 Hi Kendall. Hello, sorry I'm just coming out of another class. Yes. You know, oh it's slightly perverse because we're doing everything from our computers, those of us who are teaching remotely, we don't really program the time between things. So I'm still a little discombobulated but it's very nice to see you all and to see my dear friend, Professor Kurgan, whom I've never, this is, this is our baptism by Zoom because, well we've been on Zoom before, we did Passover on Zoom, but this is our first time at Columbia or on our digital campus together. So I'm delighted to be here with you. Thanks for inviting me. No, thank you for coming. We're very excited. We met you during the CGCO event and we're super excited to have you. And then just to give you a little brief that Ragnar's gonna present first and then Felipe and then you can go third and then Laura's gonna open up for the round table. Great. Yes, I'm gonna start sharing the screen so we can start the event. Can everyone see my screen? Mm-hmm. Great. So good evening, everyone, and thank you for coming. My name is Alice. I'm a 30-year student in the Master of Architecture program degree at Columbia University and I'm originally from Sao Paulo, Brazil and one of the co-directors of Latin GSEP. Latin GSEP is an interdisciplinary student organization in the Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation dedicated to the promotion, discussion and reflection of contemporary issues and ideas in Latin America. The overarching theme selected by Latin GSEP for the semester is Alterity. Alterity refers to the acknowledgement of the existence of oneself through the capacity to recognize the other as such, a singular subjective person. Alterity is a session process to achieve empathy, the capacity to put ourselves in someone else's shoes. If we cannot see the other, we cannot respect them. Or if we can only see the other as a negation of oneself, we cannot relate. This semester, Latin GSEP is working on a variety of projects related to the theme of Alterity. As we speak, we are launching the call for submission for our new publication titled Pathio. Pathio welcomes submission from all creators with a focus in Latin America subjects. We invite you to submit any project, provocation, interview or imagination that you have created that addresses the theme of Alterity in Latin American context. For information and about submission and guidelines, please check the Pathio's website and Instagram. The links will also be in the Zoom chat. So, Latin GSEP's conversation series will continue to explore the relevant theme of Alterity after tonight's event as well. Our next events include herbal fabric and scale on a verbal test, and our keynote event on Alterity and the Third Landscape on Disabled First. The events in the conversation series are co-curated with Professor Ana Deets, co-sponsored by GSEP and the Institute of Latin American Studies and supported by Columbia Global Center Rio and Santiago. So tonight, Latin GSEP would like to welcome you and all the panelists, Dr. Ragnaramos, Felipe Correa, Dr. Cano Tomas, as well as moderator Laura Curgan to mapping and authorship. Tonight's event aims to bring forth the question of mapping as a tool to define and redefine landscapes that expose the concerns, priorities and values of the author and the society around them. This exercise of recognition to define the author informs the construction of place and space, creating implications on the Latin community in Latin America and the United States. On this note, I would like to invite Professor Ana Deets to introduce tonight's panelists. Thank you, muted Professor Deets. Sorry for that. So I was thanking everyone for being here and especially thanking the panelists for their time and for their wisdom. This event is, I can say, I think a direct result of the powerful movement that happened in our streets this summer. And it was very interesting and very, very good to talk to the students about all of these issues and then to see them act upon them. This word altarity is so powerful. And it's interesting enough, a word that I don't think Americans use a lot. So I'm very curious to see the discussions that we're going to have around it. Our first speaker is going to be Dr. Wagner Hamos. Dr. Hamos is an associate professor at the University of Puerto Rico. He is the author of the book Queer Sites in Global Contexts, Technologies, Spaces and Otherness, which showcases a variety of cross-cultural perspectives that foreground the physical and online experiences of LGBTQ people living in a variety of places in the world. His doctoral thesis, Spatial Practices, Digital Traces, uses GPS apps as a lens through which he can analyze how users construct alternative embodiments and spatial relations. Is that right? Hagnish? Our second panelist, Filippi Kohen. I'm trying to unmute myself. He's a founder and managing partner of Somatic Collaborative. He is currently professor and chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Virginia. And prior to joining UVA, Professor Kohia was associate professor and director of the Urban Design Degree Program at Harvard University, Graduate School of Design. His most recent book, Sao Paulo, A Graphic Biography, released in 2018, is a bilingual edition that traces the history of the city's urban form. And then finally, we'll have Dr. Kendall Thomas, Laura's friend. He is a Nash professor of law at Columbia University and scholar of comparative constitutional law and human rights. Dr. Thomas is the co-founder and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia Law School, where he leads interdisciplinary projects and programs that explore how law operates as one of the principal makers of meaning in society. He is a founder of Amanda the 13th, a movement to amend the U.S. Constitution to add enforced prison labor. And then joining the speakers, we have Professor Laura Kurgan to moderate our discussion later. Professor Kurgan is a professor of architecture at Columbia GSAP, an author of Close Up at a Distance, Mapping Technology and Politics. As director of the Center for Spacy Research, she has used mapping as well as data visualization, collection and analysis to create, and here I quote her, a critical reflection on the limits and ideologies of both data and its representation. So I think we can begin with Hagnet. Can you see my screen? Yes. Well, thank you for the introduction, Anna. And thank you, Latin GSAP for inviting me to talk tonight. And hello to everyone who's joining us. I've seen some of my family members and students are here. So that's pretty cool. My name is Regner. On Instagram, I'm Regner.xyz. If you want to know more about my work, I'm going to try to go really, really fast so you don't have a lot of time. So I just want to put these three books out there, which are three really important books that really inform my work. The first one is Samuel Delaney's book, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. The second one is Site Writing, the Architecture of Art Criticism by Jane Randall. And the third one is San Juan Gay, Conquista de un Espacio Urbano de Mi Nuestro Cuarente Ocho de Mi Nuestro Cuarente Uno, from a Puerto Rican historian Javier Laureano. And they really helped me think about the work of how I can tackle issues of architecture and queerness from a Caribbean context in Puerto Rico, where there's very, very little that's been done or mapped out. So through my work, I look for different ways to think about architecture and the politics of space with, against, from, through, across and towards queerness. This use of preposition is intentional and it's something that I borrow from Samuel Delaney and Jane Randall. And I do this through different ways. Primarily my research methods are site specific events, writing, drawing, making, and most recently, cartography, or my attempt at cartography. And by no means an expert and I'm trying to find my way around it. So I thought that I would just kind of introduce you briefly to my work to let you know how it's unraveled and where it's at now. So the first thing that I want to mention is L-Site, which is where I do my writing and where I put all my research. It's a performative writing tool, but it's also really helpful to keep my research updated all the time. The other one is Lost Sites, which is my latest exhibition that I did here at the University of Puerto Rico and this was funded by the Fondos Institucionales para la Investigación. And I want to show that so that I can explain how I've gotten to Querotopia, which is my recent project, which has just been awarded funding this term for the next two years. So it's in diaper stage and this conversation I'm hoping will really help me think about the material that I am going to be tackling for the next two years. So I want to introduce you to my website. This is L-Site. It's my research method, as I mentioned, and everything that I put here is a mix of writing, queer events, exhibitions I've done, ongoing research projects, and I just want to briefly go through the work that I do with Lost Sites, which is the exhibition that I mentioned. I think we're still seeing your PDF, Dr. Sorry to interrupt. Oh, sorry. Yes. All right. So this is my last research project that I had in 2017 to 2019. And what I was setting out to do is to map out spaces where the LGBTQ community in Puerto Rico gathered. So I did these series of maps and they were based off the US quadrangles, the US TOCO maps. And I drew them up, locating not exactly the precise building, but the areas that were being appropriated by the queer community. And as I drew them up on an AutoCAD map, I was also thinking about them in three dimensional form. So I was putting together this compilation of maps, axonometrics, and models, as well as you can see here, some projections of the buildings from the outside. There's really been nothing done in Puerto Rico to document these spaces and the spaces of the LGBTQ community, apart from this book that I mentioned, which is Javier LaRiana's book, but his book, only documents from 1948 until 1991. So I'm trying to follow in where he left off and really address it from an architectural standpoint, which is something that's really, really behind in the island. So part of what I'm trying to do is to clear the process of model making itself, creating these colorful kind of archipelagos that are kind of informed also by the archipelagic studies field. Here I post all my events so that I'm very interactive on social media, for instance, so this is where I pinpoint everybody. I think that's also part of my research method, engaging with people who who are interested in my work. From this project in particular, what I started to notice when I started doing these maps, right here, these orange ones, was that some of the conditions of Puerto Rican queer spaces, and I say the word queer as this huge immense umbrella of possible non normative identities, is that once you print out these maps, they become outdated almost immediately because the queer community here is so active that a lot of these spaces get borrowed for a particular night of the year or a particular night of the week or a particular night of a month. And so the space itself isn't necessarily an LGBTQ owned venue, but rather an appropriate space that's lent by the bar owners usually to peak bar sales on off nights. So also one thing that's been happening, especially after Hurricane Maria in 2017, and most recently because of COVID, is that a lot of the spaces that we do have that are properly LGBTQ spaces have closed. So we've been in a recession for I don't even know how long it's been. And the hurricane only made it worse. It really just stabilized the economy and made people leave the island because of work. There was job opportunities. And because of COVID, most of these places haven't really opened. So the act of mapping is only makes sense if it's digital. So I was thinking about this new project, Queer Topia, and what possibilities I had to translate these maps and think about them as artifacts that have a lot of people think that they are really objective and they present harsh truth, but really they're very carefully curated and they actually exclude a lot of information. What I partially argue is how they've excluded the LGBTQ community in Puerto Rico. So I've been thinking about what kind of information these maps will present. And I think I'm quite early to this conversation because we've only just started thinking about what this map is going to do and what it's going to be used for. And I'm sure that I'll have more to share in the coming months, but it's still under design. But basically this proposal, what I'm doing with Queer Topia is creating a web based interactive map that acts as the first architectural and urban register of LGBTQ plus spaces in Puerto Rico. And I'm going to be trying to do that from the 1960s until today. So what I'm saying is that by recognizing spaces of queerness within contemporary cartographic practices, Queer Topia, which is the name of the map, inserts the buildings and spaces that are significant to the Puerto Rican LGBTQ plus community into the island's architectural history, into its cultural infrastructure, into its urban memory and it's hopefully its political future. So the map, the way that I foresee it is that it's both an archival artifact where users can input data, but also a speculative research method and that I'll be able to test innovative approaches between the urban studies and socially oriented GIS technologies. So what I want people to be able to do is to interact this map and let us know about the spaces that we don't know. And part of some of the questions that I'm wondering is how can digital mapping help generate knowledge about Queer histories and spaces and practices in Puerto Rico? And can this map suggest new ways of thinking about the island's built environment? We've also been having a lot of hate crimes lately in Puerto Rico where many trans women have been murdered. And I'm wondering how this Queer map can be used to empower and protect our community. I think there's a huge problem when we think that LGBTQ plus spaces in Puerto Rico have been excluded from the very representations of space and from architectural discourse almost entirely. So what I'm trying to do with Quertopia is to consider the act of mapping as a political act in itself and it's a reclaiming of space in the search for equality in the right to the city. So in that way, Quertopia aims to be a historical register of the contemporary resource and a future tool for advocating for LGBTQ plus civil rights and democratic inclusion. Thank you so much, Ragnar. We're going to follow up with Filipe Coghia's presentation. Good evening, everyone. Very, very happy to be here. And before I start my presentation, of course, a huge thank you to Latin GSEP for organizing this event and to my co-panelists and to Laura for moderating this. I was given a host-disabled participant screen sharing. So you should be good to go, Professor. I'm good to go. Thank you. Can you see my screen? Yes. Perfect. So I was told I should speak for five minutes. So I have condensed a lecture that's generally an hour to five minutes. So I'm going to try my best, but it might be seven. So I'm going to speak briefly today about this project that we just finished called Sao Paulo, a Graphic Biography. But before I actually go into the specifics of the project, I would just like to introduce, through one slide, sort of the model through which sort of my body of work has developed over time. And for us, both in the office through Somatic Collaborative, as well sort of through teaching at the University of Virginia, it is very important sort of that we develop a body of work that is iterative and that actually is explored through many different avenues. And in that context, sort of my work oscillates between sort of design pedagogy, larger applied research projects, where we ask sort of larger questions on a longer timeframe, and sort of the immediacy of professional practice. And for me, it is the dialogue between these two conditions that becomes extremely important. And our portfolio specifically in the office also lays between 50% sort of design commissions, 50% these larger sort of research project commissions. And it is within these larger research project commissions where the idea of mapping, or more importantly, drawing the city becomes extremely important for us. For us, by drawing the city, by drawing it, we edit it. By editing, we can interpret. And by interpreting, we can transform territories. And this is a process that for us is extremely important. And within this context, about two or three years, three and a half years ago, we were actually approached by the Haddad Foundation to develop a larger vision plan for the Arco Tiette and to rethink the transformation of post-industrial land between the city center and the Tiette River. And this for us was a fascinating task because of all the cities in the world, Sao Paolo has the largest amount of inner city post-industrial lands. There's no other city with more square kilometers of post-industrial land. On the one hand, on the other hand, it is heavily disconnected from the city center. So in terms of our initial task, our project actually revolved around the transformation, around giving a new identity to the post-industrial. The issue with post-industrial is that it's always on what it was and not what it should be. It's always defined based on its historical use. And for us, it was important to begin to think about this area in terms of a new inner city district for affordable housing that could only happen through the negotiation of the sort of through the rescaling of mobility infrastructure, the reimagining of a larger hydrological project for the area, and then the reorganization of block structures in relationship to new uses. And this was sort of the task or the mission of the project. But for us, looking at Sao Paolo was for sure a much more expansive and ambitious task. And for me, it was specifically important to develop a body of work, a graphic biography that would help us understand how a city that it in 1842 had 20,000 inhabitants. Today is a metro region that has more than 25 million inhabitants, depending on how you count. And what is the larger history of its urban form? If you go into a bibliography of Sao Paolo, you find thousands of books. But until we produced this book, there was not a single book that would tell you its history through the lens of urban form. And for us, that was extremely, extremely important. Specifically, understanding Sao Paolo's relationship to its larger sort of territory and sort of understanding that its history is sort of strictly tied to a much larger territorial project, which was actually the transformation of the lower Paraná River into a hydroelectric Eden, a project modeled after the TVA, which provided a steady source of energy that created sort of the security for investors to turn Sao Paolo into the industrial capital of Latin America. And then, of course, its transition from industrial capital to a service economy. If the state of Sao Paolo would be a country, it would be the third largest economy in Latin America after Brazil and Mexico. So the first part of the book, which is what I'll focus in the next couple of slides, primarily looks at the history of Sao Paolo, not as a city that was a center, but as a city that grew as a node between the Porto Santos and the larger sort of hinterland and interior, and the larger sort of complexity of geometries and geographies that sort of evolved from this larger sort of regional connection east-west. And equally as important, the urban projects that have actually shaped it over time, one of my favorite spaces in the city, the Centro Cultural Sao Paolo, a great cultural center that's built by giving value to residual land that sits between a highway, a street, and above the air rights of the metro line. So to make a long story short, the first part of the book looks at Sao Paolo through eight different lenses, a hydrology, grids and grains, vertical growth, mobility, open space, housing, industry, economic hotspots and their migration over the city, in many ways, creating a larger sort of cartographic set that would then begin to inform a series of transformations in the area that we're talking about. And of course, this is much sort of broadly documented in the book, but just to give you an idea of sort of how sort of this larger research then sort of sets the framework, establishes a territorial grammar for the intervention that we proposed, I'll just sort of explain the project in these three slides. This is the city in 1842, sort of occupying a higher elevation along sort of a free-floating plain that was the river. This is the city in 2017, where we actually see what is called in Sao Paolo the rectification of the project, putting a stray jacket along sort of the river, and in many ways establishing an extremely utilitarian relationship to the river. The river was never part of the life of the city. It was always utilized in support of something, in support of industry primarily. And then developing a proposal, which here I'm just explaining with one image, but that makes an argument that sort of from both a sustainability and public space, sort of from a sustainability standpoint, from a hydrological standpoint, and from an open space perspective, the city needs to establish a new contractual agreement with the river. And that a river that once upon a time had a very, in many ways, utilitarian or almost pornographic relationship with the city, it was always sort of put to the service, to the use of something, needs to be rethought in terms of a much more romantic relationship with the city. And in a way, by giving the space back to the river, the city can actually reimagine a new role for the river within the city. This, of course, is not sort of both the book and the proposal is not a project that is going to be built tomorrow, but it is actually a project that both through the drawings, through the mappings, but also through the design strategies, is meant to ignite the imagination of Paulistas. And on the one hand, it's meant to open a conversation about the transformation of the river, but on the other, it's meant to sort of showcase not just the challenges, but the many lessons that Sao Paulo, as a city, offers across the world. And I always like to show these two images, sort of a project in one of the main pages of FOIA, the Sao Paulo, one of the main newspapers in the city, but also the way the work has actually circulated through many different exhibitions, in this case, as part of an exhibition that just opened in the Seoul city hall in South Korea, about sort of urban best practices across the world. And I'll finish with this image of the exhibition we opened at Escola da Cidade in Sao Paulo, and sort of looking forward to an exciting conversation. Thank you. Thank you, Felipe. Great timing. Now, Dr. Kenneth Thomas, we open the floor for you. Very good. So, I need to, if I may, share a screen. Yes, you should be able to. All right. Let's see how I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this, and then I'm going to do this. Then I'm going to do this. Okay. Full screen. Do you want to put? Am I sharing a screen? I'm not yet scaring a screen. Let me just... It's not full screen. Yeah, you should go into present mode. Not slide shell mode. Let's see. I'm sorry. Yeah, you go slide shell, Kendall. Slide shell. Slide shell, yeah. Play from start. There we go. All right. Perfect. All right. So, I must confess, I don't really know what my charge was. I agreed to do this as I said at the beginning of the evening, because Laura Curgan had been invited to moderate, and she and I had been engaging in a number of conversations about possible collaborations, and I thought this might be an opportunity publicly to jumpstart some of that conversation. So, I must confess, I don't know whether I was charged to talk about Latin America or whether I can talk about something else. So, this is the moderators or the panel organizers' worst nightmare, because I'm going to talk about what I want to talk about, which is a set of observations organized under the rubric of the development of underdevelopment, race, rezoning, and the right to the city. And the Latin American city that I'm going to talk about is New York, because the fact of the matter is, and I'm not saying anything that we don't already know, is that New York is part of, is a crossroads for several diasporas, and the neighborhood in which I live, Harlem, is certainly one of the central nodes of the, the triptych point, or triptych point for many different cultures, global cultures. So, I want to frame my remarks with an observation that's inspired by the preface of Richard Rothstein's 2017 book, The Color of Law, a forgotten history of how our government segregated America. Rothstein points out two of the many euphemisms we Americans have coined, quote, so that polite company doesn't have to confront our history of racial exclusion, unquote. He writes, quote, when we consider problems that arise when African Americans are absent in significant numbers from schools that whites attend, we say we seek diversity, not racial integration. When we wish to pretend that the nation did not single out African Americans in a system of segregation specifically aimed at them, we define them as just another people of color. So, I think it's important to highlight the ways we talk about specifically my subject, which is zoning and zoning law. Because I think if we use the language of zoning to describe the radical transformation of the racial geography, the racial and ethnic geography of New York City, we in effect do similar semantic work of the kind that deracialized terms like diversity or de-black in terms like people of color do in capturing the specificity of the uses of state power as a mechanism of politics of racial geography, which is about exclusion, right? So, I want to say as a threshold matter that zoning for me understood as a racial project is a crucial tool or technology, legal tool or technology in U.S. racial capitalism. So, the U.S. state itself, like the U.S. state itself, American law and American political economy are, in the words of the scholars, Michael Omi and Howard Wynet, racial formations, racial meanings, and here I'm quoting them, pervade U.S. society extending from the shaping of individual racial identities to the structuring of collective political action within government institutions as well as society. So, it's obvious once said that the American state at both the national state and local levels is a racial state and that American capitalism is a racial capitalism and zoning law, zoning policy, my subject, really sits at the nexus of the racial state and of racial capitalism because to use a term coined by my colleague at Columbia Law School, Katarina Pistor, U.S. law and U.S. capitalism both codify race. So, I want to say a few words about New York zoning law and specifically a policy that has codified race and which uses law to advance the interests of racial capitalism. And I stress the racial dimensions and determinants of U.S. law and capitalism because I believe the time has come to abandon once and for all the idea that what we lawyers call racial discrimination is a discreet, insular, episodic, or aberrant subversion of an otherwise colorblind, race-neutral, legal, political, and economic order. To the contrary, consider the street rebellions against police violence that took place in the streets of our country starting over the summer and which have continued. Now, for those who are willing to listen, the protests organized by the Movement for Black Lives and others provide a national seminar on the foundational role that institutional and structural racism have played in shaping policing and police policy. The target of the national movement to end the police beating and shooting of African-Americans and Latinx residents of cities and towns all over the country is not just a few dirty cops or a few bad police departments. The movement... Kendall, can I ask you a question? Are you just speaking to one slide? Or have you just speaking to one slide? Great, great. Okay, that's what I thought. I understand that the problem is not merely punitive policing, but rather what we constitutional lawyers call the police power itself and the police power state. What I'm going to do... I'm going to exit the formal... Oops, this won't work. No, I'm going to exit. Yeah, I'm going to exit. So now, can you... Let me just stop the sharing so you can see me, right? The Movement for Black Lives understands that the problem is not merely punitive policing, but rather what we constitutional lawyers call the police power itself. And the police power state, which from its inception has made the violent taking of black and brown life, of black and brown property. For those of you who've been watching Lovecraft Country and the story it told in the last episode on Sunday of the Tulsa riots and the theft of black property. The Movement for Black Lives understands that the police power and the police state has made the violent taking of black and brown life part of the essential work of policing in America. So the demand of the Movement in short is not merely to stop discriminating on the basis of race to quote Chief Justice Roberts, but to dismantle the legal, political and economic regime of racial domination. Now in the 1847 license cases, Chief Justice Tawny offered a description of the police power that is still valid. The police power Tawny wrote is quote, the power of sovereignty, the power to govern men and things within the limits of its dominion. So in my remaining minutes, I wanted to consider a use of the putatively race neutral police power here in New York, which is not a withdrawal so much as a redistribution of economic power and resources through the tax system, zoning law and housing policy. New York's 421 abatement and subsidy program. I want to say in brief that while the 421A policy, which is a city policy and the regime of zoning, of which it is a part, was packaged and sold as a way to develop housing and wealth in the city's black and brown communities. It was anything but indeed the story of the 421A program in New York is a story of the ways in which formally colorblind development policies are used as a tool and the use of the police power has been used to underdevelop the welfare and well-being of black and brown communities. Now the 421A program was basically, is basically a story about neoliberal public and private partnerships. In which a city in effect allowed the most powerful political and economic block in the city, mainly private real estate developers to rewrite and reorder the priorities of the city with respect to housing citizens and to in effect hijack what might have been a city policy of building public housing, affordable public housing by instead developing private real estate, private housing under a policy that required private real estate developers to allocate 20% of projects or to build additional public housing off-site in exchange for tax subsidies of real estate projects that built private housing. So I am talking to you from one of those buildings in Harlem. I live in a building that was built as a condominium which set aside 20% of the units to be sold below market. Right? I'm in a market rate unit, but there were several of the units a small number of units, 20%, several of the units which are sold below market, although they weren't truly affordable. Right? And this was a deal that the city reached with private real estate developers. So this 80-20 formula has changed the racial geography of the city. I very often talk to communicate this about a film by John Sayles. It's a feature length film called The Brother from Another Planet. And it tells a story of an alien who comes from another planet who looks phenotypically black played by the actor Joe Morton. And he comes to New York City and there's a scene in the film on the old subway which most of you are too young to remember where there's a guy hustling on the train who says to this alien from another planet played by the actor Joe Morton, you want to see a trick? I can show you a trick. He says, when we get to the next subway stop, I'm going to make all the white people get off the bus, off the train. And when the train gets to 96th Street, all the white people leave the subway and it's only black and Latino and Latina passengers remain. That was the New York City I arrived at in 1983 when I came to New York. You simply did not see white people traveling into Harlem or into the Bronx on the two, three train line. They would have gotten off at 59th Street on the A train. So the racial geography of the city was actually part of the material culture of our transportation system. But the racial geography of the city, as you all know, has changed. It has changed radically. So New York's 421A tax incentive and subsidy scheme and the use by New York of the sovereign police power which are part of our federalism which is the way our political system is structured to allocate power between the national and state governments. It seems to me that the 421A tax policy is one that offers us an example of how zoning policy and zoning decisions have been used to perpetuate a color blind regime of racial sovereignty and of racial dominion. But it's one that is secreted in the interstices of a color blind deployment of the zoning and taxing power. The 421A tax abatement lowers the taxes of real estate developers who have built real estate under the guise of providing housing to people who otherwise would not have it. But the tax scheme like all taxing policy is redistributive, right? So what is an effect happen in making the decision to do this through private rather than public means is a massive redistribution of public wealth upward, right? From the poor to the rich. As one commentator has noted although the policy was sold as a policy that would promote the creation of affordable public housing by private developers, it quote perpetuated a giveaway of public funds that could otherwise have been collected from private developers and then used to build public housing, right? Not only, so the proponents of the 421A tax transfer scheme promised that it would provide decent shelter and promote wealth creation in low income communities because people could buy apartments below market rate and build wealth. Moreover, they claimed in a typically neoliberal argument that it would achieve a more efficient allocation of public funds. In many parts of the city such as Harlem where I live the public subsidy to private real estate developers led to a precipitous decline in the black and brown population in what had historically been black and brown neighborhoods. So the program in the words of one book zoned out and displaced the very black and brown New Yorkers who's welfare and well-being it was supposed to serve. So Harlem, the historically black New York neighborhood in which I live and where Columbia is located is now predominantly white because of the government subsidized but market driven dislocation and exclusion of community communities of color. So my point in short is that the 421H PACS transfer program highlights the paradox of colorblind law and policy and reveals the underlying truth of racial capitalism that my late colleague Manning Marible underscored in his observation that the most striking fact about American economic history and politics is the brutal and systematic underdevelopment of black people. Manning Marible pointed out to us the ways in which that underdevelopment is not an aberration but has been baked into both our political system and our democratic government and the processes of policymaking that produce policies under the guise of zoning like the 421A tax abatement and it is baked into our so-called free enterprise system our capitalist system which is a system of racial capitalism that is structured deliberately and specifically to maximize black and I would add brown oppression. So capitalist development has occurred not in spite of the exclusion of black people and brown people but because of the brutal exploitation of blacks as workers and consumers and we have seen this during the COVID pandemic in which black and brown workers predominantly or disproportionately women have been essential workers yes I'm about to wrap up leading inessential lives so by calling attention to economic development law and policy as a racial politics of underdevelopment my aim has been to show or to suggest the ways in which development development policy here zoning can and must be seen for what it is a continuation of racial segregation domination and dominion by colorblind means sorry to have gone on for so long but I'm not sure I was told I'd have 10 minutes in fact I wasn't even told that I have to present I thought this was going to be a conversation so let's have a conversation okay all right that was great everyone thank you so it's it's hard to know where to start because the presentations were so different but I'm going to but I think Kendall it was great to bring the focus back back to New York and through a legal and zoning order which which really relates to the map you know to the map of the city which also is is a tool also has historically been a tool of dispossession and segregation throughout right throughout the history of New York City so what's interesting is that you didn't talk about it in terms of a map at all but the zoning the effects of the zoning were were as active as Felipe and Regner were asking for in in in some ways right so whereas Felipe was talking about say Apollo and the industrialization of the river and you were talking about it in such physical terms but those things have to have been zoned in the first place right so the the that is as you know that happens through zoning where all the industry is on the river and extracting things from the river but and then you're trying to produce an imagination through rethinking it through the very same maps that that that caused it to be so polluted and right the way the way it is now in the same way that Kendall is talking about these these racialized tools which seem to create some form of racial segregation and then do racial integration and do the exact opposite and you know Kendall those those zoning orders they were supposed to like your building be in the same building but often what happened was that a developer would build a building in midtown and then negotiate for that 20 percent to be in the Bronx or you know further east in Harlem and things like that so terrible tricks were played with the developers with that with that particular law and Regner I really love your project and it's interesting how you make the the maps so physical I don't understand I never I never never go never go that route but I'm wondering if you've seen the project querying the city have you seen the the map called querying querying the city where people write in their own experience first experience of of being gay or whatever you know it's yeah clearing the map querying the map yeah it's called querying querying the map and it's the same thing like using the space of really the space of invisibilization and of in you know where you where right you were calling it a dynamic space in Puerto Rico because things were moving around so you don't really want to map it right so I was just curious why maybe I can start I I can ask each one of your question but just start there why you've gone to cartography in the first place where you're kind of fighting against its effects and I think all three of you fighting against the effects of of of cartography and producing a kind of counter narrative but so it's a way of bringing all those three things together I'm not sure how effectively but we can start there and and have a conversation well Puerto Rico is a very interesting island because it's very small it's only 35 miles by 100 miles but it's very fragmented in terms of community it's very dependent on the car for instance and it doesn't really have a lot of urban life San Juan is probably the most city-like of all the cities in in Puerto Rico but we are a very fragmented community when I speak about community I'm talking about the LGBTQ community I think that if we are not located and marked in space it's very easy to dismiss us and I think that that is something common not just for LGBTQ people but all minorities it's a really easy way to dismiss an entire group of people so architecture here has been largely responsible for that the spaces of the LGBTQ community but it's interesting because because Kendall is saying the you know the precise opposite that the maps are used to describe you know to racialize and discriminate so you're wanting those same tools to reveal and to expose is that and to connect is that fair to say it to connect yeah yes I don't think that that it's about wanting to use the map to want to look like any other form of mapping I think that particularly what I'm trying to do with Crotopia is to map things that aren't usually mapped so for instance pleasure and joy and safety which are something that's so important to the queer community but I think that it's very I think politics are it's largely responsible here we're living in an island where still today we have really religious groups of people trying to take control of the governorship and the politics and they want to other the LGBTQ community even more I think that the map would serve as a tool as a political artifact where we can locate ourselves and make ourselves known and I don't know how yet but I think that that's what I'm attempting to do to Crotopia is to use it as a tool for political future for reclaiming a space because I think people think that there's that we're not worthy of space or that we don't deserve the right to the city but it's very easy to be disposed of Yeah, okay Kendall or Felipe do you have a response to that? Well, I was intrigued by and I should have made the point that my intervention really is a kind of genealogy of mapping which is to say as Laura observed that the zoning and planning decisions are a condition of possibility right and or prologomenon to mapping that occurs later but the actual redrawing right of the city landscape takes place through zoning and planning and so in the Harlem case between 2000 and 2013 the population of Harlem grew by 18 percent there was a net loss of five percent in the numbers of Black residents in Harlem and a net loss of 13 percent in the numbers of Latinx Harlem residents there was a 455 percent growth in the number of white residents and so Harlem is now majority white it is to use a phrase of Elijah Anderson a white space right and so spatialization the politics of spatialization through zoning uh and planning right proceeds the the mapping of those spaces and I want to suggest that you know maps are maps of race and they're maps of political economy notwithstanding the fact the fact that professional planners are typically taught to see zoning law and the exercise of the police power of which zoning law is a part as race neutral and and the essential point that I want to make is that these spaces become racialized and then map mutually I mean I I don't I don't I don't I've never seen a map a racial map of Harlem that would represent right because maps are that's what maps are their representations that would present the spatial injustice that has led to the whitening right of Harlem and the divestment or the investment in in in white residents a subsidy to white residents that has made the displacement of black and brown Harlem residents possible okay I see my colleague Leah Meisterlin over here and I know that they that they assigned the color of law to all the planning students this semester in response to our black faculty asking us to unlearn whiteness and to you know to deal with anti-racism in the school so I'm just curious Leah can I put you on the spot in I know you'll have an opinion about what Kendall is saying as a mapper and planner yeah on both of these things for better and for worse Laura you can always put me on the spot Laura said we did ask this sort of summer reading for all of our incoming masters of planning students that's here to read the color of law so that we could use this use it as a starting point for discussions both during orientation but also through the semester I think it's been extremely valuable as a way of starting especially with first years starting to not only not only starting a discussion on the racial violence that is involved in policy and the histories of planning it's that we're implicated in and implicated within right but also to talk about the various devices of our discipline of the spatial disciplines more broadly whether that's policy making whether that's cartographic practices and technologies whether that's social science sort of data collection and I apologize a different computer just started up and you might have heard that and to be able to challenge sort of we'll say not only dominant but dominant and white narratives of the history of the profession and the professions of the built environment so I found that to be really useful thus far specifically Kendall I thought you I thought your comments I don't know I hadn't formulated a question before I was put on the spot so I just have some responses and reactions honestly to these amazing presentations yeah but Kendall I think I will probably remember for the rest of my life one phrase you used when you when you described the kind of racialized outcomes that that are often or yeah that are often sort of either excused dismissed or you know condescendingly lamented as unintended consequences or even worse like externalities as secreted from the interstices of the policy themselves right that we don't need to actually read between the lines of in order to predict the impacts and disparate or just proportional impacts on some communities over others or the because they're baked in right they're not only baked in those futures that these policies will create are bleeding from the page and and it's been a long day so my my language gets a little bit more colorful as the night goes on or like there really are they're just bleeding from the page from these sort of predictable acts of not only discrimination but I'm going to say spatial and economic and experiential violence and the map ends up being a device and a tool for this in ways that are deeply troubling but like Redner and and you are working your explorations moment I get I get why you've been brought into the cartography because it seems like you're trying to not only understand but hijack and exploit the kind of the assumed authority and legitimacy of the map as the document of spatial record right so that you can you can like inserting and us serving and demanding a place within that record by drawing one's community and oneself into spaces and means asserting that presence on that experience into history and I find that deeply moving and and reassuring in many ways and I'm so glad to see how many of our students are here with us and recent grads as well to hear exactly yeah yeah Pauline I can also see I can see there's so many who was that it's me it's Anna yeah a couple of interesting questions in the yeah I was just I was just reading all of these all of these things and Pauline Pauline was in my Puerto Rico seminar we actually Regnar we have to show you all the maps we made of Puerto Rico and the same you know we really sort of looked at the whole history of the island and its various colonizations and destructions and yeah yeah so Pauline particularly did some amazing some amazing work but what are you saying over here Pauline do you want to ask your question and we also have to talk to Felipe as well sure no problem Laura I'm right here yeah also hi Teri hi nice to see you they work together yeah yeah so it's kind of a broad question actually for both yeah do you see any risk or biases related to maps and visualizations that you have produced for Puerto Rico and Sao Paulo and if so could you please expand on what's your approach yeah yeah maybe Felipe yeah I can start yeah and I think in many ways the answer is yes mapping is never neutral right and specifically in our work a we generally sort of examine cities from a perspective that's inherently sort of extremely sort of attached to the discipline of architecture right to the larger sort of history of how architects have drawn cities and within that you actually have certain biases and certain sort of and give preference to certain things versus others but I think what's important about sort of this process is that sort of despite the approach it actually allows us to visualize sort of conditions in the city that otherwise would not be visible to the naked eye and therefore allows sort of a very different kind of discussion to start in the sort of bringing a much larger set of audiences to the table so for example as we were actually developing one of the research lines for us one of the most interesting a sort of narratives that came out of the mapping project or the mapping component of the project had to do for example that this area that sort of by the sort of municipal standards has been deemed as entirely post-industrial and a sort of is in dire need of transformation also has some of the most sort of historically important original workers housing in Sao Paulo worker housing that was originally established in relationship to the industry that actually got the lowest sort of land within the flood plain so it's highly floodable and part of this conversation now has sort of began to develop a strategy that's not just about the transformation of the territory but also about the critical conservations of certain parts and pieces so in many ways yes I think that sort of at least from our perspective mapping is always in many ways biased it has a particular sort of angle to it but I think it becomes an important tool not just to sort of visualize certain things but also to instigate debate and dissent and I think that that's where it's it's most powerful yeah it's interesting Felipe because you never do maps in a GIS way as far as I've seen your maps they're very based in in you know landscape and physical physical instantiation of things and so I'm just I'm curious why you know because I thought that was very powerful what what Kendall said that things are racialized and then mapped neutrally do you ever why do you never go why do you never go look we look at it's it's just it's interesting yeah I think we actually look at a lot of data yeah for us it's very important that sort of the work that we develop goes beyond the collection of data and actually begins to reveal certain physics sort of certain social cultural and economic perspectives from the vantage point of urban form of the form right that's yeah yeah so for example a one of the the issues that for us was very important once again in Sao Paulo is to begin to map sort of distribution of land in relationship to topography and who actually got access to that land and you begin to see that the areas that are today sort of most prone to flooding because of sort of the larger sort of straight jacket that was put on the river also begin to coincide with sort of all the land that sort of immigrants from the 40s 50s and 60s primarily Italian and later Japanese sort of occupied so I think that all of these layers are uncovered in the drawings but we attempt in many ways to be perhaps sort of more open from a perspective of urban form of the open ended in the in the interpretive nature of the of the you did the same in New Orleans as well with that that was the first time I saw that kind of work that you that you did okay any other questions from question received Ina has a question yeah okay who's that yeah Ina you mutin yeah go ahead hi hi so basically I realized in all three examples that the relationship between the author of the map and what they're trying to either expose or conceal in some examples racial zoning laws and concealing the reality behind doctoral intention behind these divisions and other parts revealing to what a lot of the population is invisible queer spaces and giving them their own space so this relationship between author and the manifestation of these non physical things in a very graphic visual form I'm sort of interested in commenting if like in the way that maps do create alterity and deciding who the map is for and who the map is made by and just wondering if any of the speakers have any advice about what us as architecture students being people who make a lot of maps should maybe unlearn or keep in mind when we're producing these new maps yeah so yeah it's a very good question yeah I mean I would just sort of answer this briefly in that I think that there is one an overproduction of maps and mapping in architecture school it's something that has become sort of that has permeated sort of all curriculums and in many ways I think there's a need to be able to sort of create I think a more rigorous sort of taxonomy and overlook at what are all these sort of mapping exercises doing and I think for me the sort of the the main answer to your question is that I think you should be less concerned with what is the map that you're doing and more concerned with what are the larger ideas that you want to push forward and then ask yourself if sort of mapping or drawing what medium is or set of media becomes sort of the most appropriate way to advance that question but I think for me the key question is always sort of sort of checking or double checking sort of the technique in real sort of consistently with the larger sort of a set of ideals that you might have set forward and I think we do see today a lot of mapping for the sake of mapping Yeah I think it's it's such a complicated question because in architecture school as a professional school you learn certain tools you know when you go off and you work in offices and you work in plan and section and perspective and you use maps and you do this right so when you're when you're in the process of trying to do things in a in a different way to produce different effects right and in your work you you you have you know you can't sort of start from scratch so you're always sort of looking at the limits of tools and the biases and the the constraints of them and also you know trying to use them in in in new ways to undo their effects so that's I think what the counter counter cartography might mean but I don't know what that means in terms of architectural representation you know like the axonometric there's so many Kendall you won't understand this because you're not in architecture school but you know you walk around the studio and when I was in architecture school axonometrics were completely prevalent and then they stopped nobody drew axonometrics now they're rampant everywhere in the school and they have a military orange and you know they they were designed to to you know show a missile going over a wall of a of an old city for on the one hand and on the other hand they were used for engineering you know to show three different sides at one time and hardly anybody thinks oh what's the history of an axonometric but most people think what is the history of a map and that a map has always been used as a you know as a as a tool of control but you don't think of that in terms of the drawing technique so I like to think of them all together but I don't I don't have any answers right now but it is I think it's a very interesting question that you're asking Inia and following up on something that Previpa said at the end of his presentation when he mentioned that these maps were intended to spark debate and conversation and confrontation I think there's one thing that that one thing that that is important is to recognize that the way that architecture students are taught to represent maps is a way is a system of representation that is legible mostly to people who study architecture so if you open up these maps to people who are not trained in an architecture school they are not going to understand it in the same way so what you present and how you present it I think one thing to keep in mind is who your audience is intended to be and I've been doing a bit of research on what Puerto Rican maps used to look like before so to help me like make decisions on the design of Queer of Tobias and I can't get the image of if you think on Puerto Rican restaurants which I'm sure that you've been to there's these placemaps that have these very kind of cartoon like maps which caricaturize certain important points in the island or certain things where different municipalities are known for and that's a system of representation that's intended for architects might think it's it's kind of basic or or cartoon like but people who are not architects understand this system of representation and in that way it's very powerful for them because they're visualizing things with the world view that they are and the vocabulary that they already have their disposal so I think that we are very trained to do things and and represent things in a particular way but that does exclude a lot of people that will see these maps and I jump in as someone who's not a professional architect but who I think can can make an observation by way of analogy because I teach students who are becoming professionals professional lawyers and what I would say is that what I say to my students is equally true of architects that is to say you have to understand that your your professional practice is embedded in a network of power relations and that therefore mapping is never only or even primarily a mere technical exercise but it is a technology a mode of representation that is either advancing or contesting relations of power many years ago I was in Chicago at it was an art show it was actually it's the first time I saw the paintings of Leon Gallup and there was another exhibit and they use words and and there was this quotation which I've never forgotten which is that the map is not the territory and the name of the thing is not the thing itself and I thought of that a few years ago the first time I went to Rio de Janeiro I had this map and I was standing in Ipanema on the beach in Leblanc on the beach with the map and on the map there was this huge area which had been rendered green and unpopulated but when I looked up I saw all these buildings and lights and I found out later that it was the favela of Vigigal where you know tens of thousands of people live right but the the map as a practice of power rendered those people invisible and so maps are regimes of visualization or of Invisibilization right and maps are ideological right so I just offer here the famous insight of Lealtes there about ideology ideology represents he says the imaginary relationship of individuals to their material conditions of existence so maps are an imaginary domain both a site and a vehicle of power in much the same way that law is and so I would just urge a critical cultivation of the consciousness of the ways in which your professional practice is always already implicated in networks of power that you can't escape but that you have to figure out ways to navigate thank you I have a shameless plug here all for it okay shameless plug captive audience of architecture students luckily at GSAP right there's the undercurrent it's not an undercurrent it's a the rocket ship of underpinning most of the cartographic oriented visual studies and seminars visual studies courses and seminars and so if this is a direction in which you find your own like toolkit moving in or your own interest in research methods and spatial research methods the sort of premises of critical cartography I know are threaded through all of Laura's courses and the shameless part is that I also know they're in mind that's totally fine yeah but there's a there's a wealth of really hard conversations about mapping practices specifically and then of course there's the there's the relationship between the map as a drawing and the plan as a drawing although they share a projective kind of or similarity they are they are different in how they're read but there's there's there's a lot of conversations that can be had and I'm just I'm excited to see that you guys have organized this conversation I'll stop talking now yeah no and I think the what's great about the way that they curated the speakers you know starting from a very personal mapping exercise which that Regner's a project which then exposes you know all kinds of politics of visibility and invisibility to Felipe's work which starts with a formal you know rendering all formal you know analysis of a city but then opens up all kinds of new imaginations of what's possible later on to Kendall's you know non-mapping you know it's not a mapping but starting with a legal term and then showing how that really activates all kinds of geographies and inequalities and spatialities you know they it was very very well curated so you know I don't know who who did that but you know sort of brings up a whole range of of methods as well that you should all keep in mind as you move forward if you're still if you're interested in these types of things any other questions where are we we're almost at nine maybe one one final question given the this is a question we received given the increasing silos and isolation in which we find ourselves in everyday life how can we ensure that a panel like this one with researchers lawmakers and practitioners working through critical analysis can take place 20 years from now digital platforms aside maybe I'll start by I don't I'm not sure if we can guarantee anything 20 years by now things are going but one thing that I will say and what I actually find very productive about sort of these kind of dialogues is that sort of by not necessarily blurring distinctions across disciplines but by finding moments of overlap I think professionals from all disciplines are in a much better position to actually engage questions of much greater complexity within the built environment and in that way I think sort of as architects as landscape architects as planners we need to continue expanding the toolkit of the discipline which in many moments is going to involve not necessarily becoming an expert at another discipline but having enough knowledge to be able to establish those conversations so for example tonight I'm actually fascinated Kendall about your sort of presentation on sort of inclusionary zoning right and 421 H where I think sort of the perspective of how sort of law shapes the built environment and its affinities to architecture and design are actually sort of quite productive and in fact maybe I'll finish this with a question for Kendall if I can which is that I'm in complete agreement that sort of inclusionary zoning has sort of failed not only sort of from a racial perspective but even from sort of a basic perspective of providing affordable housing in the numbers that it should actually provide from sort of my vantage point revisiting a new model of municipal housing would be an interesting avenue and I want to hear from the perspective of sort of land use law and implementation what do you think are the alternatives to to the model we have right now in New York City that's a great question you know I mean clearly I think these decisions about basic goods like where hospitals are cited where schools are cited what sorts of resources are provided to schools this is all the stuff that people were in the streets about right so the defund the police the call to defund the police and I always add to refund the people was a call for distributive justice right so you know I think you know in the broadest terms we need to reimagine what the right to the city means in ways that take questions of distributive justice seriously which is very hard to do in this age of radical inequality right and so I think in the first instance we need to advance a vision of decisions about the built environment as decisions that should not be controlled presumptively and exclusively by markets right but our question of democratic decision making in a way that they certainly not been in New York and which I imagine they haven't been in other cities so it's for me in the first instance a question of reimagining what the spaces of democracy and democratic justice should look like and what the claims of spatial justice as a democratic ideal for specific decisions about housing and the built environment more generally where parks are where hospitals are where schools are and what they look like where jails are for goodness sake where polluting or pollution processing plants are their whole host of decisions that have simply been taken off the agenda of democratic decision making that need to be put back on and I add one final thing to that question oh my god I hear myself yeah just reacting to this question that Luis Miguel posted I think that one thing that's really important is to acknowledge that maybe one thing that makes this viable is to have more architecture students working within public policy working within politics working within education not just going towards the traditional route of architectural practice for example in my teaching I always make a point to include non-architects and my crits as judges because they bring a different way to interpret the projects and they bring a different set of experiences and people are calling it the toolkit here I don't know if that's the same the same thing that I'm referring to right now but I hope that bringing those people make my students also appreciate people from other disciplines getting involved in architecture and then when they're practicing or teaching in 20 years they also establish those interdisciplinary collaborations so I think that this question about what the future might bring is a lot to do with what you the students of GSAP of Latin GSAP are going to do about this I don't know that it matters so much the platform I think that these will be conversations that you will have at the dinner table with friends that you will have at the pub with peers and co-workers these will be the conversations that you have with partners and that you have with students yeah I think this is a great way to put what we were trying to accomplish with this event is a lot to ask us like how do we decided to reach out to Kenneth Thomas because he's usually not someone who's at the GSAP sphere so we wanted to give a little shake to not be in the discourse of architecture that usually keeps having the same narrative so bringing someone to give a different perspective I think it was great and then I would like to thank you thank everyone so if Anna wants to give a final statement to close up the event I will open the phone for you yeah no this was great I just want to thank everyone I think you know we have to keep on pondering the invisible as Kendall said because the invisible is not really invisible right it's there and I go back to what I was saying at the beginning it's interesting being from Brazil you know and having gone through all of what we have gone through the summer in the streets and everywhere else to realize that Americans don't usually know what what the word alterity means and that's I think why the students chose to use this as this kind of like you know big framework for the discussion because I think it's it's really what you guys are doing with all the mapping and trying to or the language right that Kendall was talking about trying to to morph or reformat what we're seeing right and how we're seeing it so thank you so much yeah I'm really glad you brought it back to that to that word and yeah thanks so much for organizing this and I wish I could say I'll see you in Avery but some of you on Zoom Windows I can see a few of you so okay thank you everyone thank you all for all right and thank you thanks Philippe and and Ragnar and Kendall yeah