 Again, sorry for the delay, I'm Linda Essig, I'm the head of the PAVE program in arts entrepreneurship and I'm also your host and your erstwhile emcee for this today event. And I want to tell you a little bit about, if we could leave the house lights on that would be great. The house lights should just stay up the whole time, thank you. I want to tell you a little bit about the PAVE program, what you can expect this weekend and then I'll introduce you to our first speaker, Roberto Bedoya. It's his son. It's trying to be jazzy. So perhaps now would be an opportunity to remind you to silence your cell phones. Yes, okay, I do mind. So I want to tell you a little bit about the background of the PAVE program. When I came to ASU nine years ago it was to head what was then the department of theater and I saw this as a place of tremendous academic opportunity made possible by both an administration and a faculty and actually student body of great entrepreneurial spirit. Two years later I was the director of what was the school of theater and film and my colleagues and I were able to seize on an opportunity to gather our entrepreneurial efforts together as part of a university wide initiative in entrepreneurship education. And so with the help of very generous support from the Kaufman Foundation the PAVE program was born as an umbrella for a variety of activities which today include curriculum and many of my undergraduate students are here today taking part in that curriculum. Undergraduate coursework and starting next year an MFA concentration in arts, entrepreneurship and management. So if you're looking for a new graduate program you can see me at one of the breaks. We do research and in fact we publish the only scholarly journal with a focus on arts entrepreneurship and arts venture incubator for student ventures for student initiated projects and a few of those you'll be hearing about tomorrow morning. And public programming which includes this biennial symposium. If you look in your folders and if you want to follow along with me you can do that or not up to you. You'll see that there's a program schedule you might want to review that. Bios of all of our presenters right behind there. There's a description of the projects that are featured in our student pitch showcase and there's a postcard about the feast on the street. And the feast on the street is a creative place making event sponsored by our ASU Art Museum and the very entrepreneurial folks at the Roosevelt Row Community Development Corporation. I also just so you again so you know what to expect. I go to a lot of academic conferences. I don't know how you feel about this. I'm a big fan of three people sitting behind a table reading their research papers so you are not going to get that. Here you're going to have two days of workshops and talks and Q&A and give and take with each other and with our guests. So it's really not a conference and it's a symposium. There'll be times when you'll be asked to get on your feet and participate and maybe make stuff and mark our own creative places. Before I introduce our first speaker I want to thank our home unit the School of Theater and Film and our partners the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, the ASU Art Museum, Roosevelt Row CDC, the Phoenix Haskell and Cultural Center and the Arizona Commission on the Arts for their in kind support. I want to thank very much the 20 or so student volunteers who are helping out this weekend and let you know that it's okay to tweet. In fact it's encouraged. Please use the hashtag PaidASU. You can see it very faintly in the bottom of the slide. It's the hashtag PaidASU if you're a tweeter. And with that I'll start my introduction to Roberto Bedoya. The concept of entrepreneurship and the concept of creative placemaking are both double-edged swords. And in a recent article and Godwin Nokadimes, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly so forgive me, discussed the slippery relationship between arts-based creative placemaking efforts and gentrification. In it she references Roberto Bedoya of the Tucson Pima Arts Council. The creative placemaking projects in which he has been involved directly engage It's okay, come on in. Please welcome. Directly engage with the potential for inequity in such efforts. And he's done so in projects like the Finding Voice program in which refugee youth generate stories and images through print publications and work projects at malls and bus stops. And the Worker Transit Authority, an exhibition by artist Bill Mackey of mock planning projects created by a mock planning authority in which Tucson residents engaged in three weeks of dialogue on issues of land use, infrastructure, and transportation. And with that short introduction, which does not begin to do him justice, I'll turn it over to Roberto to talk about creative placemaking and the politics of belonging and disbelonging. I'm going to do this. Well, thank you. Hi, Michael. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm going to primarily talk about this paper I wrote and then do some little spins and share with you what's... Oh, I think I can stop flashing. Oh. So I... there you go. So I was thinking about how to begin. And I'm going to begin with a poem, not by me, but by Aphelia Sipata, who's from Tolona Autumn Nation, Tucson poet, winner of the MacArthur Award for poetry. So poem is called Words on Your Tongue. You come here on silver wings. You gather on a fruit ripening month. You come from the river people. You come from people of the foothills of the Sierra Madre. You come from people of the tall pine. You come from the people of the round earth place. From the four corners of the earth. You come with the glint of turquoise in your eyes and salt on your tongue. You come here and see a lost sand hill crane sitting on top of a telephone pole in the desert. You watch him survey the land for moisture. Moisture is still a long time in coming. You watch as his attention is momentarily distracted by empty washes and memory of wetness. You hear him cry the word for water. You come here on silver wings. You come here from the people of towering clans. From people of desert lands. You come from river crosses. You come from people who are water barriers. You come from hauling resting on your shoulders and the spoke from cleansing blessings still lingering in your clothes. Your family blessed you before you traveled. You have prayers for your safety. You held out gifts for you, gifts of words, of stories. You come to us from people with words on their tongue. So welcome. You come to us to this little gathering here. And so I think it's important to say to that I come from the Elegio Bedoya who was my father was born in Civil Valley, Arizona and beaches Gomez from Santa Cruz, California. So I got that was 61 years ago. So now I'm here in front of you guys. I'm going to talk about place and sort of place making and the notions of belonging and disc belonging which I've been really thinking a lot about and the examples that were mentioned earlier is about projects that I support. Can I get my water? So a favorite song of mine is which bothered to be wielded by Alaphitz Gerald. That version of that song that is warm, radiant where you feel each word in pure tones. Ella sings about love, a blind love and escaped from that bewitchment. That is a song that plays for me in the background when I think about the practices of creative place making which as an arts manager and policy maker I define as those cultural activities that shape the physical and social characteristic of a place. I embrace place making and it's all its aspirations as it is manifested in a variety of methods from city planning to art practices with the goal of advancing humanity. But I'm bothered by what I consider a significant blind spot, a blind love of sorts and the creative place making discourse and practices. I'm referring to a lack of awareness about the politics of belonging and disc belonging that operate in civil society. Ella sings, I'm mild again, a simply whimpering child again be which bothered and bewildered am I. Wild can be fun, be gild, I don't know, the jury's still out on that one. The lyrics raise the questions for me of what I perceive and suspect in some instances is a blind love associated with creative place making practices. How do we understand and talk about creative place making? Is it the narrative of potentiality and its bewitchment that's bought, sold and traded upon in management practices? Or is it engagement with spatial justice, the empowerment of talent, of community? These contextualizing concerns inform my work and the questions I'm asking here. In my work, I'm in dialogue, often in debate with peers across the country about creative place making, prompted by two significant philanthropic initiatives, the National Endowment for the Arts Art Town Program and Art Place, a collaboration of numerous public and private foundations that are invested in creative place making projects nationally. What I've witnessed in this discussion and practices associated with creative place making is that they're tethered to a meeting of place manifest in the built environment. For example, artists live workspaces, cultural districts, spatial landscapes, and this meeting, which operates inside the policy frame of urban planning and economic development, is okay, but it's not the complete picture. Its insufficiency lies in the lack of understanding that before you have places of belonging, you must feel you belong. Before there's a vibrant street, one needs to understand, needs an understanding of the social dynamics on the street. Politics of belonging and dis-belonging at work and place making in civil society. Art society is under a great deal of stress, triggered by the continuing recession and its challenges to our economy. The growing plutocracies abuse of our civil rights, the cultural 2.0 battles of a woman's right to control their own bodies, the right of union workers, the right of Mexican-American students to study Latino literature, the rights to be free of racial profiling, the rights to gay, lesbian, to married, the loved ones, immigrant rights. You can add your own example of the politics of dis-belonging at work and civil society. The nation is far from perfect. A troubling tenor of creative place making discourse is an avoidance of addressing social and racial injustices at work and society and how they intersect with creative place making projects. Against this background, creative place making practices must understand history, critical race theory, and politics alongside the spatial planning and economic development theories that dominate the discourse. How race allows poverty and discrimination shape place through a politics of belonging or dis-belonging needs to be reflected on whether one is engaged in creative-making practice as an artist, funder, developer, NGO, or government agency. One needs to reflect upon U.S. history and its troubling legacy of place making. Manifest an act of displacement, removal, and containment. The history is long and horrible. For the forced movement of American Indians from their lands and their confinement to reservations, the Chinese Exclusionary Act of 1882, the Intervention of Japanese Americans during World War II, to urban development movement of the 60s and 70s that destroyed working poor and ethnic neighborhoods across America using the language of light alongside bulldozers. How is creative place making different or complicit with these actions? What are the imperatives that form infused creative place-making activities? What are the visions of our humanity that are manifest in the plurality animated by place-making activities? It's ethics. How do ethics inform policies that support distinctiveness and identity of a place? Place-making in city-neighborhood spaces enact identity and activities that allow personal memories, cultural histories, imaginations, and feelings to enliven the sense of belonging to human and spatial relationships. But a political understanding of who is and who is outside of central cultural vitality. How does... That's right. A political understanding of who is in and who is out is also central to civic vitality. How do current place-making activities practice support this knowledge? The relationship of creative place-making activities to civic identity must identify who has or doesn't have civil rights. If creative place-making activities really support the politics of disbelonging through acts of justification, racism, real estate speculation, all in the name of neighborhood revitalization, then it betrays the democratic ideal of having an equitable and just civil society. Is the social imaginary at work in creative place-making activities when enclaves of privilege are developed in which the benchmark of success is a whole-food market? The task of us who work in creative place-making activities is to ensure and sustain a mindful awareness of what is authentic in creative place-making. The authenticity I vote is grounded in ethos of belonging, cultural and civic belonging, how to create it, how to understand and accommodate cultural differences in matters of civic participation, how to enhance the community's understanding of citizenship beyond the confines of leisurely pursuits and consumption, how to help the citizens of place achieve strength and prosperity through equity and civility. Having a sense of belonging therefore needs to be foregrounded in creative making practices. As a policy-maker, I argue for the aesthetics of belonging as central to creative place-making. The blind love of creative place-making that is tied to the lower speculation culture and its economic thinking build it and they will come is suffocating and unethical. And it supports the politics of dis-belonging employed to manufacture a place. Creative place-making and its aesthetics of belonging contribute to and shape our person, the rights and duties of the individuals crucial to a healthy democracy that animate the commons. It also animates creative place-making, not as a development strategy, but a series of actions that build spatial justice, healthy communities and sites of imaginations. Now as bewitchment, bewitch song ends with some words of witnessing. Why is at last, my eyes at last, are cutting you down to size at last? Bewitch bothered and bewildered no more. No more is the assertion social and cultural activists must use to dispense creative play-making's allure and its bewitchment, bewitching blind loved effect. Let's support the ethics and aesthetics of creative place-making, grouted in belonging and have the wisdom of Ella's witness to blind love gone wrong. Let's reflect upon the work of creative place-making and ask if the activity is engaged in the politics of belonging or dis-belonging as it sucked out creative life or supported. Is it ethical and just? And let our answers to these questions be centered to our self-reflection in discussions of impact, of outcome, of success and failure and the work being done. This particular piece was published in a blog called Arts in a Change in America, which I'll talk a little bit further. But at that point, after I did my little read, I figured I'd better tell a story. And so, in some ways, somebody accused me of just being like, somebody said to me, oh, Roberto, you just like to promovatize things. And I said, yeah, there's nothing wrong with it. I enjoy it. But at the same time, I also just don't want to sit there and, you know, break the windows at the church with my rocks. So the Arts Council has initiated in 208 an initiative called the Place Initiative, People, Land, Arts, Culture and Engagement, which is sort of, in foreign's mind, thinking about this ethos of belonging and aesthetics of belonging. And today, we've probably funded about 53 projects, and they range, you know, from happy face, let's make it mural, to more contentious, let's look at death in the desert of migrants crossing the border. And I love them all. I'm going to talk a little bit about three particular sort of projects that we supported. Linda mentioned some of them. One that I really like is Folklife Field School, which was part of an initiative that Tucson Meet Yourself did. And basically, in Tucson, the Pasquayaki Tribe has a little enclave right in the middle of town, basically. Just 10 minutes from downtown. And working with indigenous communities, you know, there's so often a subject of research. And so there's this leariness about, you know, the scholar coming to talk to them. And so what we did in this particular project, we did what Folklife Field School. So we went to the Ol Pasqua, the res there, and taught all the neighborhood folks how to be their own documentarian, how to figure out how to tell their own stories, and not be the subject of research and have agency. So that was a particularly wonderful project. It was involved asset mapping, photography, documentation of cultural traditions. So to me, that's a good example of placemaking that's about sort of finding a way to tell your story. And a community asserting its agency. We mentioned earlier Bill Mackie's Work and Transit Authority. I love this project because it was one of those sort of highfalutin conceptual art school type projects. But it was a wonderful experience because basically people were asked to figure out how they moved through the city. Do they walk to work? Do they take a bike? How long do they drive to work? And then there's this whole, so there was a bit of, you know, how postmodern modernity loves irony. So we had this little thing where we're trying to look at like the official Transit Authority. What happens if, you know, you ask the actual, the workers that are going to work every day to talk about how they go to work and try to do a shift in their perceptions in which you actually think about the routes and your behavior. And I loved it because it was whimsical, it was playful, it was very successful. It was in downtown and then one of the elected officials had it in his warder office and, you know, it got a lot of buy-in. But that's an example of a place making in which you could actually kind of turn your, try to impact thinking about like how you move through a city and movement as part of place making. Finding Voice was a project that works with refugee kids. We've been working with this project for many years and they're wonderful. And basically it's sort of, most of the refugees in Tucson are, believe it or not, come from Somalia and Bhutan. It's kind of a funny mix, but they get sent to Tucson. And so, you know, the acculturation process, which is kind of a funny word to say, but obviously, you know, they really, what happens in that program every year, the kids decide what they want to do. And it's usually a kind of a tell a story with photography and words and then present that story. But what's unusual about this project and this school and this particular practice of creative place making is that the kids identify a product, a book usually, a photo exhibition, and a policy outcome. They say straight up, I want to change, the first year I met them, they were going to change immigration policy, they did their car wash, they went to Washington, D.C., they met with elected officials, they were going to change it. So they think of their creative place making practices as place makers that have a beautiful piece of art but also have a policy outcome. And most recently, they were really determined to make a green space on campus. They go to Pueblo High School. So they talked to the principal and they figured it all out and now they've got a green space for them. Then they told the story of their success in the mall with big posters. So those are sort of examples and then some final thoughts before I just open up to questions. I have a habit of sort of writing stuff when I get all hot and bothered and I say some things and I go, I don't really know what I'm saying. If I were an art history student I'd be at the door and you know, but okay, in this piece there are a couple of things that I've said and they become sort of like my homework assignment. So I'm just going to give you a little tease of three sort of like concepts I'm playing with as they relate to place making. Obviously, the aesthetics are belonging and its ability to shape a community of aesthetics. So, okay. And place making in that context of creating a community of aesthetics, creating an articulation of beauty as a plural activity, not just as it relates to objects, not beauty as it relates to, so exclusively beauty as it relates to objects, beauty as it relates to experience, but beauty as it relates to community and I have to be really precise here. Not community as a noun, but community as a verb. So in some ways those are sort of like a clothesline that I'm going to be down off of it. One of the beauties of being in Southern Arizona is this, and with my community that I work with, is this notion of stewardship, which is really a strong feeling among my artist community. I can't, I feel uncomfortable saying that they're mine, they're not mine. You know, I work for them. But anyway, cultural stewardship as a concept has been something that I've been thinking of an awful lot about. Which concerns itself with tending the work of imagination. The realm that embodies both the aesthetic and ethical experiences of being in relation to art, to community, to one another, and how to make the principles of cultural stewardship operational and management practices. For me, and this kind of relates to creative place-making practices, is to understand what it means to be a deliberative practitioner based on the principles of deliberative democracy. Because if you're going to do place-making work, and if you're a place-maker, you've got to listen, you've got to listen, look, and learn all the time from who you're talking with. And those, and you know, the principles of deliberative democracy can teach you that skill set. And the last thing, and this is sort of, this is where I sometimes feel I can be like a weird poet paladin. How many of you are old enough to remember the TV show Paladin? None of you, okay, there you go. Paladin was like, when I grew up a kid, it was a TV western, and it was about a cowboy who lived in San Francisco. So he was a dandy. He always wore black all the time. He had a card and it said, have gun, we'll travel. And it was a little chess piece. But this idea of a paladin is sort of this warrior, this sort of person that comes out there. And so, you know, sometimes I think well what would a poet paladin do? How does he make his arguments? Or how does she make her arguments? And in some ways I've been thinking about, as a byproduct of place making conversations that I've been engaged in more nationally than just in my local context is the idea of the sovereignty of context. And that for me, working in Arizona and along the border, I have a greater understanding of how the Sonoran Desert and the indigenous world views shape this place and culture production. And in that, so, you know, I just, like for example, I was in a phone conversation with somebody at one of those conference calls and somebody from Art Place was there and they were talking about the vitality indicators and they talk about walkability and I kind of looked, I said, man, first of all, that's kind of an odd one because everything is walkable. I mean, you choose whether you want to walk or not and how conducive or how are you encouraged to walk. But walkability in the desert is something completely different than what would be in a big city on the coast. So that's what I was showing. This is where I understand the context of being in the border and in the desert. It's not sometimes the knowledge that is informing policymakers elsewhere. So, and then when you work inside Indian country, you have this profound sense of what sovereignty means, sovereignty means. And it's weird because it impacts governance systems and support systems, but it's just kind of interesting. It's inside and outside of law at the same time. And in some ways it's a weird thing about the sovereignty of context. Because if you're going to do placemaking work and as placemakers, you just have to constantly make sure that it's loosey-goosey. I mean, don't tie it all up. Make sure that, I mean, that's not the right word. That it's messy. That it's messy. Because it's about vitality and vitality comes out of mess. At least that's my thinking. Also, and I have to be really blunt here about the sovereignty of context. Also, I understand the fact that most recently I've been asked to write about whiteness and the racial frame and how it works in culture. I think if you embrace context, you understand that we live in a multiracial world. And the dominant ideology of whiteness is fading. And yet it's still in all the systems. So it's really weird. So then I think about when we talk about public spaces, are we talking about white public spaces? Are we talking about placemaking? Is there an imaginary of a place that is still in some way shaped by a notion that has been constructed around this line with whiteness? That's always a hard conversation to do because white folks get really nervous when you talk about whiteness. On that note, I'll answer any questions from you. Yes, ma'am. I didn't bring that essay with me. It's pretty much the dominant ideology that this nation was created around in the sense that this normality, and you could ask every white person probably and they'll probably feel the same thing that you do. However, it is constructed around a worldview that is in many ways shaped by this form of thinking. It's ultimately deeply embedded with notions of privilege. Well, thank you so much. I really love this piece. I think it's important. I do want to really invite you into the world of urban and regional planning, which we've been teaching at universities for years, which has tons of progressive content and lots of discussions. The Planners Network, an organization that we have that has been doing this work for three or 40 years in lots of ways, opposing that as the sort of concrete building and place making and really working with communities and so on and so forth. I'm proud of that tradition. It isn't everybody in urban planning, but it's one of the most progressive areas in universities in the US. I'd like to ask something, you know, to come down and be more concrete and detailed about this, because I have two things that I grapple with a lot, and one is there are communities in which different people who are all in need of equity are struggling over the same space. And what do you do in a situation like that? Suppose you have a city where, you know, there's a Native American organization that's really on the rise and it's really claiming a certain area quarter as its and it's getting foundation money to do some really wonderful things for the Native community and the Native communities never really had, you know, that kind of thing, but there are also a lot of Somali people and African Americans and so on in the neighborhood and they're not as well organized, et cetera. So I think one of the, I think it's when you're actually on the ground level, it's often not that simple. Are there conflicts between younger people and older people? Or even in a case I'll show briefly tonight, in Santana, California, you have this robust cultural organization of recent immigrants from Veracruz called El Centro Cultural, they've been kicked out of six buildings and they're fighting their all Latino city council that wants to bring in nice university student who has already, you know, artist housing and so on and so forth. So, you know, how do you really, when you have situations like that where you have, and also there's just a lot of flux. I guess that's the other thing too. People are, new people are coming all the time and often the most recent immigrants are the people most in need but they may be, you know, moving into some, you know, a place that was other recent immigrants and so how do you negotiate those kinds of, you know, conflicts? Let me, let me, before I answer that question let me just sort of talk a little bit about, I think a lot of my thinking about, well then let me start here. I think an awful lot about deliberative democracy. That's really important to me. So when I'm in dialogue with neighborhood associations and different communities, I'm mindful of that but I want to step back for a little bit. I came through, I came to sort of understand deliberative democracy through urban planning. Through some urban planners that I read about in the Netherlands and how they were dealing with disputes about open spaces. So that sort of said, okay, well wait a second, what's going on here? And that sort of thing. So I'm not to say that I understand that there's, you know, great thinking. I think highly of Ed Soja and the notion of spatial justice and that's, so those are, it's not, I didn't mean to damn completely theory, but, well, you know, both. A little bit of both. But a city manager may not have read it, read that, you know what I mean. And I think the, one of the, here's a funny, the big sigh is always usually a story about public art, by Rex, anybody that does manage public art projects like in my city, it's inevitable that there are always a contention. It may be around an aesthetic, it may be over whose story you're going to tell. And it may not be over a space per se of building, but the idea of sort of figuring out what I said earlier about listening, learning and looking in order to feed your knowledge. And then when I, if it gets really, really naughty and I can't resolve it through dialogue and deliberations, I sort of also throw down this. And again, it's another political notion that comes from Shantoumouf, about the notion of negotiated equivalences that you try to create a chain of equivalences. So I can say to Joe, I'm sorry you lost today, but Joe, you're going to be working with Mary and maybe a year from now and you two may win and you two lost today. So the idea that you sort of think about equivalences longer and you teach how to live with, not animosities, but with antagonisms and not try to make it all happy pace. And, you know, it's sort of like that's what you demand as a professional when you come to the table and say, this is how it works. You may win, you may lose, you may hate me, you may love me, I don't know, but we're trying to get the best we can out of this situation. So, you know, when I say what are the ethical principles of place making, it really, I want my constituency to decide, is this just, is this equitable? You know what I mean? And if it takes a really long time, it takes a really long time. The beauty of being into someone, there's no money, there's plenty of time. Anybody else? And then you, Michael. Oh good, welcome. And highly influenced by Ray Oldenburg, the great good place and a guy named Dan Chemis, Missoula Montana who wrote Politics and Poetry of Place. And it's in my favorite place in the United States is Bryant Park. Because I think Bryant Park does a couple things. One is the chairs are all movable, and there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. And everybody is welcome. There's no segmented component. And it creates conversation. I think the fundamental, for me, the fundamental issue is to create the great good places. Very simple. That simply encourage conversation in the raising of the quality and the character of the interaction between people. So I'd like your comment on that. And that comes from someone who is both saddled with the mechanics of building a city, but also cares a great deal about the interaction that shapes the city. You onto something that's really wonderful about placemaking practices. That space is usually being animated by artists. They're reading, they're doing a... That space became alive. Artists came in as placemakers to do something. And usually when that happens in any kind of like the dancers in the world or theater productions that are happening outside of the 99 Seats in a park, those become ways in which you start to learn how to behave. Or you get invited to, you know, feel comfortable in this open space. I go there as a funder of the funder. I'm always looking like, okay, for example, we just did this last weekend. There was a syclovillia, which is sort of like a festival or whatever. They close down a lot of streets in the city and they close down a lot of streets in the city and you get to ride your bike around. So we did all, we supported a dozen little pop-up art experiences. So that animated the street more than just hey, Joe, how are you doing today? But oh, let's stop and do this. So I think that's really where arts become really, really an important part of building that sense of place. Hello, sir. I would like to ask if in your mind, if a place can be made successfully without a simultaneous rise in economic indicators that are traditionally looked at to define a successfully growing economy. That's a good question, sir. It's so funny, you know. Oh, buddy. You know, let me try to figure out how to answer that. I'm not opposed to economic growth. Coupled with economic development is human development and that's what I privilege. And so I want to make sure that the people in a place feel that they're validated and I gotta believe that once you are validated, money falls. I mean, you're going to be asking for jobs. You're going to be asking for a living wage. You know, I mean, when I think about, it's so funny, I, you know, I think, I don't know, I was reading something and maybe it was about I don't want to damn them completely art place, but there's like I have this vex feeling like I want to let them, but I don't know how because I don't get them. And so when they were talking about equality and stuff like that, I fucking like, you know what, if you go to the Mexican food city, the Mexican supermarket on the west side of my town, at 6 o'clock in the morning to 6 o'clock and 8 a.m., it is the most vital part. Day workers are there, people are dropping off their babies, they're buying tamales for the day, whatever they're doing and then it's dead. And then again, at 6 a.m., it's another hub. So, you know, I'm thinking about so that sort of I guess I tell that story because I think there's a, the images that are sort of foregrounded through art place don't have, don't, don't tell that story of that vitality. And so, um, placemaking them to me sort of becomes a little, when I want to unhinge it from location I want to look at hives. Where there are hives of activity and how that makes places. Um, and so, that's kind of running out without me. There's a great study by Marx during the students' see for Philadelphia. So, uh, gentrification happens when there's generalized pressure on land values and other outside people who want to come in. And that, that is a concern even in, you know, neighborhoods that start with equity. But what they found in Philadelphia, since nobody really wants to move Philadelphia, that neighborhoods which had artists or cultural facilities were more diverse, safer, and that there wasn't any, uh, there wasn't any generalized rise. I mean, they were, there were better places to live, but there wasn't any of this, you know, the thing that happened in Soho, which has become so famous and everybody thinks it happens everywhere. That if you put a few artists in there and then suddenly those, that doesn't happen in most places. Let me just sort of, um, and then like, Gregory, um, I've been thinking about this the other day, about sort of like, um, we have, we have, I have an art time grab and I'm working with, uh, the warehouse district with a lot of artists. I'm lucky in the sense that the artists were mobilized, um, in which they own three pieces of property. Three or four of these. Four. Anyway, they own a number, they own. And that's good. So that in somehow their identity and their, their, that, that cultural production can still happen there. But it, it, it was really interesting because um, I was talking also with a colleague, Deborah Cullen, who runs Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco and they moved into a big development complex and at fifth admission and people are like this about it, um, and it's working with a big time developer. But I think what's happening is sort of a reimagining of a workforce that was always in buildings that were already workforce buildings. Yeah, there were warehouses and now they're no longer warehouses. There might be for creative entrepreneurs. So the, that displacement is not so much of, of moving people out of their homes. It's a displacement has different kind of workforces coming to being. However, it's, it's not to say that gentrification happens and, and it's, I mean, it's really, really hard to sometimes stop the force of speculation culture. It dominates America. It's capitalism. And so it always will figure out how to get what it wants. And so I'm going to go back to when I, when I bring all my grantees together um, and about once a year from the place initiative and I ask them the question well, you know, I have to evaluate you. How do you want to be evaluated? I don't have time. I don't have time. There's no money, but anyway, long story. Ultimately at the end of the day they, they say how are you clocking it? How do you know you're having success? And I said ultimately they, they, they think about agency. They think about the communities they're working in sort of wherever they are and do they feel like they began this project and now over here they feel like there's more agency. So it goes back to what Mako was saying. If a group of working poor people feel at the end of a creative place making project, that they can demand fresh fruit, fruit in their supermarket and supermarket, they have agency and they will move forward and help to realize maybe that market. I'm not sure. But that's sort of hypothetical about, you know, understanding what could happen. Gregory. I think that's a really nice segue into this question that I have that's about recognizing you have agency and leadership. I think one of the things that was really interesting about the project that you spoke of early on the Bill Mackey project about urban the urban planning for Tucson was in addition to asking the community what they wanted in their community, he had since the early 1900s he had every master plan that had developed for Tucson in that room on the walls that could be studied. So you got to see the evolution in history of how those notions of leadership and governance and who is consulted had played out in the community those people lived in. It was a great forum for that. That leads to this question that I want to ask you specifically because we've been in a cultural time when all the sort of agencies like yours, the Tucson Pima Arts Council and in many cities are tightening their belts they're cut down to a third, a quarter, a tenth of the budget they used to live on. They are not in the site of agency on their own to do the work that you are managing to do in a place that doesn't have a lot of resource. When I see it up here we are doing interesting things up here. It's coming out of the university it's coming out of different types of cultural institutions and still out of some of our agencies but not at the same level. You're making a commitment to go after a Kresge grant to go after major funding to support the artist creators in your community. I want to know how you are doing making that commitment aligning your support and your community in part and how your history is someone who's been in and out of those inside roles, you know, you're a consultant then you're a... How have you pulled that off and what do you have to say to the people in the room to the students in the room about stepping up to leadership in a time like today? I think about my mom I mean that's the simple answer she's the most wilful person I know she taught me how to be wilful she taught me how to continue to proceed and how to ask and to be smart and to really do be thoughtful and not to be blowhard and try to listen to a constituency you serve the place initiative came out of a cultural plan that we did I don't know 8, 9, 10 years ago and we decided then among the stakeholder community which was about 500 different people from all over the city to create this initiative to celebrate what we felt was the distinctiveness and identity of our community and in some ways the place initiative which kind of basically supports civic engagement work came out of a strong community arts move that's always been around in Tucson but you know as my I mean like I said oh god you know I've lost 45% of my public funding in the last since the recession has hit it's been devastating I've been profoundly lucky to kind of form these partnerships with the Kresge Foundation the Open Society Foundation Nathan Cummings Foundation came forward and helped me I saw in the program that there's going to be like a pitch section let me tell you my pitch story it's never an elevator it's an escalator I'm at a conference in Seattle and the Americans for the Arts Conference five six years ago and it was on the we're going up to the ballroom on the fourth floor you know all these people are just getting on the escalator I get on the escalator I happen to be right next to this this African American woman I introduce myself to her Roberto Bdorei from Tucson oh I'm Regina Smith I'm from Michigan and I said well what do you do oh I work at the Kresge Foundation and I said oh interesting she said oh I've been studying I've been studying Tucson I said really what for you have one of the highest percentage of poverty in the US oh yeah I know that so anyway we were just sort of like we're going like this up four flights of escalators and I told her what I had and she said that sounds very good let's continue the conversation so I pitched it to her in an elevator where you have 30 seconds you actually need longer if you have a complex subject and you need to really know how to tell your story and have a dialogue but I think I can tell you why I'm trying to read the pulse like every private foundation you know that's fading my relationship is not over but it's fading I want to look at cross sector work so place making is perfect place making means that now when I look at place making I'm talking I talk to the mayor, I talk to housing and I say I want you to put me into your agenda find a place for place in your place, your agenda so that's kind of where that sort of tempo anything else we have time for maybe one or two more maybe some of the students in the room might have some questions for Roberto is it possible or I guess maybe what does it look like to have to work on having talking about being creative and going into different types of communities and stuff without active engagement people of color and other people in those communities I guess it sounds kind of a basic question but I see it all the time say it again is it possible or what does it look like to have to try to to go into different communities to try to be creative work in there try to offer agency without the creative ideas of people of color or women depends which neighborhood you're working in obviously I read that poem at the very beginning because I'm very I think of the desert a lot I love the desert and I think of who's been the first peoples of this part of the world you begin every relationship with humility you have to who are the local knowledges and who are the gatekeepers I can go to a Pasquayaki moment and it could be really interesting you know you talk to A while A is not authorized to tell that story B is and C says no D is and you could sit in that circle for a long time and before you find out really what you need to know what I was telling you the story about the folk life school I mean I think there is a oh man this is so complicated because I think that folk life score obviously the indigenous community that are in urban Tucson have been so colonized so many times and the subject reads too so much they're just the defense is the mechanism is just silence you know and so I get it when I work with my Latino community it's really interesting first of all I don't know how to solve all the problems I listen here's a project that we did that was actually really I guess the question is sometimes now I'm speaking as a person of color in this field I always say I need more of you don't bitch to me Jose or Maria I want you to be the damn leader you come to that table get up and speak to mayor and council become the president of the neighborhood association give me grief because you don't like that public art I'd rather have you do that than call me up once a year and say you're not serving me you know man the project is sort of a certain agency and but you know it's the trauma of racism you know my grandpa never had his papers this is a funny story I don't know why I'm telling you this one but and he probably was he was probably amnestyed many times over because he came over the beginning of the 1900s and you know it was so weird and then I just was thinking like you know I have an odd history I have an odd history which I'm sort of skirted in and out of the academy but you know I never had a college degree until I turned 50 I decided I better get one I had been a Getty Scholar I had been a Rockefeller Fellow but without a BA and got far and all that stuff and I had a ticket I had a pause and say well what's this and that you know why am I afraid of papers I'm an undocumented egghead I told myself and I better get my papers in order if I'm going to have agency so the trauma of racism not west and of Mexican Americans I see that a lot now I'm just thinking from the heart because I see those Latino kids being streamlined to prison just like that you know and if the art is all about sort of self affirmation art I'm totally cool with it but when your book is banned from school from your school shit I mean you know it's like what is going on here excuse my language it's sort of like you know that sort of that's in which you really need to employ arts to be as liberating emancipation liberating tool and it can we're out of time for questions but I'm sure you can catch each other in the lobby and we'll take a five minute break and return for our workshop with Laura Zabel of spring work for the arts thank you so much thank you