 Welcome to part two of this event today on Settling Land. Because we are live on the internet, it's good to publicize things, so keep in mind we will have more such events, one in February, one coming up in Chicago, one that has passed which you can watch online, which are all part of this theme, Conversations on Architecture and Land in and out of the Americas. I'll reintroduce Joe Goldie very quickly if that's okay. Joe Goldie completed her PhD at the University of California Berkeley in 2008. She's currently professor, quote unquote, I mean in parenthesis in practice of quantitative theory and methods at Emory University. She previously held positions mostly as a historian. Her research into quantitative methods focuses on improving AI approaches to understanding the past. Her historical research concerns the history of property rights, the origins of eminent domain and the story of rent control. And without further ado, thank you Joe for joining us. And your talk is from her book, The Long Land War. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you Lucia for the invitation to join you. Happy birthday to the center. Thank you esteemed colleagues and students for joining us to talk about unsettled land. I'm going to offer you a story about land theft and land reparations. Land restored property rights and at least for five seconds in respect to the previous speaker shovels. Shovels, there will be shovels with implications for all those who want to work for a better world. I'd like to begin by sketching out the talk that follows. So I'm going to riff in this talk. This is not a written talk. This is a talk because I've given the written talk so many times. I've been on book tour for the last year. This is a riff on the talk that I've given many times in the past, a riff on the summary at the request of the Bewell Center, that I transfer what is essentially an intellectual, social and political history of land redistribution projects in the global 20th century. Normally it's about individuals and documents, but the very clever faculty of Columbia who know that I'm an architecture school dropout realized that secretly this is actually a landscape history in which the major players are not the people or even the ideas so much as the land itself and the ways in which we occupy that land. So I'm going to tell you that secret history. Through a vision of two landscapes of the 20th century, what does it mean that there was an era of the landscape of the fowl? The fowl meaning the food and agriculture organization of the United Nations. I'm going to be talking to you about a 30 year period in which the United Nations fowl is one of the principal institutions reorganizing landscape and space to repair the sins of empire and land theft in the past. And I'm going to give you some hints about what a landscape history of the moment of the fowl would look like and some hints because I will show you pictures that aren't in the book. I will give you suggestions that aren't in the book. Material for future dissertations on the landscape history of the fowl perhaps if you like or not. And then I will follow that up with some remarks about the post fowl landscape of the world. And what happens when the fowl unfortunately collapses or is assassinated in the power vacuum that follows? How do we tell the landscapes of the fowl for the landscapes of the post fowl? What does it mean to periodize the 20th century in this way? And where would we look for instances of spatiality in this archive? So I want to begin with a first landscape site. This is the Palacio Nacional of Mexico City. This is the seat of federal government, the seat of the presidency in Mexico City. It is history painting by Diego Rivera. The mural itself wasn't completed until 1951 which means that the creation of this mural overlaps in a large part with the moments of land reparation in question. This purports to be a particularly Mexican view of land reparations. But part of my history begins in Mexico so this is an excellent place to begin. It is a history of land reparations and the creation of the ahedo system of protected communal lands following the Mexican Revolution. A history painting that tells us about agency working at multiple levels. It is one part, a narrative of the travesty of colonization. The conquistadors, the ravaging of native lands, the Inquisition land theft followed victoriously in the middle, Tierra y Libertad, land and liberty by the coming of the Zapatista of Milho Zapata and the Mexican Revolution and the creation of a national system of land reparations, giving land title back to the peasants restoring land after the theft of the haciendas and so making right native title, peasant title across Mexico. It is also a synoptic view of the labor of land restitution that features peasants, indigenous people, statesmen, surveyors, intellectuals alongside laborers. The labor here is coming from many different arenas. And this is the mural that I returned to again and again as I was thinking about the organization of how I was going to tell a story of land reparations. What would it mean not to tell a social or intellectual history of land reparations? But a story of land reparations in the 20th century in which we could see a land parade, peasants with the tools of inhabitation, indigenous people with the tools of remapping native title, walking alongside intellectuals, sociologists with the tools of their trade, surveyors with the tools of their trade, an era of land reparations. This is in fact how I begin the book in chapter one, The Land Parade. The land parade is a fantasy about if Rivera had created a global mural of land restitution. It is loosely based on contemporary histories of land restitution written by the like of Rayner Shickley, the director of the Land and Water Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization, who wrote a global history that culminated in land reparation movements in contemporary South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, where the peasant and the peasant leader were for the first time, he argued, the heroes of world history leading a democratic revolution against what we now call settler colonialism, what he called empire, a democratic revolution restituting rights to occupancy, to land ownership, and to housing for all. So this is in some way the visualization of Shickley's narrative of world consciousness through history, a newly democratic age. You can also think of this as merely one episode, the Mexican episode, of the three great histories of land reparation in the earliest 20th century that launched the post-colonial movement as it was understood by the United Nations in Rome in 1945. That is to say, at the origins of the fowl in Rome in 1945, it is abundantly clear to most observers that they are in the midst of a global post-colonial revolution which is embodied by three major revolutions in their time. First 1881 in Ireland, the original land war, the Irish land war, is the episode that gives us the first modern rent control law, and the first law that enables peasants to buy out their mortgages from landlords with the backing of the state. Ireland in 1881 is the punctuation mark on an era of mass terrorism by which the Irish people, tenants on their own land, because of racist laws that prohibited Roman Catholics from owning or inheriting property, rebelled against the landlord class and demanded rights to their land, demanded the authentication of indigenous Irish tenure. It was granted at gunpoint by the Britain's parliament, and it was thereafter granted to Bengal in 1886 and on paper to Scotland in 1886. Scotland wouldn't get its land back until the 1990s. West Bengal wouldn't until the end of the Second World War. They were delayed the other land reforms. First Ireland, the second was the Mexican Revolution. So this revolution led by Emilio Zapata, a revolution of land restitution to put the documents of land tenure back in the hands of peasants. And then the third is India, widely expected in 1945, at the moment of independence to finally at last enjoy the fruits of that 1886 law. The peasants would get land tenure, reversing the system of the settlement of Bengal from the 18th century. So these three events in world history, Ireland, India and Mexico, are written about by the founders of the fowl as something like a trajectory of modern revolutions that plot where we expect the course of post-colonialism to go. The people of the land need their land back. The first director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, a man named John Boyd Orr, puts forward this thesis in his book right after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, The White Man's Burden, in which he forecasts that the era of the 20th century will be an era of unlimited struggle over resources, unless the white men of Europe can concede the land rights of indigenous title, do all over the world and erect a proper institution for ensuring a path to economic participatory success in all of those nations. The fowl is erected in order to complete what the members of the Roman consensus understand of the logical world history, the logic of this mural. So when they found the fowl, they're thinking about these people. They're thinking about a global post-colonial revolution. And they are thinking that they are at the very beginning of an era of marches, not unlike the marching of world history shown in the Rivera mural, which can be traced from Ireland to India to the homes fit for hero's movement and successive communist protests of London and Paris after the Second World War, demanding public housing and access for all, to other movements around the world like Vinoba Bhave, the Apostle of Gandhi, shown here in 1950, leading prime ministers and politicians of India on a walking tour over hundreds of miles to land, which will be gifted to landless persons by believers in Indian nationalism, to many other sites that we will touch on, including the American Southwest and the American West and that site of the Gold Rush San Francisco, site of native land occupation by the end of this era. So part of the work of my argument is to put these local North American movements for land reparations in the 60s and 70s on the same page of a wider arc of history as understood in 1945. And to say, is it not possible that T-Arena in New Mexico and the Indian occupation of Alcatraz and the other land-back manifestos of the 70s and later understood themselves to be part of a global movement already underway, already endorsed by major universities, by major institutions of international governance that was necessarily going to return American land to Native American and other displaced people. Viewed in this global light, these are something more than local identity movements coming out of the 1960s. They have a much deeper and longer trajectory, which is endorsed and validated at particular intellectual and institutional points. So the Rome Consensus is my name for that set of intellectual movements that congregates around John Boyd War and the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, in Montreal in 1945, which moves to Rome after 1951 in order to be closer to the global south. So in an era when airplane travel is rare and expensive and flights are long, Rome is more accessible to Latin America, Africa, and Asia than is Montreal. And so in 1951, the fowl with its motto fiat panace, let there be bread, moves into this structure across from the Colosseum in Rome. It is originally the Ministry for African Lands, a colonial ministry of Imperial Italy designed by Vittorio Caffiero in the 1930s, and it's expanded and adjusted for an era of internationalism. So this is the site where intellectuals like Doreen Warner will show up and preach the successes of the Irish Revolution in the hearing of Egyptian nationals who are in the midst of leading their own democratic revolution, spelling out in Irish rent control and land redistribution as the principle for erasing the sins of empire and creating a more democratic world. This is the site where John Lossing Buck, Pearl Buck's husband, agrarian economist, will come and lead the land and water division, preaching the role of infrastructure and appropriate technology for the rest of the world based on his research with Pearl in rural China in the years when land redistribution and land reform seemed certain, and it seemed clear that prescient thinking about the role of technology was necessary to make Chinese land reform a success. The building itself and the fate of the building in aesthetic terms I think tells us a lot about what it was like to live and work at the fowl at this moment which I'm arguing is not a moment of imperialism but a moment of socialist hope in a utopian moment of joint expertise from the developing world, transforming land ownership on a global scale with the help of carefully selected, carefully guided economic ideas and technologies, many of them also from the developing world. It's no accident that this is a building for colonial rule which has been vacated by the defeat of Italian empire and the defeat, the apparent defeat of European colonization projects in Africa in the 1950s. The building itself is left unoccupied because there's a model of world system which is collapsing and it is repopulated by this new bureaucracy of experts on land economics and technology. And one of the first things that they do in this building is to repopulate it with a different kind of art, not the art of empire, the art of anti-empire. So joyously effusive portraits of the universe by the glass artist, Mirko Balzaldela and portraits of European peasant labor which instantiate the ideas of the European peasant commons which are current with the founders of the fowl, current in their thinking about the possibility of collective land ownership like Guido de Grave. There are also gifts from the many nations that the fowl works with from Africa, from South Asia, from Southeast Asia. We see this gong in the Thailand lounge, a gift in 1955 from the Kingdom of Thailand. We see this Ethiopian landscape from 1965 and Vasquez's tapestry from 1982 about the cultivation of maize. There are celebrations in other words of something like folk culture, something like landscape and native landscape and native ways of growing and the peculiarities of that. The art and the culture and the agriculture of each nation are understood to be gifts to other possible nations. Now as a reminder, what's significant about this, where does I think this runs in parallel to how the fowl is constructed? The fowl is not an imperializing bureaucracy of white expertise. It's founded with European leadership and the work of a Scotsman, John Boyd War but with the help of other people from the peripheries of British Empire in the 1940s. And the fowl is set up from the very beginning to support South-South exchanges of expertise. So the way the fowl works in 1945 and the way the fowl works today is that there are experts from on dry land's agriculture from Lebanon who are sent to other places in North Africa or to dry land's agriculture areas in India. So it's not exclusively American expertise or European expertise. There's an intentional cultivation of developing world expertise funded and supported by member nations, by all of the member nations including ours. And I can say more about how that was constructed but I think the art itself symbolizes the desire for this even playing field, for an even system of exchanges if such a thing were to be possible. The fowl is also a site of practices of technology and mapping. And previous scholars have understood this mapping in a particular way. This is, I'm showing you a picture of the Soil Map of the World which was first published by UNESCO in 1971. The Soil Map of the World was the output of a 20-year collaboration between UNESCO and the fowl. Most of the previous historians who have written about this map went to the UNESCO archive. UNESCO is a funny place, UNESCO, which we know has ambitions to promote the culture of many lands according to the ideas of Huxley. UNESCO was run by intellectuals and if you read the UNESCO papers about this map, what you learn is that they want one map to rule them all and that they want the best of expertise and that they're going to map everywhere in the world. And it really does sound like a surveillance project. But if you go to the fowl and you read their debates from 1945 forward about the role of mapping, what you hear is their expectation that there will be post-colonial revolutions in many lands that follow the pattern set in Ireland, Mexico and India, giving the land back, re-establishing native title, using land to the tiller strategies and other strategies to cultivate broadcast landownerships and rights of occupancy around the world. And what they know is that the government of India needs a map. They need a map of soil. Because if we're going to divide up India and redistribute all of India, it's crucial that we don't just lay down a grid and give you a piece of rock and me a piece of loamy soil because you might get upset. You might not be able to grow anything on that acre of rock, right? Whereas if we know that it's rock, we can irrigate out, we can give you more land, we can justify, we can retailer our distribution scheme in some way that's more even. So the soil map of the world is actually commissioned by post-colonial people. You can read the Governor of Bengal in 1970 saying, where is this map? When is this map coming? Not now. We have voted. We have legislated land redistribution. But we cannot do it correctly. We cannot do it efficiently without the help of international geographers mapping the soil at an appropriate scale. To coordinate this map, it takes the voluntary labor of hundreds if not thousands of geographers coordinated through international organizations of scholars all vying to map the land at different scales. They're impossible to herd. It's a terrible problem. This is why it takes 20 years. And then it's a tragic story. The map is created just as modern GIS systems, satellite mapping, are launched. So it's almost immediately completely irrelevant. It's a beautiful map, but we no longer need it. Thank you very much. And it arrives just at the moment when the international powers that we have yanked the cord of funding from the fowl and declared that the moment of international land reform is over and the moment of capitalism has arrived. Henceforth, there will be land titling projects. Yes, a la de Souza, but no land redistribution, no support for the infrastructure needed to build communities of small farmers. The flood of funding is shut off. The fowl is reduced to a shadow of its former self. The moment of neoliberalism has arrived. In 1974, I talk about the smoking gun of the World Bank under Nixon and McNamara and how it ends the era of the fowl producing the first modern neoliberal land titling scheme in Thailand as its first operation. So this map is a tragedy as well as an ambitious exercise in technology. So if it's a tragedy, it nonetheless tells us a lot about what was happening inside those moral buildings of the fowl. What were they doing? They were trying to use the technologies available to them to support small farmers around the world in their endeavors to become self-sustaining in the long term. So we see economic calculations of the number of man-hours per farm needed in different regions around India by Samarajan Singh, the uncle of Amarchya Singh, which suggests that you can indeed produce more food with more people on the land, but maybe the Malthusian limits to land production don't work the way we thought they did. We see clipping from an article later published in the New York Times magazine, Send Me a Ho, advertising what will later be known as appropriate technology, but what is at the moment a Gandhian philosophy about the power of small technologies which has been debated within India itself, hence the spinning wheel on the Indian flag. These ideas are explained by Sen and others to Norse Dodd, second director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization on his world tour, an extensive stopover to talk to Indian intellectuals and Indian economists after 1952. Gandhi has this idea of appropriate technology witnessing the enormous debt that the subcontinent is under to Britain as a result of corrupting regulations of railway traffic that promise shareholders in London guaranteed returns, parliamentary guaranteed returns of 5% on their investment, on the backs of the Indian peasant, complete with currency devaluation, big technology. Gandhi and Daniel Thorner later conclude, big technology is about indebting, developing nations and stealing their land. Small technology is what can make small holders productive and free. And therefore, Gandhi looks around at the new bicycle shops of India and says, here are technologies that can liberate individuals and make any small holder of the industry and a tiny industrialist. Norse Dodd hears this explanation and thinks, yes, maybe the fowl should be sending hose and buckets and yes, shovels, shovels to the developing world, John Lossing Buck after 10 years of research in agricultural China concludes that the Chinese farm cannot be made more productive unless there is a revolution in appropriate small scale technology alongside large industrial, infrastructural systems like roads and railroads connecting markets and allowing small farmers to become profitable. This is more or less the logic of Pearl Buck's novel, The Good Earth. Also, the impossibility of farming in a region of small farmers unless there are further investments in technology. This message of appropriate technology is, of course, later taken up by E.F. Schumacher and it is delivered to Western universities, especially MIT and Oxford, as a message that engineers need to learn about small technology and become the designers of small technology for the developing world, which has not gone this idea. That is not the Indian idea of small technologies being manufactured and invented on site in the developing world. That is the power grab by engineering and design departments trying to understand their relevance in a new era. So all of these, I want to understand all of these revolutions from the map and information, from the map to the revolutions in agricultural economics to appropriate technology as part of the practices of technology and mapping that are being promoted by the FAU by the way of instituting and making permanent postcolonial land reform. I can only make my small farm productive if I have appropriate investments in infrastructure and technology. There are questions about big and small. There are questions about expertise and the cost of design expertise. The FAU is always on the side of the small and cheap. It's on the side of the economists from the developing world. Part of what the FAU does to leverage this hope for revolution of technologies and surveying is to turn itself into a site of information exchange leveraging the cheapest and lightest of appropriate technologies, paper. So the FAU becomes a manufacturing site of journal upon journal. Journal upon journal about dry land agriculture about the maintenance of fishery and organization of fisheries about appropriate technology about agriculture at different scales in different regions about native forms of land tenure. Journal upon journal filling up stack upon stack much of it recirculated to the major research universities of agriculture like UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Cornell, Wisconsin, Michigan and to a much lesser extent Ivy Leagues, sorry. Daniel Thorough was kicked out of this university before going to India to work on this revolution. So the part of the labor of organizing this information at the FAU becomes the work of bibliography. So we're looking at the cover of bibliography that was manufactured at the University of Wisconsin where the land tenure center represented the interests of a dozen faculty and their students from all over the world compiling yet more reports on dry lands agriculture, fisheries, native title, the best, cheapest and most efficient titling practices and how to execute them. The work of annotated bibliography in the era before large language models was to answer your queries as efficiently as possible. So before you had Siri, you had bibliography and you looked up, surveying and there are 50 short paragraph links explanations of the meat of published scholarly articles published from all over the world on land titling practices. You can read and summarize them and adjust them and then go look up further reading to your heart's content. So the bibliography system is part of what's running this entire machine and they have to be manufactured at the FAU where there's a small army of intelligent women who have advanced degrees in agricultural economics and that are put to the work of writing bibliographies without much attribution. Thank you very much. They're typing up cards like this one, this is from about research done in the 1940s by the founder of the land tenure center at the University of Wisconsin. The system of bibliographies, libraries, seed catalogs and soil maps is a massive information network. Imagine deciding, oh, my architecture school is really great. You know what would make it even greater if we were a language model that was serving all of the design needs of the entire world? It would be an astronomical ambition, right? You're thinking donor money. Well, they did it. It's an incredible feat that all of these universities and foundations in the United Nations went after such an ambitious model. And if you go to the Columbia University Library catalog and you look at the dissertations produced here or at Harvard or even more so at Cornell or Michigan or Wisconsin during the 1960s and 70s, I assure you that if you look for references to land tenure, peasant land tenure, land ownership and small farming from the departments of economics, agricultural economics, sociology, anthropology and history, you will find an enormous volume, something like over 50% of those dissertations concern the subject. We're thinking of the university system as a whole as a tool for producing knowledge in the service of small farmers worldwide. So the FAO is a site of information serving and technology on behalf of small farmers. And not all of it disappears. You might recognize some other people who integrated themselves with this network. This is the young Eleanor Ostrom long before she became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics. Here's the young Eleanor Ostrom who told us for the first time that native systems of land tenure or forestry or fishery that held resources in common were efficient and producing and protecting their resources and would not suffer the tragedy of the commons purported by Garrett Hardin in his famous article of that name. Ostrom's conclusions were written on the basis of a library, a library this one, which was collected from seminar paper after seminar paper delivered up at the workshop a political economy which she founded in 1972 along with her husband at Indiana University and they began to invite all of the ethnographers of common land traditions starting with the Swiss grazing commons and proceeding to Mexican ahedos to ask them, tell us how this works. Was there a tragedy of the commons? How did you maintain those resources? What are the rules? When did these rules exist? What about the Islamic water commons in Spain? They collected information about traditional commons holding systems for managing natural resources from all over the world and they filed them as paper in another one of these filing paper machines these paper systems for organizing knowledge to produce new findings that would be useful for the new regime of restoring local small land tenure. Ostrom's research of course cut across what was then the dominant paradigm of single proprietor land ownership one person, usually a man the land owner as the result of most of the first land tenure titling schemes other similar work was being done in Africa by anthropologists who discovered that yes indeed there were traditions of women's land ownership and so in this way it's not simply a reverie to think of the social sciences as somehow helping this global socialist project of redistributing the land of the earth they were indeed sociologists and economists creating new rules deciphering the logic of native land tenure across the world in such a way that would allow these land redistribution schemes to honor native title in its complexity it's an applied format of scholarship but not paper for paper's sake enormous research paper undertakings insert the service of a global society of the dispossessed so to sum up the landscape of the fowl the landscape of the fowl is an era composed in a synoptic view whether by Diego Rivera's mural of collective and intellectual labor hand in hand transforming land ownership of the earth or through the paper machines like Austram's like the fowl itself which existed to leverage new forms of knowledge to underwrite land redistribution so that it could be economically successful all of this was organized in order to reverse the sins of empire in an era of post-colonial projects is not chiefly an era of surveillance for surveillance's sake or expertise for expertise's sake but something that perhaps we have lost in the construction of our universities an era of expertise's sake in order to leverage greater parity and equality and access to the rights of occupation for all so let's go from this summary of the landscape of the fowl to ask what were the landscapes after the fowl the landscapes after the fowl were I would argue an era of seminars and pamphlets and other paper apparatuses designed to serve not small farmers and not occupation or land tenure but instead weaponized on behalf of the logic of private ownership of lock-in property rights single owner proprietorship and the end of public housing and there are maps and other activities from below resistance movements which are tempted to re-establish land rights and native land rights piecemeal a stochastic logic rather than a synoptic logic is the characteristic of the landscape post-fowl so seminars work of Milton Friedman is familiar to us perhaps less familiar is the fact that he gets started as an economist writing about his objections to rent control in the era after the Second World War objecting to the logic of squatters demanding public housing for all as an improbable fantasy now perhaps more important than Friedman and the University of Chicago to this story is the founders of the Institute for Economic Affairs the IEA in London who are a group of counter-socialists who are galvanized by the work of the socialist state to build housing and to create land-use policies in the era after the Second World War I tell this story in the book about how the founders of the IEA began reaching out to anybody in Britain who hates bureaucracy as much as they do in order to compile their own paper machine of cases when red tape goes wrong who are their number one subscribers? the construction industry the construction industry hates land-use planning why? because you designed a building architects the construction industry the real estate industry wants to build it and then those pesky urban planners come and the land-use experts who say no no this is slated for a playground or we need more parking or we need more access or we need to do a study or we need to see how this will affect taxation or something else the IEA starts to compile these instances instance after instance when the construction industry says that its work in providing housing efficiently has been marred and as Britain enters an era of a housing crisis in the 1960s the IEA's pamphlets take off and they begin to circulate pamphlets like these which advertise the end of public housing the end of rent control and the end of the public library system as forces of liberation that will end this plague of bureaucracy which Britain is suffering through it is the founders of the IEA who recruit and groom a young chemist Margaret Satcher for a decade before she becomes prime minister of course her first acts as prime minister will be to privatize the public housing system of Great Britain and this is just one dimension of what we might understand as a neoliberal assault on the rights of occupancy this is the episode where there's an assault on public housing in the cities but in the book I trace a longer history of the assault by the American led World Bank in the 1970s on the fowl itself and land redistribution and small holder farming after the 1970s there are economists who have been saying small farms can be just as productive as large farms there are economists today who have done the same studies and come to the same conclusions and the World Bank makes sure that those economists have no hearing in 1974 they release a memo that says hereafter there will be no land ceilings only land floors so paper is collected and weaponized by the other side it creates this system of paper typical of neoliberalism creates a power vacuum well the first thing that it does is that it creates it helps to support the green revolution and with the green revolution it creates enormous farms industrial farms that can only be provisioned by irrigation and tractors and it puts out of business many of those same small farmers this is like India who had benefited from state-led land reform and who were waiting the extension services provided by the fowl or waiting proper soil mapping and this rise of industrial farms supported by USAID and American foundations like the Ford and Rockefeller in turn pushes those peasants those dispossessed peasants the small farmers into cities which as Mike Davis explains are not built to hold them it's not the pull of jobs that draws them into cities it's the push off the land of the green revolution it's this shift of infrastructures which leaves them destitute and so a world of squatter cities materializes seemingly overnight squatter cities where the only land claim is your shovel in this world there is a power vacuum of what has been left behind in the collapse of the fowl there are still people who believe in land rights and native land rights but hereafter they will pursue their causes in an independent piece meal stochastic pattern characterized by voluntary work often by faculty aligning themselves with native movements so for example I tell the story of the hunting lions collected by Hugh Brody and his maps of dreams maps and dreams which tells the story of the beaver and creed people of Canada who begin to organize themselves in order to map their ancestors' patterns of walking the land the hunting rights which are laid out as overlapping patterns of walking they can be mapped once they are mapped they are a court worthy document and native land rights hold up against mining and timber companies now this pattern of grassroots mapping participatory mapping becomes a model which is promulgated and shared the people who are mapping rent in Appalachia are invited to Chennai in India by a group of trade unionists to tell them how to do participatory mapping of native land rights and this exchange produces among other things a visible a sense of pavement dwellers an early attempt to map the rights of homeless people in India so these participatory maps begin to appear all over the world in Latin America in North America in Scotland in Africa as a way of organizing native people to make land claims and also to do something like urban planning on their own behalf but they are no longer organized and supported by a universal infrastructure an information infrastructure coordinated by the FAL neither are they understood by the nations around them to be moving towards an ultimate tellos of repairing the sins of empire through land redistribution so these efforts are successful for example in restoring Beaver and Cree land rights are successful in limiting tannin effluence from a leather factory in a region in South India but they are not successful in producing a broadcast national or international pattern of reform they are technology working in the absence of a universalizing mission stochastic and piecemeal what they lack is a synoptic understanding of land rights in history or how they can properly ally with each other with universities and other institutions of knowledge okay so I give you the landscapes of the FAL and the post FAL one opportunity to think about the trajectory of land rights in the global 20th century thank you very much thank you Joe I'm going to follow that lovely extemporaneous lecture with reading of paper for the next few minutes so I'd like to begin by saying how sincerely privileged I feel to give a response today to Joe's work it was not so many years ago as Lucia hopefully reminded us during my second semester as a PhD student that I read Joe's first book called the most important historical study of the origins and early consequences of what she names the infrastructure state so I'm sure many here are familiar with this work but to provide a brief summary the book shows how the construction of roads in 18th and early 19th century Britain constituted a state-making enterprise in a very literal sense the roots that began binding territory together created the conditions of possibility for modern scales of social and political cohesion so in this she reveals how roads were not just physical design entities but rather constituted the very nerve endings of a state apparatus so following from this my goal in this response is to try to offer a reading of Joe's current work or new work on land through this previous work on roads and through time to bring this discussion into the context of the Buell's ongoing discussions of land in the built environment which is all to say that my response will deal with questions of infrastructure its history its cultural implications and perhaps the kinds of politics or morality that different forms of infrastructure suggest so to put it in different terms and this is my central question what is land without infrastructure this seems to be a crucial theme in the history of land reform the fowl, the soil map of the world as well as the kaleidoscopic series of cases from squatters to mystics to housing policy Joe presents throughout the rest of this new book and of course many of which there wasn't time to touch on so land without infrastructure remains in a very literal sense disconnected to put it simply it is difficult to bring land to market without a road or a canal on which that crop can be transported and this is a central theme in roads to power and it is important in the sense that Joe's previous book takes place not at the post war United Nations but in the 18th and early 19th centuries a period of time before the term infrastructure was itself coined by French railway engineers in the 1840s so by the mid 20th century of course infrastructure takes on a very different meaning as scholars like Timothy Mitchell and Bill Rankin among many others have shown mega projects like highways and dams were central to the post war developmentalist imagination a long land war which we see here suggests a very different story the book uses the word infrastructure quite a lot but it is almost always modified with another word most often Joe refers to information infrastructures which she said toward the end of her talk but at other points I think she tellingly contrasts what she calls the light infrastructures of small scale and paper technologies to the heavy infrastructures of power plants, roads, railways and so on so a persistent if constantly shifting dream throughout this research it seems to me is that the lighter and more nimble forms of information transfer if planned with enough intelligence might serve to somehow repair the problems of earlier infrastructural regimes so that is if conventional infrastructural forms of modernity were linear extracted and aided the centralization of both political and economic power then lighter forms of mapping and communicating might serve to redistribute decentralize and ultimately unsettle that power but and I guess this is my second question is it really possible to separate out light infrastructures from heavy ones or instead is the light infrastructural imagination by definition something that is projected from places thick with heavy infrastructures to places where systems of circulation and material distribution are scarce the soil map of the world I think provides an exemplary case it was imagined by Files utopian bureaucrats from their Roman headquarters a minutely detailed register of soil quality throughout the entire world as Joe has told us a comprehensive guide to the judicious redistribution of land so we might say it was intended as a kind of infrastructure of care even as it employed the language of infrastructures of circulation as Joe shows however this ideal was watered down repeatedly in her book she goes into more detail on this so this ideal was watered down repeatedly until the map was reduced to she writes quote an overview suited to the planners of roads and dams so in her book and in today's talk she suggested the many ways in which the lack of funding and institutional structure of the FAO perhaps destined the map to fail at meeting its initial lofty goals but I'd like to ask was there a deeper problem here that is is it possible that an institutional consciousness that was reared as it were on the heavy infrastructures of roads and railroads etc was perhaps destined to return to those roads and railroads was there a kind of inbuilt inertia that only the built environment could provide in this sense we might read the failure of the soil map of the world excuse me not simply as a problem of missed deadlines and insufficient budgets instead we might read this failure a kind of aesthetic quasi art historical sense as a document that was faded or kind of a turn of kind of dramatic irony faded to express the scalar limitations of the institutions that created it that perhaps any institution that aspired to work on a global scale was destined to operate with what historian Frederick Cooper memorably called quote long arms but weak fingers Cooper was of course referring to limitations of European colonial governments acting at a distance but those colonial governments as Joe has told us were in many ways the salient precursor and in the case of the very physical precursor to the institutions of post war internationalism addressed in this project so you might say then that the soil map offered a crucial representation of this problem the file could sort of feel around with its long arms providing enough detail to find space for the place flattening infrastructures attempted to remake the world in the image of a developmentalist progress but the ideal of the unrelentingly detailed maps perhaps like the imagined pipeline between the university or metropolitan expert and the rural peasant was something too intrinsically difficult to achieve without a more radical recomposition of spatial and political relations so this is all to ask finally and this is something everyone here knows about quite a lot whether spatial compositions carry the history of their formation or whether that history can somehow be escaped without fundamentally altering the space itself once a plot of land is tied to a road or global soil map whether that connection can be reversed or inverted or atoned for and maybe to continue this idea whether a system of infrastructural circulation that was constructed to start to guide the accumulation of capital can ever be put towards other ends and this is a big question do infrastructure and capitalism in other words have a necessary or contingent relationship as Joe's earlier work shows the genealogy of concepts that created the very possibility of a global scale ran through beliefs drawn from early political economy ideas about the liberatory potential of roads and canals to open markets and to create connections the question becomes whether a more equitable world might be built on the ruins of a system designed for extraction concentration and accumulation whether it's possible to imagine a corrective compensatory planning that might clean up after the ravages of capitalist expansion so in response and Joe didn't go into this too much in her talk today but in the book one of the book's most poignant arguments in my view for land reform is that occupancy is and always has been a basic human right and therefore must be viewed not through the narrow and relatively recent lenses of for instance capitalism versus communism or socialism or markets versus states but rather in a fuller perspective that considers the full scope of human experience we might call this a kind of humanitarian long-duration which is a view at distinct odds with the impatience that I think capitalism has installed in each of us and here I wonder whether Joe is asking us ultimately for patience and perhaps a kind of grace in the face of what can feel like an accelerating unraveling world so my last question is this does this wide historical perspective this humanitarian long-duration provide another way of acting it is all well and good to see things in the light of history but as John Maynard Keynes famously said in the long run we are all dead and so who has time to wait for the arc of justice to bend in their direction Keynes perhaps like the FAU and the UN also operated in what historian Carolyn Biltuff has recently called a constrained meta-geography subtle techniques for smoothing the turbulence of industrial capitalism were predicated on those policies remaining within the command center rather than the periphery of capitalism's beating heart by contrast and to conclude I think Joe's project is the most inspiring and the most provocative in how it searches for sympathies that extend past the constraints of these persistent and obdurate divisions that exist in our geographies and more disturbingly in our minds separating out place from place and from people if infrastructure has done much of the work of this separation Joe implores us to imagine and believe the ways that the systems we have constructed can be turned in a sense against themselves in repeating the invoking and she didn't do this in the talk surprisingly but in the book she repeatedly invokes a simple central universalism of FAU's director Norris Dodd quote the earth for man or perhaps better the earth for humans and in this call Joe insists that in the face of our uncertain and stormy future global solidarities are the most necessary perhaps at those moments when they seem the most impossible thank you as you see we really plan ahead the bill I'll ask Joe a question so I was wondering about this post war moment the most international solidarity I did not understand that but looking at something like that database on which information about this and that was written it strikes me so much like a continuation of the 19th century databases that I happen to be working on but the techniques seem very similar I mean I don't know if you're familiar with something like the Imperial Institute for example where they would both they were a bit more I think straightforward about what constituted resource and they would display rocks and you know plants and so on but the idea was exactly the same and the two differences I notice is one there's not as much room for exhibition in the database that you showed us and the other is a kind of weird cultural sensitivity injected to what is otherwise undiscussed extraction so I'm just wondering given for example that continuance you know thread from 19th century very colonial kind of databases to your database in the 20th century can we really characterize that as a moment of solidarity and hope or is it the layer of you know primary layer that you need before neoliberalism comes and sits on the whole thing so it's about you know it's not new to call this neo-colonialism but that kind of even moment of hope might have been structurally necessary to be able to build what comes after yes so I mean I think this is hard a question about periodization and it's you know one of the tricks about doing periodization in history which is to say defining the events which structure time into eras that look distinctively different is that it is an artificial practice it is not for example the case that after the French Revolution the Catholic Church disappears and that there are no more Catholics in France or no more monarchists in France or that those those impulses have disappeared from intellectual history authoritarianism or gender have altogether fled in a utopian moment but there are there are there are movements of time and so these periods are useful for thinking about how we can structure a form of analysis so I talk about the lens in this talk about the landscapes of the fowl now it's emphatically not a case that all of the landscapes from 1945 to 1974 are landscapes of the fowl as the people in this room know there are also landscapes of the world bank and landscapes of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundation landscapes of global pesticide interests landscapes of European tax havens and tax flight which siphon off the tax investment dollars intended for infrastructure in the developed world and also cap a kind of corruption level on the building of infrastructure in the developing world so we can talk about all of those other features happening simultaneously but that doesn't mean that what's happening at the fowl is any less instructive especially for trying to understand the global history of attempts to create alternative systems and it may be true that the fowl borrows from the lines of history or lines of economic reasoning that were themselves developed alongside statistics as a whole under empire in the era of European empire but they are to a large extent being repurposed by intellectuals from the developed world or in dialogue with intellectuals from the developed world at this moment it is that the British historian would rush to note not the only anti-colonial or post-colonial movement there are also 19th century anti-colonial movements which have universal flows but we can in a history exam most of the work in a history phd exam is to argue about the definitions of periodization in this way which proves that one is an engaged participant Joe can I ask who have been so what I am hearing from the questions you are being asked and as a kind of theme it is not only the question of continuity of ideas or continuity of institutions or continuity of even impulses but that there is maybe a unique thing that happens in a second wave specific questions of second wave Timothy had this in his paper too the first wave of gold mining is easy Manu told us there is more machine that has come along and I think in Alex's question as well as Zainab's we hear maybe the question is isn't there a moment at which heaviness begins to drag on the possibility to undo or to like the build environment affects continuity in a certain way this is what Alex was saying that once something has been institutionalized or once something has been accumulated is there not something specifically with land as we like to think of ourselves specifically with the built environment that then really has a unique drag on history so it is not just periodization of before and after of things leaving but yeah I have to determine this I think it is a very powerful question and I don't think I have totally unpacked it but you might say that the division of land into small plots and farms should have had such a drag and yet this did not lead to the Green Revolution from moving forward okay, Reinhardt is back hi, thank you everybody and all of the above and to continue I want to ask Tim but I would also love to continue the conversation from last night with Joe about memorials and monuments but I just want to this is more like a first to begin a comment or suggestion maybe question if there is room for people like in your book I don't know because I haven't read it who wrote an economics dissertation here in the teens and twenties under Zelligman and was Gandhi's opponent from the left in Indian anti-colonial programs similarly someone like Walter Rodney actual third world intellectuals who were actual socialists and not so much the E.F. Schumacher Eleanor Ostrom kind that anyway so that is to continue that conversation but I have to sorry with Timothy I so much love listening and reading your work and feel interpolated in this case I was wondering if it's going to be the Ames shovel and the monument when I saw the title and you started with the gold rush so maybe these two things can be drawn together because it seems to me both of you in different ways maybe Timothy a little bit more sorry to force the question are telling incredible stories and really producing cartographies of circulation at the level that Walter Rodney for example might call superstructural and I'm interested in the other axis and how these things might intersect which would say the more vertical axis of production something like the shovel the various agricultural techniques these are the kinds of things that people like Ambedkar Rodney and the others were committed to economists working out of Dar es Salaam similarly we're the discourse of production class struggle the kind of old school actually anti-colonial in that regard I mean militant anti-colonial thought comes in and similar I think anti-colonial in the North American context when we think about gold in relation to as a circulatory medium in relation to the capture let's say of production through settlement and so on of the land does that make sense however you want to take it yeah so it does I'm receiving that more as comment I'm trying to parse like how to you know in a good way how to think that through the thing that maybe begins to bring into focus more for me is my own uncertainty about whether to follow maybe this is puritization but to think of that precipitous moment of the gold rush as something as a kind of precondition for what happened after or as just a its own kind of blip in that moment before the activity of production becomes in technological terms like fully industrialized and hydraulic mining which is then accompanied by actual possession of land as opposed to possession of the use or property right as a use of land what the and I haven't looked at like what the bridge is between those kind of thinking as thinking historically does the does the initial few years of the gold rush vanish and actually leave no legacy and get taken over by this other paradigm of ownership of production of the kind of circulatory mechanism of gold or is it a precondition and I don't know I'm uncertain as I start to kind of think through your comment I'm wondering whether whether it's worth trying to think of the initial moment of the gold rush as being actually that does vanish that this moment of a certain kind of claims process of the shovel being both tool and symbol simultaneously vanishes because it's no longer a symbol at least in the legal process once the claim system is superseded by a possession system and so then the question is kind of where does it go and I don't know whether the shovel as a kind of both tool and symbol of production has some legacy in the all we need is a hoe bring us a hoe this kind of other you know where the imagery it doesn't seem it still seems overridingly about the actual instrumental value of the hoe and that the the hoe doesn't necessarily serve a symbolic purpose beyond the advertisement but maybe that's one place it locates whether maybe kind of you have thoughts about whether this at dinner so anyway I guess that's as best I can do to try to wonder whether there's this moment thinking thinking in depth whether that actually moment gets really separated out from a kind of longer unfolding of history and it just becomes something an aberration, a moment, a discontinuity what that would mean is that the legal theorists it would mean that this sort of flourishing of a certain legal thinking from the eastern United States that migrated to the gold camp then perished there because for the legal historians what's important is that the miners were bringing with them the legacy of town meetings and placing those town meetings into a new context of property rights and coming up with a model for self-governance but if that historical moment is not a precedent for later things then that means that possibility vanished with the last of the 49ers right one last question maybe but many other opportunities go ahead I would say at dinner and drinks after my question really builds on what Zaynep asked as well first thank you for all your talks and it's sort of directed at Joe when my comment really builds on what Zaynep said which is that the maps themselves are so reminiscent of these colonial 19th and early 20th century maps of extraction but they're also the far itself is espousing a certain fiction in a way that what does native land rights mean in South Asia for example which exceeds settler will and indigenous dispossession so that itself is a fiction in itself stems from an internationalism that has its roots in sort of mid 19th and early 20th century sort of thinking and this is what separates that sort of developmentalist intelligentsia from land rights and land rights issues itself so how can one really disentangle what the fowl does from the history of these internationalism itself is stemming from colonial liberal modes by which standardization is agreed upon in some ways and what does that mean by collecting information on native land rights in a place which has such a contested both land rights and so on and the last thing is about thinking about where some of the records that you found and thinking about dissertations that address this also this information about so much is what we understand as area studies of the military industrial complex so can fowls documentation of agriculture soil and other things be separated from the military industrial complex is interesting in that and which is why by virtue of which University of Chicago for example has post 1950s records of all of agriculture in India for example and that's why people do thesis there so how are these separated sorry so there is a strong tradition by the end of the 19th century within India of critiquing European extractivism by thinking through what forms of socialist institutions might replace British empire when Daniel Thoner leaves Columbia to practice Indian history within India and then has his passport seized by the FBI believes him to be a communist he starts retelling that story on his own and his version of it is that European extractivism is characterized by these large scale infrastructural experiments like the railway and that what has to follow it is a new kind of land system of the kind that have been designed by various Indian economists so one can tell that story in terms of descent Ambedkar versus Gandhi one can zoom into any one of these stories in great detail and find the refractions, the variations the communist story of West Bengal or Kerala is very different than the story in Uttar Pradesh but it also looks different again if you start the story in 1990 when the issue is Dalit representation or indigenous forest ownership as represented by international organizations like the ILC but my readings suggest that the FAO is really modest in a way of following intellectual discourses that have been set in the developed world and of course that is a huge simplification because there is a multitude of discourses set in the developing world but the wrong consensus represents something that is not imperial in that way and I think that's important to grasp because it's important to be able to imagine an international participatory institution that reflected a diversity of views and what I was trying to correct for was kind of Manichean portrait of the 20th century where the real drama is always the US versus Russia it's always capitalism versus communism and then all of the whole range of human rights work and socialist potentials of identity movements all over the world falls out of the picture so the long land war is just one frame it's not the definitive frame it's not the final frame it is one frame that allows us to see some of the commonalities between these post-colonial movements as understood by intellectuals like Dorian Warner who are Daniel Thorner who have embedded themselves in these movements and who are really trying to pay attention Thank you so much everybody