 I'll just start, I'll start. Hi everyone, I'm Isabelle. I work in the Office of Publications if you don't already know. I'm sure most of you also know that they've re-review published a special inauguration issue on inauguration, which very broadly looked at architectures, complicities, sort of longstanding complicities with a little bit more urgency. And so now we have a belated printed version that is set up on the mezzanine on the third floor. So please just take them. They're free to be sort of distributed and spread as you like. And there's some in the back also. You can't miss them, they're in bright orange bags. Hello everyone. Thank you for being here. I'm David Smiley, Citizen Director of Urban Design and I'll be moderating. I'm going to introduce the speakers and then I'll offer just a couple of quick remarks to set the tone perhaps, or set the tone to reject, I guess. I just wanted to thank Dean Andreas and Paul and the all events people for helping to arrange this series. The first 100 days, as you well know, is the kind of the traumatic introduction to what the next several years might be like. So it's very healthy for us to start this now. I think today is day 27 and already there's been one resignation. That's a good record. So in order of their appearance that our friends today, Ifeoma Ibo, is the Urban Design and Strategic Initiative Specialist at the New York City Department of Design and Construction. She has worked in design research and coordination capacities on national and international projects, on affordable housing projects, on master planning, always focusing on social inclusivity and sustainability. Ingrid Haftel is the Community Education Program Director for CUP, the Center for Urban Pedagogy. Before that, she was Curator of Exhibitions at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, where she developed major exhibitions on planning, design, architecture, and public engagement. Cordeon Lewis Allen, founder of the nonprofit youth creative agency called Made in Brownsville. I keep seeing the abbreviation as Men in Black, I'm sorry. And 2013. Made in Brownsville provides a gateway for young people in Brownsville, his native Brownsville, to learn marketable skills, access post-secondary education and access employment to help rebuild their community. He previously worked for the Chief Chife Foundation to develop affordable and sustainable housing typologies in Nigeria. Betsy McLean is the Executive Director of the Hester Street Collaborative, an organization that works with community organizations, private firms, government agencies, to provide low-income communities with the tools they need to shape their built environment. Before Hester Street, McLean worked in East New York as the Director of Community Development at Cyprus Hills Local Development Corporation, where she oversaw affordable housing development and the construction of Brooklyn's first green public school. And also, she's a CU alum, I see. Kilian Riano is the founder and principal of Design Agency, Collaborative Design Research Studio, exploring space-making through social, sociopolitical engagement in architecture, urbanism and art. Their firm asks, what is a robust democratic process? In practice in academia, Riano works with on-the-ground partners and transdisciplinary teams to create and propose targeted policies, programs and physical designs, from pamphlets to architectures to landscapes. They have much longer biographies with many more recognitions and awards and publications. I encourage you to go to the website and read it all, memorize it, send them your CVs and get to work. So, urban design and social justice. Big. In these strange and troubling times, we are shocked, befuddled, angered and appalled, but it is important to know we are not rudderless. We, the design and planning communities, have agency yet and still. We can make and use tools. We can help others make and use tools. We need to remember that powerlessness is itself a tool, an ideological tool of those in power. Thus it's good for us to take a moment, a pause from working inside our professional and disciplinary pursuits and stand outside them. In fact, we could argue that such disciplinary pursuits are part of the problem. Disciplinarity has its uses, its pleasures and its critical potential, but removed and insular disciplines, programs, specializations, become disempowering, which is another way of saying that we seed power to others. So, what is to be done? Ask the famous revolutionary. But in this case, we use the word we a lot. We who care about the complexities of cities, we who nurture sites of difference, compassion and struggle. For many of us, the principles of social justice need new assertion. Yet even as I speak of we, I realize that we are not necessarily a we. Not everyone can take certain social principles for granted. And here I'm talking about racial, ethnic, class and gender-related exclusions and histories. I'm talking about inequality. We is too broad. Many communities have never had the luxury of taking for granted so-called democratic social norms. Trump and company giving voice to long, simmering, misdirected anger. Trump and company has managed to cross, however, the proverbial tipping point where the privileged, that is us, here in this building, must confront the precarity in which so many others have long lived and still live. So, I would offer that the organizations represented here today take social justice as a question of voice. Who is speaking? Who is listening? And with what social roles and positions are they associated? Who decides who will speak? Under what circumstances? These questions are now more important than ever because they expose the links between politics, power, space and design. These organizations empower communities to create using their own voices, to take their own actions. These organizations and these people practice democracy. They recognize struggle and help create aspirations and make them actionable. Produce actionable alternatives. They offer also an array, a picture of an array of institutional homes and situations which is extremely complex and no longer a simple landscape. Change is possible but it is also very complex. Thus, design for us perhaps is a toolbox which is both professional, intellectual, social, all political aspects of the making of space and the use of design tools. Over time, I have had a harder and harder time understanding just what design is. Too often out there, so to speak, it is perceived as the special sauce. But design is less of a noun than a verb, an action. Design at its best enables action. Beyond the goal of revealing networks of power which was an older avant-garde position perhaps, call it now that design enables participation, engagement, practice, agency, sharing. All of which are deeply political and that is the kind of interaction we see today. So that, I hope, gets us at the stage for urban design and social justice. We will start with Yifuma. I wanna first thank G-SAP for just inviting me to add my two cents to this discussion that I hope becomes really amplified during this administration but continues far after. The Department of, I currently am working at the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice but I have spent time at the Department of Design and Construction. And the Department works as a design agent for numerous government agencies to design and build our city, public libraries, public police stations, museums, plazas, streets and many other public spaces. The Design and Construction Excellence Program was created during the Bloomberg era as a way to raise the design quality of our public spaces that are newly constructed or undergoing major renovation. Under the leadership of de Blasio, the current DDC commissioner, Dr. Feniasca, Feniaski Pinyamora wanted to dig deeper into four key platforms of the program and develop design policy that would inspire design consultants and begin a conversation with government agencies working with the DDC. The Design and Construction Excellence guiding principles, which you see four of them here were published in March, 2016. And I can pass this booklet around and take a look at it. After a process of research and engagement, the four lenses serve as a basis for the way the DDC reviews and judges the achievement of exceptional design quality in New York City. The key initial stages of any design process should involve, in a way, a mission statement, goals or principles to be achieved through design. We wanted to encourage design consultants to think outside of the box, identify what is unique about communities and use it as design inspiration, particularly in communities that have been marginalized and forgotten. We wanted to guide consultants towards the creation of projects that can build equity in the community. Myself as a strategist at the DDC, I focus on the principle of equity in which in the context of the DDC portfolio, we understood it to mean the sense of welcome, acknowledging cultural heritage, supporting social cohesion and civic engagement. We felt that specifically for this principle it was important to have an engagement process to fully define the many ways equity can be articulated in the built environment. In collaboration with the Van Allen Institute, a nonprofit organization that engages with issues of social justice, through research and advocacy, we held workshops throughout the city, including Corona Queens. Corona is a neighborhood that was once home to a significant African American community is now home to a diverse Latino community. It was held at the Langston Hughes Library and Community Center, which was really a library that came out of a stewardship process in that African American community. And the focus of discussion was how our public spaces can remain culturally relevant despite changing demographics. What came out of the workshop was the identification of the unique needs of immigrant communities, people who felt oppressed, socially neglected and marginalized, people spoke passionately about how they felt walking into a police station, walking down the street or passing through their neighborhood plaza. The workshop revealed community-based initiatives already occurring in Corona, opportunities for collaboration between local institutions and future desires for community development. The engagement process formed the basis of the creation of five key guiding principles, each further articulated by five separate goals. The first principle conveys a sense of welcome to all, identifies ways design can be less intimidating and more inviting to all New Yorkers. The second principle eases access to resources, explores strategies to ensure that every public space is physically accessible for those with disabilities and language barriers, with an emphasis on dignified design. The third principle strengthens communities, explores design that supports community organizing and addresses unmet needs in the community. The fourth encourages a focus, respect histories and cultures, encourages a focus on local histories and unique cultures of the neighborhood and really listening to the local voices through engagement. And the fifth principle, evolve with needs and change, recognizes that New York City neighborhoods are continuously evolving and our public spaces must remain culturally relevant through time. As a result of an emphasis on these design principles, there are a number of design projects that aim to transform the built environment in a way to uplift and in the words of the commissioner of the DDC provide a beacon in the community for people who have felt marginalized and left out of service provision. So the first two projects are the East Flavish Public Library by Levin Betts. And you can see in the first image, it looks very cold and you can't really tell what's happening inside, almost looks like an army barracks. But through design and transformation, it really opens up the facade of that building and encourages people to come in and access the services that are occurring within. The project in upper left hand corner is the Weeksville Heritage Center, which is a significant historic location in Brooklyn, New York. And through design, the consultants really revealed that history and incorporated it into the design of the facility. And finally, with the 40th precinct in the lower left hand corner by Big Architects, for the first time ever, a community room is incorporated into the design of the police station. And actually it's put at the front of the facility to really emphasize the importance of community engagement and proliferate opportunities for police officers to engage with local organizations. So in conclusion, I just add that as designers, planners, built environment professionals, we are in a unique position to affect and infect the lives of everyday people. I believe that design activism should involve recognizing what is different about the people that live around a place or a space and use design to celebrate that difference. Secondly, and I'm sure that I'm preaching to the choir, a meaningful engagement process is critical to achieving social justice in any final product, thank you. Hi everyone, I'm delighted to be here and delighted to be on a panel with such inspiring practitioners of design at the intersection of social justice. My name's Ingrid Haftel, and as David told you, I'm the Program Director of Community Education at the Center for Urban Pedagogy. CUP is a nonprofit organization based in Brooklyn that whose mission is to use the power of design and art to increase meaningful civic engagement, particularly among historically underrepresented communities. And the way that we do that mission, the way that we carry it out, is by always bringing together three groups of people. So there's always CUP staff, then there are visual thinkers. So artists and designers, folks who are really good at breaking down complex policy and planning issues. And then there are folks who are working, going to school or living in communities impacted by social justice issues. And the three of us come together and we collaborate sometimes over the space of a couple months, sometimes over the space of a year or more to create tools that really break down these complex policy issues so that the folks who are impacted by them can better understand them and hopefully better participate in shaping them. And so you can see some examples of that work on the screen in front of you. We create foldout guides that distill really complex policy information on everything from fracking to housing rights. We create workshop tools, hands-on activities that help people understand complex land use issues. And we also do lots of work in youth education, working with high school students and teaching artists across the city to really dig into who makes decisions about our city and how students can understand their role in shaping those decisions. And I stand in front of you today as a consummate, non-designer, non-planner. I think it might be the only one on the panel who's like art history, humanities, kid through and through. But for the better part of 10 years, I've worked with planners and architects first in a role that really helped them translate their ideas and concepts to broad public audiences. And now in my work at CUP, I'm really focused on helping designers think about to echo Ifoma's point about a good engagement process. What does a really equitable and effective engagement process mean? How do you work with communities effectively and put their needs at the forefront of your work? And I also wanna just recognize, as David did earlier, the urgency of this particular moment, day 27. I'm glad PSAP is counting the days for us all. We know that this is a time of increasing violence and discrimination against communities of color, against women, immigrants, all kinds of folks across this country. And it's a really scary, dangerous and urgent moment. So I applaud all of you who are asking yourselves, what can I do? It's a really important question to ask. What I'm going to propose to you today is that after you ask yourself that question, ask yourself who else is doing? That's not grammatically correct at all, but what I mean by that is who else, who in the communities that you wanna work in and the problems that you wanna help communities solve, who's already there? Who's been doing this work for a long time? And how can you engage them to be decision makers and kind of rethink the traditional power structures between design and community? And I'm gonna emphasize the need to ask this question by treating you a group of serious adults to a little story that Cup created in partnership with some other practitioners in community-engaged design, a group kind of known as the Equity Collective that our Executive Director, Christine Gaspar, is part of. And for those of you old enough to remember, I think it's still around, actually, Highlights Magazine, Goofus and Gallant. We're gonna do a little highlight-style exploration of community-engaged design here to learn what's good ways of going about that work and maybe some not-so-good ways. So I present to you Rick and Dick, and I'm gonna read you this story if you don't often get story time after lunch, so I think it's a nice change of pace. Okay, so once upon a time, there was a guy named Dick and a guy named Rick. Dick and Rick wanna use their design skills to help communities, but they're not sure about how to go about doing that. Dick is pretty sure he can think of a great project after seeing a story about a local community in the news. He hasn't spent much time in the area, but he knows he can help. Rick believes in the power of design and wants to support and strengthen communities. He seeks out people in a nearby community to find out what's important to them. Dick and Rick approach the community to find out more. Dick starts his site analysis. He doesn't talk to anyone. Rick finds out the group is concerned about parks and listens to their stories. He learns that residents for parks, a long-standing community group, has been working on improving a park for the past five years and he asks if he can join their efforts. Dick and Rick figure out how to start working with the community. Dick wants to ensure the community is engaged in the process, so he holds a public meeting to show off his design proposal that will activate the space, of course. Understanding that residents are experts about their neighborhood, Rick begins to work with the group and asks them about the park and their community. Dick and Rick start to get feedback on their design ideas. Dick asks for input, but is pretty confident in his proposal. He gets some mixed reviews on his ideas, but he still believes his design can have the most impact. Rick spends a long, long, long time hearing from residents who do not all agree with each other. He designs a way for them to work together to shape their proposal. Dick and Rick manage their project budgets. This is not in Highlights Magazine, or if it is, I would love to see it. Dick doesn't really think about the budget. There isn't much money, so he gets an unpaid intern to help with the work. I'm sure some of us in this room have done that unpaid intern. Rick knows the budget is tight, but he wants to make sure the community's time is valued, and he knows that paying his intern will make it possible for someone from a less privileged background to move up in the design field. After many months, Dick and Rick's projects are complete. Dick's park is pretty, but it fails to activate the space, since no one seems to be using it. Rick's park is pretty too, plus it's used by all the community members who helped create it. In the end of our story, Dick and Rick learn about equity. Dick got his project published in a magazine who didn't seem to notice that there were no people using it. The community was left with a new park, but it didn't respond to their needs, or do anything to address larger social issues impacting them. Community members, on the other hand, got so excited about Rick's design for the playground that the youth leadership group asked if he would help them design a stand for their farmers market, which they built themselves. The community got two new projects and some new skills, and the design process increased civic engagement and leadership opportunities, and gave community members the chance to implement their own solutions. That is the story of Rick and Dick, and I think we all know that we're all Dick sometimes, right? But the idea is that we can try to be Rick more often. These are lessons that cups learn through our own work. We have made mistakes. We know our colleagues have made mistakes. We try to be honest about those failures and talk about them. And so that's why we created this tool to really boil down a few key lessons that I just wanna be super obvious about in case the allegory didn't really make, you know, to drive down the point. It starts off with don't be a colonizer, right? And I say this also knowing that plenty of you will work in communities that you're a part of, that you're a member of. And then in that case, it's just a matter of realizing that you are not the only person whose experience in that community matters. But there's always someone else in the community that you wanna work in who cares, who's been thinking about these issues for years, and they have the resources and the knowledge and the know-how to help you make a better project. Give people the opportunity wherever you can to really become leaders and ambassadors for the project. That's one key lesson we've learned. Oh, I've got images in the middle too. The other one is don't fake it. Be really honest about the parameters of your project, what you can do, what kind of feedback you're looking for. Sometimes you can't take feedback on every detail of your project, right? That's simply not realistic. So be really transparent about that. But then where you can take feedback, where engagement is possible, use it, right? Do your best to put that feedback and that engagement into action. Value people's time. This is where we go back to the internship image. And this is just a lesson that we have learned and that we know is so important. Participating in a community-driven design process isn't easy for everyone, right? They're the matters of time, money. If you're a community member who needs to worry about childcare or if English is not your first language, providing translation services, providing stipends, childcare, food, the things we've all heard of before, but it seems so basic but are so essential to being able to encourage people to actively participate and meaningfully participate. And this also goes for you in the room too, right? In terms of making sure your time is valued. If you're a student or a young designer who's interested in doing this work, you'll often be asked to do the work for free, right? And we need to have honest conversations about how that's not an equitable proposition either. Facilitate feedback. This is something that we work on all the time at CUP. So it's not about, it's not just a matter of asking yes or no questions, but it's about really digging in, particularly when someone disagrees with you, asking more questions about what's at the root of that disagreement so that you can really get to the bottom of the issue and make important and impactful decisions about your projects. Follow up. So this one's important because you wanna make sure that it's not just a one and done engagement, right? Or if it is, you're going back to make sure that you deeply understand the impacts of your work in the project. And another way you can follow up is to think about all of the good resources that came out of the project. If you collected survey data, if you gathered other types of data, how can you share that with the folks who have participated in the process with you so that maybe they can use it for their own projects and benefit from the other research and resources that you've brought to bear? And finally, be humble. And I laugh about this because I realize it's ironic for me. I've just told you what I think you should do if you're gonna work in, at the intersection of social justice and design. And then I'm saying be humble. But I think we all understand the importance of this, right? And this also doesn't mean that you're not experts, that you don't have the ability to bring your brilliant minds to a project and to do exciting work. It just means that you recognize your privilege in that process, right? Recognize that your expertise puts you in a different position than the community members that you're seeking to work with. And being humble about that is a necessary step in making sure that we all recognize the unevenness of power in community planning and neighborhoods in New York, certainly across the country and across the world. So I will leave you with that. Thank you so much. Here is CUP's website and I look forward to more questions later. Thank you. All right, good afternoon. My name is Cordean Lewis Allen. Who am I? I grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which is like a neighborhood, East Brooklyn, right next to Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, Bushwick, East New York. It's kind of like nestled in between all that. Around the age of eight, I lost my uncle to gun violence in Brownsville and it kind of changed my perspective of public space because he was shot outside in a car sitting in the back of the car. And I was like, well, I shouldn't be going outside if that's happening outside. So my mom kind of convinced me that I shouldn't be a comedian. That wasn't really gonna, that's not what she was sending me to school for. So I was like, so I was like, I'm an artist. Maybe I could be an architect and also maybe I can change public space so that it's safer for me and my neighbors and I can play outside and it would be a little bit easier for us. So that was naive of me. I went to architecture school in SUNY Buffalo and then at Harvard and I came back and started working in Brownsville for a little bit and realized, you know, we have the second highest concentration of public housing in the nation in Brownsville. And so it's kind of like concentrated poverty. We have like a lot of young people that are not in school and not working, like one out of every four, right? It's a realized in working for a nonprofit in the neighborhood that it's more of an economic issue. Like these kids need jobs, people in the neighborhood need jobs that would keep them occupied and off the street so they're not engaged in crime that's contributing to kind of like the high crime statistics for Brownsville, right? And also keeping police guard heavy. So like in 2011, you know, stopping first was the highest in Brownsville with 25,000 stops and then over the years they figured out it's probably not a good idea to stop like 93 out of 100 residents. It's just, it doesn't work. And so they stopped doing it and, you know, but over that same time that they were stopping doing it, you realize there was still a drop in crime, there was still a drop in shootings. So maybe the stop and frisk wasn't necessarily correlated with like the lowering of crime, right? They did 40 stops in frisk in 2015. So now we're here. I decided that if people need jobs, maybe I could use some of the skills that I had to bring jobs to Brownsville. So I started made in Brownsville. It's a youth creative agency where we're employing and training young people to increase their access to design professions and technology professions by engaging them in community design and benefit projects, but also commissions from clients all over the city so that they can build portfolios that make them more competitive for the workplace and in the changing creative innovation economy, right? So we do it in three ways. We have an in-office apprenticeship, like 12 weeks. They get trained and then they kind of graduate into the creative agency. We also have a school-based model where we go into the schools and we provide after-school programming in STEAM. So Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics and Architecture for the A as well. That's my jam. And then we also are going to start offering public workshops this year. So I was trying to figure out what to call this conversation. So I came up with lessons in active listening and then it was like, well, first 100 days. So lessons in active listening in the age of he that shall not be named. And I think the importance of that for me, right? He that shall not be named is talking about bringing back stop and frisk. And we have a large number of public housing and Ben Carson is going to be like, hot person, like why is this happening? So the concentration of public housing is now in the hands of someone who doesn't know. So we have to kind of like take some charge in this very crucial time. So I'm a strong believer that those that are closest to the problem should be at the forefront of the solution, right? So active listening is like, when you look somebody in the eye when they're talking and you actually are listening and you're not waiting to have a retort, right? You're not like waiting to say something. You're just listening, you comprehend it. You sort of be like, okay, and you remember it. So how can design some plans in an activist? I call myself an activist sometimes when I'm an architect, use active listening. So I'm going to show you some examples of how made in Brownsville, engages young people to use active listening. Okay, is that all right? Everybody cool with that? Okay. And we don't have all the answers. Yeah, so just a preference. So this is a entrepreneurship initiative that our neighbors were telling us that they needed spaces for entrepreneurship and they were not affordable in the neighborhood. So we applied for some money from EDC, New York Economic Development Corporation and they gave us some money to create a retail market in which we engage young people in creating the mural for or design and tech did the groundwork. And we engage young people in creating the mural for that space. And we're also tenants in that space. So that's like my guys right there. And selling some of the products that our students make. So this was a vacant lot that the city owned and we were like, we responded to an RFP that they had offered for the spot and we got it and we kind of transformed that space. Anybody familiar with Marcus Garvey Village? Yeah, so like Marcus Garvey Village is designed by Kenneth Frampton. I was like commissioned by MoMA and the Urban Development Corporation which is now in prior state development. And in 1970, like as a reaction to all the tower in the black typologies that it was more of a low rise, high density housing for low income people. So LNM Development just bought it and they wanted to engage young people in reconceiving some of the spaces that are in Marcus Garvey Village. So we had a cohort of 14 young people and we engaged them in surveying and now analyzing the site. And this is an interesting map. Marcus Garvey Village was like right here. They mapped where they felt safe walking. So the blue is where they felt safest and the red is where they don't like these kids that live in Brownsville houses. So they don't even walk over there and our office was like over here. So they wouldn't even come to our office we had to come to them in order to do programming. No computers or nothing. We couldn't bring any technology or stuff to them. So what they were telling us was that because all the stuff was for programming was like over here where they could have gone to a community center but it's in somebody else's territory and stuff. They needed a youth clubhouse for themselves like a community center. So they identified where they felt safest in that blue and then we kind of helped them envision what that youth clubhouse might look like with some pop-up structures. And they wanted to use it for entrepreneurship and think tanking solutions for the neighborhood. And we actually presented it to Ken Frampton. And he wasn't really like, he wasn't, he didn't quite, he was like, what was his feedback? He's like, you guys need to think bigger. I was like, but we can't, we can't wait five years to get this built. We want to do it tomorrow, right? Like we need solutions today. So it got built because we had a ready-made solution, right? And L&M gave them money to do this and these guys helped to bring that to life. So they're doing programming inside of these structures. Then a school called us up and said some of their students are sick of getting suspended and they would, they have a spare room. And they had like a, you know, something crazy like a 40% suspension rate for the school in Brownsville and they had a spare room that the kids wanted to make a mediation meditation room. So they can go there and like solve issues themselves or like just take time for themselves. That's opposed to like getting kicked out of school. So we helped them to create that space in Brownsville over like 12 weeks. Okay. It's fair, it was so popular, the teachers had to like schedule time around us through this so they can use it too. It's problematic. And I was from Plaza listening to our neighbors saying that this corridor that was created when they built all of this public housing that's in black this corridor that cut off the super blocks that cut off these dead ends is unsafe. And they wanted it to kind of like be used as a pedestrian plaza. So our partners got a designated through DOT to be a pedestrian plaza. And then we envisioned with some young people about what that might look like if we like greened it up a little bit. And then we, DOT wouldn't let us take the, do the green wall, but they let us draw on the ground, which is good. Okay. And what's the time now? So let me speed it up. So this is a different type of listening, but this organization that I think is important to just mention, this is Rasmia, she's the president of ED for the Fund for Public Housing. And she's also the director for NYCHA's office of public-private partnership. And she's awesome. She used to be our boss in Browseville in Browseville partnership. And she asked us to do a logo for the Fund for Public Housing, which is what they're calling NYCHA's innovation and escape hatch to get private money into public housing. Yeah. So these are residents of NYCHA that are designing their logo. And they came up with this kind of like scalable logo thing. But she knew that like her constituents in NYCHA, they would value the input of people that are from NYCHA. So that was a part of their decision making as to why they chose us, right? And then Police Foundation came to us through a partner, Browseville Community Justice Center who we partner with very often and said that they wanted to get people to start snitching more on their neighbors by using crime stoppers, which is great. I think it's great. We should all be snitching. So they wanted to rebrand an ad campaign that BBDO, a large ad agency, second most awarded in the world, designed for the citywide campaign. And our young people, we had to map out what they felt strongly about reporting in terms of the crime. And if a police officer, for instance, was committing a crime, they would report it all the time. But if their mother murdered someone, no way. I'm not telling anybody, so it's interesting. But what they felt strongly about was child abduction and domestic violence and rape and abuse. And so the campaigns that came out of that was more around those lines of children and abduction and kind of like mysteries of place and that kind of thing. And I'm almost done. This is a corridor district needs assessment that we did for small business services where we were able to talk to our neighbors about Belmont Avenue in Browseville, which was at Colisec with the mural on the ground was that used to be really vibrant. People used to get dressed up to go to Belmont and it kind of like lost its vibrancy over the years. Highest vacancy rate in 10 to 20 for all three of the commercial corridors in Browseville. So we talked to our neighbors and the merchants on the corridor, kids walking around with tablets and took all the survey data and compiled it and regurgitated it to them so that they understood what we were hearing. And they really said that they wanted more opportunities for young people after school programming and vocational training and less churches. There's like 10 churches in three blocks on Belmont. Less liquor stores, less dollar stores and that kind of thing. So we were like, well, we do youth programming. Maybe we should go to Belmont. So this is our new space that we're renovating. It'll be fully open in May, but we soft launched it. So we're using a quarter of the space right now and we're still getting community input on the design of this space. So this is just a scheme that we put up to just to get the conversation going. It'll be like co-working space. It doesn't need all the space for social entrepreneurs and creatives and then like fabrication space, 3D printing workshops and that kind of thing. But then we wanted our neighbors to come in and like actually tell us what it is that we could be doing more immediately. So we kind of like activated a quarter of it and they're writing on our walls. They're leaving messages. This is like our superpower wall. They're leaving what they're really, really good at on the wall and then what they want to see in the space and then neighborhood. And then this is like an interactive survey that you go, it's the colors are their ages. It's age ranges like 14, 24 or 24 to 50 or what have you. And they kind of like respond and we're trying to get out of them what where they are in their careers, where they want to go and how, what's the barriers to getting there? Like what's their grandest possible vision for themselves? Okay, almost there. So this is not, this is, so when you create a space like this in Brownsville it's like the newness of it is like foreign for people and they were like, is this for us? And so this happened, a young man, his name is Don. I know Don very well now because he was making a lot of noise on the internet who went viral. He posted on Facebook, I see this new sign in my neighborhood and it wasn't there before. Who is this sign for telling me where all the great spots in Brownsville are? You know, this clearly isn't for me, I live here, right? But this project was by young people in Brownsville Community Justice Center and commissioned by the DOT to showcase the art that they were creating and taking photos of and sharing it with the community. So the misconception of just putting things out in public space, it gets misread. So we're trying to think now about a campaign to showcase some of the things that are homegrown that are just good, they're not gentrification. They're like, just good things that are happening and you can be a part of them if you want to and you can add to the stories by hashtagging not gentrification, right? Like, so this is kind of like one of the things that we're doing. And then also in sharing stories, I think a large part of it is kind of like creating campaigns and awareness around these types of things. So we are able to use our skills as designers to create products for messaging, basically propaganda, right? To share messages. So if it's anti-violence that we want to promote, we can put it on trucks and murals and shirts and tell people, squash the beef, increase the peace and save our streets and advocate for it. This is a design that the kids came up with to represent the neighborhood, like Pride Lion, like neighborhood pride, families and loyalty and that kind of thing. So a lot of this kind of like social justice stuff. So that's the end. And I just wanted to leave y'all with like a message from our kids in MIB and schools is a war is coming. But don't worry. There's Jedi's to protect our monuments and precious things. And Harambe is safe in Paris. So. Hey everyone. So I just, I want to thank the GSAP folks for inviting me, but I also want to say it's not really fair. I have to go after all of these brilliant people because it's like the stakes are very high now. So lower your expectations. You've seen the best. No, no, I'm just kidding. No, but it's a real honor to be on a panel with such brilliant folks who are doing such righteous work in communities. And I feel very lucky to be working with many of them in lots of different projects. And so that's a beautiful thing. So let's see, I was excited to come today to talk about work. To, you know, it's a horrible moment. Like, let's, you know, there make no mistake. It is a horrible moment. But like, I just want to talk about like how can we get ourselves out of this? Like, you know, what can we do? Well, you know, what can we do? Let's focus on the work that we're doing, what kind of work we're doing, how we're doing that work, why we're doing that work, and be like super clear about, you know, the choices that we're making. So I'm the executive director of Hester Street Collaborative. Hester Street is a nonprofit technical assistance organization. We've been around for about 15 years. We provide planning, design, and development technical assistance to community groups largely throughout the city and also increasingly nationally. Our work is rooted in a deep belief, like all my colleagues, that buildings, public spaces, neighborhoods, whole cities function better, are more equitable, socially just places when the people who use those buildings in public spaces and who live in those neighborhoods and cities have a meaningful say in how their plan designed and developed. And let's just, I think there's like, we don't wanna kind of make any mistake about this. It's not just about good design. Good design is like a means to an end. It's actually about power and it's about kind of adjusting for power and changing systems. So, you know, my belief is that kind of taking on this kind of system challenging, power shifting work is not a choice, but actually a responsibility that, you know, and I'm assuming like everyone here goes to Columbia or has gone to Columbia at some point or some similar kind of elite institution. So having access and having these brilliant kind of opportunity to kind of build all of these great skills and technical knowledge, then also gives us access to power, which we need to handle very responsibly. So, you know, I think it's funny because I'm a planner and my background, most of my work has been in affordable housing development. So when I moved to Aster Street, I like kind of, I had never known of the world of like socially engaged design. This was all new to me. And I find that, you know, that what troubles me, I think about sometimes the way socially engaged design is framed is this as this kind of like pro bono add-on that we do like on the weekends or in the summer vacations or something like that. And that's, I just think like, well, if we're really gonna make change and kind of thinking about Dick and Rick, if we're really gonna make change, then that we really have to be thinking about power and how we're shifting that power. So I would kind of encourage everyone here, if you're kind of thinking about work and stuff. And again, what do I know? But, you know, I think it's important to like think about, you know, our friend Paul Davidoff in advocacy planning and just generally about kind of social justice and your kind of responsibility as a technician on the planet. You know, take a risk, kind of get uncomfortable, really recognize and question your own privilege. And then kind of really firmly ally yourself with those folks who don't have power with underserved communities, underserved and otherwise marginalized communities, including low income folks, community to color, immigrants, LGBTQ community, native and Muslim communities. Okay, so I'll talk a little bit more about Hester Street. So we are a group of really awesome architects playing planners, urban designers, real estate developers and community organizers. Two of my staff actually were students of Killian, so that's super awesome. We work with communities kind of throughout the city in these kind of, you know, it's funny because I think talking about like really good community development work is super integrated and like multifaceted and intersectoral and all the stuff, but that's really hard to talk about, especially like on a website or like in a brochure. And so we end up kind of bucketing our work into planning, design and development. Although we say if we're really doing our job, there's some aspect of all of those things in all of our projects. We work again like kind of all over the city, all over, more and more we're doing lots of work upstate, tri-state region. We have a project in Cuba, which is super awesome. And the way we work, we do a ton of community engagement and Ingrid really just killed it on that, so I'm not gonna talk about the stuff that we do. We try to do all the things that Ingrid said in terms of making sure that information is relevant to folks, that our job is really to kind of tap into deep community knowledge about neighborhoods. And so we really act as kind of a lever for that. Like Cordin said, the folks who live in the places where we're working know those places best and it's our job to kind of access that knowledge and lift it up. We do lots of this kind of stuff. So skipping past the community engagement stuff, so through our community engagement activities, we are able to like kind of start to identify community needs and priorities. We pair that with our kind of technical planning and design skills. So using kind of identifying neighborhood indicators from public health to demographic to access to transportation, those kinds of really important, the kinds of data that really impact people's lives. We take what we learn kind of from that kind of technical data, site specific analysis, zoning analysis, those kinds of things and pair it with the feedback and information we gather from communities. And then we start to kind of map that stuff, kind of overlay that those two kinds of information, which gives us the ability to kind of map needs in space, which is super awesome because every project has limited resources, like there just aren't that many resources. And so being, and there's really kind of endless need working in East New York, developing affordable housing. You know, this would regularly happen where we would have, we would just finish a building of something like 50 units. We would then go through the city's lottery process. We would get, you're like, no shit, we would get 20,000 applications for 20 of those 50 units. And that, I mean, so that's demoralizing because you're like, we could never, there's just not enough land in New York City to build that much housing. So it really inspired us to be really tactical about our interventions and make sure that we were not only, that we were addressing the kind of the most pressing needs in neighborhoods head-on. This kind of like mapping and overlaying demographic and public health and other kinds of data with community needs and priorities is helpful in that, although standing alone is not enough. This is the Rockaways, by the way, if you're interested. So, but what I really wanted to focus on, you know, kind of going back to this whole power thing is one of the things that we've been doing kind of over the last couple of years is doing some development. So we're working with a number of community organizations that do not have kind of internal development capacity that are advocacy organizations that are subsidized child care centers that have, so what they have is an amazing track record of serving their communities decades long, like incredible. They also have, and kind of going to our asset, a kind of an asset model, they also have really great relationships with their local elected officials, so they have access to power in that way. What they don't have is real estate finance knowledge because frankly, like, why would you? Like, unless you went to school, yeah, unless you do something like that, I do. Like, you just, why would you have that? So, and at the same time, these are folks who just like renters, kind of city-wide, are getting forced out of their spaces. So spaces that they have been in, again for decades, serving their communities, their rents are going increasingly up and up and up. More and more of their budget is being used for rent as opposed to programming, and they kind of live in the state of total insecurity. And so we are working with a couple of these folks to kind of do a development project, kind of from soup to nuts. So we start planning the project together with the organization. We then identify a site. We then work with them and their local elected officials to secure city capital financing. So big grants from the city that council members and the borough presidents are in charge of. To be able to use that money, you also have to work with a lender and get a mortgage to kind of fill the gap. So we do that. And again, why would you know how to do that unless you know how to do that? And then once we secure the site, secure the money, secure the site, close on the acquisition, we work with the organization's leadership, their staff and their members and kind of important community stakeholders throughout to start to design the site together. So we're working with Make the Road New York. Corona is getting lots of love today in New York, in Corona, so we purchase the site. The big thing that it does for them, with not only does it kind of take, currently they're operating out of six different storefront offices kind of throughout Corona and Jackson Heights, the paying a tremendous amount in rent, like obscene, frankly. And constantly facing these rent pressures. So it gives them this kind of long-term security in addition to a new, fabulous, brilliant building. We're working with, we kind of went through an RFP process for the architects. We're working with Enrique Norton and 10 architectos, which on the one hand, it's super awesome because he's famous and like fancy. And super fancy, like wow. They just gave it like our first, we had our first like design presentation from those guys recently. And I've been doing this for a little while, I'm like I'm old. I have never, you know, they like pulled out the model and like the 20 million gig like PowerPoint thing. Like it was like, whoa. So that's super awesome. But the other awesome thing about them, because we had lots of people who respond to the RFP, but the really cool thing, because I still think they're charging us way too much. Like they just are. Are they? No, I've told them that too. I'm going to go off. Yeah, yeah, no, go, feel free. They know how I feel, they know how I feel. But it's also awesome because as we all know in the room, architecture is an amazingly white male dominated profession. Enrique's studio is overwhelmingly staffed by the folks of color. And so that was super important to our client, make the row, but also super important to us. So kind of all around, you know, and then of course we want to try when we're doing the construction to work with a general contractor whose union and who will do kind of, who will work with us to ensure that make the road members go through their pre-apprenticeship program, blah, blah, blah. So it's like the wraparound, brilliant community development model. So I mean, I'll end with this picture. So this is the day after the closing. And it's like, it's really hard, I think, to kind of capture what this stuff means, I think, like kind of doing this work. It's so hard. It's so hard. I mean, like working on this project, it was like, you know, like crazy, it was too hard. It's so hard and it should not be this hard. But the amazing benefit of it, you know, is, you know, I get this picture texted to me the day after the closing, which was very hard fought. And this is the folks from make the road, standing in their piece of Queens. And it's a shitty, like overgrown, big and long, it's nasty, like rats and trash, and they are like the happiest people on earth. And mostly because they now have power. You know, they have lots of other power, like they have tons of power, but meaning like no one is moving them from this place. It is theirs. It's theirs now. It's theirs forever. When we talk to staff at make the road and also members, one of the questions we ask is like, what does make the road mean to you? And, you know, I really like, I love my work and I love the people I work with. I really do. Like it's so fun and so smart, everyone's so smart and I'm like inspired regularly and stuff. But I would never say, and this is what the folks at make the road said about their work. They're like, it's a second home. It's a place that makes me think of courage and hope. And like that's the kind of project I want to work on. And so thank you so much for having us. Hi everyone. I'm gonna go Betsy and saying how, you know, lowering expectations that has been amazing to hear what everyone's had to say. Also, perhaps, yeah. I'm not gonna be showing, I'm so happy to see the kind of very community engagement work. I do a lot of that, but actually I'm not gonna be showing a lot of that. So maybe it's a little bit different too. It basically, I wanted to start with this quote by Shantow Move because although we're 27 days into this new administration, the reality is that the paradox on liberal democracy has a long time been coming. A lot of the things that we've been talking about here is describing who the we in political subjectivity is, ways to broaden it, et cetera. What Shantow Move wrote about about 10 years ago, writing her democratic paradox, the paradox of democracy or democratic paradox, I don't remember the name right now, is that she saw something coming in the Western democracies, which is that this increasing the diversity was gonna create a backlash. And the backlash would then go back to revert to all their versions of the political subjectivity, that white male subjectivity, landowning most, so it also includes class, it includes a whole bunch of things. She actually goes through a whole bunch of theory. I really recommend that it's both very dense, but very easy to get through. And one of the things that she comes out at the end is this conversation about how can we create a democratic model? I knew that that is radical, and it's radical and it's pluralism. And it's pluralism, it's not just diversity, it's not just kind of who, what do you have to say, but rather recognizes that we all have conflict and that visualizes, works with that conflict, makes it visible and leaves it up in the air. That conflict is not to be solved, it's to be just constantly up there and work with agonistically, as she says. And one of my students, and I remember one, I teach at Parsons, said one time that agonism, the best way to describe it is a little bit like judo or jujitsu, where you kind of use the other person's power and you're both at dance and it's a fight, but it constantly recognizes that the political way of working is that way. So this big idea of conflict. And also one thing that I wanna talk about, because I think it's important, she sees a lot of, for example, she brought Gramsci from the Marxist theory and out of the economic view of the world into a political one, she basically says and thinks, I think the way that many of the groups that have been talking about here, that instead of just purely thinking about economics, meaning it means a production, et cetera, that old kind of Marxist stuff, is rather the political sense of this thing. How do we come together? How do we have these discussions? How do we both understand that the conflict exists and that we can work with? And then ideas of multiple subjectivities. Okay, but my lecture is not about Shantungwuf, it's about my own work, but it's about conflict. I wanted to start with visualize, which is the wrong word, it's more like make visible. And the issue here is that, although in modern, in the Western democracy as we live today, there are conflicts everywhere, but I mean, liberalism, whatever you wanna call it, tends to hide them, tends to put a kind of happy face on it, there's the imagery of agreement. So what happened when the Occupy Wall Street happened in 20, was it 11 already? 12, I forgot already, but a few years ago, one of the things that I found most interesting, and perhaps as a designer and thinker of space, was that it happened in a publicly owned, privately owned public space in a pops. That seemed like an interesting approach, both because the protest could not have actually happened in a public park, in a purely public park, because it was closed at midnight. So actually a pops had within it the rules that allow it to be more open, but also it's still privately owned. So then even, and the issue is that all of a sudden you begin to have rules like this. So there are the rules, the law, and then there are these kind of rules. And that kind of constant, that blurring of lines, not only public, private space, et cetera, but in policy has been one of the things that I've been most interested on. So in order to look at this as a public research project, I launched that collective co-owned space. Co-owned space was made up of design agencies, my practice, Urban Planners, 596 Acres, the public school, and not an alternative, who is a group of, they created, if there's an aesthetic, to Occupy Wall Street, the yellow tape, the tents, all that, they were the ones who did it, to look at this more closely. So the idea was to reveal, question, advocate, and then intervene. One of the first things we did is put this map out, and most of the, I know the map is not super visible, right, that wasn't the point. The idea here was to point that in an interesting way, that the power that Occupy Wall Street in many ways was fighting was actually in midtown now. So most of the banks were there, but this is where the idea of kind of the abstraction of these things, the abstraction of our political moment becomes interesting, because if you say Occupy Midtown, that would mean nothing to anyone, the power is in the word Occupy Wall Street. So it was a way to talk about the rules around public space, then how those public spaces get managed, and make that all in a quick map that we passed around all around Socati Park. Then the second part we did was a series of workshops in which we walked in the three areas with the most pops, the Upper East Side, we did try to go into Trump Presidential Tower. Yeah, they actually didn't allow us because the people there thought that that was not a public space, it is. We went to Midtown, so the Bank of America area, that Bank of America happened to close their pops. There was a moment where everyone was a little bit in alert, so I think they kind of, they basically closed the pops, which they never do. But we ended up at the Phillip Morris one. And then in Lower Manhattan, which a whole bunch of pops where we discover are not open since September 11th. So we did this, the other thing, and the idea here is to also make it clear that a lot of these policies is, people are making money for this kind of public space. So when they break the law, it actually does mean something. So when Occupy Wall Street got just a little bit of final action here, when Occupy Wall Street got kicked out of Sukati Park, the lawyer Paula Siegel from 596 Acre and I created a series of little vignettes about the way that pops laws were being broken and began to disseminate them. The ACLU, we asked people to send email to the Department of Buildings, and the ACLU kind of joined our call, and then they were taken down, just kind of a quick kind of project that shows that. Out of that project and that interest in continuing to see both conflicts and possibilities in public space, I'm gonna go with another theme, and this is gonna include a few projects, but it's idea of gaming. Gaming to me has become kind of very interesting because it addresses some of the issues that we've seen today. For example, the role, and for me gaming comes out of Theater of the Oppressed. I have become obsessed with Theater of the Oppressed, mostly because I took a group of students from Parsons to Medellin, Colombia to work with a Theater of the Oppressed troop in one of the, what used to be one of the most violent places in Colombia, probably the world, and they've been doing this kind of theater forever, and now they were becoming urban planners, and so our role was to help them figure out how, because when they became urban planners, they were like doing the typical urban planner thing. So we were trying to figure out how to turn the performative nature of what they were doing to urban design, urban planning architecture. One of the things about Theater of the Oppressed for you that may not know, there's a lot of things, but the thing that I'm most interested in, the one that a couple of us have participated in the past, is Image Theater, and I forgot the name of the other kind of theater, but in which you replay everyday situations, understand the conflicts and oppressions that are happening within that, have, and bring other people in. So basically it begins to test out possibilities quickly with an actual performer, meaning an actor, director, someone, as a facilitator. So that whole system has been very helpful for the way I work. So the Queens Museum asked me to look at, commissioned me to look at Corona Plaza. This was a new kind of, a new plaza done under the Plaza program by the city in an area that used to be a plaza was taken down because the Colombian drug lords down here used to like shoot people here and there were like a lot of drunkenness. There's a whole history to that, and they were making it a plaza again. So the idea was how to create this kind of community engagement around what it is. The commission was not to design the actual space, was to talk about it and come up with new models of community engagement. The first thing we did was a series of signs that talked about some of it similarly to what we were talking about, policies, and about constant questioning of who belongs here. People drew on the signs, so these signs were attached to infrastructure, had questions, and allowed people to both see what was happening here, but also begin to like give us whole, like much deeper stories. And what happened here is that we have people in each one of the signs is the speak Spanish with markers with other ways of talking about it. So we gave some data that we had collected, hadn't been asked people, do you even know about this? This one was our transportation. So although it looks like Corona Plaza because it's right by a subway stop, is well met by public transportation. The reality is that a lot of people live kind of much farther than it is easy to get to this point. So people are talking to us about their commute, but their commute became a conversation about their job, about how many roommates they live with, mostly single Latino men, Mexican men that live here. And this is the highest area with the highest rate of stop and frisk for Latino men. So what we did after, as we collected these stories, kind of began to like put it in and come up with some themes. At those themes, we created a game. The game was, so some of the things we heard about people on social services, the Mexican and Ecuadorian embassies actually set up services in this area for undocumented immigrants specifically, green spaces. There's a green space that's completely enclosed. Mobility, again, that question. Community programming, the one thing that brought everyone together. It's in a good way, everyone wants to showcase the things that their kids do. In a bad way, everyone's the homeless out. So it's one of those things where you sometimes have to actually also push back a little bit during these kind of engagements because there's always another out there within each one of these communities. And then local economy, it became a conversation about the fake sneaker store, the tamale woman that's always danced by the Pollo Tropicala or. And then we created a life-size pieces of these and created 15 pieces, 12 slots, and gave scenarios. The idea is that no one wins or loses this game. It's a conversation piece. It's a way to like have, it's basically get people out of there because in my experience, when you have these kind of meetings and conversations, usually people come with that idea of their political position. I know what I'm gonna say here. And when they meet with something like this, like it's weird, strange, and kind of begins to do something else. So on a very snowy day, in 2012, I think, or 2013, this year, we stood out there and played the game for like two hours. And the anxieties around what was happening with this plaza became real. I think we heard about gentrification more than a few times already. That although the plaza program great, but who's that for, how's it gonna, how can the plaza program include local economy subsidies? How can it include other kind of things? So then the final thing, the clean decisions, actually kind of a reading of this as a series of moments. And instead of, and that became the programmatic study that we gave them. That led to a couple of studios I have taught. One at Parsons and one at Carthoun University in Ottawa. One at Design Urban Ecology, the other one at Masters of Architecture, looking at, I got interested. So this is the plaza right here, plaza program. One of the biggest issues around the plaza program is that it needs a maintenance partner because the city can't pay for it. I always call it, it's part of a very well-meaning plan by the city to put a band-aid over the fact that we don't wanna pay taxes and we can't create any public space. That's what POPs are, that's what plaza program is. It's band-aids, but band-aids are, they're good. They're not bad. But the maintenance partner here, no one no longer wanted to maintain the plaza. So what they were proposing was an expansion of, and someone might be able to correct me here, but what I think from our research, one of the biggest bids, business improvement districts in New York City. Bids generally are not necessarily bad. However, they can give more power to the very powerful, the landowners, and they get a bigger sale when it happens on their street. They get to put more cops, they get to make rules like we don't want street vendors, although I'm not even 100% sure how those are enforced because street vending is not something that bid can do, but here in the existing bid, those kind of things are enforced. So what was happening, and the fear of this entire bid, which again, existing bid, plaza, in order to maintain this plaza, they were expanding the whole thing this way, is that this entire area on Roosevelt Avenue is full of immigrant businesses that all those would go away. So the question became, how do we deal with this? Both, again, and the idea is that, how can we work within the system of the bid and rethink it in some interesting ways? One of the groups, and this is one of the ones that one person works with Betsy Masoon, Mateo Kendrick, and Dimitri did create a game. Again, with the idea of theater of the oppressed putting people in the role-playing aspect of how would you create a bid? Because we understood, first of all, a bid structure is way too complex for most people. It took 12 graduate students a whole semester to more or less understand it. So what we try to create is something a little bit simpler, a little bit something that could be played. Again, the game doesn't have a whole bunch of rules, but it gets played. One of the things we found is always that the activists wanted to be the big, bad developer. It was the role that everyone wanted to play. And we began to talk about it. What are the real-life consequences? What are the political processes that people go through? So you get to play and here in action, this is actually a group of local street vendors playing it and beginning to, so the first time you played, like the original monopoly, right? The first time you play, you play like a big, bad monopolist. The second time you're trying to rethink ownership in the old-school way of playing it. You don't do that anymore. So in this, you did the same thing. First time you kind of do a bid as a bid, as best we can tell happens. The second time you kind of rethink that process and try to come at the same outcome, which is cleaner streets, paying someone to pick up the trash a couple more times a week, a security guard, which I may or may not agree with, but whatever, but for those two things, we were privatizing more or less an entire section of the city in a weird way. Anyway, so the groups did that and continued to do that. I think that, what do I want to say about this? Yeah, no, okay. So the second part of the game, this is in Carlton University, Matt and Latina. So I brought a group of students of my architecture from Canada. They worked out of the Queen's Pride House for a few weeks and then we did a few charades in Canada looking at the same size, same issue. And these students began to use also the game and I didn't even tell them about the old game. They came up with this all on their own, but the interests of mine have been always about gaming, these kind of things, in ways in which you can begin to do urban interventions. Who would they belong to? And then the processes by which you would even get political support for them, like for example, if Make the Road was a card player here, and if they were supporting you, it was likelier that your thing would happen instead of this other group, you know, Vamos Unidos or if Julisa Ferreira said yes. So kind of trying to play that up and trying to turn it more spatial. The thing I wanted to say before is that in the final review of this game, we had the two bid directors. We had the activists that were against them. We had a room full of people, both foreign against the bid. It became, and it was kind of funny because in the same way people would get up, talk about their political stance in that situation, but then they would stop and talk about the project. And then the bid director and the director of Vamos Unidos, a kind of undocumented immigrant street vendor organization, agreed that they both liked the alternative to the bid that one of the groups proposed. And you know, so again, one of the things that design can do because both it proposed something similar to what a bid would do, but in a completely different structure that the ownership would stay with another group of people. So this, I just wanted to end with this. This is a project he's did in Dallas. This is again trying to now bring this idea of games into physical form in some ways. This was an art piece for a conference, a group of artists looking at the future of the Southwestern city. And what I decided to do is create a sandbox, but the sandbox is one that is negotiated, one that I take my inspiration on this for Mad Max. You kind of negotiate water and sand. This is a passive system back here that collects water, a do catcher. And so the idea is that the water that goes in here, you use that to create castles here. There's pieces of wood in here that go in here and allow you to rethink the space. So you're constantly negotiating space and water. So just a quick kind of thought about that. The final thing I wanted to say, and some of these ideas are going into other places. I have a big project in Phoenix that Jake was the person who introduced me to them. So I always have thanked them. But there's a big project in Phoenix and that last project was a little thing to work on that one. That one has gone through some of the same kind of community processes. Another little dirty secret, sometimes when you go through these processes, actually good things happen. We got a half a million grant just because we listened to people and it was very visible that we were giving space to the everyday practices and activities that people were having. Instead of trying to impose something, the grantmaker liked that so much that they gave us half a million. So that this also is smart, not only is it what you should be doing. Organize, finally I will say organize. At this moment there's both organization on the ground, but I think that one of the things that we also should think about as designers is that we shouldn't think that other people organize. Other people are a community and other people out there that otherness, we listen to them, et cetera. It's, I mean, some of that work is very true. But that one of the things we at the architecture lobby, another group I kind of belong to have identified is that we need to begin to think of ourselves as workers, designers, and collaborate with each other to truly begin to get an identity as a political subjectivity that can come together and negotiate together. It can work towards certain amount of things. So one of the things we're putting out is basic information on the kind of state of the profession what everyone just said, that doing this kind of work pro bono actually is bad for the entire field because we're saying you don't have to pay for that. It does become harder because often, like I'm sure all of you, I have to write the grants for my clients and put my own kind of little byline there and then a whole bunch of other people because if not, they will treat me like you mentioned that people treat their interns. They will forget to pay me because all I do is draw, right? So basically it changes, but we're putting this kind of information. We're also doing what I call kind of performative protesting. We're always like that there's still kind of a value in going out there and saying things that are clear. We are precarious workers. We as architects are not even, it's just the condition of our generation, precarity, either under being underpaid or woefully or just unemployed. So how do we deal with those issues? It does not mean that we're saying that we're gonna create a union and go fight, although we are maybe saying that a little bit, but we're gonna fight like X. And this is where the conflict issue comes back out because a union for architects or an organization, a solidarity-based organization for architects includes students, professors, interns, owners of firms, middle management, sole practitioners, non-profits. So there's an inherent conflict of interest in all those. Then how do we work? How do we then can create a language that both acknowledges that there's real differences and moves forward? This is a theater piece and you might recognize, I don't know if Julia and Violet are there. I think they were at least one of them, no, maybe not. Anyway, but we did this in Chicago where we actually used the process of theater of the oppressed where we created little, everyday circumstances of firms that people had experienced as interns, employers, or clients that come in and demand more than you would negotiate, all that kind of thing and the kind of situations that it led. Finally, I will leave you with our 10-point manifesto. If you're interested, Violet and Julia are in the back and they are both part of the architecture lobby chapter here at Columbia and I help run the one in New York City. Thank you. One kind of question observation that I'm happy to start off with, am I supposed to use the mics? Is that the deal? Thank you. One of the, in the history, let's say, of advocacy and resistance, community empowerment, there's often a suspicion of, there's a suspicion of institutions of power, there's a suspicion of the government, so to speak, and I think what is really amazing with all the work we've seen is that there's actually a very powerful overlap with all sorts of complex portions of institutions and regulating authorities and I'm wondering if you have any specific comments about the tensions between perhaps a kind of mission of social justice versus the kind of inherent inertia or bureaucracies that take place within a regulated environment. Well, myself working in government, I think it just, it certainly becomes a challenge every day. Just for us to develop these guiding principles, we wanted to engage with agencies. We wanted to, because after we published the initial document, we really wanted to see how the equity guiding principles and all of them would play out in different buildings and just the process of engaging with different agencies and them taking it seriously was quite a challenge and we still pushed forward to develop them fully because we really wanted to take the guiding principles to another level and really see how they played out in libraries and police stations, but you can imagine engaging with an NYPD versus engaging with a library department, there can be certain levels of openness and receptiveness or being very closed and very much having a very strict way of where their facilities are being designed and built and that plays out when a building's actually realized and how people perceive that building inevitably affects how they perceive the services that are being offered in that building and the people that are situated in that building employees. So it has a direct connection to how things happens on the street. I just wanna say that I think it's important for me, for my practice, to understand that the system's overwhelming, that it includes, so I personally am a status and that I believe in the state strongly, that is one of the places where some sort of social justice can happen because it aggregates all of us up to a certain point. However, the state is woefully underfunded and it's really our fault more than anyone else that there's a whole bunch of issues that they have and the bureaucracies and a whole bunch of things. So how do we begin to love all these things? How we as designers also love these institutions that often people have tried to actually, that the critical position has been to stay away from? Rather, why don't we critically engage? Why don't we engage? Even if at times the conflict will happen there. But it will probably be more fruitful, the engagement will be more fruitful than it will be in any danger. So it's great to see, for example, the great work of the strategic design office. That's brand new and often from my experience, especially with DDC, is that they want new ideas and new ways of working and that they want to really kind of, this kind of work to happen. Yeah, so we work with city agencies all the time. I really very deeply believe that to affect change at scale, you have to work with government. Government has power that none of us as, especially as nonprofits have. So for example, we're working, along with our pals at Cup, in a number of the rezoning neighborhoods as part of the mayor's housing plan. And so in those, in that work, our primary goal is to make sure that the residents of East Harlem, of Bushwick, of East New York, of Bay Street and so on, you know on and on and on, have the kind of information and resources, the information that they need to engage meaningfully in the process. But make money, I mean, the other goal we have is to change the way planning is done in New York City, which is overly ambitious. And, but it's very much what we're trying to do. I think this is a moment, the DeBlasio administration has kind of provided an opening that I didn't see coming, that I think that is way welcomed and flawed and clunky and really challenging. But it's, you know, that we're talking about equity, that something like mandatory inclusionary housing exists. Like those are things that are like seriously revolutionary. And so it's an opportunity and I think we have to take it to the end each other. Yeah, we're also often like, the philanthropic community is often for nonprofits, the one that's guiding a lot of the work for us because that's where money's coming from if it's not coming from the state or federal governments. And so like public housing, for instance, you know, social housing, early typologies, there were tests, there were pilots by rich people that were like, these poor people should be living better, these working class people should be living better. And so they started like building stuff with their own money. And then, you know, then the federal government decided that that's a good idea to create an agency for it. So that's when that money started to flow for public housing, for instance. And we're still kind of, you know, the federal government, that machine, the state government is always a little bit slower than the philanthropic community, which puts us at the whim of the philanthropic community, which is difficult sometimes to try to translate to people with the money like, what we're doing is important and you should be funding this because they have to be the first ones, they have to be the pilots, you know, they have to kind of like believe in you. And so I think that that, and then the state, the state's lower, the federal government will be like, something's good happening there, let's take that and like institutionalize it. So, you know, the smallest person on the ground is reverberating up to the biggest impact. Like, you know, the first CDC, I think was in Bed-Stuy, the, you know, like. We talked about a series of talks from people, you know, that I kind of, I follow, you know, all of your work and likely you follow the kind of work that we do as well. You know, in a lot of programs like Columbia, but you know, here we are in 27th day of this person who has no name. And so I wanted to ask all of you and I don't know how easy or difficult it is to answer. You know, in light of the fact that we can't, we can't be as optimistic as we were with all our social justice initiatives as we were, you know, eight years ago. I just wonder what you guys think of, you know, of the fact that we don't, we don't actually know what's coming down the pike, but just all of you in your own, you know, with the work that you currently do, I do believe we shouldn't change the work that we do because of the current administration, but I'm just curious how you guys see this 27 days and forward. I wanna say that I am excited. You know, I have a lot of colleagues who are feeling depressed right now. And I can't really take that on. I feel like, you know, there's an onerous on all of us to step up when Obama was president. I sort of just was like, oh yeah, Obama will take care of it. But now I realize it's really, I need to be a part of the solution. And so for me, that means really focusing and pursuing opportunities to ensure that there's social justice in whatever it is that I do. And so I do feel it is, it does mean changing what you do. If you're doing something and you're not ensuring that there's a lens of social justice on what you're doing, then you need to alter that because right now it's more critical than ever. And so, and I feel encouraged by that. I feel challenged by that. And I think it's what, in all disciplines, it's what we need to do. And really to ensure that it's not left out of the equation, it's not out of the conversation, even though we do have presidential administration that doesn't believe in that, we need to make sure that on the ground, it saturates everything that we do, so that it's not lost. For us at COP, I would absolutely agree with all of that and also say, well, so much changed after the election, so much didn't change. So we're dealing with the same issues, unaffordable, unreachable housing, discrimination across communities, community new members who are not safe in their own homes or in public space. So there were so many issues that did not change for us after the election, and then of course there were, there was plenty that changed, and there was more urgency around certain issues. So the way that we've kind of been thinking about it strategically or trying to create space to think of it is this work will continue, we've been doing this work for a while, we will support the organizations that have been doing this work for a very long time, and then we'll carve out 10%, 15%, I don't know that we have a calculus for it yet, of time and resources to kind of think more responsibly. So it sounds really pragmatic and not as heartfelt and personally that's exactly how it feels for me, working in the space, everything is incredibly urgent, but I think for us it's also important to not drop the irons that we already had in the fire before and then find the space to kind of create thinking and create space to be more responsive for a certain percent of our brains and our business and the partnerships that we have. I would say that, you know, in many ways, for many people nothing has changed, right? Like I just, an anecdote that the things that last 27 weeks have reminded me, the time that I got stopped by border patrol in the Mexican border coming into El Paso with my military ID, at the time I was in the military during the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton Administration and my passport and I got held for many hours for no reason, like literally until someone big had to come and say he's okay. So in many ways nothing has changed for many, many people. I'm gonna carry my passport more often, quite honestly, because my fancy Harvard degree is not gonna keep me for nothing, for my military service not gonna keep. So in the personal, in a way nothing has changed, something has become even more visible, which could be helpful, actually. But then in the professional, I have a couple of things. First of all, I've been working in Youngstown, Ohio for now like two years, working in Warren, Ohio, which is a little city right up from Youngstown for three years in Youngstown for about two. I'm committed to those places. Those places just let out the most amazingly incredible primordial scream and whether questions do we hear it or not. I've been working there with the local museums when we're doing community-engaged projects, working with the fact that half their infrastructure is falling apart, a whole bunch of things. So there's plenty to do. So for me personally, and I have a half-cocked idea of going and literally measuring places that voted for Obama and then Trump and then going there and trying to do projects. That because those groups of people and the thing is this, for example, Youngstown used to not be a segregated. The unions and certain amount of units still work actually allowed a little bit of social cohesion which in the U.S. is never 100% in the American context from Canada to Chile. That has never been 100% true anywhere but there was a little bit there. Now with this amount of things happening, you begin to see segregation. Finally, I don't wanna, is that I actually see Trump's election as the result of re-urbanization and previously privileged or currently privileged groups saying whatever money's gonna come to you, servant centers should come to us. So literally, to put it bluntly, I see white groups behaving in that kind of ethnic way that many people have talked about saying now that re-urbanization is happening in a place like Youngstown, Cleveland, where's that money going? That should come to us. That's my two points from my observations in Ohio. Thank you for coming. One thing that's interesting to think about what architects can do, I'm not an architect, I can say that right out, is how architects and designers can be involved. I feel like I'm seeing lots of examples of architects and designers using their skills for visualization and it's incredibly powerful. I think, I know that CAP doesn't just work with architects but I think in terms of the making policy public, talking people through, visualizing inequality and then also visualizing solutions. I'm curious what you see as opportunities for people in terms of making and building. How can architects be involved because those are expensive, long projects? Sort of what interesting cases have you seen from your experience, your projects, or from your peers? Find the rich people? Find the rich people, your friends that care about the issues that you care about. It may not be, maybe they're not your friends but there's LinkedIn and you can find out where they're going and what they're doing. I don't know, I think that the last question is that what would help us all is if we win the lottery or change the systems in which the money is flowing and because philanthropy is what kind of like and the people who allow for the active listening of particular groups, disenfranchised people or people that are excluded from conversations, it helps their voice be heard in the absence of money, right? Is there a question, should we teach architecture studio differently? Yeah, and the project from Marcus Garby Village was just like L&M, the people with money saying we have land here, you can build whatever you want. So it's very much so dictated by the people with money, the things that we can create in our communities. Yeah, and I guess I would add to that. I think the ownership piece is key and I would kind of tack that on to the last question too about what's different in this time. Like we need to own stuff, like community members need to own stuff and control it and the community control of neighborhood assets. Like that to me is the way, you know, saying with everybody else we're doing the same work, whatever, but really focusing on ownership and control. Cause no matter who's in the way, you know, if you own, I mean, well, anyway, ownership gives you power and that it's really important to like figure out what's the path to ownership and not depending on, like, I mean, I've talked to the BCJC people, I mean, you guys should own that, like L&M should just give that, like that's not enough to just like give it over temporarily, you know what I mean? Or to, I mean, as much as I like when communities, and we did this in East New York, like we, you know, made this urban, this super awesome urban farm and there are chickens on Picken Avenue and it's like so awesome, but at the end of the day, communities don't, I mean, they control it temporarily and then the city can do whatever they want. So like, let's figure out how to control stuff in perpetuity so that communities can benefit from them instead of this other kind of, you know, whatever, temporary, nice, whatever, pop-up thing, which I also love and we do a lot of and I think that helps to get to that place, like, again, it needs to be done, but I think we need to, communities need to control, to really control their neighborhood. Like, I totally agree with that. I actually, so there's a couple of things. First of all, I think, like, your question is incredibly important because space still holds power. There's a reason why Occupy was driven with this kind of, what I find kind of funny things about abstractions, et cetera, but the fact that they occupied a space and created something new, even if it's temporary, that something happened, that's maybe a bad example, but it shows the power of physically being in a place. For me, I will share that the project in Phoenix comes to mind because that's one that has become a Trojan horse. It looks like an 18 acre farm, but it's really a way to rethink ownership. So we're beginning to create co-ops. We're beginning to create, we're bringing money from the arts community and from the urban, from the USDA, from philanthropic. We're literally, by making the thing that we're designing and working on, flexible. We open out a lot of avenues to bring money, not only to that project, but to that community. Hopefully, we think models and processes in the process. And finally, there will be a public space and a farm, a working farm. To add to that, one of the powers of design is that it provides value to a neighborhood, whether it's in increasing revenue for retail or generating pedestrian traffic for commercial properties. I believe that designers always need to think about what are the mutual benefits, not only the benefits to the community, but how can, what the change you're seeking also provide benefits to those who have the money to make it happen. And whether it's the developers, financers, whatever. And so, with the example, or even government agencies, with the example that I presented, the police station in the Bronx, the 40th precinct, where the designers designed a community room into the facility. For that, for NYPD, it was really a way to make people comfortable to come in and snitch. To come in and if they see a crime happening to engage with police and be a part of crime prevention in their neighborhood. But out of that also came a space that people can use for anything. And so I think that was a way to really look at that mutual benefit and create something that really addressed the needs, the unmet needs in that particular community and use the police station as a way to bridge that. So like ownership in communities looks like land trusts and looks like co-op, worker co-ops. And we were all actually thinking about doing a worker co-op for Made in Brownsville so that the kids are shareholders in the company and they're getting residuals of the time that they're putting into the organization. But that model of how wealth is generated and then who's earning from it is really important to who gets a say in the end results. I just wanna give an example of something that I think sort of speaks to the whole conversation that I think probably the students who are in the room aren't aware of. But in Chicago, there is a group called the Resource Center and they are really interested in recycling and so they've been doing all this recycling work and they have developed a system where city owned land that is disused can become farms temporarily. So they create urban farms and then on those urban farms where they're using city land temporarily they teach the people who live in that neighborhood how to farm. And then the vegetables from that farm are both like a farmer's market for that neighborhood where you can pay for that food with your food stamps. Also, some of the food from that farm goes to Rick Bayless's restaurants and it ends up tomatoes that are in salsa that is sold all over the world. So like Rick Bayless is the rich person who's holding the city accountable to not closing the farms in the middle of a season. So like Rick Bayless is saying to the city like it would be really helpful if you would work with Resource Center so that I can compost all of my food waste from all of my restaurants where I like pay taxes and make money and like I'm an attraction to your city so you can like put me on your Chicago posters and be like there's so many great chefs in Chicago I'll stay here if you keep working with these people and you keep training locals and you keep allowing vegetables and then like keep letting them use their food stamps for vegetables here and that there's like a huge sort of like linkage and then like because there's an urban farm there the apartments there are more interesting and then there's enough money for development to redevelop all of the demolished public housing. So there's like a huge cycle of things that happened this small organization found a chef who was really important and the city needed headland that it wanted to use and so the point that I wanna make about that is what we can do that people in this room can do is become the connector that says oh I know this guy who like runs this super wacky recycling organization on the far south side and there's all of this land that we've got this program for and like I know a chef who needs tomatoes like what we can do as like I'm not an architect and I can't like build a building and I can't promise anyone $8 million to build a building but I can say oh I heard about this project and this person was interesting or like I read this article I'm gonna like send it to these people so I think that something that we can do that students can do and that administrators can do and that people who work in small nonprofits can do is like maintain connections and like keep talking to each other not just by like reposting angry political articles on Facebook but by saying like here's some great work that someone I know is doing and that's kind of just like some advice that I wanted to give that I think should be part of the conversation because none of these projects happen like it's always shocking to me how connected now it's not shocking it's I totally understand it but like how connected each of you on this panel end up being through having worked together through different networks and like what we're trying to create here with our students is like more people who are connectors so I just wanna like introduce that to the conversation as like an official note. I think a couple of times come up where you mentioned get an architect to build a building and you mentioned 10 architect us acting in a rather traditional manner despite the fact that they may have a diverse office meaning they charge too much and they act like architects and I think in some ways the urban design and social justice needs to be followed by an architecture panel so you get some regular architects doing regular architecture to answer these questions because in some ways this is a supra architecture you know we're addressing architecture as part of urbanization and we're addressing the systems of urbanization so I think you have a clear mandate for your next one not moderated by me because it seems as though we're asking questions about that architect that figure who's you know Dick who is doing the buildings that you're showing us they're not in this conversation directly yet so I think to get to that would be an important step. Just one more super practical way of using that technical knowledge and it's not building anything that is always my default role I do not build anything but which is using that technical knowledge as an advocate I've heard actually Chicago as well Catherine Baker who does the development of a lot of affordable housing in Chicago talked about the byproduct of her work getting to intimately know zoning codes getting intimate you know to know this intimate knowledge Betsy to your point like community organizations don't know real estate finance why should they using that technical knowledge to support whether it's you know when it's time to review how the uniform land use review process in the city works you know showing up and trying to make those systems those complex bureaucracies work a little bit better and it's a small thing and it's not the sexiest thing but I think it's effective and having the experts in the room to say like yes this makes things easier this makes things better for communities is really critical so. I just want to defend my friends at ten architectos because now I have like to think like I know I mean all architects charge too much if you're like working on a really limited budget to develop a community facility so like they're doing what they're supposed to be doing and and I guess my point being I don't want architects to like and then we've all said this like I don't want them to behave differently I don't want them to like not charge us maybe we actually had someone offered to like not charge us to build this community facility and we were like why would we want to do that like then we have no accountability you know you have zero accountability like who knows when this thing will finish I've also had experience of like you know reading you know metropolis or something about some fancy architect doing a lot of affordable housing calling that architect up and being like come we're building affordable housing in East New York love your stuff like would you come and work with us like we'd love to great project fantastic but just so you know we don't do any projects that involve government money well then you will never develop a formal housing like you just you know what I mean so that's how I want architects who do really fancy stuff to like get down with the pain and agony of working with public money do you know a slow payment low budgets like all of that stuff so I just wanted to put throw a little thing in there about that the distinction between architecture and all that important yet how I in my experience especially with some communities that distinction goes away quickly so for example again the Phoenix project if I don't move fast they're gonna do this design and they're already like they already have a couple of shipping containers the building is happening whether or not so in many ways I have to accommodate what they're doing and then create structures because I am doing the architecture for that one that accommodate what they already have been doing so one kind of word of caution in this whole conversation because I think it's an interesting one is how in my view those fields are beginning to blur so right the weekend after Trump got elected I went to an art conference in Dallas looking at the future of Southwestern city I went to Yonestown, Ohio for urban for the McDonald Museum to invite urban artists to propose projects from their own community and then an architect's community and all three of them they were more overlapped and there was distinction and I do think that there are times when you're gonna need the safety and certain you need to get some things and actually I'm not licensed in Phoenix so I need an architect in Phoenix and they made a deal with the government to get paid in another way so now they're working with and helping me develop the plans and finalize the structures so anyway just saying that those things get blurred and that there are other ways to get things done Great Day 27, we're looking forward to our second resignation as soon as possible Day 24, higher 7, higher or better then I have to go but thank you all for being here and staying and stay tuned for days 64 so let's go for more weirdness I have to say every day it's just a life really weird you know what civil rights have been lost today but yes you know in some ways the work that you guys are doing has been necessary and will continue to be necessary it's not like everything changed so thank you all for being here and showing us that there's forward motion