 My name is Kate Orr from the Director of the Columbia University Urban Design Program and welcome to this next installment of our urban design in practice lecture series. So we have students from Columbia University and from around the world and faculty as well. We're so glad to be able to convene in this online forum to think about, discuss and hear from some of the most prominent and interesting practitioners of architecture urban design today. We have a special special event today we have a professor in manual at Masu with us, who's joining us from Columbia, and I'm just very excited in particular to welcome Emmanuel because he's also joining the full time faculty of Columbia and we could not be more excited. He brings just an incredible dynamism and kind of a sensibility that brings together art, architecture, social justice and spatial practices that is completely compelling. By may way of a very brief bio and Emmanuel I hope you can expand on this in your remarks. He is a founding partner of the dynamic and emerging firm at well with his partner Jen would and when I say emerging it's sort of silly to say that an emerging is not a major exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art I suppose that moniker no longer applies Emmanuel, and congratulations. His ad war was part of this seminal exhibit called reconstructions architecture and blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art curated jointly with what with our very own maple maple Wilson here. So, he is also a practicing architect and urban designer with built projects in Addis Ababa and in the US. And today's focus, his lectures titled after property. So the focus of his lecture today will likely be very targeted on his urban design and urban research, and on kind of a new framing So this is my special message to Columbia architecture students, particularly in their first semester, you will have the pleasure of having Emmanuel as your coordinated coordinating faculty member for your fall semester so I believe, you know, many of the concepts that he addresses will likely be explored within the space of the studio. So, again, welcome, Emmanuel, and in terms of the structure and flow of today's lecture, Professor David smiley, who's here will be moderating the question and answer period and a quick thank you to Tal first for her organizational assistance and David Cohen with this lecture series. So, with that, I will turn it over to you Emmanuel with a very warm welcome, both for this lecture and to Columbia I believe this might be your first event. And thanks for joining us for this lecture series. Okay. Thank you for having me. And for the wonderful introduction Kate, can you guys see my screen. Okay, and you can hear me fine. Yes. Okay. So, I, what I would, I want to start off by saying, you know, exactly 10 years ago I was sitting in every hall as a student. And so this lecture has great symbolic value for me now returning as an educator in the same institution. So I'll be presenting two projects as provocations or strategies to operate against the vision of property. And these are, you know, of course, very large questions that require collective imagination across various disciplines and cultural realities. And I believe that 2020 should not be understood as an anomaly, but but a turning point to reframe our relationship with each other, and also our relationship to the planet. So in fall 2020 I taught a studio at the PSP called after property. The studio was very direct. How can we disentangle architecture from property. And how can we use this moment of global lockdown and uprising to disassemble the exploitative regimes of speculation and displacement that anchor the built environment. The studio challenge participants to identify temple slippages and spatial practices that carve out moments of liberation from them. The studio participants developed kind of collective intelligence that experimented with ways of seeing beyond the privatizing closer, building a world that was not tethered. This work was of course done by recognizing drawing and modeling ordinary spatial practices that operate against the hegemony of real estate speculation systems that value people over profit. In order to develop a dynamic archives spatial temporal basically construct and sample through reinterpretations of historical and contemporary interventions where every day struggles, begin to approach the surreal or even the sublime. The aim was to liberate urban design and architecture from their parent commitments to border. We modeled undervalued spatial practices that actively dismantle the Cartesian frame of great capitalism as a gathering of performances committed to imagine a different world, because the status quo is untenable. In spring 2021 I taught a version of this video at Winston. And this fall, for those of you going to be to, I look forward to continuing these experiments, much larger. In 2020 we were also completing work for the exhibition reconstructions architecture and blackness in America. And our installation was called immeasurability. Well, sorry to interrupt. Can you just check you're not covering your. My mic. Yeah, I think it's better. Can you hear me better now. Yes. Okay. Thank you. All right. So this is us kind of installing the exhibition for reconstructions. You know, basically, I think part of the challenge here is that these interventions both academic and my practice are really attempts to deal with the with the ethical dimensions of urban design and architecture, both in the discursive realm and in the spatial realm. I will say that this lecture will not provide any solutions for these questions, but basically would provide a series of fragmentary provocations that hopefully will expand our collective imagination. And this this friction between, you know, the, our politics and our discipline is also very much evident in my practice at well in collaboration with Jen would. The project on the right is slated to start construction later this year. So we do a series of commission projects for clients and most of these projects have been multifamily residential projects. And most of them have been designed for the city where I was born and raised which is at Selma, Ethiopia. But if one half of our practices interested in urban designer architecture. The other half is more broadly engaged in art production. It has been extremely generative for us to maintain the project of potential of a design practice, along with the explicit cultural and political critique of an art practice simultaneously building and on building. I'm talking a lot about this image. This is an etching of Savannah Georgia by Peter Gordon establishing the colony of Georgia and America. It is in a way an explicit diagram for the spatial practices of settler colonialism. It simultaneously illustrates the erasure of indigenous communities and cosmologies, but also transforms this communal land into individuated private property. But we also all know that histories and in most cases, empires are constructed through specific tools of visual representation, who gets to represent whom and under what circumstances. What value system is being communicated and visualize through that image. We have been examining the colonial obsession with measurability, a specific worldview that understands land as something that can be measured, owned and exploited. These images also work to make human and more than human life quantifiable. And this is how the continent of Africa was partitioned at the infamous Berlin conference in 1884 facilitating the extraction of resources and labor from the continent to Europe and the Americas. The map on the right measures the density of enslaved people in each county in the state of Georgia in 1861 measuring both land and people as property. Another example of this proclivity across the Atlantic Ocean is the nine by nine meter grid of the coconut Shamba or farm established by Sultan Majid bin Said of Zanzibar and 1862 that initiated a regime of measurability on Dar es Salaam. The land, its people and resources have since been allotted to quantifiable units. Under the German colonial regime the coconut Shamba transmitted into plots for segregated single family homes, again grafting speculation on communal land. And more recently the asymmetrical allocation of capital and land rights has transformed these plots into mid rise residential condominiums. What is more interesting to us are the forms of resistance and transmutation that work against these colonial interventions. For example, the colonial fragmentation of Dar es Salaam is registered at the scale of city block Kariko, as you can see here, composed of multiple plots that are forced individually owned. And it demonstrates how those single family homes have been incrementally converted into these residential condominiums. These towers are currently being repurposed into storage facilities for the shops on the ground floor. And like most other cities storage spaces are used as placeholders for future real estate speculation. The interstitial spaces resulting from the unitization of Kariko by the coconut grid and the Swahili plot are now being reinscribed by the former president. John Magafuli's decision to basically legitimize street trading. And this has completely transformed the pedestrian experience in the city and more specifically in Kariko. This market is a drawing project exhibiting 16 large format drawings, along with images commissioned from photographers in both cities. And I would say that, you know, in lieu of the aerial photographs that are typically employed to represent African cities as homogenous, corrugated roofscapes. The drawings identify specific moments of political intensification. Moments where a political project materializes into urban form. And this preoccupation with marketplaces in Africa comes from an acknowledgement of their role as testing sites for the future of the cities and nation states. They offered dynamic models to trace the ongoing cultural, political and economic shifts in these nation states and also the continent at large. Kariko and Mercato are not only sites of local trade, but they're also sites where global economic and political regimes are being negotiated from the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative to the ever present resonances of the colonial project. They are made up of spatial practices that unfold at the scale of the body, the city and the planet. And these everyday spaces can also be understood as sites of collective agency from radically different forms of sharing space to spatial tactics that work against surveillance and precarity. One of the earliest experiments and representation came in the form of a stop motion animation. We produced in collaboration with Ezra Hubei. The seven minute stop motion animation basically compresses 80 years of spatial history in Mercato. As Ezra translated our drawings and diagrams of the market into these immersive worlds, made up of found images and his own sketches photographs and sound recordings. And this is followed by a large 2.7 by 4.2 meter tapestry for the African Mobilities exhibition in Munich, curated by Empomatsipa. And this tapestry reassembles the market into an array of 126 scenes as a response to how Mercato's merchants devised material temporality as a strategy to anchor themselves to the marketplace. Coming from Charles Gaines' numbers and trees on the right, these market scenes were transcribed into elevations and codified into woven notations by the degree of material permanence. But part of the challenge for us is the inherent bias embedded in architectural representation. It was invented to do the work of appropriation and privatization. The two markets aims to implement a framework of animus materialism, working against a Darwinian evolution towards Western modernity. The drawings aimed to be in conversation with works being produced by contemporary artists like Otto von Kanga. Ida Molina, as Elias Simé just to name a few. And these works really provide pertinent references for reconsidering how we could represent the material and immaterial aspects of the city. Animism is a refusal to establish any separation between our bodies and our planet as a recognition of shared agency. For several centuries, Tanzania has been experiencing extended colonial invasion from Portugal, Oman, Germany and England, while Ethiopia has remained relatively cloistered until a brief Italian occupation from 1936 to 1941. We chose to research these two cities and relative proximity and sub-Saharan Africa to articulate difference within a context that is typically flattened and homogenized. The name of the Kariko neighborhood is a Swahili-ized derivation of Kerakorps depot, a building that was used by German and British troops during the First World War that you can see on the far right of this photograph. Conversely, the Kariko Market Hall of today, which is the anchor of the neighborhood in Dar es Salaam, is an open-air structure shaded by 24 concrete funnels, each spanning 15 meters. That harbors rain and facilitate passive cooling for the trading spaces below. The Kariko Hall is an animus enactment of the Arusha Declaration, which introduced President Julius Nerere's political philosophy of Ujama, or familyhood, promoting egalitarianism, socialism, and self-reliance. Designed by Tanganican architect Beta Amuli, the Market Hall canopy recalls the coconut trees under which markets were held in the past. A building designed as the first multi-story mall during the final stages of Emperor Eilis Lasset's feudalist regime ended up being built as a distribution center by the succeeding socialist military, the DERG. Again demonstrating the instability of monuments and architectural symbols. The relative proximity to water plays a big role in determining the texture and ambiance of the two marketplaces. Mikato being positioned at the center of a landlocked country versus Kariko being 15 minutes from, or let's say a 15-minute walk from the Indian Ocean. The Dar es Salaam's proximity to the Indian Ocean has rendered it valuable and therefore vulnerable. Multiple types of boats, ships, and tankers are employed in a choreographed process of extraction, taking resources and labor from the hinterlands of East Africa across the ocean. In Addis, it's not water but topography that has significantly determined the urban form of the city. Settled as a temporary military camp for the Ethiopian Empire, a nodal network of houses for army generals and tenants radiate out from the rural compound on adjacent hilltops. In a way militarizing the topography to defend the territory from colonial invasion. And these rivers and residential compounds on hilltops continue to anchor the main neighborhoods of the city. To the west of the largest hill is where the original market was located. Similarly, echoes of this perimeter logic and temporary occupation can be found in present day Mercato, where the construction sites are fortified at their base with rings of merchant stalls. These stalls are abbreviations of what you know that the future market will be, but they're also in a way echoes of the previous market. And they allow merchants to maintain relationships with their customers during the three to five year construction period required to build a new mosque. I would argue that our work grapples with the overlaps between identity and geography, both as non static and highly contested realms of investigation. It has been productive to think of these marketplaces as sites where people are engaged in practices of liberation that are working against various forms of enclosure and containment. It's safe to say that the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative is one of the most important and influential factors really shaping the future of these cities. The median age of the Ethiopian and Tanzanian population is approximately 18 years of age today 45% of Ethiopia's population is under 15 and 71% is under 30. So these heavily subsidized large scale infrastructural investments by foreign nations are hoping to gain access to these future customers and laborers. On the right here is the light rail system that recently got completed in August. Similarly, the recent, the recently built PRT or a bus rapid transit system in Dar Salaam is serviced by Chinese Golden Dragon buses, radiating tentacles of Kariko to the periphery. In Mercato, green and yellow fence is interrupted by signage for the CG COC group. A Belt and Road Initiative contractor and one of the largest contractors in the world, whose revenues primarily derived from building roads throughout the continent of Africa. So this pale concrete frame foreshadows a future bus terminal within a network of transportation infrastructure that is almost exclusively constructed by the Chinese government. The overwhelming forces of global capital are also apparent on Missin Bazi Street, while papered in itel red and techno mobile blue, demarcating the western border of the Kariko neighborhood, and physicalizing the mobile banking networks of Dar Salaam. It materializes the battle for control of next generation 5G networks between Chinese Indian and British multinational corporations. Only 2% of Tanzanians rely on conventional banks, leading to a massive popularity of these M-Pesa apps. So, M refers to mobile and Pesa means money in Swahili. And these M-Pesa apps are not being used by about 65% of urban Tanzanians, allowing them to store, transfer, send and receive money via their cell phones. We're also interested in local forms of refusal that work against this global regime. When a Malaysian developer was negotiating with the Ethiopian government to buy out the marketplace with hopes of building a central business district, the merchants started forming cooperatives and started developing the market through different forms of collective ownership. Now, single malls occupy almost every block within the marketplace, owned and maintained by up to 40 merchants and their families, consolidating individual stalls into these stacked mega blocks. But in addition to these ownership models, the rhythm of these marketplaces is also determined by rituals and ordinary practices associated with space to worship. Two large blocks at the northeast of Mercato deviate from the orthogonal grid of the Italian master plan, the Anwar Mosque and the Silver Dome of St. Robwell Church. Their deliberate co-location by the Italian regime was intended to incite animosity. However, these two religious institutions have managed to peacefully share these walls with each other for the past 80 years. Hopefully, the most important and maybe long lasting legacy of the show that was on view at the Museum of Modern Art this past spring is the formation of the Black Reconstruction Collective. The 10 of us who were commissioned for the show decided to form a nonprofit in order to continue the work of reconstruction or the incomplete project of emancipation, well after the passing events of the exhibition. The aim is to provide funding and intellectual support for liberatory practices within art and design. And this is our manifesting statement covering the name of the gallery. Adwo's contribution to the exhibition is called immeasurability, and our installation was really born out of a fundamental question. If architecture is a discipline that encloses space, making it measurable and exploitable, then how can we think of an architecture without measure, an architecture that refuses enclosure and borderization. Our installation is primarily made up of two disks, a vertical disk and a horizontal disk. And it was important for us to really think of blackness at the planetary scale. Therefore, one disk, the one you're looking at right now operates at the scale of the city. And the other disk operates the scale of the planet, and depicting the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is a planetary scar, a massive shift and rift on the ocean floor of the Atlantic. But it's also a site for an incalculable loss of black life during the middle passage as enslaved Africans were moving across this line to the Americas. And this is the detail of the tapestry that we have produced for the exhibition. For me, as someone who grew up on the continent of Africa, it was also important to consider the process of racialization that one experiences upon crossing the Atlantic. That line has always been the space for the formation of blackness. The moment you cross that line to the west, you basically become black. To the east you are Yoruba, Amhara, etc. And I would say that mostly this happens because the construction of race relies on the homogenization of blackness, but also the formation of value and relation to whiteness. So, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge really establishes this echo and link with the continent of Africa. When I went to the Cotton Gin in Savannah, Georgia, the city of Atlanta was established as a terminus for federally funded train lines that were linking the port of Savannah to the hinterlands and back extension to enslaved people in West Africa. And for the movement of goods and enslaved labor across the Atlantic and from the port is what generated the city of Atlanta. And Atlanta has always been really the space of movement, much like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. So we kept meditating on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and really gathering a set of maps that were generated for slave traders who were attempting to navigate the winds of the Atlantic. And we also have maps of wind patterns on the coast of West Africa, depicted by Matthew Fontaine Mori, who was nicknamed Pathfinder of the Seas. Again, measuring not only land but also wind patterns to facilitate the larger project of extraction. Mori eventually resigned his commission as a US Navy commander and joined the Confederacy during the Civil War. But even these seemingly abstract notations are tied to certain ideas of racialization. Our work on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge has also been deeply influenced by a long list of contemporary artists who have been thinking about the Atlantic Ocean, both as site and subject. For example, Matidio, Suisse film, Atlantics. In addition to that, we're also interested in the refusal of legibility by contemporary artists like Chris O'Feeley, especially his Blue Devil series. As you can sense from these photographs, it's almost impossible to read these paintings head on. O'Feeley uses silver paints mixed with dark blues so that light catches the different forms within the painting in unexpected ways. So the tapestry to not only depict the history of the diaspora, but to think about contemporary forms of surveillance and policing that limit the mobility of black people. So we started working with and transforming these cartographic and oceanographic notations. It's also important for us to maintain an explicit material relationship between the urban and the planetary. More specifically the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the city of Atlanta. As we did more research we uncovered that a magnetic black sand called magnetite is present along the length of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. So we started doing a series of experiments testing magnetite as a material to essentially represent the immeasurability of black spatial practices in Atlanta and the Atlantic. So the city of Atlanta is a horizontal environment that is primarily defined by its highway infrastructure, its single family homes and strip malls. They appear as clearings within the forest. And these relatively generic everyday environments gain meaning based on who occupies them and the types of ephemeral events they facilitate. So it's not a city built on exceptional and monumental piece of architecture but really ordinary spaces that facilitate extraordinary events. We've also been thinking about, you know, really banal kind of everyday spaces like the bedrooms and closets where young musicians are producing some of the most important albums in popular culture. The strip malls and fast food restaurants that provide spaces for different forms of commonality. Basically, we were very much interested in the history of these ephemeral spatial practices, and we started looking at Freak Nick as a form of cultural production that has direct spatial implications. Freak Nick, for those of you who don't know, who was a yearly event where students from historically black colleges and universities flew to Atlanta from all over the country for a picnic during their spring break. And each year became more and more popular until it's peak in the mid 90s. And what's what's really fascinating is that the influx of college students would create a lot of traffic jams throughout the city, and those traffic jams ended up becoming dance parties. And so it became this way of reinterpreting the highway from a space that typically cuts black people off from the city or the suburb into a space for an extended outdoor partner. And I would say these are the types of immeasurable spatial practice practices that are extremely inspiring for our practice. We're doing a series of these experiments with the glass department at RISD, trying to test various ways of slowly transforming black sand into black glass. And these are a few studies from those experiments. And, you know, in other words the immeasurability of black spatial practices is always in a way tied to both containment and liberation. So the horizontal disc and the installations made up of these 160 bricks covered in black sand and magnetite, modeling these everyday spaces of black life. We're also interested in blurring between, you know, the lush and seemingly endless forests surrounding Atlanta, and the signs that you would see in the landscape from the highway, etc. And so we're creating these generic spaces with specific groups of people. When I lived in Atlanta for 10 years, Waffle House was our destination after the nightclub. It's basically the place you go to at 4am for your last meal before bed. So we produced a series of these collages of Waffle House. Subtle and somewhat surreal interpretations of the woods in Atlanta keep appearing in popular culture. For example, most recently and Donald Glover's TV show Atlanta. The Woods episode where Paperboy gets lost. In the woods. And the Young Thug's video for Chanel, and even further back to outcast video for elevators. So we're interested in spaces that are both mythical and ordinary. And we worked with Bednar and Brooklyn to fabricate the cone. And the cone is topped with black glass and the magnetite is basically shifting on top of that black glass. And the glass where these 160 unique cleats that allow the bricks to lock in. And below the glass are two shelves, the top shelf has these magnetic robots that are shifting back and forth, and also moving the sand. And below that is another shelf housing the speakers projecting the soundscape of Atlanta. So it was really based on a day in the life of a person in Atlanta. Now so basically one minute for every hour of the day. And the soundscape lines up with the fragments of the city on the disk. And this is us frantically assembling the horizontal disc right before the opening of the show and you can see the cleats and the templates that were used to put bricks down. So that's, that's it for the slide presentation about quickly show a video of the sand being activated. It's very subtle, but hopefully you can see it. But thank you. That's it. Thank you so much, Manuel. That was offer us many things to think about. I'm writing down notes frantically. Everyone. Please put questions in the chat. Are you able to hear me okay. I realize my notes were covering this mic. Okay. Questions of zoom. I'm really taken with the kind of detail and the breadth of your work and I just want to come and ask my own questions but I do want to ask everyone to please some questions into the chat. I've got one. And so it's really important. As you know, students and friends to make inquiries, even challenge. Nicely, of course. So anyway, I'm really taken with the kind of decision that you against terms like the Enlightenment or the colonial project, you know, versus your idea of animism that animism is somehow unregulated. And just that's a great framework for positing another form of social life that isn't codified and grid bound if I can use that term like Savannah. And I don't know anything about animism. I mean, I took anthropology one on one, but I think that was in the pre Enlightenment days. So I'm wondering if you could kind of comment on that binary or that opposition, how it's fruitful for you and how it's fruitful for kind of setting up an alternative practice. Yeah, I mean, that's that's a that's a great question. But I almost feel like that question alone could be a full lecture. So I'll try to give a fragment of the way we've been thinking about it. I mean, more specifically, our definition or at least our interest in animism comes from the work of the theorist, Eric Gruber, the late Eric Gruber just passed away recently. And I think the most fundamental critique that he provides for the colonial project is the linear conception of time. So a lot of his ideas around animism are really based on nonlinear understandings of time that force us to collapse histories together in order to begin operating on them. So I would say that that is probably the first step. The second is, you know, the tendency, you know, but within Western epistemology to create separation between the human and nature. So in a sense, a lot of the writing on animals materials and embeds the human within nature. And there's always this understanding of shared agency that the planet has other living beings have just as much as us. And, and I think those two approaches alone give us a lot of tools to begin operating on and carving away the kind of, you know, the mentality of the disciplines and knowledge systems that we all been trained in. But I think that that is that is the operation that you've identified one is almost oppositional, which has been really generative like by basically, for example, with the studios from the beginning by positioning ourselves against real estate speculation, which forced us to imagine a different type of city. Right. So I think similarly, for saying we're anti colonial from the beginning, then that creates a completely different way of engaging with one another, but also engaging with, you know, our ideas of progress or modernity. So, yeah. That is indeed a full lecture required, but you'll be around we'll do that. One person asks, What is the difference or what is the impact, or what is the kind of status of being both an artist and an architect. Does that affect your commissioned work. Is there any overlap or their different relationships when you have when you have developers. I mean, it sounds, it feels like there could be attention in there. Can you. Sorry, I don't know if I did that to the recording, but I was trying to unmute myself. Okay. To be quite honest, this is precisely the question that we're dealing with on an everyday basis within our practice, you know, we love designing buildings. We love engaging with kind of the projective potential of architecture and urban design. But we keep getting frustrated by the simple fact that we're making these beautiful things that eventually lead to certain forms of dispossession and displacement. So, for us the art practice became in a way. A hack to maybe destabilize that the design practice, you know, and I think there are limits both ways, you know there are obviously major major limits to any type of critique presented through an art practice. And you can say similar things about a design practice so for us. The these two avenues forced us to engage with ideas. More broadly but also when we see the limits of one type of practice we can change gears and say actually this is this is no longer architecture this is art. And it's been really intellectually enriching and it's also been liberating to be somewhat undisciplined. And to say there are set of questions we're interested in investigating and grappling with, and it doesn't matter if they produce end up producing buildings or if they end up producing tapestries. We want to continue doing both. Thank you. Really. It's another key distinction or opposition that it's kind of a good problem to have, but at the same time it's a problem. Another student is asking about the two markets that you presented and the representation of those markets. There's projections. And she says I wonder what you expect other viewers to get from seeing urban elements through this lens. Well, I will say, you know, we have. I'm merely a drawing practice. So a lot of the work has been about engaging with the history of image production and what what those images entail and how they can hopefully be demonstrations of a certain political agenda. And for us when we started engaging with animals materialism became very important to say the center of the building and really engage with other more ephemeral interventions in the city. So I think the first challenge for those for those images was to equalize. At least, you know, the relationship between merchandise and build. And then in addition to that it was also about, you know, this nonlinear depiction of a particular narrative. So each one of those panels have a have a story that goes along with it. And those stories are, are in some ways cyclical and in some ways kind of fold back on themselves. So, I would say this is our first attempt at it. Looking at them now. I have certain critiques that we would definitely change moving forward. But it was our first attempt to really grapple with the limits of architectural representation, how we can engage with certain ideas that are being presented by a contemporary artists and how we can bring those ideas into the spatial realm. I hope people can at least think twice about the value of these marketplaces while looking at these images. And, you know, there's there's so much weight in the kind of the gaze of the photograph, and we wanted to slightly move it away from that. One thing I noticed about some of those market drawings is that there's a kind of a clear distinction between the architecture and the social life around it. The architecture seems somewhat monumental, but definitely solid and orthogonal. And then you have these amazing kind of plans of buses and people and all sorts of things and they're completely. They're kind of clearly implicating movement and, you know, kind of interaction. And it's a really strong, it comes across really strongly and so I just, it's funny, I think that we're all taken with the drawings and trying to read into them a little bit but I do think that I think the kind of incredible complexity of the actions of fuel that you're portraying and those representations is very strong. I think brings out the idea of the nonlinear and the kind of what some might see as chaotic is in fact a normal way of life. So I wanted to ask about these drawings. What is the, I mean, this is pushing a little bit further on this idea of communications through the drawings, the representations. How does this strong visual and and color coded and kind of stunning use of visual tools. Do you have a particular audience or do you do I mean what kind of and I'm kind of taking off from the students, the person's comment. How does that add to the storytelling you're trying to do how in particular does that method of your representation. Move things along share information how do you see, I think I'm dragging out the question further than it needs to be. Go ahead. Yeah, I'll say two things. I mean, you know, there's a whole other version of this presentation that's really about the collaborations that produced the two markets project. And in both cases, we have been working with with architects and artists and Dar es Salaam and Atis. So it's been, I would say almost eight years of going back and forth exchanging images and notes, and really trying to produce these images that hopefully will challenge people who are intervening on those cities, but also become archives of you in particular, forms of resistance that that we've identified in the marketplace. So it is for karaoke and is it is for Mercato. And, and I think it was very important for us to work with photographers in those two cities and to work with artists and architects in those two cities, and to make sure that we're producing knowledge that is valuable for them. I mean, of course, we are based here in the West. So an undercurrent of the work is always challenging the ways in which African cities are represented in Western urban discourse. And I would say not even just African cities, but really cities in the global south, you know, there's the tendency to pursue to particular avenues one is the binary of formal versus informal. And the other is kind of looking for mid century interventions, which are usually monumental modernist projects and we want to really look at these spaces as contemporary environments that are that are changing rapidly. I mean, the population of Ethiopia has pretty much doubled in my lifetime. So, when you're dealing with that kind of context, you have to begin to think about density different. And, and that has a very different value system than going over there to sanitize the environment or, you know, present some sort of quote unquote solution. So, I mean, I don't know, a lot of the work is also us working on ourselves, you know, it's challenging our own value systems to a certain extent and our own training. And I hope at least these conversations will, you know, challenge students to do similar things. Another question that's come in on a different, well, not that different actually, the belt and road initiative. Can you kind of give us a little bit of an expanded view on the impact on the just how foreign funding for infrastructure is just seems like an amazing, like an incredible project both in the the classic terms of colonial infrastructures but also, but it's hard to envision it today, especially with the population demographics that you also mentioned. So, tell us more about your take on belt and road. I think it's really complicated, you know, and I would say, at least speaking specifically from an Ethiopian standpoint, Ethiopia's relationship to China is really complicated and simple fact that China provides a clear model. You know, a model that feels accessible. There's always this narrative. At least promoted within the African context that China was a radically transform itself within 50 years. So I think for African politicians that is a very convincing narrative, you know, but when it comes to actual structural changes, you know, addressing lack of access to education. You know, addressing, or at least building infrastructure that can be maintained by Ethiopians instead of Chinese contractors. Those things are not happening. So, now, a lot of it is leading to an extended relationship that is highly dependent. The light rail system in Adi is to a certain extent falling apart, mostly because there were there weren't that many people trained in Ethiopia to maintain. So the Ethiopian government constantly has to, you know, bring contractors and engineers from China to maintain the light rail system. So, I think maybe 10 years down the line will get a clear picture, but but a lot of it, you know, yeah, a lot of it makes me hesitate, let's say. But it does also provide a certain alternative away from Europe and North America. And I think that part of it is probably good. But but yeah, I think it's something we're all thinking about. I'm also a repeat of the European project. And yet, obviously not the same, but it is quite shocking that how, as you say, there's so much Chinese presence in the infrastructure business. It's amazing. Okay, this is a question about how when you present this, this kind of work. How do you kind of portray different layers such as scale, society, history movements. How does that find its way into the layers of representation and quote unquote, do you have to put one layer in priority to tell a counter narrative question mark. Yeah, I mean, I think this to a certain extent comes back to your initial question, David, where I think the counter narrative is as always there, you know, we know how these cities have been historically represented so we're working with those models. But when it comes to priorities, I would say, you know, it's a form of storytelling, and I think there are specific stories that we think are important to consider when when thinking about the future of these places. And that determines, you know, the ways in which we compose the images. But yeah, there isn't a formula. Dilip, to Kuna is asking that the continental rift in the Atlantic has become an important was and continues to be an oppressive difference between the Americas and Africa. And without he asks Europe and Africa or India and Africa, they to have perpetuated oppressive differences in no less measure. Do you have thoughts on representing continental relations. And yeah, that's it. Yeah, I mean that's that's an excellent question, I would say, you know, that's definitely the next project. And because of the simple fact that I am from Africa, I'm fascinated with the Indian Ocean. And we have started doing some work. And that realm, but but I think it's an incredibly rich and complicated history. And when you begin to understand the relationship that East Africa has had with, you know, Southwest slash South Asia. And I think we do need to think about those relationships because those relationships are becoming extremely important again. But yeah, I think Dilip you're outlining the next project. Excellent. So I was fascinated how the, the, the rift in the Atlantic was a marker. You know, in the East side you were from one particular group and on the West side you became black. And that's a really powerful framing that kind of takes the middle passage into a kind of sociological definition or sociological construct that is again another powerful image of understanding blackness as not just blackness but in blackness as full of threads and stories and differences, which I really appreciate. There's another theme that works related to that which is especially as you, you mentioned it both in Atlanta but also in the African context which is what you call immeasurable spatial practices. And that's hard to imagine in an American city. On the other hand, it's the American cities are full of such, you know, appropriations for different groups. And I wonder how that's where that's going in your work or perhaps you need to give a little peek at your fall, your fall thoughts, your fall semester thoughts. So in terms of theory, you know, that's kind of anti disciplinary. You know, we don't do immeasurable. You know, that's just like, you know, that is a challenge to so many, so much of our language so much of our assumptions so much of our methods, and yet so many urban design groups, small firms, big firm, well mostly the smaller experimental firms in South America as well as other places, some in the US are really looking to bring these so called immeasurable spatial and social practices into a larger challenge to urban design practices from the kind of planning and discipline of the traditional tradition of rules and conventions. So, could you kind of give us an idea about how you see that working in your Atlanta work a little bit further. Yeah, I mean, I would say that really comes from a certain intuition that I feel, at least within our practice we've been discussing and architecture team seems to measure in order to take. And the first question was maybe, can we measure in order to share. And that became increasingly difficult to imagine. So then we said, what if we give up on the whole idea of measuring and really actually try to understand a more non static way of understanding spaces. So I mean, full disclosure I think it's a way which we are trying to compromise maybe some of the, the over determination of form. So we're trying to, we're wondering if there are other conversations that we can begin to engage with as designers that could help us reimagine cities. In the Atlanta context, it was really honestly, taking the brief very literally, you know, it's the show is called reconstructions architecture black in America. We decided from the beginning because of the simple fact that I moved from odd these two Atlanta, we decided to investigate Atlanta, and we started looking at zip codes in Atlanta that are majority black. And, you know, it became very clear very quickly that these spaces are made up of strip malls fast food restaurants. And, and these kind of single family homes so we started really drawing those spaces and the more we drew them the more we understood that they would never be considered, quote unquote architecture with a capital A. So they always fall outside of the value system of architecture and urban design. And that's really what led to to that consideration. But I think immeasurability is a super generative concept that will keep coming back to and I have a feeling six months down the line I might have a better answer for this question. It's, it's kind of, again, not not relying on property lines, not relying on form, but really other ways of relating to one another. And that's what led to that concept. Just a teeny little footnote. Because I'm thinking about this right now in Broderick or city by Frank Lloyd right. It's a gridded plan, just like from Jefferson to whomever I mean it's that tradition of American gridding. And yet he proposes that the there's no private land ownership that it's more of a cooperative. So, I don't really quite buy it from him because I don't really. On the other hand, he did, you know, he has he spoke to many economists and social theorists and created an interesting position but I think more to the point is that when you bring up this idea that you don't want to. At first you went you wanted to measure in order to share, which was a first step away from measuring in order to take. But then you say the measurement is itself the problem. So, I guess you say measuring to share would be reformist and measuring, not at all, would be a kind of radical, a radical challenge to that. I think that's a great. For me that's a great way to think about how measurement can be both involved in some way but also needs to be kind of challenged at the larger scale. Okay, one more question, perhaps a bit of a challenge of one student is really interested in the, the, the rift, the Atlantic rift. And, and asks, How do you make that rift question. How do you take it to other audiences. And the second part of the question is that the student is would I think wants a little bit fuller explanation of that, the role of the rift and creating this two categories, and one more piece. Yes, so just take that. Sorry. Sorry, I think I got lost halfway through so the, yeah, me too. Sorry. Essentially the, I think the students saying that maybe the rift is too easy. Maybe the rift is. I would say that it's a kind of heuristic, as well as a kind of content device but I think the student is just asking for clarification about that. And from that, how do how does the representation of that, you know, show the complexity, not just the simplicity of a rift. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm going to address global blackness and in one tapestry. It's already a ridiculous proposition. Right. So I think this is this is the issue with the representation, kind of have to choose. One way of talking about a particular issue that hopefully will open up millions of other perspectives. Because the more we kept thinking about racialization caused through, you know, a particular form of forced migration. The more we struggled to represent it. And, and then we said okay let's just look at the Atlantic Ocean the actual space it's kind of similar to what I was saying with Atlanta, right and when we zoomed in, we found this painting. And I believe a lot of the research on the middle Atlantic Ridge was done at Columbia. And once we found that we were just like man, this is really the space for the formation of blackness and the kind of invention of race. And we, we started basically kind of meditating on that looking at other artists who are who are thinking about the Atlantic Ocean in different ways. And that's what led to the tapestry. Sure, it looks easy now. Definitely two years of work that led to one seven foot by seven foot tapestry. I think, sorry. Oh, one thing I would say quickly is, I think we've been trained in urban design and architecture to produce drawings that demonstrate labor. And there's always kind of these super dense diagrams and drawings that are supposed to demonstrate how much work was put into it. But when you go into the fine arts, there's kind of a certain reduction and directness, even though the ideas are incredibly layered. And, and I think that was our ambition, you know the tapestry with the first tapestry and this this one as well. It might not be successful but that's what we're going. So follow up from this same student. And I'm going to frame it slightly differently. You have the model, and then you have the tapestry. How might you describe those as different forms of research or, or thinking. So the task at hand with the exhibition was to look at Atlanta, right. But as I was saying earlier for for me as as someone who migrated to this country was important to link Atlanta directly to the continent. So, as I said in the lecture there was always this interest in looking at the planetary scale and the urban scale simultaneously. So, the moment we identified the Mid Atlantic Ridge, we also clearly identified this diagonal line that currently exists in the city of Atlanta between predominantly white North Atlanta and predominantly black South Atlanta. That line was constructed. It was initially a set of train tracks that now have become combinations of train tracks and highways. So, in one case it's almost an ontological condition that is represented through geography. And on the other, and you basically have an urban intervention that that really tries to solidify certain ideas of race. So it was productive for us to go back and forth as we were drawing the city to also be drawing the ocean. That's what produced the two pieces. And the relationships are not always direct, you know, sometimes they contradict each other. Well, I think I've exhausted you. And I really enjoy. I've enjoyed kind of learning through your work, just as you presented here as well as your writing. And I think that the students are. They, they, your next class, our next class in the fall, got a kind of peak in introduction. And so I think that was very useful as long as well as interesting. Thank you very much for a really great lecture and a great series of propositions and problems for us to think about. So, goodbye, everyone, and we'll see you next week. Have a good day. Thank you.