 Good morning, good afternoon or good evening. I'm really delighted to welcome you today. I'm Amal Ondraus, the Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, welcoming you to Planning Futures on Decolonial, Postcolonial and Abolitionist Planning. I'm really here to introduce and thank Professor Hidbabu Akkar who joined us in 2017 and has been just a highlight of the school. Pushing issues of urban theory and practice, issues of equity and social justice in the built environment, and finding incredible ways to connect her research on the outskirts of Beirut to protest around the world, to anti-black racism in the US and to really imagining what the future of hope might be, even giving up on hope itself to move forward. So please welcome Hidbabu Akkar and also welcome just an unbelievably exciting group of scholars and practitioners today to shed light on where we might be and where we might go. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Dean Ondraus, for this generous introduction. Good morning, everyone. Afternoon, wherever you are in the world. So I'm Hidbabu Akkar, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia University. I'm speaking from our campus in New York, which I'd like to acknowledge first that sits on the ancestral and traditional homeland of the Lenape people who'd suffered displacement through the scepter of colonization of Manhattan. Addressing longstanding histories of dispossession is at the core of our conference today. Our conversations will tackle questions about land and the production of the built environment that bear traces of the cartographies of violence and itineraries of displacement. These are intrinsic to the geographies we inhabit and are inherent in the making of the institutions that many of us are speaking from today. Before I provide an overview of the conference, I first want to warmly welcome and thank the speakers who agreed to join us today from across the globe. I also want to welcome all the 2355 people who registered to be with us for this conference. Such an unprecedented volume of interest attests to the amazing group of speakers we have today, as well as to the dire need to have a global conversation about planning and its futures. As we all look for answers at the critical and existential juncture, while we collectively face compounded and multiple human scale crisis, human made crisis of racial violence, climate change, pandemics, wars and new colonialism. My hope for our conference today is to tackle this challenging conversation across continents and time zones, made possible through the silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic that has virtually connected us in ways that we haven't been connected before. Of course, while being very much physically isolated, opening up the possibilities to think collaboratively from diverse perspectives, histories and geographies. The idea for the conference started simmering back in June 2020 when I along with friends and colleagues joined the Black Lives Matter protests in New York City. Two weeks after George Freud was brutally killed by the police in Minneapolis and after bearing witness to the three dark months of thousand pandemic deaths a day in the city that disproportionately affected low income people of color. While marching along Central Park West, chanting no justice, no peace, a sense of power and collective imagination for liberation loomed in the air that we breathe that day, while surrounded by signs reading, I can't breathe. Throughout, I couldn't shake off the feelings and memories of marching just a few months before in the streets of Beirut during the October 17, 2019 uprising, chanting down with the regime before it all crumbled down. In both instances, I felt like I was simultaneously carrying a sense of hope that things would change one day, intertwined with feelings of an immense sense of despair about the kind of unjust society we have created. Whether we are speaking of the racial injustice and cruelty towards Black people in the US, the undocumented children locked up in cages on the border, the refugees dying in seas, seeking shelter from away from war and violence, and uprooting people's lives again and again, and the likelihood we could ever change any of that. As we marched, I wonder where and how do we go from here to dismantle structures of oppression that perpetuate dispossession and violence, what kind of work needs to be done, whose narrative of hope and liberation should be championed and how. And how to explore these inquiries in the discipline I'm rooted in urban planning and the question of temporality in urban planning that has preoccupied me as someone who grew up during the Lebanese Civil War, where the expected future has often been that of wars, and more recently of explosions that destroy thousands of homes, lives and dreams in mere seconds at times, only to dust off and rebuild yet again. Yet by roots temporalities are not exceptional. Increasingly it's becoming clear that we are living in a global moment in which the imagined future of most places in the world in both the global south and the global north is one of conflict and contestation, characterized by ecological crisis anticipated terror attacks, the unprecedented influx of refugees and migrants, and more recently a global pandemic that killed millions. It's also becoming clear that the assumed future of indefinite progress is fictitious and only accessible to dominant socioeconomic and racial groups. It's a future that excludes racialized impoverished and gender bodies, but is often only possible through the sub-education exclusion, through their sub-education exclusion and dispossession. Thinking geographies relationally, which is the aim of this conference, exposes the need to reconceptualize planning practice and its futures, and its futures outside of its modernist biological dimension, towards recognizing multiplicities on alternative futures, method of knowing, ways of living and practicing, raising questions on how do we educate, theorize and practice urban planning differently? How do we bring temporalities and materialities of planning and its hopes for betterment to match the gravity of the temporalities and materialities of oppression? To try to answer these questions, this one-day conference gathers leading planning and urban scholars who are thinking the field of urban planning and policy from post-colonial, decolonial and abolitionist perspectives. It asks the following two interrelated questions. What are the futures of the field of urban planning? And what future should we plan for? One, the future that's imagined in most of the world is one of state violence, dispossession, exploitation, conflict, pandemics, and climate change. In terms of panel structures, the day will be divided into four panels, of course, with interrelated themes. And one, on dissentering urban planning, will be rethinking planning and its actors outside the normative planning box, attending to the spatial and temporal structures rooted in uprising's political movements, displacement, mobilities, and everyday urban life. And two, will center on decolonizing planning, but also ask how do we learn from theorized practice, post-colonial, decolonial, and abolitionist planning, while placing these movements in the proper and distinct historical and academic context to envision and describe socially just and contextually suited interventions. Panel three and four will think of the geography of theorization from basically the margins and the frontiers to critical categories for rethinking planning and urban theory. We'll ask how can we reconceptualize planning from the margins, as well as from peripheral epistemic and ontological traditions, and what new planning theorizations could be thinking from the margins bring to light, while Panel four inquires about how might our understanding of frontiers and planning across territorial, historical, and conceptual context help us shift through the stakes and potentialities for alternative approaches for planning practice and research. Logically, the aim of the conference is to begin to break down our walls of privilege by bringing spaces of knowledge exchange to a larger group of people who are usually excluded from these spaces by national borders, prohibitive tuition fees, and structural inequalities. My hope that convening virtually today across continents with a diverse participation from across the globe will be one possible way to think creatively about bridging spaces of learning knowledge production, as well as scholarly activism beyond the confines of the classroom walls, the university's campuses, and the global north. Finally, I would like to thank the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation for all the support they provided to make this conference possible. I want to specially thank Dean Amal Androwas for her wonderful support since I started and for making GSAP a place where it's possible to convene to have such a critical and imminent conversations about planning architecture and the built environment. I also want to thank my amazing colleagues with special thanks to my most wonderful mentors, Mabel Wilson and Laura Kergan, who have been there for me since day one, since I joined Columbia for years ago. This event would not have been possible without the brilliance of Lila Cattelier, who is the engine behind putting the pieces of the conference together, while making it all pleasant. Thank you also to Han Kim and to Stefan Norgaard for helping out in developing the program for the conference. I'm also very grateful for my friends and peers, Sai Balakrishnan, Dalia Wendell, Kian Gogh for agreeing to be my co-moderators for today. And finally, I'm grateful to my amazing students, my masters and PhDs, who rose to the occasion this year in ways I didn't think it was possible to collaborate, produce knowledge, volunteer, be fierce activists, support each other, as we all struggle together in a pandemic, reminding me every class, every meeting that they are the real hope for the field of planning. And of course, as we start our day today, I cannot think of a better group of people to have this conversation with than the speakers we have today. Many of whom have been my teachers, my mentors, my intellectual inspirations, my lights, those who made planning exciting and radical for me. I look forward to our generative and exciting discussions today. And thank you again for accepting my invitation and for the audience for being here with us today. I will pass it on to the first panel, modulated by Sai Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor of Planning at UC Berkeley. Sai, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you so much. Hiba, thanks very much to Professor Hiba Buakar for bringing together such a remarkable group of speakers and scholars, and to Dean Amal Andros and GSAP for hosting this conference. So we'll start off with this first panel on Decentering Planning, and the participants in this panel will reflect on how actors outside the normative planning box, undocumented migrants, formerly colonized populations, religious organizations, the working poor, produce, negotiate, contest and transform cities. To help us critically rethink planning from its outsides, we have four scholars who work in diverse geographies across the global north and south. And I now have the somewhat redundant task of introducing four speakers, four scholars, whose work is very influential for planning theory and who need no introduction. But in any case, given the rituals of conferences, I'll briefly introduce our speakers, and then we'll move on to their eagerly awaited presentations. Our first speaker will be Professor Faranak Miraftab, who teaches urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign. Her book, Global Heartland, Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives and Local Placemaking, has won numerous awards. It's a must read for planners and other audiences for its multi-sided ethnographic methods, and for addressing key questions on transnational labor migration and industrial restructuring in the red rural heartland of the United States. Faranak, unfortunately, has to leave a few minutes before the end of the panel, as she's a keynote speaker at the ACSP, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planings, the Council of Administrators, where she'll be making a case for a globally responsible planning education. Her keynote speech at ACSP can be found online later. We'll then be followed by Professor Mustafa Dikash, who teaches urban studies at the Ecole du Bernice des Paris, and his teaching focuses on public space and emerging issues in cities. He's the editor of IJER, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, which is a beacon for many of us of uncompromising critical scholarship. His earlier book, The Badlands of the Republic, focused on black Muslim youth in the ban layers of Paris, and very, very powerfully used the analytic of space and aesthetics to make the argument that the Algerian war is not over in France. His latest book is Urban Rage, The Revolt of the Excluded. Professor Abdul Malik Simone is a senior professorial fellow at the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. His research and teaching over the past three decades have focused on what he calls the urban majority. A heuristic category that includes the working poor and lower middle class residents of the city. Abdul Malik's work de-centres urban theory in many fundamental ways. In my view, at least one of the most important de-centering work that he's done is to ground urban theory in diverse foundations of Islamic thought and in working class experiences. And last but definitely not the least, we'll end with Professor Mona Favaz, who teaches urban planning and studies at the American University of Beirut. She's written extensively both academically and for the popular press in Arabic, French, English, on property, informal settlements, the right to the city. But what I'd like to highlight in this brief introduction is that she's also actively involved in local democratic struggles in Beirut. Most recently, she played a major role in the Beirut Madinati, a grassroots political campaign that ran for Beirut municipal elections against sectarian political parties. And this grassroots political campaign was successful in seizing significant political power in local government. So without further ado, over to our panelists. Our panelists will speak for 15 minutes each and then we'll open it up to our conversation. Thank you, Sai and thank you Hiba for organizing this important day like conversation and for inviting me. Let me share my screen. I've been asked as mentioned to speak to rethinking planning and its actors outside the normative planning box. For that I will share with you a collaborative project that will speak to the theme of this panel as well as the conversation in the remainder of the day on the colonial planning from the margins. I will then focus on one particular aspect of that project on practices of care by women and formerly colonized people who produce, negotiate, contest and transform cities. I articulate the notion of radical care as practices of care that attempt to de-link from capitalism and its accumulationist interest. But let me first mark the moment. We are rethinking planning and planning futures in the time of global pandemic. Pandemic has exposed many cracks, contradictions and inequalities that have always existed but are now more visible for all to see. This also includes a global vaccine apartheid that is ongoing as we speak today. The protests last summer which spread all over the US like fire through a long-dried haystack exposed to Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid, a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the US, the belly of the beast where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence. At this historical moment, I assume the upcoming generation of planning professionals and educators are convinced of the need for a different world is necessary and a different kind of planning is needed. One that is more open to recognizing the range of important city-making practices that take place outside the invited spaces of professional planning in interstitial spaces of everyday life, as well as in the more visible street protests and contestations. With this introduction, allow me to share with you the Mellon Foundation funded collaborative project that Ken Salo and I initiated and led for a couple of years and it was interrupted but is reviving now. This project brought together housing activists from Cape Flats in South Africa and Chicagoland in the US as well as academic partners from UIUC, University of Minnesota to learn from each other, exchange strategies and tactics and produce popular education material. This was all with the idea of constructing transnational solidarities through dialogue, site visits, workshops and art-based exchanges. The activists determined which exchanges they wanted to make open to public, which ones they wanted to have recorded or not, and what critical themes they wanted to address. Early on popular education was flagged as an important desired goal so the project brought together housing activists, academics and artists through its first event, which was held at UIUC, followed by other exchanges at Minnesota and California. Through publication without walls project, these exchanges were turned into an e-book and open access site that could be useful for activists, students, urban dwellers, all over the world and wherever it was involved in constructing humane urbanism. I should say this project is not unique, a growing number of initiatives employ this kind of co-production of knowledge and epistemic shift in planning that as Heba mentioned, I think pandemic has also helped it quite tremendously with the internet. One example is Alaskan Institute at UCLA that is doing great job. Okay, now I share this collaborative project with you because my discussion today on radical care builds on grassroots and urban movements in this project and elsewhere that seek to build an alternative future that I see as humane urbanism constructed through practices of solidarity and radical care. Now, what do I mean by humane urbanism and what do I mean by radical care? Humane urbanism is the alternative future I envision. We are surrounded by a dominant form of urbanism that I call bully urbanism. In bully urbanism, the winner takes all profit is at the center, the top of the value system. In bully urbanism, on the other hand, centers on life, it centers on practices of care. To shift from current bully urbanism to future humane urbanism, we need to revisit the core values that guide and policies and plans that guide our policies and plans that is a shift from profit making to life making. Before I say any more, let me on this point, let me discuss terminology. Life making is as a term and the demand to place life making not profit making at the center of politics was popularized by organizers of women's strike in 2017, and authors of feminism for the 99%. They articulated complexities of social reproduction and the range of practices, institutions and values that make life and therefore life making for the majority of subordinate people. The concept of social reproduction was originally introduced by Marx and Engels in a limited sense as biological reproduction of laboring class for the capitalist system. The scholars and later anti racist feminist geographers in rich social reproduction theory by showing how processes of gendering and racialization work together to sustain a racial racial capitalist, a patriarchal racial capitalist economy, and how this works through a spatial manufacturing of social reproduction. Feminist scholars including Bell Hooks Patricia Collins Catherine McEthric, Isabel Bucker Bev Moolings and yours truly have drawn attention to the devalorization is to the devalorized work of subordinate communities in reproducing the necessary conditions for life. Social reproduction and life making form sites of fierce contestation capitalism needs social reproduction work, but also needs to make it invisible and devalorized so capital enterprise can enjoy it for free or low cost to accomplish that spatial and temporal restructuring of the work has been critical. A process in which the profession of planning has been implicated from the colonial era to present different spatial and temporal modalities in role social reproduction into capitalist city making processes, yet in each of these iterations that I list here. Social reproduction is made invisible objectified devalorized commodified and co opted through co constitutive racialized gendered logic and a spatial temporal strategies. I would like to share with you the example of banterization in interest of time in classic banter stones, as well as in contemporary global banter stones, as I show among immigrants and displaced workers. So this work is made invisible by being performed in homelands or across the world at the moment by workers families and communities of origin. So this makes care work and life making work invisible by especially restructuring the performance of it in elsewhere. As I mentioned, social reproduction and care work form sites of fierce contestation, because they are key to capitalist accumulation. They are also key to destabilizing the capitalist order in global south and for subordinate groups everywhere organizing in the realm of social reproduction, namely in residential areas and around practices of care has been a long established strategy and for anti capitalist organizing. Another pandemic care work has become more visible than ever, and called essential, but this does not mean it has become valorized, we see this disposable essential workers everywhere. Once a range of movements have emerged more widely, even among the middle income groups to contest policies that selectively but not moment but only momentarily make essential workers valued and visible. The accumulation of radical care is inspired by practices of alternative movements committed to practices of care and solidarity, but insisting on this enrolling and attempting to decouple care work from accumulation is agenda of patriarchal racial capitalism. And these are the key healthcare practices as those that sustain life, but not merely to patch the wounds that capitalism leave behind. They seek to sustain life and build alternatives to capitalism through everyday practices of life making and solidarity that construct humane For example, housing assembly in Cape Town, South Africa, which is part of the collaborative project I mentioned earlier in the opening of this presentation. Under the pandemic has had to intensify the everyday practices of care, they have always done. They grow food, run soup kitchens, but also organize against evictions and take their case to court, occupy land, hold political school and teachings against gender based violence and work in solidarity with African immigrants refugees in their local areas. In short, they don't just do municipal housekeeping for their poor neighborhoods. They make sure their work also targets patriarchal racial capitalism. I read this as radical, because it recognizes and values the essentiality and power of care work, and has the potential to create transformative solidarity against patriarchal racial capitalism. conceptualizing this way radical care practices constituting humane urbanism has significant policy implications as they put forward specific values and principles to guide city making Even in the US policy world of there is no alternative, we have witnessed that momentarily health care can be made free and universal that evictions based on non payment and rent non payment of rent and mortgage can be banned. That water and public transportation can be made free for all that hotel rooms can be turned into accommodation for homeless and that basic income might be given to every adult. Even before the pandemic, there has been a rich range of alternatives to turn to for inspiration from urban commons, Brazil's MTS T to South Africa, Abashlali to Oakland's moms for housing communal land trust social and solidarity economy is the growth movements new municipalities experiments to autonomous indigenous and food sovereignty movements, all are organizing to promote a logic of care that is based on need and use, not on the exploitative logic of market value and exchange. But to make all this happen, we need mobilization on the ground. And that is the infrastructure of descent that must have a leakage has been writing about a whole range of creative practices of life making that up on Malik Simone has introduced to us and radical politics of hope that Monofa was has been sharing with us as people of Beirut, you mainly rebuild their city. Moreover, to make this happen, we need newly new planning that emerges from ruins of colonial planning by shifting planning scanner, and it's core values. It's vocabulary. It's my epistemology and tools, a shift that the speakers in other panels today with address as southern turn to planning and a decolonial plan. To conclude, formal planning as a standardized profession and practice, often implicated in the brutality of the displacement and dispositions we witness today has a repertoire tool kits, and an idiom developed over more than 100 years, at least in US Experiments like the insertion midwest that I shared earlier, and others that the speakers will share today will not need 100 years, I hope not to, but they will need sharing if they are to construct a humane urbanism. I will end here with a famous quote from France and on that is calling for this generation of planning students educators practitioners as they seek to construct an alternative planning future. Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. I'd like to start by thanking the organizers. I know the names of Heba and Lila, but I'm sure there are others involved in the organization of this wonderful event so thank you all. Thank my colleagues who are participating and the audience I'm sure we are all very tired of sitting in front of the screen so thank you very much for being here or there, wherever you are. Now, our panel tries to think about planning and making of urban spaces more generally outside of established norms as I mentioned in her introduction to the panel. This includes in my interpretation at least listening to voices and grievances that may be expressed outside of established institutional spaces using perhaps forms of expression that will be deemed unconventional or lacking decorum according to institutional norms. I'd like to talk about rage as a political emotion, which of course is related to care that my colleague for Anna talk about earlier or other emotions like solidarity and law. I think of rage as a political emotion depends on three premises on the nature of emotions. First, there is not a strict opposition between emotion and reason rationality, because reason is not a pure power unaffected by emotions, guiding us to make rational decisions. These emotions are the products of their context, they are not isolated individual eccentricities, but are deeply embedded in particular social and cultural practices in specific context. And finally emotions are about how we perceive and interpret these contexts as Martha Nassbaum puts it, emotions are not irrational push pushes and pulls. These are the policies of viewing the world, they reside, they reside in the core of once being the part of it, with which one makes sense of the world. Now this final argument in particular allows me to relate emotions to politics. If politics is about forms of perceiving the world and modes of relating to it. We have political implications because they are about how we perceive interpret and make sense of our worlds. My understanding of rage is a political emotion is empirically guided by urban uprisings, especially those that have taken place for this talk in American cities since the turn of the century. Most intense and commented upon uprisings include those that took place in the wake of the murders of Timothy Thomas in Cincinnati in 2001, Michael Brown in Ferguson into 2014, Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015, and George Floyd in Minneapolis last year. But, however, that in citing these examples, I do not mean to privilege a form of politics centered around the murdered black body. Nor do I mean to underestimate the devastating effects of what Shatiman threat crowd called black femicide. I'm citing these examples as large scale uprisings of late, triggered by these high profile killings. If we do an exploration of the context in which they took place. This makes it clear that the violence went well beyond the murder black man associated with these uprisings. These uprisings are significant to consider planning to consider for planning scholars and practitioners, not only because they are very much part of our urban lives, and they will be part of our urban futures. I'm worried that we might see yet another episode soon, following the trial decision in Minneapolis. These uprisings are important. Also because they are all related to policy and planning decisions with implications ranging from evictions, gentrification, suburbanization of poverty, increasing urban inequalities, and stigmatization, and of course the consequent violent policing of certain areas in cities. These uprisings are important to consider for students of cities, because they are unarticulated moments for justice. These uprisings are eruptions of rage, and they signal a politics of rage that is bent on survival rather than destruction to paraphrase other law. They are guided by cognitive states rather than impulses, and they affirm equality rather than pathology. In other words, I want to argue that the rage that erupts in these uprisings is a political emotion guided by cognition and judgments about right and wrong. It is not just an unjust rather than a pathological reaction spurred by allegedly uncontrollable impulses. This argument has another implication for the theme of today's events. The Decentering and Decolonizing Planning, which involves, in my view, a decolonization of thought as well, of thinking about what counts as legitimate, acceptable speech. It is called then to open up planning and politics beyond what Michelle Smith has called respectability politics, which for her signals a disavowal of the legitimacy of black rage and cannot comprehend uprisings as politicized expressions of outrage. The context for the uprisings in Cincinnati, Ferguson, Baltimore, and Minneapolis were all prepared by stark inequalities and aggressive and racist policing. These uprisings were responses to this context, these practices, which were created by policy choices rather than isolated actions of rogue police officers, and these actions, these choices hit racialist, stigmatized groups the hardest. These uprisings were not the outcomes of inevitable trends or cultural peculiarities or individual pathologies that can be explained away with references to impulsive anger or pathological rage. I agree with Tavitra Vasudevan that racism operates through the normalization of oppression. I will add, however, the following as well. Racism also operates through pathologizing reactions to oppressive practices. By contrasting rage as pathology, associating it with irrationality and allegedly uncontrollable impulses obscures the traces of the structural institutionalized and routine nature of violence visited upon non white groups. Pathologizing not only undermines the political significance of eruptions of rage, but also foreclosest black futurity, and I'm referring to the US case here, but this argument can be about futurity can be extended to other groups in societies where white privileged mainstream. It can be about losing control or being emotional or being neurotic. These are the main tropes used to silence voices of the oppressed. This silencing must be resisted if we are to the center and decolonize planning. In my catric powerfully wrote about how black bodies face a corporeal predicament. They also face, in my view, this emotional predicament by this is inscription of rage in the pathological register as if it as if it were a group feature or identity. That erupts in these uprisings is not about a lost privilege, such as white privilege that has sustained unequal power relations and domination for centuries. It is about equality and justice. This implies that racist and white supremacist violence cannot be explained by this understanding of rage or anger. I'm trying to outline here. Anger and its intense form rage is distinct from other negative emotions such as disgust, hatred, contempt, and envy. Anger is focused on directed at or about a wrong doing. It requires a wrongful act. It may therefore be more appropriate within my conceptual framework at least to talk about content when referring to racist violence that has filled the anger of protesters. The starting point of content is personal traits that are deemed to be low or blame worthy, regardless of a wrongful act. It is this content, this contempt for life that better characterizes racist violence in my view other than rage. I'll try to keep within the time, try to wrap it up to conclude then. Urban uprisings are violent outbursts, not of uncontrolled or corrupt motions of the criminal or the irrational, but of well grounded rage produced by social, economic and political structures and dynamics. This shows Black and minority ethnic, Black and minority ethnic that's in custody in the UK. It was impossible to put it for the US case, too many cases. Attending to the sources of this rage allows us to understand the structural institutionalized, routinized nature of its sources to understand, in other words, what produces and reproduces it. Attending to the sources of this rage also allows us to see rage, once we have contextualized it in a political rather than pathological sense. If rage erupts in uprisings, it is not because the participants are unable to control their emotions. It is because they have decided to show it, to act on it, to perform it in public spaces. Given the extent of structural violence against non-whites in US cities, it will be pathological, not to be moved, not to feel outraged, not to act on simmering rage. Thank you for your attention. Thanks very much, Mustafa. Thank you, Malik. Yes, thank you for, thank you Hiba, and the organizers for putting this thing together. Hi to friends, friends and colleagues. What I want to briefly do is simply to think about this issue of decentralizing through posing a kind of topographical problematic for planning. And particularly, particularly across the extensions. And, you know, we call them hinterland suburbs peripheries, but these extensions where a greater number of the of the world's urban population find themselves or don't find themselves but I mean, in Jakarta, for example, 3.5 times the number of people in the extensions then, for example, in many other urban regions. And I want to think about, in some sense, the conundrums of dispossession and thinking about what does it mean in terms of a kind of a repossession, the afterlife of plunder. This has something to do with with availability and the dynamics of what is available and under what circumstances. So on the, on the one hand, to rectify dispossession would mean in some ways making available the basic kinds of infrastructures rights provisioning institutions that are required in order for, for people to sustain themselves to endure. On the other hand, availability also concerns, making available the kinds of knowledge that have been generated in the process of being dispossessed. That somehow there is a kind of mode of livability beyond the normative terms of viability that if only would be made available to the world that in some ways the world would be different because of that. And on the other hand, at the same time, you know how do you how do you make, how do you ensure that this knowledge in some ways is unavailable from being folded into the existing circuits of extraction. So why is this then this this question of availability as as Hortense Spillers has long cautioned us, that is, how do you make ways of life. It's applicable to other kinds of uses but the normative use that this kind of question is inextricable from a kind of murky entanglement of freedom and oppression that it doesn't specify a kind of arc of liberation, but it's always a question that has to be engaged in about in this kind of messy entanglement where that continuously undoes any kind of clear cut differences. And so between capture and freedom is not so clear as what those kinds of polarities are, they're entangled in very murky ways and in some sense we have to engage this question of availability through through that entanglement. And this in some sense entails, what do we mean by by possession. And it's not merely an object or property. It's not simply as, as Denise Faradis Silva has really incisively demonstrated the locus for exercising autonomy that's realized through domesticating property. And possession is also something about being possessed of taken hold of to find oneself in the hold to be folded in. And that holding is in some ways ambivalent in and of itself, because it entails interdiction to be slowed down, slowed down to be scrutinized benchmark to be sorted decanted, but holding also as a kind of active affection between openness and intimate operations. And, and these are, these are themselves are are in some in fundamental ways entangled as a kind of landscape as a kind of kind of a topographical object, the whole. And sometimes it's impossible to disentangle that those kinds of intersections. And so in some ways there are many holds you know the home the factory, etc, each with its own language it's eligibility. In some sense the, there's M in the need to be held held in order to be scrutinized discipline constrained incarcerated but held in the need to be secured affected intimate. In some ways these, these, these, these entanglements are are not easily taken apart. So, in some ways then holding is not only consolidation it's not only gathering. It's only not only the maximization of resources but holding off also operates as a notion of a kind of base a baseline. And a baseline is in some sense a kind of pause in the incessant wheeling and dealing of that are entailed in, in moving on. The baseline is a coming together to be to to manifest and realize to be part of something to attain acquire something to the realization the baseline becomes the kind of means of materializing concrete to concretizing that particular kind of attainment or desire. So, as I say here you want to acquire a sense of autonomy alright go ahead and inquire land or a house, which so many millions of people do all the time, but realize that that acquisition is also something that needs to be held, secure defined distinguished and linked to a dependency and all the procedures that will register this autonomy. So the baseline, the baseline is a kind of realization but then it only specifies a particular trajectory forward or particular trajectory way out. So the notion of the whole as as a baseline. So in some sense, one has to think about planning is more than a repertoire of techniques, but that it is a locus of shared affection. The story of individuals with their own desires and histories that come to hold on to each other for dear life to make life endearing, and the disparate ways in which life is taken from extracted from. And each of them find their renewed capacities within in some sense this this locus of shared affection. So for example the way in which the management of the pandemic has become a whole. It enables the sort of reaching out of all the different ways in which control takes place through managing the intimacies of everyday life. And that's a kind of new benchmark is formed through which these techniques control reach a kind of moment a moment moment moment of truth. And that holds are themselves not fixed. That is, in some ways, each of these holes operates as a kind of projectile that penetrate on settle recompose and solidify each other. But generally within the within the interest of a kind of prolongation. So an institution is able to prolong itself in many ways by barring from all over the place. Take a little bit of the home take a little bit of the club take a little bit of the bar take a little bit of the street, fold it in as a way in which to a way in which to prolong itself and where the where the dominant interest becomes that kind of prolongation. And so in some ways, what are the implications of basing habitability on the prolongation of life. The work of, of Nasser Aburam and observations of Fred Moten are particularly, particularly salient. That is what price do we pay when the planning the repertoire of planning is directed simply to the prolongation of life as a way in the sense that it becomes detached from politics. Of course, politics is a war against the strictures of how one is to live, then becomes construed as a denial of life itself. So then how to break this notion of prolonging, how do you how do you break with simply the agenda in the interest of simply prolonging life, or, or this, the life of the body or the life of the institution in for for its own sake. In contrast to the notion of the baseline, there are then baselines, the baseline, and the baseline are, on the other hand, all of the kind of propulsive rhythms and reverberations and undertow and underpinning of more lateral relations, all the ups and deals, adjustments and improvisations and repurposing that goes into making spatial products and the dispositions work, but not necessarily in the terms in which they were, they were designed. And, and here then the extensions become the, particularly salient and interesting site to think through the relationship between baselines and baselines, because the extensions. The extensions are not simply a kind of reformatting of urban logics, as we have come to know them. It's not simply the replication of the city form. It's not simply a kind of fractal spread out of spatial products that are in some ways set and formatted. Something very, very different, very, very different going on. There is formatting, there is ways in which the extensions, you know, reveal or represent all of the very kinds of banal means of a producing space and built environments. There's something else. And here it's here it's here is here the extensions are replete with really different kinds of temporal horizons. Where, where decisions and projects are undertaken, not so much for what they do for now, but anticipating what they might do in, in the future. Many, many kinds of projects are not based on the need for things to be profitable or effective at the moment, but anticipating some kind of use that doesn't yet, yet exist. One of the things that that when people talk about eventually things will work according to plan. It's because the plan itself, even though it attempts to specify precise ways in which different spatial project products are to be interrelated in practice actually builds on the obsolescence of those very specifications. There's a dependency on what I've called in some sense in in operable relations. And here, the sense of the Bay of the baseline and an intensive artificiality even noise as a means of interrelating things that are not informed by a specific vision, or even objective. The infusion of incomputable instrumentality in the intersection of the everyday experiences of hundreds of service workers and laborers security guards, parking attendance, and a landscape characterized by moving things around constantly improvising where they might fit disrupt and supplement operations of almost of almost any kind. So one finds, for example, within the many of the extensions of Jakarta that you have all kinds of spatial products mean you have industrial zones you have factories you have mega mega developments shopping malls internal customs ports. And the thing is, is that when you when when you pull back the curtain in some way, most of them don't work according to the ways in which they were specified to work. But in order to work. They depend upon a kind of substrate of these kinds of baselines these kinds of these kinds of constant rearrangements constant recalibrations in order for them to at least appear to do the job that they intend to they intend to do. So, in a sense then it's particularly at the extensions, just beyond what has customary been purported to be the real city is increasingly evident that a continuous recalibration of projects material inputs and residues and altered ecologies of reciprocal causation or generating landscapes that exceed the salience of available vernaculars of analysis and intervention. So again, what is made what is what is made available in terms of the kind of language and tools of both analysis and even local politics. Somehow, the realities exceed that kind of availability. So what does then become available. And in the sense this is what I'm talking about the kinds of reverberations of the baseline. All of those apparently in operable useless relations that seem to be either circumstantial obsolescent marginalized weakened anachronistic that somehow these are so oftentimes the very things that through their availability are in some making some kind of viability from out of these extensions. But then the question is, what do we make of that kind of availability. Do we do we do we inflate them do we codify them do we celebrate them to do we ensure their their visibility how do we ensure that they themselves are not extracted from and folded into the very kinds of normative planning procedures that don't work and are not really relevant anyway. And so this is a kind of ongoing ongoing dilemma ongoing conundrum that in some ways has to be worked out experimentally in terms of new engagements with the kinds of actors that do that kind of work themselves. It's an engagement that oftentimes is not itself amenable to our particular understandings of what is a collective. What is a political mobilization. It's in some sense an ongoing experiment with trying to, in some ways, pay attention to the very processes by which they themselves attempt to act act collectively. So instead of eventually finding optimal solutions or ways of settling in for the long run. These relationships between in some way sense the baseline and the baseline between fungible built environments and the more provisional plans and maneuvers of residents constitute the stage for a process of continuous extending the available formulas dispositions prove insufficient in themselves and must extend so in some ways how do we extend ourselves to particular kinds of logics and practices and operations, which in some sense fall outside the purview, either of our professional practices, or are even our own familiar political imaginaries. And so this notion of the extensions as a space require particular kinds of forms of extending, which entail a continuous attention and engagement with a very kind of complicated politics of availability of both the work and the practices of those that have been in some kind of discussions dispossessed. Thank you very much. Thanks. Last but not the least, Mona. Hi everyone. And with, like everyone else I want to start really by thanking warmly about, and everyone else involved in the organization of the conference and it's thinking it's an honor to be here. There are many people, particularly among the participants will realize the kind of stress it puts on me coming after three fantastic presentations. So, I'm really happy to be here and I'll start just by sharing my screen. So the, the last 20 months in Lebanon have been probably actually the last 20 months all over the world have been really complicated. But in Lebanon, it's been a real roller coaster. What started out in October 2019, following the, the the science strong signs of a financial meltdown and austerity measures what started as a hopeful moment in which many of us took down to the street, feeling down the government but also a 30 year old political system that was obviously dysfunctional and turned into public debates on the street in which we took our classes our ideas occupied open spaces, tried to enact imaginaries of different urban realities, including over theaters that were closed, urban quarters that were kept for economic for financial speculation. So all of this seems like a really far memory and instead what we're seeing is bursts of anger is that are erupting everywhere. Some or most of these are exploited by political gains as many are saying here in Lebanon, traded among members of the political elite, whether this happens or not matters little. It may indeed well be that many of these young men who have burned tires and closed roads in the past two weeks in Beirut are plotting their actions within. And I borrow here, Abdu Malik Simone's terms every day hedges. They participate in choreographed road closures reside chance as part of an effort they deploy daily to attain a better position on the street level hierarchies of Lebanon's political party. They need these positions to secure their survival, the survival of their loved ones, a mission vanishing opportunities and in the quasi absence of any social protection. When the calculations are involved, I will not repeat what Mustafa Dikesh just helped us understand brilliantly, which is the true demands for equality and justice that are embedded in these acts. The intensity of the meltdown in Lebanon is so striking that that it's worth pointing to it for a for a second. The moment in which between bone boundary default on boundary payments and US imposed sanctions that have severely limited the flow of capital in the country. The Lebanese ruling mafia has chosen to upload the full weight of the bankruptcy on the shoulder of lower and middle classes within a year it is estimated that more than half the population has slid in poverty. Not only the Lebanese population more than 80% of the refugees who are about one in four in Lebanon are also below the poverty. More than one in three is unemployed and those who are earning a wage are earning today with the real value of the currency about $40 a month. So cruel is the way in which Lebanon's meltdown is managed that and I kid you not the IMF actually has denounced its brutality. Where do we as planners in academia, those invested in careers in teaching and research stand in the face of this condition. What can we deploy from the repertoire of action and reflection that planning has to offer. If we want to position ourselves as anything other than distraught citizens to be sure a first step is to recognize the complicity of the practice of planning in the arc of Lebanon's history and the immeasurable despair it has triggered. The actions of those that are ill of health has called the urbanist might be more benign so let's not give ourselves too much credit here that their actions can be the urbanist actions can be more benign than others. Yet it is clear that a critique of the sphere of professional planners urban regulators surveyors building developers architects and the journalists who celebrate their work, as well as the universities that train them is that warranted here and like elsewhere. In your work documented how the introduction of planning and Lebanon was historically integral to the normalization of a property landscape that began the slow but inevitable commodification of land and consequently provided for the current state of the city, in which the crisis sores but one in five apartments is empty hijacked by the act of safety deposit boxes and you see here a mapping of what the fantastic researchers at the Beirut urban lab have really done so this is the mapping of the financial properties that were taken all the regulations that are happening in planning and lifting of rent control in facilitating property acquisition for for those who are not going to live in the country, but also in really facilitating the provision of big loans and the circulation in the country over the last few years. And the map that is consequently created of the city is one which you see here, where one in four apartment is actually one in four to one in five depending on the neighborhood is actually vacant demolition permits are everywhere and the city feels like a construction site to those who live in it. Of course, planners were also part of drawing the as Ahmed Canada has nicely shown in Dubai and we can see in Beirut. Planners were also an integral component of the selling of the success of the financialization story by creating the glitzy developments. The most notorious of which is the development of Beirut's historic core as downtown a playground for the rich and their star architects, and one that inspired in turn projects documented by colleagues elsewhere in Jordan, Morocco, etc. Planners also have worked in the urban peripheries where have a black that have showed them negotiating the process through which territorial control can be enacted, and they've helped dissect continuous landscapes into guarded enclaves. But as I recognize the culpability or implication of planning in the urban devastation. It's failure on the multiple counts. The tradition of brilliant colleagues, including many of you here. I still hold dear the basic promise that there can be collectivities that come together to reflect on and organize how to occupy and shape the shared spaces in which we live and practice our everyday lives. This is an aspiration. Many of us are not prepared to draw. And we saw this recently in the pay report last very powerfully where many, many people everywhere we walk turned to us asking how can we plan it better. How can we plan it differently how can we avoid the city being the way it was. I suspect that this aspiration motivates many planning theories today, including I believe almost all those speaking in the conference and of course it's organizer. Over the past few years, many of us have asked if it's possible to reconstruct an alternative modality of planning, one that thinks planning otherwise, in which the arc of the planning trajectory would be to counter rather than to foster the dystopia we live in. The project requires a reinvention of the categories of thinking and organization, including who can act as a custodian of the shared good at what scale, how and when. This may require that we trade debates about the objective nature of the common good with honest allegiances of ethical considerations of care. At the time when our cities are ravaged by decades of neoliberalism and mounting nationalism. How will collectivities come together. What are the processes through which they will work. A first question to answer is whether plan what planning are we actually talking about. I follow a growing number of colleagues in the field who have emphasized the learning and knowing dimension of the practice. I mean that would he has argued for planning to be conceived of as a practice of knowing to conceive of planning as a practice of knowing she argued requires an understanding of the complex interrelationships between knowing what knowing how knowing why and then doing the practice. I want to extend and contextualize that definition to recognize knowing as an incremental act of learning, sometimes hesitant, always incomplete, a project in the doing, driven by an ethos of engaging with care and her away and other feminist terms, rather than a university desirable good that could be objectively pinned and the action or practice as tactical when needed, strategic when possible, always provisional and deeply embedded in the context where and moment when it is deployed. In the imaginary of a planner speaking in the green narratives of a public good, often associated with the public agency imagined somehow as the custodians of the common good. I pause at the reality of a planner who is realizing increasingly that she is part of abdomen Ximone urban majorities. Those who are hedging counting speculating making alliances forging networks, not necessarily of solidarity, always though, although these are really important. Yet perhaps incremental modeling through but not like Lynn blimps white men who deliberated behind closed doors with half measures of the scientific model. Rather often on the street stitching across bodies of knowledge word views and positions and modeling by engaging directly and indirectly resisting carving out possibilities exploiting openings and alignments and driven by an ethics of care and an aspiration for justice. The main task is not to mediate or criticize but to create opportunities to assemble justly and equitably established networks across disparate words. Make provisions within context that are ripe with inequalities and injustices, and among actors who may not agree on the ultimate goal or share temporary but share a temporary value. There are at least three intertwined modes of learning and knowing with which we have been experimenting with colleagues at the Beirut urban lab. So I will try to in the few minutes that I still have to actually run through these these projects and interventions to show what I mean when I talk about an incremental project. The first mode of knowing is one of establishing third platforms of knowledge to speak of knowing is to create the share platforms of knowledge that makes visible the trends and pile up the evidence. The basis on which a shared understanding of how the city is governed by what alliances and at what level can happen. So what you're seeing here is a map of Beirut and it may seem so simple but guess what three years ago there was no unified single map of Beirut that existed. To produce that map we worked in the lab with surveyors we developed relations with the land registry. We benefited from the fact that we had participated in electoral campaigns and that we had good relations now with people in specific positions to get data sets to we went on the ground and surveyed we did exchange and trade. And we managed to produce a single map of Beirut that now is used by everyone but that was very useful for example during the Beirut Board blast because it allowed all the actors of relief who were involved actually use that shared basis. But also to share a common knowledge is to produce work on the power relations that exist behind the making of this landscape. So what you're seeing here is then a survey of all the developers who have built in Beirut all 2000 of them in the last 30 years. Each of whom mapped on social media on property records to figure out his relations with banks with the political class in order to make visible to render evidence. The sort of the the the claims of corruption the stories of who does what to really make them visible and legible, but also to make, but also to be able to counter what the Lebanese legal activists are sorry has called manufactured when he was describing. Sorry I was describing the Lebanese law that was rendering vulnerable Syrian refugees. I am thinking of the ownership model as a chief example as pointed out in the aspiring work of Nick Blomley Libby Potter and Anna Roy Madame 1000 others. Again was very visible during the Beirut Board blast as the post disaster recovery and who will be allowed to return and when was actually very much around landlord and tenant fights, whether the landlord would allow the tenant to get the compensation who will actually pay the repair and why making power structures visible is also mapping sectarian lines in the city and showing how they are organized. It's mapping in a previous project and of course all of these projects are collaborative so I don't claim any of them as my own it's a lot of energy and stitching has happened for them to be possible with colleagues in the lab and beyond. I'm mapping security mechanisms in Beirut by showing how and this is a more well known project militarized security has transformed the practice of the city. The second kind of knowledge is a knowledge of the invented possibilities that people make of the urban and in the interest of time I'll stop reading and just show a few examples of mapping really for the sake of understanding and here really Malik and I have done a wonderful job or the years, telling us how important it is to pay attention to how people make their livelihoods and protect them. And as we work to, and as we work to invent that knowledge it's important to be aware of what networks exist of what whether they're hidden or not and to take them into account as we seek to to produce knowledge or make proposals or fight for issues in the cities. In 2016 17 for example we map the networks that the delivery drivers were using in Beirut in order to, of course they were all Syrian refugees working this profession. We try to understand what landmarks they use and also what geographies and understandings of the city they've developed in contrast to those you see up to the right that were developed that are the official divisions and what one gets from this is not just a recognition of the ability of individuals to be city but also of the fact that there's agency in that practice of the city that needs to be protected but also a lot of replication of inequitable social relations, the fact that many of these informal practices as Bandavi has warned us, or insurgent planning practices are not guaranteed to be hopeful. And here yet another example of those insurgent practices more recent in which people during the post financial meltdown have taken to occupying private lands and turning them into green open area as a sign that another imaginary is possible. And that is very much the last kind of knowledge that I want to talk about today. It is the fact that, and that's probably something that most people here are less familiar with or comfortable with. It is the fact that it is sometimes important to use the planning tools the actual classic repertoire to show that even within that repertoire tomorrow or in other possibilities exist. And so for example in this project in which we worked bringing on board. All the many of the very well known planners in the cities in addition to NGOs and activists to produce actually a full alternative plan for what the city's cost can be. And to use it as a way to demonstrate that the privatization was neither inscribed in the law, nor needed. And that it was possible using existing regulations to actually return the cost as a as a shared public space. Same for housing. I conclude by saying that planning as knowing and learning is doing away with the possibility of a grand critical theory or grand critical theory and narrative of what constitutes the common good, or the theories of change that guided, just like it is a consequence for an imaginary future that will never come, wink have the project of building an accountable participatory process with public agencies as the custodian. It doesn't however turn its back to these agencies nor position itself as only insurgent. It is making of the shared platform on which an ecosystem of planners designers city dwellers state officials artists and others can assemble to build a collective practice. Accesses may take the form of a change of policy regulation, a temporary or permanent concession in the form of halted eviction, or the implementation of a public space or a community center. It is a practice of knowing that is collective on stretching the boundaries of the familiar, developing new spatial imaginaries that may become otherwise, but recognizes that the collective and the matters of care it holds as valuable such as anti racism, feminism, etc. are not always widely held in the societies where we live. Reflecting on the South African context, Supernel had pointed out that planners do not alter the fundamental relations of society. Yet she had emitted the hope that they may be able to stimulate particular growth facts, those that can bring more spatial justice. More recently speaking of the post disaster recovery viola Jacobs has written that planning is a discipline that is capable of holding space for critical thought and social justice, but that space must be actualized. I take that possibility very seriously. Thank you. Thank you so much for those incredible presentations and really in the midst of dark times. We're opening up some spaces of hope through radical care, rages of political emotion, possession and holding, and new forms of knowledge and planning imaginary. So we've started getting questions rolling in. So for all of the panelists I'll start with Claudia Selden. Do you all and perhaps this is most relevant for Farhan Ak Mustafa and Abdul Malik, but Mona feel free to pitch in. Do you have any comments on the fact that this decolonial de centering work activist research, mostly from global south professionals is being carried out at renowned universities in the global north. And what are the benefits of that. So the question on the politics of knowledge production within institutions of colonial harm. I could try and started. Well it depends, you know, within the so called global north or what has been known as you know former colonizers, we have global south. And I think it is to be reminded that how practices that for example I have been studying in South Africa is quite relevant to South Chicago. So I think that division of global south and global north gets challenged when if we look at the hierarchies of power and domination and colonization within these context so in that sense. And from each other these are solidarities that maybe between how housing assembly in South Africa and our Chicago activists against evictions. They were closer to each other than within Chicago between the elite and the ones that are struggling to keep, you know to resist evictions. So I just thought it is important to comment and wherever we are positioned we can help with building these solidarities transnational. Yep. Up to Malik you want to go. No, just just to say something quickly, part of it's about the money. I mean when the UK had, and when you before the UK basically canceled its, you know, foreign assistance program. You know they were doing all these kinds of manipulations whereby, you know, they would, they would give money to the universities to do research on the south. And then use this as a way to prove that their ODA commitments were still, you know, 0.7%. But only 30% of the money would ever leave the UK so I mean, it's, I mean I agree with completely far enough but sometimes there are these kinds of manipulations whereby, you know, who gets what money to do what still is the purview of of those that are located in the in the north. Yeah, over to you, Mustafa. No, I don't, I don't have a, I mean, it's a tough question and I understand why the question has been raised. And I agree with Faranek I mean that it's not, it's not like scholars from the global north universities are trying to teach global south what they should do. That's not that's not the kind of knowledge exchange that's been, that's been going on. I'm less troubled by that. I think there are more structural reasons why this is happening. But there are also, I have some personal reflections on this, I mean you're in the global north but you're not. I mean, not everyone in the global north is in the global north you're being taken back to where you came from in so many ways. So that's something we also need to consider. Sorry, this sounded dark but yeah. Mona perhaps this is not as relevant for you and be rude but in case. Okay, all right. Yeah, thanks for that. I wonder if the speakers could reflect on the role of the state, and the need for a new kind of societal organization beyond the nation state. It seems the state is correctly understood as the custodian of the interest of the ruling class but can we live without a state isn't the state at least in theory the highest form of societal collective organization. Can we think about new forms of democratic rule. Can we take a stab again or Malik or Mustafa. Mona. Okay, so I get a stab at this. I think one of the high Roberto so good to hear your comment question. One of the work that we have been, you know, many of us who are working in this field, bringing informal urbanization into picture and all of that they have had to be very careful about not glorifying not being a celebrating that self help and care and the work that poor people are doing in their neighborhoods is they are doing a great job and then letting the state off the hook. So it has been a very persistent at least in my own work and I know the other colleagues here that to say we do recognize that is happening by poor and recognize those as practices of planning but it is not to substitute the state and say poor people are taking care of themselves. So that is not the case, but what could, what could be that alternative that is not at the service of the 1% the elite right. Those are experiments that we are busy with I mean I want to go back to the to the code I ended with. That's the agenda, the calling of this generation, and there is a lot of experiments going on with how could we do we do we. I don't think it's a question of not having a state but what forms of new municipals movement is experimenting and some of them are not working because they are replicating the electoral system, but this trying to capture at the local level so there are many experiments and I think really there is no recipe right now what it is but that is the calling of this generation of how could we have a state that is responsive to the majority. Can I add something here. I often speak with say with friends from Lebanon that we would love to organize trips for radical American thinkers and Republicans who want to talk about the end of the state to come to Lebanon and see what that ideal is like. I think it is extremely this topic actually and Lebanon is becoming now as I wrote with my colleague Mona had had a really very close to being the Republic and other Republic of the NGOs run by UNHCR and other organization, and let me tell you it's nowhere. More more desirable. And so we do feel that part of this incremental work that we're trying to imagine is about recovering any functional piece of any public office that we can running for elections forging alliances advising mean. We're not really sure that it's going to take us anywhere because right now intellectually, we can say that Lebanon is a colonial project. It's 100 year now and I can say that obviously at no point did the state act as a custodian of the common good. At the same time, as we think that this form of organizing intellectually will change on the long history. We don't have the luxury to let it go right now because the repercussions are massive on people. So it makes a huge difference to be able to work with any kind of local public agency to make it accountable it's a luxury. I'm sure that you know Mona would, would in some ways, what some semblance of a. I can see that you're speaking but I can't hear you, although you're not muted so I'm wondering if it's something with your internet connection. I can, I can hear her. That was my fault. I'm sorry about that. That was my fault. Sorry. I'm saying that I'm I'm sure Mona would like, you know, the semblance of some kind of functioning public institution capable of taking care of things. But I think this is the this is that this is a, this is, this is the critical question, you know, what kind of institution what kind of apparatus can exude a sense of publicity in order to fulfill a certain kind of custodial to embody the participation of those that affiliate with it. And I think this is, this is something yet to be in some ways it invented, because as it stands in most instances, the state is so ribbon with different fractures to the extent that in Lebanon it sort of simply dissipates, the state within itself is so heterogeneous in terms of the different kinds of antagonisms and pockets of authority and contestations that in some ways it is inoperable in many ways because of that but also that the state in terms of a disciplinary and custodial function is distributed across so many different kinds of entities. So many different kinds of of actors that you know where does the state begin and and and also is is is a question. The heterogeneity and the fracturing of the inside to its distribution across many different kinds of entities, you, it raises the problematic of what constitutes a kind of viable public entity capable of basically governing. And one thing to say oh we one needs a state one, you know, but what what what exactly it looks like. I think is is is a critical is a critical locus of work. To say something along this along similar lines I think the challenge is to find democratic forms of governance that will respond to the desire, not just the desire even the requirement for a minimum of stability and accountability, but somehow won't get too exclusive and solidify and still be open to renegotiation reconsideration of democratic citizenship different claims that arise from within or outside those institutions. Thanks for that. We've started getting some individual questions for participants, which I'm going to save for the participants for later. So that I'll perhaps abuse my prerogative as a moderator. I had one collective question for all of you on COVID-19 as a historic conjuncture. And and of course, Abdul Malik Teresa Caldera and others have already started writing about collective life in the midst of COVID. I think if COVID is a historic conjuncture to steer planning towards, as Mona said, new imaginaries. But it still seems, it seems that we're returning to business as as usual right where we've already started succumbing to disaster capitalism, we're seeing the rise of fiscal austerity, a sharpening of intellectual rates, which is leading to the vaccine apartheid that Farhanak spoke about. So in many rates, COVID is exposing any qualities that all of us knew existed. But can we really seize this as a political moment to steer planning towards some new future, new futures. I can start. Okay, I mean, again, I'll speak from a very local condition. I'll say that there has been very important concessions that we saw possible in the last few months. And I think these concessions are important because they do change the imaginary of what states can and can do as Farhanak pointed out very well in her presentation. We did see halls on evictions we did see some limitations on foreclosures and I think these are important because then we can say look it was possible. On the other hand, on the grand scheme of things. What has definitely happened in Lebanon and we've worked on a project that about that is actually the resurgence of a very divided territory across the country, because that organization of clusters that you claim you have to prevent the disease from moving from one place to the other is the perfect thing for a segregated urban for a segregated national territory. So what happened is that territories were closed and we saw the exact same elements of the Lebanese Civil War, being deployed very quickly, and rather than the moment of hope or recollection or change. What we did is it precipitated very, very quickly some of the divisions that we were already seeing looming in the in the beginning of the financial meltdown. So political parties controlling specific territories of villages and towns being closed, political parties providing services and cleaning and more recently now vaccines so I'm not comfortable that I can't look at it as a hopeful moment on this end at least. On the on the on the one hand, it just is a reiteration of the extent to which particular urban regions can absorb death without a great deal of implications, simply to absorb death. But on the other hand, it can be it's mobilized as a way in which to intensify the engagement with the intimacies of everyday life as a means of governmental control. Already, I mean already so many of the urban majorities are experiencing direct assaults on the very intimacy of their of their social relationships. So in some ways this this relationship between the capacity to absorb death without great implication, but also using it as a means of further intensifying rule through through everyday processes doesn't leave too much room to. The only thing is, is that the that it's precipitation of, and it's visualization of all kinds of rearrangements that we don't know quite what to do with, you know, the sense of, where is the household, where is it located. How are people composing themselves in terms of everyday responsibilities for each other. They're new forms they're new. They're new terrain that it's not clear what we do with yet. They're not easily, they're not easily recognized by the state they're not easily recognized by the apparatus is of control, but then they have no platform of which to ensure some kind of endurance so. Yeah, we are on the cusp of some kinds of possibilities but I'm not real hopeful that this is a time to think that I agree with Mona. Mustafa do you want to go first. No. Well, I make my brief share my brief thoughts on this and then I have to excuse myself and leave but it's been a wonderful conversation so far and I know that the rest of the day would be wonderful to I try to come back later. On this side, I guess I am the, I need to be optimistic. Otherwise, it's so hard to, to take all of this, you know, grimness so I stay not optimizing necessarily this is a moment of new alternative, you know everything emerging but at least that I see the possibility that there could be new forms of organizing of new practices of life that will emerge. So I see this that as as could go either way. It is really as I said that it's the site of intense, you know, contestation struggle, and it could lead to an alternative I see you know in the belly of the beast in us. I see how the language of socialism, the dirty word the dirty s word is becoming more acceptable I see it among my students that before I had to work so hard to convince them that we need a different world did different planning they are more open to it. So I see that a lot of the this exposure that COVID has been catalyst of could lead us to something positive. I don't see it as necessarily will do that but there is an opportunity and I like to grab this hope possibility of hope that there is. We're unfortunately at time. So far enough Mustafa Abdul Malik Mona, thank you so much. And we will continue with panel two which will start at noon Eastern Standard Time on decolonizing planning it'll be moderated by Heba Buakar. Thanks again to the panelists.