 is our speaker today. Dr. Bizarre is currently a postdoctoral research scholar in urbanism and governance at Columbia World Projects. Her work examines implementation in land use planning, in particular under transition and uncertainty using institutional lenses. She has to call author of a textbook on zoning, which is published by Rulesh in 2020, recently reviewed in JAPA, as well as author of several peer-reviewed articles. She has consulted for the Inner American Development Bank, the World Bank, Habitat for Humanity International, and National and Local Government entities, among others. She has worked for several years in housing microfinance, as well as for several years as a local staff planner in Leipzig, Syria. She holds a PhD in urban planning here from Columbia and MCP for MIT, as well as a BA in Education and Political Science from Swarthmore College. Dr. Bizarre's talk today is entitled, Ground Rules, How City Officials Tweak Urban Futures through Great Institutions of Land Use, which examines how the legal yet informal patterns of daily practice of great institutions, sustained by lower level staff members and their interlocutors in land use offices in municipality in Mexico, in turn consistently shifted the requirements, time horizons, and shape of new subdivisions. So Dr. Bizarre, if you're ready, I'll pass things over to you now. Wonderful. Thank you, Helena, for such a kind introduction. Welcome and thanks for having me here at Lips. It's a pleasure and also kind of extraordinary to have been an organizer of Lips and many of the ideas came out of Lips during my time at GSAP. And so it's, I don't know, it's a special place full of intellectual foment and this is one of the things that bubbled out. So I'm excited to present my work today to you all, such a wonderful group of thinkers and really look forward to your questions, ideas, critique, thoughts on where some of these ideas might resonate or might conflict in the areas where you've worked or studied. A special shout out to my students who are here or former students, it's nice to see you all in past colleagues as well. So, well, later I can send you a link so you can navigate through the site, but there's no need to see the situation now. Today, I'm here to talk about action and to make a case for action and to examine, make a case for how we can study how everyday action shapes are been planning and when and where it does. When I say action, I mean how projects, initiatives, policies and regulation unfold in real time in everyday life and the actually occurring city and the actually occurring planning. I'm motivated to do this from my personal and professional background where I grew up in Southern West Virginia next to coal mines and East Austin and formal areas of Mexico where I went to public high school. In those places, it's just a given, it's reality that well-intentioned plans and policies don't work, they don't unfold and when they do, they're unevenly applied. This puzzle also held true in places where I work in the municipality of Aleppo where who knows what rule is happening, why don't you go and ask so and so? It's the way to undo, to do things that in my recent experience with the GESAP Housing Lab also holds true in the fancy technocratic cities, city governments such as New York. This puzzle between plans and theory of planning and policy making and then what actually unrolls in daily practice also played out in my experience working for development banks and broader housing and land policy and implementation or how things happen was often relegated to a discussion section at the end of reports. We hope it happens. Concern should be made about how it unfolds and so I came to do my dissertation and what I'll be talking about is one small part of my dissertation to examine, to look at how planning happens and how land use policies, in particular in the old arenas of planar, arguably the heart of planning, one place where planning power remains overlooked, land use regulations and how they happen in one site, in one set of offices, among one network of people. So I, in my dissertation and another work, I kind of a methodological omnivore, I examined both the Middle East and used spatial and quantitative methods, but today's focus I'm really going to take it from the qualitative institutional angle and talk about how that's one tool that can help us, us meaning planers and scholars of planning and policy makers and other people who are here too, just in case it's not just a GSAP-UP audience, to know how things happen in practice helps us understand when and how to intervene to perhaps shift needles towards slightly more versions of just or fair or inclusive cities or the ways or processes, the ways that we want to do things. I should also just say for the GSAP audience that all of these documents come from the intellectual community of GSAP, the conferences organized, lunches, this lip series, the PhD workshop, the conversations in the UP lounge. So in some ways, what I'm studying in Guadalajara is what you guys are living too, what we all live and how those networks shape our ideas and practices and the norms which we do. So look around you, if you're in 114 Avery, talk to your neighbors, you leave, that connection was probably the most important, one of the most important things you'll do. Another reason for studying action is that how urbanization is happening isn't great for most people around the world and in the peri-urban areas of Guadalajara, where I'll be talking about today, are one edge that is both extreme and extreme of growth and ordinary. So in Tlajomulco, which is the southernmost part of the metropolitan area of Guadalajara and the fastest growing, one of the fourth fastest growing in Mexico, it had a population of 127,000 in 1990 and 727,000 in 2020. So almost growing six-fold over the span of just a few decades. Like many other local governments in particular in emerging economies or in the global south, they recently have the responsibility to decide how zoning happens, that is make the maps, make the regulations and give the stamps for changes of use, changes of bulk, changes of height and subdivisions, whereas before those responsibilities had been centered at the state government. So this is something new, it's where all the growth is happening and suddenly municipalities are at the center and at the edge. So Tlajomulco is an extreme case, but it's also what I'm arguing is an ordinary case. So if you get off the two-hour bus ride down the 20 kilometers from Guadalajara and walk into the city hall, municipal building of Tlajomulco, there are rooms and desks and shiny aluminum siding, communicating modernity and transparency and good administration. And one of these on the fourth floor, officials process requests for subdivisions. This is called the land use office, not the planning office. Those people have big ideas. This is just the land use office where projects are reviewed and discussed. We walk up past the requests and modernized spaces to get a birth certificate, past snacks, past lines of people holding files, developers assistance with papers to submit to review and into the office. Why this matters again, or how coming into this office and asking questions, one way that they framed them, the officials who work in these spaces, framed themselves was being in a condition of permanent disaster response. So to understand what they mean by that, take you back again to the urban framework of Tlajomulco. Most of these, I am just going to animate the growth. I don't think it was automatic. Hopefully you all can see this. If not, the point is that Guadalajara expanded really fast everywhere in particular in the peri-urban areas. So in these spaces, in these offices, they started about 15 years ago after a massive increase in the built environment that's continued and described conditions that are obvious and clear to everyone who works and every scholar who works in Mexico and indeed peri-urban situations worldwide. But growth happens and will continue to happen. The bulk of the 7 billion new people coming to cities are going to be in areas that are radically inaccessible from jobs, the two-hour bus ride I mentioned. In the outskirts of Guadalajara, they're contaminated. There's extreme, an English language report called it a slow-moving Chernobyl where industrial effluence go into the river Santiago and make it so polluted that a six-year-old died after only 10 minutes of exposing part of their body because of the toxic elements that are in there. Water in the aquifers is depleted. Flooding happens continuously and municipality must reply and dig out and build homes. The new formal developments that were approved and have been approved. And again, much of urbanization is increasingly formal. That is, it receives some permit or interacts in the state in some way that it's official, but it's there on the books. And yet it's intensely underserviced in meaning there's no running water, no drainage has been set up, no bus might even come to a development of 5,000 homes and no school. As a result in peri-urban Mexico and in Tlajomulco in particular, and again an extreme and an ordinary case, many of these homes, 33% of them were abandoned by their residents who had in this case, many of whom had accessed them through a national housing subsidy, subsidized mortgage provident fund. 33% were abandoned 10 years ago, now only 25% are abandoned. That's still 77,000 housing units that in a place with housing with a shortage of affordable housing, the urban conditions of peri-urbanity and the vulnerabilities at the edge are so bad that people choose to move back into overcrowded conditions. So amidst these conditions, someone has to make a decision every day about permits and about subdivision requests for construction. How do they do? How do they do this? What happens? What plays in? Again, we teach and learn about the history of planning and planning theory and how plans don't work and policies don't work and should be problematized in really important ways. But for me in my background in housing and land use, I wanted to dig deeper going beyond the binaries of informality, formality, south, north, center planning and deviant planning. Municipalities is simply low capacity and say the way, how do the planning outcomes come in a way that might relate but not always to the way that they're intended and what if not, then what types of things are intervening. So to start from the bottom, what's happening in the day to day and then work back up forensically to figure out what is it play in the formal tools and informal tools that we use. My tools, I mean institutions, which we'll talk about later. So this is the way again, where this I argue also municipalities and in particular land use is one of the kind of main or lasting leftover as Dean and former Dean and Dros called them points of encounter with the state of places that states or the public interest have a say in what happens, even if it be small. So from that, my question is all right, how can the day to day patterns of staff, are there any day to day patterns of staff? Can we understand them as part of planning action? What's happening inside of these offices? The first thing that's pretty obvious is that there's a sea of laws and programs to navigate. In Berry Urban Model Hara, there are the urban development code, land use code, zoning code, state codes, national laws on housing developments, programs that come down with specifications for how infrastructure should be expanded. The alternating image, I'm not sure if you all see it on the right of this is how two overlapping but somewhat contradictory classifications of land use can exist simultaneously in the same geography providing contradictory guidance. Part of this comes also from an inheritance which lives on of plans and frameworks that overlook the Berry Urban or there wasn't a Perry Urban when they were made, but yet there is still the plans in place. So here is one of the earliest kind of schematic plans for the larger metropolitan area of Guadalajara that was shown to me by one of the lower level women who helped draft it by hand in the 1970s. One of Guadalajara's first kind of land use plans that was done in 1981. I don't know if you all can see my cursor. If you can't, that whole green pentagon to the south or right below the yellow circle is Flajo Mulco. Most of that is urbanized now. All of that was designated as ecological preserve and rural development area. And so these areas were left out of the planning framework and the frameworks that were developed were often done around central cities that had as rapid urbanization or the urbanization didn't happen in the same way. Not unlike plug for other work, how New York City is still operating within 1961 slash 1916 zoning ordinance, right? Rules that are developed survive formal rules. So I'm thinking about how to study action and how to make sense of action in one place. I kept coming across what I'm calling two old stories or two myths about how things work in municipalities and in local governance in particular in the plan doing not the plan making but the low-level bureaucrats who give stamps or don't give stamps in the land use offices or in permitting offices, right? And they're interlocutors of kind of entry level or mid-level developers assistance, the city council person's chief of staff. Those folks are who are having the conversations about the files that are being reviewed that the guy was holding in the chair. So story number one, there's applications for developments come in. They hit the black box of a strange little municipal office. The applicable land plans and laws are applied and a value neutral technocratic framework and what comes out are plan and law compliant projects. Challenge to that is as we all know, there's a bunch of plans and laws that contradict each other. There's the amount of legislation and regulation is so massive that it would be impossible logistically to navigate among other things, right? But that's one point. Story two that we tell most often, I would say in planning is that local government, government planning apparatus, all planning institutions simply reproduce compound inequalities. So this is true. Most structures have whiteness and exclusion baked into them and they reproduce it and planning is central to that. In this story about local government, applications for developments come through and the most common way this is told is kind of the regime way that power and money, someone lifts up the phone and says, you know, hey Eduardo, you know that plot over there? Yeah, my cousin's gonna develop it. Oh, sure. Yeah, that Eduardo. Oh, yes. Okay, that'll happen. And then permits for the powerful come out. So in the dark side of planning, the planning apparatus or the black box simply is an accelerator for inequality or part of the broader apparatus however you choose to frame it. One thing that both of these big stories leave out and that's my central curiosity and point today is the agency of anyone working inside of these entities, anyone or any teams as well. So I'm actually gonna dwell on the collective teams more than individual discretion but the assumption is that there's no space for movement or dynamism inside of the black box of implementation that either happens well according to plan, it happens deviantly because they don't have enough capacity in the development framework or it simply reproduces patterns based on connections. Both of which are probably true, right? In some instances, I'm not saying they're not true but these are the big stories and they weren't satisfying. They're not satisfying to me. We need to change them. Come and change them with me. So looping back, I'd say, hey, wait a second. Planning owns action. This is our field. We fight cases from here to the end of the wall about amazing stories, in-depth nuanced stories that engage across disciplines, how experts come together and navigate knowledge and who's legitimate and how people have access or not access to processes. And yet we often don't foreground it. By foregrounding action, I mean putting it in the center of what we're studying. So the folks who do or the disciplines and writing that does, I should say, does share an inheritance or kind of disciplinary inheritance or a lot of DNA with planning but we've become slightly separate from it. Or at least we don't, people don't read our articles in those journals or they don't often listen to planners. At point they should because we will. So one is the field of organizational analysis. So economists like Mark Brandevetter and others examine firms through the lens of efficiency and say, how are they working? What exactly is making them tick? Saxonian looks at networks between firms in Silicon Valley and how those operations make something occur and how they interpret their mandates. In policy analysis, some of you may have read in your planning classes or not works by folks like Michael Lipsky who examine street level bureaucrats. And often individual narratives of individual low level staff exercising discretion and creating routines that reflect on their own values in this narrative. And sorry, there's a lot of horn action. I'm in New York, if and unless anyone can't tell. And also, so that put in place values might sometimes be progressive that is be better adapted to the specific needs of the individual they're serving than the policy itself and also create routines that make their work easier. Just one way of dealing with the morass of applications that come their way. One thing in policy analysis though is they almost always study social services and sometimes education. And those are very much individuals coming to a window receiving a decision. Planning is not that. We are massive projects with tons of people that take a lot of time to say, to state a bold claim about who we are as a discipline. We usually look at bigger stuff and the smaller stuff. The third arena where there's a lot of good stories is that is writings and development and international development or writings about the global South. And from this tradition comes a lot of good insights on governance and kind of the intersections of governance with colonialism and local norms and patterns of doing things and power and control. Great cases you guys may have read like by Judith Pendler or Lisa Pieti examine how and when networks between state entities happen. In planning, I think I'm trying to contribute here to a strand that also champions the everyday plan doers. So not just plan makers, which we have a great kind of tradition of examining the micro practices in the plan making who's around the table, who gets invited, how are the colors determined in the plan or in the proposal but what about the actual plan doing? Like, okay, there was a great plan maybe it was super inclusive or not but anyway, we have to do it. Who are the consultants involved? How do the notaries give their stamps? How are the permitting offices operationalized? So these are all which things to do, happy to mention and give more citations or follow up with any of you later who's interested. But so from that, I say, all right, how do these practitioners, how do the employees of the land use office in the fourth floor of Tlahomulco's municipality in this corner of a corner of a really fast growing socio environmental catastrophe area that's one of many use their daily practices to mediate land use action. Are there any patterns? What do they look like and how do they matter to socio environmental justice? So the ways that I went around this here was an institutional approach to methods. What are institutions mean? I mean, let's put the rules at the center not necessarily the actual decisions and what happened but the things that they referred to in making those decisions. So written rules, unwritten rules, one way of understanding this is what, how does somebody explain their decision? What made you do that? How would you understand that? That's Eleanor Ostrom's framing of working rules. Willem Salat, Patsy Hewley talk about some of this in planning in terms of culture and public norms as well. But the question is not just laws on the books but what are the rules that actually operate? Again, what's the actually existing planning for the actually existing city that's happening? So I used a case study with ethnographic tools with this institutional lens using what Dorothy Smith has written books and books about as an institutional ethnography putting these rules at the center. What does this means in practice is that I went and sat for more than 25 hours in the land use division in Tlahamulco and just through their generosity was able to work to observe the practitioners and identify the ways that they were doing what they're doing through questioning and asking them. I also went to four other municipalities and interviewed a total of 40 or around slightly more than 40 people but centered my work in this article around Tlahamulco. One other kind of three shout outs to three tactics that worked well for me. One that came from a conversation with Harvey Mollack growth machine was the usage of hypotheticals and counterfactuals. So going from person to person or in between two different municipalities and saying, hey, what did you do or how did that rule work? If somebody came to you and they said we only have 500 homes or would they still need to make the deposit and a score count or how would you figure that out? And well, what would happen if that development suddenly said that they couldn't complete the timeline? What process would you use or is there a rule for that? What questions would you ask of who, right? So not just what rule but who would you consult with or who matters? Who would you reach out to? And fundamentally, the main strategy I used was one that reflected my own identity as a white North American or Estowneerense outsider albeit one who speaks Spanish. I went to high school in Mexico but is very naive about how the rules of the game operate or how the ropes. So I said, teach me the ropes. Could you imagine, explain to this to me as if I were a new employee? I said, I'm a PhD student. Who knows if I'm gonna get a job? I might need to come back here. Imagine what it would take to train me to do your job. And that yielded an immense amount of thick description of the micro rules and practices and processes that you actually pick up when you're doing a job. I didn't learn everything at all but I learned an immense amount. Most of which through the generosity of people like these. Note on the right, women who are almost always women in Mexico and in many in the Middle East and places I've worked as well who actually pull open the GIS maps. If there are GIS maps or look over the printed cadastres go through the files and the checklists and review the paperwork and then prepare them just to show to their bosses in the corner offices or in the middle corner office but with a window who are almost always men who also deal with the day to day and who have stacks of folders with documents submitted by developers sitting on their desk. And who are also not part technically part of any planning regime, right? These are the land use office. They're not part of the planning division or even strategic planning or special initiatives office. This is simply the low mid-level bureaucrats and implementers. So what was happening here? I'm going to flow to term that I think helps me explain and understand that things that they did in the ways that they received in process these applications for subdivisions and navigated these catastrophes that were occurring in the urban environment around them with people then complaining to the municipality as I mentioned before. So the term, they use the term gray institution to mean a rule or a practice that sets up an expectation that can be predictable. That means and sorry and gray signifying that it operates both between the informal and formal space and it's neither doesn't necessarily need to be legal or illegal. It's neither dark planning or technocratic planning but as you have to show notes, there's the gray cities and gray urbanization that acknowledges like a lot of writing about institutions doesn't that the world is unequal. Surprise, surprise. That's what planners can bring to all the rest of these scholars is our value laden orientation and our justice oriented orientation, I think. So the grains, I'm not gonna dwell on this there's another body of work that I go into in more detail but to give a flavor some of these gray institutions are really boring things things that appear boring or mundane but that I argue mediate the application. So checklists that enforce values and priorities inside projects here's what you need to bring ways of talking and rules of thumb code books with highlights on them saying this is the one that matters or this is the one we're gonna get audited for inside of the office. This might be something like an Excel sheet on a shared drive that tracks and sets up the columns that needs to be measured setting the columns means setting something that would be repeated over between projects and then a developer would come and anticipate that that column might be asked for. Does that make sense? I can't see any of you but I'm hoping you're nodding and thinking about the places you've worked and the micrata or the mundane tools of everyday life and the ways of talking in the places you've worked where there might be resonance. Creating an archive, having triage meetings and prioritization shout out to Joe here who mentioned and brought this to my attention by talking about the experience of DCP here in New York City. And then I went back to my interviews and he said, hey, when you guys are totally overwhelmed how do you figure out which project to do first? And he said, oh, we sit and we make a list and we prioritize. So that was signaled to me from a former planner and amazing mind here at GSAP, Joe Hennikens. So, but today I'm just gonna say that there's a bunch of these Cray institutions practices that repeat and structure expectations that are unseen, not talked about, flying to the radar, they're taught and reinforced and survive and adapt. So this pushes back at our models of action. It's not a black box where things go in and out of according to specific pressure, but instead it's embedded in a big network of relational institutions and patterns and ways of doing things and expectations. There's gonna be laws, norms, personal connections, pressures of money, the ways in which the stream is flooding and that inside of the box of local governance that the officials who work in these areas figure out how to perlipstee, streamline their own work makes sense of it all. And I elsewhere argue apply their own values and thinking about the city to create twinings of these broader institutions into ropes. Like when you learn the ropes, they're learning the ways to twine existing things into patterns of practice. So that doesn't mean that every project follows along the same channel of going through the spreadsheet, of going through the list. In many of the times when I was sitting in the offices, a phone call would come in or somebody would blow, breeze past the line and it was obvious they were connected or maybe they had a mega project that was authorized by the state and then constant yards and the ways that goes around the normal ways of doing things, but these ropes can streamline the process for the ordinary, for the overlooked, for the ways, the everyday ways of expansion. So, sorry, going back here on the right, what are the ways that these ropes are made? I'm just gonna highlight three. One that probably you all know if you've worked is strategic downplaying. Hey, we're just technocrats, we're just making, we're just following the rules. We're really just doing these things to help people figure out what rules they need to follow. But look, yes, okay, great. So that's a way of deflecting attention away from what I think is a really exciting operation here that's happening. I don't know how well you all can see the details on this screen, but if you look closely, this is a 10-page checklist that the team in the land use office in Tlahomulco hands developers are almost all of them. And it has the requirements for a subdivision process and all of the phases in which documents will be required at each phase and how much money. Note that on that picture, some of them are highlighted in green with boxes around them. There are others that have green dots on them with a highlighter. Those mean super essential. We're not gonna process it before you come in for your kind of project. And it would be great if you had this, right, the green dot. And then all of the columns and lists themselves are themselves selected and called and refined from a massive list of possible things that they could ask for. And this list varies between municipalities massively. So this is, but it had survived and evolved and been relatively predictable in Tlahomulco. So when I asked about this or when they said, oh, nobody cares about this. The city council people, the mayor, we're just technocrats, we're just little people sitting in our little corner. So embracing the narrative that's even given of agency less, either deviance or not in that case, but agency less value neutral public servants served help this document create, emerge and survive. Another strategy deployed or a thing that I help, I believe help make these ropes stronger and survive is the pride and expertise in tinkering. So narratives inside the office among the team. This is a spreadsheet flower, I'm sorry, a flower of Post-it notes and each one represents a development that the team had reviewed and done together. They said, the way we know how to do these things is something we figured out together. The most important thing that made all of this happen is the idea how to function as a team, funcionamiento del equipo. And so they frame this knowledge as one collectively established, not homogeneous, in need of constant maintenance, relational and cause to celebrate. So it's constructed, maintained, collective and something to be proud of and make beautiful, right? Finally, and perhaps the most obviously is how continuity of staff and continuity of teams were really essential in creating and sustaining these great institutions. So the team in Tlahumulco had been there for 15 years in other municipalities where in Mexico elections occur every three years and administrative staff clear out every three years is not on the turnover time is the short period of turnover time is unusual, but whole scale turnover is not when a new boss comes in, everyone in the office clears out. And so one thing that I thought was particularly interesting was kind of how they had taken one of the offices with windows and on their own, no one had asked them. The team had decided to make an archive of all the project requests and proposals that had come in. So what does this mean? How do they use it? Like they, a developer would come in and they say, oh, we remember your project from 2003. Hold on, we'll get the folder, we'll get the binder, or if the municipal president or the state representative would come in and say, oh, hold on, we have that knowledge. We have the knowledge because we have the continuity that's retained the system so we can show you the knowledge. Lastly, they wrote code and the devils in the details, those who know the details can get things done, you all have read PowerBooker. And some of these gray institutions and the ropes that they created spread up and became formalized, such as plot size, zoning code, and ecological protection zone and others. So I wasn't there to look at outcomes and how these actually shaped development, but quick things that I noticed and how they did matter that I could see directly, or that actually not that I could see, that I asked and they told me, and sometimes I observed was one, they almost all restricted development. All of the practice in place made it harder to build new subdivisions, which arguably in a peri-urban extreme like Lahomulco probably makes sense to some extent, where they said it did. They prioritize these developments based on the collectively developed criteria, including reputation. They increased their power, and sorry, one good reason I'm going to go, as municipal decision makers through these institutions that they developed. So in the checklist, they successfully advocated as well that they would have better oversight of the checklist if they could have a more enforceable permitting duration. So it used to be you could get a permit for a subdivision and then hold on to it for five years and build nothing or build half of it, leave the sewer system unbuilt, developers in Mexico have to provide a lot of services and still go forward. Now, permit duration is only 12 months. You have to submit, you have to have an inspection before you get an extension and it's much more, they have harder and sharper tools. They require the deposits that are legally mandated by law for any subdivision in Mexico to occur. Again, in part tied to this provision of services, but almost no municipality actually implements because setting up an escrow account for deposits and then actually taking them if somebody doesn't comply and requiring the supervision and maintenance and enforcement is really hard. So that's one thing that Fajamulco does now or did build the change of staff, but that's a different story. They also advocate and connect with other departments in the municipality to provide homeowner education. One super tangible thing that stands out in my mind if you take away one thing is that they in the checklist instead of unusable strips next to the road, the 16% of every subdivision land that's supposed to be set aside for public development is now has to be in a square near a road and on buildable land for a school or a clinic or another development, sorry, just a second, almost done. Almost done. All right. So all to say the ways that people do stuff, if you sit and watch and interpret plans and policies and action seem to matter and they repeat and construct your expectations. One way that you can tell that they matter or that I think is really interesting is to watch them across transitions. So that's something I've done elsewhere, but in the metropolitan area of Guadalajara, one examination of this, I looked at 10,000, I scraped or assembled the database of 100,000 permits over 15 years across four municipalities and looked at them when there was a change of staff and when there wasn't in October, balancing for seasonality and all this other stuff. There was a huge discontinuity in years when the staff turned over. And so I don't know, there could be any explanations for this, but after balancing and trying to account for many other things, it looks like things as massive in the urbanization process as the scale of permits and when they come in and how many there are in a specific time respond to the gray institutions created by lower level officials. So the black box can go backwards too. It doesn't just impact what's coming out, it can shape expectations going forward. So Nisam, I think that gray institutions and understanding them and building them and the processes of building them in this municipality allowed for, allows us to see how there's agency by lower level, low and mid level staff and their networks. They have power, authoritative, allocative, discursive. They engage in institutions that are nested and connected and reproduced, right? They're embedded in all these other rules and they create through their expertise, practical wisdom or rules of thumb or clinical practices or furnaces. So using, I say these words because I think they can translate the cases elsewhere. And there are concepts that we've used in planning but don't always apply to the study of practice itself. So foreground action, because this is how it works on a data basis. This is what I've been sitting, watching, studying, asking. Let's study how we actually plan. How they actually unfold, at least here in this case, matters for outcomes sometimes. Retrenchedness and fairness usually isn't visible almost always as in not talked about by bigger policy makers or scholars and is learned on the job from peers and from women. And it's important. And this is a way of de-centering and re-centering in the South and in spaces of places where you'll be when you graduate, hopefully, and offers a way to understand the types of changes, non-reformist reforms, something that can happen in these spaces at the margins, whether you're in an extreme like Pajamulco or in the center like New York City. I think these types of great institutions matter and can interact with the larger planning paradigms and kind of orientation to fairness that we aspire to. So thank you. I'll stop there. I have other slides and ideas, but I'd love to take questions and hear from you all. Thank you. Should I stop sharing my slides too? I mean, you can look at this area, but it's not. Great. Thank you very much, Dr. Bizarre for your talk. I would like to open up the session for questions now. And as a reminder again to ask questions, participants on Zoom are encouraged to use to raise your hand feature. And I'll be calling on you to unmute or you can ask your question directly or you may also type your question in the chat box and I can read them out loud. So yeah, anyone with questions? Jenna? Hi. Great presentation. First of all, can you hear me okay? Yes. Thank you. And nice to hear from you. Yeah. Miss you. Was wondering, can you say a little bit more about how you saw the bureaucrats as influencing or having agency in the shape or the types of development? Like you mentioned something briefly about constraining development to a like a square, kind of like a super box shape. Yeah. This is figuring out how the gray institutions actually or the bureaucratic repeated practices that develop as a team interact with the built form is something that I want to dig into more or would love to hear from if you guys have examples and ideas from your own work and research. What I picked up on in this round of field work was that was a lot of many mentions of the public space allocation as it's called for subdivisions in Mexico that it's legally required. And it's one of the laws that is enforced that people prioritize or that was prioritized in all the municipalities that I saw and that's a set aside of 16% of the land for a public institution. And so in most other municipalities, I'd say probably six of the nine in the metropolitan area of Guadalajara, there is no supervision where this might happen. So a sidewalk in between two houses might count as the public land allocation. And what that results is that there's no space to go to school or a clinic. And so they instituted part of the checklist was review process with a map and the parcel of land had to show that it was a polygon with certain size limitations and access to a main road on a flat and buildable area. And so that was one example. They wanted to do a lot more. Another, actually one other example was the, it's kind of a regressive or exclusionary one to some extent that happened just last year in San Muelco. And it was that they increased, they said one of the priorities that we have in the land use department is we need to protect the ecological zone of the volcano. And so to do this, we need to increase the minimum plot size, which meant no more affordable housing or no more low-cost kind of the default construction is R1, low density housing. And so that's just kind of standard code for no more poor people, please. But that was something that they requested to facilitate their technical implementation. And through connections with the elected leaders at the time passed it as well, but it was framed as a technocratic improvement. But thanks, I'd love to hear your ideas. Jenna about this, and as someone who understands the built form much better than I do. And examples from elsewhere and other geographies. I see some other hands up though. Great, and now Joe. Hi, Bernadette. So, this is an amazing talk. And I have so many questions. I made me think about so many things, but I guess I have sort of like a big question for you about the implications of sort of this gray institution for theory, sort of for how we think about planning. And I guess just to like expand, you introduced those two models of the black box and one that's sort of this model where reason goes in and one where power goes in. And those two models, I feel like both also sort of like extend to theories of what people think about planning. So like the first model is sort of like, it arises out of action, but then it extends to being a theory that sort of like planning is basically good and it's orders the landscape. And that second dark side model, it extends out of like studying the sort of practice to have like a larger sort of theory that planning is basically bad and just an application of power and capital on landscape. And so I'm wondering if you in introducing this like gray institution's idea where you're sort of complicating that and sort of finding maybe some space in between those two models, if you sort of thought about whether it also how it also extends to like planning as a whole and whether you're also sort of like positing a sort of gray planning that planning is both good and bad involves reason and power and whether you sort of thought about that sort of extension. Sorry if that's like way too broad but it's just something I thought about. No, that's exciting and ambitious and way beyond the ambition of anything I've thought about. You should write it. That's really interesting though because I think there is this kind of value overlay and overlaps with the bigger stories that we tell about ourselves as a discipline and the inheritance that we have. And one thing that those two narratives do about planning I actually, I also think is they deny agency to planners even people. So the people I'm talking about and writing about don't that aren't necessarily identified as planners, right? They're not in the planning office, they're just doing but if we include planners in this orbit then both in let's just figure out the best model for this site and oh well our knowledge matters little, you know Cuomo and friends are going to do what they want for Hudson Yards anyway. Planners in both situations don't have agency, right? And then it's incredibly disheartening like most students in history and theory for a semester come out and like, well, what can we do? Nothing. So maybe this offers a small arena for optimism where you can chip away at the margins. Maybe it overlaps with, I think, with Nancy Fraser's and Feinstein's assumption about non-reformist reforms. At least if you can do something little pull at the threads that might unravel bigger structures that are more and pull at the threads that untangle or unravel the structures that matter most to reproducing inequalities or retrenching whiteness, right? If you have something to do in your office about how a meeting is structured like in the beginning of lips we're going to ask these questions with inclusion in mind, right? That's a tiny microprocess but that pulls at a thread of something super big. So that's one idea. The other thought is to engage in kind of the sociological and institutional school that, hey, everything we do is created by us. We're part of systems of reproducing structures that are constructed, reconstructed. And so if we're part of them we should think about them as we reproduce them, right? Like, can I rent? If you know what's happening, at least name it. And then maybe by naming it you can start to figure out where to intervene. All to say, I'd love to think about this more and love to think about it with you. And yeah, let's think. Oh, sorry Jenna, you can go ahead. Oh, I have another question if we have time. Yeah, some of my research when I'm running into is looking at the agency or the influence of people who attend public hearings in terms of how they can use certain persuasive arguments what types of technical studies they use or maybe like what types of legal or non-legal discourse they use to try to influence decision makers. But I'm wondering in your work I think maybe an actor that could also have agency as well are the applicants, the developers? Do you think there's any kind of room for that within this very kind of like bureaucratic approval of subdivisions, for example? Yes, I think the central question is who is creating and co-creating? Who's invited to co-create these great institutions, right? People were invited, not invited but people end up co-creating them. I would optimistically argue in the gray spaces are the lower and mid-level women assist often women assistants of the developers who sit down across the table from municipal staff who tease something out and figure out something together, right? And there's push and pull for sure but they're the ones that, I didn't mention that as much today but I think the idea of the black box overlaying a network means that anything that happens in at the table responds to a bigger network of interlocutors. And so developers are certainly one of them. Another component I didn't mention but it was also kind of networks of civic advocacy which are really active in Guadalajara and they're part of the space too. I think, often we don't, we assume that developers, so the big thing is often we assume that developers influence goes through political channels, right? We still carry this barbarian differentiation between bureaucracy and politics but in fact, developers influence or the ways that they're trying to get their projects to go forward operates at all levels and so does the state. And so politics and administration are intertwined. That's in dadanized politics obviously in what we do which could studies do as well but I would love to read your papers and research that sounds really, really interesting and the types, the ways in which that technical knowledge is deployed by people who show up. I haven't heard about that, I'm really fascinated so. More questions to write down and to work on together. Thank you. Thank you. Hi everyone, thank you for the talk. So I have a question just to play like to put the lens on you a little bit. So if you're saying basically that great institutions make it possible to make development happen in a periphery of Mexico City, so what are the downsides of thinking about it? So I think you're portraying great institutions. This is a theoretical question. So you're portraying great institutions as a way in which kind of a solution to the fact that you have this messy system going on and therefore this is what enables but what are the problematic aspects of the great institution if one is to ask you about that and what is it who is being excluded who is being marginalized, what kind of developments is it affecting the kind of how the geography of the periphery is developing, et cetera? Yeah. Actually this ties in with what Jenna and Joe were saying as well or I think it does in my mind now that thank you. I mean, I think the question of how great institutions are part of and not part of a system, they're part of a system. They be produced by a season inequality. Any twinings and repeated institutional patterns will pull together ways of doing things in an unequal society that probably favor those who have the most weight. So the people who are in these offices all have college degrees, for example, almost all and almost all of them live for Mexico, stable relatively middle-class lives. No one is at any table discussing any requirement for development that might even bring up something like are the streets wide enough for the water delivery truck that's going to come because there is no water because none of them live in those developments. So that's one very just kind of classic way that they are just another institution of planning. So the space for optimism I don't think is any different except that when we make them visible, we can identify how they reproduce biases and inequality. And if there is a way that's any different than the systems that we know and examine and talk about well or often, there might be new ways to intervene, right? So if these systems are more hidden, I would say, more out of the public view, none of the number of construction permits can be seen on any Mexican government has a lot of open data laws on any website. But the checklist that's given to developers or the whiteboard in the office is not public. The ways in which you have to hire someone to be a broker, right? To get in the zoning exception in New York is not public. You have to know someone or go there and spend lots of time trying to figure it out. So that's the techno-optimist angle that making it visible. And the pessimistic angle is just simply, yes, this is another form of institution and so it's necessarily gonna reproduce inequality. And by institution, I mean like way of doing things, power norms networks. Yes, since, yeah. I mean, that's a great explanation. Since many of you, the audience here are actually PhD students. This should be part of in your presentation when you present this, you need to, I think it's better to articulate that what you just said, shorter version within the theorization. So you're not just portraying it as a panacea for urban development, but rather you're saying it's gonna produce its own systems of exclusion, but that might be not very different or the same from whether we're thinking about this top down. But like, so just include this as part of your theorization or the presentation, at least for now. When I talk about this earlier this fall with Bob Blake, I don't know if any of you know me, it's a writer based, I don't know, older writer about justice and planning based in Brooklyn. He said, hey, if we spend time looking at the mundane tools, aren't we gonna forget about what's really necessary like revolution of systems? And I said, yes, basically also, this could just be a distraction, right? But do we have anything else left? And aren't we all gonna graduate and work in these systems anyway? So I think there's an important critique that I heard from him and I've heard from others too about priorities, right? Like if this in some ways is a counter narrative to insurgent planning or planning from outside the state and the critique of looking at inside of the mundane is that you distract away from where real substantive systematic change comes from and sparks and those pressures and how to help and support it from a planning perspective. So that's, thank you for that note and flag and yes to everyone here, they are not a panacea at all, just another part of an unequal world, making the world more unequal, but maybe in different ways as not Professor Buakar noted. Thank you. Thank you. So I think we have time for one more question. Anyone for the audience? Thank you all so much then for coming. And one thing that's gotten me really excited about this work as I do it is that everywhere there are offices and everywhere there are mundane things to do. And so I really look forward and invite all of you to reach out, connect with me, talk about it. I can either throw theory and articles at you, but more importantly, just chat about chat about these things that you've observed and that I've observed and the ways that we can think about them perhaps differently together. So reach out and for those of you who are my students don't worry, I'll reach out to you. Looking forward to learning with you all and then collaborating with those of you who ask questions here and those of you who haven't. Great, I guess we'll conclude here. So on behalf of Juicap and the urban planning program in particular, I'd like to thank you again, Dr. Bizarres for your great presentation today. We really appreciate you taking the time to share your work with us. And thanks also to everyone who has attended. Our next talk will be on February 15th by Professor Hugo Sarmiento here at Columbia. The talk will be on reframing climate justice in San Diego de Cali Afro-Columbian resistance to climate relocation. Thank you and we'll see you soon. Bye-bye. Thank you all.