 All right, hello everybody. My name is Juan Francisco Salderriaga. I work with Laura at the Center for Spatial Research, and I am here to introduce the next panel, which I'm very excited about. We're gonna hear from Dietmar Ofenhuber and Mitch McEwen, and I think it's gonna be a great session. Dietmar is an assistant professor at Northwestern University, where he works at the School of Art and Design and Public Policy, and he has a PhD from MIT, from Planning, a Master's of Science in Art and Design, Master's of Science in Media Arts and Sciences, and a Diploma in Architecture. So as you can see, he straddles both spheres between design and governance and policy constantly, and what I'm really looking forward to is that he has a very broad and generous view of design, and he really tries to understand how design interacts with governance, with informality, with policy, so that's a talk that's gonna really address the topic of today. How do we learn about cities through different methods of looking into it? And Mitch McEwen, our second panelist, she's an assistant professor at the School of Architecture at Princeton University. She's also the principal of McEwen's studio and one of the co-founders of Ann Office, and she has received multiple grants and awards. She has exhibited in the Venice Biennale, in the Istanbul Biennale, and the one thing I really appreciate about Mitch's work is that she's not afraid to be provocative and to engage with the purely political aspect of architecture. She really sees architecture as a political act, and through design, through her exhibitions, and through her writing, she challenges how architecture shapes our political environment, how it reflects our political conditions, and how the public can play a role in our cities. So again, I'm really excited about this two talks, and we're gonna start with Diedmar presenting his talk Platform Man and the Bricolore. Please join me and welcome them too. Yeah, thank you, Sean, for this generous introduction, and thanks everyone for inviting me. Though it's gonna be hard to follow up on this absolute brilliant set of three talks in the morning. So, 10 years ago, almost to the very date, the designer, Daniel, published his essay, The Street as Platform, which was very influential in the whole smart city crowd, and in this text he didn't really talk about future technologies, but he described a very banal and everyday street scene through all the different events of data capturing and transferring and interaction, and looked at this through the lens of then contemporary technology, which already in 2008 occupied a substantial footprint in the city, which led him to assert that without this infrastructure, the street only half exists. So, the past decade then was really characterized by the desire of many planners, governance companies, and amateurs and hackers to build urban data platforms that would embrace and capture all these disparate activities. While Daniel was, there was a slightly ironic undertone, so half of the data processes that he described failed and didn't really work, but this irony was mostly missing from all the following large scale initiatives to create these data platforms. But I also think that on a more general level, almost all conceptualizations of urban technology, assume the need for some kind of platform, a platform that enables collective action, creativity, governance, but very often it's framed as a not just yet stance that once we have the platform finished, then all these magical things will happen. So, this creates a kind of chicken and egg problem. If the platforms and their network effects are the prerequisite for collective engagement, how do platforms themselves take shape? In open source development, this is often described as a recursive relationship. In order to build something, you first have to build the tools and those tools are again composed of other tools that have to be built and so on and this fascination for recursion is also visible in all these recursive acronyms, GNU is not UNIX and things like that. And Chris Kelty, anthropologist, describes this community through his concept of recursive publics, a public that is concerned with the maintenance of the infrastructure that at the same time is the basis of its own discourse. So, the platform is never finished, it's always in a kind of better condition. Instead of this little bit mechanistic concept of recursion, I prefer to look at it through a lens of improvisation in a way building a plane while flying it and almost like a process of call and response where multiple actors adjust the individual components they're working with. My talk is gonna be about these improvisational relationships between platforms and social practices. Gonna use a recent project that I worked on with my colleague Katja Schechtner about the street lighting system and electricity infrastructure of Manila as a case study. And so, the way I see it is that platforms are not really a stable basis on top of which interaction and other things develop, but they obviously change through their use and it is a little bit complicated because on the one hand, practices of appropriation and sometimes subvert or even sabotage the platform or the designer's intention. On the other hand, sometimes they're also necessary for the platform to work in the first place because the designer's intentions didn't really encompass all the different facets of reality. Steve Graham and Nigel Frift have written about that extensively. So in my talk, I'm gonna focus on the electricity system and the streetlight system in Manila, which is a very good example for improvisational governance, something that we termed impro structure. So the question is what happens when a new component of this infrastructure lands in the city seemingly out of nowhere, in this case, a smart grid initiative that is pushed by Meralco, the local utility company. And if you look at the rhetoric in these ads, they're very generic and exchangeable, so it really resembles the smart city rhetoric everywhere on the world. And of course, this is also a common criticism of the smart city. Adam Greenfield, for example, talks about how the smart city solutions are always generic in space, generic in time, place less. But I think we should not confuse the rhetoric of the ads with the underlying motivations and assume that a smart city salesperson has convinced a completely clueless, naive city government to buy something that they don't need. I think on the side of the city, there are very specific expectations and there's a specific local context, although it's never really spelled out and it remains somewhat hidden. Manila, of course, has ongoing infrastructure issues. There's an explosive growth of the city after the Second World War, which also has led to insufficient coverage of basic utility services, insufficient resources in the planning departments. The privatization of the late 90s and early 2000s did not really solve this. They made it in many ways worse, especially since now, the city has to deal with a lot of different actors who are all entangled with each other in complex relationships of dependency. And the Philippines also has among the highest electricity costs in the world, both in relative and absolute terms. What is, however, interesting is that the infrastructure in the street looks a little bit different than we usually would expect. So it's very, the street lights are very idiosyncratic. They very colorful, don't really fit this stereotype of the invisible infrastructure that's in the background. Here it's really very much in your face and it comes in a confusing range and in a variety. So we had this studio trip with students where we tried to map all the different lamp types and whether they work or not and which technology are they using. And in this really small region in Paco, which is in the center of Manila, we counted more than 25 different lamp types which were all official luminaries from the city. And this notion of bricolage is, of course, also obvious in street scenes. So there's a lot of repair and appropriation by citizens. We have the Fiesta decoration or the laundry. And all of that looks, of course, very illegible but it follows a very strict logic again because of the high electricity prices and the street level bureaucrats know exactly how much wattage, for example, this particular lamp which is part of the official street lighting system would consume. And, of course, all the different wires are color coded and have different purposes. On the user side, there is a informal electricity market which, for example, involves that property owners rent out power to street vendors. Here we see just this cable going across the fence which makes it possible for the vendors to sell their food but, of course, they pay a premium for this electricity which is actually very expensive. But an interesting thing is also that the local government improvises. So here this is a chairman of the local council who works with residents to provide street light in dark alleyways that are not covered by the official street lighting system but also the other way around they would provide electricity to poor families by just hooking them up to the street lighting system to give them electricity. And, of course, the improvisation always involves a certain urgency. It means that you have to make a decision in the moment with the resources that are available to you and the local council in these little neighborhoods of course also have a difficult relationship with the utility company and with the city and so they are limited in their agency. And this, I think, is very consistent with what Manuel Castellas and Alejandro Portes talk about the structuralist perspective on informality, where informality is not something that is outside the formal system but actually inside and fills the gaps in the formal system. And we see this in the way how street lights are repaired. So we see, again, one of these colorful, sculptural street lamps, but unfortunately it's not working so someone has pulled out the wire and connected it to a nearby lamp that is then maintained. So we see that just to provide those basic functions always requires some informal acts of repair and maintenance. And our approach is to look at this through the lens of informal improvisation. So governance is a process where the actors in the absence of clear arrangements constantly react to each other's actions and this is a constant tug of war, a renegotiation. Unlike in this call and response in chess, it's not always a very harmonious relationship. So those actors who improvise together can also be antagonistic. So they have different interests and using a very small example, I will show that we also need to understand the smart grid initiative through this improvisational lens. For the utility company, of course one of their main concern is stated concern about electricity theft, where they have a very inefficient system of delivery that has a lot of system loss but they mostly blame it on people stealing electricity, which is of course a very dangerous activity that also leads to fires when the transformers overheat. So what the utility company decided to do about it is to come up with these new systems which are elevated metering clusters. So what happens is basically you take off the electricity meter from the house and put it on these poles so people cannot really reach it and can jump the electricity and but then this means that you have all these cables running from this meter cluster to the individual household and those meters, those cables have orange color and it's supposedly tamper proof so whenever someone tries to get electricity, they shut down, but since it's behind the meter, it would also count so they would not necessarily lose money through that. But it also makes it slightly inconvenient for the company. For example, the surveyors, the meter readers use binoculars twice a month to read the meter and which is slightly inconvenient. But the city who was surprised by this in a true improvisational response started to regulate these cables where they said, okay, you can do this but you can only have 10 wires per cluster so we don't have this visual clutter of all these systems. So we see that there is a kind of a response to a particular action which turns into a new policy. But then of course this also has material and aesthetic implications so those are very, very visible installations and to some extent they become a marker for a poor neighborhood. Wherever you see those poles, this means that there was an issue with electricity theft and some of the council members in neighboring neighborhoods said, well, we don't have those, we are on a higher level. But those residents in these neighborhoods that actually have those metering clusters are also proud of them because it shows that, okay, everything is in order and they are connected to the system. And I see that there's a very interesting phenomenon of using those infrastructure installations as a communication system. How it's very apparent that there's always political messages next to those big installations because one of these clusters shows that, okay, the local council has done their job and they have provided electricity. So it's infrastructure is not something generic but it really conveys a message at the local level whereas most theoretical accounts always look at infrastructure at the systemic level and which brings us back to the streetlights which then become political messages in a very literal sense. So at the boundary between two neighborhoods we have on the one side a functioning streetlights on the other side, not so this is a very clear message but this also means that it's no longer important that all the streetlights work, they only need to work in very particular places. So as a conclusion, I think this process of platform building, we have to look at it as a pre-collage that is never stable, that is constantly dismantled and rebuilt in an ongoing process of improvisation. And this process is not finished. I mentioned the problem with the binoculars so Meralco is looking at different ways to identify power theft and they're looking at smart meters, how they can analyze the signal and as maybe some might know, if you have a very fine grained signal from a smart meter you can even figure out which TV programs or which movies you watch because all of these activities of power consumption have a very specific signature. So with that they would no longer need to have all these complicated installations. And of course they are actively exploring these things, they are commissioning PhD thesis at the local university to develop algorithms for this stuff. And constantly as, or it said, experiment, bake new test beds. Last year they talked about drones for mapping the power grid, now they talk about blockchain. And so we see that there's, but of course we can really dismiss this as just jumping on the latest trends in technology but I think it all is very closely connected to this local need of the different actors for Meralco to really understand what their users do on the system and for the city to somehow overcome their limitations and for the citizens to somehow get on with their life. So I think urban technologies play a somewhat paradoxical role in this. On the one hand it's often presented as something that informalizes all interactions if we think of three one one systems where everyone can send a request without going through all the hierarchies and might even get a response from the mayor. And a lot of the rhetoric has focused on this informalization of coordination. But I think at the same time it's formalizing, it's very formalizing because every interaction is encoded into categories, requires a very particular set of agreements and if you think of smart contracts, all of that is very rigid, which of course also means that those categories and those very hard encodings constantly break and need to be fixed somehow. So there is this constant struggle and this tension between these two things. But we don't really notice it because there's an active effort to hide this through purely aesthetic means. If you think of Uber's interface, it looks exactly the same in every city but of course behind the scenes, the company has to negotiate with every city and constantly has to renegotiate which leads to different arrangements. So it's not as clean as it might look from the interface. And I think Amazon was very smart with using the mechanical Turk as a name for one of its products because it's a perfect way of describing this. From the outside it looks like a robot, like a clean algorithm, but inside there's constantly this tug of war and this improvising and back and forth. So thank you very much. So modern watercraft. I'm gonna be presenting two modes of what I call modern watercraft. And of course, modernity is outmoded, but I think what the study of modernity or just modern watercraft, part of what I'm kind of teasing out is how in being outmoded, this modern watercraft supplements itself and responds to its own crises which become part of its persistence. So the first part of my talk, which is located in Detroit, this is dealing with the watercraft of shutoffs and the important thing here is understanding that water shutoffs are not a bug, but a feature in the infrastructure of watercraft. So the shutoffs are a feature, what I'll show are a feature of the network design where treatment and maintenance processes are centralized and water delivery is widely distributed to subsidized sprawl. And this is the watercraft of shutoffs as much defined by austerity politics and homoeconomics as by sewer lines and interceptors. The second form of watercraft that I will present briefly is in Mexico City, where it's a watercraft of what I call a profound modernity. And then I end with the reading of local activism in Mexico City in terms of a political ecology of MUC, which I think is a bit helpful. So I wanna begin briefly, I will begin briefly with the architectural work that I've been doing in Detroit for the past four years or so, which is primarily dealing with vacant houses in city-owned land, both of which are plentiful in the city of Detroit. I begin with these not so much for the sake of chronology and the work, but to situate these investigations of infrastructure as entirely material to architecture. And I mean material in an evidentiary sense. So how do we design within these situations, not reducing them to images or not obfuscating them with a projected, a kind of vague emotional responses, things like affect. So to imagine that this infrastructure study might be relevant in architecture and vice versa, is to take seriously LaFevre's argument that space is space, not similar or analogous from one space to another, but actually consistent from the abstract space of mathematics to the live space of the city and its streets. So in Detroit, we see the emergence of infrastructure and resource management to accompany a spatial and an economic and a racial order within the city. This is kind of what brought me to Detroit, is working on one property in a kind of investigatory way. And then finding that I needed, in order to continue working, I needed a pile of money very quickly and then artists brought this pile of money to my house. So, water shut-offs are just one of many procedures from tax foreclosure to eviction that are enabled by algorithms of pricing and payment. These procedures and algorithms generate an instance of a contemporary urban divide. But this divide is no longer one of borders and closed polygons, right? It's not the kind of red line maps or the zoning maps that we're used to. The suburb inner city distinction in its concentric order continues to generate socioeconomic effects, but its effects do not coalesce in the same mid-20th century pattern of center and periphery, right? Instead, it's this kind of shut-off. So I started investigating this. This is really the neighborhood where I've done most of the work in Detroit. Since then, I'm moving east, by kind of staying close to the waterfront. And so this is where I'll be fleshing out an analysis of watercraft and then zooming out to the whole metro area to understand just what's happening in this neighborhood. I call this infrastructure logic watercraft, building off of course a Keller Easterlings notion of extra statecraft. Like extra statecraft, watercraft is beyond the governance of statecraft. It is the management of privatizing and respatializing resources. It is fluid, yet it is capable of evicting residents, criminalizing households and rendering faucets, fixtures and toilets useless, all from the manipulation of a spreadsheet. And here, other than these three projects that I'll show quickly, this whole field of red that you're seeing is demolitions and brownfields. So this really started for me trying to understand how this field of not just vacancy, but other processes were contributing to this kind of churn in the city, kind of boarding up certain things, turning certain things on and off and then dumping certain things into holes in the ground. So it's really not a situation of kind of emptiness. It's very much a situation of various levels of toxicity, brownfields, demolitions and evictions. And that's what I was trying to understand my first kind of drawing this. So to quickly, briefly go through the architectural scale projects, house opera is really a study of what happens with a house that is sort of bricked in a way that a cell phone is bricked with no electricity, any of that. Can it still be designed as a space to do something that really is regarding this in a way as a found object, right? So this becomes a kind of performance space rather than a space, it becomes a public performance space rather than a privatized space for a living. This is a speculative project for the Venice Biennale which was concerned with a very dense housing possibility and frating and a kind of reparative, kind of pollution repair happening in one location. And this is a project in construction now which is very much about plants and a kind of investment model. Also a repurposed kind of land bank house. But to go back to the Venice Biennale, this is a kind of reading of this area of Detroit as a border, as an international border. This is the project that's called Promised Air and it's very concerned with Detroit as a border city. It's a border with Canada. So in the bottom there in Windsor, it's heavy frating. But as I was starting to understand Detroit as this kind of border condition, really what was happening in relationship to that sort of brown field, those dots that I showed you, was a lot of activism around water. And so even though the activism itself and the protests are very concerned with the discourse of rights and natural rights and a kind of right to water, which I just politically I don't think that those kinds of ways of organizing and natural rights will work in this context. But at the same time, there was also just questions around the relationship between sewage and citizenship that I thought were very, very provocative and worth investigating. Specifically where do you expect us to shit, right? That's what the protest sign is saying. And so in that way, I wanted to understand the kind of imagination of water, right? This is literally an old license plate that is in that neighborhood that I showed you of Southwest Detroit, where it's really a city that is surrounded by it by the Great Lakes, which I'll show you in a bit. But what that automobile points to is the specific moment and that you can kind of if you go to the archives located in terms of 1966 and a plan for pollution control. So what's key here is the dual authority of sewage and water. And this was formalized at the height of the Department of Water Services suburban expansion that this map here is looking at this moment in 1966, which I get into more in an article in perspective. But the Detroit is located in the middle of the Great Lakes, which is the largest kind of freshwater resource. So how can there be these shutoffs in something like a crisis? How is it possible to have a water crisis in the midst of this water abundance? While the processes of water intake have remained unencumbered in Detroit since the late 19th century, the processing of sewage has consistently failed to maintain clean waterways from the city's first sewer in 1836 to today. And this is largely due to Detroit's combined sewer system but cannot be disassociated from the suburban service expansion. That's what I'll flesh out. So effectively this whole kind of myth of Detroit being vacant and declining, I'm afraid to do a pointer, but if you just look around 1960, this kind of idea of this centralizing network being designed for this expansion makes total sense in terms of just looking at this population growth. So what was designed effectively was a large part of the runoff from storms, including the entire runoff from small storms and the highly contaminated first flush of the very large storms is retained in the system for complete treatment at the regional wastewater plant, which I'm showing there with that one circle. And everything that you're seeing in yellow are these combined sewer overflow events, which of course occur in Detroit along with the wastewater treatment plant itself. And so the stormwater monitoring and remote control system, it reduces the risk of basement flooding and preserves the value of the single family house at the same time. So for the metro suburbs, so maybe that's clear if I go back. So this whole gray area outside of the light gray is all the metro suburbs and this is the whole sewered area. And so there's this whole network of these telemeter devices that makes sure that all of the wastewater goes into Detroit to be processed and not floods into the basement of the single family home in the dark gray area. Right to the single family homes that find themselves connected to an overflowing sewer line during heavy rain events. Instead these kind of telemetering devices kind of send the first flush to Detroit. This consolidated centralized effects of flooding in a way that shifts the risk impacts of heavy rain events from the metro area single family house to the city of Detroit. And here's the public, even though there's extensive public GIS data, the actual sewer lines are not public. So here's me speculating from the sewered area and the paved streets and then also smaller sewage plants that don't do that much actual processing because the telemeter devices make sure that the real processing keeps occurring in the wastewater treatment plant. So then this is all kind of facilitated by these very weird contraptions. Meters that monitor, report, sense and transmit this information. So a lot of this kind of information, even though this telemetering is happening, it doesn't actually deliver itself as evidence in the moments that evidence are required for legal cases. So what I mean by that is there's with the emergence of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act of 1972, the federal government sued the state of Michigan for its CSO data, combined sewer overflow, so sorry, not for the data, for the combined sewer overflow into the freshwater of the Detroit River. So just because of those yellow dots that I showed you. This lawsuit continued for decades, giving the state's judicial courts, not engineers, not planners, not democratically elected officials, but just judges a leading role in the management of Detroit's urban and suburban watercraft. So my question about this is how actually, could it become evidence? How could it be hacked? There are other questions that I have. But sort of zooming up to the whole city, this series of maps spatializes the water infrastructure as a form of wealth transfer effectively from a 50% poor majority, black urban population to a wealthy majority white suburban population. And in a way, I just sort of wonder, how is this possible, right? 50 years after the civil rights movement in black power, right, how is this really possible? And shifting back to the neighborhood scale, the house then becomes an odd artifact of time. It becomes a very material thing to be understood in terms of networks of infrastructure, but also in terms of time and our expectations of time. So that's where I wanna connect this to another site that I'm thinking through, modern watercraft, which is a very different situation, but I wanna pause because actually find art critics and theorists sometimes more helpful on this than the kind of typical infrastructure and technology crowd. And George D.D. Huberman is someone in talking through the archaic in Paris that I'm thinking through a lot of this with. This broader question of time, cities, technology and time. There's an assumption that cities chart time, right, an expectation that a series of maps will read like a chart or improve like a piece of technology. We read cities very differently than we read, say, hair or clothing, right? With hairstyles, especially, we mark time, but not so much as progress. There are certain hair or clothing styles that we do not expect to inhabit the same space or the same time, like a wedding dress and sweatpants. But cities maybe also consist of matter that's more like that, right? And so that's not entirely to say flat, that these pieces of infrastructure have a kind of flatten effect, but also that they might not necessarily be progressive and sequential. So perhaps the object and materials that make up the systems of a city do not have to be self-consistent but can be dispersed and relational. So in that way, I wanna turn to Mexico City to look at another situation of watercraft that presents a way of schematizing modern watercraft as well as a mode of resistance against it. But my writing in Mexico City is dealing with modernities of an overly draining water infrastructure, very different than the Detroit situation. This is a form of something that I'm calling profound modernity. Profound modernity has a troubled relationship to maintenance. The extensive reshaping that modernity demands from urbanism, reshaping what lies beneath our feet in terms of sidewalks, streets, and building foundations is related not only to rational engineering but to speculation, image, the collapse of great distances, right? And so there's a burrowing of maintenance in all of this. And in Mexico City, one doesn't need to uncover anything. This is not even a scene from the earthquake. This is before the earthquake. So the whole thing with the gutter rag that I see if I can squeeze it in here, George D.D. Huberman, he writes about this fabric in the gutters of Paris, which are a bit like rolled up sweatpants, that he'd sees as a kind of return of the archaic. And in D.D. Huberman's reading of Benjamin and the sewer fabrics of Paris, the city becomes a series of artifacts and organs, organs without a body. Despite the 19th century house manian boulevards and sewer system of modern Paris, the archaic mucky rags remain. For D.D. Huberman, these rags are potent objects of study, both for how they return as archaic objects into the temporality of modernism and how they inhabit images. So there's this artist, Eileen Flesher, who will go back to re-photograph this what he calls a doormat. But it turns out that if you actually look at the Paris sewer system, not as an artist, but as someone who can read sections, that the rag and the underground system are actually symptomatic of each other. And they're born of the same time period. When Belgrand, the director of water and sewers of Paris, under Houseman, designed this two-in-one water system for the new boulevards, you actually have untreated water, the kind of gray water from the River Orc that's coming out of here. And this rolled up fabric is laid in front of the gutters to channel the direction of the water so that it cleans the street before it drains down. And my whole argument about Mexico City is that in effect, this droneje profundo, this huge, huge infrastructure project that's been going on since the 70s, is a kind of houseman boulevard ambition that totally forgets those rags, right? A kind of, and I think this goes back to the talk just before me about improvisation that actually these 19th century kind of early modern infrastructure, they depend also on these soft moments of improvisation already, but there's a kind of odd rereading of them as overly rationalized and formalized that forgets the rags, really, forgets the maintenance of the rags. And so there's an issue here of maintenance versus control. So like the street rags of pairs are these kind of instruments not of control, but of hunches or gestures, right? Asking kind of which way the water should go, kind of nudging the fabric, versus this extensive, effectively the droneje profundo, it drains the former lake of Mexico City so extensively that then potable water needs to be pumped up from the aquifer and then delivered by these, by these extensive trucks. So I'm just gonna close with the protest against the project that doesn't initially seem to be about water, but I think is very much about water. This was a proposal for a public space in Mexico City that protesters shut down as a proposal. It was going to be kind of like the high line of Mexico City, effectively. And it seems initially that the folks who protested this, it was for a neighborhood, it was always called the Chapultepec, this Avenida Chapultepec, and the folks who protested it, they protested with hashtag chapultepec, S-H-O-P, just sort of calling out that the whole project was really about privatizing the street. But I wanna assert that some of the kind of activism on the ground might be much more aware of the political ecology than we tend to give it credit for, and that this kind of chapultepec project is actually very much was an attempt to continue the privatization of water with this kind of fake diagram of water as a kind of org chart. And I just wanna then pause it that this sort of Mexico City protest might be a form of what Bruno Latour calls a political ecology. And as Latour notes about the gap between local politics and global ecology, we have problems, but we don't have the publics to go with them. In these local conflicts over commerce and streets, the burgeoning of what Bruno Latour has called the seventh regime of political ecology detached from romanticism of the natural and liberated from the rational humanist subject might be witnessed. The city stews with objects and matter already politicized amidst legacy systems entangled with muck. We can also look at these drawings that are these kind of terrible diagrams or this terrible raster ground. The task of political ecology in Mexico City would not be to return the city to a natural lake that can host its local species, which are rapidly going extinct, right? And neither would it be to simply resist every privatization of public space. I think in protesting the public status of streets and drainage, the protests for chapultepec implicitly posit that the public aborata of Mexico City's drainage projects might become another kind of environment capable of negotiating various uncertain survival of species including our own. Thank you. So we're gonna go for a small discussion. We have about 10 minutes. Okay, so first of all, thanks for those wonderful talks. I'll start with a question. I see in both of your talks a lot of images and a lot of emphasis on appropriation of infrastructure, on hacking infrastructure, on subverting infrastructure, on how do the people and the state and companies act through infrastructure and take charge of infrastructure? And in the end, maybe what's, I think something that's happening underneath everything is very strong power dynamics between governments, residents and companies. So I wanna ask you, where do these appropriations, where do these interventions, where does this informality become resistance, political resistance, or when is it just an act of survival, an act of people trying to carry on or is it always an act of political resistance? One of the things that I'm working on with water is actually an alternative to what you just said. Because I think at the architectural scale, my work on houses has been more like, yeah, let's just go cut it open. And I think in investigating what the more layered process is that are happening with the water shut-offs in the neighborhood and how that then facilitates the vacancies, when I talk about hacking those meters, it's not so much, I mean, I have talked to activists about just turning an interceptor off and seeing what happens, right? But I don't think that's really productive. What I think is more productive is the possibility of something like a FOIA request, Freedom of Information Act, that says let's gather, because it's actually in Detroit, and I think Detroit is in some ways a very specific place, but maybe this is going on a lot and we don't really know how to look for it. You would think that anything that operates based on the kind of financialization and this concern about payments and spreadsheets, right? Would be happening from corporations. But it's actually a fake market that's not a market that's a set of rate settlement agreements that's set up between suburban authorities and the city that's facilitated through another authority that's kind of quasi-governmental. So that's why for me, Keller Easterling's work is so important because it's not always just a company or the city government, right? And these rate settlement agreements set the water prices. So it's actually, for me, much more productive to understand things like poverty and race than the kind of market condition because it's not a market condition, for example. And the legalities, it's not so much informal versus legal practices. I think what I'm hoping from the work is that it will open up other realms of activism that can happen very much within the bureaucratic situation. So really changing the ongoing, these lawsuits that are never ending around things like environmental controls and building more spatial intelligence and spatial data into them. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think in my case, I think there's definitely a political element to it also very explicitly around the street lights. You know, there's discussion around corruption and where these lamps come from. Also the high electricity prices. So acts of appropriation definitely can be acts of political protest. I find myself increasingly unable to really draw these dichotomies between, let's say, city versus resident, formal versus informal, appropriation versus centralized planning because in a way, you know, the city or the governmental structures are not monolithic and the street level bureaucrats are improvising and they are using all these tactics of appropriation pretty much in the same way. And even the distribution utility is not this kind of all powerful company. They also have to operate under certain constraints and they also try to push the limit in a very improvisational manner. So it's a very entangled, complicated situation. Good. One last question and then I will switch it to the public. Within that, within what you guys have just mentioned, what would be the role of technology? You talked about the role of design as covering up this very diverse back end. But in the activism that you're talking about through FOIA requests, through a new kind of system, where does technology stand? Where does technology stand for us to help overcome these difficulties? Or on the other hand, how are these companies using technology to hide the complexity? I don't know how complex it is, really. But it's like, I mean, wealthy suburbs are being subsidized and they're benefiting from an impoverished majority of black city and that's not new. But as far as technology, I don't really look at sort of, the rag is a kind of tech-nay, the telemetered devices are kind of tech-nay. Obviously the spreadsheets and GIS changes how quick these things can happen as far as something like a shut off being set up on a spreadsheet. But I think for me, I'm more interested as far as, because I don't think architecture means that we understand technology better than anybody else, but I do think that architecture means that we can mediate something spatially in a very sophisticated way. So I'm more interested in changing the dynamic of environmentalism, actually. In terms of right now, there are certain kind of expectations that are set up around what environmental protection means. And at least in Detroit, that is evicting people. So I'm interested in sort of how architecture can change the dynamic of what environmental protection looks like or how it's imagined also. Yeah, I mean, of course I also prefer very narrow terms, but with design and technology, it's unfortunately not possible and I would also say that the rag is exactly an artifact of urban technology. So I wouldn't really draw a distinction, but what I think is used very strategically is the rhetoric around technology. It's not so much the material practices and devices. It's really about how those are presented. Questions from the public. We have time for a couple of questions. Raise your hand if you wanna ask somebody. I think, come on, nothing. Yes. My question is for Dr. McEwen, but anybody can have a go at this. I'm so not a doctor. Oh, sorry. Whatever. I really like the point that you were making about the meters as evidence, but somehow this meter doesn't deliver the evidence to the person that can use it or doesn't really produce the evidence, which is a fascinating point, but I wonder whether we really need the evidence that it's gonna give us and whether we don't have enough evidence already. I mean, what's sort of the devastating thing in watching all of these crises happen is that we have more than enough evidence and really the rhetoric of reception around evidence needs to change. I wonder if you have thoughts on that. I heard Wendy give a talk last night that I think was very convincing around this, but I'm talking about evidence within a legal process. And I went down a whole rabbit hole reading way too many kind of moments of these ongoing federal EBA cases in the state of Michigan and you would be shocked at the ignorance of the judge. And it was one judge for decades. So, I mean, at one level, there has to be a kind of an alternative to a certain legal format for how kind of the environmental protection is adjudicated and that's not, I don't know what the answer is and it's not my field, it's not my discipline, but to the extent that that is what we're set up with, where there is a judicial process, that process needs to be delivered much more rich evidence that is spatialized in a much more intelligent way. I mean, even asphalt, they don't understand asphalt, much less bringing in the data from the test pumps and understanding the flows and the risks related to that. It also ties into the whole history of these environmental laws, EPA lawsuits in the 70s and Supreme Court, where it was all about nailing down scientific evidence and it would basically go, okay, you know, 0.1 above or below. So it is, I think it's a very legal concept of evidence that is manifest here. Yes. Hi, thanks very much for your presentations. One of the things that I thought both of the presentations brought back into the conversation was this issue of maintenance. And the importance of a certain kind of labor in the production and reproduction of infrastructures. And that, I mean, I think kind of goes to the question that wasn't answered in the first session about gender, you know, because part of what the smart city seems to be doing is not so much, it's not so much about what the technology does, but the forms of labor that it obviates and particularly different types of reproductive labor. So the way that it reorganizes labor in the city is obviously one of the things that's being optimized for. You know, whether it's traditionally domestic work or the kind of maintenance work done by people who work on electrical lines or since that has a gender dimension, obviously. But the goal is really to optimize the ratio of a certain kind of knowledge economy, high value labor in relation to labor that is less costly. And thereby also kind of control the power that people who work in those types of economies have in the smart city. So it's really like, to me, the smart city is not so much about, you know, intelligent city, but it's more like a kind of counter-counterintelligent city that it's about bypassing the forms of intelligence and power that people who work in a certain kind of maintenance of the city and its infrastructures would otherwise have. So I wonder if you can just talk about that, like how you understand the role of labor in relation to the maintenance of the city and what technology or infrastructure and the various kinds of projections of that from municipal governments is trying to achieve vis-a-vis the labor of the city. Yeah, I mean, I'm totally with you and also what Miriel Eucalis talked about in her maintenance art manifesto where she contrasted this heroic act of design versus the invisible maintenance. And from my view, it's definitely the maintenance part is definitely where the actual creative problems are solved because the devil is in the details. And yeah, I agree. That's my answer as well. All right, with that, we're gonna leave it there. Stayed here for Wendy Chun. She's gonna be speaking in five minutes. Thank you.