkeley, and the Excellence in Achievement Award of the Cal Alumni Association, a Lifetime Achievement Award, which celebrates her contributions to the University of California and public sphere. She also serves as the editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. For those of you who have checked out TEDx and YouTubes, Ananya used to teach, I think, was it 1,000 students class at Berkeley? 700, and it's really worth checking out, even after today's lecture. So with that, I welcome Ananya Role. Good evening, everyone. I am thrilled to be here at GSAPP. I thank Dean Amal Anders and Director Waping Wu for the invitation, and Lila Kattelier and Lucy Kraschbach for their work in organizing the visit. My talk this evening is about the city in the age of Trumpism, and I will talk in particular about sanctuary cities and what they tell us about space and sovereignty. In doing so, I'm interested in interrogating both liberal inclusion and radical hospitality, thereby shifting the discussion of cosmopolitanism to what I'm calling the threshold of empire. But I also wish to situate our disciplines, urban planning, architecture, urban design, at the threshold of empire. I'm interested in their role as what I've called infrastructures of assent in the age of Trumpism, as well as in the possibilities of a reconstruction of these disciplines at the present historical moment. To do so, we must start by acknowledging our embeddedness in what has been called the global university, or what Pia Chatterjee and Senaena Mayra have called the imperial university. So if I were giving this talk at UCLA this evening, I will start by noting that UCLA, the country's top public university, a land grant institution, sits on stolen, occupied and colonized land, the land of the Tongva people. In his essay on Columbia University, Your University, for the Imperial University book, Nicholas de Genova, right of the experience of crossing the line here at Columbia, and examines whether universities protect critical thinking and political dissent. That line that de Genova crossed can be thought of as a threshold of empire. So with this in mind, let's consider my discipline, urban planning. Two days after Trump's election in November 2016, I walked into my histories and theories of urban planning class, a course that all of our first year master students and first year PhD students take in urban planning at UCLA. I had stayed up all night rereading a book that has always meant a great deal to me, and now had new meaning. W. E. B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935, with a subtitle worth paying attention to. To what a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860 to 1880. An extraordinary history that is also, as Cedric Robinson has noted, a theory of history, black reconstruction is a vision of abolition democracy. The 90 students gathered in the classroom that day, wanted to talk about democracy. And we knew that we could only talk about democracy in relation to the long history of white power and white supremacy in the United States. The question on our minds that day was what this might mean also for our analytical and ethical orientation to urban planning. Out of that moment of despair, came a brilliant student-organized course at UCLA and the broad endeavor that they called abolitionist planning. If you haven't already seen this resource guide produced by our UCLA Masters of Urban Planning students in collaboration with students in architecture and public policy, I invite you to do so on the institute's website. And in response to this came a powerful critique penned by Dishonet Dossier, doctoral candidate at Cooney Graduate Center, a piece called There Is No Room for Planners in the Movement for Abolition. Dossier argued, I quote, that the fight for abolition is aside from and not something that can be fully incorporated into professional planning. Because planning has been a central conduit of the very forms of violence that abolition seeks to end. Colonial and capitalist violence against black, brown, and indigenous communities and bodies. Dossier also drew a distinction between insurgent planners, whom she described and again I quote, as those who continuously put freedom into motion to turn the tide of the violence of land extraction and enslavement without a paycheck or job title and those that she called planners, whom she described as those who get degrees and or compensation from institutions of colonial harm. Abolition, Dossier concluded, is not nor ever will be about planners. Instead, she wrote, it is about practitioners of freedom dreams that occur outside of planning education and profession. I find Dossier's provocations to be vitally important and urgently necessary. As director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, I have sought to create a terrain of research and praxis that is in solidarity with radical social movements and that insists on articulating freedom dreams in unequal cities. But as a scholar and teacher of urban planning, as an urban planner, I worry that our discipline has made peace with violence and refused to participate in the freedom struggles of our times. This concern was dramatically amplified for me last summer at the Association of European Schools of Planning Annual Conference, which was held in Gothenburg, Sweden. To that choice of keynote speakers, the local organizing committee in Sweden had sought to highlight some of the key front lines of spatialized struggle in our world today. One of the keynote speakers was Seda Sangur, a prominent figure among the urban planners dismissed by Turkey's current regime. This is Sangur in red, being tear gassed by the police during the Gezi Park protest in Istanbul. These planners have taken a public position on how urban planning is being used by the regime as what they have called a medium of destruction and displacement, including through the restructuring of Kurdish cities. Imprisoned, banned, dismissed, these planners now face what Sangur in a keynote talk described as social death and civil death. But they also, in their own words, I could stand in solidarity together as junior urban planners who remain insurgent. At the end of a keynote talk in Gothenburg, Sangur asked ASAP, the Association of European Schools Planning, as an organization, to stand in solidarity with these dismissed junior urban planners to issue a statement of support for their call for peace. That never happened. In the belaborate discussions and deliberations that followed, ASAP's leadership argued that urban planning was meant to be a safe space, free of political influence and political position. Sangur's brave and risky act of giving a public talk about the social and civil death of urban planners was for naught. The infrastructure of ascent could not be breached. I opened with these reflections on urban planning as a discipline because they indicate the analytical and ethical orientation with which I approach our present historical moment, its challenges and the possibilities of reconstruction. And I'll return to these provocations and challenges in the conclusion of my talk. But first let's turn to this historical moment, what I have been calling the age of Trumpism. The constellation of ideologies, discourses and alliances that make up Trumpism is not a uniquely American phenomena. Around the world, right-wing populisms and chauvinist nationalisms are on the rise. These are often articulated with agendas of neoliberalism and comfortably reside within liberal democracy, as in the case of the Modi regime in India. Nor is Trumpism new. Its racialized logic is only the most recent iteration of racial terror, a phrase I borrow from Paul Gilroy's seminal book, The Black Atlantic. In the United States, the practices of expulsion and exclusion at work in the Trump regime inhabit a post-911 machinery of deportation and surveillance developed under various American presidents, including President Obama. These are also embedded in the histories of settler colonialism and chattel slavery through which a possessive investment in whiteness, George Lipset's important phrase, has been constructed and maintained in the United States. But another way, Trumpism can be viewed as a renewal of white supremacy, specifically as a renewed institutionalization of white power in statecraft. What is key to Trumpism is how racialized logics of exclusion, colonial logics, are reactivated and repurposed to wage war against racial others. It would be a mistake for us to understand this only as immigration policy. This is in fact about utter dehumanization. Such xenophobia is a constant feature of Trumpism and must be understood as an ideological commitment of the regime. And to give you an example of this, I want us to think for a minute about Steve Bannon, white nationalist and media mogul who is no longer part of the Trump White House, but who was the key figure behind the notorious executive order that came to be known as the Muslim ban. I'm interested in the specific contours of this sort of raceology, this sort of race thinking. And to do so, I've been thinking a lot about a novel that is said to have had great influence on Bannon and others around him. Titled The Camp of the Saints and authored in 1973 by Jean Reusbell, this French novel has recently been shown to be a prominent feature in several lines of alt-right thought and organized white supremacy. It tells the story of the invasion of France by what is described to be an armada of Indians, thousands of wretched creatures with fleshless, Gandhi arms led by a turd eater. The influx is enabled by liberal politicians and religious leaders in Europe, including a pope from Latin America. And it sets into motion what the novel describes as the end of the white world. The novel's white heroes, the only fully human depictions in the novel, take up arms to defend the last vestiges of European Christendom. Bannon has repeatedly cast immigration as the end of the white world. In his words, an invasion into central and then western and northern Europe and indeed as a global camp of the saints. For the Trump regime, a key part of this battle that is viewed to be a global camp of the saints is the crackdown on sanctuary jurisdictions. A glimpse of such an agenda is available and visible in the whiteboard behind Bannon in this widely circulated photograph taken in May 2017. The photograph revealed a set of plans and priorities drawn up by Bannon, many of which pertain to sanctuary jurisdictions, including the following. Cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities, create support programs for victims of illegal immigrants, issue detainers for all illegal immigrants who have committed a crime, expand the 287G partnerships, triple the number of ICE agents, restore the Secure Communities program, and pass Kate's law. Indeed, one of the first act of the Trump regime was an executive order issued on January 25th, 2017, titled Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States. Arguing that illegal aliens were a significant threat to national security and public safety, it directed all jurisdictions to comply with federal immigration laws and noting that those failing to do so would not receive federal funds. In particular, the order called out sanctuary jurisdictions and their refusal to enforce federal immigration law. Here, it is worth clarifying the scope of sanctuary, though I imagine many of you are already familiar with this. Currently, in the United States, it is a prohibition on the cooperation of local law enforcement with federal immigration enforcement or what is known as ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The sanctuary designation does not mean that ICE cannot implement deportation in these cities. It simply means that local police forces do not facilitate such deportation. Several of the priorities and accomplishments on bannant immigration wish list, that whiteboard, such as the Secure Communities Program and the 287G partnerships aim at strengthening local cooperation with ICE enforcement. Since that initial executive order, the Trump regime has been at war with sanctuary jurisdictions. In turn, these jurisdictions have pledged non-compliance. For example, in defiance of that January 25, 2017 executive order, the mayor of Boston declared that he would use city hall itself as a last resort to shelter undocumented immigrants. A few days later, the city of San Francisco sued the Trump administration, charging that its threats violated the state's rights provision of the US Constitution. The legal battles have only intensified since then. As the Justice Department has sought to punish sanctuary jurisdictions, specifically by withholding law enforcement grants, cities such as Chicago have pushed back. Research conducted by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center shows that there's been an expansion of sanctuary jurisdictions since the election of Trump. And what the sort of map does is to give you the spectrum of local cooperation with law enforcement. So I encourage you to go on the IALRC website and take a look at these maps, they're interactive, and you can zoom in and take a look at what this looks like in your communities and cities. At the same time, in states such as Iowa and Tennessee, new laws now ban sanctuary policies and threaten to punish sanctuary cities by withholding state funds. But again, it's necessary for us to examine the scope of sanctuary. In the United States, sanctuary jurisdictions rely on, and I argue, even consolidate local police power, specifically the local refusal to enforce federal immigration law rests on local authority, notably the authority of the police. Sanctuary then, I argue, is a paradigm of liberal inclusion, extending rather than limiting state violence. In fact, in the age of Trumpism, the struggle over sanctuary has been waged in the name of national security and safety. Trump himself has sharpened the language of raceology by characterizing sanctuary cities, especially those in California as I quote, a ridiculous crime-infested and breeding concept, one that stands in opposition to the demands of the people of the state for security and safety. In his tweet, all of these you can imagine, capitalized. The defense of sanctuary jurisdictions has also turned on an argument about security and safety, especially the cooperation between police and immigrant communities. So I'm arguing that sanctuary is not the antonym of detention and deportation, but rather exists in relation to such forms of power. Indeed, sanctuary is continuous with rather than a counterpoint to the unending border. Sanctuary thus reveals how state protection and state violence are closely linked. Now, I've noted earlier that sanctuary cities can be interpreted as jurisdictions of under enforcement of immigration law. But also at stake are the procedural protections guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment, notably those against unreasonable search and seizure. Key here is something called the ICE Detainer, a central mechanism of immigration enforcement, but which has been repeatedly found in a series of lawsuits to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. Indeed, despite the characterization by the Trump administration of sanctuary cities as places of lawlessness, sanctuary cities might be more appropriately understood as Fourth Amendment abiding constitution abiding cities that refuse to enforce the ICE Detainer. We have therefore at hand a very interesting matter of what in other parts of my work I have called the illegalities of the state. It turns out that federal immigration enforcement unfolds through violations of constitutional protections. What is crucial here is the relationship between the illegalities wielded by sovereign authority and the production of what Nicolas de Genova has called migrant illegality and deportability. I'm arguing then that for the city as sanctuary to be a plan for freedom, we have to think about sanctuary not as a form of protection for the undocumented, the illegal, the border crosser, but rather we have to think about this as a methodology for making visible the dispositions and illegalities through which the state exercises spatialized power. And indeed, at its roots, the sanctuary movement in the United States was about challenging American imperialism. In the 1980s, churches and synagogues and then cities provided refuge to asylum applicants fleeing war in Central America, notably in Guatemala and El Salvador. The majority of these refugees were denied asylum and face deportation. The sanctuary movement provided refuge even at the risk of prosecution by the federal government. In particular, the movement had a keen sense of how refugees were fleeing violence instigated by American imperialism and by American interventions in Central America. The movement in fact was about transnational obligation and responsibility. And this was the case in these sanctuary efforts around the country. San Francisco City of Refuge Ordinance in 1989, which provided asylum rights for refugees fleeing war in El Salvador and Guatemala, stated the following. The people of the United States owe a particular responsibility to political refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala because of the role that the US military and other war-related aid has played in prolonging the political conflict in these countries. I view the sanctuary movement of the 1980s as a departure from liberal inclusion. As a civil initiative, it was one of many fronts of mobilization against American imperialism. Unlike today's sanctuary practices which consolidate the police power of the state, the movement of the 1980s was a direct challenge to the legal and moral authority of the United States government. Now, similar ideas of sanctuary can be found in the European debates about refuge, asylum, and hospitality. One of the most ambitious visions for a city of refuge comes from Jacques Derrida. In 1996, in a speech to the International Parliament of Writers convened in Strasbourg, France, Derrida makes the case for hospitality. Already in place was a network of cities of asylum and a resolution by the Council of Europe to protect writers who faced threats and persecution. Formed in the wake of the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, such protection was seen to be both an expression of transnational obligation as well as of liberal freedoms. In fact, the European Charter of Cities of Asylum of 1995 declared a two-fold protection of the writer. On the one hand, the right to freedom of expression, and on the other hand, the right to asylum in one of these cities of refuge. Derrida, in his 1996 speech, dramatically broadened the charge of refuge. He refused the focus on the writer and argued that cities must protect, I quote, the foreigner in general, the immigrant, the exiled, the deported, the stateless or the displaced person. Ethics, he insisted, is hospitality. Building on the writings of Levinas on refuge and rejecting Kantian notions of cosmopolitanism, Derrida emphasizes hospitality, extended, again I quote, not only to the foreigner provided with a family name with a social status of being a foreigner, but to the absolute unknown anonymous other. The city is an important figuration in Derrida's conceptualization of hospitality, especially as a counterpoint to the state. Derrida states, if we look to the city rather than to the state, it is because we have given up hope that the state might create a new image for the city. And the freedom of the city does not rest for Derrida on police power. Instead, he calls for a restriction of the legal powers and scope of the police and places questions of right, refuge and asylum in the political authority of the city and its relationship to what he describes as the renewal of international law. Derrida's exposition of hospitality has been understood as a radical ethics of cosmopolitanism. As Barnett notes, for Derrida, hospitality is not a gift in the conventional sense of exchange for something, for example, for good conduct or respect for the law. It is neither liberal inclusion nor multicultural tolerance. Derrida's conceptualization of hospitality is in fact ultimately a re-signification of the meanings of host and guest, self and other, native and foreigner. In a due to Emanuel Levinas, Derrida states that hospitality precedes property. This in turn allows him to re-signify the host as residing in a home which in the end does not belong to him. The host resides in a home which in the end does not belong to him. What makes Derrida's notion of hospitality radical is that it is based not on possession, but rather on what many scholars have noted is a sense of radical dispossession that the host herself or himself is a guest. In fact, scholars have noted that Derrida's notion of dispossession of personhood must in fact take us back to these notions of exile and refuge and these in turn have a very particular genealogy in Derrida's work. They come from what one scholar has called the remains of Algiers or what has been described as Derrida's Judeo-Franco-Magrabian genealogy. In monolingualism of the other, Derrida writes, I lost and then gained back French citizenship. I lost it for years without having another and then one day, one fine day, without my asking for anything, I found the citizenship again, the state to which I never spoke had given it back to me. Here then, as David Carroll notes, we have the experience of the outsider who is declared by law not to be in his proper place, even in the place where he has always been. I interpret Derrida's philosophy of refuge as locating the city, not at the heart of the nation, but rather at the threshold of empire. In insisting on the unconditional nature of hospitality, Derrida emphasizes the idea of threshold, including the threshold of home. That threshold is key as the host herself or himself becomes a guest. The threshold is one where the home becomes a site of radical dispossession. And yet, Derrida's concept of unconditional hospitality requires some critical interrogation. The other is granted a place only in relation to something called Europe. Derrida's ethics of cosmopolitan humanism shares many of the conceits of liberalism. Derrida, we know, was torn between a colonial regime towards which he felt grave misgivings and a French republican tradition to which he expressed a strong allegiance. But bluntly for Derrida, it is only Europe that can grant sanctuary to those constituted as the other of Europe. But Derrida pushes us to the threshold of empire. He requires of us a post-colonial reconsideration of property and personhood. And here is one example of that threshold. This is the Palestinian-Canadian rapper, Belly, on Twitter, responding to US white supremacist, Tommy Lahren. With a line that we've heard quite a bit, no one can be illegal on stolen land. I had shared Belly's tweet in my keynote talk last summer at the ASAP conference, which I already had described to you. My talk was called Plans for Freedom. The ASAP gatekeepers angrily responded, asking what urban planning was to do with a slogan, such as this. One of them, a scholar, who works on both human dignity and land policy, asked me, do you want us to just give all the land back? To whom? How is that practical? Why should we think about stolen land? I have often thought that practicality is a useful weapon of depoliticization in urban planning. It is meant to silence the analytical and historical work that is needed to pay serious attention to displacement and dispossession. At the Institute on Inequality and Democracy, we take our cues about practicality from social movement on the barricades of struggle in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the world. These movement leaders deal every day with the most urgent practical matters of life and death, housing and transportation, urban development, environmental equity, so on and so forth. Yet what drives them are grand traditions of thought, such as the black radical tradition or decolonial philosophy. For them, these are the grounds of practical action. Put another way, their practical action takes place every day at the threshold of empire. They are the insurgent planners of whom Dozier writes, their work shifts us from sanctuary to abolition. And so I return once again to the possibility of abolitionist planning in the age of Trumpism. Let me in the final part of the talk building on my critiques of liberal inclusion as well as of Derrida's radical cosmopolitanism, let me lay out a few key ideas in what might be involved in the shift from sanctuary to abolition and what it might mean to locate our disciplines, not only at that threshold of home, our property in personhood that Derrida wants us to think about, but at the threshold of empire itself. A few days after Trump's election, I wrote a short essay for society in space called divesting from whiteness. I argued that we have to expose and confront what feminist geographer Kate Derrickson has called the unbearable whiteness of our disciplines. Derrickson was writing about geography in the age of Ferguson, but that argument applies very well to many of our disciplines as well. This whiteness is about the entanglement also of the modern university, the imperial university with racial capitalism. It is about infrastructures of assent. It is about what Lipsitz has called the possessive investment in whiteness. And that possessive investment in whiteness takes place also through our disciplines and professions. Some of you will remember the AIA controversy that unfolded in the wake of Trump's election, where the leadership of the American Institute of Architects pledged support for the new president and his infrastructure plans, thereby triggering a rebellion in the membership ranks of the AIA. Some of you will remember the hashtag, not my AIA. Jonathan Massey, now dean of the University of Michigan, spoke out loudly and boldly, stating that there is some work that an architect must refuse. Massey asked, would you design Trump's wall? How about a border station for the Homeland Security Department? How about a conversion therapy clinic? Massey concluded that withholding our labor is architectural agency in one of its strongest forms. Or take, for example, the recent border-making practices of the Trump administration. As you know, children have been separated from their parents, mainly Central American families again, fleeing violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. These children have been placed in warehouses masquerading as shelters. These facilities are operated by massive nonprofits, including Southwest Key, which since 2015 has received nearly a billion dollars in federal contracts, and whose CEO makes well over a million dollars in salary per year. My other department, and now discipline, at UCLA is social welfare. And social welfare is an integral part of this sprawling nonprofit industrial complex, which in turn is entangled with the prison industrial complex. And so what has been on my mind since Trump's election is what it might mean for us to take a knee in our disciplines and professions. What are the struggles we are willing to take up and the sacrifices we are willing to make in the age of Trumpism? Because the sacrifices, as we've seen with Kaepernick, are real. But taking a knee also requires specific analytical and ethical reorientations. And let me outline just a few as I begin to wrap up this talk. The first, which I've been arguing in some of my recent writings, is that the ideal of the city as the city of refuge of the free city, which looms large in both liberal inclusion and cosmopolitan humanism, will simply not suffice. What if we were to start not with the ideal of the free city, of the city as a zone of autonomy, but instead with the plantation? And this of course is the provocation of black geographies and the black radical tradition itself. There's an extraordinary set of descriptions in chapter seven of Du Bois' other magisterial book, The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. Titled off the black belt, it starts with a train from the north, thundering through, I heard, the crimson soil of Georgia, stretching away bare and monotonous right and left. Du Bois' right of Atlanta, as bordered by the land of the Cherokees, the spot of Samhose's lynching, and the remnant of the vast plantations. He writes of the black tenant and the shadow hand of the master's grand-nephew or cousin or creditor that collects the rack rent remorselessly. Only black tenants he observes can stand such a system and they only do because they must. And then as he approaches the black belt below Macon, the world he writes grows darker. I quote, the Indians were removed to Indian territory and settlers poured into these coveted lands to retrieve their broken fortunes. For a radius of 100 miles about Albany stretched to great fertile land, luxuriant with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory and poplar, hot with the sun, and damp with the rich black swamp land. And here the cornerstone of the cotton kingdom was laid. In her essay, Plantation Futures, Catherine McCutrick thus argues that the plantation, precisely because it housed and historicizes racial violences that demanded innovative resistances, stands as a meaningful conceptual palimpset to contemporary cityscapes that continue to harbor the lives of the most marginalized. McCutrick's conceptualization has been an important foundation for new lines of inquiry and geography. Thus Nick Hyman calls for a new agenda of abolitionist ecology that is attentive to the deep historical spatial logics of the ghetto, the plantation, the colony, the reservation. He holds in simultaneous view McCutrick's Plantation Logics and Fanon's description of the colonial city. Fanon's description, like Du Bois' writings on the black belt, is an extraordinary text, demarcating the colonist town, its feet protected by strong shoes, its belly permanently full of good things, and the native town, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, a world with no space, a famished town, a sector on its knees. Derrida's cosmopolitanism, inspired though it is by the remains of Algiers, has little mention of the absolute difference of which Fanon writes. His concept of the free city, of the city of refuge, inevitably the city in Europe, cannot deal with or make sense of the native town, the Negro village, the Medina, the reservation. I'm arguing then that we need to rethink liberal inclusion itself, as a conceptual palimpsest for freedom, that we need to rethink the free city as a conceptual palimpsest for democracy. So the Institute on Inequality and Democracy, we focus on biopolitics, especially in disciplines such as ours, in urban planning, architecture, in public policy and social welfare. We focus on the management of life, but we also focus on necropolitics, on the geographies of criminalization, illegalization and death. One of the projects we're very proud to support is titled Million Dollar Hoods, led by Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez in the Department of History and someone who's also director of the Bunch Center for African American Studies at UCLA. Million Dollar Hoods exposes the spatialized logics of criminalization, the systems of carcerality that Michelle Alexander has called the New Jim Crow. And for me, this is one of the most urgent urban planning issues of our time. Million Dollar Hoods shows where in Los Angeles, so in Los Angeles County, which by the way you might not know this, but LA is the carceral capital of the country and the LA Sheriff's Department and LA Police Department spend $1 billion a year incarcerating people. That perverse investment in carcerality takes place only in a handful of neighborhoods, those marked in red in the maps produced by Million Dollar Hoods. For the urban planners in the room who think historically, you will recognize that these other neighborhoods that have faced long histories of redlining and disinvestment. This perverse investment of course targets quite specific bodies, not surprisingly young men of color. This targeting of black and brown bodies produces what many of us have called racial banishment or what Kelly Lytle Hernandez called disappearance. This logic of carcerality permeates so many social institutions and it is why the call for abolition needs to be a broad one. So at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy is part of our methodology of decolonizing the university. We have an activist in residence program where activists in Los Angeles and now those also based in other parts of the United States spend a three month sabbatical with us. Last year our activist in residence was Manuel Criolo, one of LA's really well known organizers who spent about 20 years organizing against something very specific in Los Angeles, which is the Los Angeles School Police Department. The LA Unified School District has one of the largest police departments in the country putting into motion what has been called the school to prison pipeline. Millions of dollars and a school department that is quite adept at acquiring military grade weaponry from the Department of Defense in the name of security and safety. But I wanna go back here for a minute to the Million Dollar Hoods map. And if we compare it to redlining maps from 1939, the scales are different, produced by the Homeowners Loan Corporation, maps that we are very familiar with, maps of racial segregation. What I'm interested in is the ways in which our discipline, urban planning, produced this racial exclusion. Urban planners built and held the color line. We produced the possessive investment in whiteness. We too are implicated in today's color line which takes the form of a different kind of redlining which is the perverse investment of the state in carcerality, criminalization, and illegalization. And so when I call for a shift from sanctuary to abolition, one of the questions on my mind then is how do we make reparations? I don't mean this as a rhetorical question. I'm increasingly convinced that the discussion of reparations has to train a spotlight on professions that are implicated in the production of inequality, those that were forged in the crucible of colonialism and imperialism. And for this reason, we've got to think about the ways in which movements have framed plans for freedom. The platform of the movement for Black Lives, the first required reading for my urban planning students and my histories and theories of urban planning class is as my colleague at UCLA, Robin D. G. Kelly, has argued a remarkable blueprint for social transformation. As Robin notes, you want a plan, here's a plan. A plan, as Kelly argues, for ending structural racism, saving the planet and transforming the entire nation, not just Black Lives. If you are familiar with the movement for Black Lives, National Policy Platform, you will know that there is a very specific section on reparations with very specific policy priorities and steps that can be taken to make real and agenda on reparations. And in fact, these questions are not rhetorical in other parts of the world. In South Africa, for example, there is a very lively policy debate underway about what reparations might look like in a post-apartheid context. More broadly then, I am arguing the following. What if we were to think about abolition as a conceptual palimpset for planning itself? Not liberal inclusion, not cosmopolitan humanism, but rather abolition, not sanctuary. Following Ruthie Gilmore, abolition can be understood as a form of placemaking. Gilmore describes it as the undoing of bondage, and she says that that undoing of bondage or abolition is quite literally to change place, even if geometrically speaking, they hadn't moved far at all. One type of placemaking that I'm very interested in is redistribution. Du Bois, writing in 1935 in Black Reconstruction, emphasizes that the redistribution of land was a necessary corollary to emancipation. Indeed, as Sinha details in her important book, The Slave's Cause, abolitionists supported land reform as a way of challenging capitalism and the system of racial slavery. Needless to say, such land confiscation and redistribution never took place in the United States. Unlike many other parts of the world, the United States has never had land reforms. Instead, as Du Bois demonstrates, the counterrevolution of property ensured the consolidation of white racial domination through new regimes of racial terror. But dreams of reconstruction persisted. Du Bois was to write in 1935 with some optimism the following. It is quite possible that long before the end of the 20th century, the deliberate distribution of property and income by the state on an equitable and logical basis will be looked upon as the state's prime function. I find Du Bois's emphasis on the state to be an important intervention in the age of Trumpism. A critical reading of sanctuary attunes us to the illegalities of the state. It attunes us to the ways in which state protection and state violence often go hand in hand. It situates sovereignty at the threshold of empire. But Du Bois gives us a very different understanding of the state. I see it as an exuberant vision of the state. The state of which he dreams is built through what he calls an uprising, the uprising of the black man. For Du Bois, such uprising was most evident in the desire for schools and the organized effort for education. Freed slaves, he shows, were intent on creating a public infrastructure of education in the South on a permanent basis for all people and own classes. It was their demand that in Du Bois' words planted the free common school in a part of the nation and in a part of the world where it had never been known. I argue then that as plantation and colony is a conceptual palimpset for the city, so the infrastructures of abolition democracy, such as the Freedmen's Bureau, such as the Underground Railroad, can be understood as a conceptual palimpset for the state itself and therefore for urban planning. This vision can also be interpreted as the undercommons, a space created by fugitive planning. Indeed, the history of abolitionism is filled with examples of such transformational infrastructure from the permanent organizational apparatus of the Underground Railroad to independent land-owning communities. But such plans for freedom do not just appear. They have to be demanded. Ruthie Gilmour reminds us that abolition is a totality. It is ontological. It is the context and content of struggle, she writes. To have abolitionism, she notes we have to organize. At the Institute on Inequality and Democracy, we locate this organizing at the heart of the university, at the heart of our disciplines, at the threshold of empire. We call this various things, including teach, organize, resist. We call it decolonizing the university. We call it turning the university inside out. Inevitably, this organizing involves a reorganizing of our disciplines and our epistemologies. So I'm hoping that some of you in this room listen to hip-hop. In his recently released song, Brackets, J. Cole, one of my favorite rappers, raps about a curriculum that tricks us. He says, one thing about the men that's controlling the pen that write history, they always seem to white out their sins. To dream of freedom means changing who controls the pen. That is key to insurgent planning and fugitive study, or insurgent study and fugitive planning, however you wanna describe it. Robin D.G. Kelly, in an essay that has been foundational for many of us at UCLA, describes this simply as black study. And what is black study? He says black studies was conceived not just outside the university, but an opposition to a Eurocentric university culture with ties to corporate and military power. The under commons is a fugitive network where a commitment to abolition and collectivity prevailed over a university culture bent on creating socially isolated individuals whose academic skepticism and claims of objectivity leave the world as it is intact. Robin argues we've got to love, study, and struggle. The world as we know it cannot be left intact. Thank you. Thank you, Ananya, for the powerful and eloquent talk and really asking us to reckon with the role of planning and planners as well as other professionals in state action and in state violence. And the call for the shift from sanctuary to abolition as sort of the undoing of bondage and to call for us to take a knee in our profession. So these thoughts and intellectual conception and really reminds me quite a bit of some recent discussion, particularly of Carl Polenny's work, The Great Transformation, as well as Robert Cottoner's new book, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? And I think what you have done here really has point to how the outcomes and the actions of the free markets are much crueler than what we have imagined in a way that making us, and many of us, more vulnerable to fastest solutions. And changing simply how we used to see equality as a primary income issue or primarily a redistribution issue as being insufficient. And really challenging how even for those of us who are proud to be called progressive or leftist in thinking we have really reneged on principles. So I'm sure that are lots of questions in the audience and I won't say very much. And I really would just start this Q and A by asking you perhaps to also help us think through as planning and planners. And I think you mentioned ASOP and then so on the equivalent of that on the US side, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, we also been wrestling of recognizing this role of planners and planning in state violence. And then you mentioned about practicality as an excuse in a way of not to ask these tough questions. And so perhaps you can help us in saying how do you in, at UCLA, which has a really strong traditional progressive politics among students in the planning program and beyond, is how do you start a discussion, right? And then where we're so used to be talking about practicality skills and so on in a field like planning and architecture is how do we start thinking about taking a knee, right? How do we start thinking about reconciling our past and what we are hoping to do particularly for students being here next? Do you want me to answer some of this? Should we open it up? It's up to you, yeah. No, so let me briefly respond. I've seen this much more for dialogue than a response. And then we'll open it up for questions. So two reflections on what you just said, Waping. One, I think it is actually very instructive to think about Pallani's work. It's always instructive to think about Pallani's work, particularly in relation to what we think of as planning. I mean, Pallani's famous line that markets are planned, planning is not. Reminds us of sort of the different ways in which we can think about what is planning. Planning is state intervention in his words to forcibly open markets and create the stark utopia of the self-adjusting market that in Pallani's understanding brings humankind to the edge of disaster and then planning for him as a set of uprisings which is perhaps closer to what Deshaunais does here in her critique of our work on abolitionist planning talks about as insurgent planning. As these practitioners are freedom dreams, not those who are embedded in these institutions of colonial harm and hopefully in Q&A we can talk about how these distinctions are not so easily maintained. How in fact, we proceed often from a place of complicity with institutions of colonial harm and how then might we make change. But I also think this question at UCLA and I think our students lead the way and we keep up with them. And they have repeatedly demanded for us to think about the role of planning, of having planning as a discipline and profession on the front lines of struggle. And I raised this question about practicality because when one thinks historically in particular, when one reinterprets Los Angeles not as a city of neoliberalism but as a city of settler colonialism and thinks about the long history of dispossession and displacement, one often gets the sort of response that I heard at ASAP. What are we gonna do? How can we make reparations? Well, the conversation about reparations is actually a very real and practical one. But aside from that, there is a way in which historical, analytical, thinking, critical theory plays a very important role in what many of us would see to be the practicalities of urban planning. And I'll just give you one example that's been on my mind. So we've just started work on what we're calling housing justice in unequal cities. And as part of that, I had the occasion to co-teach with one of our activists in residence, something called Activist Graduate School and it was a class on housing justice activism. And it brought in key movement leaders in LA talking about some of the most pressing housing justice issues in that city, be it the fight against evictions, be it rent control, community land trusts, but the readings were unapologetically historical and theoretical. One of the first pieces we read was a brilliant essay by K. Sue Park, who is a postdoc fellow in the critical race studies program at the UCLA School of Law, which is on foreclosure as an instrument of confiscating land. And what K. Sue Park does through meticulous historical empirical research is to show how foreclosure emerges as such an instrument in the context of settler colonialism. It wasn't even the application of British property law to the United States. It was a very particular colonial invention to seize the lands of Native American people. But the moment we do that sort of thinking, that history, that critical race studies approach becomes a very practical tool in the ongoing struggles by housing justice movements to de-legitimize foreclosure and to make evident the ways in which it is part of a long history of land grabs from black, brown, and indigenous communities. So this for me is precisely sort of one example of why what seems totally impractical, thinking about settler colonialism, might in fact lead us in very practical directions. And for me, those directions are precisely what social movements on the ground are doing every day. My question is something that I think continually comes up in discussions of abolition are where to find a how to balance abolition with reform and how to critically critique reform as often times a method of perpetuating the systems that exist by making them more digestible. But at the same time reform is much more pragmatic and tangible often than abolishing property ownership or something like that. So while those are the ideals, something I've heard in the past is this idea of non-reformist reform, which is kind of the reformism with the goal of abolition. But it's hard to materialize, I guess, and I'm asking about your thoughts on that debate between reform and abolition and how to merge the two. It's an excellent question. And one that I feel I wrestle with every day, the Institute wrestles with it. It came up constantly in activist graduate school as we heard from movement. It's come up in criminal justice reform. So while the goal might be to abolish the prison industrial complex and the state's perverse investment in it, it doesn't mean the criminal justice reform is not important. It was interesting at activist graduate school to hear from many of the movements that are leading the fights for housing justice in Los Angeles at the moment. And many of them talked about how victories matter, that a certain wins matter, right? And sometimes those wins have to be horizons we can see, but those wins matter when there is, in fact, that more ambitious horizon, right? So one example of this would be the fight for rent control. We lost Proposition 10 in California that would have been an important step towards statewide frameworks that would have enabled rent control in cities and counties that don't have it. If rent control had been achieved, it still would have been a modest reform of what our structures of displacement and dispossession in our cities. And yet what rent control would also allow us to do is to keep in mind what that more ambitious horizon might be, whether it be a rethinking of land or a rethinking of landlordism itself. So I would argue that what matters here, as I noted, are the ways in which there is the practicality of the frontline, but for me, the most inspiring front lines are those that are shaped by these quite deep lines of thought, the ones that I talked about today that have been particularly on my mind, are the black radical tradition, decolonial philosophy, but there are many others. And I feel that that philosophical work is absolutely crucial. I will say one other thing. There's a paradox that runs through my talk today that I hope you've picked up on. So on the one hand, I'm making an argument about the relationship between state protection and state violence and saying this lies at the heart of liberal inclusion, right? On the other hand, I ended by thinking about the role of the state in abolition democracy. So one can argue that what had been thinking about the role of the state that is a highly reformist approach to freedom. One can also argue that it is, as many black geography scholars have noted, a re-enchantment of democracy itself. So sometimes what seems reformist might not be that, but I think the two exist in entanglement with each other for sure. We're very preoccupied right now with ecological crisis and also the opportunity that it creates for these deep social and radical movements, including the just transition movements. But you didn't speak to it, I know in part because you had a lot to speak to and it was a wonderful lecture. So I'm wondering if you could bring that angle in and whether in fact some of the activism motivating the Green New Deal has an opportunity. This is a segue from what you just said for some kind of reform of the state. And my other point was just, we did the Million Dollar Block Project. I didn't, but the Spatial Design Lab here did. And that actually led to a little bit of reform, which was very exciting. So I was wondering whether you were inspired by that work here or this is completely independent and whether there's been any also action based on that really compelling work that you showed us on that. So thank you for both questions. For the first, I didn't talk about just transition and the Green New Deal because that is not my expertise, right? I would say a bunch of absolutely wonderful colleagues at UCLA who are thinking about this, including two of my colleagues in urban planning, Kian Goh and Liz Karslav. I think that precisely certain forms of crisis shifts the common sense. I think it's gonna be very interesting to see if AOC shifts the common sense and what that means and what that new common sense might be. In the spheres of organizing that I'm more involved in such as housing, such as displacement, the dispossession of land, there is in fact a shift in common sense that has come out of this incredible thing that we so gently call the housing crisis, right? That is so visible in our cities and that is about utter dehumanization as well. And out of it has come forms of collective action and mobilizing, say the tenants unions. That I did not imagine a decade ago that I would see and that I would have any opportunity to contribute to and participate in. So I do think it is possible to shift that common sense and partly in the work that we've been doing at the Institute, we've been thinking very much about other parts of the world that allow us to create a new common sense here in the United States. Million Dollar Hoods led by my colleague, Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez is in fact inspired by Million Dollar Blocks. And as Professor Hernandez and her colleagues would say, inevitably such endeavors lead to a new common sense and also lead to reform. So in Los Angeles, this was the first time that researchers managed to get data in raw form from the L.A. Police Department and the L.A. Sheriff's Department and they've broken down this data to show how a city that keeps saying that it doesn't have money to house it's poor, right? Doesn't have money to invest in schools can spend a billion dollars a year on incarcerating people much of it for nonviolent crimes. And that work has meant, for example, one of their latest reports has been on policing the houseless. So showing the ways in which the city of Los Angeles in this case disproportionately spends money on policing the houseless and particularly black and brown and indigenous houseless bodies. What that does is of course shift the policy debates around state investment and disinvestment. What I love about these sorts of mapping projects is that they make legible these broader questions around coloniality and imperialism and brings them down literally to the scale of blocks and neighborhoods and makes legible, it sort of re-enchants democracy, right? In somewhat libertarian fashion it allows us to make an argument about my tax dollars and how they're spent. But from a social democratic perspective or from a radical democratic perspective it allows us to really occupy the state and take back the state. As you know Ananya, I have no background in urban planning or architecture but I'm just really curious to maybe hear you speak a little bit about this idea of practicality and if you see any way to maybe possibly change or expand what practicality actually is because I feel like there's probably a very narrow idea of what practical means in a lot of people's minds and I'm wondering if that's one of the ways to try to get at some sort of forward movement. I think that's a very good point in many of the spectacular social movements, Occupy Wall Street, Movement for Black Lives, I would argue were both practical and thoroughly impractical. But I think part of the work of changing what practical means, changing what theory might mean. So urban planning in particular likes to use quite strategically and persistently this divide between theory and practice and the PhD students and I were having a lovely chat about this earlier today and for me it's a debilitating divide and it's a depoliticizing divide and part of this is precisely what counts as practical, right? So is a 15 year struggle towards land reforms and reparations practical or not? I would say it's totally practical, right? But it also means that we've got to re-signify what theory is. One of the reasons why at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy we said from the very beginning that we were gonna have programs such as an activist in residence or that we were gonna journey in solidarity with movements was precisely to re-signify what counts as theory. So I'm gonna say that the best urban theorists I know are not necessarily at elite universities. They are on the front lines a struggle. Their citationary structures might be different from ours but not even that. I would bet that they've read more Du Bois and Fanon than most of us, right? But their work, often because it is not published in a format that I'm totally complicit in as editor of Iger, the peer reviewed article, right? Since their work does not travel in that way it is not authorized as theory with a capital T and this is a much bigger conversation about what counts as theory in urban planning, urban studies, geography, right? But this in particular I think is crucial that if we were to do a history of ideas and a history of theory, right? As Du Bois does a theory of history it means restoring agency to key ideas that have been produced by those who are not often counted as a theorist and intellectuals at their time but whose ideas have in fact been absolutely essential both to immediate practicalities and these long horizon practicalities that I'm talking about. That's a really great take on that in the sense the potential of the planning field as more of a forerunner in terms of being more open to scholars of other areas in bringing in theories of racial studies and black studies but also planning scholars particularly that I think the younger generations to really engage in actions in their research and really engage in a way with theory in somewhat non-traditional ways I think they still struggle in academia but I think we're seeing more of that and I hope that's also a one way in terms of bringing planning closer to practice. I agree with you. I think planning absolutely has that potential. I think we have to realize that potential. One of the reasons why I often talk very openly about my discipline is precisely to remind what are called junior scholars, our PhD students, our assistant professors that they don't have to abide by these forms of silencing that they can do the work that perhaps our generations and that they can do the work that challenges these associations and disciplines but in some ways if they take that knee, we as a discipline will have to think about how we in fact support and stand in solidarity, right? And that to me is a discussion that we've had sometimes but not in any meaningful way in most of our departments and associations. Hi, I'd like to expand the conversation a bit more in terms of geographical boundaries. So far we've been talking primarily in countries and in places where there was a clear colonization and post-colonization structure. But I guess my question is a lot of the most unequal cities in the world today are places that in Asia where the current beneficiaries or the current aggressors so to speak are not necessarily the former colonial powers but people of the same color, people of the same race or the same background who also suffered under colonization. And I suppose colonization in that sense or slavery or land grabbing in the past provides a useful moral and historical narrative to poke at the existing structural inequalities but how do you recommend we take that on in countries where that narrative isn't so clear? So that takes me back to some of my earlier work so absolutely the conversation here was very much about settler colonial societies and a very specific set of settler colonial societies and the ways in which we might think then about a possessive investment in whiteness or think about dismantling power. So in the context of say some of the work that I've done with Iowa Ong on what we called Asian urbanism, welding cities, we were very focused on the ways in which these south-south flows of capital and expertise, particularly urban planning expertise, what we called inter-Asian circulations were not liberatory alternatives to global north, global south relationships. They were not a liberatory alternative to the role of USAID or World Bank or the Apparatus of International Development. In fact, we were very interested in how these were the new cartographies of hegemony. And what was striking to us was the ways in which Asia emerged as a symbol, as an ideology, as a citation, if you will, to produce these forms of hegemony, to make an argument about why the Asian world-class city was better than the first world world-class city. Why Asian models of urban planning were more humane, more green. And so I think it absolutely behooves us to play close attention to these multiple articulations of capitalism and historical difference and to think about the ways in which particular histories are mobilized in each of these contexts. That there are, in fact, histories of racial capitalism that are being mobilized and interpolated, but they're not the histories I talked about today. And that work needs to be done diligently, and this is why I think it's very difficult to have a universal paradigm of planning justice. I think we've got to very much think from place. Ruthie Gilmour, whose work I've cited many times, is one of the most important abolitionist geographers of our time, has this wonderful line called freedom is a place. And I think thinking very much about that relationship between freedom and place is crucial. We very much, if I could say on behalf of the audience, appreciate your sharing your thoughts and sharing your activism with us, and we very much look forward to reading more of your work and more conversation with you. Thank you, Ruby.