 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Making the Land Pay, the third in the Buell's conversations on architecture and land in the Americas with Tim Mitchell and Stephanie Bahad. My name is Lucia Elias. I'm the director of the Temple-Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia. I'm joining you from a campus on an island that lies within the ancestral homelands of the Leni Lenape people. Until about 1650, the Lenape people managed the forests, the marshes, the animals, the winds, the floods, and the paths of this place by stopping in as they navigated what is now called Hudson River, seasonally staying in small encampments, growing food, perhaps also harvesting crops, hunting and fishing, some animal species while conserving others, periodically setting fires to control growth, and generally maintaining a resource ecology that stretched all along the Atlantic coast from what is now Western Connecticut to Delaware and including most of New Jersey and Southern New York. By the end of the 17th century, the Leni Lenape had largely been driven out of their homelands. In the centuries since, their communities have been decimated, their humanity denied, and their descendants dispersed. The European settler state that was responsible for this erasure and diaspora relied overwhelmingly on the institutionalization of land. Columbia University, a land-based institution, is a legacy of this urge to settle and to appropriate. In fact, the Red Brick building in which I sit today, which you see here on the slide, embodies architecture's imprigation with settled land in a particularly vivid way. Beale Hall is the oldest building on campus, so all that preceded the university's arrival on the site, having been built in 1885 for an earlier institution, the Bloomington Asylum, that had existed on the sites since 1821. And yet, so central was architecture to maintaining institutional legitimacy on this site, that not only did Columbia decide to keep this building when it purchased the land in 1892, but the building was preserved and moved 42 feet vertically and 97 feet north as the campus expanded and the trustees negotiated with the city, deciding where the grid and the campus should intersect. Not all architectural legacies of displacement are honorific. At the same time as this campus was being built in 1897, the General Allotment Act was signed by the United States government in order to break up the large reservations of land into which indigenous communities have been gathered since the 1830s. The Allotment Act shrank the land base of surviving indigenous communities and compelled them to adopt Western institutions, such as that of private property and of family farming. So in 1995, the descendants of the Lenape officially changed or chose the name of Delaware Nation, and their communities today reside largely in Oklahoma and in Texas. And I'm showing you here the Osagic County of Oklahoma, about which we'll hear more today. So I recount this history today, not only to acknowledge the role of our hosting institutions in this history of displacement, but also because the relation of architecture and land is a theme of our series, and takes the form of an open question. How to tell non-objectivizing histories of land? How do we heed the insight from indigenous scholars and activists that land isn't an object, but a relationship? The title of our conversation today is Making the Land Pay, and I'll just explain that briefly. As many of you will have recognized, the phrase is given to us by the American architect, Cass Gilbert, who made the statement, a skyscraper is merely the machine, the building is merely the machine that makes the land pay, in a 1900 article about the pressures on architects to build ever faster. This was in Lower Manhattan. This is the same time period as the Allotment Act, and also that when the first Greek class is being taught in this building at Columbia. Gilbert was proposing an economic rule of thumb derived from his own experience with the Broadway's Chambers Building, which I'm showing you here, which he had just completed and he proudly said from foundation to roof in less than four months. So if you read this text on the one hand, Gilbert paints a very simplistic picture of building as an economic activity. He basically compares the value of the empty plot with the value of the same plot with a building on it, and implies that each floor literally multiplies the value of the plot of land in the vertical dimension. But reading between the lines of this text, you can find a much more complicated depiction of building as a dynamic feat of technical organization and synchronization. The architect has to coordinate the ordering and the arrival of materials from various locations. The architect has to factor the income loss during the time of construction, but the architect has to deal with land appreciation with visual factors, factors of proximity. And there are also pressures that Gilbert doesn't mention in the text, but that we know from historians who are very much in play, such as the pressures of labor unionization or the pressures of the rise of the developer as a kind of profession. And if you want to know more about that, I recommend the dissertation by Alexander Wood, who just completed his dissertation in this department. So it's not that the architect takes one object land and transformed it mechanically into another, which is architecture. The architect starts from land and then establishes a network of relationships. So Gilbert's statement has stuck, but it's in deep need of technical political update. And our two speakers today can help us do just that. So I'm showing you two diagrams drawn from the research that they'll be presenting. They look very abstract, but in fact are very concrete financial instruments for ways that land pays today. They don't look like buildings, but in fact they contain very specific mechanisms that demand that buildings should proceed in a certain way. The buildings that we'll be hearing about today are not skyscrapers, although somewhere in the story, every time you hear that there's an economist involved, there is an office building somewhere that the economist sits in. Most of the architecture that we're concerned with today, however, is not office buildings, but the architecture of life. And by this, I mean on the one hand, the livelihood of persons who need housing and who sometimes build it themselves. And on the other hand, entire ecological systems that support the life of a creature like this one, a little beetle, who don't live in architecture, but who are not architecture in the traditional sense, but who make a claim to very specific spatial footprints on Earth that have consequences on building. And especially how and whether building is visibly evaluated in a global energetic and economic picture. So our event today takes the form of two presentations followed by a Q&A and I'll just introduce each speaker just before they speak. So we'll start with Tim Mitchell, who has asked me to keep his bio short. This is very difficult to do. Tim Mitchell is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University. He's a friend of the Buell Center having long sat on his board. I'll just say that Tim writes about colonialism, political economy, the politics of energy and the making of expert knowledge. Like he's currently working on a study of durability examining how the more durable apparatuses for capturing wealth that were characteristics of the 19th century colonialism, such as railways, canals, apartment buildings, dams, how they engineered a new method for extracting income from the future, a future that we now inhabit precariously. So please help me join me in welcoming Tim Mitchell. Thanks, thanks very much Lucia. It's wonderful to be back at the Buell Center. Thanks to Jason and Jordan. And I'm looking forward to the discussion with Stephanie. Thank you also Lucia for sharing the Cass Gilbert article with me, I'd heard the phrase, but the building is merely the machine that makes the land pay, but I hadn't ever read the original source. It of course poses a question, which I think both our presentations are going to be thinking about, how does land have value? And what is the relationship between land having value and the proliferation of mechanisms, restraints, devices that appear to make it pay? And you've asked us to think in particular about how that is different today from the world that Gilbert was writing about just over a century ago. So I think one thing I'm hoping to show and I hope we'll intersect with Stephanie's presentation is how these machines of payment and evaluation have proliferated and taken much more diverse forms since the first skyscraper. But I also want to suggest in a way that the machine is the wrong metaphor. It's a 19th century picture of how value is extracted. It's an industrial metaphor, one based on 19th century capitalism and very 19th century understandings of what wealth is and where it comes from and how it's created. But I actually wondered even today at a century afterwards, we still like to use. But I think it's actually interesting the way the very processes Gilbert was involved in in constructing that Broadway chambers building were already making it an out of date metaphor. And that's something I want to sort of come back to at the end. I'm rather embarrassed that Luchino suggested I circulate for this a paper that I wrote 15 years ago or more, but I think it's actually been very interesting for me to go back to that and to rethink it in relation to today's debate. This was a paper called The Work of Economics, How a Discipline Makes Its World. And it was about the work of a Peruvian development entrepreneur, Anando De Soto. In the year 2000, exactly a century after Cass Gilbert's article he had published, De Soto had published a book called The Mystery of Capital to wider claim. Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist called it the book, one that had answered for him the question of why capitalism works in the West and fails everywhere else. And many other leading pundits, politicians and economists celebrated this work. And essentially the argument of the book was that the problem with poverty in the global South was that the world outside the West, outside the developed capital West had not figured out how to make the land pay. They did not have the right machinery for extracting payments from land and that precisely those machines were the secret of the West. And this was the case where the one was talking about urban property or rural farmland. In both cases, predominant form of either building or relating to agricultural land was to control it and organize it and share it informally. They did so typically without property titles. The problem for De Soto with informal housing or informal land tenure was that the inhabitants of those houses or the farmers of that land were unable to borrow against the wealth that was locked up in their land and in their houses. And so what they needed, the device he proposed was a simple mechanism that would unlock that stored but inaccessible wealth. And it was a very simple device and part of the enormous popularity of his work was the simplicity of the device he proposed. Simply go through the cities of the global South, neighborhood by neighborhood, informal neighborhood by informal neighborhood and very rapidly give people property titles, register that title in a simple system of land registry, bypass the whole accumulated system of property titling that might already exist for the formal areas of cities and the same with rural areas and have this simple way of handing out street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, the title to the land. And that would then allow those people to unlock that stored wealth that they were denied access to in the particular form of borrowing against it. They would be able to take out small loans on the basis using this title as security and use those small loans to set up micro enterprises to improve their farming practices and embark on the path of capitalist entrepreneurship that was the secret of the growth and wealth of the West. It's still astonishing when I summarize the argument of the book that such an utterly absurd argument could have been taken so seriously. Anyone who is familiar in any way with almost any part of the countries of the global South know how long and how arduous has been the struggle against such systems of credit. In many parts of the world, the decisive political economic period by experience of the colonial era was the imposition of new mechanisms of credit, of debt and of courts and legal systems that allowed that credit to expand by giving powers of appropriation to the creditors. Of course, led both to speculative increases in the value of land and rural land but also perhaps more so in urban land. It increased the costs of housing. It made eviction widespread. It made poverty endemic. And if I want to understand many parts, as I say, and particularly the parts that I'm familiar with in the Middle East, what was happening in that particularly late 1930, 20th century colonial period, it was precisely a struggle against everything that De Soto was proposing. And it was actually in some ways a relatively successful struggle. So just to give an example, in the case of Egypt, the British were forced having occupied the country in 1880 and put in place this entire mechanism or consolidated existing but still relatively new mechanism of credit and hasn't indebtedness and loss of land. They were actually forced to limit that by passing a law that no farming household in the agricultural side could be dispossessed by a creditor of their last five acres. So severe was the crisis of dispossession that was unfolding under a form of colonial capitalism that had built itself on precisely the mechanisms of property titling, credit, indebtedness and eviction that De Soto was now proposing and that many leading economists were celebrating as a brilliant intellectual breakthrough. There are sort of two questions that that gave rise to and that I explored in the paper. What evidence, what evidence of any sort was there for the viability of the success or the success of this property titling program that De Soto was proposing? He, as these programs were introduced in various countries around the world, including in Egypt where I first encountered it in the late 1990s. All the reference was back to an original pilot program that De Soto himself had carried out in Peru where he was originally from. Not where he'd grown up, but he'd moved back there. And introduced these programs there on a sort of pilot basis. And when one looked at evidence of the success, it was almost impossible to find any. And again and again where the word claims that it was successful, the references all actually went back to one source which was a Princeton University PhD distiller was a Princeton University PhD dissertation in economics that had gone and studied the effects of the property titling program as it was introduced differentially across different cities of Peru. And the claim to find that it had worked if one actually then read the dissertation more closely one found actually it hadn't worked. There had been no increase in lending to the poor despite the property titles. The dissertation and those who then cited it and were excited about it were amazed however by a different discovery that it even though it didn't seem to allow the poor to borrow more it did because of issues in the banking industry and access to credit by the poor that are much more widespread. It did seem to have made them work much harder. There was a 20% to 40% increase it seemed in the number of hours worked once people had this piece of paper. And it was hypothesized in this dissertation that that was because even if they didn't have more access to credit and therefore the possibility of more wealth through borrowing they would at least somehow thanks to the piece of paper feel secure enough to go out and get jobs. Maybe they spent too much time at home beforehand because of the insecurity of their titles to the property and they felt they had to be there to guard it perhaps with this piece of paper they were now able to go out and get jobs and that would be the explanation for the increase in hours worked by those with property title rather than those without. Now, that seemed even more absurd to anyone who knew anything about populations living in informal neighborhoods than the original claims of De Soto sort of some image some property rights theorist image of a world that is entirely anarchic and people are defending desperately with their own guns and lives whatever they've got until property titles come along and then suddenly you have peace and order and people can go out to work. It didn't stop the economist celebrating it. The author was interviewed for jobs and there were even economists who blogged about how brilliant the job candidates were that year because they were doing such innovative work citing this PhD thesis and the author themselves was given a job in the Department of Economics at Harvard. So that was the curious sort of origins of the evidence. And then once there was that sort of apparent evidence then it could be taken up by the World Bank and promoted as a solution to these issues. But the second question, if the evidence was so flimsy and so easily questioned, why then the success of this notion of a new set of machineries for ending the poverty of the global South? Why the Harvard job? Why does the World Bank then immediately start taking up these schemes as I think the most popular new program for addressing these issues. New program for addressing questions of poverty through the first 10, 15 years of the new millennium. And then of course the endorsements from the, not just the pundits like Friedman, but Thomas Friedman, but from his cousin Milton Friedman and many other leading economists. He's not his cousin. The, and constant talk every year that the author, De Soto was going to be the next candidate for the Nobel Prize in economics and so on. The article sets out to answer that question in a way that isn't quite so relevant to our discussion today to do with the very sort of concrete organization of the neoliberal movement on the ground through think tanks, book prizes, endorsements by famous economists, the longer history of the original organization, the Mont Pelerin Society that had sort of carried the flame of neoliberalism from the 1930s till its emergence in the mainstream in the 1970s and 80s. I mean, I think that is interesting to think about the sort of work that this is what I refer to in the article as the work of economics. I mean, not only the work that these informal property owners are now seem to be doing, but the work that is done in and by and in connection with discipline of economics to make these mechanisms operate. And of course De Soto's work seems to confirm everything that neoliberal economics theorist from Douglas North to Milton Friedman to many others have been saying about the absolute essential nature of property rights to building a system of successful capitalism and not just central, but in many ways almost all you need is the basis of that and everything will follow from the securing of those rights to property. But I thought instead in the five minutes I've got left, I'd talk about a different aspect of the success because this is one that I don't think I take up really in the paper relates a little bit more to what you mentioned about my interest in this history of durability. And that for me is a shorthand for a wider way of thinking about the nature of capitalism as capital and the nature of capitalism in which I think questions of property and building and architecture in some ways right at the center. And it's a place where one's not thinking critically just of something like the neoliberal movement but actually about a much wider misunderstanding of capital on the left as much as on the right. Because on both sides one has this understanding of capital as something pecuniary as wealth in some sense that is accumulated in various ways and of course different approaches left and right have different understandings of how that surplus is accumulated but having been accumulated is then stored up and there to be reinvested. So it is something that comes from the past as Jonathan Levy has written in an interesting article. It's an understanding of capitalism as something backward looking. Capitalism as this store capital itself as this store that is there waiting in DeSoto's case to be unleashed or in other senses simply to be mobilized and reinvested and of course historically land is the form in which capital is thought to exist. Nowadays land would just be one of the forms. And against that an alternative view is to think of not backward looking it's a storing up of something from the past there's something forward looking and specifically capital as the command of a future stream of revenue. And command is important here and it's trying to get away from that pecuniary sense. Of course that revenue can be likely is in part pecuniary is some set of payments, rents for property or any other kind of rents in the wider sense, dividends that are paid to the owners of shares in a corporation speculative gains of one sort or another. These future flows of income their essence is not in their pecuniary nature but in their political nature. The political economist Nitz and Ambechla have been particularly important in thinking this through this political nature of this claim on the future. Though I differ from their work in insisting on their techno political nature. And in other words to think about the nature of the kinds of apparatus that can be built to secure a future revenue stream. If I had more time I'd break it up into the way it actually consists of both the stream from the future and the devices in the present that allow you to trade that future claim. So it can be realized in the present stock market or housing market or whatever. And also for breaking it up into tradable units. So companies are things that are now thought of as having shares and organized by shareholding. Buildings are now composed of apartment units that can be traded separately. Multi-generational housing gives way to single family housing so that it becomes a more tradable unit in some sense and so on. Once one understands capital in this different way not as accumulation from the past but as this system of ways of indebting the future organizing politically claims on future payments whether those claims are payments of rent for a building or dividends on stock or whatever sort. So it's a politically constructed process and it's the power and durability of those claims into the future. So durability is both a political process but also a material process of the kind of constructed nature. So one of the problems of informal housing is not just its lack of title but its lack of durability from the point of view of those who want to make it an investment asset because it's a form of housing that is easily added to extended pull down, rebuilds and so on. So just to wrap up I actually want to go back as I promised I would to Gilbert and that moment of the sort of birth of the skyscraper in the late 19th century. We've been guided very much in thinking about that moment of sort of the speculative explosion of the urban landscape in the late 19th century by the work of people like David Harvey who of course gave us this notion of the urbanization of capital that as against a sort of earlier 19th century industrial understanding of capital in the late 19th century in Paris but also putting it in the early 19th century in Paris but also in Cairo and equally in New York it becomes urbanized. I think and I've argued this and it's been taken up by Brent Christopher's and others we need to switch and think about the capitalization of the urban that is to say how and in what ways did the urban become the site of these modes of capitalization in the technical sense these modes of organizing future revenue streams that can be given a value in the present and traded. So from that point of view, thinking in Harvey's terms the city is not a spatial fix. It's not a frontier that somehow unblocks capital from the past or as De Soto would think about it that has been stored up and is blocked and needs released through some kind of spatial extension as the accumulation of capital accelerates as it expands too fast and causes crisis of one sort or another. In some ways the city and the skyscraper is it kind of slowing down because what it accomplishes is a kind of temporal dragging out a building out of a more extended future to be capitalized over longer stretches of time composed of more individual units. And as a result, it does absolutely nothing to solve the problem that Harvey identifies of soaking up excess capital because what it's doing is it's drawing more income from the future. All those future rental payments that are capitalized and sold in the speculative building of architecture. It builds out a longer and more dense future. And of course, the amazing thing about reading Gilbert's four months timetable is the astonishing speed of what is it? 16, 18 story steel frame structure that goes up. Interesting too, sorry to go back to Gilbert but I find it fascinating. Because as the chair mentioned and I look forward to reading this dissertation she mentioned you know, inside that steel frame it's still a wood and clay structure. It's not yet a concrete structure. They haven't figured out how to pour concrete slabs. And so the wood is floor, sorry the floor is wooden and but there's a fireproofing layer in between clay tile arch. So the amount of labor to build those vaulted ceilings on each floor, but of course that's required not structurally but to prevent the spread of fire. And the spread of fire of course is a major aspect of the architecture of skyscrapers and solving that partly through steel but also through clay tile arches and later concrete is critical not to the speed but rather to the durability and finally coming up with a way of building cities so they don't burn down every few years of some of the historians of Shark Chicago have written about very imaginatively. And if you can think of both the amount of labor that goes into constructing every ceiling as a clay tile arch, a terracotta arch so one's building with clay one's not building in sand and aggregate. And one also hasn't yet was just at the moment of the takeoff of electrical power which is gonna burn coal which is gonna produce cinder so you can then produce cinder concrete and gradually figure out how to replace wooden floors with concrete floors. All of that has to do with this extension of time. So I think there's something entirely different going on in Gilbert's article that's about slowing down and spreading out and building out futures of accumulation. Yes, it's got nothing to say about labor and I think that's a really important point but in the question of who's paying it's clearly not the land that is paying and so even the very title of the article is misleading and I'll stop with this sentence. This is not an apparatus for making the land pay it's for making the rents pay and the rent is of course that future and when one tries to think of the sort of exploitative aspects or those whose incomes will pay for this new form of architecture and accumulation one wants to think about the workers but one also wants to think how a particular mode of inhabiting architecture that of the payer of rent is to come into being and I think the attempt to transform Peruvian neighborhoods into systems of rent payment is a useful reminder of the ways in which people are still fighting against these forms of apparatus not for making the land pay but for making the occupier of housing pay. Thank you. Thank you so much for this. Absolutely. First of all, self-enclosed reflection on your own work but also for engaging with Gilbert as precisely not knowing what he's doing but in a different way than we think we know he's not doing especially issues of fire and on how one could trade on that future stability. So I will say no more and just to thank you for your intervention I will now introduce Stephanie Barral and we encourage everybody to hold your questions until the conversation between them. So Stephanie Barral is actually sort of a, you know has been at Columbia, spent some time at Columbia a few years back and but is joining us from Paris. So Stephanie is a social scientist at the Institut National de Recherche Agrinomique et Environnement so the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment and she has expertise in economic and political sociology. Her work focuses on the rise of private investments within environmental and agricultural policies so essentially the question how are markets proposed as solutions to environmental problems and of course there are quotation marks around the word solution and problems. Her first book was called Capitalisme Agraire Agrarian Capitalisms that came out in 2015 and that analyzes how the growth of capitalist palm oil plantations in Southeast Asia despite social environmental criticism occurred. So she today is going to talk to us about cases of biodiversity and carbon markets. My understanding is that your work does this within France and in the US and but we've asked for, given the, the America's theme for her to focus on the US. So please join me in welcoming us to Stephanie Barral. Thank you very much and see ya. Let me share my screen first. There I should work now. Yeah, can you see it? Yes, we can. Okay, perfect. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here. Rendo, as you said, I'm sitting in my office in Paris right now. Today I will talk about the use of economic and legal mechanisms to make natural areas economically valuable in order to ensure their conservation. So what I will do is I will highlight some mechanisms stemming from environmental policies in the USA that aim at increasing the economic value of non-productive land so as to ensure its conservation. First, very rapidly, I thought I'd say a few words on the historical background of these environmental policies because until the 1970s there was a great divide between available land for construction and development and land that ought to be preserved on the grounds of their beauty and especially in the USA in the sake of wilderness. So national parks and natural reserves were the main institutional mechanisms for land preservation, the majority of which have been established in the early 20th century. And conversely, most part of territories was considered as a pool of land at disposal for economic development, urban spread, farming activities, and so on. Things started changing in the early 1970s. During these intense, these years of intense environmental activism, the idea that negative impacts of land development ought to be regulated emerged. The dual conception of pristine land and land for development did not hold anymore. Available land couldn't be considered only as a potential for development anymore, but also as achieving important functions, such as water regulation, but also as the habitat for a number of species that was faced soon or later extinction, if land was not regulated. If land consumption kept on being unregulated. So the rise of scientific warnings led to the prediction of a number of acts. The two main acts are the Clean Water Act, 1972, that establishes protection for wetlands and the Endangered Species Act 1973, that establishes protection for species on the edge of extinction. Today, the ESA, the Endangered Species Act, lists more than 1,200 species and instituted a number of mechanisms to regulate land development activities on endangered species habitat and to secure land for species conservation. So the rest of my talk will be centered on the implementation of the Endangered Species Act and notably through a specific market-based mechanism that is called conservation banking. During the first decade of the ESA, this market-based mechanism didn't exist. The ESA compelled a strict approach to endangered species protections. So it succeeded in imposing a ban on every land development activities that on land that was bearing endangered species habitat. So as you can imagine, this was very contentious at that time and it got smoother in the 80s and 90s. The ESA has been smoother and since then ensured the possibility to impact endangered species habitat under specific conditions. The counterpart is to mitigate the impact on endangered species habitat through ecological restoration activities of the same species habitat in the surroundings of the impacted land. So in other words, flexibility was brought into the policy because it became possible to destroy land somewhere under the condition that similar nature would be restored nearby. This pathed the way for the development of a market-based mechanism called conservation banking. So as you can see here on the map, there's approximately 180 conservation banks in the USA, two-thirds of which being located in California and the rest of them being spread across 18 other states, including Texas and Florida. Many other states never have had any conservation banks or at least not at the moment. So what is really a conservation bank? Not to be compounded confused with a financial bank, a conservation bank is materially a piece of land on which entrepreneurs and finances carry out ecological restoration activities like the rebuilt nature of a typical of a specific species habitat. Here you see on the right side, a beetle bank and on the other side, a salmon bank. So let me explain a little bit more about these conservation banks. Here's a general outline of a typical conservation bank. The square in the middle, the green square that you can see is a plot of them, the one that you just saw in the picture. It's bought by entrepreneurs that are willing to invest into species conservation. Once they have achieved ecological restoration on this little piece of land, the US Fish and Wildlife Service approve the conservation bank, which means that they permit the bankers to sell some assigned number of credit spaces to whom are they going to sell the species credit? They will sell it to land developers. So land developers, as you can also see on the graph, when they foresee a project that will have impact on endangered species habitat, one of the conditions they have to meet to be able to get authorization for their development project is to buy a number of species credits. So once they have bought species credits to the entrepreneur, then they will get the authorization and see administrative authorization of their project and be able to go on with construction. Usually the main metric that is being used is a credit per restored acre. So this makes possible for someone to make money by protecting a natural area. Prices range between $1,000 per acre, up to $1 million per acre. And as you can see, the market is being forged out entirely out of regulation. But as development usually impacts endangered species habitat in perpetuity, the Endangered Species Act states that conservation ought to be carried out in perpetuity as well. Hence, this little piece of land with Endangered Species Habitat is only the visible, the tangible part of conservation. It is also tied to impacted land and developers' duties through a complex assemblage of financial and legal tools that makes up the credits and ensure a link between impacted land and restoration in the long run. So let me present two of these tools to make myself clearer. The first one is a conservation easement. I believe most of you must know about it. It's a voluntary contract that limits certain economic activities on the land. It states landowners' obligations in terms of conservation and its duration in time can be unlimited. Once a conservation easement is set on a piece of land in perpetuity, it becomes protected in the long run. So that's a first specification of conservation banks. They have to have a perpetual easement and to ensure conservation in perpetuity, as they say. The second tool is complementary to the easement. It's a financial endowment. So why is that? Because conservation banks need to be maintained in the long run, as I said. So practically, fences need to be repaired, scientific monitoring needs to be carried out, etc. And last but not least, land has to remain suitable for the species in the long run. So while nature, by nature, I would say, grows and evolves to a succession of different ecosystems, conservation banks have to remain in the same constant ecological state so as to ensure the presence of the dedicated species. So the financial endowments aims at maintaining the propriety and incurring conservation into this one required ecological state. The initial lump sump is calculated so that yearly interests cover the costs of maintenance. This requirement to maintaining land in a specific shape can look somehow surprising to an environmental scientist as it goes against natural laws. In addition, this mechanism also faces natural resistance, so to speak, as climate change currently jeopardizes this finance conservation balance. The rise of temperature renders the land unsuitable for species in many cases, and the endowment may not always be sufficient to maintain land in the desired ecological state under a changing climate. So this to give you a sense of the complexity of the mechanisms to ensure the equivalence between a piece of land that will be targeted for economic activities and a secure piece of land that bears conservation. I insist on these elements as they reveal how conservation banks are tied to financial markets in two different ways. First, conservation bankers borrow on financial markets to invest in land and expect a return on investment of 10% on average when selling the credits, at least when I investigated three years ago in the USA, that was the rate they were expecting. And second, endowments are invested on financial markets to secure ecological risks in the long run, as I just explained. So endowments are an important part of the upfront production costs together with the price of land which means that they are inversely proportional. A high endowment limits return on investments for the investors. So scrutinizing these technical details of these land protection mechanisms highlight two major tensions. The first one is related to the temporalities of ecology and finance. The second one is related to the special scales of action. First, this conservation banking mechanism is built on a tension between long term ecological rationality and the idea that a good conservation is conservation in the long run and a short term financial vision that favors rapid returns on investments. Here we are with the future of the rent. This tension deeply questions the possibility to entrust land conservation policies to the market. Where does the balance lie between making the land pay and attracting investors and making the land be an ecologically sound area? That's a big research question in my sense but also a big policy issue. And the second tension I wanted to mention is related to the scale of conservation because conservation biologists agree on the fact that for many species, recovery requires landscape approaches. The second one is the scale that allows for good conservation of the species as it enables management of the whole ecosystem and species population and not only a reduced number of individuals. Consequently, landscape scale is also promoted under the ESA as the relevant scale for conservation planning and actions. Yet, landscape frequently entails multiple ownership and as we saw, conservation banking is this key mechanism of conservation even though a robust mechanism is developed at the plot scale. In some, protection of a piece of land to play a part in landscape conservation requires once again to align ecological interests and economic interests identifying spots where located conservation can provide landscape benefits and also where landowners are willing to engage in conservation banking. In the second part of my talk, I will outline a specific case study that I conducted in Oklahoma with Ritvik Bush from Arizona State University three years ago. We chose Oklahoma as we had realized that California and Florida concentrated most of the scholarly attention and we were eager to conduct research in other parts of the country. Oklahoma appeared as an appealing case as it's not known for the presence of an active environmental movement that would favor the implementation of environmental policies, but yet two conservation banks had been approved in the early 2010s to ensure protection of a beetle, this little beetle that you can see here on the picture called the American Burring Beetle or ABB. The case of ABB is worth detailing because it helps going further in addressing the temporal and spatial tensions I mentioned before. So the ABB lives in open and pasture land and its population that used to be distributed across 35 US states has reduced and disappeared from 80% of its historical distribution range. As you can see on the map there's now three remaining population, one in Rhode Island, one in Oklahoma, one in Nebraska basically and Oklahoma is the largest natural ABB habitat in the USA. ABB habitat there in Oklahoma also sits at top of one of the largest oil reserves in the country. We'll see that opens the way to market-based conservation, but first I need to add a detail about the ecology of the ABB. The ABB lives underground. That's the funny part of the story. During our investigation in Oklahoma we met many ABB experts, scientists, consultants that dedicated their career to studying and counting ABBs but they had never seen an ABB in the wild outside of the buckets used to trap and study them. So that's an important detail to grasp the fact that knowledge about this little insect, about its living condition, its presence or absence on a piece of land is doomed with uncertainty. Research is ongoing and ABB experts keep on advancing new knowledge about ecology and new propositions for its protection. The beetle has been formally listed as endangered under the ESA in 1989, but the permitting process for oil and gas companies willing to develop oil ways in the whole Oklahoma remained pretty smooth until 2012. Prior to 2012 the US Fish and Wildlife Service considered that translocation of the species was a sufficient prerequisite not to harm the species and to authorize drilling and pipeline installations. In other words at that time the agency asked oil and gas companies and their environmental consultants to trap beetles with rotten chickens and to relocate them on other plots of land suitable for ABBs and where no development projects were planned. That was called bait away or trap or relocate. In 2012 a bunch of scientists from the State University of Nebraska published a paper where they demonstrated that trap and relocate was doing no good to the beetle as during trapping they were likely to get eaten by predators and relocation was also affecting the soundness of the individuals. So the Fish and Wildlife Service came under intense pressure to stop allowing the baiting and trapping based mitigation. Some field level officers brandished the scientific evidence as an incentive to rethink mitigation measures for oil and gas development and promoted the idea of setting land apart and organizing conservation banking mechanisms. This change in regulation created investment possibilities for conservation bankers and two ABB conservation banks were approved in 2013. Here you can see a picture of one conservation banker showing us around an ABB bank in Oklahoma. This allowed for an easy mitigation solution for oil and gas companies. A mere check of $20,000 per acre was sufficient to fulfill regulatory obligations and to get development oil and gas project authorized. Here again, the case of the ABB reveals temporal and special tensions. We observed that the rise of a costly option had a direct influence on the structure of land development as it influences the type of oil and gas projects that can be developed. Within the landscape of oil and gas project, not all companies could afford paying $12,000 per acre, especially the activities of small firms building individual oil wells were stopped. This was the case in the Osage County that we talked about before where individual entrepreneurs were unable to carry out further activities. In such, the rise of a robust mitigation option participated in some kind of concentration of the local economy and in artificialization pattern based on big plots of developed lands more than small and distributed small plots among landscapes. Second, to understand how the ABB case speaks of the temporal tension between conservation and finance, I first need to tell the end of the story. In 2015, as oil prices dropped, the Independent Petroleum Association of America petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to delist the ABB on the grounds that ABB did not meet listing criteria anymore. In 2020, the US Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that the ABB was not currently endangered anymore and removed the mitigation obligation for development project permitting. No need to buy credits anymore. At least not until litigation may lead to a releasing of the species. So the story of conservation banking in Oklahoma proved to be short lived, but in the end of the day, something remains. ABB conditions is likely to decrease as construction now goes unregulated. Finance has saw their assets suddenly losing all value. What remains and should remain in perpetuity are the two 30,000 acres plot of land now protected under a conservation easement. Such story tells us about the fragility of valuation mechanism. Accessing land, organizing conservation, building up securement and insurance takes tremendous time, administrative work and expert inputs. Meeting up the conditions to ensure that both finance and conservation interests will be met on a dedicated piece of land is rare as it enters to fulfill so many prerequisites. But yet, even when all has fallen apart, conservation has been weakened, finance turned away, but some land remains. In the last slide, I will briefly provide further details about the prerequisites I mentioned for conservation banking adoption with a few quotes that I got during interviews. So just to let you know, another part of the investigation I carried out about conservation banking consisted of understanding what are the factors that underlie investing decisions from conservation bankers, based on what do they decide to invest in one state more another, in one species more another, etc. First, conservation bankers carry out market studies, as one can imagine, and they seek to understand where is land development ongoing, where it's overlapping endangered species habitat, where industries going to develop new projects. And some industries such as housing are known for their high profits, which entails the possibility to sell credits at a high price. So here you have this quote, if there's a strong need for a project that made a lot of money, you can you can sell credits, there are no poor credits in California, you know anywhere from 150 to 300 or 400,000 an acre for urban development houses. Houses make big money. But there are also territorial and biological factors that come into play in the calculation of expected returns on investments. For instance, the size of the species population has a direct impact on the ratio between impacts and credits available, whereas the pace of restoration of species habitat also influences the length of time between upfront investments and credit availability, which has a direct impact on the return rate. In conclusion, I thought I'd show you that there's also mitigation banks, a bank that's made out to protect wetlands here not so far from where you are in Staten Island. And I think it's also an interesting way to show that these banks are also right in the middle of this urban densely constructed environment and but there are still there a way to achieve some kind of distribution of the value between the built environment and the unbuilt environment. And maybe just as a rapid conclusion if you're interested in buying one of these credits, they're with something like around one million dollar per acre, but you can afford to buy just half of one if you're interested. Thank you very much. Thank you with that final pitch for us to get invested in our conservation bank. Thank you so much, Stephanie. And the format calls for me to let the two of you be in conversation. I will occupy some airspace for a moment with throwing some questions let's say thematics and I also refrain from indulging my temptation to ask Timothy to give us right now the revisionist take on Cass Gilbert that we all really want to know and to ask if any more about this land bank which is right there in Staten Island. So it seems to me that there are kind of I would say three themes that we could speak across the papers and across your inquiries. One is space the other time and the third is paper. Paper in the sense of a piece of paper that transforms how the economy works. In terms of space it's really it seems that big transformation is being made in the question of what proximity is Timothy your critique of the urbanization of capital thesis is one that puts pressure on everything we think we know about the alliance of capital and density of centrality of proximity the idea of the metropolis is a place that concentrates people in space as well as attracting capital. So I'm curious what happens to proximity and Stephanie also really the mechanisms ask for similar nature to be restored nearby and the nearby is a completely unfactored in the market itself and so I wonder how these mechanisms transform our idea of proximity. So that's space the time element it seems to me you're both talking about I mean Tim you had this sort of critique of a backwards and forwards mentality but there's a kind of middle range of temporality which durability would occupy so it's not forever and it's not an immediate on the contrary it seems like the questions of maintenance would be at the heart of it and Stephanie you also mentioned that there's problems of having to fix fences and having to maintain things so in a way the question would be sort of like what about the scale of maintenance the temporal scale of maintenance has been has this been financialized or is it actually just not a relevant scale and I asked this in part because I suspect that an architectural audience would think somehow they're occupying this middle scale and then finally paper because you know it's the most visible aspect of these mechanisms but of course invisibly behind there is sometimes architecture there are Beatles who are more or less invisible and and the wild you know is not visible you're showing us the wild is not visible you're both talking about a natural experiment in which a piece of paper somehow made a big impact so the question I have is kind of dumb and big but to what extent do cultural visibilities affect these natural experiments you know and the case that comes to my mind is one drawn from older work on Egypt where you have people like the architect Hassan Fati who is there to facilitate in that case the natural experiment there and Hassan Fati is an architect yes but he also speaks a kind of economic language he talks about price etc and I imagine Stephanie that you also in the markets you study there are these kind of middle facilitators agents who make visible make things more visible than not so I don't know if this is in other words they're not as formal as a piece of paper but they facilitate somehow so these are the kind of three larger themes and let you maybe you know if you want to sort of start us off with questions answers or any comments really I'd love to should I take all three or would it be better if I take one and then we definitely comes back because otherwise I'll go on for too long so I'll take them in the order proximity and specifically capital and density I mean I was struck by the way that worked in Stephanie's paper and I'm struggling to think how to make it work in mind I mean there was an obvious way in that your case study I looked at because part of the way in which I showed the unreliable nature of the research that appeared to establish the validity of the soto's claims in six cities in Peru was that it had claimed essentially that one informal neighborhood is just like another whereas one of the things that actually came out when you read more closely how the research on the contrary proximity had defined the way in which different neighborhoods were titled at different moments because they wanted the pilot to be a success and informal neighborhoods that were long established tended to be in the city center so people had access to jobs and so they looked like they were precisely doing all the things that people with access to capital were meant to be doing it could be by assuming every neighborhood is like every other you could distribute this to the consequences of the program rather than actually understanding a little bit more about how something like proximity to an urban center affects the way people inhabit the informal and how if you're lucky enough to have your informal housing close to a city center it essentially becomes a fairly desirable location for all kinds of reasons why you're still somewhat protected from the financial mechanisms of the kinds of investment people want to put in place so let me say that I just want to think a minute about the way you in terms of capital and density but I feel the space issue is so relevant to Stephanie's paper that I may come back on that item but I'll be interested to hear what Stephanie has to say Well thank you thank you very much about the question of space it's also a nice way to kind of articulate in the case of conservation policies the way you have these entanglements but also tensions between regulations and finance and the whole story is about how there's kind of law act that is stating a framework a way to preserve but then that it's being implemented through financial mechanism that also speaks to the question of proximity actually species conservation and biodiversity conservation unlike other types of environmental policies like carbon carbon is a very standardized thing any type of greenhouse gas you can make it reduce it to a ton of carbon whereas this is something you can't do with biodiversity there's still a level of coherence coherence of the population which means that you will never be able to in my case destroy the habitat of a snake in California and mitigated by buying I don't know an ostrich credit in another state of the country so you have the law kind of sets and imposes this very strong ecological coherence and this convention that you know species is a species and you can't exchange it with something else and you have to think the proximity and the size of the markets is very reduced these markets you know they are based on the population areas so the law kind of imposes some level of proximity but then finance as we see is also playing with the value of land because the value of land is a big part in the return on investments that there's a seeking when they invest in these conservation policies and so even though you have this proximity and for instance in urban settings there are also a way to maintain natural areas in areas that are getting densified and densified with constructions but still they impose to have natural areas around but when you look at the value of the land usually where it's interesting to build is maybe within the very natural environment and the conservation banks will tend to be maybe further in the peri-urban areas so even though this mechanism of proximity is being this one definition by the regulatory framework and then the finance will kind of play it out a little bit different in a different way in that sense I'm struck by the way in which therefore the urban development that follows is entirely uncontrolled or nothing is controlled for it does not have a value except maybe in the phenomenon that actually Tim was mentioning that housing is a much more quantifiable form of space than let's say an ecological unit of an ecological family of beetles so in that sense the transformation of housing and urban development into highly quantifiable tradable developable quantity facilitates the capacity for conservation banks to even exist so behind every conservation banks and every discourse of diversity and biodiversity there is the sameness of the built environment somewhere where humans live in yeah do you want to just let me come back one quick thing and then I'll go on to your second question and this has been partly inspired by Stephanie's remarks ah sorry but I've forgotten that I was already thinking about your next question I'll come back and question no there was something really interesting that came out of that but I cannot oh sorry I just wanted to think about this point that Stephanie made in relation to carbon being measurable and endangered species being much more difficult which I think is fascinating there is some interesting obviously ways of thinking about what kinds of translations have to be done to make every form of consumption of carbon into something that produces a single so it appears to be measurable in a simple way and I think that's a very powerful difference to make but then whether whether urban land or urban property is equally readable I wonder and I think that's part of the way the research in Peru sort of founded because and certainly I first came to it from research in Egypt because friends of mine were asked to actually do the work of trying to figure out the difference between the value of informal housing and formal housing for the whole city so that De Soto could make a claim that if the Egyptians adopted his plans they would realise so many billion dollars worth of untapped wealth simply by the difference in value between what is informal and what is formal they could not figure this out there is no way and actually while I was just doing a little research on the history of New York and current building practices for today's purposes I tried to find out the difference between construction costs and the cost of unimproved land in New York it seems impossible to figure out partly because there is almost no unimproved land that comes on the market, a variety of reasons and partly because actual construction costs vary so much from neighbourhood etc etc so I think to me what's interesting about the work Stephanie is doing is precisely opening up the enormous amount of work that has to be done to produce something called value or price so as against a sort of mainstream economist sense that that is going to be produced by the intersection of supply and demand somewhere no that's a little device that may or may not work at certain points as you know Stephanie has shown that incredible amount of work of engineering has to be done to produce the price of something is fascinating Stephanie do you want to go first on the second one I don't want to keep necessarily going first on the question of time and maintenance and durability yeah sure about time I think what I like in this conservation policy especially in the USA because they are framed in a very different way in France actually but in the USA as I said you have this legal tool that I was quite fascinated about when I first learned about it because we don't have such a tool in France at least not in that way which is the conservation easement because it's meant to protect land in perpetuity and so what is perpetuity so perpetuity when we ask legal scholars in the USA you really say perpetuity is about 150 years and okay and then I started digging in these mechanisms and I saw that to be able to implement perpetuity you need to tie the mechanisms to financial markets as I explained so it means investing and dominance and with the financial interest being able to maintain the banks in perpetuity with the early interest every year having this maintenance so the underlying assumption is that the financial markets will be here in perpetuity which is also a nice assumption I think to make so like conservation is being tied to financial markets and these financial markets are thought to be working in perpetuity so I think this is a great idea and as I said changing climate is completely jeopardizing this kind of strange balance that is being composed between conservation legal tools financial investments species bureaucrats investors and so on so this question of time is really key is key to it and the temporality of nature is really not the temporality of finance so how do we make the interplay between all these I think it is a fascinating if any is in your sense that the American why would the American market have a notion of perpetuity but the French one not what would that be I mean the legal tools we don't have such legal tools that would protect and secure land in perpetuity we don't have that category in the legal in the French environmental legal yeah it's the legal tool that perpetuity in French law but not perhaps land or to anything yeah because conservation easement is tied to the land which means that even though you sell the land whatever you do with the land conservation easements and the obligations with the conservation easement remain so it's really tied to the land it's not tied to the owner whereas in France we have long term easements for like 99 years but they're tied to the owner actually just recently in 2016 we got a similar type of tool but it's not really being implemented at the moment Tim did you want to interesting that question of perpetuity in particular I don't know enough legal history to know why the Anglosphere systems are different from the French but you know there is this way of course in which one of the things modern states want to do is they want to prevent things being done in perpetuity because there's a long history of institutions like the church and many others that endow and prevent the the state from taxing and so on and that whole history of what can be done in perpetuity and what perpetuity means I think would be very interesting thing for somebody who actually knows the history to weigh in on but yes so this notion of what is perpetuity and as against sort of middle range and how that relates to my argument about durability so I introduced the term durability because I think this moment in the late 19th century is an important moment in the history of durability because it becomes possible to build these apparatuses of capture of future revenue on a new scale it's not that's always been what people have tended to do but it's tend to happen through land owning and agriculture and then increasingly from the 16th 17th century much more extensive control of long distance trade which gave you a durability of a sort of two year trade cycle or whatever as opposed to sort of one year durability of the agricultural cycle but suddenly in the late 19th century not so suddenly you can see it but one can see this sort of concentration of new forms of durability that have to do partly with the emergence of new kinds of materials or materials that can be used in new ways manufacturing processes make steel affordable so that it can be used for rail lines when building railways so that talking of maintenance they only need to be replaced every 30 years whereas before when they were made of iron and they buckled easily they had to be replaced every 12 months so durability has a history and that's the point I'm trying to make because of course we think of modernity and particularly the sort of acceleration of modernity since the late 19th century in terms of speed up in terms of things that happen more rapidly and one of the things I'm trying to do is against that look at a history of how things are kind of spread out and precisely because that's spreading out in something as close to perpetuity as you can get becomes or re-emerges as this extraordinary source of wealth so as opposed to that brief interlude where you were kind of stuck making your money out of machines out of factories which is why I think that Gilbert's metaphor is a little dated that you don't have to bother with that detail through manufacturing very much anymore because now you can build these structures that don't have to have more and more rapid turnover but on the contrary work from the durability or the extension in time in ways I was referring to but you're quite right and that's definitely says durability or perpetuity means what 99 years or something and one of the things that's so important I think architecture is that whereas other kinds of emergence of stock markets and other ways of acquiring from and speculating on the future are dealing with sort of 5, 10, 15 year horizons architecture is dealing with 20, 40, 50 years I mean that's how that's the period of time over which you can capitalize the value of something you've built so it's vastly different and of course that's still the case today which is why 50% of all money is created in the housing sector it is the thing that will create long-term credit far more so than than any kind of sort of business eventually you can make a lot of money I don't know creating a monopoly on car services and calling it Uber but that's only being calculated over 5 or 10 years whereas a building is much more durable so it's relative but the point is there's a history the different kinds of durability and I think that's exactly what Stephanie's thing with this how do you produce something that and you know the connection in her paper with the fact that you are producing something notionally in perpetuity that is fixing an environment which precisely is meant to be that which is constantly in flux and I think that's absolutely fascinating to think about it was built into the just to pitch my own research it was built into the notion of reinforced concrete that it would be something that would last in perpetuity but that would have to be patented every year because the innovation rates were so fast and so this idea of slowing down the capture of wealth or expanding the capture of wealth how does that deal with how does that help us revise our notion of precisely kind of innovative notion of technology and therefore let's say of architectural technologies being driven in some way by a kind of clip of innovation and kind of a similar question to you Stephanie because I was struck that you specifically did not choose to go to California and Florida places which would have a claim to novelty etc whereas you went to Oklahoma were presumably nobody's that proud of this happening or claiming it for a kind of novelty so what does this do to our notion of a kind of entrepreneurship or novelty driving markets which of us is going to go first sorry go first go first yeah so sort of technology is innovations you immediately bring to mind the work of the historian of technology David Edgerton whose argument in his book The Shock of the Old is we've got to stop thinking about technology or the technical right under this sign of innovation partly because a lot of stuff that claims to be new isn't new partly because it coexist and only operates thanks to the existence of very old things yes you can use a high speed drill but you are having you've got a hammer and partly because it you know it gives this sort of power to some process of innovation which may not be the way to think about the technical and the technological and that's certainly that's been a book that's been really helpful to me for thinking about ways that we should think about the technical and one of the things it brings in is this concern for maintenance which doesn't come under the category of innovation right it comes precisely under the capital under the idea of making do and fixing and mending and so on which somehow aren't thought to be part of technology but of course we've been talking about absolutely central to and and because because of my interest in durability in the history of the construction of ways of stretching out time so much of what is thought of under this rubric of things happening more rapidly of innovation occurring is obscuring the fact that so many of these things are in fact designed to make things less efficient more extended because what drives them is the ways in which you can control revenue payments, rents of whatever sort over longer and longer periods of time and that doesn't mean that you need always to be the most innovative or up to date no technically what you need to be is the device or the apparatus or the technology that will most of secure these largely monopolistic or at least relatively secure forms of control of revenue schemes so the entire way that technology sort of governs our thinking of time in the future is problematic and again I think I mean I want to hear Stephanie's answer but I'm struck by the fact that the if the property title policy can be thought of as a kind of technology where property titling in Peru precedes the Soto there are older programs where there are attempts to do this to remedy the so-called informal problem with titling so what does aside from is it the sort of fame of the Soto is it the internationalism is it the climate what is it at that time it quote unquote works or it is sort of taken up as a policy that's interesting question I think what he offers is a vast kind of simplification because yes property titling has been around and even serious attempts to deal with property titling and the problems of property titling as part of development projects and so on but he comes along with this vast project of simplification and it's actually something he's been trained in so the think tanks who take him up in the neoliberal movement are interesting the kind of political takeover of the discourse, the economic and the political discourse of the west and one of the things they've sort of worked on is sloganeering and simplification and marketing and you know these think tanks that he comes and you know they love him because as they say explicitly you know he's from the third world so he can say things that we can't say about the backwardness of the third world and they make a big deal of this but what they're training him in and he himself comes already equipped with is marketing, sloganeering simplification of the message so I think the notion of paper is itself you know he says all these people need is a piece of paper and with this piece of paper they're now secure to go out and get jobs because they can sit at home and that piece of paper is there to show them I think you're muted. And that's wonderful the piece of paper taking the place of the person who goes out in the work. Stefanie go ahead. Sure, yeah, maybe I think this there's an interesting point about this idea of simplification because the whole story I'm saying is that of complexification actually and not of simplification so it's I think it's an interesting point and maybe making a link with this notion of paper and paperwork and administrative work that is also being involved in the making of all these conservation policies and maybe that's also a link between this idea of why Oklahoma and not California but actually yes indeed as I showed all this is really a matter of investing time bureaucratic time writing all these conservation plans because you need consistent conservation plans otherwise investors will never come because they will not be sure to get a return on their investment so this this very this vast and tremendous amount of work that is being brought into the system that also explains why it's very very very slowly expanding within the whole country I mean as I showed on the map there's only 18 states that have adopted such a conservation policy because this needs to you know to have these very thick books of conservative habitat plans and things that help its work so that's one of the idea complexification of the system it makes construction more complicated so litigation and so on and maybe a naive remark about all that but everything emerged in California actually so the first conservation banks to are constructed in California and after 10 years the federal state took on the the mechanisms and decided to implement it in the rest of the country and when we arrived and so we had that story in mind when we arrived in Oklahoma and we were sure that everybody would refer to California as the place you know where everything started and everything happens and we decided to see a French scholar and my colleague is from India so these two scholars like coming in Oklahoma you know and asking about beetles that was kind of strange and we had the whole story in mind so we were sure that everybody would refer to California and nobody knew really about California things were happening here in Oklahoma the closest state with the more people from Texas so we had people coming from Texas to invest in Oklahoma and I was quite surprised I mean maybe that's naive from a European vision but I was kind of surprised to see that yeah this divide you know between California that was where everything kind of happens in Oklahoma where no I mean things are here happening here happening in Texas I mean it's been a maybe well we're over time but it's been a challenge to think of getting how to speak about land in the US although we are calling it land in the Americas because there's different Americas in the US and also the US belongs in a kind of spectrum of American continent to how to speak about land without further objectifying it in a way that these markets really have a unique way of doing it and I think that the the interstate relationships just a small point to what you just said is turning out to be completely fruitful there truly is a different way to tell the history of the relation of state and market in the United States then certainly France but also then Peru then this I don't think we have any sort of present questions in the chat so I wanted to say if you had less comments for us since we you know we are a schedule of people returning to their classes having given them this kind of interlude of absolutely wonderful interventions from you too so I wanted to give you one last chance to say last thoughts go ahead too okay well my last thoughts are actually about Stephanie's paper which is just to say one line when you introduced the conservation bank you said you know don't think about a bank you know a high street bank and I actually want people to go away from your paper and and not think that but instead every time they see a high street bank think about a field in Oklahoma because I think you know because you're capturing something as it's being invented you're seeing how it works and of course a high street bank works the same way in terms of coming up with a set of mechanisms for credit creation that rest entirely on forms of you know law and regulation that I give it this power of the extending of credit for some purpose now this purpose is a particularly fascinating one but don't mislead people into thinking that ordinary banks work any differently so and with that in mind you know I think there's between what you're doing and some of the stuff I've been talking about particularly sort of trying to think about urban housing and speculation in the grounds for speculation there's another connection between our papers which is that of course one of the ways in which this opening up of the possibility of ever more credit on the basis of housing takes on a new life is with the is with the vast expansion of credit in the US and other countries around the creation of second mortgages and the repackaging and slicing up of mortgages to create the vast debt bubble of the early 2000s which ends in the crash of 2008 now what do they do they can't all those people who've been creating finance through speculation in housing where do they go they go to Oklahoma because they need a new field of speculation and the one that's been written about is the money pours into fracking in places like Oklahoma but of course some other savvy people who realize hey this fracking is involving some Beatles we could create another field of speculation by so it all fits together and I really enjoyed the conversation with you fantastic thank you maybe just a very very quick word yeah I think also what speaks to our stories is that how people or species you know get integrated into the policy the economic world or conservation world and the case of in the USA reminds me of a French sociologist who's talking about so it's like negative individuals and positive individuals because some of them they have the characteristics to answer to the requirements of the policies for instance the loan policy with the formalization of property rights the positive characteristics of species being able to speak up to finance and conservation policies so here we also have this kind of positive individuals versus negative individuals being integrated or not in the mechanisms well with this encouraging everyone who is watching and listening to next time they pass a bank imagine a field of Beatles invisible except if they have been collected by a little Tupperware I want to really thank deeply Kim and Sivani for joining us for playing along and everyone for joining us and we will have one more event for this semester which will be a book launch for the new aggregate volume Writing Architectural History and you should check our website for that it's April 22nd thank you again both very much thank you very much thank you bye bye