 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage founder and director of Colloquate Design, Brian C. Lee, Jr. I'll be on. There it is, perfect. How are we doing this morning? Feeling all right? All right, good, good, good, good. Yes, my name is Brian Lee, Jr. I am the director and founder of Colloquate Design in New Orleans, Louisiana. And I am really, really happy to be here. Thank you for coming out this morning to give me your eyes and ears for just a little bit of time. We're gonna have a little bit of a presentation time and then a conversation like you're in my living room. I used to do this back in the day when I first moved to New Orleans. A lot of my friends would kind of get together and we would just have a real serious conversation about the things that we're kind of dealing with in our respective work. So I'm gonna talk through some of the things that I've been working on over the last few years and I appreciate it. Thanks again. So my efforts, my work focuses on a conversation around this thing called design justice. And design justice came about over many years of dealing with social impact design and public interest design work and then thinking about myself as a young black man in architecture school in these environments that were maybe not servicing the communities that I was from and wanted to serve. So this is a story. This is me telling a story, right? It's based in this idea of colloquial architecture. Now colloquial architecture is the sophisticatedly informal use of formal architectural precedent as a means to speak directly to the communities in which we haven't serviced in the past, right? There are disinherited communities that we often neglect in this work. And so my objective as a director of this organization is to think about the ways in which our work speaks to organize, advocate, and design for racial, social, and cultural equity. And that's not an easy task. It means that we have to acknowledge the difference between equality and equity. It means that we have to dig deeper in our past to understand the injustices and inequities that have been pervasive in communities in order to understand how we interact moving forward. And so that's what our practice does. So I'm gonna tell you a little story. When I was seven years old, eight years old, my mother was sent off to Sicily, call me so Sicily. Now this was during the first Iraq war and this is where all the kind of nuclear warheads were held, right? But she was working on recreation there. And so we ended up living there for a few years. I ended up walking around the city and enjoying the space and ways that I really didn't understand until I moved back to Trenton, New Jersey. So this second bubble here is my grandmother's house in Trenton, New Jersey, right? And so my grandmother's house was this space where all of the family members would, we would pack 30, 40 people in this house, run up and down the stairs. And I remember seeing my grandmother walk up and down the stairs and feeling like this house, this old house, this house that she had lived in for such a long time was taking advantage of her. It was hurting her legs. Every time she walked up and down the stairs. And I remember thinking, I don't want this house. I don't want this space to interact with someone I love so dearly in this way. I want to design something different. I wanna do something to help her. My parents said, okay, well, that's architecture. So you should think about the ways in which you design spaces. And so I started designing houses frantically, frantically, right? And so over that time, that kind of put me on the path to looking at being an architect proper. This is my grandmother's tall woman right here in the center bubble. So about seven months ago now, she passed away in Philadelphia. And obviously my grandmother, like everybody's grandmother and a lot of people's grandmother is super important to me. But when she passed away, I tell this little story because I wanna connect the ways in which that space really bound to my heart. My grandmother passed away and my aunt kept saying, let's play this particular song. This particular song was by Charlie Wilson, I'm Blessed. I don't have the best vocals so I'm not gonna sing this song for you. So you're just gonna have to look it up, you just Spotify out and do what you gotta do. And so my aunt just incessantly wanted to play this. We're all a little bit down. So do what you gotta do, auntie. They played it during the funeral. We're all just crying. Oh my God. And so after the funeral, I go back to New Orleans and I'm working, I'm in a meeting about three weeks later and someone has this song on their phone and it comes on and I just break down. I'm just, oh my God, I can't, I can't with this. And what it meant to me in that moment and what I think it means to me still to this day is that there was an inextricable link between this cultural moment, this social kind of interactive person that was important to my life and these spaces that created who I am to this day. And this happens so often, right? Whether it's music or a painting or anything else in this world that kind of distills your experience and that can be in a note in a keystroke and the like. And so this is about, I always say architecture is the hardware to the software of life and art and culture is the user interface. It's the way we understand these complex constructs and put them into a space that we can fully grasp, right? And so that in a sense talks about the form, talks about the content and talks about the context to which we understand those things. So design justice, what does it do? It seeks to eliminate the privilege and power structures that use architecture and design as a means to perpetuate injustice into the world, right? And design, it allows us to then stratify the profession in a way that brings in people who have historically been disinherited from a process that creates our cities, right? The marginalized have always been the mass. And so finding ways in which design speaks to the masses is where we start to find those little wins and those little wins start to pile up if only we're on the same page. There's a quote by Whitney M. Young. You'll find this to be true in this particular presentation. My presentation is about 90% quotes and about 10% memes and that's what you're gonna get. So, no, it's not that much. But, Whitney M. Young, 1968, spoke to this particular issue talking about my profession in architecture. You are a profession that is most distinguished by your thunderous silence and complete irrelevance. Yeah, I know, right? I say this in a lot of architecture rooms and they've heard it a lot, but that was nice. That's the reaction I wanted. It is, it's a powerful statement when a profession of 100,000 speaks so softly or doesn't speak at all on issues of injustice or inequity in the work that we do, and specifically when we have such a powerful impact on the world that we're serving. There's another set of quotes that I talk about, one that is directly by James Baldwin, Giovanni's room, that says, perhaps home is not simply a place but an irrevocable condition. And I say this because this is the Baldwin test. This is how we kind of understand whether or not we are working with our clients in the right way and whether or not this is a project that we wanna work on. Are we thinking about conditions that are actively seeking equity and justice in the work? It's not simply about the shell. It's not simply about the physicality of the space. It is actually about the forces that create that space and perpetuate that space into the future. The second question that we always ask when we're dealing with clients, when we're dealing with communities and in community conversations, we can disagree and still work together unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression, the denial of my humanity or my right to exist. Right? Yeah, you can go out to school. Yeah, I dig that. Yeah, I'm gonna take that. I'm gonna take that. I'm gonna take that. It's super important because again, when we're dealing with spaces that have embedded histories to them, if the conversation does not speak to the ways in which we lift oppressions, lift people's humanity and lift people's right to exist, then we're having the wrong conversations and it's not a conversation personally my company will be a part of, but we hope that within the larger conversation of design justice, we ask that other people consider these as principles as well. So, how does this affect us, right? So, how do we look at the system? When we do this, we can talk about individual biases and we can talk about systemic biases, right? Oftentimes, when we talk about prejudice in the built environment, we often think about these interpersonal connections, interpersonal disadvantages. And that's important. That's important to understand the ways in which bias plays out individually, but the ways in which systems work, the ways in which systems work extend beyond the individual and extend into the community in ways that last in perpetuity in a lot of ways, right? The city is often seeking immortality and the ways in which the city, the neighborhood seeks immortality is through the system itself. It's through the pedagogy, the policy, the procedures, the practice that we put in place, the projects and the people, right? All of these things create a system that we have to interact with in order to make a better space for more people. So we ask that you understand these and you start to see the ways in which these principles can start to impact your work. Because again, as designers, as a designer, my focus tends to be in the practice and project area. And if I'm not careful, I will stay there. And so what we ask is oftentimes for people to think about the ways in which your primary focus goes up and down this continuum and the ways in which you can play a broader impact on that. So within the design profession, we also have health safety and welfare. A lot of times people don't necessarily understand what the welfare component is. And I find this to be a really, really powerful moment for us to think about the ways in which we already have systems that can be pushed forward even further. The welfare component of HSW speaks to the demonstrably positive emotional and physical response amongst buildings and users. Positive emotional response. There's a directionality to it. There's a force, a mass times acceleration equals a force. There is a direction and a mass to that. And that's what we're asking people to consider. So in this, I'm gonna ask you and I'm gonna show you a little bit of ways in which there's a critical path of injustice that has been perpetrated within the built environment over time. And then I'm gonna show you a couple of projects that I've worked on that tries to consider these issues. I'm gonna run through these just because we're gonna have a conversation about a lot of this stuff. Again, the black codes were a really important thing after the Emancipation Proclamation, we started to see the extension of slave codes go throughout the South and creep its way up into the North a bit in certain aspects. The other one we talked about is Euclid versus Ambler, which really started to stay at the Supreme Court level. What does it mean for cities and states to have rights around police powers for changing zoning requirements in particular areas? Whether that's going to project housing after 37 to 41 in New Orleans, Levitown, the kind of segregationist community in New York, sep-ted policies that happened in the 70s and 80s, and then housing and urban development, which has really, we saw in the last 10, 15 years around the housing crisis, the ways in which the Fed actually put a lot of money into affordable housing in ways that were not sustainable over time. So this is an image I often show that really talks about the ways in which institutions of oppression take hold. There are more prisons than there were ever plantations. There are more prisoners than there were ever enslaved peoples. We're creating spaces from a, again, from an architectural standpoint that do not speak to lifting people's humanity, do not speak to lifting oppression off of people. And we've got to be better about those considerations. And when we talk about the ways in which our history tie, what's important to particular communities, we've got to acknowledge its totality. This is a series, this is Alton Sterling and Baton Rouge on your left-hand side and Eric Garner in New York. Both men murdered in front of convenient stores and their respective cities. This is important because the convenience store is a particularly powerful place within communities of color. And to understand that means to understand all of the nuances around those interactions and those spaces and why it's important for people to be able to have a safe space, a space of solace within a community, specifically in this type of community. And so, if we look at how these two men were accosted, this is policy in place, right? At the bottom, you'll see the Black Coals in 1876. No Negro shall be permitted to preach, exhort, or otherwise disclaim the congregations of colored people without a special permission in writing. Person to loaf, at the top you see, in 2011 they did a vagrancy law. This was all the ways in which they did this through vagrancy laws. Person to loaf in the streets habitually or who frequent the streets habitually or loiter around a public place. So the laws haven't actually really changed all that much. We use the same things to criminalize Blackness, to criminalize marginalized communities. And so we have to understand that all of this is still embedded in who we are. It's still embedded in our policies and procedures in place. We obviously know about redlining, separate but equal. So what I'm gonna talk to you about is a few projects to which we consider these things explicitly. So one project that we, I don't know if you know, we took down a few monuments in New Orleans a few months back, yeah. So monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a lost cause, right side of history, wrong side of history. This conversation happened and so before everything happened in Charlottesville, those same people that were in the streets in Charlottesville were standing in front of Jeff Davis, in front of Robert E. Lee, in our faces in New Orleans with AK-47s pointing directly at us. Like this is the state that we're looking at in 2017. Now, I did not lead this particular push but being a part of it was eye-opening in a lot of ways. So the bottom you'll see Malcolm Subur and Angela Kinlaw and Michael Questmore, these three right here. They led this in its most contemporary form but it extended over 60 years, right? Like people had been attempting to take down these racist monuments for a very long time. One of which was to the white lead which is essentially the KKK in New Orleans which overthrew the city government for seven days and had the National Guard have to come in. And for some reason they felt like, all right, well let's throw up a monument to that. All right, so I mean, these are the things that were hoisted as valuable. And really the critical point here is that we are, and I oftentimes, I'm a little bit of a nerd, that just happens sometimes. But the idea here is that if you've ever watched any time travel movies or TV shows, there's always somebody that's trying to protect the timeline, right? They're trying to protect the timeline from somebody jumping back or this, that, and the other. And what we see here is that people are changing the timeline when they put and exalt and lionize things that had no bearing or were completely false from the narrative of what our cities were or are, right? It doesn't mean that they didn't exist. It means that we honor what actually happened. The Confederacy did not lose. Why are you the highest point in our city? Why are you the person that's standing on the highest point in the city of New Orleans? You didn't win the Confederacy. You didn't win that battle, right? So anyway, we had the conversation during that time. What does it look like for us to challenge those narratives, to tell a full story about what it meant to be Robert E. Lee? We talked about the 197 enslaved people to which he owned, the brutality to which he treated them. And so as we started to see these takedowns happen, we started to see those who were on the wrong side of history and the right side of history. And by the final one, we were a jump rope in the streets and having a good time. But that mission doesn't stop in that day, right? It has to keep going. We have to, once that palette is cleared, what does it mean for us to tell the stories the true history? We've got to acknowledge that and we've got to root it. And so Paper Monuments came about. So Paper Monuments is a project in New Orleans that is a public history and public art project that combines artists and historians to tell stories that are beyond the stories that are often told, a way for us to kind of acknowledge the people, places, events and movements that are bigger than individuals, bigger than lionized soldiers, right? And so that's what we've set out to do. And over time, we've collected more and more of these stories and these are being posted around the city and we're able to extend that story beyond just the individuals that get a chance to be heard. We also tell these stories publicly. We allow those stories to permeate our environment. This was at the old side of the Jeff Davis Memorial. We actively collect public proposals. We ask artists to do murals and what you see on the far right here is the story of project, which is the next phase which allows us to take those stories, turn them into physical space interventions that hold history in place and start to acknowledge it in a way that previously had not been given. So the last project I'll talk about before we sit down is a project called the Claiborne Innovation District. So in New Orleans, there was a highway, like in a lot of disenfranchised communities, a highway that cut through a historically black in African American community. Now this highway destroyed about 300 or so businesses in that community and has caused exponential damage to the housing stock, to the wealth inequality in the space and the like, right? And so how do you change it? How do you start to think about the ways in which design can be a positive actor in that community? So we asked, how do we think through this in a way that specifically talks to the way people already engage in the community? We second line, we dance down the streets all the time. We festival in New Orleans all the time. That's what we do, play music every single day. That is who we are. And so our job as designers was to tie into that and allow people to be expressive in the ways in which they already are, right? And so we combined ourselves with a Chame Seventh World Festival to do a lot of community engagement. And what that resulted in was a series of projects with the community that built out small little quick shelters that were booze designed with community to ask these kind of critical questions about what was the past here in this space? What was the future in this space? And then we went on a design strategy that extended our scope of services beyond the five scope that we generally do. We added programming and planning in a way that really hadn't been done in the city before. We had over 85 hours of community engagement over four and a half months. We had six hour workshops, usually weekly, in which people came and did the lecture component and did a workshop component in which they had direct hands-on in the design process. We talked with our elders, we talked with our youth, we talked with our artists, we talked with our business people. They became design advocates for this project. And so this will be the first project that I know of in the country that will hire 16 young, 16 between, 16 and 24 year olds that will serve as design advocates that will be organizers for an actual architectural project, almost like a political campaign, and they will be in the community constantly drumming up support and working on the ways in which the things that people don't support can be derived. Create reports around that, and we get to a design that has some impact, right? And so over the next 18 months, we will be seeing a newly refurbished space underneath the highway in New Orleans that speaks to the cultural, historic, and economic needs of a community that has historically been disinherited from a process. So I wanna leave you with one last thing. Again, all of this is about the language we speak to the communities that we are serving, right? There is a lot to it because language is important. The stories we tell are extremely important. The culture that we acknowledge in those spaces is extremely important. And for people of color, for people in general in America, there's a power in the places and spaces where the culture is recognized, where stories are told, and where that language is valued. So that's not just because that is good design, it's because that's justice. So thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you again for giving me eyes and ears. And now please welcome to the stage the Future City Summit panelists, Eleanor Esser-Gorsky from the City of Chicago, and Stephanie Meeks from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, with moderator David Dudley from City Lab. I have you down. Actually, I think I'm moderating, but do you wanna take over? I am not prepared to moderate. Please take over. Brian, that was fantastic. Thank you. I appreciate it. Very inspirational talk, and your work is inspirational. I appreciate you sharing it with us today. We're supposed to have a conversation here, as Brian said, like we're in our living room. I'm sure this is what your living room looks like, and certainly what mine looks like. And so please feel free to just, don't wait for a question, just jump in anytime if you'd like to do that. But I did wanna start with this premise. It's one of the ideals that the National Trust aspires to in our Reurbanism Initiative, where we say that cities are only successful when they can work for everyone. And Brian, I think you made a very compelling historical case here about the many ways that the deck has been stacked against cities and citizens of cities for a long time. So Eleanor and Dave, you're both keen observers of the American city, and I'm curious what observations you would have to add to those that Brian has already shared about equity and justice and access and how we make cities work for everyone. And Eleanor, do you wanna go first? Sure. So, role that I serve for the city of Chicago is a newly created role where we're integrating planning, design and historic preservation together in one division to first, kind of get our own house in order and understand how those disciplines work together, and then we can better bring those services to the people of the city. And that was very mindful, putting those three items together, recognizing that often they were practiced in their own silos, and it wasn't serving the people of the city well, and there's a lot of close collaboration with those different disciplines that different neighborhoods are expecting of us. So the work that we just saw under the bridge and doing design charrettes, they're common, I think, to planning practice, not so much in historic preservation. So it's been an interesting journey that we've had in marrying the different techniques and borrowing what's most successful and taking those to our neighborhoods. Yeah, go ahead. David, what about you? What do you think, and all the cities that city lab studies across the country? Sure, sure. Well, I love Brian's talk because it touches on so many of the themes that we cover in our daily lives at city lab. Just as by way of introduction, city lab is a digital publication where operated by the Atlantic Magazine, FAME, and we cover sort of the current challenges and future promise of the urban world and the urbanizing world. And it's a great gig and it takes me places like this, which is awesome. And it's also a very challenging one because we're in this very difficult time. And for a lot of the reasons that Brian mentioned, cities are increasingly places of concentrated inequality. And this is the great challenge of our time, I think, in terms of making this notion of urban places that work for everybody. So there's this concentrated advantage and there's concentrated disadvantage. One of our contributing editors is the urbanist Richard Florida and his latest book is called The New Urban Crisis and it is very much focused on this question, which is, in a way, this is a great success story in the last 10, 20 years. People reclaimed neighborhoods in cities that appeared to be dying. There's been a surge of investment and several cities in particular are enjoying spectacular results. And we can see the results around us in certain neighborhoods, in certain cities nationwide and globally. But there are a lot of unintended consequences to that and the degree to which certain communities have been disenfranchised and whether we're talking about highway removal project, which is a great example of how design can be a weapon that destroys communities. You know, there's just a lot of baked-in inequality in American cities in particular. One of our five channels on our site is just equity and that was a way of signaling, look, this is a fundamental issue and if cities are gonna survive, they can't survive just on the investments that have gone to a small percentage of people and that's the great challenge we'll be dealing with and talking about throughout this rest of the week. I'd say it's been my observation as I travel around and talk with communities about equity and injustice and integration of communities and cities that work for everyone, is that where there's a political will, there's usually a way. And I'm wondering if you agree with that. Is it, do we have the tools that we need or is it that we lack the tools? I'm curious, there's certainly some bright spots out there of where what we're talking about, I think, is being done really well but it's not as widespread as we'd like and I'm sort of curious why that is. I mean, I think we have the tools, I think we're out of scale, right? So at the city level, we deal with city issues, we deal, I worked for New Orleans City for a little while and the policies and procedures and ordinances, all of those things deal with city-wide affect and so the ability to make true impact is really at neighborhood scale, honestly. And so if what you say, because neighborhoods have those different forces that apply distinctly to them and so being able to bring in the community members and the forces that actually act on the ground is where we have to be able to get a stronger foothold or to lift, again, lift the people who are actually doing it already. Yeah, the tools are there, we just have to be able to, oh, there's a fork, let's use it. We gotta be able to use the right tool. And I think Taylor, those tools for different neighborhoods and different situations, not everyone has the same issues or the same problems and I think that in a city as large as Chicago or even New Orleans, I think that when you look at the city level, you do have a scale that you need to deal with, again, city-wide, but then we need to change our mindset to go into individual neighborhoods and I think it's spending the time and creating the trust with the community members there to really have a fruitful response and for us, that is how we're starting to tackle this. Going into certain targeted neighborhoods strategically and integrate that with other city agencies, the work that we're doing. Can I have one note real quick as well? Like, there's a, so I've been fighting furtively around the word gentrification more recently. Like, I really hate the word. I think it's like saying somebody died of old age, right? Like, people don't die of old age anymore. They die of specific processes, death processes and so if we actually understand how neighborhoods change, we know that people die of different things or expire, transition, however you want to solid it, whatever spiritual level you have, right? They change, but I think neighborhoods do the same thing and they have a combinatorial set of issues that lead them towards a path of transition and whether that's policy or people or there's a bunch of different things and until we understand what that is, if we just keep throwing the word gentrification at different things, you're never going to solve it. You're just going to be like, oh, well that's gentrification, it happens, that's the natural flow of the world, but it's actually a thing you can, people used to die at 40 years old, you know? Now we can live to 120 sometimes. The thing is, if I put gentrification in the headline of the story, everyone clicks on it. That is true. So, I need to keep using that one. Yeah, understood, understood, understood. Your other points are well taken home. Yeah. Respect, respect. So let's just stick with this theme for a second because we obviously, in the preservation community, Bristol, let the idea that preservation necessarily equals gentrification, necessarily equals affordability and displacement issues. So I think you're, I love the idea of sort of unpacking that and diagnosing it. I'm curious, David, all these people who are interested in gentrification, what's sort of the current state of thinking on that topic? You know, it very much depends on who you're asking and what you're asking. I think you hit on something. It's a very powerful world. It's a very kind of, it's full of signals. Communities and neighborhoods are always in a state of transition. They're always changing. They're growing or they're shrinking. There's no stasis. There's a lot of research about how rare, quote unquote, gentrification actually is in its sort of classical sense of people being forced or pressured to move out. Anecdotally, however, it's a very, very powerful force. And it really is, you know, it's the idea of gentrification that is incredibly powerful. In my city, I live in Baltimore, Maryland, which has a host of interesting problems which are occasionally discussed nationally. Gentrification is an issue that has affected a very small handful of neighborhoods. Most neighborhoods, if you look in the last 10, 20 years, the ones that were sort of struggling got worse. A couple that were on the upswing got way, way better. And the degree to which those handful of neighborhoods sort of changed the narrative of the city because it's very visible when that happens, when suddenly you have five craft breweries in a neighborhood that used to just have a diner and a couple of vacant storefronts. So that is so much more powerful than this other story, which is that a whole bunch of neighborhoods that were full of people with jobs and businesses got markedly worse over a period of 20 years. That happened very quietly. And that is sort of the power of the word. There's no other replacement word or whatever. We talk a lot about displacement, displacing communities, which is, I don't know if it's better or more accurate or just sort of more neutral. But certainly, when you talk to people in neighborhoods that are feeling anxiety about real estate speculators moving in or there's a rumor of something about to happen and my rent's gonna go up. Displacement feels too bloodless a term for that fear. It strikes me that part of the dynamic that we see is the difference between owning and renting and access to capital. And I was wondering, Eleanor, if you could talk a little bit about the Chicago Neighborhood Opportunities Fund and how you think about access to capital as part of the design equation. Yeah, no, I'd be happy to talk about that, but can I add one thought on gentrification? So what I particularly liked in the example that you had about bringing young people in and kind of teaching them to be a design core, I think that in my observation, gentrification is used by communities as a blanket word because they don't know how to articulate in planning terms or design terms how they're feeling. And that's why I love about your example and just creating this fluency and how to explain what's going on in the community. And we're seeing in Chicago, it's even cultural change that's happening. It doesn't need to be economic. So it's having that discussion with them specifically that we have found important here when that comes up. So the Neighborhood Opportunity Fund. This is a new tool that we've developed in the past year in Chicago that is a fund that basically leverages the amount of development that's happening in downtown Chicago, capitalizing on the great growth that we're seeing right now. And developers desiring additional floor area in the downtown area pay into a fund for that privilege and that fund is then used for commercial development in our neighborhoods most in need. And by commercial development, that's a blanket for really revitalizing or rehabbing existing buildings. And this is where the National Trust Study of our character buildings in Chicago and buildings that are kind of the background buildings really came into play and helped us identify those areas. It's also areas that had a commercial core that were vibrant maybe in the 50s and 60s and have since come been depopulated but they're still served by transit. We've really targeted those investments. In the first year, we had 700 applications. We were only able to award 32 but we're seeing the fund continue to be replenished. So we're hoping to keep this program going forward. Yeah, and I don't know in New Orleans, are there interesting things happening regarding capital access? So we attempted the very same thing but actually, so I was at the Arts Council of New Orleans for a while and what we looked at within the ordinance for our Percent for Art program, which Chicago has a Percent for Art program as well, was to essentially say any developer who is putting dollars into a particular community would put 40% within their own radius of the building. The other 60 would go into a trust of some sort and so that ordinance is still kind of making its way through policy but it's good to see that one's working out in the world already but the intention is the same is that most of the Percent for Art ordinances require even the ones in San Francisco or Oakland, they all say let's go ahead and add developers giving fees to a trust but they have to do it within the radius of the building, which actually continues to lift in equity because all of those dollars being taken out of communities proper is still not adding to bettering those communities overall. So the hope is that this gives us an opportunity to push those dollars back into communities that have historically been neglected from the artistic standpoint, from the economic standpoint, from the housing standpoint so on and so forth. So Brian you had that wonderful graphic about the design continuum and the different elements of it and I think that raises a lot of interesting questions about how communities are engaged at different phases of design. Assuming just for a second that we all agree with the biases and the challenges that our cities face today. Dave, I'm curious at City Lab you think a lot about design and the design of cities. I'm always looking for the examples of who's doing it really well so that we can share those and I know you're trying to share those as well so that we can inform the design of other cities and I'm curious where you're finding inspiration these days, what cities you think are doing a good job and what is it about what they're doing that's particularly effective. Well this notion that Brian mentioned of making design a positive actor rather than a weapon is something that a lot of cities are dealing with. The one example that leaps to mind, there are a couple related examples but so in New York City, the High Line is a great urban success story of our time if you're not familiar with it, this is beautiful elevated park, created this magnificent public space full of park throughout a big chunk of the city and it was not well accessed. It has been a great success in many ways but it's also been kind of an intensifier of inequality or a factor in New York City's increasing and affordability and the degree to which future cities that are contemplating similar sort of marquee signature projects whether they're parks or kind of connective projects is something that has really consumed a lot of folks. So one of the parallels is with in Atlanta which has a project called the Beltline which is a 22 mile transit mixed use pedestrian path corridor encircling the city. Huge project, it's not gonna be finished until 2030 cost billions of dollars. It should be this great amenity for the entire city. It's gonna affect all kinds of neighborhoods that need investment, it's gonna help people get around, help people get to work, help get cars off the street, all the things that we like to tout in city labs cosmology at least but it's also raised all these terrors of displacement which are well founded on the section that's been constructed, housing prices have gone way up, affordable housing has become a real issue. It's now entering I think it's the east side of the city, Atlanta's who are here can correct me and there's a lot of concern. This is a historically black part of Atlanta and there's a lot of legitimate fears about housing. What I think the community is doing there is pushing really hard knowing what is coming to make it an inclusive project and to mandate whether it's inclusive housing zoning so that a certain percentage of the projects that are going to be stimulated by this amazing project are going to be set aside for people who are already living there so that the people who are living there can actually enjoy this amazing amenity and access it. That is something we're watching very closely. It's too early to say whether they will succeed in sort of easing or mitigating the innately kind of concentrating qualities of this project but it's one of those projects that has huge potential. There's a similar one in Los Angeles, the LA River Project which is going to open up this kind of industrial kind of concrete waterway that had been historically not something that was seen as a great amenity. That has huge potential for opening up investment in the neighborhoods that are surrounding that but again you're going to see a lot of anxiety about who's going to benefit from that but it's certainly enormously promising. Solana, you're the kind of person that has to make those projects work. Both get them done and move them forward but also make them achieve the larger social good that the city is designed to create. So what's working in Chicago? Well I'd like to take on a little bit on the affordable housing discussion. We have an elevated park as well to 606 and that was a project that again went forward not seeing or not understanding what the repercussions could be on the neighborhoods around it and that's part of the discussion here now. Not just around that particular park but also other big public projects that we have planned. There's a Paseo trail that's planned through a largely Mexican neighborhood in Chicago and kind of preparing now for that discussion in parallel with planning for the trail. In other areas of the city where we've opened up development and in our industrial areas, there's a huge track, it's over 700 acres, the North Branch industrial area. There was a discussion about equity in terms of parks, green space, what the surrounding communities could benefit from opening this up to the river that hadn't previously been accessible. Also affordable housing and we have a pilot affordable housing program that just went into place in September that was voted through city council to set aside a certain amount of units that we anticipate will be coming into this area. So it is learning from other cities and really reading city lab and seeing what other cities are doing and what's working and looking at case studies. Good. Thanks for the plug. Yeah, that's why I'm here. No money changed hands, right? Yeah, good. Bye, drink later. So one last question. I wanna ask you all about historic preservation and bring the conversation back to that and Brian, let's start with you. So historic buildings and neighborhoods, we've done some work at the National Trust trying to document the economic and social and environmental benefits of historic buildings and believe that there is a lot of inherent goodness in keeping our historic buildings and our neighborhoods but I'd love to hear each of you talk a little bit about our historic resources and how they are contributing or not to the things that you wanna see for your cities. Yeah, I mean it's absolutely vital to kind of retain a culture and to understand what's valuable in the historic context for all the communities that we're serving, right? I think that's the critical point here is that there are always multiple sides of history's lens, right? And we wanna make sure that that's the case. And so in New Orleans, 80% of our city is historic, right? And so the ability to find value in the building that's dilapidated but was the straight university was the start of Dillard University which is one of the oldest historic African-American colleges that HBC use in the country, right? Like that place started and was almost destroyed by a highway that kept through it, right? And so the values that we place on that are really, really important. And so I think the building stock in our particular cities that hold these histories and tell these stories allow us to maintain cities that have a soul and have a voice to them. A lot of what we do now, and most of you know this, they're the CBREs of the world, the JLLs, the kind of mass institutional housing complex that they purposefully don't necessarily have a soul. Their purpose is to generate dollars, not to generate culture and kind of the wealth of community, right? And so I think the more we lose that stock, the worse off we are. So yeah, I'm all for it and I'm all for the ways in which it's integrative into the new spaces that are built, but holding on to the ones that have shaped our city for so long is absolutely vital. So a lot of historic buildings in Chicago. How does that make your life more complicated or not? You know, the joke is you can ask any cab driver to take you to the Reliance Building and he'll know what you're talking about here in Chicago. So in a way, our job is very easy when it comes to landmarks with a capital L. I think that it's pretty well regarded and recognized. I think where our challenge is going to be is in the neighborhoods and a lot of the histories that are more layered in Chicago. And this is something that we've not tackled before such as in a neighborhood that's gone through many different changes as different immigrant groups have come through. How do you preserve each one of those layers in a meaningful way and still keep it affordable, keep it a living neighborhood? So I think that's kind of a new direction that we're going to be taking and hopefully in partnership with our friends at the Park Service because an important component of what we do here, of course, is meeting the standards, qualifying folks for hopefully the tax credit and certainly the tax freeze to keep those neighborhoods affordable and I see that as kind of the new frontier here. Yeah, there are two things that leap to mind from our perspective in terms of the stories we cover about preservation, which is a big part of our MO. There is no city in America that has enough affordable housing right now. We need to build a lot of apartments and they're not all going to be pretty and they're not all going to be something you're going to want to preserve in 100 years, but that inherent tension between build, build, build now and the neighborhoods that are like, please preserve our historic fabric, that's not going away, that's going to be an enduring source of tension and probably always has been but really it's an acute issue in places like Seattle, places like San Francisco, which have these very, very severe housing crises but are also older historic cities that have all sorts of amenities. You see it in Toronto, you see it everywhere. So that's a big topic we are constantly following and it creates very strange bedfellows. So it's certainly something to monitor. The other thing is that when you're involved with this historic project, who is going to be the beneficiary of it? In Baltimore, where I live, we have a host of beautiful old industrial buildings, old mills that were in a very disinvested part of town on the Jones Falls, chemical laden cotton duck factories ignored for the last 30 years. Now they're condos, now there's a Brazilian restaurant in one of them, it's magnificent. There are no sidewalks to get to them. You are expected to drive there and to have a valet park your car. It's in the middle of the city. These kinds of things are the kinds of projects that even though it's a magnificent adaptive reuse project, something went wrong there. You can't access that, that's a pedestrian in your own city. So those are the challenges that I think the preservation community has in terms of being positive actors in an equity conversation. Well, I feel like we've just scratched the tip of the iceberg and with the conference in San Francisco next year, I have a feeling we'll be picking up on these themes of affordability and the intersection of all these different points that we've been talking about. But will you please join me in thanking Brian and our panelists?