 Welcome everyone to the eighth lecture and GESAP lectures in planning series of the semester. Today we have the pleasure of welcoming Vajanti Rao, an anthropologist, writer and curator. As an anthropographer of urban life in India and elsewhere, Rao writes regularly about visual art in the role of creativity in urban life. Her work explores heritage, memory, modernization, violence and speculation in urban and rural contexts and her research combines ethnographic field work with mapping, filmmaking and other forms of visual research. Vajanti is currently the co-director of Terraform Center for Advanced Urban Research and not-for-profit research and design practice in New York City and teaches urban studies at the Spritzer School of Architecture City College of New York. In today's lecture she explores the transformation of the modernist association of city form and civic life into a set of speculative practices and incoherent forms that are gathered together under the rubric of the urban. After the lecture we'll open the floor for questions and with this please join me in welcoming our speaker. Thank you. I must say that my journey which is simply from like way downtown to uptown was like so harrowing today because firstly because there's a gas leak in my apartment so I mean I think I encountered all of the infrastructural frailties of New York City on my way here but so it's ironic that what I'm going to speak about will have more to do with Mumbai which is a city where I you know where I did grow up but has been the site of my field research or research practice but I you know I'm the talk I prepared was more sort of with a well basically it was like more like clearing the plate for myself in the sense that you know as an anthropologist I do tend to work at the scale that's much more intimate than you know planners or other urban practitioners tend to so mostly look you know trying to understand things at an urban scale in my case because my methodology is ethnography it's field work it was necessarily has been a practice that's restricted to neighborhoods and to smaller community groups and so the struggle has always been knowing that there's this kind of larger framework in the background how much of that seeps into the everyday life and practice of of residence of you know the kinds of settlements that that I've investigated so so just to say a couple words about my own research practice I as I said I grew up in Mumbai but in a kind of but my dissertation research was also in India but in a very remote area of rural southern India and there I was for my dissertation I was investigating the effects of the construction of a very large dam upon a fairly large rural territory and I have to say that I was in a way trying to get away from the city as far away as possible partly because you know this conversation that we were having the idea that in order to study the DNA of Indian culture one had to look at what was happening in the villages or at the rural level was still very much an idea that you know many anthropologists subscribe to at that point in time not so long ago about 15 years ago but when I completed my my dissertation I was very fortunate to be invited to become part of a very interesting and emerging new urban practice which was which was to democratize research and bring it outside of the the university so part of my practice with for example with terraform here in New York you know continues in that spirit so to think about you know how to leverage the sorts of knowledge and concepts and ideas that are developed within the academy and and to look at how they actually resonate with people who live in these cities and who whose whose life is entangled with with the city so with this this this this kind of institution which I was part of which I helped to set up in fact was called partners for urban knowledge action and research it's called Pukar though I'm no longer really actively associated with it it continues to to thrive in Mumbai and it has in fact fulfilled its mission in some ways of bringing you know the practice of research to a large number of especially younger citizens of Mumbai who would normally not have to you know to put in their hands the tools to investigate their own neighborhoods and to to really think about the nature of the problems that they are that they encounter in their everyday life so with that as a kind of backdrop what I thought you know for the last few years though I have been teaching in a school of architecture just further uptown at the city at City College so I I thought that you know that and that stream of of teaching has given me the privilege of interacting with practitioners and that too has profoundly transformed and affected my work so what I'd like to share with you today is a few observations about research and the kinds of questions that have emerged from my research practice studying the spatial transformation of Mumbai and the relationship between those profound formal changes to urban space which you can see in this image that's why I want to keep this image on the screen for some time you you know this is an image that I captured somewhat accidentally from the balcony of a friend who lives in a high-rise building and looking looking at this theme it to me captured something you know it was like almost like a stage set so you have in the middle you have the kind of slum or the informal settlements and then in in the front here you have a much more an older low-rise fabric which was you know typical of this neighborhood and then in the background you have the kind of the new you know the new urban built fabric of Mumbai rising up and one of the things that you know that is part of my research is is understanding how these three typologies are related to one another they're invisible connections which do not you know in looking at this image you will not quite understand the the nature of the the very intimate relationships between the slum and the high-rise and in fact you know Mumbai in many ways is a pioneering city because 1995 the the government made a decision to provide to slum dwellers what they offered as free housing and the way that they were to prepare to basically to produce this free housing was to displace these slum dwellers who by then had been occupying fairly central areas of the city and offer the land to private developers and the bargain with the private developers was that they would actually produce housing for those people who were to be displaced by this by this transformation or modernization of the city as they they thought of it so what we have then is a formula or a scheme whereby eligible slum dwellers or people who could prove that they had been living in Mumbai at the time that this law was passed 1995 that they would be offered standardized unit of about 225 square feet by the developer who would then move them out move in and start constructing a high-rise or a more kind of luxurious market-oriented housing for sale so in this way you know it was basically like giving away the land for free to people who would profit immensely from this bargain and in the as you might imagine this you know this isn't exactly a I mean it's not very hard to see given all of the corruption and all of the layers of proof and evidence required from the slum dwellers to to take part in this kind of scheme that you know you could see that there would be the that this was in fact also a form of displacement that you know many people did not have the means to fight now since 1995 you know roughly about about 6 million people or roughly half of Mumbai's population lives in slums housing very similar to this kind of low-rise blue dense blue tarp housing that you see and that number hasn't gone down actually it's gone up so this kind of bargain for producing you know at a mass scale resettlement housing has not exactly yielded the outcome that was expected but instead has given rise to some other very very interesting consequences and that's sort of what I want to talk about today but before I do that I'm just going to lay out certain you know some problems in now when we think about a situation like this there are there are many many scholars who have written about not only about Mumbai but very similar things happening here in New York right with the kind of changes in zoning and the various kinds of bargains that the city government has struck with private developers to give away you know or to produce vast quantities of luxury housing in exchange for a 20% affordable housing subsidy so that in that sense you know this kind of DNA which Mumbai pioneered has been spreading across the world as if it were a solution to housing crises to urban crises of all kinds and I would like to suggest that you know one of the the things that that's very striking is that you know in the research around cities we still sort of have this sense that cities and civic life have a certain an association an invoitable association that it's that informs the study of cities in every way possible let me let me turn to my text here so that you know we and then we can I hope we have a discussion around this because what I'm trying to do is a little bit convoluted so I hope you bear with me and listen to a bit of this text because I really do would love to have some kind of a dialogue and even a debate a pushback to some of the claims that I'm making okay so let's see so in studying these kinds of settlements that that I do study and the quest for life within them I have encountered a number of important theoretical impasses that I want to share with you today most specifically these impasses have to do with the disjuncture between our methods for selecting objects of inquiry and observation and the theories that attach explanation and ontology to those objects so our object in urban studies continues to be the city right whatever however we disaggregated we may say we're studying infrastructure we say we're studying housing what have you but there's this thing the city which continues to remain at the in the background so over the last two decades there's been an explosion of research and cities of the global south especially that one can trace back to for me a very formative text might Davis's planet of slums and its apocalyptic prophecies about the kinds of conflicts and power struggles that were likely to dominate the world should there be no action taken to correct the explosive growth of slums across the former third world so this of course this book was written in response to the UN habitats I mean state of the world cities and so not so so you have this actually the human development report so you have this kind of discourse being addressed to multilateral organizations in other words institutions that can actually do something about the situation so that was very much part of Davis's argument that was who he was addressing so planet of slums is also very much part of a world in which the clash of civilizations paradigm dominated global politics we sort of have forgotten the 9-11 moment and all of the you know the rhetoric about the clash of civilizations that was framing global conflicts at the time and what Davis did was that his analysis suggested that such cultural conflicts the clash of civilizations were bred in the soil of dispossession and intense inequalities so he actually took that kind of clash of civilizations argument and situated it within a kind of urban context since then there have been a number of vast a vast number of nuanced studies and ethnographies demonstrating the subtleties of everyday life in poor and deprived neighborhoods across the world a lot of people have challenged my Davis as well in saying that you know poor people all over the world are not going to end up like becoming you know terrorists and so forth just because they are in in these like you're adding the superstructure of ideology to the base of deprivation so there has been a lot of scholarship that's devoted to actually debunking this so Mumbai itself has become the subject of several studies focusing on infrastructure governance and social movements to name only a few even as these studies seem to point to the necessity for revising our understandings of our object of inquiry that is what is the city of the global south what is the nature of that city and how can it be become a better place for living there remains a curious persistence of the idea that urban theory can uncover the causes of urban malaise by discovering the true and inner workings of the city on the practice side much has been invested more recently in the idea of the smart city which offers the latest panacea for planning conundrums through the deployment of technologies destined designed to gather data and through the use of algorithms to discover correlations within that data useful for the more efficient management of large urban agglomerations debates are on the right to the city are also indicative of participation as a solution to the disjuncture between civic form if you like the city form the built environment of the city and civic life so there's this whole then all these sort of framing and seminal debates really in urban studies are focused around you know cities look like this but there's also you know so what is the solution to that transforming these urban forms can actually lead to better civic life in the midst of these shifts however it has become clear that the concept of the city itself is no longer an adequate anchor for urban inquiries for more than a century the city has served as a metonym for modern life both as geographical entity and heuristic concept the city gave birth to the modern social sciences and the specific methods for understanding and situating newly emergent modern forms of social life the idea of modernity itself gave the city and urbanism the power to stand in for emerging forms of social life even as older forms of breaking down with the advent of mass industrialization at the beginning of the 21st century urban studies as preoccupied with distinct discussions about the endless city and the end of the city the homologous association between financialization and urbanization and the intimate relation between climate change planetary urbanization and the end of human life as we now know it the cities have now become not only people don't know what is the city and there's this continuous like explosion of debates about planetary urbanization everything is urban and so forth on the one hand on the other hand you also have this idea that cities are responsible for everything that is disastrous about the world so such debates seem to signal the breakdown of the association of city as spatial form with modern civic life specifically what we perceive as cities today are bundles of inchoate forms such as these and speculative practices this is increasingly reflected in the hard wiring of the cities of cities themselves that is to say in the built environments where acts of war and destruction on the one hand and acts of speculative mass construction on the other are turning cities into sites where it is difficult to distinguish the half built from the half destroyed so any I mean you know Mumbai I know from years of experience of going there is is like completely dug up and under construction for at least the last two decades and it's some sometimes you do feel like you're moving through some kind of war zone I do I I sometimes feel that in downtown New York as well but anyway the association so everything seems to be in process yet we have little sense of where the process is leading the association between newness and the idea of a progressive future itself has been irrevocably challenged as technology driven climate change causes natural catastrophes that in turn destabilize high value development projects such as these sparing the march of financial instruments that promise the hedging of risk further promise of hedging of these kinds of risks so how then do we approach the cities that we study and solutions that we propose for them let me quickly revisit the role that the concept of city has played in the development of the modern social sciences because that's my field from Weber and Zimel onwards the city furnished a spatial alibi for investigating questions critical to study of modernity the origins of industrial capitalism and class the individual as a figure of the subject democracy is a form of government and the idea of freedom itself with the end of the Cold War and the rapid global transformations following the adoption of market-based government systems was what many people call neoliberalism we see the simultaneous propagation of the idea that the world is flat and the emergence of informality as a key yardstick by which to measure the inadequacies of the global south from the vantage of modernization theory so on the one hand there's you know this widespread embrace of market governance but on the other hand we still apply modernization theory when we diagnose these conditions as pathological the growth and the rise of informality specifically so you know people are fine with you know all of these with the financialization of cities on the one hand but on the other hand when it comes to the large numbers of people who end up in slums or other forms of informal settlement then it becomes an index of the inadequacy of the city of the global south in particular while we continue to swim in the murky definitional waters of what is informality etc a new flatness is rapidly taking hold one that observes the ubiquitous rise of inequality as a transversal that cuts through geographical divisions between north and south so now we see even in our study of American cities for example similar sort of sense of despair sense of you know things falling apart so how should we approach that extractive spatial projects and products atomized subjects floating populations of the displaced and violently evicted are now visible in many cities across the globe in conditions that are no longer confined to the global south these conditions underlie the transition from modernity to the contemporary and I along with others have argued that the rapid spread of speculative financial and economic practices lies at the heart of this kind of cultural transformation reflected most visibly in contemporary cities contemporary urban life beginning with this built environment and infrastructure is saturated with speculative practices where the comfort of an imagined future has long been abandoned unless it is an apocalyptic one speculation itself as a distinct feature of contemporary's economic social and cultural practice and by speculation I'll throw out a very general definition where I think of it broadly as the production of value from states of profound uncertainty so that's how I would define speculation not simply you know financial speculation that you see in that with which that word is commonly associated but I think of all practices that produce value from states of uncertainty as being speculative practices that these speculation has undermined the association between modernity and a distinct sense of the future replacing the modern sense of a progressive future and one that could be shared a vision that could be shared with with a multitude of speculative alter realities so this I think is one of the what I'm defining as the shift from a modern to a contemporary understanding of of the urban so this this kind of progressive future that we once could share and you know and I think that you know it's one may argue with this but modernization theory as it was applied in many post-colonial democracies was basically built on that promise that promise of a certain kind of modulated future where every every citizen could hope to benefit from you know where the infrastructure of cities for instance would be used to provide equitable access to all citizens so now that I think that understanding that shared vision is in a sense has been if not destroyed it has been profoundly displaced and disturbed so if the city itself is being constantly remade like this both physically and socially how can it serve as an anchoring concept for understanding and explaining contemporary society what forms of civic life can take root in the speculative soil this is a question that I would like to turn to in the rest of the time that I have I actually like to I hope that I can I can conclude in a certain you know with enough time for us to talk about it so it's through examples from my own practice adventure to offer some suggestions about how to understand the relationship between urban forms and practices in the 21st century to do so I'll let me turn to a few few authors and few thinkers from whom I you know I am I'm inspired by in their recent books seeing like a city geographers Ashameen and Nigel thrift suggests an understanding of the city that provides a way out of an impasse of the modernist association between city form and civic life have perpetuated I mean and thrift argue that although there is an acknowledgement of what they call the code the hybrid urban processes remaking economy society nature and politics and culture it has yet to lead to any rethinking of the fundamental core fundamentals of the core disciplines in the social sciences they suggest that this is because the quote tendency endures to count factors the absence of presence of key attributes such as attributes of the built environment attributes like density and so on as the the tendency to count fact these factors the presence of absence of key attributes rather than to focus on the nature of the combinatorial ecology and how it forces reconsideration of the staples of urban agency and analysis the dynamic and vulnerabilities of the unfolding Anthropocene and the meaning of what it is to be sentient unquote so they suggest that because of this tendency enduring tendency to to to focus on you know counting the presence or absence of factors rather than focusing on this combinatorial what they call the combinatorial ecology is the fundamental problem with how we approach the city today and why there is so much kind of despair or disarray rather in the arguments that are made around urban life they argue that then that understanding the city as a combinatorial ecology rather than as a spatial or built form driven by planning protocols is the key to restoring to restoring the profound connection between the city and our ways of understanding the world so they want to bring the city back into the center of the conversation but they want to do so by actually proposing that we focus not on the form but rather on practices on this combinatorial ecology on the city as a form of combinatorial ecology so in the spirit of this ongoing conversation repositioning the city as an epistemological category I would also like to flag Abdel Malik Simone's new book improvised lives which focuses on something that he calls the uninhabitable or on the kind of on the lives of of people who who actually live their lives out in conditions that would that are deemed impossible and uninhabitable what are we supposed to do with the lives of those people apart from simply rejecting them as kind of you know leading like placeholder lives in some sense right so that is the key question I think that a lot of of urban practitioners are now grappling with having identified the the problems with continuing to use this concept of the city and it's very within the logic of modernization what do we do where do we go from here and that all of these people do not want to in some sense you don't want to reject the idea that there is a framing backdrop but yet how do we move forward without having to say that you know that the right to the city or any of these any of these particular debates will provide the answer to the way that people live out their lives the most important question I think to me is you know when you when you do research in an informal settlement or in a slum neighborhood you are automatically averting yourself from asking these kinds of questions you you know you either have to frame the way that people live in the mode of survival alone or necessity or you know you simply have to just not even ask that question and say this simply has to be erased and all we can think about are ways of doing so so that is I think one of the biggest problems which prevents us in fact from engaging in a dialogue with the inhabitants of places that are considered uninhabitable so let me start from that and I'll turn now to a five minute film that was made as part of a larger practice that I'm trying to pursue in my own research which moves slightly away from analysis and into a much more dialogic mode into experiments with how one would be in dialogue with these conditions so I gonna play this film and then we can talk a bit more about it I'll tell you context for which it was made in which it was made so wanted to show you that as part of this new kind of practice that I've become involved in in 2016 I along with a group of architects as well as the activists that you see in this film were invited to take part in a contemporary art Biennale in Kochi and we then decided that because one of the one of the demands from neighborhoods like Sathe Nagar where this film is set and where these activists live one of the demands from these neighborhoods is to have their voices heard on stages that they are normally never heard we decided to have them script and produce a series of films along with many other kind of mediated performances that we brought brought together in Kochi in a space that was given to us at the Biennale so in a way this was sort of going to a contemporary art Biennale was one of the you know was a very it was very counter intuitive sort of performance in that context and we want but we wanted to bring it there because we thought that the the the biggest lesson from our dialogue across these disciplines and across activism across people who were living in these conditions was to actually show that there is a necessity for understanding how different people situated differently have a sense of what is larger and what is beyond their own localities and their own neighborhoods and this for us was a quest to understand how people struggle for the city despite their you know despite there being pigeonholed into into into boxes from which they were only supposed to to speak for themselves for their own rights for their own localities so to puncture that that pigeonholing or that boxing in that we decided to undertake this collective and collaborative project of making these films together and of allowing in fact of allowing their voices to script what was what was an understanding of the larger scale of the scale beyond that of their own neighborhood and that of their own struggles so in that sense there was a clear sort of you know having read Malik Simone's new book improvised lives there's a clear sense that what you know what Malik calls these rhythms of endurance and these practices of persistence are being played out on an everyday level as as well as you know in these kind of highly choreographed and highly rhetorically crafted performances that slum dwellers in places like Mumbai and this is only one small group out of a group of of out of many many such groups that are struggling to make their voices heard and what was most revealing to me and to to all of us who are you know belong to the category of professional expertise was that you know that we aren't the only experts and that if we can make the leap to try to situate professional expertise in a new light by including all of these people not just as our collaborators not just as our informants but actually as experts what what exactly would that take and what would that shift entail this for me the the shift that it entails is is actually to get rid of a predetermined sense of a future that we all share and to arrive through this dialogic engagement in a sense of of collaboration that can define that can continue to invigorate the larger concept of the city and what it means for for all of us not just for the poor and for those who struggle to find a foothold in the city but also for all of us who are sitting here in this room in in institutions of higher learning and so forth the expertise that we produce you know what kind of dialogue can we have that includes those who live in these conditions as experts as well so for me that that shift is also a shift from going from kind of modernist understanding of the city to a more contemporary sphere of practice and by contemporary I'm referring to the adjective I use it very much in the spirit of contemporary art and contemporary art practice because I think that we are familiar with debates about what is contemporary in the sphere of contemporary art and the the the main thing that the shift from modern to contemporary entails is is a fuzziness is the introduction of a fuzziness and of an expansion of those who consider themselves artists so you know that was a that was a sort of breaking moment for for contemporary art which is to expand the sphere of those who could be called artists so those who could see themselves as artists and is similarly what I'm suggesting here is that this universal status of being able to be an artist of your future in Hindi the word for artist is Calakar and my my colleagues the ones you saw in the film I have often used this word and have often broken that down this word into those who give a shape to the future so this sense of being an artist is also sort of profoundly tied up with the ability to give shape to the future and it is in that spirit that I want to introduce this kind of new sense or space of practice and and I want to open out to you all of you you know rather I want to invite you to think about think with me about this kind of speculative space that we are in the space that we occupy and what we can do in becoming artists of the future in and what we can do in enabling this kind of practice that is open that is inclusive but without you know having to foreclose or having to predetermine what is inclusive and what is exclusive what what can be what can be correct practice and what is not correct practice being open to all of those I think that you know that is where we we need to sort of be thinking of our practice within urban studies as well to think about how we we can make the shift from being attached to certain modernist notions of how to take the city forward and to becoming occupants of this many many alter realities that you know speculation has thrown open to us so let me stop there maybe and you know take a few yes that's a very that's a very that's a very technical question so the blue is is a particular kind of blue plastic sheeting that is applied you know I think the last maybe 10 years I've seen it in all slums in Mumbai and all you know to basically to protect from the monsoons and the blue color has become very common because apparently it's the cheapest dye so it's you know the cheapest plastic cheating you can buy is in the color blue so it doesn't have anything to do with the UN or any such thing but yeah suddenly in the last 10 years or so you'll see it everywhere especially before the monsoon you know most people cover their roofs but so that's why you can see it even in these old structures which are quite dilapidated yeah yes and tiller yes no no it's not but it's not too far from here I don't know I don't know but it's very very highly guarded is the home of like one of the richest people in the world and so it's and it's it's in a it's in a small lane where I mean it's quite difficult to enter that lane but you can see it no it's not it's not it's not it's actually in one of the very posh neighborhoods of Mumbai one of the few neighborhoods where you don't actually have this juxtaposition of slum and and high-rises like really close together yeah it's one of one of the very few neighborhoods I would say so it's funny because you know that that building attracted a you can see it from certain parts of the city but it it's very hard to get to and it's extremely heavily guarded so I don't think people think of it as a tourist attraction you know it's not like a Taj Mahal or something like that So you've seen it down here in a neighborhood which are mostly low-rises I guess right? So it's very tall and it's... ah no actually it is in a neighborhood I don't have an image of it but it's in a neighborhood of similarly similar height building to similar height like 25 stories or so you're shaking your head Antilla? No, I think the label to place it is going to say stories and you know just building a lack of correctness in the back, tiny narrow alleys, sorry, you have to look up the first ten or fifteen floors are all blocked up basically like a parking That's true, yeah that's why it actually seems like it's 60 stories Yeah I think my question is when it happens does it change this state of speculation or does it stop the process or what will be a process like a good way to continue this content speculation without like us being the ones kind of this larger view that we insert when we go to Disney Yeah that's a great question Igor and I you know I don't have an answer to that because I don't think that we have actually opened our speculative practices or even our understanding of speculation to include the kinds of practices the kinds of movements that we saw in the film for example I think there is what is needed is firstly a change of imagination and then and also you know to think of speculation itself not as you know dealing with uncertainty that can be tamed and that can be you know placed into a kind of a box that that can be controlled I think that's exactly what the smart city concept is about right it's about saying that yes it's it's great to have uncertainty as long as it can be profitable and you know to some group of people as long as it allows us to leverage opportunities for capital for you know that sort of thing but then we also have this other kind of technological system that can allow us to control whatever the ill effects of that might be and by ill effects is more often than not it is you know people rising up or you know democratic challenges conflicts that arise from from people sort of not wanting to be surveilled or controlled in this fashion I think that is that is the that's going to be the the the the cleavage of the future so shut down yeah yeah I know I mean I run during the great danger of using the word speculation to cover a broad swath of practices. But the reason why I want to insist on using that term is because I think that I have a much bigger argument to make about the rise of a certain form of subjectivity that is profoundly connected to self-appreciation, which is what the French political theorist Michel Fahere uses that term self-appreciation. It's very much updating a Foucauldian idea of subjectivity, a historical notion of modern subjectivity which came with the care of the self. So what Fahere was arguing was that what we see now is not so much a kind of profiting on investments, on things that you have built up over the course of a life, like, let's say, a degree. But instead, what we see more and more are people, the Instagrammers of the world, who build their value by this constant ax of appreciating their investment value, rather than actually using what they have, an accumulated bank to profit on, like a saving, rather. So there are no savings. They're only debts. And I think that the lives that people lead, even in the slums of Mumbai or informal settlements across the world, they show remarkably similar patterns. They show profound kind of understanding of existential risk, of environmental risk, of all sorts of risks that they're hedging on a daily basis. But you are right that using the term speculation immediately kind of signals a certain neoliberal practice or practice that people who are in power and who wish to hold on to power engage in. So what is the value of transferring that across the board is how you would ask that question. And I think that, as I said, I think that this is a cultural question. And I think we cannot exclude. We cannot say that the poor are actually interested in redemption. And they are interested in getting to a point that middle class people were 50 years ago. I don't think that's the case. And one of our reasons for starting this media project is precisely because I was constantly hearing this refrain that television channels don't show our reality. They don't show what we are. So for instance, a few weeks ago, I went to see the film Gully Boy, which has become very popular Bollywood film about rappers from the big slum of Tharavi. And I went with my friends from Sathe Nagar. And they were very disturbed. They were like, but this isn't us. This isn't really our story. We need to make our film. But the question of scaling, where their film or their voices can be heard on a stage that is as large as the stage that Bollywood occupies, that's the struggle, I think. So I think we have to get away from, yes, they're struggling for water and for lights and housing and what have you. But at the same time, they're also struggling for the imagination. So to become part of the imagination and not just as kind of pathological, you know.