 So everyone, thanks so much for joining us this afternoon. We're sort of nominally here to celebrate this day and divide the Avery Review title and now architecture against the Avalokra Presidency. And I'm really delighted that we have almost the entire Avery Review team in the architecture building area that never happens. We have Melissa Anderson, who just rolled in from the airport, Katelyn Blanchfield, Shimi Bows, who's joining us this year, Jordan Carver, Jacob Moore, and Elizabeth Arkham-Lewitt. And so this is an object that's taken a few different forms and so we're really happy to be sending it out into the world. You can look for them, you can find it at the table at the back for a wonderful studio presence. But really what we'd like to do today is to have a conversation about writing and dissemination. And for that, we really couldn't be happier to have with us Karen Abrams, Kadabari Bakshi, and Anu Siddhi to share some of their thoughts with us and to engage us all in the conversation. And so we'd like to keep the proceedings, I think, as casual as possible, but because I suspect everyone in the room is really invested in thinking about how architectural discourse can become more responsive to the situation that we find ourselves in. And I toyed with reading a paragraph into the introduction but I think I will leave that for you to encounter in the book itself. I think we would come out with some of the conversations. But so the format for the day is that we're going to hear from our three speakers who've really been given a total broad license to talk about really what feels urgent to them right now. And then they'll be joined in conversation by a review editor's Cable Blanchfield and Jacob Moore, along with you, the audience, who will have a lot of thoughts and questions. So first up will be Karen Abrams. Karen has been doing really incredible work as the Community and Diversity Affairs Manager at the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh, where she's helping disenfranchise the residents of Pittsburgh's historically active American neighborhoods become more actively engaged in questions of real estate and economic development that impact their lives. Karen was a last-term interlocutor at Harvard GSD and she's a Harvard native with degrees from the slippery rock University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia. And Karen's contribution to the book was a really brilliant critique of some of these sort of colonizing tendencies of the rhetoric around facing the... Karen will then be followed by kind of our Bakshi Home Street well known quite too well. Kenabari is, of course, visiting us from across the street over at Barnard where she's a professor of practice in architecture. It occurs to me that everybody must always say that a G-staff would always have to laugh at those I got here. Good one. She pursues work that moves between architecture and he is often addressing questions of contemporary globalization. And you also know her, of course, as one of the collaborators in the who builds your architecture collections. And other projects that I've gotten the chance to see are the recent air drips from the also architecture triangle and her extremely poignant drawn-to-redraw projects that I'm beginning to have in mind. And then finally, we will hear from Anu Siddhi. Anu received her PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU and she's currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. She's finishing up a book titled Architecture of Humanitarianism The Dodon Refugee Caps and Emergency Urbanism in History which I've been honored to see her present on even other pedagogical settings. And she's a really incredible thinker on questions of spatial politics and has also been engaged in editorial ventures of her own in that regard. And I'm delighted to add that she'll be joining the faculty across the streets at Barnard next year. And Anu wrote about the moment's recent insecurity that she might have seen last year for the book. So we're so delighted to have Karen come over here as friends, collaborators, readers and thinkers who we admire. So please join me in welcoming Karen. Thank you so much for being here and I wanted to thank the crew at Avery Review, James towards Jacob the three days I called for their help in writing this essay. I write grants for myself and community members in Pittsburgh. I help write policy for counseling members to help train or write plans. So this was definitely a challenge for me and it was a wonderful experience and I'm going to talk much about the article about what inspired me. It's like a little fellowship I had a chance to do what I wanted to do and when James approached me this topic basically came up. And something that I've been living with all my life. I grew up in Harlem in the 80's and 70's so I'm teaching myself. But a lot of the work that my life was spent around making a property and neglect in Harlem in the 70's and 80's and even in the 90's a little bit I studied African history and colonialism and UVA and developing work in Pittsburgh. So my life kind of came together in this article. I'm studying how I live and work so this is an exciting opportunity for me. I'm going to take you a little bit through my background and how I got to where I got the singing ideas to what I grew up with. So I took some of these photos from Google. But during that time and when you're young and you're living from here but you haven't seen what was here before or the development that's happening in the last 20 years in Harlem and in parts of the Bronx and Brooklyn so this is not unusual to have seen this as a child's program I'm going to talk a little bit about searching for treasure. And as kids you can do what you can with what you have and we can have a lot but this is a lot of times you can find yourself thinking a lot and looking for stuff and playing around and there can be kids playing basketball on a clear out line but residents in these neighborhoods took time out to actually clear lots and it took time out of their busy days I'm dealing with what was left so this has been neglected you may see a big headline Ford tells him he dropped dead in the 70s and the state will escape to some rivers to escape the urban decay and so a lot of the African-Americans and Puerto Rican Cubans with the purpose of being in Harlem were left to really deal with this and it became part of our lives it became part of our lives it's basically nothing essentially so you know this is something that's not quite clear but because we couldn't really do anything we were with a playground or a mess we're dealing with obviously a huge community so people don't have their kids playing with this stuff anymore so people made spaces for themselves in these properties in the street you can find this place where you can play scales and hopscotch in the middle of the street and we also really did a lot of urban ag is a big thing but African-Americans have been doing urban ag for a very long time so it's just been new branded with the new community and since they've been seized all of these functions I've heard from African-Americans that they can't think but I've heard people listening to roosters growling at 5 o'clock in the morning because if you were to be able to have you know animals it's part of that culture they brought to this country so I've got goats people growing all kinds of vegetables back in the day I think this is me, a Susan artist who did a lot of research in Chicago I believe and just to give you some context of how tall this is this is a four-story building so it was really high up so African-American artists use these blocks to do all kinds of art demonstrations as well so this is where I grew up it was originally called Shopper after Art 30 Shopper so part of like a lot of the place-making and branding is renaming things that have existed for some time that was kind of a recent, you know the culture that was dancing that's part of what I wrote about I'm not sure if you recognize William Perkins who's on the far right he was a district leader my mom's in the red very active members extended council and then kind of pulled to the district leader in Harlem and then subsequently the council and subsequently the state representative so it's an active political life in Harlem people tend to think that these neighborhoods go but people are very active but they're just not in power they didn't have a political plight they didn't have to have money to influence anything down in the city hall so we do what we could to bring the community amongst ourselves this is William Perkins' daughter this is right by Central Park so that's actually where my mom would be like get out of the house before the park so I spent a lot of my time in Central Park with my brothers this is just the seating there were three buildings there's a plaza this is a time when if you were being mad your neighbors would tell your mother or they'd spank you it was acceptable so in the woman that's in the was my neighbor Fufu and I posted this photo on Facebook a couple of years ago and his and her son who she was writing with time didn't know that he was in her belly so he wrote about growing up in Harlem and growing up in this community and really appreciating all the people like myself he knew me a little bit because he was tagging back when we left but really put this permission of community so he asked me actually to go into Old Timer's Day which is a 40 year old celebration in Spanish Harlem a lot of Puerto Ricans and African Americans living in that neighborhood would celebrate so last year I did go back the first time in years to Old Timer's Day if you ever get a chance to go I think it's in July between Madison Avenue and all kinds of amazing food but people go back to this neighborhood to celebrate this festival this is Fufu's mom I'm still here and he's my brother so this is our family reunion and these are some of our kids that we grew up with so my brother's friend Kenny has this shirt called the Burr because it was called a chamber class of Burr and I'm kind of next to it what they call it now heritage so really trying to maintain this culture that we grew up with as a challenge but we want to keep on to it so this is kind of what I wrote about I remember reading this article this is what happens when a new person it's usually wealthy white young people this woman was two I think she was probably in her 20s screaming about the ice cream truck maybe you ran into the ice cream truck when you were younger but we certainly did and we love to hear the sound of the ice cream truck coming down the street so we can yell at our mother and her friends this thing was one of the sketches comedy sketches about the ice cream man if you listen to that it's exactly what young urban kids did we ran into the ice cream truck we had our 15 cents to get our ice cream and it was a gathering of kids but our culture, she's just like this is too loud this happens in so many different ways in Harlem there are festivals and street events and people call the police to help people to quiet down so this is the whole show I'm sure that you all heard about this it was a rebranding by a realtor South Harlem and presidents fought against it they went to do spa ha and all these different highs and no one recognized any of these things we've been there for 100 years and we're like what is this spa ha what are you trying to do to us and this backlash is going to continue hopefully and even at Pittsburgh we're trying to fight it so this is Pittsburgh rather than now as James said I work for the city government and we're doing it on the authority you know I got to Pittsburgh and I was like my gosh I recognize this is where I grew up and this is back in 2008 and 2009 so this was around 15 years behind but you know it takes a lot of Pittsburgh to get things because you rapidly split attached from a lot of the higher systems just been creating like 15 years ago to get you to Pittsburgh so it's kind of isolated but you know this is my backyard this is like I lived three doors down from this so this is like somebody dumping mattresses this is the raccoon they come all the time they're constantly on trash raccoons, possums grand hauls are not really that cute because they're running around your yard and like you know divvy holes so this is basically my front door and somebody actually cleaned that lot out so like I'm going to have a white screen and I photograph it but if you could see that black hole thing this is a steel tower and that's downtown Pittsburgh I walk to work every day it's a 25 minute walk from here so this is a black permanently black neighborhood in Pittsburgh and it's 20 minutes from downtown and it looks like this and so there is a concern with the residents that this is going to be gentrified quickly so part of my job is to go to community meetings in the district talk about planning talk about what the change may be like really trying to figure out how to preserve the culture of this neighborhood it's a rich culture, they call it a little harm because there's a huge jazz in the arts but I was supposed to live there so many people that you probably know grew up in the district of Pittsburgh so I cook community events it's important these are a couple of people I work with this is one of the state senators who just reside and some friends of mine people who have become friends of mine since I've been interested in so much time just learning about Pittsburgh and learning about what their values and what their history means and how important it is they built this playground for the kids there so a lot of my work is really trying to get young people to really understand how to do planning and how to design work I don't have a degree in planning real-time I learned it on my own and it was my job because I had to but it was really important to have them think critically about what they're planning who they're planning for and why they're doing what they do because if you want to make pretty buildings that's great but I've been thinking of people who've been living in them because I felt they've been thinking of people's lives and you really have failed in your job as an architect or a planner or designer so that's what I really want to get across to them like who are you building this for how is this going to put their lives how can it be a part of this process how can you include that so what we started doing was these community toolkits and so I got young, mostly African-American designers and architects who have a program at CMU a point in our university, a little architecture meeting with the residents to look at what they, you know, the typical charrette but we talked critically actually to charrette about what they learned and about what they were surprised about and really tried to make sure that they had a lot of communication with community members with council people this is one of the interns she did this really amazing plan for the same we talked to the residents I also work with high school students I also work with high school students because I think it's so important to maybe plan but we're planning for 15 year olds like why aren't we including young people in our planning and even our architecture work so we just broke that cast legislation around a land bank it's supposed to be a land bank and it was funny because they're the high school students mostly African-American they interviewed about 106 people asking them who the land bank was they know who the land bank was so these young people got to teach residents, adults about what a land bank is they did not even a video of it their parents showed up, their friends showed up their community members showed up and you can find it online it's called Land Bank 412 but they do a land bank video basically demystifying the legislation around land banks and what they are and how does the impact on the residents who live behind their favorite property and what I also do which is not part of my job but it kind of is, I have parties at my house I get people who never speak to get together and talk about things so I have a proof from a friend of mine who said some people have junior bay, I think some people have board rooms and golf courses we have cans in our garden and it's interesting because people from the mayor's office people from my office have also come over foundation community my neighbors have come by and they would be drinking eating and talking and there's no people on the great personal level that impacts how you treat people and how you treat people and how you mention the bills for people because if you know somebody you know how important things are to them and that makes your job even more important it's not just the job it becomes part of who you are and part of your passion and so what I really want architects to be passionate about what they do not because they only make nice things but they make things that are important to the people who they are using whether they're wealthy or not whether they're black or white or Latino or whatever so I'll leave you with that I'm sure you'll have questions thank you so much again the first slide is okay so thank you all for coming thank you for the introduction and I actually do like coming to this particular room specifically I think I've gotten kind of attached to it with all of these ongoing discussions and so many events that are going on here especially as opposed to the larger auditorium downstairs and the 125th street campus I think there's some really really very poignant things and debates that go on in this room so it's always a pleasure to be here so I just wanted to start I think first of all congratulations on this book yet another book I think as a kind of a collection done by the the Publications Office and the AFB reviewer I think that this is really a great addition and as I was going through this I think two things really struck me first is the power of this book as a kind of a rapid response I think it's a fantastic collection that captures the moment a very specific moment I would say which would be for just a few months after last November, is that right? I don't know exactly the timeline but I think it was just a few months after last November and what were then the emerging territories I would say of the very rapidly changing political and cultural dynamic and so I think that this is a very kind of a precise slice to that dynamic of exactly what was happening then so then starting from Ananya Roy's immediate response that also came up very very quickly on day four or something again I don't know the exact timeline to the AIA's embarrassing response what has been characterised here and then to the architecture's obvious response to that response and then the discussions that went around all over or some of the campuses in century cities and to the reflection I think by Ananya Roy on the heartland I think these were kind of terms that just started coming out very quickly and I think it was really interesting to see these I mean I can keep going but I don't want to kind of go through the whole book here but I definitely recommend but this was a really good collection also in terms of its format which is short format short plan and I think that kind of capacity to talk very directly to the issues but also to the idea of response and descent so I think that that really should be noted here but again I think to continue to think about that another reaction I sort of immediately had especially in the light of the current events last few weeks all this seems so long ago even though we think of it as a rapid response but this constant barrage of these kind of events that keep happening you know and we haven't even completed year one yet I guess we're coming close to it so all this is just to say that I think this kind of strategy of rapid response and these type of projects really are crucial documenting what happened has another popular book says right now but in really capturing what was the descending response and also on many many different fronts what was the response and for us especially as a connection to the built environment and the university settings so I think with that in mind before I go on I also want to compliment the form the design of the book I think this kind of small book that we can carry around read easily and I think that particularly makes it almost like a manual I know our term we use a lot and you know but a specific kind of a manual that really is for reflecting remembering and I would say ways of thinking further but I think as the every review project this is something that maybe we can discuss further the kind of online format versus the printed format what happens when one goes to the other how quickly can that be done what is online format good for versus printed so this is an ongoing discussion that I hope you can address a little bit so I think that for today's discussion the terms offer or maybe just starting with the title of this panel which is writing in dissent so another way to see this book I think is perhaps saying writing in dissent and I think I say that term specifically writing in as opposed to writing in is because I think the contributors are specifically writing in or inserting you know as Karen's work I think just also pointed to their inserting responses to the current situation in whatever they do in their online research and their other activities but of course I think at the same time they're also they and I think we are looking for you know what is often being raised is the kind of systemic and systematic change that this particular this particular presidency calls for so in that sense I mean not just Trump but I think we also have to add here what's happening in other countries specifically in India in Turkey you know so this has kind of connections that you know need to be examined and so these first set of events that happen so quickly and their reactions to their unfolding impact they begin to give us already I think a kind of a toolbox and in especially some of the issues that are raised in this book a kind of toolbox that can be redeployed so I think it would be really interesting maybe perhaps to hear from the editors further than what you were looking for how did you come upon specific articles because I do think that they give you kind of some ideas about how things can be redeployed in kind of different circumstances so I think but you know on the I think they really do kind of underline even if they're kind of initial gestures perhaps towards a different kind of a politics and I think they start outlining for us the fact that descent is possible I mean we should know that already but you know descent is possible yet again and perhaps to also just repeat the ongoing mantra that another world is possible so with that I think what I wanted to do was since James didn't read many I will I'll read two kind of statements from the book that in some ways kind of encapsulated the kind of project of the book and they also kind of give us perhaps a way to kind of move forward and in that sense I think the first and in that sense I would actually want to also highlight the name and now which I think we should pay attention to because this and now is going and knowing so think about that while I'm reading that the statement these statements so the first one that I wanted to highlight is in Shayla Shayk's article on translating jointologies and here I'm quoting from her article where she says for many the present woman calls for a new language a new political practice that entails effective communication on a municipal, national and international level through forums that we're all speaking with one another through antagonism and about uncomfortable matters work then of our critical lexicon work new terms are needed work currency through the academic terms current are work currency through the academic terms currently at our disposal above all in the Euro-Western Academy hold work formations of power and governmentality might be overlooking and then the second statement which is a very very short one which is in Manuel Schwartzberg his very point and speaks piece on complexity and contradiction in infrastructure on the Schumacher term hegemony and this is perhaps particularly close to home for student in architecture but just in a very short statement and I encourage you to read the article because this might seem that it's taken a bit out of context but it says for Trump is a warning call to think and act even more critically so I'm really particularly I think in terms of extending the project of this book the two things that I'm really interested in is this idea of what is our new critical lexicon that we can move forward with and finally how do we act even more critically and so I think that for that I also wanted to emphasize that this critical lexicon and our human thinking more critically must include and in this case I want to also add other forms of dissent that particularly draw in are made visible with drawings, data, images, films, etc so the writing and project must include all these other aesthetic forms that we particularly study in the schools of architecture and other kind of visual disciplines so I think that that what I thought I just wanted to bring three examples of what's going on and these have been kind of going around but three forms of very recent forms of dissent that really caught my attention in particular how they were using certain techniques so the first one is what Oxfam did very recently did anybody see that if you haven't seen that then I'll show the video also it's just a two minute I think we have time for a two minute and something video so this is actually Trump's opinion influence that you see and that now is an Airbnb so what Oxfam did is that they rented this Airbnb when the UN discussions were going on and they hosted some refugees that they stayed in and they made a video so since you haven't seen it I think you should see the video or most of you it looks like thinking peacefully to me the American dream is having a safe and stable home and being able to accomplish your goals and having those opportunities and now it's starting to be a friend there are so many parents non-dad who are holding their kids across journey all these different countries and so we're just trying to do the best for the children so we're here today and the President Trump send a message President Trump but also world leaders that they need to do more to help refugees we are on track right now to have the deadliest year for refugees and migrants that are trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea and you've got to right now there are over 1 million refugees fleeing the home of the insides to help refugees people can contact their government leaders and it's just that they welcome refugees to provide assistance at home so the next project I wanted to highlight is you see the logo at the bottom but I don't know if you can see but it's another organization that just has come up in the last 6 months I don't remember or maybe you're here but I don't know whether it's edgy which is edgi and that stands for environmental data and governance initiative and their mission here and I'll just read it which is it is an international network of academics, non-profits mostly university based addressing potential threats through environmental energy policy and through the scientific infrastructure built to investigate, inform and enforce so what they've been doing this coalition is just looking at first of all looking at all the federal sites particularly EPA and NOAA and NASA and getting all the data that years and years of data that they have making sure that redocumenting them and kind of storing it another thing they've been doing is doing these interviews with federal employees mostly actually retired employees that used to work for EPA and other federal agencies and kind of documenting their work and research but the one thing I wanted to particularly kind of mention here is going back to this idea of lexicon the way they present their work and the way they talk about it so they don't talk about just kind of saving the data they say data rescue that's their mission they really say their main mission you know I think it says here it's that the EPA is under siege that this is a threat and edgy which is this organization is monitoring these federal government acts that are potentially devastating for short term and long term policies so they have these kind of hackathons they've been doing with because it is actually lots and lots of work to kind of come through these websites and get data and kind of make these deposit depositories but through these interviews etc. they bring a historical context to these federal agencies of what their data have ever formed etc but also one can say that they're kind of producing evidence, the kind of evidence that might be useful in the future so I'm kind of really interested in this sort of new terminology that they're introducing and others to the idea that it's under siege that this is a threat data rescue data refuge evidence etc so I think that that here they just added a report if anyone's interested you should go to their website and download the report which I'm just beginning to kind of study because I'm doing it as James mentioned I'm doing this project on climate data etc aeroglyphs where we're working with NASA scientists to think about how this data is envisioning for us the impact and the effects of climate change but again this is the what the idea under siege Trump's assault on history and testing and then the last, this is just a quick example that I wanted to share some of you might have seen this was in the New York Times I think in September I didn't have the date after or environmental floods etc and I think there was a very very succinct description here about your questions about climate change answered and really really very concise precise etc under three headings what is happening what could happen what could we do very simple really informative but I do have an issue with it can somebody yes what I might have an issue with students in architecture schools I would say most of you I have issues with these images I think these if we just look at them they are the most mundane I think but now generic descriptions of what is the very precise succinct description this is where we working in the visual culture kind of discipline come in what is this new visual culture that has capacity to make visible for us the kind of systematic injustices that are going on and it's a particular challenge and especially with respect to climate change and before you work with somebody like Rod Dixon on slow violence that the kind of temporal and the slowness with which these effects and especially when we start thinking about the asymmetries of the kind of impact of climate change that how you make that visible or even enraged I think that's a real challenge so I believe with that thank you so thank you so much Karen for those excellent talks and giving us a way to start this conversation and thank the editors also for setting up this opportunity to think a little bit about this little project that they've been working on and how they've been working on it in the context of a book launch I thought I would talk today about how we read I'm particularly grateful to have about it for in some ways setting up a way to read this book and I think I'm going to maybe take a very different approach that we can all talk about afterwards but I've been very interested in how we read and I think I'd like for all of you to think about reading as a form of action I've been thinking lately about the difference between consumption and engagement and how reading can misrepresent itself as the letter when it's actually the form so there's this issue of a kind of book this volume is and I think I've already explicated it very beautifully this is a volume that has the intention to be polemical it comes in the material form of a pamphlet the original essays in the journal too or a small book which is the actual book that they've made the editors have made and my sense is that its publication is shielded from the politics and economics that typically spur radical criticism journalism or editorial activities but we can come back to this in a moment and I'll invite the editors to discuss it but for now I'd like to ask why these kinds of material forms the pamphlet the quick writing remain important and are they still reminders of a form of resistance in the context that we are in today so particularly under the umbrella of writing and dissent I really wanted to think about reading as a form of dissent in order to think about the space of literature as a space of action I'd first like to think about material spaces of protest where architecture was drawn to re-read an essay a really lovely essay by Judith Butler called Bodies in Alliance and Politics of the Street if you haven't read this essay it's in a volume 12 sensible politics edited by Magnum Glockman and Gates McKean if you haven't read that volume it's a really important one if you're interested in these subjects her essay was written just after the Philippine Arab Spring demonstrations and it discusses the solidarity of bodies in reconfiguring the material environment and co-producing public space so I'll just read a little bit of her essay these demonstrations were indeed these movements are characterized by bodies that come together to make a claim in public space but that formulation presues that public space is given that it's already public and recognized as such we missed something of the point of these public demonstrations if we fail to see that the very public character of the space is being disputed and even fought over when these crowds gathered so though these movements have depended on the prior existence of pavement street and square and have often enough gathered in squares such as Tabir where political history is potent it's equally true that the collective actions collect the space itself gather the pavement and animate and organize the architecture so Butler's argument makes the case that architecture as the realization of democratic space is a mirage the built environment functions rather under conditions of uncertainty as a platform for negotiation and contestation or in other words it's under development and the Avery review would like us to reflect upon those developers I think for the purposes of this discussion it's useful to understand that Butler's argument situates architecture as a protagonist with agency rather than a scene upon which politics are active I think for this audience this argument is easily consumed but I want to ask how well this argument is engaged the answer to that is individual of course but I'd like to imagine that the space of literature is being negotiated just as vigorously as Butler imagines the built environment in the throes of public demonstration that its pavements are being gathered its architecture is being enacted so what does that look like for the texts you read some of that is a matter of calling into question who has speech under what conditions speech is enabled what forms it takes these are questions for publishers and editors so I'll ask the editors again to think about their book but for their volume I wrote an essay that took to task the context for an exhibition on the architectures and material culture of displacement which was represented much more as a category than a condition the essay's overarching argument was that the museum of modern art behaves much as a colonial archive this powerful institution selects and chooses histories it privileges certain narratives that it ignores others it preserves some in perpetuity and offers others a fleeting glance this exhibition fell into the latter category and it's been criticized widely by many for its disturbing manifestations or apoliticizations of people and things that should hardly be thought of outside the politics of disenfranchisement and the potent solidarity of bodies however given our sad times marked by our developer presidency I argued that it is precisely these open and compromise institutions that hold the best chance of capturing histories and capturing archives even if it's through the fleeting remnants of temporary exhibitions rather than executing a post-truth context they formulate the conditions for pre-truths so what I think we propose today is that we think in the same light about how we are reading our selection of texts what speech they enabled and what histories they archived do all university publications represent asymmetrical power and if so what narratives might they actually preserve inspire themselves what happens when we engage with them rather than consume them it's not a new idea the political promise of reading is action but it's worth underscoring and I hope we get to do that in discussion today so I would like to turn it then over to the editors thank you I think all the speakers so much for such wonderful talks of addressing the project of the book and with your contributions to engaging with it and works around these questions and I guess to pick up a little bit on something that we were talking about with the inception of the book itself in that moment which it came about a very specific moment and one that we were definitely we passed and we're not in anymore and so in the anticipation of this event we were thinking about that editorial moment in which we were starting to put together this call and how to react to something that you know you absolutely can't not react to but also that so many are and how to create a discursive space a little bit different than the editorial space that have emerged just in the way of the election and so thinking about kind of the temporality of reaction and of response and this sort of like fast-twitch immediate sort of reactionary response to Trump and to that political moment versus something that would be a bit slower and that would allow us as racial practitioners and as citizens to think maybe a little bit more carefully and over a longer time span of what this might mean and now several months later we think back from like oh my god we should have just reacted quickly because so much has happened so quickly that's so awful but then I also realize that that's kind of the mode in which our president now wants us to react so but to speak a little bit to how to kind of balance these different timescales and how we're thinking about dissent and about architecture how to kind of be there on the front lines right away but also be understanding where we might end up or where we might need to be three or four years down the line I'm still thinking I didn't give a lot of context to my piece when I was presenting really wasn't specifically about Trump it was about architects and for so long there's been a dissent in the communities of color around architects that has been completely ignored and it's to some extent still being ignored so and then the immediate rush to you know you know the AIA chair and boards and the letter and it was like it immediately seemed like we have to this type of dissent and I was like here we go we have to kind of follow behind but everybody's ignoring these communities so my question is always do we have to go along with this or do we really kind of stop architects and say wait a second what have you been doing for these communities for so long so that's a difficult question because I think architects are a very small community but who do you bring along to this argument and that will figure out like how it takes because I think people assume that you know if the love people are forget something that will happen more quickly and that's quite possible but if you don't have people if you're ignoring a set of people who have actually been even ignored for so long there's a lot longer for things to happen because why should we care about what architects are thinking about what we're thinking about so I see that in conversations because I think people just thought it's Trump and I've obviously been watching Trump, I mean I grew up in New York I know who this person is just from how I grew up I grew up in Schomburg I know those kids and when you look at that piece in the New York Times there's a person who we've seen before we've seen this person before so I think that he means that work and we don't think it's ever going to change and because obviously there's always a hope for it to change but even if the dissent is so intense even the next election no one's after that I don't think people think about the fact that they're issued to be recognized in a way that people want them to be recognized and that they are recognized in certain circumstances like we're talking about Trump now and the dissent that the community is having against what he's trying to do and what he is doing but you've got to take that argument beyond the classroom and beyond these laws and really go to the communities and really figure out how to really make a move towards it it's just like a it's more a time and space I was thinking about what you were saying about creating a space of discourse for this and I think all of the problematics wrap up in that and what that space is and what its boundaries are and I was thinking too about Kovner's publication about and now when I ask why launch just one issue why not decide that this is a 12 month project where every issue is an and now because I think we all could have predicted back in November that it would be that I would continue to do so or why not launch a project where the writers are not from the academy specifically not from the academy but perhaps from spaces that have much to say to architects and this is a space of discourse that actually enables that there are like a thousand different ways that we could all rewrite our journal for you which is not about the goal here but I think what I would hope that all of you students would think about is a little bit about not just what it means to do something fast but what it means to do something slow and that sometimes the very slow project is an architecture it's the epitome of the slow project actually plan to build a building someday you will learn that it won't get done for the next 10 years but I think that tracking that into the space of discourse can radically change things and I think what's been wonderful I think in my years that I've been in the academy I'm just about 10 years now I've seen a really a sea change in the awareness and openness in this field I think when I entered it it was a very closed canon and I've never even used the word canon anymore because I think it's being the concept has been challenging so many ends but I think that what hasn't changed and what has been speeded up more is the space of discourse and the way we read I mean I think we all get these things in our inbox from e-flux or media or whatever it is they're all beautifully written things that you know the authors have written in the span of 3 hours and yet where you're supposed to understand these things so quickly but I think that as practitioners who practice in a slow field this is a primary area where this is a skill set you can actually bring, this is a detail oriented sensitivity to time as a work process that I think you can bring to making descent somehow real in the real world just possibly echo that in different ways I think for me this the idea of temporality and have things have just changed not great but this kind of constant and it's not me just it's clearly emerging that this is the kind of a strategy, it's a political strategy of this fog this kind of fog of distraction and I think that's why what I think is being brought up here by Karen and this kind of systematic and systemic sort of underlying that long histories that we need to understand but all this kind of connects to that so that's kind of one, but on the other end I do see that in terms of like a descent I think it can and should happen at different scales and different temporalities and I think that there is a value to this kind of this is not acceptable you know, kind of very strong as you go and this is where the media of any journal you know, whether it's online or whether in all, like how do we use what's available to us in a way to be able to respond at these many different types of scales and things do happen I mean I have a very very small kind of example of you know, when Barnard's students and it really started from students so for those of you who are students here you know, the idea of divestment Barnard has a very small endowment and a lot of it is wasn't invested with fossil fuel companies and this really came from student pressure to investigate where the endowment is invested in and that resulted in, I mean this happened really within, I think I could be wrong but really made me a span of 2 years not 4, to set up a task force which included trustees and faculty and students and they went through and finally they have changed the company that manages the Barnard endowment and they have, you know, divested and of course all this to also say the reason that this could happen because the endowment is relatively small and the percentage of investment with the fossil fuel company is also relatively small so that was possible to do but I don't think that could have happened so quickly if the students hadn't really put this issue on the table and you know this issue so I think that I kind of want to say that we need especially if you think of it through the lens and the sense that we need to understand the long histories but also we need to find out we have all these new technologies and which, you know on the one hand they create this fog and obviously the politicians are using it very well to do that and so how do we turn that around how do we insert in things Yeah, this too don't let the conversation to be too much about like the format and the you know and we're looking to do a review but I could respond to this a little bit to our thinking about format I think specific to this project but also more generally I'd like to think personally that we tried to build something from the beginning that that allowed for like sort of knowing that they were coming from a space where at least initially and certainly to this day like there's sort of networks certain geographies, etc. that were going to be more easily covered or addressed and so we sort of tried to pick formats that were like very short set of rules that everything else was sort of like up for grabs that can hopefully change over time so anyway that's the online thing it's once a month, it's contributors the only rule for them is they write about work that's not theirs and yeah that's kind of it so I guess I'd like to think that every month of the review is a man now more or less at least in our heads so we're always totally and perfectly but like working to improve you know in terms of how we're encouraging people to write who we're trying to find to write etc. etc. so I don't know this year for example we're working really hard to like focus on the website because we, I think this is it more so than any of the other print projects we've done, we did a Chicago Biennial sort of broadsheet and we did a book on climates, all of the contents of those were online first more or less, this too so they have really just kind of served this the most pointedly to mark a moment in time, but the project project is still the website and sort of hopefully continuing conversation there that's a little more fluid so anyway that's that's um I don't know just kind of a silent about the process but I have a question that builds on I think I really appreciate Karen's presentation and I had worked on the essay too and it was really nice to like to revisit and I think the question about time I haven't thought about it until the conversation today but it fits like so obviously like you said so nicely in your essay because you say like yeah now but you know it's like in the 80s and 90s and it's um that I think puts all of this into really one perspective both locally and sort of historically and I have a question that I wonder it also goes to any question about sort of inside and outside the academy about an emerging field in the academy or a set of emerging fields maybe of whiteness studies or critical whiteness studies and I'm wondering if obviously you know race plays a huge role in the book as it does in everything that Trump does and um I'm wondering um I'm wondering like it's kind of a blanky question but I guess it's the newest question because it's like yet again you know probably some academics are or there's I wouldn't want to claim that this is like a discovery that whiteness is a thing that needs to be addressed um and yeah that's kind of it's like something that the academy in different ways and I'm speaking in generalizations but the academy is doing now to try and how do you contend with something like Charlottesville white identity politics that are made so clear in this election how do you contend with those at an academic level but that's something that outside the academy there's been plenty of critical preparatory for in a lot of other communities and that's not to say it hasn't been discussed in the academy but the formalization of that I think is maybe interesting for addressing in terms of this newness and who is talking about what when so the general question is how might we situate architecture and it's all it feels these are being whiteness studies um now and is that or is that like an unproductive question that you know is that like a not actually not a helpful thing to try and anchor it in some new field and maybe we've been contending with this thing for much longer and that's like not a critical lesson on that it's useful and that's a rambling question that Chris was just saying in architecture is there a productive way to think those things together yeah I actually had that in my first two years I mean I think that's a real that seems to be the only thing I've ever heard what's the question actually are you asking are you asking is it a relevant question today are you asking a kind of self conscious question like would we be ridiculous to be shedding light on this thing that obviously has required light shedding for so long I don't know if I understand the question is um in what ways is it productive to name architecture as a white field and like how does that it's a kind of an academic inside outside the academy question I'm wondering what productive paths forward are there in writing or otherwise in alternative practice in and around architecture that sort of address whiteness so to speak that don't claim any kind of I guess I'm caught up on the sort of newness of this but it's not new I'm wondering about how to sort of self consciously yes engage with this as an academic field while also engaging with longer histories outside does that make any sense can I just I'm only thinking it's on my mind because I've just come from Cambridge and as we speak I think the Black and Design Conference is going on and I I guess I've been privy to a lot of conversations about like asking the many different questions that I think are embedded in what you're saying and I feel fundamentally it comes down to the context of publication that we're talking about today but our question is not so much about whiteness but I think your question is about what is the academy for and how can the academy be productive if you're going to have a conversation among students in this classroom what how does it become a larger conversation or I think and I mean race is then de facto a part of the I mean I think it's one of the things it's a massive thing right now but that seems to me like it's a context question that has to do with the enclosure and what enclosure we're in and what role something like this publication or the project like Averview can play in demarcating those spaces I mean it's kind of a question for students in a way I feel like what on the design conference was an initiative of the student association and I think it's created a wonderful space for students there will be endless debate over whether it's a scholarly intervention or not and I mean there are many of us who will say yes everything should be a black and designed conversation like what isn't a black and designed conversation but I would say it goes for the white or what isn't it I was just going to talk about racism so black people and people call it in trade racism so I think I'm not sure with the white the particular fact I think it's about racism I think when I thought about like a conversation about whiteness it's just like it's about how wonderful white people are I mean I think you can choose so many different ways because our foundation for everything I mean that's what it is and so how can you have a conversation when you're dominating a conversation I mean it's a really bizarre way to think about it and I think racism is more a critique of racism and what the impacts of racism are opposed to whiteness because that's part of the conversation because black people I mean if you talk about racism what people will discuss racism in this work like it's like a black boom that we have to solve and I'm like we didn't invent racism so why are we trying to solve it and it's it's an uncomfortable kind of struggle because you know for so many reasons that I don't really understand because I'm not white but I don't think that it's a critique of whiteness or it's a critique of the white culture but it's a critique of the systems of high whiteness and that amounts and this is a very recent concept it's not something that's been around for so long it's like within 200 years old I mean it's not something so that's why I think the idea of whiteness is a I mean these are our ideas right but if you have an if you have an industry which like what percent of the population is African American and I'm not sure what the other ethnic groups or representation is how do you begin that conversation it really starts with a concerted effort to be kind of with people of color and within the conversations actually really give a good critique of it I'm asking that white people keep a take of architecture and race because they do but I think there are plenty of architects out there who are really far to think about it's with the hip hop architect Michael Ford and if there are a lot of design justice conversations happening but unless white people are critically involved in those things and really quickly think about their place in the world and what it means to be white then the conversation it's just left with it's just black and that's a really good question that you're asking I mean I think it's an important one I mean I was in Harvard in a budget school talking about this and their challenges a lot of the African American students who were in architecture have moved to planning because the field obviously is not addressing what they wanted to address these young people grew up like I grew up and now that architecture was the answer to this question of how do I change my neighborhood, how do I change where I was from and when they got to school there was nothing about the way to explore so it's a really important question because you're learning young people are learning in school of architecture and how it's more representation of their forms or are people actually going to school like why do people do this you want to create nice things but people want to really have an impact on their communities so it's a great question I mean I know how operating power is I really like parents sort of framing your own racism and I think that that is so you know you know kind of in some ways perhaps moving a little bit away from white and black but just racism is really the crux of what the question you're asking and I think it's really timely and I particularly say that because it showed up in Stephen Corbair if anybody watched Tennessee Coates was on Stephen Corbair last week and he in some version well he he was asked a similar sorry he was asked a similar question the reason I'm trying to be excited I don't really remember the exact question but you know his answer was that again the idea of the white identity as something you know who's white you know and how do you similarly as you would do the other way maybe define you know whiteness and how it's constantly changing so I just think that even you know that issue is very topical in a way and particularly in architecture I think that's something not something I mean the issue of racism I think that we should definitely start a discussion on that absolutely and perhaps with that in mind I think it would be a good time to open up to just a few good questions Hi I I actually want to address what has been something that reflects me towards the worried me and reflected it in an essay or paper today about speed about the problem we have in the academy with trained to have long dissipated reflections when the world around us doesn't see, doesn't react in that way and I'm asking a question or rather positing how can we overcome this conundrum of speed changes of speed from an article that came out today in The Guardian I don't know if you've read it on the makers of Google and Facebook apps that argue with likes many of them are now regretting what they've done they're coming out as a form of resistance saying we didn't realise that we've been culpable in changing the place of society almost possibly destroying democracy in the process it sounds so ridiculous but if you read through the article this seemingly innocuous thing about getting addicted to likes and response and getting live feeds and pushing or pulling information and getting new departments and all this sort of stuff this is leading to a culture which is always reactive always kind of on the edge of getting multiple reactions a day going on a photo of a 2009 today little intro photo and so the challenge I think with academia is also addressing an efficacy question how can we in the university respond through the paradigm that I've set up to respond slowly thoughtfully resist in a way that this is increasingly speeding up world where our anger is managed by others to take down a legitimate as it is and own it and reflect and reason through the background formulate think carefully respond carefully when there's seemingly no time to do so so I'm trying to ask how does one read through dissent how does one write a dissent in a praxis which is slow and thoughtful in a world which is increasingly discovering that attempt to do so I'm trying to I was thinking about this anecdote about the Barnard students and that my reaction to that was what's interesting is that yes what they did was fast but in fact what they did was slow down the process of investment and that I think your question is in fact about praxis and it's not so much about frameworks how one practices and whatever it is you're practicing your practicing history but I think the issue isn't the speed of the praxis it's the speed of it's making the things around you slow down I would be thinking about how to make that happen but I think it's hard to say in these fields that are somewhat creative because I feel like the answer is always individual some people will write something very quickly that will be fantastic and will really put on the brakes for everyone else some people will labor over something for 10 years and it will have the same effect but I think the question is a subject-object question but I don't know the one thing I was thinking sorry about that is the for me particularly I think is and I'm sure you and the the gardening article is I don't know if it goes there it mentions that these Google, Facebook these new technology these are all corporate owned these are corporations that are setting up that are influencing our democracy and so I think that but at the same time these are kind of tools so I think first of all I think in some ways I do feel like we cannot sometimes be outside these tools to really start unpacking them, opening them figuring out how to exploit them, manipulate them I think you can only go so far if you're sort of outside if you're not using them or trying to see how what to do with them I mean we are we are sort of being normalized as a public discourse as if that they are they are using them to corporations so I think that the first step is to figure out how do you use these technologies and how can they be put back into the public domain like why isn't the government and you know I mean it used to the fact that the internet came out of you know a kind of government military initiative or whatever you know I think so so that's one thing I do think that the particular role that universities can play and I think this came up in some of the work I've been doing with the air solution and the kind of data scientists that really all that data was what was on the government websites, federal websites really should have been in the universities I mean my collaborator the scientists I work with universities are a perfect place to be you know depository of these of this kind of data it shouldn't be with Google etc perhaps now it's emerging that it shouldn't be with the government either so I think that it's it's a way you know both with technology and institution institutions that we need different frameworks and possibly whether so I mean the academy is where that kind of thinking can take place you know what are the alternative or what are the other forms I mean it might take a long time but you know where else would this happen not that universities are corporations too but I actually couldn't resist when you were talking about the conversation but I think for me in a way this conversation it gets at the heart of some of our questions about editorial practice because the thing we're pursuing together is a sort of editorial practice and I keep finding my self feeling that some problems are always existing with each other in the same moment in the sense that October is already overdue and yet the April review is a thing that we've been trying to figure out how to run for four years right and so like we're slowly learning what it means to do this kind of work how we want to pursue it and hopefully we take what everybody's saying to be incorporated and I think the same goes for the critical essay that is a genre of writing and the people we've tried to do in embracing the critical essay is a return to some sort of like original sense that it's a way of testing a person's commitments against a particular sort of project of study and so the thing I'd like to imagine is that again as the sort of instantaneous reaction is happening and we have a new sort of figure in front of us to sort of respond to what it's doing is being fed through a sort of very long various sort of work over a sort of well-needed piece of dough that helps this kind of you know respond in a given space so I would say that for me as much as we can actually capture both sides of that temporality spectrum that you might be getting somewhere sort of interesting. Any other questions there? I mean uh I can't really see a question It was a question It was a question but as the conversations I think you've touched on so much first of all thanks for the great presentation Thanks in general for a room I just where I promise pretty much much more it's a way to by the end of it sadly to be scrappled to participate in order to present this new figure as far as I'm afraid to respond to that anyway I'm going to first develop the last question to deal with the speed and the performance but imagine the speed and performance so much as value because something being produced and being here with the particular kind of methodology that almost like makes it clear that almost the scientific or rigorous number of possessing that energy has the particular value but then it's not very accessible to people outside of the economy so there's that to consider there's a different kind of value I think placed in when I first read the title I was obviously thinking thinking of things like some of that literature and zines and so on and there's a notion of authenticity then because it's coming from certain voices and so that again has a different value and if we include things like digital and social media there's a different value according to volume and speed and flexibility and performance and I just wanted to know how you felt about value in terms of recognition for example let me see my favorite capital strongly about the fact that oftentimes digital media is less valued than in India especially if it's not a systemic situation like India really is but for most of the time digital media doesn't have that luxury it doesn't have that standard of authority and it's those things that I guess I wanted to ask you about with the authority value and just before I can't help but share this I wrote with you I very recently met a young practice on Kappa one of which is a practice of people object to a local front hooker that a couple of them trained in the US UK and so they've taken back a form of practice which was engaged in research and so on they've come to London and I have to say I'm quoting not to me but to me it's one of my colleagues to say we need your white faces in Haka to convince people to pay for engagement and research and stuff because they want to leave us so I mean just a question of racism I don't always want to marginalize age by a white authority but often it's self-imposed but that's very great you're about to question the value of authority I just had a quick comment about I think you're you're raising this question is quite precise because I think it does the idea of thinking through value is such a great way to frame it because what I've always felt with these pain verses online these kind of new social media etc that we also need to think about broadcast verses what this media allows and maybe the pain media doesn't is this sort of idea of two-way or multiple way multiple voices that is the specificity of this media I think we haven't really figured out especially in terms of thinking about dissent and certainly in architecture how we value that specificity of media what that allows us to do I think there's so much work to be done on that especially in relation to the kind of architectural field but also in publishing you have a website but it really is more of a broadcast platform how can you use it in a way that more responses are gathered I mean I'm sure you've all thought about a lot of different ways of doing that but I think we're just scratching the surface of this really new media which is compared to print it is new but I think there's so much work that we need to do that in terms of that value but the idea that it's on broadcast I think the media question is an absolutely great one because I was thinking when we were talking about I write brands I write policies I do all of these other forms of writing and I think that's one way I think we can really start to push our idea of dissent and writing is to think that writing is a mode, it's a tool but it takes a lot of different formats like critical essays on architecture at a journal doesn't mean we can't also try to help write policies in different senses or that we can't bring those policies then back into the journal and have that as a space to talk about them I also really love that point though but there's one way to write writing means lots of things it was a really nice way to start today it's like this conversation seems to be angered in this kind of writing there's a lot of the outdated architects are trained to identify the the education they get in certain areas so that's my life but that was the clue here there's more to it in the last second even though that happens to be our are there any questions out there if not maybe yeah I think with that it's probably time for moving on to today and so thank you very much so over to Zunz for