 After the first semester was all about New York City. So the 43 students are working in places like Hudson, New York, Kingston, New York, and then we have a group of students working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and all through the lens of the Green New Deal, trying to develop urban design scenarios that address the climate crisis together with the racial justice crisis and the public health crisis that we're currently in and find intersections there. And it's part of a larger framework that the Landscape Architecture Foundation has put together this year, where across the entire country, design studios are working on this framework called the Green New Deal Super Studio. So the idea is to develop lots of ideas of how this policy concept could be translated into physical space. We've been invited into some other studios across the country. I can imagine. You're very popular with this crowd. And Robert and Elizabeth, I teach, as I said before, a corporate sustainability course at the Graduate School of International and Public Affairs. And the course is essentially a survey course on the underpinnings and elements of corporate sustainability, the underpinnings being the mindset, the broader philosophical perspectives that businesses need to actually optimize an integrated bottom line of environmental, social, and economic performance. And the elements, as I tell my students, are the things that a Chief Sustainability Officer needs to do Monday morning at 9 o'clock to move a company in this direction. So that includes product and process design, stakeholder engagement, access to financing. Just about every aspect of a business has a sustainability dimension. And one of the new exciting areas is businesses beginning to assess their ecological footprint, not only carbon, but also impact on biodiversity, not just to assess it for the sake of assessing it, but also to actually minimize that impact over time so that they can indeed enhance their environmental and social performance. So when I heard about the Urban Design Studio and the Super Studio, it was ecstatic at the opportunity to collaborate to bring my students in to explore public policy options to support the projects that the Urban Design Studio is working on. And then also to consider business development opportunities that can fit within the conceptual and physical framework of the various design projects. So this is our first exercise in doing it this year. And the first session, we listened to the preliminary presentations from the design students. And now today we have wonderful guest speakers and then you'll hear a brief presentation from one of the Urban Design teams and from two of my students who worked on a project that is related to that particular Urban Design project. So now it's just about 210. Kaya, do you wanna kick off the official meeting? Well, I'll just briefly introduce Rob and Elizabeth and then if you guys wanna share slides, that's great. I'm just so delighted to have you join us today because we're at the point in the semester as you can imagine being indicators yourself and designers, we're trying to think about what the Green New Deal looks like on the ground and we're looking for some inspiring visions that really cut across sectors. And when I think about the imagination that's involved and bringing about something like the Green New Deal, you guys are just come to mind in the first thought because this land art generator initiative that you've created brings together art and technology in a way to really show what a green future can be. And so I'm just really excited for you to share with our students. So maybe if you don't mind talking a little bit about how you came to this work because I don't wanna give a lengthy introduction of your resumes and so forth. And then what you're working on now would be great and just so glad you're here. So thanks for joining. Super, thanks for having us. We're going to go ahead and share our screen and we have 30 minutes so we're going to just jump into it. And what we'll do is provide some cultural context, historic context to why we're doing what we're doing and then sort of give you a broad overview of the different layers of programming we have here at the Land Art Generator. So at the beginning, we're really trying to bring together a lot of siloed disciplines to be greater than the sum of their parts. Art and public space, energy systems, energy landscapes, the idea of living buildings in cities that close the loop on their energy and waste streams and bringing that all together. Super quick like history context here. If you go back to the beginning of electrification, all of our power plants were located right in the hearts of our cities because we couldn't raise the voltage high enough to transmit efficiently over long distances. So you've got power plants that have been repurposed into museums like the Tate Modern but they were designed by architects and they had art incorporated into them and everybody knew where their energy came from. Even at the time, you can see really beautiful examples of art and culture integrated into wind turbines for drawing water, et cetera. Really integration of onsite energy is not new. Neither is micro grids. This is all stuff that goes back to the very beginnings and we're understanding that a little bit more. But of course, the form of power generation was thermal and mostly coal or natural gas and no one wants to live next to a coal-fired power plant although many people still do and that's a very big important conversation about environmental justice. But as we were able to raise the voltage and transmit across long distances, we started to centralize and got those power plants out of the city. They lost their relationship to art and to architecture and so now there's a very big cultural disconnect and no one really knows where their electricity comes from. And that same centralized paradigm was very easily translated into the renewable energy, the early stages of the renewable energy transition. And to be fair, competing against the incumbent energy sources for the cheapest kilowatt hour, wind and solar needed to be stripped down and utilitarian in the approach. But that's changing now and these kind of utilitarian installations that you see on the screen here have often been used as an excuse for those with ulterior motives to push back, not in my backyard for wind and solar power installations, for example. So that's what was on our mind when we founded the Land Art Generator in 2008 while living in Dubai. We were thinking, how do we move through these pinch points? And we thought the big idea is what if we could reimagine our energy landscapes as books of art, as places to take your family on a picnic, really flipping the paradigm upside down. And we could see that the possibility of this included not just the kilowatt hours of electricity, but economic development, tourism, steam education. And we like to look at this example of what public art can do for a city. This is not a Land Art Generator. And in fact, it's energy intensive rather than giving back kilowatt hours. But it's a great case study. So New York City Waterfalls was up for four months. It was a $15.5 million project to install, which is on the high end of public art, but it brought in $53 million in incremental spending over those four months. So it really shows that tremendous economic impact of public art. And we'd like to add, well, what if then it was giving back megawatt hours of clean electricity to the people who live near it. And that's what motivated us. We've been holding international design challenges that we're gonna give you a snapshot of. And these are a platform for interdisciplinary teams to utilize renewable energy technology as the medium for public artwork. We've held these competitions around the world by invitation, Dubai, New York City, Copenhagen, Santa Monica, Melbourne, Abu Dhabi, Fly Ranch. Each one of these has a unique set of private and public partners. And also each of these is a different site typology. So we go from landfills to brownfield sites, urban gateways, coastal master plan sites, rural site in Nevada Fly Ranch competition we just closed. But we also do invited competition. So there's a wide range of ways in which we work. And some of those will show at the end of the presentation including participatory design projects. But let's give you a snapshot of some of the outcomes from the international competitions and then we'll move from there. My technology type generally, here you have, when you close your eyes and you think of a solar panel this is what probably pops in your mind. And if you give this same technology to a team of engineers and artists collaborating you get energy duct. So everybody loves a duct, right? So why not have it power your neighborhood? And what's interesting about this proposed artwork is that it is also a battery. So it stores energy by its buoyancy, it's a gravity battery. And at the end of the day when the cost of energy is high and the sun is setting and the people are coming home from work and you've got that energy spike. It slowly allows water into the whole of the duct through micro turbines to add some energy to the grid at that last moment and address the duct curve. So it's covering all sorts of bases with this artwork here conceptually. This is an example of bifacial solar panels creating these beautiful biomes. They're shaped like a clutch of eggs to celebrate the importance of the Falcon to the culture of the United Arab Emirates. This is a proposal from Mastar City from the 2019 competition. So those are both using basically monocrystalline solar panels but you can think very much more creatively when you think about all the technology that exists already in the world off the shelf. You can get tinted polycrystalline panels. You can get panels that have special base laminations. All of the beautiful custom shaped golden shapes that create this arabesque sphere are that tinted polycrystalline. So this is like the most beautiful solar panel you can possibly imagine here. This is, if you look at the little fuchsia box there, you can see the team behind the artworks. You can see their annual capacity and if you drop the blast zero you can basically get a very quick sense of how many American size single family homes this artwork would power assuming 10 megawatt hours of annual consumption. And this is a beautiful representation of the relative position of the planets around the sun on the day that the UAE was founded. So that's the concept behind the piece and all of the spheres are using some kind of thin film solar technology. Here you have that custom based lamination technology being incorporated into these beautiful yellow solar power rectangles that flow off of the top of a new hotel and create a cap part over Jack of Boulevard in Melbourne, Australia. And let's do something. Yeah, I just wanna talk about this design site. So for Longhi 2018 Melbourne we were at a site that you can see is surrounded by the water but also historic landmarks. And it's a peculiar site because right now it's a parking lot and it's gone through multiple master planning stages. The first master planning stage was so non-inclusive of local community that when presented to the local community all city council was voted out. So it was a very dramatic bad outcome led to a second master planning event that did include community and was more positive but unfortunately the community still was very bruised by that process. So that's when we were brought in to come back to the same design site, include community and open the design competition to the world, but from day one having local community participate in developing the design brief and the partnerships. So it was not surprising that the winning submission for Longhi 2018 Melbourne was a local team. Keep in mind that the process is 100% anonymous. So when people were voting on the jurors they did not know that this was a local team but it spoke to the needs of this local community and is a tremendous outcome with a huge interdisciplinary team including some RMIT architecture students. Here we have a desalination plant submission to the 2016 competition for Santa Monica it produces 4.5 billion liters in drinking water a year using 100% solar energy. And it also deals creatively with the downsides of desalination which is the waste brine that is a byproduct of the process that can be dumped right into the renegot system causing incredible damage. Instead this proposes a large holding tank so that the water can be released in a slow mixed mechanism mixing the existing water with it to reduce the salination percentage. And that holding pond is a beautiful pool where you can go and you can load in there as if you're in the Dead Sea. Moving into even more advanced technologies that are also available in the market today you've got dye sensitized solar cells and organic photovoltaics. These are all the colors of the rainbow they are eminently flexible and some they can be made to be semi translucent as you can see in the image. So all of the pink ribbons that you see here are the solar panels themselves. And you can imagine this is the slide that we talked to people about going on a picnic to a power plant. So this would power nearly 500 homes probably more than 500 homes in Denmark for sure and creates this beautiful place for people. So it's not about thinking of we don't have to limit ourselves to focusing on just the places where we can put down solar panels and put them a chambering fence around them we can actually integrate our energy systems back into population centers to great effect. Here's another example of dye sensitized solar cells for the proposal for Logi 2019 Mastar. Again at Mastar City you'll have to go and visit there you'll find this prototype. This is a beam down tower. You're probably all very familiar with the conventional solar thermal CSP solar power towers like Ivanpah and Crescent Dunes. These are tens of thousands of mirrors focusing the sun's light to a single collector where a vat of salt flashes molten steam or flashes steam through a heat transfer process to create steam and power turbine. It's thermal energy. It's just not coming from coal or nuclear or natural gas it's coming directly from the power of the sun and these installations are almost like unintentional works of land art because you've got all these mirrors you've got these beams of light in the sky and definitely one of the things that inspired us originally. The exact same technology is incorporated into the winner of the 2014 competition the Solar Hour Glass by Santiago Miros Cortez and this power is a thousand homes in the city. It's also a beautiful message talking about how there's still time to deal with the worst effects of climate change if we all can get together and do the right thing. So it's a positive inspiring message and it's a bit of a counterpoint to the climate communications that tend to be a little bit gloomy and gloomy about sea level rise and heat map projections and mass extinctions and all of that is real and scary. And we need to understand it but if we dwell too much on it then we just turn people off in terms of the political will to effect change. We need to give the general public something to some positive vision to run towards rather than just scary stuff to run away from and this is the kind of artwork for the city that could really accomplish that and it allows you to get up and touch that it's obviously protected by an insulated cylindrical piece of glass that beam of light, power of thousands of suns you can really understand it you can touch that glass and feel the heat and see how the electricity works and it connects people culturally with the energy that they consume. This is a beautiful example of an artwork that through photovoltaic thermal technology and absorption chillers actually generates rainfall inside of this artwork just using the power of the sun in the middle of the desert. So it's an amazing use of technology to create this beautiful space. Wind energy can be incorporated into civic art. These are ducted turbines so they accelerate the speed of the wind as it hits the rotor. They haven't had a good time in the open market because it turns out you don't need to build that very expensive lens you can just make the blades a little longer and you get just as much energy but it was a fun experiment and if you take that physics principle and you bring it into land artworks these beautiful landforms can be placed onto a hill collecting the wind as it rushes up and concentrating at accelerating its speed before it hits the turbine and creating beautiful calm spaces even on the windiest days for visitors to the park. That is a summary of some of the projects that have come into past competitions and we're happy to say we've just closed the selection process on loggy 2020 fly ranch at partnership with Burning Man project for the 3,800 acres that they own in northern Nevada just about five miles from Black Rock City if you're familiar with the event and the goal there is to create a year-round place for activities, learning creativity and to do that they need infrastructure because this is completely off the grid and so they rather than bring out generators and swap out board of toilets and do things unsustainably like bringing in bottled water the fly ranch team wants to think through this in a very holistic way and have everything that comes to this place be net positive for the planet and for the people this is the top voted submission called Lodgers and MIT team and it's an interesting combination of high tech and low tech the team used parametric design techniques and fabrication technologies using recycled materials and locally sourced materials to create these beautiful shelters that merge with the landscape and also very much center of habitats for the animals, wildlife that currently live there. The source is an interesting also digging back into solutions from the past it uses the idea of a brick wall using rammed earth construction to create that and what a fruit wall does is it's basically a passive solar technology that extends the range of orchard growing seasons. Solar mountain pretty self-explanatory creates this interesting merging with the landscape of the mountains on the horizon generating quite a bit of solar power for the site and places for people to have events. Aqua plantera is very interesting it is a way to engage the community and an easy to learn pottery technique and then inside of each one of these beautiful organic vessels is another custom vessel that is using micro pores to filter the water to drinkable quality also providing the vertical gardens where it provides sprouts and herbs for people to use and also increases habitat for birds and butterflies, et cetera. Coop is a mobile henhouse that gets moved around the site fertilizing the soil as it goes providing a place for the hens to have a good time these little eggs also solar powered for climate control so it's fun the idea. I'm really excited that this summer beginning in June we'll be prototyping on site at By Ranch the top 10 outcome from Loggy 2020 so it's a direct path to implementation but the site is very harsh climate so there'll be functional prototypes to begin to make sure that they can handle the conditions out there and then working towards full scale development in the next year. But there's lots of other ways we work and we want to take some time to chat about that. We also want to bring it back to the big picture obviously a 100% post-carbon energy grid is going to be a mix between centralized remote installations and distributed integrated installations and population centers and more and more research and sophisticated modeling is showing that distributed energy resources can actually be more economical and they're already understood to be more resilient. Distribution infrastructure is even harder to permit than the installations themselves out in remote areas so the more we can bring solar power especially into the hearts of the places that the energy is consumed the better for everyone and it opens opportunities to engage communities and think about all the co-benefits that can come from an integrated approach to the design process where the impacts are well thought out with the people who are living with these installations and if we do this right we can present opportunities for new wealth generation because solar investment is a very stable investment that performs fairly well over its life cycle we can create places for people to enhance the environment to create economic development you can imagine agriboltics in the city you can imagine shared land use with reservoirs, parks, riverfronts, streetscapes and as we've shown through the examples today you can see that the opportunities for creativity are really endless with these technologies so what we'd like to see is the silos of energy developer and mixed use development for cities to really merge together over the next decade so that we can see the best practices of creative placemaking and urban planning being implemented when embarking on new energy landscapes especially in urban environments and so what that's going to take is the same kind of approach that that one might take for a neighborhood you got to first talk to the community even before you select your sites to understand the complex interplay of variables and the history of these places and their aspirations for the future create a diverse mix of stakeholders engage them in the early part of the design process co-design with them every step of the way and expand the investor base so that it's not just Wall Street money coming in and building our solar future but everybody can be involved in this process so this is an extreme example of what may not be the best approach to community solar installation but this is often what you will see chain link fences, barbed wire, the panels on the ground it's a it's a no-go zone for humans and if this is the standard model that gets implemented and all distributed energy resource installations then yes we're we're solving the immediate issue of a carbon footprint of our energy systems but we're doing a greater disservice to the overall energy transition and instead we have the opportunity to think creatively, create beautiful it's a great thing to think about the relationship between the Green New Deal and the original New Deal and the Works Progress Administration era of infrastructure the last time we really did this kind of investment a lot of artists were engaged in the process and so people go today to visit the Hoover Dam not to learn necessarily about hydroelectricity and engineering but to see the beautiful works of Art Deco Art set against the landscape there and I can imagine we can imagine a future where people go to visit the installations that will be developed this decade and the next decade to remember this important time in history and to see these beautiful designs integrated in a way that's holistic Some of the more community-centered work that we've been developing over the last few years includes solar mural artworks the project you see on the wall is an elementary school in San Antonio and that's an artwork that was developed in collaboration between fifth graders and community elders the film that you're seeing on top of the solar panel does decrease the efficiency about two percent which we think the trade-off is well worth it because murals really offer an opportunity for communities to come together and tell stories and be together and share that knowledge with others who come to visit their communities La Monarca is an outcome from a collaboration with a local artist in San Antonio and Penelope Boyer who's been one of our primary project partners for solar murals in San Antonio Yeah and the work on the left is actually designed by the students that you see pointing proudly to this artwork and this is a this is a project that doesn't need a chain link fence with barbed wire security cameras to keep it safe because it's from the community and there's a sense of pride and ownership that comes with that and protection that comes with that naturally in space and we know that some of you will be working in Pittsburgh this is a project we did in the Homewood neighborhood in 2015 in our energy camp while at that time we weren't we had not developed our solar mural program we would probably work towards a solar mural outcome if we were to redo this camp but this was over the course of six weeks we took the students on field trips we took them to a nuclear plant to a coal-fired plant and then to various sustainable installations around western Pennsylvania because we really wanted them to understand the energy mix of that region and gave them lessons in energy science engineering process design process art outside of the gallery it's a really robust six weeks and during the time they designed and then helped to build a solar sculpture for their neighborhood and again this was a strong community effort the week of installation what was so fabulous was that the youth were outside helping to install and the local neighbors were coming over and engaging and asking questions and the students really had terrific answers and talked about their process and talked about solar energy and what this installation would mean for their community so you know the outcome was yes a solar sculpture but also a lot of project management skills and communication skills and so the artwork powers helps to power the community center there and it serves as a legacy for these young people to remember and learn they were able to take what was blight on the community it was an old dollar store that the marquee was up there and it never opened because it was supposed to open in 2008 so you know so it was just this rusting marquee with the light bulbs falling out and they reclaimed it for solar energy so there are countless opportunities in every city with you know rusting marquees and old abandoned sites and how can we think about turning those into parklets places for people at the same time as we're really point by point solving climate crisis together so that's where we'll stop and hopefully have time for conversation before we head off amazing that's so so inspiring so great and that you know ending on the dollar store like it you know just these these interventions in our landscape to to reconnect us to our our energy and our infrastructure so great students do you have questions for our guests? I think questions about specific technologies are welcome right but also approach too I mean what an interesting practice these guys have developed to be able to span different sectors and in the wealth the library of material that have been developed through these eight international competitions is just like such an asset for anybody thinking about remaking their city for a green energy future oh yeah there's a hand up over here Ariela yeah I had a quick question thank you for your presentation those were really really cool designs I had never seen anything like that and I'm just wondering if you have any sense of what kind of policy work is necessary in the U.S. to begin to implement these designs that's a great question and we have given that some thought there are a number of things that we could do that would be easy to implement you know many cities already have a one or two percent for the arts program those those programs could explicitly incentivize the creative application renewable energy technologies or the regenerative systems as media for creative expression the idea of the energy cooperative is one that goes way back to rural electrification and its history is is one that is as much of American history structurally about a lot of inequality with a lot of federal funding going to white rural farmers for their electrification and that the model of the energy cooperative is a really excellent tool that is already existing that could be expanded into population centers giving communities the opportunity to create their own basically legal mechanisms to to be able to to generate and sell their own power as as a collective and so incentivizing the expanding of the energy cooperative model could be a mechanism a policy mechanism and then you know lastly I guess the idea of of providing incentive structures for energy developers a lot of the expensive energy development is the soft costs in terms of the permitting and the environmental assessments the the balance becomes very lopsided when when you when you compare the the what's perceived as a blank canvas but certainly is not of a of a rural site where you just lay the panels out and nice neat rows versus what the considerations are that are required to bring these installations more into the city it becomes a little bit more about customizing these projects so if there's a way to to help developers with the maybe potential upfront additional soft costs that would go for focusing more on distributed energy so that the so that the the numbers can can work out the way they can for larger scale installations aggregating urban solar and the integration projects over multiple sites so that the economies of scale can match those from ex-urban projects is another way that we can start to address that I'm going to shift over to Lee's question about ways that we work process and partnerships it's a great question and typically we like to have slides that outline all the partners for design sites but they're a real mix between private and public so for example loggy 2018 melvin the state of victoria in australia reached out to us specifically the department of environment water and land planning so they emailed us asking if we could bring loggy 2018 to a site melvin from that point the very specific design site process selection process was that we were on the ground for about a month and sort of walking around melvin and exploring and trying to figure out what site would make the most sense for you know a variety of criteria including the access to natural resources is it a site where people will participate in a design competition we're only successful if people come to the table and design for that site is it a site that makes sense for the local community etc and then once we figure out that local design site within the city we look for local partners so the partnership grows from that point on so we worked with an eco center like an education center we worked with universities we worked with arts organizations and others to develop local indigenous groups and others to really put together the design brief and develop what the outcomes would look like of course for fly ranch the primary partner was burning man so it might be an arts organization that comes to us but every project is very unique and typically driven by whoever originally reached out to us asking us to bring our program into them and following up on our Alice question just put a link in the chat for everybody it's something we're developing right now and where we're engaged in early conversations about implementing the idea in Pittsburgh so the folks working in Manchester might be interested in looking at that especially but that document also provides a lot of good links to research about the value of distributed energy you have a hand up Allison do you want to ask a question yeah hi thank you so much for this presentation I'm just curious what you think kind of overall is one of the largest barriers to making these kind of projects actually happen that's a very good question there's so many different barriers depends it's all site specific of course but I think coming back to the root of it is that communities people aren't engaged until the very end when the developer says here we've we've planned this entire project this is what it's going to look like this is where it's going to be and are you going to prove it or not and that's the wrong way to go about things as you know so um ways to engage the community up front invest get them invested in the from day one successful outcome as many people as possible and uh you know there's always pinch points the more people at the table the more chaos the more opinions but you've got to get that stuff out of the way early on because it will come later when it's too late it's going to come at some point so get those conversations out of the way early on and know that you're going to grow within those conversations but you have to invite as many stakeholders to the table as possible yeah and cities are where it's going to happen that's there's a bit of a roadblock to federal level and state level proactive engagement on these kind of policies so so cities can really take the lead it seems like and and to that and you know going back to what we said earlier I think that the one of the roadblocks is this deep-seated understanding that a transition away from old forms of energy to new forms of energy will in some way be a sacrifice of life style and economy and it's absolutely not the case so we need to be very very clear about communicating how much better life and more thriving life will be once we've completed the transition successfully one of the underpinnings of my class is discussion about the need for systems thinking to advance sustainable development and you clearly present a powerful systems framework from inspiration to engagement to contribution investment and then protection of the asset truly the whole system approaches apparently what you're doing thanks and you know that also comes back to the question about evaluation because you know the the net present value model for assessing new projects often externalizes a lot of the more intangible benefits and we need to come up with new ways of evaluating projects for their full life cycle and for their full range of co-benefits so that it's not just about what is the power purchase agreement cost per kilowatt hour of this installation but it also includes what is the overall economic benefit development benefit of this project how is it going to increase wealth opportunities for the people that live in that community what is it giving back and in terms of culture and art and how is it keeping people is it attracting the businesses to move to this city is it retaining talent in this city is it is it teaching the next generation all of these things that are potential co-benefits is it is it encouraging urban organic farming things that we know are good for us but that just don't get figured into the decisions when when thinking about the upfront capital investment we need a new mindset this issue plays out in so many different environments even in real estate development one of the reasons that real estate developers don't incorporate sustainability is because they're focused on front-end costs as opposed to life cycle costs absolutely and I think that Victor had a question in the chat which I think is also along these lines about making that case to investors Kaya I was going to ask Victor if he wants to ask his question actually but I also have one Victor you want to go first yeah sure because like right now in our studio at least we're getting near like the end of a phase like our project phase and then there's a lot of discussion about like how to actually appeal to stakeholders and things and so like I found it really interesting how you guys decided like for example on a waterfall and like a duck I was just wondering how you guys actually are able to make these design decisions and know like they'll eventually appeal to the public as well as like how do you actually convince investors that these will are actually good investments because I think like if I go up to someone and go like I want to have a huge sort of pound duck in your city I'm not sure they'll actually apply with them so I was wondering how you guys go up through this process well on the other hand the duck the yellow duck that makes its way around the world into courts is a huge success so it's not really a tough sell the duck because you know public art you can look at a lot of case studies out there the impact of public art so that's one thing is do the research so you can showcase studies of economic value impact yeah and developers know that their their development is not only successful if there's a sustained level of football traffic to their site and one of the ways to secure that is through art and public space and there are good ways to do that that have been shown and there are some bad ways to do that that have been shown I'll just throw one out there the vessel that had some yards has had some some mixed success but it certainly brought a lot of people to the development so there's a lot of ways that you can point to examples to to help convince from our perspective we're we're mostly working with communities that invite us to work with them and and by developing a design brief with the community that brings us in to one of the stakeholder key stakeholders being the site owner whether that's the city or as a private entity of some sort co-design the design brief bringing all the same people together during the selection process so that that everybody who is the decision maker has contributed to what the call was the decision based on the outcomes of that call and so every step of the way they've been leading the process so that when it gets time to to make the decision to implement and invest they've already come up with the answer themselves any other student questions I wanted to ask that in the time since you started this the price of solar has dropped dramatically and I'm curious whether you've seen this change in you know more interest in you coming to places and organizing competitions more people interested in actually implementing energy generating public art is that a noticeable transition for your work Oh absolutely that's great to bring that up because the the cost of solar well solar is now definitively the cheapest way to create electricity on the planet and it's not going to lose that position any time soon you know 10 years ago when we launched the first competition that wasn't necessarily the case and if you go back even further in 20 in in 1992 when the first like UN Convention on Sustainability was convened the the cost per watt of installed solar was more like $20 and now it's less than a dollar so that that's an extremely rapid drop in in price and so in 2019 part of the design brief that we presented for the competition for Abu Dhabi was that we we said to the participating teams you can use a $20 per watt installation cost for your proposal we're going to cap you there because we want to make sure that your your design is is possible to implement but basically the delta between the dollar and $20 that extra that that goes into the creativity into the culture into the beauty of the piece that you're proposing so the the less expensive per watt to install solar we we get the more room we have to bring in these other potential co-benefits of these installations okay well we're right on time one last call for any student questions and if not well we'll move on Robert and Elizabeth thank you so much this was uh incredibly edifying and hopeful and uh I love that phrase about being running too as opposed to running away from that really is inspiring so thank you again thanks for having us we're gonna jump off apologies that we can't be here for the next hour yeah really nice to see you Thaddeus and thank you everyone yeah great seeing you guys thanks for coming thank you so amazing work bye okay so uh let's queue up team seven unless you want do you want to do a break first I think we really should avoid a break and and just go straight through if that's okay with you Thad and Kaya yeah that's tough act to follow so I feel a little bit like you know take a deep breath students all right they've been at this for a long time and you know you guys are are gonna be great so just just nobody do I need to make somebody a co-host so they can share a screen who's sharing screen is you Kai yeah um just give me a sec let me get things ready okay that is a tough act to follow but really hopeful and inspiring so hi um this is team seven uh we have uh Huiya Yong uh Yuhui and uh me Kai presenting for Pittsburgh specifically about Manchester in Chateau area and uh so our project let's just start with just can you guys see the screen right now yes yes yeah so why don't we start with the basic analysis of the fabric that resembles the half century ago or actually more than that of of Chateau and Manchester and see what really happened so actually yeah my computer this is yeah this is Chateau and Manchester right now as you can see the left side is the west side of the highway is called Chateau and the Manchester under on the east side and this is the fabric of what Manchester Chateau back in the 1960s and what you can see from this is they used to actually have a more homogenous fabric with a much thinner grid and when you remove this historical map and you you'll be able to see that the grid actually expanded a lot to accommodate the industrial use on the on the west side of of the highway so our approach is to extend the existence of the highway that was put in and to see how that was taking up the space and so how we can bring back the the old fabric presented by our history his context and also because of highway the Route 65 is basically intersecting the whole as an act as a wall that pretty much blocks the way from both sides of the neighborhood so we will do want to create the reconnections that pretty much stitch together the fabrics of both sides and in order to do that we actually consider this as the reclaimed buffer that's currently being taken up by the round through of the Route 65 we would do like to see how we can bring back densities and also create spaces as we call them the obligated block so this is just to give that kind of understanding maybe someone on my team can paste the link to the mirrors so people can see the and this is basically our the highway situation here as you can see this is looking from over area of view from Manchester to Chateau and you can see from the materials that they basically throughout the most areas it's it's totally blocked off so then just the singular opening here and we did then did a further examination or colonizes of the neighborhoods of the Chateau specifically and call out each of the in terms of the building and energy uses the green space the the building type that the current programs that are being occupied with the buildings and the number of building floor to examine which which one of these programs should we be keep be keeping as we try to reconnect and try to reconfigure the fabrics of the Manchester site of the Chateau site sorry and this is we also took a to look at the the water from or the water edge conditions and and for a list of analysis based of the shoreline situations like the natural what we did and the exam the the level of quality that's the display here we also look at the current water active water side activities such as the the marinas the harbors that the boat clubs that being currently being utilized so if we do you want to talk about how we want to go ahead and reconfigure the on the Chateau yeah sure and based on our analysis of the revitalization of the building mapping and what we which building we want to reserve and which part we want to revitalize so we just think about we want to like that make this Chateau to the four parts the four linear parts the first one is the highway hub and we have the hypothesis of the for the future the transportation will decrease to the 50 hundreds of the for the current transportation so the highway will release some green space and the public space for the community and another one is the compact city and we just want to compact other buildings into this area so we can release a lot of place in the waterfront and so the waterfront will be a sustainable area for the for the future and also we have a lot of industrial buildings will reserve in the in this linear part so the industrial legacy this part will will represent the legacy of the Chateau for in the future so when we talk and why we want to make this for the near part it's like it's focused on like what's the people go go through from the Manchester to the Chateau will have a rich experience of the spatial of the for the our space so when they work from the Manchester to the Chateau it will go through for all of the four parts so we just think this is the good experience for the community yeah what's particularly interesting about our approach is here that even though you can see you can see here that we were trying to start slicing these strips around by reconfiguring like the the linear experience walking from on the Manchester Chateau it's actually trying to trying to recreate this kind of step in different experiences as you walk through different slices so okay let's review what we have friendly half what it is in terms of the design phase so we this is the current map of the our site and we this is what we have oh sorry yeah this is what we have implemented in terms of the new fabric that's put in as you can see from the map that we actually did a real diet by reducing the highway in into half of the capacity and then we create the large openings to from in Manchester to Chateau and we create a lot of the public facilities walking through the neighborhood and all the way to the waterfront we actually created a water water waterway terminal as well as the waterfront trail that comes with various work form activities so this is the current opening of the highway which is has a service surface drive these and without speed without slow down the speed there's only one traffic light and the only access is through this tiny tunnel that you can get through from one neighborhood to the other and what we try to do now is create by decreasing the capacity of the highway we actually release a lot of spaces and create a public gathering space for a lot of open door activities such as boot track as you can see the the exhibition spaces the markets things like that and so these are the changes yeah my apologies if I was confusing my teammates by placing my original image on top so these these are the the conditions of the way walking to the neighborhood you don't do want to briefly talk about that yeah like the the first perspective shows how we transform the parking lot we renovated the these interused parking lot into the public open space the construction of the infrastructures in the space is used to increase the retail retail sales people can do activities and shop here and the second perspective shows how we transform the original building we are going to make the side space more fragmented and accessible so we open up the first floor of the middle of the long building so that people could work through the bottom and also edit a pedestrian bicycle path to increase the accessibility of the public space so the we also have the waterfront experiences so this is before and this is after for the waterfront since we noticed that Chateau has many both clubs and marinas we think people in Manchester could also have a chance to participate in the future water transportation so this aerial sketch shows what it will look like if Chateau has the waterway terminal in the future the government could retrofit the warehouse as the terminal and think the community would not want the trail to intersect with the terminal people will go down to the underground to take the ferry the station will revitalize the surrounding lots by importing more people so that the community could set up new offices in other retrofit warehouses also the waterfront area will provide more public gathering activities more rest space and the increase of tree penalties which will strengthen the social connection of the community and reduce stormwater pollution two minutes folks and this is our section for the full experience walking it's a pretty long session apologize walking from the Manchester Chateau to Chateau Yohua do you want to briefly talk about that yeah so when people from the go from the Manchester to the Chateau the first day we'll experience from highway and the highway we will cut off half of the current highway and also we release a lot of green space for the public use and yeah and the UPMC office building we reserved sending here and also go to next one we will meet like the back heaven is also like the expansion expansion building currently sending here and also the next part is of the industrial that latency part we will reserve some industrial function here and the the final part is what Huya just said like the water term terminal and for the waterway to transport to another part on water so this section just show how the how it looks like and how the people will experience when they work from the Manchester to the Chateau so the waterway over in your family sorry sorry so the waterway terminal it actually becomes one of the many that we envisioned for because Pittsburgh is known for have a lot of waterfront like waterfront neighborhood so if this model becomes successful we can potentially link them to other parts of the world other parts of the Pittsburgh waterfront areas to reduce the need for for vehicle traffic okay so this is very short brief well introduction for our projects so far in progress great thank you very much it is a a definite hopeful vision for transformation so now I'd like to turn it over to Emily and Lucy who are going to be talking about a public-private partnership for for entertainment for an entertainment venue within a green space which I think fits nicely with this project as well as the urban art generator projects that we heard about earlier so take it away Emily and Lucy can someone make me co-host oh actually I might have the let's see can everyone see this yes okay sorry you make it perfect that's the beginning jumping ahead there all right so my name is Emily Van Lesica and Lucy and I worked together on this portion of the project we're actually both sumo students focusing on corporate sustainability cross-registered in this SIPA class but did coordinate together and I'll allow Lucy to introduce herself as well and take over from here since she's the kickoff cool um so just sort of for quick context if you want to flip to the next slide on the the mid-term presentation for project for team seven they came they had come up with this concept called the industrial Renaissance and I realized that was not part of the the last the sort of most updated version and so for context we we chose their project we were really inspired by their mid-term to create this vision of an industrial Renaissance and something that particularly stood out to me which inspired my mid-term was sort of this focus on cultural identity and I work in the music and art sector and so that's what inspired this sort of to to create essentially a vision for the role that music and arts venues can play in helping realize the industrial Renaissance vision so that's where this comes from so you can flip forward so 30 you know and it's amazing how kind of similar this dovetails really nicely into the land arts generator project so some of these things are going to be repeat what they said but I think it's just sort of shows how sort of great of a need that you know arts combined with technology you know can be really a powerful combination but you know as they shared you know 30% of economically distressed communities nationwide are actually located in these former industrial sites also called legacy communities who you know were sort of in the days of steel manufacturing and auto manufacturing were sort of at their prime and then once manufacturing moved overseas these communities really collapsed and have never really recovered and Manchester Chateau you know was a former steel community as you can see from the infrastructure and you know typical of this type of community has higher than average unemployment rates and are disproportionately impacted by climate change and pollution as you can imagine lots of big warehouses open vacant lots a lot of cement you know causes things like the urban heat island effect and there's a heavy concentration of black carbon from former industry as well as the highway that the design students showed you so go ahead and flip forward but the other thing that these industrial communities have in common is that they all have sort of this really strong history of arts and culture and in fact in the Manchester Chateau's development plan they specifically note that they're hoping to attract investment that can not only contribute to the environmental goals but also preserve and promote the cultural legacy of the area go ahead and so this is sort of presents the case for well what is the role that music and arts venues can play as incontinence to sort of kicking off an industrial renaissance in these communities and you know through research and just through my work I know that music and arts venues are actually really unique candidates to be incontinence meaning that they have this first mover advantage so where music venues go they actually attract traffic they don't rely on existing foot traffic that a lot of other commercial businesses do and so therefore they can be sort of the first in and then other businesses move in to sort of cater to the new audience that these venues have attracted it's also well established that music and arts venues are a proven economic multiplier for the reason I just said as Elizabeth and Robert pointed out earlier they have this added cultural and social benefits that are typically not kind of valued but if you start to sort of look at monetizing that value there's a greater benefit beyond even just the economic impacts and then the last point because these venues can be used of course for private events and ticketed events there's a revenue capture opportunity that can actually help finance public good so for example a city would have to pay to restore a historic building but if you couple that with music and arts venue then the revenue generated from the music arts venue can essentially help finance a public good like the restoration of a historic building or you know venues that want I'm sorry cities that want to build green space or a park which Emily will touch on can actually couple that with an outdoor venue and use the revenue to help finance the the construction and the ongoing maintenance of of that public good which is the city park so quick case study this is actually my hometown so I had to put it in here but Bethlehem Steel was the second largest manufacturer of steel and when the steel industry collapsed so did the local area in fact my grandfather worked at Bethlehem Steel and so this is a very sort of personal story to me about the economic impacts that the steel industries collapse had on this area for for years that the city was trying to figure out what to do with this massive steel factory you can see here you know it had these these huge furnace blasters that had actually kind of become a part of the city the city scape the city skyline and so it was decided that they didn't want to tear it down which was one of the proposals and instead what they did is they rallied the community rallied around they they did a public private partnership to essentially turn it into an arts and entertainment district because you know how cool to you know see sort of a concert with that backdrop of this you know sort of historical building that was such a legacy for the area and it's been extremely successful premier destination for arts and entertainment in the northeast and it's attracted over a million visitors since its opening keep going and then just another quick case study this is actually down in Nashville there was this limestone quarry that helped build the highway that connected Nashville to some of the outer communities and when the quarry shut down it essentially became this massive wasteland it was a brown field it was used as a dump site but again it was sort of rooted in this history of the area and the industry and so instead of so what they were able to do the city was use it as a music and arts venue and like how cool like these you know what do you turn a quarry into well it makes a perfect amphitheater for music and so so through the development to create this amphitheater they were actually able to you know clean up the site which has environmental benefits to remove 900 tons of trash and to beat debris and the you know you can do ticketed events here again and so the city benefits from that revenue is unable to was able to essentially finance the redevelopment of this old quarry but while also preserving that that legacy two minutes okay done so one more slide so so really kind of the big opportunity here as mentioned earlier is you know music and arts venues of course can also have negative externalities if they're not properly managed and so the role of public policy in this is to really reinforce those those added benefits that music and arts entertainment venues can have and maximize those public benefits so for example you know promoting when trying to convert an old warehouse promote you know sustainability and restorative design so and think about that shared code benefit where you know these warehouse built roofs can really can be turned into a green roof that actually helps clean the air or it can be used to generate community community power for the local residents you know couldn't agree more sort of bringing the community in early on to help really kind of think about how to design these buildings and you know through joint ownership models having a community advisory board so again there's there's those co-benefits that that should be considered that public policy should should help kind of advance and again the unique role of music and arts is it's really about the art of the possible inherently that industry and that sector is creative and hopeful and inspiring and so by sort of making not the anchor in these developments it can provide sort of that that positive sort of future vision of what an industrial renaissance can can be so then I focused on the urban park development of this is really anyone that's either been to a live concert or a public park they do coincide a lot and I also did with that focus on not only the benefits of public parks but then how to fund them specifically in public areas so quickly just to touch upon clean air climate resilience and access nature for all is one of the goals of the Green New Deal so I definitely did have that in mind when thinking about components of this broader establishment and then the Manchester Chateau Region of Pittsburgh which team seven is focused on there are a lot of these environmental negatives urban heat islands heat concentrated areas black carbon flood plains and urban parks can be a really beneficial solve to a lot of those issues so in addition to solving those environmental issues that I mentioned green spaces do give access recreational activity increase property values which spurs local economies that come back to crimes and then of course the protection from the environmental impact but then funding themselves especially in low income areas can be tricky and that's where public private partnerships come in essentially public private partnerships can cover financing gaps that will result from pure public funding that being for example if prices increase over the lifespan of the project the taxpayer isn't paying that burden which as I mentioned is very very beneficial in low income areas so an example of that is actually for anyone that's currently in New York City or you know has been in New York City is the High Line the High Line was funded by a public private partnership in 1999 that Ray's Rail Ray was supposed to be demolished but the Friends of the High Line was established to help prevent that they collaborated with five different industries both public and private throughout the New York City area and officially established a public private partnership to help fund the revitalization of the High Line as well as the maintenance of it with the Friends of the High Line that being the fund taking on a lot of the cost burdens if you will of the High Line and it paid off by 2013 economic of the benefits excuse me of the High Line was close to $1 billion and it was only projected to be around a $200 million benefit so it really brought economic and environmental life back into that area and then another example my final one that kind of relates back to what Lucy all just touched upon and ties it all together while public private partnerships will fund the creation of parts for example it doesn't just have to be Friends of the High Line for example it could be a private performance venue where those benefits will help fund the upkeep of the park there are reverse benefits as well so anyone that's been to Boston might be familiar with the Charles River Esplanade as well as the Half Memorial Shell the Charles River Esplanade was established along the Charles River and then the Half Memorial Shell came in after that so not only can performance venues help fund green space green space can help become an entity for performance venues to establish themselves and then there are those downstream economic effects affiliated with them in addition to that any questions in regards to either my take on this or what Lucy has done as well okay since nobody's jumping up right this second let's go to Michael so we make sure we have enough time and then we'll do a quick Q&A and discussion at the end for everybody but the synergy between these two projects is palpable and truly exciting and speaks well for the collaboration between our two classes and also the underlying inspiration the land dot generator project as just something else that plugs into this kind of integration is really a hope speaks to a very hopeful future and now we're going to turn it over to Michael Schumann who is going to offer a broader national perspective on what it means to effectively develop communities in a sustainable way and bring in local investment and local engagement Michael is an economist attorney and author and entrepreneur and truly I won't say he wrote in his bio a leading I would say the leading visionary on community economic development he's the director of the local economy program for Telesis Corporation a non-profit affordable housing company and currently is an adjunct instructor at Bard College the New York City Office of that program and also at the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver he's also a fellow at Cutting Edge Capital and the Post Carbon Institute and a founder founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies also known as BAL and he is credited with being one of the architects of the 2012 jobs act which I'll speak about and dozens of state laws overhauling securities regulation to allow for crowdfunding he's written or co-written several books most recently Put Your Money Where Your Life Is and the local economy solution as well as local dollars local cents so with that Michael we're going to turn it over to you do you need the power point are you going to at some point and so what should I try to take 15 minutes 20 minutes how long how long should I hold for we run till four so maybe we can leave 10 minutes at the end and I'm sure if you feel comfortable fielding a question to in the middle that'd be great too absolutely so if you go to a 350 that would be ideal yeah great so a couple of things so first of all thank you for letting me view the presentations really interesting stuff and over the last year I've been teaching a course called The New Local which is jointly developed with a guy named She'll Bear Roach Coest in Melbourne who I regard as one of the great placemakers of the world and what we have found in our work together is that placemaking and local investment actually go hand in hand and so one of the one of the things I wanted to just kick off is just you know responding and to the presentations that you folks just gave I think there you know you've laid out a really beautiful vision for new directions to move this neighborhood in Pittsburgh or neighborhoods I guess we could even say but I think to make this thing come alive there are two things that you have to do so one is is you have to do community engagement in order for the community to figure out what is the DNA what is the history there are you know some of the history you have built in but I think some of the history has to be discovered and there may be when you think of the diversity of a community what is history to one group of people may be very different to another so thinking about you know how can everybody's story have a place in your redesign is very important the second thing that I think is very useful here is trying to understand the economy trying to understand what kind of production and retail and so forth exists there and what is missing and I'm going to give you some bigger arguments in a few minutes about why self-reliance is a positive but I'll just say for the moment I think there was a little bit one of the things that I heard in both presentations is a little bit of the treating of the economy as almost an exogenous variable but in fact the analysis of what is the precise nature of demands and the specific thing that I often look at is leakage how much of local money is being spent outside the community because every dollar that is lost because it is unnecessarily spent outside the community is lost economic multiplier now there's many of the things that you're talking about bring money into the community tourism recreation the entertainment venues those bring money in but there's lots of money in the people living there and how can we make sure that as you are creating new elements of this sort of beautiful picture that you're drawing you can increase the level of self-reliance in the community the last thing that I would say is that the high line was and most most economic development projects are very good examples of bringing together public money and rich people rich people in the form of investors or foundations or hedge funds or banks you name it but the truth is is that there's a ton of money that people living in a community have and if you are engaging in kind of working with the public in community development part of that is to excite people to become investors in the community so let me just give you a couple of examples of this so there is there is only one team in the national football league that is not owned by a single obnoxious individual can anyone name what that team is? Packers yes Green Bay Packers Green Bay Packers is a community owned mostly non-profit it's kind of a complicated structure but every other football team because it is owned by this single individual who often is rapacious in attitude will threaten you know if you do not build me a stadium if you do not give me a couple hundred million dollars I am out of here and I'm going to move my stadium somewhere else I'm going to move my team somewhere else that will never happen with the Green Bay Packers and that ownership structure has been a tremendous driver for that football franchise and community development around it let's let's think of some other examples a community co-op if you have a co-op grocery store co-ops are different than regular companies because regular companies allocate power power to elect board members on the basis of the amount of money you put in so it's sort of one dollar one vote whereas for co-ops it is one person one vote and no matter how much capital you put in as a person you get one vote so they're more democratic and what you know from from you know watching co-ops around the united states is that people who are members of the co-op because they get a patronage payment at the end of the year based on their engagement with that institution they they are really cemented there so their investment with their community capital makes them great shoppers at the co-op and they're also great advertisers for the co-op so what lesson do we draw from that the extent to which you can bring the grassroots residents of the the neighborhood that we're talking about Manchester Chateau and get them to invest in many of the features many of the businesses much of the infrastructure that you're trying to build the commitment goes up the excitement goes up the shopping goes up and it is going to be much more lasting what you're going to accomplish and here's the good news it used to be extremely expensive and difficult to bring grassroots investors into a project that is no longer true and this is a domain that most of you are probably not familiar with and you probably don't need to be for quite a while but it's called securities law and securities laws were enacted in the 1930s and here's here's one little exercise that I normally do since we're not in the same room I'll just tell you what happens so I often ask people by show of hands how many of you have mindfully bought something locally over the past week and all the hands go up I mean they wouldn't come to listen to me otherwise then I ask okay those of you who do banking how many of you do your banking at a local bank or credit union and about half the hands go up and then I explain to people well local banks and credit unions turn out to be very important in the sustaining of a local economy and then the last question that I ask is those of you with pension funds how many of you put at least 1% into locally owned business and all of the hands go down now this is a very perverse outcome because across the United States something like 60 to 80% of the jobs and the economy is rooted not in big multinational businesses but in locally owned businesses which tend to be smaller and medium size these businesses are highly profitable highly competitive and yet investors systematically invest in the minority of the economy that's global and don't invest at all in the local businesses that is a market malfunction and the reason for that malfunction is because securities law thought if we could make it more difficult for grassroots investors to participate in the marketplace in order to protect them that would be a good thing well instead what happened is flash forward from the 1930s and 40s to today is now we've made it really easy for grassroots people to put their money 10,000 miles away in the global economy and made it very difficult for people to invest in the kinds of businesses and projects that you are talking about in your work so we're now fixing this problem and one of the fixes has been the jobs act which was enacted under president Obama in 2012 which legalized investment crowdfunding and investment crowdfunding I mean the story is quite remarkable because so it took four years between 2012 and 2016 for investment crowdfunding to actually get all the regulatory framework in place but from 2016 to now 700,000 Americans have invested about half a billion dollars into several thousand local businesses around the country and some of these businesses are not just businesses they're effectively real estate projects as well so these are you know development issues and the old rules were that any business could raise up to a million dollars a year and any investor could put in up to $2,200 a year and we made this path really simple and easy and the result of four years is that the most successful entrepreneurs have been women and people of color that is those people who the mainstream markets have systematically overlooked and discriminated against have benefited from this democratization of capital the good news is is that this week in fact March 15th the Ides of March to be specific we now have new regulations in effect that have raised the amount that a company or project can raise in a grassroots way from one million to five million so lots of things lots of little bits and pieces of your vision can now be done on such wonderful sites as small change and I want you all when you have a chance later to check out the website small change it is the best grassroots real estate site in the country and guess where it's based Pittsburgh so this is a natural connection to the ideas you folks have been talking about so I am going to I'm going to pause there for a second and then after maybe taking a couple of questions I'm going to share some slides so any questions about what I shared so far yeah go ahead Lucy sorry can you just can you explain a little bit further that regulation that just passed yeah I because I'm interested but I want to make sure I understand what it means so 2012 Congress amends the Securities Act of 1933 with what is called the Jobs Act which stands for the Jumpstart Our Businesses Act which legalizes investment crowdfunding and allows grassroots investors to participate in a simpler and cheaper way and allows local businesses to start raising money from grassroots investors in a cheaper way part of what they did in that legislation is allow for certain of the details to be put in by the SEC Securities and Exchange Commission and what happened this week is the SEC and this has been happening going on for a while but this is the week it finally got implemented the amount of money that a project or a business can raise in this simplified way has been increased from one million to five million dollars there are other things that happened in the law too that are really good but I won't bore you with that now was that was that helpful yeah and that's any that's any business any business any business and in fact what's kind of cool about it is that you know if you want to raise more just create another business and another and another and you're building up an audience for these multiple businesses that are part of your project Michael I'm not in that note can you talk about that jelly in Wisconsin that you you featured last year that has built a network of businesses yes so that's what my slides are on but before I go there just any other quick questions and then I'll jump into that you had a quick question about the keeping money locally and your point about buying locally but then when you ask individuals okay well where are you investing your money how would that translate to the corporate sector I'm thinking either businesses that have headquarters and like in this case Pittsburgh or just other offices I know that property taxes is of course part of that but are there any other whether it be policy incentives or just incentives in general for companies to bring money and keep money in that local area yes I mean I think there are and and again if you if we're talking about the majority of businesses they're locally owned and they don't move as you know they may move like a town over at some point if they're really annoyed but most businesses don't move so when we talk about attracting outside businesses we're talking about this teeny global piece of the economy but yes there are ways that we can encourage that global part of the economy to do more local investment and and more local procurement and so for example if you've got a Cleveland there's a whole initiative underway with anchor institutions there that is the big hospitals like the Cleveland Clinic and universities and sports teams and government agencies and public schools and collectively they're trying to focus their purchasing power on certain targeted local businesses that do local hiring and all help to increase the multiplier so yeah bigger companies can be very helpful along those lines but I do think that at the end of the day you know what we're going to have more influence on is the growing smaller economy and that's that's really what I want to share just a couple of maybe about 10 minutes of slides on so hang on one second so I want to just really talk about four principles for local economic development and you know and as you the exercises you did in your classes this year you know won't be the last time you think about how to grow other economies and I want you to keep these four principles in mind as you're engaged in this so the starting place really is to understand that when you have a conversation with economic developers about how to grow the economy usually they say our mission is to attract and retain business and I'm guessing many of you think the same thing that yeah how attracting attracting business is really good for the economy and there's no question that it is good but what often is forgotten is that you cannot attract a local business it's an oxymoron local businesses by definition are rooted in the community and if you're able to attract them they're not so local anymore right the other thing that's forgotten is that if you're paying a bribe to a business in order to hold on to it how deep are its roots in the economy anyway and this is why studies of corporate attraction have pretty much concluded it's a dead end for economic development so this is Ann Markison a professor of public policy at the University of Minnesota she wrote what I think is the definitive book on attraction related economics and her conclusion is incentive competition is on the rise it is costly generally inefficient and often ineffective for winning regions that the word I would disagree with often because I think it is always ineffective for winning regions and the reason is this the opportunity costs when you look at most corporate attractions now take Amazon for example we're talking about several hundred thousand dollars per job but when you look at local economic development like I've looked at the guy on the right named Lou Stein who's an economic developer in Appalachian, West Virginia Lou has developed Lou has produced 300 to 500 jobs per year not for several hundred thousand dollars per job but for 500 dollars per job and the way he does this is pretty low tech he introduces entrepreneurs to banks and he knocks on the doors of existing entrepreneurs and asks them how can I help and so out of that thinking I've really tried to distill four alternative rules for local prosperity which I'll run through quickly with you you know and the first rule is maximize the percentage of jobs in your economy that are in locally owned business number two maximize local economic diversity number three spread models of triple bottom line success and number four create an entrepreneurial ecosystem so rule one says ownership matters ownership of the businesses matters and this is just another demonstration of the point that I made to Lucy a little bit ago which is that if you compare two similar businesses so in this study it's central co-op which is a cooperative grocery store in Seattle locally owned with a similar size chain grocer the co-op spends twice as much money locally as the chain grocer and the multiplier impacts of that difference are such that if you were to replace the central co-op with the chain grocer the city would lose 125 jobs whoops and there have been about two dozen of these studies done over the last 20 years and they all show that when you compare two businesses that are similar or two industries that are similar one locally owned one not the locally owned business or industry generates two to four times the jobs and other economic development impacts this is a study in the Harvard business review looking at communities across North America and it and found in those communities with the highest density of locally owned business there is the highest per capita job growth rate but not just that this study from the Federal Reserve in 2013 looked at counties across the United States and found that in those counties with the highest density of locally owned business there is the highest per capita income growth rate so in other words if you want to raise social equality lower poverty having a diversity of locally owned businesses turns out to be the best way of doing so and of course locally owned businesses matters for a lot of the other things some of the things you've touched on in your projects for tourism for entrepreneurship for political participation we know that a local food economy is good for public health and we know that local businesses are also good for sustainability there's actually a wonderful study that was done by the EPA looking at smokestack industries and what you find is that locally owned smokestack industries pollute about a tenth as much as absentee owned the only explanation being shame that when an owner of a local smokestack industry bumps into the neighbors there is some constraint some guilt about it some pressure to fix it whereas if you're an absentee owner you can get away with anything rule number two says we ought to be maximizing local diversity and I do want to give you an example of how diversification of an economy works and should work and this is the story that Jeffrey mentioned Zingerman's delicatessen in Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Zingerman's was very successful open in the 1980s and then they had a dilemma do we become a chain delicatessen like Schlotsky's and they decided against it because they didn't want to lose quality control but they decided you know what we need to still grow to hold on to our best managers but we can do so by growing broad I'm sorry growing deep into the community rather than spreading out all across the country so how did they do that they use two strategies the first was to look at their inputs and create new businesses to substitute for those inputs so for example they make sandwiches on bread they created a bakehouse they serve coffee they created their own coffee roasting company they serve ice cream and cheese they created their own creamery and then looking at the other side the products they produce where were the value adding opportunities so for example they serve good food they could create a sit-down restaurant called the Roadhouse they have great cakes they could create a mail order cake business they had great training so they could train other businesses how to do customer service so in all Zingerman's is now 12 independently owned businesses all local to Ann Arbor they co-license a brand and collectively they're responsible for 750 jobs there and 65 million dollars in sales but this strategy of economic development to go back to the projects that you presented I would want to know who are the major businesses in the Manchester Chateau region what were the biggest imports that they had and how could we substitute for those imports with new businesses in the area and I'd also want to engage the businesses there and ask them okay what are the value adding opportunities that could really help this area to grow and of course this is what resilience is all about one of the major shifts in economic development over the last year is that every economic development agency is saying we're going to create more local resilience unfortunately none of them know what they're talking about and resilience at the end of the day is about diversification and self-reliance which means they have to fundamentally change the way they do business the third rule is spreading triple or multi-bottom line businesses businesses with high labor and environmental standards and really the main point here is shine a spotlight on great performers this is what the B Corp certification process is all about and if you're in Jeffery's class you know all about the B Corp standard so I won't belabor this the last thing that rule is really to say focus on creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem and that you know as important as all of the place making ideas you have for Manchester Chateau I would add how do we transform this neighborhood into an entrepreneurial ecosystem so that people are part of this rebirthing process and in my mind that entrepreneurial ecosystem contains six P's planning people partners purchasing and policy making so planning means identifying leaks in the economy all the places where people are unnecessarily purchasing outside goods and services and expanding the business network in that neighborhood to plug those leaks people means nurturing entrepreneurs to lead or expand the leak plugging businesses partners means identifying and strengthening networks of local businesses that are more competitive as a team than they would be on their own for example they're in Tucson, Arizona there are a group of local food businesses called Tucson originals that collectively buy foodstuffs, dishes and kitchen equipment and by buying in bulk they bring down the prices for all of the restaurants and make themselves all more competitive purse is about the local investment piece we talked about purchasing is by local and policy making well there's a lot of stuff we could talk about in policy making but in my mind the biggest problem with policy when it comes to economic development is that global companies are given incentives and what people forget is that when you give money to one kind of company you're making the other kinds of companies less competitive subsidize global business hurt local business and guess what local businesses are responsible for all of the good things in your economy so we're supporting exactly the wrong things so I we have to fundamentally rethink government participation in this marketplace so I went through a lot of stuff quickly but let's we have probably four or five minutes if folks have any final questions well just an interesting point we have a lot of international students Michael and if you can mention a couple more international examples in the next minute or so if there aren't any questions or that this has applicability globally oh sure so I encourage all of you if you haven't done so there's a film actually there's two films that you should you should look at that are fun to watch so one is called the economics of happiness that was made about 10 years ago by a woman named Helena Norberg Hodge and the other is a film that was made about five years ago by some french filmmakers called dama which means tomorrow and both of these films contain wonderful examples of the ideas that I just laid out for you about local economy building about local food systems and local energy systems and localizing manufacturing creating local self-reliance and building local finance systems whether through banks or through local investment funds or even local money systems and one of the things that's been nice is since the economics of happiness has come out Helena Norberg Hodge has organized conferences all over the world where we showcase international examples so the last conference before COVID hit was in Japan about 14 months ago and just you know you really just saw beautiful examples throughout Japan of food localization and you know housing innovation and energy localization and then when actually after COVID hit we did there was another conference we did in Seoul, Korea and there we had you know really interesting panel about how co-ops in Seoul have become the leading developers of community-based community-based economies so yeah lots lots of examples internationally another set of examples that I'll give you is from Canada so Canada has great local investment models in the Canadian province of New Brunswick they have a tax incentive for local investment every dollar you invest in a local business in New Brunswick gets you 50 cents off of your taxes which is remarkable but believe it or not the state of Michigan is looking at an identical tax incentive right now in the in the province of Nova Scotia they allow neighborhoods to create their own pension funds in the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta they allow co-ops to be investment vehicles so that's how you can create community investment funds so lots of innovation as you look internationally Fantastic Michael thank you so much by the way the film tomorrow highlights the transition town movement do some research on that organization they're an international organization building local communities they focus on the energy descent building communities that are moving away from fossil fuel so Michael thank you so much this has been an amazing presentation and to the student teams thank you as well this whole two hours proved to be seamless and really inspiring and informative so thank you all for being part of this Kaya and Thad do you want to have any closing remarks we have more questions but I realize we're at the end of our two hours and we still have a packed schedule following this on our own so yes thank you Michael thank you Thad for organizing and Jeffrey for putting this like