 Welcome back everyone. I hope those sessions were enlightening. I know I've heard a lot about the relaxation that was going on being led by Panthea Lee in her session and then saw a lot of lively chat in the autonomous vehicle workshop. We are now at our closing fireside chat and I'm really excited about this conversation as a way to wrap up a great two days. Please join me in welcoming to the virtual stage Vichon Shackabarti. Vichon brings over 25 years of experience, authoring and implementing visionary design. He's the founder and creative director of PAU, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism and serves as the William Worcester Dean of the College of the Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. Vichon also has a stint in government. He's done his tour of duty. He served under Mayor Michael Bloomberg as the director of the Manhattan office for the New York Department of City Planning. And in that role, he successfully collaborated on the now realized efforts to save the High Line, rezone Hudson Yards, rebuild the East River Waterfront and reincorporate the street grid at the World Trade Center site after the events of 9-11. So I'm really excited about this conversation. And I think part of what is so exciting is I always see a bit of a disconnect between what I think of as like design and architecture and planning with a lot of the technology that really comes in my fold and how these two worlds come together in a world that is rapidly modernizing is one of the things that I'm really, really curious about. And then on top of that, Vichon, you talk about the planet being at an inflection point. You talk about us needing to center around climate and injustice and making sure that the built environment represents a just world. It's hard to find folks that really are bringing all of these pieces together in a real like in on these global platforms. So perhaps we could just start by listening and hearing more about your own background and how you came, you know, your love of architecture and how you decided to start up PAU. Thanks, Lillian. Thanks for having me. It's real pleasure to be here. And I think I start well, I was born in Calcutta and like right in the heart of the city. And then my parents emigrated to the United States and we I ended up being raised in this really boring kind of violent suburb outside of Boston and we would go back to India when I was young and then my dad was a scientist. My mom was a librarian and a musician and that set up the left brain, right brain tug of war that has been me ever since. And, you know, we would spend a lot of time on these kind of shoestring trips to Europe and so forth and we'd go to cities and museums and I just fell in love not just with cities but like kind of the oxygen that makes up cities in terms of people in the places they inhabit, especially in terms of the buildings and infrastructure and so I think that set the stage for what I do now and done with all my life. And what do you think makes PAU and the work that you're doing unique as compared to what others are thinking about today? Well, you know, architecture is a hard field and about five years ago I turned 50 and I had worked at a lot of like really large corporate architecture firms and just in big places and I thought, you know, I always wanted my own firm if there was ever going to be a moment to do it it was going to be now I was going to do it when I was 75 so it was time to kind of step off the precipice and I did and PAU is now about 20 to 25 people and we're doing exactly the work that we set out to do which was to try to advance cities that were about ecology and equity and the projects that we're doing, you know, like we just won this competition to expand the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and a lot of our work is actually in a lot of deindustrialized cities or cities that suffered from deindustrialization so I mean we've got active work in Detroit, downtown Niagara Falls, Newark, Indianapolis, Cleveland and so you there's a through line there right about cities that I think time sort of forgot but are recovering and have a new kind of lease on life and I think cultures are really big part of that so something like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a huge magnet in Detroit we're working for Ford to reestablish Michigan Central Station as a real innovation hub for the city of Detroit and it's that kind of work that I really want to do I didn't want to go and do you know crazy spaceships built by slaves in the sand out somewhere else but really focus on things that I think people need which is this investment in focus in our cities here and places that are in trouble Yeah I know and it definitely resonates a lot of our audience and night communities in themselves are really representative of as Kelly Jin earlier this morning mentioned the fabric of the US and a lot of as much as we have you know the the Philadelphia's the Miami's of the world we also have a lot of deindustrialized communities that are there are trying to find their way through this next phase and you know so kind of maybe digging into that and we talk a lot in our work around how to create sort of vibrant public spaces because we think that they're critical to helping communities you know not just thrive but also in many ways bring back a lot of individuals that have left these cities how do you see your I mean what's the role of design in that you know I'll just say in context for us it's been a lot about thinking about the reuse of the public realm you know in a lot of cases it's how do we bring you know you know pop up parklets and you know bring more biking and infrastructure into these communities how are you seeing that and I'm also curious like and how do we do it in a way your your eye towards like how do we do it in a way that's actually really sustainable for communities that aren't like New York that may not have the budgets and the real estate revenue coming tax revenue to sustain these ideas. Yeah well first of all I couldn't agree with you more on the focus on public space and I think public space is incredibly important for a couple of different reasons. You know public space is still in this world which feels increased increasingly divisive because of social media and so forth. We need public space to create what I like to call positive social friction among people of difference. Right that I'm really worried that increasingly people with different points of view have no kind of platform where they're really engaging and I think public space is really critical. So when you see that person who dresses differently or looks differently they're not as scary as media makes them out to be. In fact they're a great person to get to know and I think public space plays this huge engine it can be this big engine in terms of healing some of the social fraying that we have today. In a lot of cities you're right that don't have these big budgets and so forth. I think a lot of it's about upcycling. You know one of the things that's happened through the course of the 20th century is cities lost a lot of density and a lot of urban fabric to the automobile. So there's a lot of you know surface parking and you know you take a city like Detroit which has a fraction of the population of say a New York or a San Francisco yet has enormous enormous amounts of land dedicated to pavement. And so rather than say well let's reinvent the wheel we can just think about well what can we do with that pavement and how can we go and talk to communities about what else they'd like to see there. You know it because so much of it isn't necessary for vehicular traffic and its opportunities for farmers markets and street fairs and also like in some cases homeless services or there's just a lot of things that can happen with the upcycling of our existing infrastructure. Which I think is much more of a 21st century sustainability idea than the 20th century tabula rasa just build a new thing from scratch. I want to get to this point of upcycling a bit more but before you do I'm curious on the public spaces point and this and this coming together people of different lives in these in these public spaces. I was curious about that you've designed some amazing like buildings and I and I think about the Penn station example I've looked at some of the visualizations. I mean there's nothing more there's nothing like I you know in New York as an example where you know these spaces where people have all walks of life crossed through them. And I was talking to the colleague about this I mean there's I know I am not an arch yet I'm not a designer but I think there's there's a potential here to sort of develop these as like sort of pass through places where people you know you just walk through and kind of how do we design those spaces in a way that as all of those people are coming through to your point they really there is some deeper interaction there's some deeper engagement. Yeah, I mean, you know a lot of this, you know it's interesting as it's a kind of back to the future question, William because, you know, I think traditional we had this era in the 1900s where, especially where you saw train stations and other notions of public places were built with a sense of generosity as a place, you know, you think about, say Grand Central Station or Detroit's Michigan Central Station when it was a big thriving station, you know, and then we sort of lost that and and modernism became about efficiency and this idea of passing through because people were on their way to the suburbs and it was about this kind of the hustle and bustle of that Don Draper lifestyle and I think we've come to understand that there's a kind of deep problem with that lifestyle from a carbon footprint standpoint but also again this sort of social bubble kind of standpoint and so we need to think about public spaces in a really expansive way. I mean, every building we design even we design a building for a private client or always in search of spaces that can be used for the public, especially in or around the ground floor, you know, where, you know, it's something that's easy to access provide some shelter, you know, and just allows people to again engage with each other to have that positive social friction. And the problem I find I mean like we still haven't gotten that Penn Station proposal built like we proposed that with the New York Times back in 2016, and it's still a mess and even a very, very wealthy city like New York has very substandard public infrastructure so the stuff that every day people use in a city like New York doesn't have anywhere near the kind of investment level that's put into it that say the luxury condos do or the very high end parks that are in wealthy neighborhoods. And so, you know, we really do need to figure out how to focus more equitably in our rich and poor cities on these places that can help bring people together. And I think those one last thing I'd just like to say about this is, I think especially in poorer neighborhoods, that if you give people a sense that society cares about you like they're willing to put investments into places that people have a different attitude towards those places that there's like less graffiti and there's less, you know, there's less vandalism because there's just the sense that they're that we have a collective as a society and that we care about people, whether they're rich or poor and I think that there's been a real dearth of that sensibility and design is often a reflection of that societal impulse about whether we only designed for the wealthy are really designed for everybody. Yeah, no, and I think it's a constant struggle and I have, you know, colleagues across the the night communities who really have been investing in public spaces but are still grappling with this question of inclusivity and the community really feeling like they can own the space and be in the space, even if it's out there and in the in the realm. So you talk a little bit about or I've heard you talk about the infrastructure of opportunity. I'd love for you to share kind of for folks what it what do you mean by that. And we've heard a lot in the last two days about, you know, these references to infrastructure bills out there and we now have a bill. And I'd love to one hear about what infrastructure of opportunity looks like and also are we even meeting the mark I mean where you know what do our cities really still need to be digging into to get to a more inclusive public realm. You know, so that term infrastructure opportunity I coined as part of I wrote a book in 2013 about American cities and I, I'm actually really dead tired because it just I'm just finishing up the manuscript for my next book. And I'm still holding on near and dear to that concept and the idea is a basic one. It's that infrastructure isn't just the traditional things that we think about like transport and water and sewage and electricity. But it's all the things that create social mobility right so we need to think of housing as infrastructure we need to think of cultural institutions as infrastructure, public spaces, health care, educational spaces because they're all the things that build social mobility in our society. And what I think was really fascinating to watch over these last few months on this infrastructure bill in Washington is, I actually think the original Biden proposal got it like they, they were out there saying infrastructure is a much bigger thing. Right. And unfortunately what you're seeing in the new Senate bill is the 1950s version of infrastructure so there's a really great graphic that ran in the times yesterday that talked about the original proposal versus what seems to be the bipartisan compromise. And so I think the bipartisan compromise is largely saying well yeah of course we need to fix all these decrepit roads and bridges and, you know, power grid systems and stuff and that's good it's good to step forward but missed all the stuff on buildings missed all the stuff on clean energy missed all the stuff on on human infrastructure in terms of, you know, helping to pay for childcare and other things that, you know, Democrats were arguing for as a sort of broader definition of helping to create social infrastructure. You know the thing is, I think there's a lot of confusion when we talk about equity, because, like equities are really hard concept, you know, people are not people are not born equal people have different skills. To me, the most fundamental place to at least begin the conversation is to say equal opportunity that a kid born in a rich place and a kid born in a poor place should have an equal chance, regardless of where they were born. I mean, I, like, I know some people will take the concept of equity further than that. And I respect that. I'm just saying, like, can we at least create that as a baseline condition. And that's what infrastructure is about that larger sense of infrastructure opportunities about creating equity of opportunity. No, I like that. I love the idea of the infrastructure of opportunity and we talk a lot about all of those things. It's amazing that it's still, you know, it's like still a hard sell at a national level to get our leadership to really think about these infrastructure components as critical to their own success, frankly, their own community success. And I know that we have a lot of folks from night communities here who who are deeply invested in a lot of these efforts. So I invite them all to ask questions or share share thoughts in the in the chat. I mean, so moving along the route of infrastructure. We today we talked a lot about equity and mobility and I know that you have shared a lot around the challenges of a third of our infrastructure actually being dedicated to cars. Again, and at the same time, you know, we're also cognizant of the fact that there are efforts out there and there's a lot of money being put into things like autonomous vehicles. And so one of the things that we grapple with is what is the role, what's the voice, what's the role of community in these efforts. And I'll tell you there's a tension between legitimizing something and actually saying this is sort of already happening. At least let's try to get into it. Let's get into the conversation, have communities have a voice. Talk a little bit more about mobility. You know, maybe share some of the thoughts that I know you've you've shared in other spaces around where you see the future of mobility going and and are there any reflections in the last 18 months. You know, at the beginning, everyone was worried about, we're all now going to be in single occupancy occupancy vehicles because we're afraid of this pandemic. How are you seeing, how are you seeing the trends really shift in preferences and and where do you see the future of mobility and how it impacts, obviously the equity of cities. Yeah, huge and great question. I mean, first of all, I'm very, very skeptical of technological panaceas, whether it's autonomous vehicles or rideshare or electric fields or whatever, you know. And part of that is just all you have to do is be a student of urban history to understand what happened. I mean, you know, cities were built a certain way for human beings up until the end of the 18 hundreds. And then, you know, structural steel, the elevator, and especially the internal combustion engine come along. And all of a sudden, we screw up the world in a way that we never could have even imagined that we were capable of doing because we so bought into this one technology hook line and sinker. We rescaled our cities and our streets and then the way we did things like housing and like cut out the informal sector and and cars are much to blame for this. I mean, there's a huge and then there's a by the time you get to the 1950s in this country, then then there's an enormous racial component where the Federal Highway Act is passed. You know, white flight, red, red lining, which are things that happened before World War Two. But, you know, like just there's this way in which the car instrumentalized segregation in the country and now is increasingly doing that around the world. And so when people talk about their new hot shot technology about cars that can drive themselves, which, by the way, I still think is a lot of hype. You know, I'm very skeptical. At the same time, I'm not a Luddite. I think technology can be great. But, and I think so I'm in the same bind you are, which is, okay, this this thing is happening. How does one adapt themselves to kind of think about this thing in a midway that's more positive. So like one example I like to give is during the pandemic. One of the things I noticed is the makeup of who attended community board meetings really changed. And suddenly we started to see a much broader, I think, coalition of people, people who wouldn't normally be the usual suspects that came to public hearings and so forth come to all sorts of meetings. And that to me was a really great kind of thing that came out of the pandemic and I hope today's. And so there are great things that come out of tech. But I just my big problem with the technology industry and I gave a whole Ted talk around this is that technologists tend to like invent the thing they want to invent and then foisted and hype it on the world rather than say, What are the things that human beings really need technology to do. So for instance, wheelchair critically important piece of technology horribly designed. Right. And we literally spend billions of dollars Lord knows how much in carbon emissions, trying to accommodate this really poor piece of design, rather than spend that on existing technology, which is to give every single person who needs a wheelchair, a wheelchair that can climb stairs, which exists. That's just a small example of where there's this kind of mismatch in our economy between someone, you know, who invents a juicer that can talk versus like things that we really need. You know, and that I think is is where we need to have a broader conversation with the tech sector. Yeah, I know yesterday, I'm one of our speakers, Anika Makawa talked about it. She talks about technology solution ism right, we kind of feel like technology is going to solve everything and a lot of it as you're describing is just insert a lot of the investment unfortunately seem to be in search of problems and not necessarily actually solving the ones that are there, which is why we tend to really promote this idea of engagement right that trying to at least bridge this gap between technologists, government and community as a way to create better matches, if you will, between the technology and the real issues that people are facing. And so I guess one thing I'm curious about is in cities, you know, planners have a great, great amount of responsibility and in some ways a lot of opportunity to try and also bridge these gaps, bring in appropriate technologies, think about some of the land use and mobility challenges of people in the design of cities. I'm curious about your thoughts to the to the to the field, if you will. What are I mean what are some of the opportunities that you think planners themselves can take to be more creative or innovative, both with technology and at the same time really obviously focused on the thing that they do which is trying to build more livable cities. Well, again, I think we just starting with the big problems that we have we have a housing crisis related to an equity crisis and a racial crisis. And housing, the cost of housing in the United States is absurd, particularly in terms of the cost of building more affordable housing in our inner cities. You know, cities like San Francisco, New York spent hundreds of thousands of dollars per subsidized unit to build affordable housing and there are so many technologies that planners and, you know, urban politicians and think tank should be thinking about, you know, cross laminated timber, different, different technologies that if they got to scale, they could be cheaper, they could be more sustainable. There's all sorts of ways of building out of this basic building material would to create much more urban density. That's affordable in our inner cities. And I think we are we're really, you know, like during the pandemic, housing prices in most suburban areas skyrocketed suburban poverty has been on the rise for 20 years in this country. And so, you know, we really, again, I would just center on the problems that we have. And similarly with mobility, I mean, I just think there's so much we can do would say just basic rubber tire bus technology where we close more streets to private vehicular traffic run zero emission buses, much more than network less about a central business district more about, you know, the kind of entire kind of lattice of the city, because people are working in a very different way and probably will continue to be going into the future and not everyone's going into that central district. But my point is with all this stuff like, we know how to build out of wood, we know how to build a bus, like, yes, there's technology that can make that more efficient cheaper, more sustainable. But it doesn't, you know, the problem is technologists love to work on step functions because step functions tend to be very profitable. Right. But a lot of times what we need in our cities, especially if we're really working with communities is not step functions, but that that more steady curve from where we've been to where we're going. Yeah. No, and I think this is why the financing question of a lot of this is so important. It's in some ways, I think the elephant in the room because I think it seems like there's a challenge of incentives and really trying to draw a lot of the innovation that's in our disposal towards the real issues that matter. The incentives are really lopsided towards things that are profitable. You know, like, for example, we all talk about Uber, you know, it's just a glorified potentially, you know, like it's in some way the service is already in existence, there's a convenience with the technology but we could use that same level of investment or manpower and brain to solve some of our other issues it'd be, you know, like kick mini buses, you know, like in India, you know, they run mini buses everywhere that are like 20, 25 people, they run some mini buses that are women only because women get harassed on buses and so forth. But the thing is, imagine an on demand mini bus service, there was an electric mini bus service that ran on ran in cities like Detroit and Newark that have large expanses of territory and we're not everyone's going point to point to a central business district that's using some of the same similar app technology but something that is just fundamentally more socially broad. Yeah, there's definitely a coordination issue to here right. I mean, like a lot of this as you're describing is technology and solutions in some ways we know we can iterate and innovate on them but in some ways we have there's a lack of coordination to kind of bring these things to life. There's a question from Herman Milligan about your recommendations for the development of infrastructure of opportunity that are maybe short term versus long term for urban areas. Well, I mean, in the short term look, obviously, we're coming out of this pandemic in very unequal ways, and communities suffered from it very unequally and I think, you know, I think one of the more interesting things I don't think cities are dying at all you don't like when you look at the data that just isn't what's happening. But you know, obviously, retail is in big trouble. There's a big mobility question around everyone trying to drive into the city. I would like, you know, I would try to ban as much private vehicular traffic from the central most congested parts of our cities I'm not talking about all the city but like, you know, in New York City like Manhattan, why do we have private cars going to the city, it's crazy. Right. And like, every city has some coordinate area, and then rethink that area, rethink what that can be, because cities, if a lot of suburban I'd say you know what I want to work remotely and I'm not not going to go to city so often and Well, what does cities become in the aftermath of that cities become places that are for the people who really love them. And I think we've been ignoring that population for way too long, including the communities of color that were really the the local networks that kept our cities together through the 70s in the 80s, and really paying attention to the local needs of those people. And so, by looking at relooking at how are those streets used. How can we rethink ground floor retail, maybe as places of social infrastructure. I think as leases collapse right, how can those places be healthcare clinics vocational, I mean vocational training is a disaster in this country right like, you know vocational training senior centers. So I just think there's all like if there is a new emptiness, having to do with the city. It's an opportunity, right to say, you know, what can we use that emptiness for that form social infrastructure. Over the longer term we have to pass that infrastructure of opportunity bill, we need federal money, and we need to redirect stupid expenditures like the mortgage interest deduction which is largely for rich people into building housing for people who need it in our cities so that to me is the way to think about things short term versus long term. Thank you. That's a, that's a, I think the moment is it's a really interesting moment to think about these outsized investments and yet at the same time the sort of kind of the tension of like, they're still hitting the mark and we talked a lot about that yesterday with broadband. To, you know, it's like, never before have you seen this amount of money being spent and at the same time, is it, you know, is it the level that it needs to be to really connect America, American communities. I'd love to kind of think about, you know, some successes and leave sort of on a positive end here which is, I mean I think, as you think about like what keeps you optimistic about a lot of the kind of it. A lot of what we're seeing in cities in terms of the trends. What what gives you a hope that that maybe we'll get right or hopefully we'll get it right. And also, I mean where we talk a lot about, you know, you mentioned the idea of building 20th century city using 21st century technology like, where do you also see technology having some really strong opportunities that we're just still not leveraging. So, I mean where my optimism comes in the fact that, you know, most of our, like I said, when you look at the data, despite all of the anecdotal newspaper stories and stuff, I think the people who really love cities have stuck by them. You know, when you look at the sort of outdoor restaurant stuff and all of that, like it's not perfect, but it really shows this extraordinary, you see, people get it all wrong, I think when they think that people only come to cities out of economic need. So, human beings are a social species, and we've been building cities for millennia built around being together and being social. And so where I'm optimistic is this notion that people are still doing that despite the pandemic and I think mass transit will recover and all of those things that like our big questions. You know, there are questions after 911 I was in New York government after 911 and like a lot of the same, you know, prognostications were going on. And again, I just on technology, I just that constant drumbeat of human need. I mean, when I, you know, when I work in the cities we're talking about, like I go through downtown Cleveland or downtown Indianapolis and understand what some of these communities went through from the 1950s through the 1970s and 1980s. It's extraordinary that they're still there and that they've stuck by and like the technology needs I think are really about them and their needs how can they be better integrated in their communities there's kids schools all of those things before we invent highfalutin stuff for rich people who don't need it anyway. No, I think this love of cities and the joy pieces is such a interesting component. I was watching online. Just this past week the Cleveland formerly Indians now Cleveland Guardians announced the change of the mask and what was most fascinating to me is I saw from several different people that they were alluding to the infrastructure they were alluding to these to these figures that now they are overseeing traffic so they're the guardians of traffic known in Cleveland for that. So maybe not not the right analogy given the conversation we're having but it was amazing to me that people from Cleveland and then the community really noted that that you know like the importance of those figures and so I think to your point people love. We love our cities and love these these buildings and that infrastructure that's there that reminds you that that's the, that's the, you know, what is it that's the backdrop of LA or Cleveland or New York. Okay, a couple more questions here. So this concept of upcycling. It seems like a key barrier is repurposing of the repurposing of the space is really political and existing residents and other people with political power push back against these ideas how do we I mean how do you see us creating more political space to try to design these solutions. I mean, I do see a lot of hope in our younger people, you know, what's interesting is when I started writing about this stuff 10 years ago and was writing about, you know, kind of cities and suburbs and where, you know, when cities get money from the government, it is a subsidy when new highways get built in the suburbs or you talk about the mortgage interest deduction, it's an entitlement. And so there's this incredibly, not very subtly racial kind of divide between how we talk about government investment. And, and what I discovered after my book came out was that like as I thought I would get a lot of pushback, you know, in terms of red blue territories politically, that's not where the pushback was at all, the pushback was generational. And so what you find is the generation that benefited from a certain set of policies hangs on to them fiercely whether they live in red states or blue states. And the generations that see themselves getting screwed frankly, right, are ready to question all of that. And so like so we have a generation of renters right now and they're like, how come there isn't more government money in rental assistance, as opposed to, you know, spending billions of dollars giving people with million homes tax credits. On upcycling, it's the same thing if you start taking roadway away from people who think it's their God given right to drive, you know, a three ton SUV to take their kids to school. And they think that road is theirs whether they vote Democrat or Republican, they fight that tooth and nail the notion it is an entitlement for them to drive that SUV down that road as a taxpayer. And that's the way they think about it. And they don't think about the 30 taxpayers that live on that road or maybe the 300 taxpayers that live on that road that maybe want to use that road differently and want to think about how to upcycle it differently and that it shouldn't just be for you and your kids in this huge truck. And that's, I think we really have to engage young people in those discussions, but engage them in such a way that they have a reinstated view of what government is because you can't just do this stuff as DIY, it is, you know, they have to believe in political engagement. Yeah, no, that's a, I mean, it's such a key issue with young people because as much as there is a lot of angst and I and and and deservedly so fear about their own future that willingness to engage with the political structure to actually make. I mean, that's the challenge, right? There's almost like an apathy away from it. And yet, I don't, I personally am not sure will be resolved if you don't actually engage in the political, you know, in the political fight. We have a question here about the psychology of affordable housing. And I think, you know, a little bit in a related note, as you just talked, you know, the Americans seem to really have a very different perspective or a negative connotation, whether city or suburban dweller on this idea of affordable housing. So, for non urban communities, do you see a potential shift within equity gaps increasing. And also, I think there's a powered part of what you're saying is I think it's a it's a power. It's like framing and storytelling. I mean, I don't know if you've seen really great examples of how do we really start talking differently about these issues so that we're not subsidizing versus entitlement but really talking about the quality of life of the people in the city. So a couple of thoughts on this great question. First of all, it's astonishing to me how many people think that the American dream has to do with houses and cars. So the person who termed the American dream in the 1930s James Truslow Adams talked about it as a dream of equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, gender or social status, which is kind of extraordinary for the 30s. And this notion of equal opportunity is deeply embedded in the country's cultural narrative, but somehow after World War Two, we translated that into a much more commercial idea, which is that if your definition of success is to own a lot of stuff, right, cars, houses, etc. And so housing fell right in the kind of crosshairs of that transition. And so, you know, I kind of really like the way the questioner phrased the question because it's not about affordable housing per se. It's the question of like, why is urban housing unaffordable and suburban housing affordable? Why are urban school systems not as great as suburban school systems? There is a whole economic system that undergirds why those discrepancies are true. So in a sense, it's it's not about affordable housing as much as leveling the playing field, because we've subsidized the suburbs so much that both urban areas and rural areas, both of which, by the way, are much lower carbon footprints per person than the suburban area in between. We've subsidized that suburban area in between so much that now we have to talk about agricultural subsidies to the rural or urban housing subsidies for the cities, because we just take for granted all the money we pour into the middle. Yeah. No, I think, I mean, I've heard you talk about the subsidy question around housing. And I think that it's a, I mean, I think for a lot of us here as part of the night network, when we've talked about, we talk about equitable community development and look at this issue of affordable housing and also how do you ensure, as we're thinking about building more vibrant public spaces and vibrant housing opportunities, you know, we're also grappling with the challenge, not just of the of the subsidy question but also of as you're investing in these areas, how do you think about the questions of gentrification and also the child continuing to, in some ways, do what you're in some ways, I think a lot of my colleagues are trying to do what you're espousing, but also being really conscious of the fact that it just keeps perpetuating this idea, this notion is, and I think it goes back to this notion of American, the American dream and owning a house and owning more cars. So even if we think about equity, it seems like, you know, there's still attention between almost redoing what and continuing to subsidize the sort of unsustainable vision of America that that we are in many ways still grappling with in cities. Yeah, I mean, I think that's why there's, you know, it's a two pronged, at least a two pronged effort on issues like policy and instrumentality and implementation and when we're all out there, you know, we have a we have a project in East New York or the poorest parts of New York City that's 100% affordable housing and like we all need to work on those things at the day-to-day level. But at the same time, we also have to think about cultural narrative. What's the meta narrative that's driving us to call something subsidized, some things affordable. You know, that like as long as people have in their head that rather than live in an apartment where I can take a subway or a bus or walk to work, I would rather live in that big house and drive as long as that is the privileged status. You're always going to deal with this this kind of this this kind of bias against what we're trying to do on the field, right. And so it's a tough one and cultural narrative is a really tough one, which is why a lot of us focus on books and teaching as well as, you know, doing and public engagement and civic engagement as we do here. Well, listen, I want to be conscious of the time I want to thank you so much for joining us and thank everyone actually for staying with us here on this Friday afternoon. It's been so great to I think a lot of what the Sean has said really also has touched on a lot of the different points made yesterday, whether it be about how do we really think about visualizing a lot of the inequity in the communities and really understanding what that looks like in terms of tree canopies and green space and accessibility, or whether we think about, you know, broadband and digital inclusion and how that has also the inequities there and how that enters into the public realm as well. And then if it's available, if all of this technology is available, what do you really do with it and do communities really have the skills to really bring that technology to life and also have and use it as a stepping stone, a stepping stone for opportunity. Vashon, thank you again for joining us. I'd love to just wrap up the session here by inviting everyone to please, you know, share a lot of the conversation that you had here today. A lot of the audience are grantees. I hope you've met other grantees with innovative ideas, or I hope you've taken away some interesting points of view from the conversations over this two day, these two days. You know, there's three themes that really have stuck out. And I think this conversation speaks to some of these in a lot of different ways. One that having participatory communities is really the key. And one of our speakers yesterday said, you know, nothing for us without us, the wisdom and the lived experience of residents is just as critical to policymaking and to designing technology as it is to ensuring that our communities are thriving and livable. And also that all levels of government really have to be involved and working together and that is no easy challenge. We're facing civic and community transformation. And whether it be an infrastructure bill from the federal government, or local zoning, I mean, and then the state, the opportunities that you need to be able to partner with states around and state preemption as an example that came up, all three levels of government in the US really have to be working together and the capacity for cities to really work at those levels is going to be critical to ensure the kind of collaboration we need to innovate. And then lastly, you know, people need information, people need data to make better decisions both as citizens and residents of their community, as well as leaders, and to really understand some of the inequities, and also the possibility to understand what's actually really happening and resonating and relevant to community. So those really have been, I think, three pieces of conversation that have flown throughout our two days. I've heard really amazing ideas myself and I'm excited and energized by the conversations I've had on and offline about the forum. We invite you to share your feedback and your critical feedback about this event. You'll see a link to a survey chat. And with that, thank you very much for joining us and happy Friday. .