 Welcome again to a school event. We hope you're getting ready for the coming year. It's a challenge to all of us, and we are sure, and we're hoping that we can all rise to it. What follows today is a discussion among several UD faculty about racism and teaching. We will offer some thoughts and some ideas, have a short discussion. But just as important, we hope you will add questions and your thoughts into the chat, which we will take up either during the discussion or following the discussion. We have about one hour, and everyone should know that we are recording this event. I'm joined by Adriana Chavez, co-founder of the Mexico City based firm, Office for Urban Resilience. We have Jerome Hayford, co-founder of Brandt Hayford, a Harlem based architecture and design studio. And Justin Garrett Moore, executive director of the New York City Public Design Commission. All three of these folks are also UD faculty that you'll meet somewhere along the line this year. And I just want to thank Lyla Coutelier of GSAP Events for helping to make this happen. So as many of you have been reading and hearing and listening to all sorts of discussions, United States has been going through a crisis of racialized violence, a violence specifically against the black people, sanctioned by the state and problematically ingrained and unacknowledged throughout society or repressed. This works through something called whiteness, the privilege and the power that starts quite literally with the color of my skin. This crisis, however, has exposed a long history of racial violence in the US, as well as the complicity by, among others, the design professions. We are here today to focus on urban design and its teaching and practice and how they need to be changed to unlearn whiteness. This entails something we call decolonizing, which is a kind of disassembling of what we think we know and what we do in order to start building a more equitable way of working and working with communities that have been hurt by this systemic racism. Those people and communities subject to institutions, laws and professional routines enabled by whiteness and other forms of exclusion. Me personally, in my teaching, I have focused on the problems of the terms and practices around what we call public space. Simply, how do we discuss the concept of public space when it's clear that the public is often exclusionary? The conventions of publicness are coded in the United States, as well as many other places, are coded white and more specifically, white, middle class and straight. So how do I begin to approach this in the classroom? We examine professional and non-professional challenges to conventional ideas of making and using public space. We challenge and examine regulations and design decisions that shape experiences in places labeled public. Finally, we challenge the common idea that public space is about leisure or shopping, which is a common perception. Unfortunately, this masks the capacity for space, public space to be about speech and politics, which entails different needs and different demands by different kinds of people with unequal access to power. So with that kind of throwing out a little bit of things for people to think about, I'm going to invite Adriana to offer some thoughts about her work and her practices and her thoughts on this and then we'll move to Jerome and then to Justin and then perhaps along the way we'll also have discussions, but let's just get going. Thank you. Hello, everybody. Very nice to meet you, even if it's the Zoom. So myself, I think that I'm also, I'm from Mexico City. I'm an architect and urban designer slash landscape architect and I've been working most of my work is based in Mexico City and Latin America. So I like to bring that into the conversation. And to start, maybe I think it's very, maybe I don't know if all of you, but maybe you have seen the statement called Unlearning Whiteness by the GISA faculty members. I think this statement is very relevant and if you haven't read it, maybe we can put it on the chat so that you can take a look. I think we need to acknowledge that we are trained in a Eurocentric vision of the world. I know that many of you don't come from the United States. You might be from other latitudes, but even if you are somewhere else in the world, I think these issues apply. I can speak by Mexico and Latin America. I think that racism is overlooked. There's a narrative that says that we are all the same, but it's not the reality. And we are a product of conversations where we are blended as mestizos or brown and the reality is very, very different. The reality is that there's a huge gap economically. There's segregation among racial groups. The several recent studies have shown that the color of your skin determines your economic standard very accurately. So the color of your skin can play a role when you are getting a job. The positions in government, in the private sector, have been mostly held by white people. And the same goes for education. The highest levels of education are also correlated with a lighter skin color. And another thought that I would like to bring, I don't want to take too much time, so I also want to, Justin and Jerome, to talk. But I think it's very important because they're only women right now, but in this conversation in the faculty. And I think the very, very important point to consider is gender. Because on top of all the unicol opportunities that I buy by book communities face, gender access surveys, the challenges for women. Having a darker skin color and being a woman, it's even worse, right? So on top of that, if you're indigenous, that puts you in a higher disadvantage. And I think it's very important as we are designing, we want to design inclusive cities. So we need to acknowledge that our communities are facing many, many challenges. And women face many challenges, for example, and just maybe I'm bringing another narrative, which is the challenge that women have in Mexico, but I think the same ones can correlate in the United States. So women out of 63 out of 100 women have experienced physical, sexual, economical, or emotional violence. And Latin America includes 14 of the 25 countries with the highest rates of feminicide in the world. So decisions have been exacerbated by the current crisis that we are living right now. We are asked to stay at home. And sometimes home is not the best place to be. So I think that what can we do? Maybe all of these issues, what it has to do with design and how we relate to certain design. I think that as David mentioned, we are complicit. We are designing in a Eurocentric, white male oriented vision. And I think the first step is to acknowledge that. And that's why maybe instead of learning these processes, we need to all learn because we have been educated under those patients. So we need to ask ourselves dear questions. And I think that we can reflect on that. And that's why I'm very excited because you are a new generation of designers who are joining this very specific moment in time. And I think you are the ones who have to challenge. Challenge ourselves as faculty, but also challenge the world, challenge the design and be very critical to what you are designing for. Who are you designing for? And of course, taking account the context. And the context is not only the geographical context, but the political context and the social context. And that would be it for now. Okay. I just wanted to jump in quickly before Jerome starts and say that I put into the chat two links. The first is the link to the unlearning whiteness letter that Adriana referred to. So for those who haven't seen it, do take a look at that. That was written by full time and adjunct black faculty at GSAP around some of these issues. And then I wanted to especially underline the very, very, very important point that she brought up about gender. And so there's a term that hopefully some of you are familiar with, but if not, should become familiar with, which is intersectionality, which is to fully recognize and address the role that gender has had as it's connected to issues of race and power and sort of different paradigms. So I just wanted to highlight those in the chat. Sorry, go ahead, Jerome. Thanks, Justin. And thanks, Audrey and David for having me here. I'll be fairly brief and just kind of pick up on some of the things Audrey is raising and reflecting on kind of where you guys are at as an emerging entering generation into kind of new field of scholarship for yourselves or a continuation of your scholarship in a new context. And I wanna underscore what Audrey said about, she used the word we have been trained in a Eurocentric vision. And that really I think is so important to understand that when we talk about whiteness, which has really only become a sort of working term for the mass media and mainstream pedagogical framework in the last few years, so many people immediately, especially who aren't familiar with the American particularities of race will think that it pertains only to someone with white skin and become immediately defensive or feel alienated from that discourse. And what I think is so productive and so exciting for a student of your guys generation entering a field of study of urban design which talks about systems and talks about root causes as opposed to symptoms and it's most kind of ideal deployment is that really when we talk about whiteness, it's really to be understood as in a sense, yes, pertaining to white supremacy and privileges that are afforded to one with lighter skin in general, but really as a set of practices, as a force that exists outside of individuals that has to do with an entire epistemology and way of practicing, way of knowing, way of learning and way of operating in the world that we have all been trained in and pertains to all people, really most people on the planet at this point. And so what I think is really exciting and what I have a lot of hope for your generation, could say our generation, but I'm a little older probably than a lot of you, is that from my limited experience in the urban design, as an urban design faculty, I think that we're actually poised to begin to decolonize ourselves and the urban design as a system of knowing and making and creating is already, I think a step towards that decolonization, this idea of collaboration, of co-authorship, of looking at systems, looking at communities, foregrounding community-based knowledge and experience. And I think that where we just need to take it is to not assume, to really get rid of this idea that discussions about race are somehow outside of oneself or an addendum or optional because we are all raced by whiteness. And once you radically kind of lean into that and we do as a discourse, it really, I believe undergirds and strengthens fundamentally our approach to these vast issues like climate change, like gender discrimination and politics because these issues of race have so much to do with our practices. And I think that's really what I appreciate about the way David kind of opened the conversation is to begin to talk about where, this is the open question now with a lot of discourse and lived experience primarily from people of color to back it up but that has been largely ignored by the prevailing winds of most fields of design. And part of why you have very few people of color in the United States in these fields is that there's just an inherent alienation of that knowledge and those lived experiences. But that said, I think it's really this great opportunity and open moment to begin to really strengthen our discourse beginning with actually looking at history, what has actually happened to get us where we got and that these things are not an addendum, they are not sort of an annex, they are fundamental to how we can begin to reframe our practices and our ways of knowing things and the subjectivities that contribute to that, our systems of knowledge, starting with ourselves. Great, thank you Jerome. So I'm gonna put, you'll see I'm a big links person. I'm putting some more links in the chat but first really wanna thank all of you for joining this conversation. This is a unique time for everybody globally and you all are kind of a part of this community and experiment along with the rest of us. So thank you now and in advance for really entering into sort of a new space and some important conversations with all of us. So a couple kind of high level points that David sort of introduced is to talk about power and urbanism as a concept. In theory, we all have to deal with and address power and power structures in our lives and coming from all over the world that happens in many different ways that you all experienced. And I would think and hope that the reason that many of you were even here and doing this and engaging in this conversation is because to acknowledge that power dynamics haven't always worked for everybody, right? In many different cultures, many different contexts whether that's about race, gender, ethnicity, any number of dynamics and all of you, I think probably know and understand that design and built environment are instruments of power, right? So we're all here together because we're people that somehow are connected to or interested in or motivated by that, I don't know if I'll call it a fact but that premise that built environment and design are somehow instruments for power. And this concept of how that connects to urban design as a field is something that there has been a long history to inequality being sort of an important outcome of the built environment, right? Through design, through construction, through development, through policies connected to all of those things. And so if we talk about whiteness and kind of the role that it's had globally as a colonial project, as what we call racialized, capitalist projects, there are things that we really are in a position now globally that we have to challenge and push some of the patterns and some of the kind of realities that we are all living with, right? We are all on a Zoom meeting right now connected to the pandemic, which has proven and shown that inequality and power structures have not resulted in a fair and equitable reality for people. And this isn't an ideal situation, but we are the privilege because we're on computers with internet and accessing certain types of resources to be able to do this work that other people are not, right? So there's always this work of acknowledgement to Jerome's point, like how we got here and where we are that has to be done. So that's one point kind of power. The second point is the article that I posted on urbanism. So urbanism is a term that is being discussed quite a lot these days, right? There's the people that are saying all of this is the death of the city and we're all gonna be kind of in remote places and we don't need certain types of spaces and infrastructures anymore on the one hand. And then there's the other hand that is a conversation about really the city that has been produced and the whiteness that is associated with it, right? Everything from gentrification to dynamics of how economies are structured, the essential worker, all of these things. And so you all, as urban designers, are in theory people that want to be what is sometimes called an urbanist, right? People that are interested in have expertise on experience with cities and urbanization and kind of that work of what happens when people collect and shape their environment. And so that article and Curved, it talks about some of the histories and backgrounds that you may wanna start to become familiar with as you're entering into or maybe you're already in the US context for what the field of quote unquote urbanism is and how it's operating and acting and really impacting directly people's lives and communities' outcomes. So that's that article. The second article that I posted is from a forum journal, it's an article that I wrote actually that talks about, in that case, historic preservation, but it's really focused on kind of the redevelopment and design of cities as they're changing, right? So the other business that we're all in as designers is the business of change. So connected to power is the power to change, right? And design and urban design is a part of that. So what is the change, right? So when we talk about whiteness, the kind of the legacies that we've kind of been taught and inherited as designers and design practice, you know, we've been taught a certain way of what is progress, what is change, what is good, what's public, right? What's quality, what's excellent, right? And those qualifiers have been defined by a very Eurocentric approach, right? My generation, I'm a little bit older too, in all of you. So my generation, you know, Rem Koolhaas was our Corbusier, right? And there's this sort of kind of cult of a certain type of knowledge and production and value that was associated with things. But if you really look at these figures and these ideas from other lenses and from a full understanding of their production and what they've produced rather for people in cities, you'll see a lot of flaws, right? You know, people don't talk kind of enough about the flaws and failures of some of these systems. So that article is called Making a Difference is talking about kind of this bigger issue of urban change and how it sits within a kind of a timeline of history. And that's something that we have to talk and learn more about. But there's also a segment that I actually speak directly to how the way that we talk about design education in the Columbia Urban Design Program is already sort of building on a legacy of doing this work of challenging the way that design happens, right? The way that kind of built environment practice works and that spans everything from this idea of challenging learning, right? Challenging practice, challenging participation, engagement, right? There are all these terms and buzzwords that you're gonna start to become familiar with as you come into the program or if you're already out practicing, these terms are flying around. Community engagement, what is that, right? The power dynamics and the understandings of the skill sets that are needed to fully engage in those conversations. So that's that article. And then the final article is, there's not an article actually, it's an example of the kind of work that we have been doing in the Columbia Urban Design Program. So this is a seminar called Difference in Design that I taught last year with mostly urban design students where we were talking like a semester long conversation about the role of difference in the built environment. So there's sort of examples of kind of case studies from history or from present for how whiteness kind of major systems that produce inequality have shaped places, but also student projects, student ideas, right? The generative space that we are also responsible to question and to create that students have kind of put forward into how to imagine different and new systems. And I think that is a very important part of our collective work as designers, as urban designers, as learners and unlearners that are connected to and doing this work. So I just threw a bunch of links at you, but copy them or I think they said they'll be available afterward. Take some time, read them, kind of connect to some of the thoughts and ideas. And this is a long-term conversation and a long-term project. We're all in this big group project together to make the world better. And so I hope that you'll take a look at some of those and sort of think on them and incorporate it into some of your discussions and ways that you're thinking about entering, either entering the urban design program or continuing to shape and enter and emerge in the urban design field. So I'd like to add, thanks, Justin. There's a lot in there. I want to add one piece of kind of language and assumptions into some of the things that everyone has been discussing and that's the term infrastructure. We do a lot of discussion about what is infrastructure and typically we think of infrastructure as the sewer, the electricity, the subway or other physical things, many of which are unseen, many which are seen, but which we assume we can fix because they're physical objects. But what we try to do in the program and which part of learning our own discipline is to think of social infrastructure and to think of infrastructure as relations, not merely materials. So that there's an infrastructure, let's say, if you're talking about sewage, okay? Well, where does the waste go? Who decides where the waste goes? What communities get the waste dumps? Who in the state Senate decided that this district was appropriate for a highway and its drainage off the highway? Every bit of what we think of as physical infrastructure is actually tied into a whole social network of decisions and powers which, to repeat this refrain, is tied to systems of power which are embedded in privilege and whiteness. So if you look at the United States, communities of color and minority communities almost always will have more of the kind of waste dumps and causes of asthma because they have highways through them. So in many ways, the history of urban design, you could say is a history of putting the bad stuff in one location as opposed to another location. And that is a political problem encoded by values. And so in the studio, we spent a lot of time talking about infrastructure, but we mean the relations and the systems of infrastructure, and that is deeply embedded in this kind of sense of privilege about decision-making. So you'll hear a lot about that and it's something that we really are very focused on because it's a way to connect the things that we expect to serve us in our daily life to politics and decision-making. Just wanted to add that to the kind of things that we think about that need to be rejiggered and reformatted. Yeah, I think that's an important point, David, and there's a conversation I had recently with Mabel Wilson and Mario Bidden. There's at Columbia GSAP, there's a research group called the Global Africa Lab. So we've got a big room of people here, but there's a whole continent called Africa that has people of African descent and African people in it that are billion people in the world that probably aren't represented in this conversation here, but the conversation about infrastructure is such a key one, right? Because global infrastructure conversations are absolutely connected to this idea of kind of systems of power. And regardless of the race of the people implementing it are connected to this conversation about lightness, right? And kind of Eurocentric models, right? There's the, you know, in Berlin, a bunch of white people a long time ago got together and carved up Africa. And to this day, for example, the dynamics of European or American or even Chinese players and actors building and implementing infrastructure for the purpose of extraction and for the purposes of control in territories in this continent that happens to be occupied by African and black people is an incredibly exploitive and damaging to people and environment context, right? So we have to talk about that, right? It's not, you know, these things aren't things that happened in the 50s or in the 1800s. These are things that are happening every day. And at scale that is unprecedented, right? As time goes and populations grow, the number of people that are impacted by these decisions like infrastructure are at an unprecedented scale. And we as built environment professionals need to be a part of that conversation, right? And, you know, the stuff that is in the handbooks and the policies that the Chinese government makes people in Sub-Saharan African countries follow is generated from ideas and policies that European white people devised and created and implemented and forced on other parts of the world a long time ago, right? It was a model that has been expanded and adapted and done now at an increasingly problematic scale, right? So whiteness is not a, to Jerome and really to David's earlier points is not only an issue of white people in America or Western Europe and quote unquote people of color wherever, right? This is a system that has huge impacts on cities and that then ends up affecting all of us. Really important point on infrastructure. Yeah, and I just wanted to, you know, ways again, the kind of, you know, obvious thing, but I think very tied to this discussion that's affecting all of us is the fact that we're on Zoom right now. And, you know, urban design, you guys are gonna have such interesting conversations. I mean, the fact that you're in this quote unquote room right now suggests that you have a certain courage to kind of embrace and lean into the sort of radical changes and implications of what it means to quote unquote unlearn disciplinarity or learn new systems or truly kind of account for the degree to which, you know, whiteness and, you know, prevailing infrastructures of domination and suppression are absolutely pervasive. And while, you know, we talk about this year or the coming few years being a challenge or a disruption to the way that we normally do things, but, you know, for this entire year or summer, I really think what comes up for me as an educator, as a person, as a citizen is that very point of, you know, things can no longer continue the way that they have continued. Business as usual must not stand. And COVID has forced business as usual to not continue in the way that it has. And it's actively, as we speak, opening up a new unprecedented social and physical, political, legal infrastructures, pedagogical infrastructure. So, you know what? I mean, I think that this year is going to be a challenge. I think psychologically, if nothing else, but again, I feel that we all just need to take a deep breath and actually realize that I think that to be a student right now is a profoundly rich experience where we're actually going to be co-creating new forms of knowledge actively together. And I think urban design is really one of the disciplines most already poised to kind of manage that reality. I think I agree with all of that has been said and just to add to the conversation on infrastructure and public spaces and the role of urban designers. I think sometimes you might be an architect and I'm an architect myself and sometimes as architects, we tend to think in form, in buildings, right? But we have to move out from that vision and getting away from the drawing and think of not only into the larger systems of power that come in play, but also in the process of how the projects are designed. What's the process? What's the decision-making process for learning or for deciding who has a stake at the table? What's the process for including the communities? Is that process fair? Does it includes everyone? So I think thinking on moving out from form and thinking on the process, I think it's critical. And also we tend to do drawings and great presentations but they are not enough. How do you ensure that what you are envisioning it's actually a reality on the build and the physical space? And that's a very big question I myself I question this every day. Also, if you have some, if the students have questions, please add it into the chat and we can start that discussion with you. Please, comments, questions, whatever your references that you would like to bring. I would authorize another thing which or another kind of social problem that we tend to, we've always tended to. We've maintained, I mean, this idea of what is a profession. And many of you are coming to this as a kind of professional growth, as professional growth. And we require that, that you have a degree. So in sense you are already architects or landscape architects are similar and we are called second professional. So we're kind of stuck with this term professional because in many ways the term professional is part of the problem because who decides what are the rules to be in a profession, who do those rules serve? So in some ways the professions, not just ours but the professionalism or the status of a profession is part of what needs to be adapted to be more inclusive, to account for more groups for to account for descent, to account for representation. So it's really exciting to be in a program that's called the professional degree even as we're trying to push on the limits of what is a profession. So we, in every semester we really push on well, what is a professional responsibility? Is it to the profession or is it to the public? Both obviously problematic terms. So one of the exciting things about urban design is that it doesn't have a license. There's no, there's no task for urban design. So in many ways urban design has the most latitude to adapt what it is. And we encourage that even though we're also trying to kind of comment on and work alongside the professional dictates of the AIA or international organizations. So we can kind of play off them in some ways but when we go out into the world even if it's often on Zoom right now we need to really think about the kind of nature of what it is to be a professional and to how to challenge it and make it more relevant for more people. Cause it has been quite narrow historically professions were formed in many ways as job protections for a small number of people but also for to standardize and make beneficial certain practices. So there's a whole history there but I think it's really one of the important things for us to think about. And that also, you'll hear the same discussion about the nature of what is a discipline. Also a limitation to produce knowledge but also limitations on what actually counts as knowledge. So when we talk about urbanism we need to kind of expand to include things that might not have previously been thought of as part of urbanism. The history of the profession will also demonstrate that. And the two kind of key threats that have already been brought up which are first climate change which is something that we under Kate Orr's leadership have been extremely become extremely invested in and we see climate change as an issue of social equity and social justice not merely better drainage. And so we see climate change as an absolute necessity of urban design because it's we among some others who can actually look across systems that are both social and physical. So we're very excited even though we have a very new perhaps exciting way of learning about all this and the thing also been brought up is COVID-19. This is not a natural event. This is a man made event and it's a feature of urbanization. It's a feature of growth. It's a feature of economic and social process. Different people, different groups are affected in different ways by COVID unequally. And so how does that affect things like neighborhood composition or densities or residential uses or how people have access to healthcare these become urban design issues as well as political and social issues. So sometimes I found in my seminar in recent years, it's kind of a problem that we have extremely, really interestingly profoundly important ways of criticizing and pointing out questions that we must answer. But we should also, I hope, recognize that there is new ways to work and we will invent them and find them and discover them together. It's, that's one of the things about urban design is that it can touch on so many things that we're hoping, we're sure that these seemingly systemic vast sets of questions can be brought into a studio environment and worked on and tinkered with so they can be more chaste. I also want to prod our participants here to put some questions in the chat, but I wanted to really echo David's point. So a little kind of quick background, biographical. So I'm also an alumnus of the Columbia UD program. And sorry, I joke with my parents that I went to architecture school for seven years, but I'm not a quote unquote architect as the profession defines it, although I design buildings and neighborhoods all the time, which is an architect, but I am able to practice urban design in all these different and diverse ways. And that's something that's really great about the field. And I think, I personally think that urban design is uniquely positioned to really respond directly to all these issues that David just underlined, right? Climate, what we call the dual pandemics here in the US, we talk about the pandemic, coronavirus and other future public health crises, but also the pandemic that racism in America has sort of produced. And because of the field or non-field, I guess of urban design does cross so many different disciplines, but also sectors, right? There's public sector, private sector, nonprofit sector. There's kind of modalities, right? There's the collaboration, there's the initiative, there's the project, right? There are kind of all these different structures and systems that we can challenge. So Jerome mentioned in the chat, storytelling as a methodology. Adri was sort of mentioning what are our tools, whether it's drawing or kind of being able to have certain conversations. And I do think that as we're all in this very strange time, we're uniquely positioned to have a bit more reflection about that because so many things are going to be different in the next months or maybe longer that we can together challenge and push what is this field and how do we operate? What are our objectives? What are our ethics of practice, right? That may be different from others. So that's a point that I absolutely agree that using our work and all of your collective interests, you all are coming into this, I'm assuming with your own kind of background and purpose, but to position now that purpose that you have with what's going on in the world around you. And there may be things that directly or personally affect you, but there may be things that you just see happening, right? And as just a human being in the world and seeing that there is harm, whether it's to environment or to people and kind of understanding how you can use your time, your skills, your privilege, everyone in this room is privileged to help address that. I think it's something that we hope that we can all work together to do. The other quick point that I wanted to mention is that we are in this kind of interesting time. And so two more links I posted. So Columbia University is, I'm a fan, has just created a school of climate, right? And so when David was referring to like these disciplinary boundaries, the sciences, social sciences, public health, you know, the idea that we can challenge some of those things and bring together conversations around climate that will be grounded in social justice and equity, right? And the power that that has. At the same time, the school has created relatively recently a department that's focused on African-American and diaspora studies, right? So again, that, you know, billion plus people in the world that happen to be black our knowledge, our value, the way that we think and work has not been valued or elevated or resourced in the way that other people's knowledge and value has been done. And there's sort of an infrastructure that's kind of forming and resourcing that at Columbia as well. So it's a pretty unique time to sort of connect to and relate to some of these things. So way back when I was in your shoes, graduate student, you know, I came into GSAP I'm an architect, urban designer. The best class that I took was in the German conflict department. You know, I don't speak German either, but you know, it was a course about globalizing city cultures. And what we learned in that course was frankly about the white colonial project that has produced just about every problem that we have that we're living with right now in the world, right? And it was from the lens of kind of a comparative literature class. So, you know, reading what Latin American sort of artists and writers were thinking about in the 1970s or problem-sizing what was happening in the mid-east, you know, during the same time. And so the idea of kind of pushing as you're coming into a learning environment or an unlearning environment, kind of what do you want to connect to and relate to is something that we can push. And I think this idea of the Columbia Climate School and this new African diaspora studies department that's going to be generating content and having conversations is also an exciting time. So I just want to put a little plug for both of those. I think that's actually a great transition to the question that was entered into the chat here by Anirudh. What is the extent to which a profession in quotes is that client dependent or by definition become political in quotes, especially if the client in quotes is the establishment, the government and our policies or our politics are at odds with theirs or can the profession and the establishment be at odds as to how the urban environment should be shaped? A good example being the removal of colonial-era statues or Confederate statues in public spaces. Well, those are two great questions. And I think there are two questions. They're not oars. It's not an oar, or unless you want two questions, also fine. I'll just take the first stab at the first part. I would say that embedded in there is, as we say in the nature of what a profession is, client dependent, whether it's a private client or a public client, is always political. It's always been political. And that doesn't mean that tomorrow you can go out and say, oh, no, you shouldn't do that project, you should do this project. I think it's a bit more of a gradual process, first of all, in which you are, let's say, and it's a little bit, I think it's more cogent in our program that we talk about it with public clients first. Because public clients are typically more able to engage political dissent and engagement. Handicap, though, they often are by their own ways of doing business. But it's important for us to learn how to work with these agencies and clients slowly to change the conversation. Part of our job is to introduce other ways of doing things. I think it's really that simple, but it's not a simple thing to do, obviously. I think that to get to the level of your question, which is our politics are at odds with theirs, that's another level of question, another level of problem. First of all, I think we would probably say that the implication there is like, well, do I build, do I door the wall between Texas and Mexico? Simple question right there. Well, part of the answer is no, don't. Another would be to try, and some young architects did, try to actually submit kind of subversive design proposals, not getting paid, mind you, probably. But so there's a kind of a range of actions there, which is one where you can actually work with a client or a public agency or even a private client to change the conversation. And then there's another level at which, no, you shouldn't build the wall, period. And we all have to be willing to, and that's a kind of privilege to be able to say no, you could argue. But that's the stakes, and which perhaps we have to actually face. So I'll let others continue that conversation. Yeah, I mean, it's funny how this also ties into our previous discussion about the sort of non-licensure of urban design as a kind of quote unquote profession. I mean, as a, I'm a licensed architect, for example. And in a sense, who is our client? Who is anyone's actual client? My license as an architect really mandates primarily that I protect the life and safety of human beings, for example. So that's really the main thing that's enshrined in a license for architecture, for example. So I think we really do need to kind of unpack when we say that a profession is client driven by definition. Because I think it's worth unpacking who really is the client in any sort of design process and who are we serving in that design process? What desires are we producing in that design process? So it is a good question that I think will be unpacked over the course of the program. What's the other thing I was gonna say? Oh, yes. And then, to David's discussion of a kind of politics of refusal, which I think are extremely important in the times that we live in. The sort of other side of that is our expertise that we have to offer when we're brought to the table. And I think that's kind of another word to throw in here aside from professional is a sort of so-called expert, which is also a kind of problematic term, but that's our specialist. And that's often where you might find yourself on a jury for a design competition or on a project team for some private client or at a public hearing for something. Your expertise is being called upon to produce desires in the world that may or may not have agency with those powerful people. And I think that that cannot be underestimated. And it may be simply refusing to do something, but we also are in a position to provide new desires to be acted upon in the world that are not, what's really, I think, part of this enormous crisis that we find ourselves in is truly a lack of imagination and a kind of status quoism of extraction, of domination, of just banality, frankly, in the way that we do things. That's simply just a legacy of the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 20th century. So every generation has to kind of offer a new set of possibilities to be acted upon. Many of these public officials just don't have any imagination. They don't know what you know or what you will know soon. So that's also something that can sometimes have a lot more leverage than sort of refusal in the right circumstance. So not to cut this part portion of the conversation short, but we do have one more question in the chat and I wanna just do a time check. It's 12 o'clock now and we can go for about 15 more minutes before we'll need to do a hard stop just for scheduling purposes to keep everyone on track. Is everyone on the panel okay to accept the last question? Great. Okay, Kristo, forgive me if that's not the full first name we've got like a combined name here. As the discussion has been unfolding, I've been wondering what is more challenging as we tackle urban projects and ideas, designing them in the context of cities already built on certain established and unfair and unequal systems or promoting them to the people who have accepted these systems and cannot envision alternative and do not accept the reality of these unjust systems. Mostly, do you think the biggest obstacle in quotes, if we can say that there is one, to new urban approaches in the built environment, is the built environment already in place or the people that inhabit it? So I think what the questioner is asking is can we reform what is already built, what already exists in the built environment or is it really truly up to us to only reform people's sort of hearts and minds and ideas? I think one short answer for that is that, and I'm sure my friends in the preservation program will thank me, we should probably just fix what we have for the most part and it is fixable in many ways and often cheaper. So this idea of doing things new and throwing things out and replacing them is actually an ideological problem of modernism. Right. The idea that we need to make a new city is really fascinating and really flawed. So it's harder to fix stuff. It's more complex, people are there, political systems are in place, social systems are in place, infrastructures, sewers and pipes and electricity are in place. But that's what needs doing for a zillion reasons, not just costs, not just engaging people who live there, but also in terms of climate and energy. Reusing things is a zillion times better for the environment than chucking them. So I'm oversimplifying it in interests of time and conversation. So it's not an obstacle, existing reality is not an obstacle, it's just what we have and we should work with. I definitely, oh, go ahead. Oh, sorry. Well, maybe quick, thank you. I think that first we need to thank if what we have been told about the problems are really, it's really a problem. Like we are trained and you will be doing in every single project I work on there's always an analysis phase. So you are analyzing a context through certain lenses and in these lenses, you define the problem. So first, it's important to set up the right question and ask yourself, does these communities really have a problem? For example, we always think, how do we create resilient communities? Maybe first we need to recognize that they are already, the disadvantaged communities are already resilient, are already resourceful. And what can we learn instead of fixing, what can we learn from that? And also maybe going from creating a new language. This I'm taking from Professor Dilip da Cunha that probably you'll know through the program. He always talks about creating a new language and the tension between the formal and the informal city. So we have been taught that there are informal communities around the world. But those are problematic. And maybe those are not problematic. We are not understanding correctly how they are accessed and what are the relationships in place. So I think we can learn from that. Yeah, I totally agree with both of those points. Something I also picked up on building, being sort of the anchor of the question and the conversation in a way, what exists versus building new. And I'm going to underline a comment, Jerome talked about repair as David was talking. So preservation, sometimes we like to use the term conservation instead of preservation for kind of conceptual reasons talking about language. But this idea of repair, which also could talk about care. It also could talk about maintenance. There are certain values that if you look at the society, who is connected to maintaining and caring, for example, in the world, right? As opposed to who's assigned to building and designing, for example, right? So we started this conversation with whiteness and privilege. And so we have to talk more about that, right? So the valuing of care, the valuing of understanding of conversation, of storytelling, there are all these things that I think as people working in this field, we try to make that shift, right? Because the market, capitalism, the way things are structured, you will be rewarded for being someone that designs, builds, erases for people with money and power. Like that is going to be how you go livelihood largely. And that's a problem that we want to try to disconnect. So when Adri is mentioning other language and other kinds of valuing of what is the problem, what do people kind of know or don't know, that is so much of the work that we hope to be are able to advance and to be consistent on. But I think the sort of opposition that was kind of outlined, like the builder or existing systems, is that the people, I think it's sort of this kind of circular thing, right? Like the people are producing or maintaining environments and that affects people. And then it kind of cycles onto itself again. And so we have to have a kind of more integrated and interwoven rather approach to how we respond in those questions. And it's, you know, Cedric Price a long time ago in yards though, like the worst thing that's ever happened in New York, right? Cedric Price a long time ago did a competition and he sat there over the rail yards and there was a competition for what should this space be? And he did this sketch and it was a sketch of not, right? Of just what was already there. And he was like, it should not be rebuilt and reconstructed, right? So that's like the power of design and thinking and a mind, right? And that we can kind of help each other, I think value that and to elevate that kind of thinking as well as much as we value, you know, the Heather Wick thing. One thought I had considering who's listening and who's listening here today is that there are vastly different ways of doing things in other countries. And we, I'll stand just me. It's like, I don't know how things get done, quote unquote, how cities and neighborhoods et cetera get dealt with. And I know it's not the same and perhaps our conversation might not be universal at this point, which is probably good. But in some ways, we hope to learn from you about where you live and the systems under which you live about how changes are made to cities, how political decisions affect pollution and climate, you know, dealing with water and dealing with public health. We know that there's a lot of variation in that and it's, you know, not all good. So I just wanna throw that out there as something that we would like to grow our own knowledge by having you make sure that we understand the latitude of the way power works, even if we are today insisting that there are ways of making change. Because there's always gonna be ways, but we don't know each one of them. We discover them like you will discover them along the way. So I just wanted to kind of put some, for myself, a kind of humility about my knowledge as opposed to your knowledge, which is completely from other places, that what, which is what makes this program so interesting. It's so utterly international. And I really do hope that you can contribute. So I think we'll take a few minutes for each of the panelists to maybe contribute their final thoughts as we close the discussion. Perhaps we should start with Jerome, who has contributed so vigorously to the chat. But some of these things that you've been mentioning here won't be recorded in the final dialogue of this video. So Jerome, if you'd like to start with any final thoughts before we close out and then we can sort of go around the room as it were to close. Sure. I think this has been great. And if this is setting the tone for the program this year, it's really fantastic. I just wanna echo kind of some of the points that I raised in the beginning and built off of the others that I feel that we're in a moment where one's personal practices, it's being made clear or inextricable from something like education. The space of academia and the space of our moving, changing, very urgent world is razor thin at this point. And I think that that's a really great place to be. And this work, I think for it to be truly kind of impactful and be different in the way that it needs to be different implicates ourselves and our practices, how we relate to one another, how we every day reify or sort of change dynamics and practices of whiteness and domination and privilege. So that it really starts with us, it starts with the sorts of courage to strike out in a slightly different modality and to take the time and presence of mind to think about how we got here. That would be my sort of closing thought. I just wanna say thanks everyone for being here and feel free to contact us or me anytime if you have other questions or concerns. This is something that we hope to continue over the course of the year. I would just say coming, entering school now is a kind of heroic challenge. And although we would much rather be in person with you, there's no question, this is so amazing. We are entering a very different world and this is not going to go away. The Zoom thing is just the beginning. So we should make the most of it because this is like Microsoft's dream, I mean of remote learning and technologically mediated connections. And actually there are good sides to it other than all the surveillance issues. So we hope that you can retain a certain level of excitement that this new medium of communication and a kind of new form of publicness because we're sharing, but we're selective. How do we create more shared online events that are somehow public? I mean, this really is a kind of challenge and I hope that we can retain our excitement over this new form of communication. I totally agree. I mean, thank you again in advance to all of you for just joining us in this community. The only thing I would say is that all of these issues that we're talking about are challenging and difficult and confusing and disorienting. And so they always talk about the dilemma that you can't be thoughtful and deliberative and communicative at the same time. And in a bizarre way, we're all being asked to sort of do that. And I mean, it's challenging for those of us that have been around a little longer and seen and experienced more. So I'm sure for those of you that are younger, it's even more of a challenge. And so I wanna just acknowledge that and to open up a space and know that that is okay to feel like it's unsettling or confusing or that you don't know because a lot of us don't know. And so hopefully you feel like you can have these conversations with any of us. We hierarchies are part of whiteness. And so we want to challenge some of those structures as well. And Zoom, in theory, we're all on the same plane greater whatever and to push us as well, right? And to challenge us to operate in different ways and to be more open to you and your questions and your motivations as well. So it's meant to go two-way and not us just broadcasting. So hope to continue these conversations and interactions with you all going forward. Well, and finally, I'm very excited about this generation, this year that is coming. I congratulate you because you are taking on this challenge and I think you have the opportunity to change and fight the paradigms. And no alternative could be possible without an ecosystem of urban designers as you that are willing to experiment, to collaborate, to really change the world.