 I'm Reinhold Martin. I direct the Buell Center here, and we've met many of you either here in various presentations about this project or in Philadelphia. And so, and for those who are new to this conversation here at GSAP, welcome. And we are actually very pleased to see that there are even quite recently requests, shall we say, if not demands to keep it going into next semester and beyond. So if anything we can do to help on that front, let us know. In the meantime, so just to get us started, I wanted to quickly repeat some comments I made at the event at the University of Pennsylvania designing a Green New Deal, which many of the students here, 150 in fact, attended. Today's event in many ways continues the PEN discussion, which was organized there by Billy Fleming of the McCargg Center, Kate Aronoff and Daniel Aldana Cohen, who Daniel is here among our guests this afternoon. At the Buell Center here at Columbia, which is dedicated mainly to research and programming, we take very seriously our pedagogical responsibilities. I tried to emphasize that over there and want to restate that here, because really we see this as a sort of teaching exercise in which we teach ourselves, we learn from one another around these issues. And the we includes, more narrowly here at the Buell Center, associate director Jacob Moore and program manager Jordan Stingard, both of whom we must thank yet again for bringing us together and for doing all the work that has helped the curricular initiative get off to such a smooth start, including getting many of you to Philadelphia. With many collaborators, including student researchers, we've therefore, we've also built a teaching resource, a website, I'm not going to show it to you right now, called Power, Power in all of its senses that features critical writing analysis documentation and related materials at the intersection of climate infrastructure, politics and life. So if you haven't had a chance to have a look at the Power website, I encourage you to do so for a sort of larger context for some of this conversation. Now among the initiatives you'll find there is the one we're here, we're focusing on here today, Public Works for a Green New Deal, a group of nine classes here at Columbia GSEP, this fall supported by the Buell Center in collaboration with Dean Amal Andros, five architectural design studios, I'm just reiterating, five architectural design studios, the entire urban design studio, and three design and planning seminars. All of which are taking HR 109, the Green New Deal resolution, essentially as their teaching brief, and which amounts to about 150 students from all over the world, and that's the part I want to emphasize this afternoon. Since although the GND in the form that we're discussing this as a house resolution, congressional resolution, is US based, the relations of climate change and society on which its centers are of course not just planetary or global, from a social, political, and technical point of view, they are precisely transnational, transregional, and transcultural. And I know that it's this kind of tension between a particularly US based project and the many, many inputs including personal experience, previous education, and so on language that all of you bring to our shared sort of table here. And we want to take those inputs very seriously in this sense. So because we cannot assume that we all speak the same language on these matters, literally or figuratively, which as I said therefore is an issue that I hope with somehow we can explore in this afternoon's discussion. To better measure the scale, scope, and texture of what I think nevertheless we can still call the climate justice public sphere. So as I also announced at Penn, to open up that sphere as far as possible, on Sunday this is sort of the one, the event on the right you see are two events over here. On Sunday, November 17th, the Buell Center is co-organizing a public assembly on the Green New Deal at the Queens Museum together with colleagues at the museum, the architecture lobby, the New York chapter of the AIA, and our architectural comrades, Francisco Casablanca, and Gabriel Hernandez Solano. Now you'll notice that the Queens Museum is located in representative Ocasio-Cortez's congressional district, New York 14. So it's an excellent place to take another step in thinking and learning together about the GND in a sense in one of its sources. There at this event, activists, organizers, professionals, and academic specialists and elected officials, including at least one member of Congress, will work with numerous publics affected by the toxic mix of injustice, inequality, and planetary warming on what specifically must change on the ground, what, when, and how. So reconnecting policy with politics at all scales, which is one of the larger ambitions of this whole enterprise, and turning the regionalist framework that I know some of you have been discussing, of the so-called original, the quote-unquote original New Deal on its head. We hope to model in Queens at this event a kind of situated democratic assembly that can be replicated around the country. So it's not to be definitive. The idea is to try to just practice a little bit the kind of democracy we have in mind and around the world, the Green New Deal as democratic process as well as transformative project. So you're all invited to join us there in Queens on November 17. And then as you see here, back here in New York at GSAP, the work that's coming out of the classes that we're going to discuss here will be featured in what we call a supercrit with another of our colleagues in the larger collaboration, Kate Aronoff, the journalist Kate Aronoff, who will respond to those projects. So stay tuned for that. But in the meantime, we want to take some time today to look more closely at specific aspects of the built environment to kind of bring it down in a sense closer to the ground and related to the teaching here at GSAP in order to help give greater specificity to the discourse and debates around the Green New Deal and beyond those debates, including both its larger ambitions and the conflicts and indeed the contradictions that the proposal addresses. Toward that end, what I'm going to do is first hand things over to my GSAP colleagues, each of whom will very, very, very briefly describe, they'll introduce themselves and briefly describe the course, the aims of the course that they're teaching, after which I'll come back and introduce our speakers and then we'll head straight into the discussion. So I will just hand it over to the GSAP faculty. Okay, hello everyone. My name is David Benjamin. I'm teaching one of the design studios that Reinhold mentioned. And just for the context, for those of you who aren't based in this school, the design studios are the design studios for third-year MRC students and second semester AAD students. So those are, if you're thinking in terms of some other schools, like MRC one, the third year, second to last semester, and MRC two, also the second to last semester, they're combined. We have 18 advanced studios and five of them are part of this initiative here. Okay, so now my studio, it's called Climate Design Core, Reinventing, Architecture, Labor and Environment. So first labor. In 1802, the United States Army Corps of Engineers was formed to deliver public engineering services, energize the economy and reduce the risks from disasters. In 1931, the Civilian Conservation Corps was launched to create immediate jobs and train unemployed young men for future jobs constructing roads, dams and bridges. In 1961, the Peace Corps was established with the aim of supporting the development in other countries and promoting mutual understanding through voluntary service. The goal here was social and cultural as well as technical and economic. In 1993, AmeriCorps was launched as a domestic version of the Peace Corps. The idea was for young members to serve in non-profit organizations and public agencies addressing education, health care, and environmental protection. So in the spirit of these organizations, this studio that I'm teaching is imagining a new Climate Design Corps, making a critical look at the earlier models and reinventing them in the context of public works and the Green New Deal. Like its predecessors, our core will call upon young people to commit to a year of service, to work together in teams, to receive training for future meaningful jobs, and to work for the public good. Similar to many of the individual AmeriCorps programs, our core will emphasize diversity of participants and promote social equality through collaboration. But our core will be more environment-focused than AmeriCorps and more design-focused than any of the precedent cores. We will imagine that our core is one of the primary elements of the Green New Deal, addressing the climate crisis with urgency and committing to leave no one behind during the radical transformation required. We will also suppose that the key to successful transformation is design and the built environment. Second, architecture. In 1973, a young Swiss architect named Walter Stahel was looking for ways to save large amounts of energy in the construction industry. Instead of looking at technologies such as more efficient lighting or cooling, Stahel turned to behavior patterns and socioeconomic issues, and he concluded that these problems could be best addressed by what he called substituting manpower for energy. In a report called Jobs for Tomorrow, he wrote, The creation of new skilled jobs can be achieved in parallel with the considerable reduction of the energy consumption through a prolongation of the useful life of materials and products, and we could also say buildings. Of course, much has changed since 1973, but Stahel's original argument about the need to look simultaneously at fossil fuel consumption and fulfilling employment is as relevant as ever. In addition to inventing a new climate design core, this studio is considering how architects might design jobs and low-carbon materials as well as buildings and overall environmental impact. It will explore how labor inequality are necessary factors when considering urgent environmental issues, and it will address design in the context of time and change, conceiving of buildings as open-source systems rather than static objects. Thank you. Hi, everyone. I'm Fu Huang. I'm also teaching one of the Advanced Five Architecture Studios. It's called Being With, Coexistence at a Planetary Scale. The studio begins by rethinking the boundaries of what we think of as public works, so what's considered both public and what's considered works. Rather than public, the studio proposes the idea of publics, designing for multi-species, both human and non-human. So animals, insects, plants, fungi, and bacteria are how we're beginning the studio. Coexisting in both built and natural environments. Being With is about coexistence. It's not based on the idealism of a kind of human self-sufficiency, but instead it's rooted in democratic modes of living with other-than-human species. It's really about making space for multi-species living. Works is similarly not just about works as we understand it, limited to architectural, infrastructural, or technological scales, but also includes the planetary scale, biospheres, climate change, marshlands, in the face of our climate crisis. This incremental understanding of scale, I think, is at the core of a misunderstanding in the environment, both architecturally and in terms of technology. We understand scales incrementally, the scale that we're in, and a few scales up and a few scales down from that. But as practitioners of design, we have to think about the planetary scale simultaneously to how when we're designing at the scale of habitats. This image is from a Bolshe's Garden of Earthly Delights. It's a kind of inspiration image for the studio in which humans and other-than-humans intermingle in a game of exquisite corpse. People turn into animals that turn into musical instruments and kitchen utensils and back again. The boundaries between things and their differences in scale begin to fall apart. So the studio, we're traveling, we leave tomorrow for New Orleans and coast to Louisiana. We are going there because it's both a studio site but it's a good place to actually experience the climate crisis firsthand. It's an area that loses one New York City block to rising sea levels every six hours. So we're going on a shrimp boat. We're going to visit the disappearing barrier islands in the marshlands. We're going to be kayaking through salt marshes and then meeting with some of the, let's say, frontline communities, in particular the Vietnamese fishermen who are most at risk in the area. So really, it's a trip that's about making or designing space for the other species. The students in the studio are looking right now at alligators, mangroves, bees, lichen, oysters and mushrooms, all at species scale and at planetary scales. Thank you. Hello, my name is Andrés Hacque and we're doing a studio in which we, many people are there, looking at trans-territorial publicness. Basically, we raise this question, is this what green public architecture look like? Everyone immediately would say no, of course no, but actually in cities like New York since the 1980s, a significant part of the public realm, its budget, its policy-making capacity, its innovation and mediating potential has been devoted to instigate the rise of a particular regime, high-encracy, architecture has been an important accomplice in this process. If we are very pragmatic, if we look very specifically to the components of this architecture, we would immediately pay attention to the glass. All 18 super towers being now built in New York are cladded with all-clear glass, also known as low-iron glass. It was patented in 1989 by PPG Industries from Pittsburgh, of course. It eliminates the greenish tone that iron imprints in clear glass. All-clear glass is an industry that keeps growing and growing. It is estimated that by 2025, the annual revenue of all-clear glass will double the one that we have now. High-end office, residential, hospital buildings, as well as, for instance, Bentley or Audi cars, use all-clear glass. Contemporary power is encapsulated in all-clear glass, when seen in its larger socio-territorial context, the existence of all-clear glass is directly related to a great number of transformations that have reshaped entire regions of rural America. For instance, to reduce the cost of mining the low iron silica needed in its production, it is extracted through surface mining that facilitates the dispersion of such a thin sand, producing an exponential growth of silicosis and carcinoma in Wisconsin and Illinois. In all-clear glass, removing iron oxide results in the need of doubling the amount of energy in the ovens in order to reach higher temperatures able to melt silica sand. The overall result is ten times increased in the emissions of CO2 and 25 times in NOx emissions, which has brought the states where all-clear glass is produced to constant atmospheric alert since 2015. And this is what is really critical in what we're very much looking at. All-clear glass is commercialized as a tool to improve the environmental performance of buildings. All-clear glass provides a neutral base that increases the effectiveness of radiation-shoulding coatings. Paradoxically, the mere use of all-clear glass in the building makes it automatically earn two points in the lead energy and environmental design rating system, as all-clear glass has a lead to a verified environmental product declaration. All-clear glass is showing the conflict of the material culture of sustainability that looks at material solutions in a techno-deterministic way without reconstructing the overall techno-social context they contribute to produce. Who's not actually attracted to this? At the same time, our culture is addicted to clearness as much as we humans are addicted to techno-determinism, making it possible for high-end buildings like this being now developed in downtown Manhattan directly related to unprecedented environmental damage to get more than $25 million annually of public money through tax abatements, as Arvina and Jose Luis are looking at at the office now. So the advanced studio that I'm leading works as an intervention to these addictions. We're revolting the use of public resources in these sites using a techno-social perspective to invent five prototypes of contemporary public infrastructures, five replacements, five trans-territorial notions of publicness as a proposal to be replicated and reproduced as a response to the context of the public works for a green new deal. Thank you. Hi, everyone. My name is Kaya Kul. I'm the coordinator of the Urban Design Studio here at GSAP. So the Urban Design Studio is a team-taught studio. Ana Deech, David Smiley, Jerome Hafer, Justin Moore, Dragana Doric, Shachi Pandi, Liz McEnany, and Rafi Rivera all teach the studio with me together. And the students also work in teams, and so there's 56 of them. Maybe sort of a bit of background for everyone who's not familiar with this when Reinhold says the entire Urban Design Studio, that's what he's talking about. It's a very coordinated effort. I think it's nine of us that I just mentioned are interacting with all 56 students. To us, House Resolution 109 really reads like the brief for an urban design competition. I want to quote a few things that we read there, building resiliency against climate change-related disasters, repairing or upgrading the infrastructure, building more sustainable food systems, overhauling transportation systems, restoring and protecting, threatened and endangered and fragile ecosystems. All of these are things that we consider sort of part of our work. And so when reading the document, we really felt like this is a charge for urban design to get to work and envision what the Green New Deal would look like. For the past several years, the Urban Design Studio in the fall semester has been working in the Hudson Valley in coordination with the Hudson Valley Initiative here at GSAP, which I also lead, which is a community design initiative that engages with community in the Valley. And so now, too, we're interested in looking towards the region that feeds New York City to imagine what a Green New Deal would look like here in a region that's politically divided that has historically been the source of power generation for New York City. And it represents a very mixed context from agricultural fields to small towns and villages, post-industrial cities, large sites of extraction and suburban subdivisions. And a strong legacy of environmental activism, actually. So the fight against Con Edison to stop the building of the Storm King power plant in the late 60s on the Hudson River has shaped national policy like environmental review procedures and, ultimately, the Clean Water Act. So it's a site that has a lot of history in thinking about the environment. What you see here is an image of our first review a couple of weeks ago where we traveled up the river from Yonkers to Troy, not physically, but by virtue of building models of five-by-two-mile sections of the river and the landscape to sort of understand the place a little bit. And we just had our second review already yesterday where we began to map the region through the lens of 14 infrastructure systems. And we want to understand both the territory through this mapping but also unpack sort of the basic knowledge about the goals of the Green New Deal. So, and when we talk about infrastructure systems, we see this very broadly. We will be hearing about three of these systems that we looked at more today from our panelists, housing, transportation or mobility, and electricity. But the systems that we looked at also include health, libraries, forests, water, waste, real estate, asphalt, the economy, food systems, and politics. In New York State, the three systems that our speakers are talking about are the development of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the state. So just tackling those is a big part of the picture, but the interconnectedness of the systems I think is also something that we all learned yesterday in our review and are looking forward to unpack for the rest of the semester. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Douglas Woodward and I coordinate the domestic planning studios for the summer. Hi, Ariela Marin. Co-teaching with Douglas. I have a firm line advisors that focuses on local government climate action and how to accelerate progress. So we don't have the 56 students that Kaia has, but our approach with our 19 planning and policy students is to do a very close reading of the Green New Deal and to actually locate it as a tradition or genre, which I personally believe is the manifesto. And so we are looking at it as architecture, as urban design, as planning and as text. Roland Barth has said that what we call real is never more than a code of representation. It's never a code of execution. And the Green New Deal is about the best example of that we can see. It's a text written in the remotest expectation of passage. It's something that its drafters knew would never actually become law at the present time. So we're looking at it as something that was written with the goal of expounding a theory of the desirable in American life at the present time and to outline the critical structural changes that it considers necessary for the critical environmental and labor conditions that we find ourselves in. And we hope to ground this vision of the GND for the planning and policy students in today's science, economic, social, infrastructure, land use and technological reality while at the same time introducing what I like to call inspirations which are these actual yet relatively small inside policies and strategies being implemented across the U.S. that have objectives similar to the GND and these are happening at different scales, different sectors and across different systems. So in the course we aim to facilitate discussions among the students to help them imagine and formulate what implementation of aspects of the GND may look like and we do this by providing the students with perspectives, frameworks, examples and the space to step back and take on the challenges of this implementation in their capacity as current and future planners, policy makers and change makers and lastly, part of this includes encouraging curiosity, asking questions that centers this work on the people and fosters the transformative non-incremental actions that are necessary but it's also encouraging a focus on governance and institutions, the role of government, the role of regulations and the role of coalitions and communications that they all come together. It's actually interesting that of the professors that we have up here teaching these nine classes four of them worked at the Department of City Planning in New York. And just one quick thing about this slide as well on the left, this is a picture of a house in Viecas that was hit by both a hurricane and a tornado and it was left by the residents of that part of Puerto Rico as an example of what happens during these events. I'm Thad Pulaski. I'm teaching a practicum also in urban planning along with coordinating it with Kate Orff who's leading a group of urban designers. You might have heard Kate talk about workshopping the Green New Deal in Philadelphia last week. We think that the Green New Deal is a call to action and it really challenges us to rethink our methods as planners and urban designers and we think is central to the current operations of our professions but even more so in the future is the workshop. We have to get really good at conducting workshops where we can co-create design ideas and planning strategies with a broad interdisciplinary population. So in the classroom we're working in between different disciplines. We have civil engineers and policy people in our classroom but we're also going to try to spend some time taking the class to my hometown Johnstown, Pennsylvania very exotic location. I'm very glad everybody signed up for this. Johnstown is both in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. It has overlapping concerns of post-industrial economy and a degradated landscape and a strong sense of despair that's been pervasive for about 50 years which has been a hotbed for a growing sense of nationalism and radicalism and white supremacy but it's not all bad there's good things happening there too and we want to elevate those voices and come together with voices in the community that want to see what a Green New Deal could mean on the ground. This is River Wall Johnstown is known as the flood city it flooded several times in 1889 there was a flood that killed 3,000 people sort of a mythic early natural disaster in U.S. history and the Works Progress Agency built these river walls about 24 miles of river walls in 1936 they're falling apart now and nature is coming back so we're there to help people think about what the river walls could be in the future and so yes we're going to work with these innovative techniques of listening and drawing and we were just doing that last week at the Governor's Island with our futures festival and so there's a little sketch of listening and drawing Hi, I'm Bryony Roberts and my studio is Structures of Care it's one of the advanced five studios and so our studio is looking at the Green New Deal through the lens of the social justice elements of the proposal and starting from the philosophical framework of the ethics of care this framework has been growing in popularity in social activism circles as well as ecofeminism and it's looking at the intersection of environmental sustainability and social sustainability so the studio is looking at care at multiple scales thinking about land use, programming labor and materials our program is a child care facility in Jackson Heights in Queens and we're looking to a near future in which universal child care with Warren and in New York it seems even more feasible given the amazingly successful rollout of universal pre-K so we're looking to that really as a model so in terms of public works we're looking at social services as a really powerful tool for bringing resources and support into communities for funding green building and sustainable land use and also creating more equitable labor conditions so the child care facility is looking at it as a social anchor within a community land trust the community land trust is also a growing phenomenon particularly in New York and it's a kind of collective land ownership that enables long-term affordable housing affordable small business spaces and also community spaces so we're working closely with a community organization in Jackson Heights Queens called Chaya CDC they're just in the process of developing their proposal for a CLT community land trust and so we're working really closely with them on identifying sites and really considering the feasibility of different locations for not only producing the possibility for supporting small businesses and affordable housing but also creating a hub for social services with child care at the center the students just presented their initial research yesterday which is greeted with a lot of enthusiasm at Chaya and it's been great to see how the research is really having a positive effect on the conversation about what's possible in that community so it's also this location is around the corner from AOC's office so we're really hoping that this will also be part of a very real conversation about what's possible in the neighborhood in terms of the architectural design the students are looking closely at the history of designing for children thinking about designing spaces of play and learning and looking at materials in particular materials that are sustainable and non-toxic but also create a kind of heightened sensory experience and interactivity for the children so there's been a lot of experimental play already with jute and cork and textiles and different kind of tensile structures so the idea is to create a very multi-scalar architectural proposal thinking from the level of materials all the way to the regional issues of land use and ownership thank you for watching in the advanced studio sequence and the studio I'm teaching really starts from the recognition that more than a set of ambitious goals and fundamental shifts in everything from agriculture to energy production from transportation to social infrastructure the Green New Deal represents in the words of AOC herself an effort to quote rediscover the power of the public imagination unquote in fact the GND which they really only exist as a relatively broad outline of principles and non-binding resolution both inspires and relies upon an intersubjective assembly of images and ideas, visions of utopian change on the one hand and projection of catastrophic environmental or economic collapse on the other and indeed it could be argued that the principal battleground on which the fate of the Green New Deal rests is not one of policy but rather of perception that its success depends on the degree to which it catalyzes a new form of social imaginary the studio examines how the Green New Deal might provoke new modes of conceptualizing the relationship between technology society and the natural world recognizing the crucial link between material culture and imagination the hypothesis is that architecture's most potent role here may be its capacity to envision in precise spatial terms new ways of living in a profoundly transformed world to do this we're examining the implications of the Green New Deal through two seemingly disparate frameworks from the aesthetic and philosophical category of the sublime and to the emergent branch of speculative fiction known as CLIFI given that we're confronted on a daily basis on our phones and news feeds with a continual spectacle of nature rendered destructive by human action the studio is looking at how issues of perception and representation have intersected in major technosocial movements of the past examining how the historical notion of the sublime which is situated in the boundary between human inquiry and natural phenomenon might provide a lens through which to view our current crisis at the same time we're looking at how climate fiction both confronts and transfigures the incomprehensible realities of climate change inhabiting the paradoxical territory between elegy and resistance in this spirit the students are being asked to imagine a condition set 30 years into our future the New York of 2050 a kind of modest science fictional standards engaging the complex interactions between environments people and technologies through specific scenarios within the larger New York metro region oscillating between the plausible and the as yet unimaginable between the utopic and the dystopic between the logics of rational efficiency and the sublime our projects seek new urban landscape and architectural formations to reconfigure the technosocial and political imagination thanks you know I won't delay further but really we could just spend about an hour talking about what we just heard and I'm sure I know many of you are all of you are in one way or the other but to help build a different kind of frame around things that bridges a little bit first of all as I said to the discussion that we had in Philadelphia and also to the larger conversations, debates controversies that the number of our colleagues alluded to have characterized our civic discourse we have four very very interesting and very expert colleagues to help us to in a sense isolate but at the same time connect different aspects of this highly complex question so I'm just going to introduce everybody all at once and then they'll speak each in turn and then we'll go into this sort of panel discussion we really are trying to leave as much time as we can for questions so as you're sitting and listening please start listing questions also in your heads because really the goal here is to open up for a discussion of some length towards the end so on the first on the topic of public housing, Daniel Aldana Cohen and by the way I'm not holding to any of these topics so this is just more or less how we've framed it Daniel Aldana Cohen who was one of the co-organizers at Penn is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania where he directs the socio-spatial climate collaborative or SC, was SC squared or SC2 in 2018-19 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and he Daniel works on the politics of climate change investigating the intersections of climate change, political economy, inequalities of race and social class and political projects of elites and social movements in global cities of north and south working on a book about housing, inequality and climate politics in New York and Sao Paulo tentatively titled Street Fight, Climate Change and Inequality in the 21st Century and his co-author of A Planet to Win, Why We Need a Green New Deal with Kate Aronoff Alissa Patastoni who will moderate the conversation and Thea Rio-Francos with a forward from Naomi Klein next on public transportation we are very pleased to have Hailey Richardson join us Hailey is the Senior Communications Associate at Transit Center an independent foundation based in New York that works to improve public transit when she's not spearheading transit cities, Green New Deal initiatives she's, and it really is and we've already heard bits of this too there's so much of this sprouting up in all different corners of our city and of course well beyond it's interesting also to connect those people who are doing that she's directing the organization's video series so I suppose there are videos to watch too Hailey has worked on livable streets initiatives around the country and is an alumna of the George Washington University and Pratt Institute then on public electricity Abby Spinak who studies energy history with a particular interest in the politics of utility ownership and the role of infrastructure in disseminating economic ideas her current research ties the history of electrification in the rural U.S. to the evolution of 20th century American capitalism and alternative economic visions she's currently completing a book Democracy Electric Energy and Economic Citizenship in Urbanizing America which explores how a cooperative business model came to be preferred for federal electrification policy in the 1930s as a third option in a fierce debate about public and private power how a vast network of these community owned and democratically managed utilities arose across the country quickly and dramatically altering the American landscape and how urbanizing communities variously interpreted the political opportunities of community ownership at different moments over the past 80 years Abby received her Ph.D. in Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and she's been a Charles Warren Center Fellow with the History of American Capitalism at Harvard and recently held a Mellon Post-Archital Fellowship in the Energy Humanities with I suppose our colleagues in the Cultures of Energy Project at Rice University and so to moderate this incredible group we have Alissa who's a political theorist and currently an environmental fellow at Harvard University working on topics related to political economy environmental politics feminism and history of political thought she also writes about the politics of feminism labor and environment for various publications including The Nation Descent N-plus-one and Jacobin where she is on the editorial board and she is a co-author along with Daniel and Kate Aronoff and Thierry O'Francos of the book that you must go out and buy as soon as it comes out a planet to win why we need a Green New Deal at November, forthcoming in November with Verso so with that I invite Daniel to get us started. Okay, hi everybody thank you so much for letting me as a front piece sociologist come to this fancy design school architecture school so I'm going to talk about why we need a Green New Deal for housing and I'll just note at the outside and we'll get to it briefly that I'm also now working for an organization called Data for Progress which does a lot of pulling and the national campaign called the Homes Guarantee I do some climate mapping and we'll see a bit more of that later but I think the big thing we want to get to right away is that the Green New Deal forces us to think proactively about the future and to think about the future and the present together and to learn from the future even though it hasn't happened so Roberto Unger who's a fantastic social theorist writes we understand a state of affairs by grasping what it can become in a range of circumstances the understanding of the actual is inseparable from the imagination of the possible of the adjacent possible of what can next happen or what we can make happen next. Now this is probably not so controversial to designers but as social scientists we are locked in the past at a time in which it provides poor or incomplete lessons for where we should go with Colbert and the New Yorker has talked about how we're going into a no analog future and so for figuring out what the Green New Deal is going to be I'm going to argue that we need a constant interplay between a political economic analysis and a sort of experimental attitude towards what are the physical changes we can make right away and what are the big long-term changes that we need to be making very soon. And so when it comes to housing I'm going to suggest that there are really three things that we have to focus on. One is tackling inequalities which is the decisive contribution of the Green New Deal. A massive attack on the social and racial inequalities that define our times. Second we need to massively reduce the amount of energy that we use and a planet to win is a book that I've co-authored with Alyssa and the whole argument is structured around this idea that to provide solidarity for the rest of the world the form of the Green New Deal in the United States should include a dramatic reduction of energy use so that we can actually decarbonize by 2030 by 2035. So when people tell you how hard it is to decarbonize because we have to build so much new clean energy that's true but the less energy we use the faster we can decarbonize and the third piece what makes this different from green austerity is that we're shifting from a logic of private consumption of things we don't really need to temples of public luxury to providing a new form of consumption where we have more time to spend in play with the people we love and to get there we need one last green stimulus to create the landscapes of public communal luxury and housing I'm going to argue is an absolutely central part of constructing a new physical world in which we can live with less resource intensity and love our lives all the more for it. So there's a long discussion already in design and planning this idea that through housing and through urban changes we can reduce energy use and then swap with clean energy and there's an increasingly sophisticated conversation which we'll get into a bit today about how transformations to housing can be in a kind of complex sort of circle with the clean energy system and this is what we really need to think about so housing is not separate from decarbonization it is not an add-on to decarbonization but as a lever for decarbonization but again in a way that provides communal luxury so the case for a green new deal for housing so I want to make three quick points before I talk a little bit about precedence first of all housing and equality is just as important as unemployment in terms of actually driving the miserable conditions that we see in this country so the green new deal has talked a lot about a jobs guarantee but if you want to understand racial inequalities in this country and the racial wealth gap you have to go back to the housing system which in fact came out of the new deal in the form of red lining which made it much easier for middle and upper middle class white families and even working class white families to buy homes very difficult for black and brown families so that there is a racial wealth gap with a ratio of almost 100 to 1 huge differential in the amount of wealth that families own and has everything to do with housing in addition to that what we have seen in the last several decades is many attempts to use home ownership home ownership for black and brown families as an escape from the racial wealth gap and what you have had instead is what Cange and Matta Taylor at Princeton calls predatory inclusion so subprime mortgage boom in 2008 is just one example of a larger system where the efforts to include black and brown families in home ownership come through these forms of financial exploitation which actually cause spirals of debt and poverty but not a different model the other thing is that the crises of home, of housing and energy and inequality all converge in American homes so not only are renters unable to afford their rent but one third of households in the United States can't afford their utility bills and in a place like the Mid-Atlantic half of black households have had to have a utility shut off made a sacrifice in something like food to pay their energy bills or to keep their homes at an unsafe temperature or simply had to keep their homes at an unsafe temperature and when you think in cities like Philadelphia and Washington DC which will go from 3 days at 95 degrees Fahrenheit to almost 30 within 3 decades you understand how grave the situation is so we can't think about the energy crisis separately from the crisis of inequality which is very much a matter of homes and finally in addition we often think that people will say there's not many new homes we have all these empty luxury towers already why don't we just invade the new super glass towers of the wealthy which I am all for 100% but sea level rise alone will displace over 12 million people by the end of the century in the United States we have heat, we have a major obligation of the United States to welcome new immigrants and refugees to this country so the question is are we going to have concrete shacks or are we going to have public luxury as a model for housing people or put another way what are the conditions under which the next great migration will have a democratic outcome and will feel good rather than the previous great migration which ended in a system that sociologists call American apartheid and then third, finally of course we need to decarbonize the building sector so homes alone over 15% of US emissions buildings in total close to 40 so sunflower homes this is an idea that I talk about in the book with Alyssa Kate and Thea which is an idea that when you have homes set up in the right way you have all electric appliances you can start to organize home energy use so that it literally follows the sun you can put your clothes in the washer and they will wash at 3pm when the sun is beating down and you have minimum energy required for things like induction but so again integrating the idea of the home and the energy system let's move ahead so the idea of combining housing and climate change is really growing in the United States right now, I think it would be a mistake to view this as simply a kind of technical question if this is going to work because there are a lot of differences by combining multiple issues together by connecting the dots we'll have bigger coalitions bigger movements fighting for the things that we need so I work on the policy team for the homes guarantee campaign this is a campaign of a group called people's action and it's really motivated by organizations that are organizing tenants on the ground groups like community voices heard in New York or KC tenants in Kansas City there's a huge amount of excitement from the movements on the ground saying yes, this is what we want we want to get in on the Green New Deal we want to have a piece of this and within two weeks we've seen the Bernie Sanders campaign release its home retrofits that we can do public housing that is zero carbon that we can do green upgrades to existing public housing and there's been a huge amount of excitement and the Bernie Sanders campaign released its housing for all plan that literally endorses the homes guarantee they say in the plan we need a homes guarantee the homes guarantee calls for 12 million new units of social housing in 10 years Bernie's plan comes in a little low at almost 10 million new units of social housing a year it's actually illegal in the United States right now to produce new social housing so we're going to have to change some laws and the Bernie plan includes a huge section on organizing public housing so you're seeing this kind of like immediate groundswell and you'll see from the groups in Congress as well I think you'll see from lawmakers pretty soon a series of bills that are trying to combine climate change and housing in order to do this we do need new forms of analysis so I talked before about political economy so I'm part of a group at Penn SC2 socio-spatial climate collaborative and what you can see here is early stages of our mapping efforts for New York City lots are in NYCHA New York City Housing Authority 400,000 people live in public housing in New York so we find where are those housing units which congressional districts are they in because the politics matter who is at risk of flooding those are the blue lines and then if you look at the shading what that tells you about is how much does your electricity cost as a percentage of rent and as you can see the lighter colored areas looking at families paying around 20% as much in rent as they're in electricity so huge electricity costs and so what this is telling us is that we need yes absolutely to do upgrades in public housing remediate mold, remediate lead decarbonize but you also have to invest in the communities around them because people literally cannot afford to keep cool in the summer or to keep warm in the winter or during a pool or vortex so we actually also need to kind of create new forms of data analysis to try to understand how are these intersections going to work in practice so we used to talk about connecting the dots and climate change was about connecting the story of a hurricane to climate change now connecting the dots is connecting the story between the built environment, social inequality and climate change policy and it might seem like this is a huge political left but these ideas are actually popular with the homes, sorry with that for progress we've been pulling the core planks of the green homes guarantee a big deal for housing and it turns out if you ask Americans do you support green investment in front line communities racialized working class communities massive public support if you ask Americans do you support weatherizing low income homes billions and billions and billions of dollars a year massive majority support and even now if you ask Americans do you support investing tens of billions of dollars in building new public housing you have massive amounts of support so we have to think of this as this insane moment we have to think of this as a prototype to do really big things and what are we going to offer and what are we going to organize around that's going to solve many problems at once I want to take a minute to talk about a precedent that's been very important to me when we think about social housing in the U.S. we inevitably think about the American model of public housing which is really poorly maintained housing viewed as a kind of last resort for very poor people but there is another form of social housing model in Vienna 1919 you have the formation of a new country, Austria in Vienna the social democrats are elected this is the left wing party and in Vienna the social democrats, the left have literally never lost an election have literally never lost an election they were defeated in a civil war by Nazis, not neo-Nazis but Nazis in the 1930s and in Vienna in the 1920s they built enough public housing to house 10% of the city's population very very high quality and now in Vienna today building on this legacy one third of the housing is public one third of the housing is cooperative and one third of the housing is private and Vienna's carbon emissions are through the floor so this is what public housing looks like in Vienna this is what cooperative housing looks like in Vienna and this is the result of decades and decades of organizing starting again at the beginning of the 20th century public health movement, labour movement, feminist movement with increasingly an ethics of care that we were talking about earlier in all of the housing developments so you can see me here visiting the Karl Marxhof the Karl Marxhof I carry a knapsack, very nerdy real research Karl Marxhof is the most famous of these samples of public housing it was built to house 1200 people in the 1920s it was literally shelled in the 1930s and 1934 during the Civil War it had a library it had a dental clinic, it had a community theater really really really beautiful housing and it's important to note that the architect the political architect of the Red Vienna housing program of which Karl Marxhof forms a part was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942 so this was very much in Vienna as today a struggle between life and death the struggle over housing and that's very much what the struggle of climate politics is about so public housing was built by taxing the rich they literally taxed champagne to help build public housing one third of the funds to build public housing came from luxury taxes so it seems like this is a story about Europe but there is an interesting connection between the European Viennese experiment and what happened in the US and it comes in the form of Roland Wank the architect who immigrated to the United States in 1924 he had spent some time in Vienna he came to the US like many immigrants because he wanted to have a different and more exciting life other immigrants come for other reasons but that was why he came and he built in the Lower East Side of New York still standing a nommage to the Karl Marxhof which is a cooperative that was built for socialist government workers in New York City gardens, there was rooftop with balconies so that workers could dance into the night beautiful art deco 50% of the lot is garden which is extremely high in Manhattan then and now and Wank went on from working on housing to working on public energy so Wank became the chief architect of the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1934 and he went on to design dams all across the southern US he also helped to steward the Rural Electrification Association and what Wank said about the public power was he said this can't just be an object this has to be a beautiful feature of the landscape and he designed dams to have viewing these viewing platforms that the public would go to these elaborate roads that people would come on to see the dams so that it would look in the words of his eulogist like a forest sorry like the Acropolis coming up from behind the forest and 4.5 million Americans 4.5 million Americans visited these dams in the 1930s so there was an idea that both housing and public power had to be beautiful had to be four of and by people it wasn't perfect there was a huge amount of racism in the New Deal but there is a vision we can kind of recuperate of trying to connect the energy system and the housing system and I want to end by noting an essay that Roland Wank wrote called nowhere to go but forward in 1941 for the magazine of art because it speaks to us now the point of Wank's essay was what should architecture do at a time of insane instability at a time of incredible struggle over the fate of humanity this was early 1940s the full on World War II about to swallow Europe and what Wank says is that security is no longer within the independent reach of even the most powerful individual wealth no longer comes in forms which may be hoarded within four walls, permanence itself may be an anachronism in a world of accelerating change and he goes on to say he goes on to say that architects have to see themselves not as a special super kind of cast who have to design everything for the world but he says to plan a housing development a roadside restaurant a school or a powerhouse is not of itself very different nor more useful than to mend boots run a lathe or total up accounts but to share in a forward struggle where the fight is hot and passion runs high is one of the vital experiences that make life worth living and that makes contemporary architecture fun so my plea to you is join this movement for the Green New Deal think with the future learn from the past and remember with all of us there's nowhere to go but forward thank you wonderful to be here with you all and I just want to give a shout out to all the people that are striking for the climate today we see you here in New York based foundation that advocates for better public transit in the U.S. we do that through a variety of ways we conduct research into what matters to transit riders we do grant making to build community power in cities across the U.S. to fight for better transit we do technical trainings for transit and agency practitioners to teach them about international best practices and we also do advocacy ourselves here in New York City so I want to start out by talking about federal transportation policy because it's been largely a failure in the United States it has failed to produce useful transit and that has been a disaster for social equity and the climate so the Green New Deal resolution by invoking public transit however briefly invites us to imagine a different future and to think about how we might reorient federal transportation policy to achieve better outcomes as many of you probably know transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. we have sprawled and paved our way into the most energy dependent transportation system in the world and this has been a disaster for public health not only in terms of harmful pollution that it produces but also in terms of hundreds of thousands of deaths that occur on our roadway every year through the federal highway trust fund transportation policy delivers billions of dollars a year to road expansion in the U.S. and what this means is that we are still building highways through low income neighborhoods and spewing pollution on the frontline communities and just in case you thought that this was something that happened in your history books Portland, Denver and Houston still have plans to expand highways through neighborhoods 80% of federal transportation funding goes towards roads which obviously leads 20% left over for public transit but what's perhaps more insidious is the fact that road funding is distributed with very few strings attached no goals, no ways of measuring outcomes whereas transportation transit projects are asked to scrape and claw for every dollar they receive so what this means is that outside of a few urban centers in the U.S. we mostly have a patchwork of low frequency transit systems that are dwarfed by highways that encourage sprawl and all but force a car based lifestyle onto us so transit funding is primarily administered through the federal transit administrations capital grants program and so that might sound well and good but the problem with this program is that it often funds the wrong type of transit projects so you'll see transit expansions in the middle of freeways that force people to walk across multiple lanes of traffic and wait in dirty noisy stations just to take the train you'll also see projects that extend rail into far-flung ex-urban places that have no hope of achieving any kind of ridership to make the case to skeptical legislatures that we shouldn't fund transit because nobody rides it we also see the FTA fund projects like mixed traffic streetcars which are sort of done under the guise of economic development rather than actually providing people with useful reliable transit so since the 1990s the FTA has only provided very small transit agencies with operating assistance which means that most are on the hook they're coming up with revenue to fund operations themselves they do that through local taxes as well as through fair revenue but it's wildly insufficient most transit agencies are woefully underfunded which leads to a vicious cycle of poor service leading to low ridership leading to further service cuts leading to as I mentioned a further public unwillingness to make investments in transit systems so access to transit is a huge determinant of socio-economic access to reliable transportation is a huge determinant of people's ability to make progress in terms of socio-economic mobility so we know that transportation is the number one determinant for whether somebody can escape poverty and so this graph is showing the number of jobs that you can reach by driving in 30 minutes in New Orleans versus how many jobs you can get transit as you'll see there's a radical discrepancy and this trend holds in just about every major U.S. city so people that are transit dependent are forced to contend with broken and missing sidewalks faded or non-existent crosswalks a lack of ADA accessibility bus stops that are basically just a pole in the ground just to get to work to school to wherever they need to go so the contemporary discourse about transportation in a Green New Deal has largely centered on electrification of the vehicle fleet and you'll see that reflected in many of the Democratic candidates climate plans but it's really important to point out that electrification is important but it's radically insufficient to solve our transportation problem as the California Air Resources Board recently concluded that we absolutely have to reduce driving if we have any chance of meeting our emissions targets and Project Drawdown is a climate modeling organization and they also concluded that electrification is just one of myriad policies needed to meet emissions targets by 2030 we need to make it much easier to walk in bike places as well as put reliable frequent transit within reach of much greater number of Americans and furthermore an electrified vehicle based transportation system is much more energy intensive which makes all of the other initiatives we want to undertake that much harder and it's also important to point out that a lot of the harmful health matter from cars actually comes from the tires and the roadway wear not just what's coming out of the tailpipe so from that perspective electric vehicles don't solve our problem at all and there's also the issue that car ownership is a trap and if we continue on this path of forcing people to spend $30,000 a year just to participate in society we have failed there are 7 million Americans that are currently underwater on their car loans because they had to buy a car because they couldn't rely on transit once again electrification even with generous subsidies does not solve this problem so a lot of the opposition to the Green New Deal frames it as a sacrifice and while it's true that we will have to change the way that we move around if we do it right it won't feel like a sacrifice transit that comes every 3 to 5 minutes sidewalks everywhere that'll enable you to go where you want to go without having to get in your car that's not a sacrifice transit that feels like a life hack like you're getting away with something temples of public luxury as Daniel talked about so how do we get there the first thing is that federal transportation policy needs to set goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions it's shocking that I haven't done it yet we also need to set goals to reduce vehicle miles traveled we also could set federal goal we need to set a certain percentage of Americans within walking distance of frequent transit we need to stop building highways any federal money that's going towards roads needs to be dedicated to bringing more capacity out of the roads that we already have by adding bus or HOV only lanes we should also incentivize states to tear down highways and replace them with street grids that encourage walking and biking so it's always infrastructure week in Washington and a lot of the debate about transportation does involve infrastructure but really we need more service we could double the amount of transit ridership tomorrow if we decided to put resources into running service and you know Canadian cities have doubled the per capita transit ridership that we do and it's just because they run more service another thing is that we should exempt transit priority projects like this red bus lane in Boston from environmental review it has inherent environmental benefits we should be green lighting these kind of projects we should also be putting transit where the people are we shouldn't be building expensive rail lines to the corn fields because a member of congress really wants it to happen we should put federal funding towards projects in places where the highest number of people will ride it like the long languishing Utica Avenue subway line in Brooklyn we also need to make walking much much easier and state transportation agencies should have leeway to spend federal funds on basic upgrades like sidewalks and ADA access using tactical methods like this project in Seattle we could improve access practically overnight for Americans so what are we up against so didn't expect that one the problem is that even the good guys don't really get it the darling of the left Bernie Sanders recently voted a highway expansion spending bill out of committee and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has taken heat for her comments that the green new deal should involve new roads governors who control state DOTs across the country have fully bought into the idea that building new roads is the best way to solve congestion massive education is needed to bring people up to speed about the harms that a road based transportation system causes of course there's the all powerful highway lobby a constellation of actors from chambers of commerce to the freight and trucking industries to the fossil fuel industries that have a stake in maintaining the status quo we need to finally sever the link between the transportation industry and the fossil fuel industry federal transportation policy needs to deliver tangible improvements to people's lives it shouldn't be this hard to get things like bus service in New York access to reliable affordable transportation is one of the most powerful equalizers that we have and federal transportation policy needs to treat it as such the best part about transit is that we know what works it works around the world we don't need additional R&D or investments in exotic technology like the hyperloop we need the political will to get it done so thank you very much so hi everybody I'm Abby Spinnick and I think I somehow failed to put where I work in either the bio or this so I should say that I teach mainly environmental history at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and I the first two presentations have been very specific and very modern I hope you will bear with me as I take you back into history and provide a little bit more of theoretical thought piece about how we should think of the Green New Deal more so than than real policies that you can get behind today but I would argue as I well I tend to argue teaching history in a planning department that I see history as a radical practice so hopefully I will invite you to join me in that perspective today so since I have the last word here what I want to do before we open up discussion is to take on the history of the word public in public works when we in this room use the phrase public works we're not talking about public ownership per se but rather technological systems that are seen to be in the public interest or that serve the public good there has been a lot of interesting work done recently on the intellectual history of phrases like this I'm thinking in particular of Adam Place's recent excavation of the term natural monopoly to refer to large scale technological systems like electricity and his argument that we only interpret natural monopolies as natural within American political economy because we have naturalized ideas about free market economics in the United States the ownership management and regulation of such large scale networked systems of public works has often been seen to be in tension with other less tangible public goods central to American life such as freedom or private industry or economic growth the way we in this country have navigated such tangible and intangible goods within the design of public works has historically led to messy coalitions of public and private actors public and private capital and public and private benefits and so talking about opportunities for public electricity in the Green New Deal requires that we do some significant intellectual work of disentanglement in that spirit I want to start with a quick summary of the research I've been doing over the past few years on energy policy in the first New Deal for the last few years I've been studying a national scale experiment in community energy ownership in the form of rural electric cooperatives in the 1930s vast discrepancies between electricity access rural and urban America became a proxy for many of the social ills New Deal era reformers wanted to address from rural poverty during the Great Depression to the existential environmental threats of the dust bowl to the international status of the United States as a developing industrial nation in 1935 President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the rural electrification act which after a year of contentious debates and negotiations about who should own the nation's energy infrastructure ended up largely providing financing for the development of local cooperatives which built and maintained electricity infrastructure across a huge expanse of rural America today over 900 of these ostensibly non-profit electric co-ops continue to provide power for 42 million Americans on community owned lines so a lot of people aren't familiar with this cooperative sector of the American electricity industry although you all are now because Dan talked about it so allow me to just dwell on a couple of points nearly everyone in this entire shaded territory receives electricity from a business that they own as a cooperative member and in which they have a right to vote on its operations not by percentage of stock but democratically one member per vote so when I first started studying these co-ops I was excited that they might be a latent landscape of democratic energy that could provide an alternative to extractive for profit and environmentally destructive norms of investor owned private utilities but I quickly found out that they were not in practice functioning as democracies and in fact the most exciting work being done in electric co-op territories in the 21st century has been by activists trying to reclaim the democratic potential of these co-ops around local issues of social and environmental justice so my research has thus become more about how these energy cooperatives became co-opted into other kinds of economic and territorial projects over the last 80 years and I argue that the particular approach to federal energy financing developed during the New Deal conscripted rural communities into national projects of industrial and economic growth that diminished opportunities for these co-ops to expand local autonomy and local self-determination despite their democratic rhetoric I therefore interpret these New Deal energy co-ops as more part of the history of American capitalism than a case study in energy democracy this has led me to ask more critical and technical questions about how ownership of energy resources is operationalized and what kinds of work claims to public, private, cooperative or non-profit status have done in this country and so to help us think about possibilities for new kinds of electricity in the Green New Deal new kinds of public electricity in the Green New Deal I want to situate these federally funded and undemocratic co-ops within a brief history of electricity ownership in the U.S. over the past 150 years as a networked technology that relied on public space electricity has always been an issue of concern for the state when Thomas Edison founded the first commercial electric utility in 1880 the country was embroiled in debates about whether railroads should be nationalized and if not then what rights and responsibilities state regulators should have to control the antisocial tendencies of these private companies providing a necessary public service the question at hand was how could the common citizen participate in the material wealth of industrial modernity progressive economist Richard Ealy popularized the term natural monopoly which I talked about earlier as a way to understand the special role of networked services within American political economy as part of a broader fight against laissez-faire capitalism and in an effort to create a new economics Ealy became interested in the contradictions of selling networked utilities as commodities and capitalist markets public works like railroads water electricity could never be a real commodity Ealy and others argued because the service they provided could not be detached from their sites of production and consumption the logic of market competition a benefit for consumers in other contexts would in this case lead to unnecessary duplication of connected infrastructures which was both expensive and a mess the question Ealy and others posed was how can these new natural monopolies be governed such that they remain public utilities that is so that they don't default to the monopolistic behaviors that the railroads had most recently demonstrated of driving prices up quality down and keeping access uneven there were two obvious solutions public ownership or public regulation many at the time believed that public utilities in the hands of private companies was fundamentally antithetical to democracy as early as 1881 the first municipal electric utilities were founded by progressive city governments and by 1900 710 municipal plants were in operation studies of labor conditions at public and private utilities in 1901 found that municipal municipal plants paid their workers 35 to 45 percent higher on average than private plants with better working conditions and lower rates for consumers so electricity magnates watched this proliferation of municipal power with trepidation as early as 1898 Thomas Edison's protege Samuel Insel started advocating for state regulation of public utilities as historian Richard Hirsch has written about in detail shrewd power company executives realized that state oversight would legitimate the status of utility companies as natural monopolies and allow them to pursue continued growth consolidation without public outrage or calls for municipal takeovers Insel and others quickly learned how to influence regulators to tip the scales in their favor against municipal utilities for example by pushing for legislation that prevented municipal systems from expanding outside their city limits say to rural communities by the 1920s municipal power was in decline by protecting utilities from competition regulation also made utility stocks and loans safer gambles in short making money cheaper for utilities who started experimenting with financial products in addition to electricity provision this included their own brand of public ownership in 1920 or by the 1920s utility executives saw their stocks passing into the hands of the small investor they lauded this as quote true public ownership under public regulation without sacrificing the initiative and efficiency of private management against the resurgence of regional and state power authority plans in the 1920s and 30s utility managers argued that the threat public power posed was not just to the private companies but to their millions of stockholders including the widows and orphans who depended on the safe stock of regulated utilities just as a quick aside one thing I've been writing about lately is how the United States knew it was an outlier in terms of utility policy a lot of other countries at the time had nationalized their electricity networks American commissions went abroad to study these systems frequently and starting in 1924 regularly participated in world power conferences an organization started after World War I with the idea that freer technological exchange was vital to maintaining world peace which delegates by the 1930s referred to as a technical league of nations despite these international influences new dealers continued to approach private investor owned utilities as the norm and focused on expanding high energy lifestyles as the path to national flourishing a path which contributed to the environmental and economic situation the Green New Deal is grappling with today so I have up to this point been talking largely about the ownership of energy infrastructure power plants electricity lines and the like but what about the ownership of energy resources the nation's supply of coal oil and natural gas the ownership of natural resources in my opinion is one of the best illustrations we have in this country of how property rights are cultural constructs in the U.S. we separate surface rights for mineral rights and property ownership that is if you own a plot of land you may just own the surface of it what lies beneath the coal oil natural gas water may not belong to you unless you have also explicitly purchased the mineral rights even if you do own your mineral rights your neighbor may have the right to drill or draw resources from under you geography Matt Huber has written about how the legal structures governing private access to subterranean pools of oil historically has led to rampant overproduction and the glutting of the market in his 2011 article in forcing scarcity from which I shamelessly stole this cartoon Huber recovers a particular episode in Texas and Oklahoma that led to the declaration of martial law and the forced closing of thousands of oil wells this violent episode was not about the management of oil as a resource but rather the management of it as a commodity state intervention was required to keep the oil market from collapsing due to oversupply dropping prices below the cost of production by 1933 there were widespread calls to nationalize the oil industry as a public utility the idea of oil overproduction is tied to the idea of profit if oil is to be profitable then the institutional apparatus built around its production needs to maintain the circumstances that keep oil prices high enough for a profit and low enough for mass consumption when oil is nationalized then the bookkeeping becomes different then it becomes part of the economics of the nation in the more classical sense of keeping one's house in order part of a more expansive calculus that weighs the technical costs of extracting oil from the ground against the environmental and social harm that that extraction entails again the ultimate path the United States took to regulate rather than nationalize was a choice in a more variegated international context of state ownership models the fact that oil has persisted here as private property should give us pause especially as these rights to so called fugitive substances like oil and gas that move underground with no regard to terrestrial property lines have increasingly led to well documented problems of environmental injustice okay so what do mineral rights have to do with public electricity if the green new deal as many have argued means a vast expansion of electrified goods then as with oil it is in our interest to pay attention to ownership throughout the commodity chains that enable all of that green technology I worry that by continuing to promote the growth of green energy green construction green infrastructure as a path to social justice green new deal advocates are bolstering a cultural script that delays a needed reckoning between American democracy and nature energy historians in recent years have highlighted the environmental contradictions inherent in the green economy as a modern manifestation of an American energy exceptionalism an enduring cultural narrative that we have a right to both pristine nature and unlimited energy in pursuit of this the landscape of this nation has been shaped to give the average middle-class citizen an experience of energy that feels in the words of chris jones and is currently immaterial of course this relationship with energy has been achieved largely through the spatial separation of extraction and consumption made possible in part through federally subsidized networks of power lines and pipelines and the pervasive marginalization of communities who live in landscapes of energy production even if the green new deal focuses on reparations for these frontline communities the question is at what scale if I can borrow a dystopian vision from sociologist max isle a green new deal focused on investments in green energy paired with job creation for the united states especially in this political climate could lead to a future of fortress eco nationalism green social democracy at home and militarized maritime and terrestrial borders and beyond them resource extraction for domestic clean tech in other words it doesn't matter if a municipality or a cooperative owns the solar panels or if the electronics that run it reinforce extractive new colonial practices in the DRC as urban political ecologist Maria Kaika has recently written about or rather it does matter in the sense that green infrastructure that relies on current global resource markets that take advantage of unequal regulatory regimes to maximize private profit makes ideals of American social democracy complicit in reinforcing global resource imperialism and climate apartheid when you follow the money through the first new deals experiments and electricity ownership it's easy to see how the prioritization of economic growth as a public good eroded what we might talk about today as the potential for greater energy democracy I therefore listen with trepidation to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's reassurance that every dollar of investment in green energy has an expected impact of $9 of economic growth or in Bernie Sanders projected 20 million jobs there's no reason to believe that a green new deal that maintains a national growth orientation won't fall into similar traps of inclusion and exclusion except maybe if they read your book which I'm looking forward to okay so what I just said it's not a unique argument but thinking about electricity beyond a public utility the venue of interacting local national and global property regimes may help us gain purchase on what we intend to do with public electricity in the green new deal so I want to end with some questions about ownership thinking about the green new deal internationally can we envision new ideas of public ownership that create international coalitions of environmental justice around global resource extraction for a green economy how can we mobilize forms of ownership and that trade enhance global climate justice in addition to decarbonization can the commodity networks necessary to construct the 21st century green new deal state also be redefined to channel direct reparations for extractive industries both within and beyond our borders and what would that kind of ownership look like what role can American definitions and practices of property play in constructing these new contracts the critical question of public electricity for the green new deal then in my opinion is not one of ownership so much as it is one of power so thank you all for coming out it's been a really great set of presentations and I think this is a really wonderful topic because I tend to think of the green new deal as really a project of reorienting the relationship of public and private the sort of trend towards privatization we've seen certainly in this country for the past several decades and reclaiming some amount of public control over our social lives, economic order and many other things that our panelists have discussed and so that's all really great and I'm going to just start off by asking a couple of questions and we're sort of posing some topics to the panelists and then have some questions from the audience and if folks want to reflect some on the themes yourselves that would also be great but I'll just start off with a few questions to get us going and the first one Ryan hold sort of hinted at in his introductory remarks and then I think Abby sort of came to at the end a bit and it's around sort of the question of the relationship of where does the sort of American green new deal stand in relation to the rest of the world and that I think could take a lot of different forms so obviously we know that climate change is a planetary phenomenon that requires not action only in one country but what does that mean for a sort of national program and I think that there's a way of thinking about certainly I think we've seen references to programs in other countries whether that's red Vienna or the sort of comparison of different kinds of energy regimes in different countries but so there's a question of whether on the one hand there's an American exceptionalism around how we have thought historically about the public and the private around the kinds of housing transit energy whether there are things that America can learn from the rest of the world certainly and then I think it's a question of how far some of the things that people are proposing here that the green new deal has put forth and the house resolution can where that travels how much of that can travel beyond the U.S. but then beside the sort of comparative question of what can we sort of take from one context and move into another I think there's a question of you know how the green new deal fits into this sort of broader climate program that I was just mentioning and I think Abby's comments certainly suggested some of the dangers of having maybe a green new deal that is focused on promoting maybe the well-being of Americans above the rest of the world but we could certainly any domestic program always has ties to the global and to the international and so where do we see those and these different kinds of programs and how can we think about the relationship of what we might be changing here and the sort of examples we've heard about here to other places so let's start there whoever wants to go. Maybe I'll just really quickly say that I don't I'm not concerned about the green new deal promoting the welfare of Americans per se but more so how it's being operationalized through the idea of economic growth and how we're still I still see in the green new deal this sense that economic growth is a public good and I think your book is going to address that so I'm hoping that more of that conversation becomes part of the green new deal. We definitely try to address many many things in the book but whoever wants to go the transportation component of this is fairly clear US exceptionalism has gotten us to where we are today and I think you know for other countries grappling with this well transit ridership is fairly healthy and you know the last number of countries around the world and so I think we really need to borrow from you know public policies that encourage transit ridership like a focus on improving the bus which is often sort of the step child of transportation systems but if you go to places like London if you go to places like Seoul it's actually better to take the bus than to take the subway and so I think that's one area where we really stand to learn from the rest of the world I love the bus I'm such a huge fan of buses and I could not agree with you more I think one lesson we can learn from other places around the world including Flatbush in Brooklyn with the dollar vans is that you don't, it doesn't just have to I mean the bus is central but you have in most developing countries a vast spectrum of collective transit sizes so anybody who's traveled outside the US will know that you are sometimes in a big taxi or with many people in it or you're in a mini van or you're in like a little mini bus so one of the things that I think we absolutely have to do is nationalize Lyft and nationalize Uber it doesn't have to be all run, yes it doesn't all have to be run by the Department of Transportation I mean in the book we talk about why don't places like an Appalachia or indigenous reservations that are small have worker cooperatives running algorithms developed by the US government which would be easy, the Department of Energy Department of Transportation and you could ride hail a mini van and in Helsinki you had a version of this called SCUTSA Plus which was underfunded but it was essentially like an Uber line type thing but it was at the mini van level and it was run by the transit authority and just cost a few more dollars if you wanted that convenience I just want to say quickly on the question of growth I mean I worry about a lot of things because I'm a neurotic human but the US economy the Bernie plan just said they would grow at 5% a year with a stimulus for like a rich country to grow at more than 2% or 3% it's not really clear that it can I mean we haven't seen that in a long time I sort of feel like to me the big question besides not using up tons of resources in other countries to make clean energy here that's an issue and we talk about it a lot in the book and can get into more now but what role can the US have in changing a global growth regime where right now the Chinese economy, the Indian economy are growing in a particular way and are there forms of investment green investment that we can contribute to here, not alone not like the US is going to lead the world but are there forms of investment we can contribute to that will push a kind of global growth model into something more like the temples of public luxury we're talking about here I mean if you look at China's Belt and Road initiative it's like you know close to a trillion dollars a year in investment that's a huge amount of money I mean that is an absolutely huge amount of money the US has no business going to China and saying this is what you're going to do instead but I think we do have an option to try to look globally as we try to develop new kinds of cooperation new kinds of trade agreements a new model of wealth or something like that to aspire to here so I think the global conversation is complicated and figuring out how to speak to the world in a nationalizing way from here will be difficult but worthwhile Absolutely Anyone else want to jump back in on that? Great So the next question I have is about sort of the place of I guess what we might call public power or in the sense of political power in this and certainly I think you know the arguments for more public transit for more public housing perhaps certain forms of publicly owned energy although maybe not in an uncomplicated way are all really compelling and then the question is well how do we actually get these things if we think that these are goods that we should have how do we reverse that kind of trend of the vicious cycle of underinvestment in public goods and public transit that makes people not like public transit that then makes results in even less funding for public transit how do we reverse that vicious cycle turn it into a sort of virtuous cycle in some sense how do we connect make the case I guess for public goods in a country where public goods have been starved for a long time and maybe not only in that context but I guess in some really pragmatic sense there was some you know I heard a bit in all presentations about sort of an appeal to you to say well here's something like great that you can get great energy you'll have actually your life will be maybe nicer if you're not driving all the time obviously public the sort of public the public temples of luxury in Daniel's presentation so there's this idea that there's something actually in it for people in these kinds of public goods but I'm curious if you can get a little more granular on how that works and how those sort of political programs work and how we build the coalition of the people saying we want these things and actually in a way that we can imagine achieving these and putting these into practice I'm going to do something rude which is disagree with someone who's not in the room so my good friend Leah Stokes you can find her on Twitter she's very popular there she's a scientist at UC Santa Barbara she writes tweets researches a lot on climate change policy and she's great but she has a thing that she's been saying which is that the Green New Deal lives in the climate plans of the Democratic primary candidates and the idea here is that you know we had the resolution from AOC and Senator Markey in Massachusetts but we don't really have a federal policy making for the Green New Deal obviously because Trump is in power for now and he says the policy the idea lives in the plans and I would respectfully disagree with her and say it actually lives in the door knocking and in the political meetings of the Democratic primary it would be ideal if the country had 30% of its workers unionized and they could be a massive political force but about 6% of private sector workers in this country are unionized so we don't have a huge number of powerful economic levers outside of the corporate world and I would argue that in that massive public mobilization which every large number of candidates are spending millions and millions of dollars to have more of that is where we can really, really build conversation maybe consensus and we can really, really build conversations and we can really, really build conversations and we can really, really build conversations conversation maybe consensus and different ideas for what the Green New Deal could be so I would say all of us have an incredible opportunity actually in the next 12 months to be part of this big mobilized Democratic exercise with all of its flaws and I don't think the Green New Deal is decided at all. I think it's absolutely up for grabs and in a weird historical moment of good fortune it's up for grabs right now in a moment where we all have way more say than what normally would because it's in primary season and everybody wants to be a part of what's going on. Yeah, I will talk about transit advocacy which has been pretty anemic in this country largely because transit riders have lower incomes than drivers and they don't have the time to show up to meetings and you know raise hell for their elected officials we're starting to see that change more with organizations like my own not to tutor at home but we are funding advocates in cities across the US and seeing amazing results just even there's a fantastic group in Cleveland called Clevelanders for Public Transit and in two short years they have completely changed the conversation around public transit in Cincinnati. Sorry, Cincinnati. Did I say Cleveland? Sorry, Ohio too many C's right? So we are seeing that starting to change we are not seeing transit advocacy on the national level and I think that there's a lot of opportunity for alliances between transit advocates and the labor movement because of the sort of stake in creating you know well-paying jobs that you know an investment in better transit service and better infrastructure could create. There's also an opportunity for alliances with the healthcare industry because I don't know if you guys know this but home healthcare aids are like the fastest growing job in the US and they are enduring some of the worst commutes in the country so I really think there's a lot of opportunity to activate that. So we have been traditionally been active in the transit space but I really want to point out that where we are seeing advocacy ridership is growing and we are seeing some of that virtuous cycle that you are talking about where ridership is going up and it's much easier to make the case to elected that they should stick their neck out. So we are really glad to see that happening. Good to hear. I feel like I am always going to say that. I guess I will say that I am interested in debt and conversations around debt being more part of the narrative around the Green New Deal and around public funding for things like increased transportation. You mentioned the idea that a lot of Americans are still burdened by debt to own an automobile and that could be part of the discussion about shifting to the idea of funding more enjoyable public transportation. When in my research on electric co-ops that it's I see the failure of the co-op model in this particular case as being related to the particular constraints that came with federal financing and there was all this along with federal loans came all of these best business practices about how much electricity should cost and what the aims for growing their electrical load should be in order to pay off their debt and I think that there is a good analogy here between thinking about mortgages and student debt and car debt and we are sort of so much of modern life and the social conditions that the Green New Deal is attempting to address have to do with inequalities over the violence of perpetual debt and I don't have a good policy solution for this but I think narratively that could be connected to the idea of what we're funding for public services and that could be powerful. Yeah I was really struck by that Haley sort of pointing to the huge amount of debt that people have for using cars obviously Daniel is on the housing and in a way there's always a question how do we pay for the Green New Deal but people are paying for privatized services, privatized goods every day it's just disaggregated and not a gigantic multi trillion dollar number for you know it's split up and so it's I think actually drawing attention to actually the huge amount of debt seems really promising and exciting as a way to go particularly in sort of conversations about medical debt and student debt and all of these other forms of debt that have in many ways fueled consumption and growth for the past 40 years in the absence of wage growth and on the issue of wage growth actually my next question was going to be and this is the last question I'll ask before you open up to the audience so start getting your questions ready or comments or thoughts or whatever contributions you want to make but the last question I wanted to ask you all was about public work and work in the sense of labor and we heard some about labor and certainly some of the descriptions of the courses all of which sound really great and exciting and I was thinking I mean I think a lot about labor and the Green New Deal and labor and other things too but particularly around the Green New Deal and green jobs and all of this discourse and so I was curious if you could each maybe just reflect a bit on what you think sort of how you think the jobs question which has been so significant in a lot of climate policy environmental policy and the Green New Deal discussion and which I think is an important question and all of this sort of I guess connects to each of the topics and I think that could be what kinds of jobs do we imagine coming along with these, what kinds of knowledge or skills we might need to develop these new forms of public works to live in these new public spaces and so on. What do we need what kinds of work are we not doing that we need to do but maybe also a question of what kinds of work public the public goods we're discussing, the public works we're discussing in my displace and how we can deal with that so I was thinking actually about like if we get out of highways probably there'll be a problem with I'm sure Chuckers won't love that and so it's like how do we think about as we're thinking about how to build political constituencies political coalitions around these how are we thinking about the ways that these changes might negatively impact some groups of people and how we can bring those people into our vision in a way so let's start with that one I'll start, I'll tell a little story so I'm Canadian, I grew up in Toronto congratulations Daniel and my brother Seth is also Canadian but he lives here now and he lives in Carroll Gardens miraculously and he's a grip which means that he works on movie sets and is very good with his hands and is in a trades union which has its issues but it's a good union and my brother sort of told me a story recently about how the house next to the one that he lives in Carroll Gardens was recently got renovated and my brother was just like shocked and he was describing me as like Daniel they had all this molding that had been built by the finest artisans of the late 19th and early 20th century like really beautiful or innate work needed to be patched up but done by really good craftsmen and it was just completely wiped out to make an empty box and my brother who works with his hands for a living was just appalled like it just killed him that that was happening and I give this example because one of the things that I've learned about as I've been doing you know more historical research on red Vienna since visiting is that a lot of the public housing in red Vienna that was built in the 20s at the time was considered to be kind of like laughably old fashioned it had a sort of like ornate quality that was not in fashion with the more advanced quote unquote socialist thinkers in places like Frankfurt who had a more kind of austere modernistic concept of what social housing should be like but the reason that the housing was like this in Vienna is because there were all these craftsmen who didn't have jobs and the idea was our public money we have to get the best architects to compete and we have to do a form of building which is also beautification and which creates a form of labor which is sort of beautification intensive so the doorknobs were all made in factories you had companies that were servicing the housing of red Vienna just creating doors doorknob sort of basic things but anything that had a kind of public facing character and it could be done by a craftsman they wanted to make that beautiful and the reason I'm saying all this is I think about my brother and I think about the debates about trades work and other building trades and the Green New Deal and I think about what it means to do work that is not resource intensive but it creates these temples of public entry and I think like we have sort of lost the notion of beautification in contemporary architecture often and so what does it mean to rethink the physical landscapes that we want in terms of absorbing work by being beautiful and that being a kind of work that people want to do right and if you're talking about sand dunes in beaches to help absorb flood waters about creating marshes housing transit and so on all the physical changes we have to make for the Green New Deal which is essentially physical reconstruction of the entire built environment there are opportunities for beautification and for I think a kind of labor that's sort of been lost and that we are in some ways right to romanticize and I think the people that I know including my brother who do work with their hands would love the opportunity to spend more time making things beautiful and things that last and those are I think values of physicality that are very much things that designers can think about and contribute to and that are absolutely consistent with the best ideals of a Green New Deal I'm really excited thinking about all the beautiful bus stops we're going to see as part of this beautiful I said I'm excited to think about the beautiful bus stops that we'll see if we commit ourselves to beautiful public goods we are really at Transit Center we're really excited about the possibility of infusing transit agencies with operating money to create a lot of well-paying jobs and these are jobs like operating a bus which currently are not always great jobs but they can be and also Green New Deal just for sidewalks would create thousands of jobs I mean do you know how much of America has no sidewalks it would and projects that you know add walking and biking to existing road space create a ton of jobs so I don't want to paint too rosy of a picture of it but I think that it is a tremendous opportunity in the transit and walkable streets arena Green New Deal for sidewalks that you should tell it's a great slogan I'd like to see a cultural shift towards having the practice of politics and deliberation about what it means to be a citizen and ideas of democracy to have a place in the workplace and maybe this is through unions or maybe it's through I don't know federal funding for corporate reform of some sort but there are a couple of arguments for this one of which is I'm trying not to devalue de-skilled labor and even calling it that I need a way to talk about this but a lot of the jobs that we talk about as being sort of dead ends and that are behind fights for a higher minimum wage for a broader social safety net they can also be made more they can also be made more elevated through opportunities for more worker engagement in the structure of the corporation or the structure of their industry and we've really separated that in the US over the past 100 years I'll just say that a lot of the terminology I was talking about in my talk, the idea of public utilities natural monopolies the regulatory compact things like this came out of early theory about them came out of an intense period of labor organizing during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era and there's no reason why I guess I would like to see more cultural norms around that kind of theoretical work around the economy coming out of labor sounds great to me from 30,000 feet up and not talking about actual programs I think it's good to have a mix of different ways we're thinking about this and I absolutely agree that it would be great to see to remember that there have been times when the labor movement has really been a source of how we think about the economy and has been really part of that how we understand and make sense of the economy and intellectual life in a real way and I think that is very possible again Hold on, Osa Since you yourself have written many of the leading articles about the relationship between work and the Green New Deal and in particular care work and green jobs I feel you would really be ruining everybody's afternoon if you didn't tell them a little bit of your own thinking on this and answer your own question I'll just say a couple of things thanks for putting me on the spot first of all I'm still a future questioner I've written a bunch mostly about sort of thinking about care work as a kind of green job and care work and other kinds of jobs and sort of social reproduction as being low carbon work that is life improving and quality of life improving and kind of maybe move away from at least resource growth while still improving people's lives and I was actually really interested when you just mentioned the home health aids being a potential source of organizing around transit that seems like a really exciting point of intersection to me because it's the top 10 jobs of growth every year basically some kind of nurse or health aid and especially home health aids tend to be paid very low wages and have really bad working conditions and I had actually not really thought about transit as being part of that but of course that makes so much sense and that's actually a really exciting point of overlap to me and some of that you mentioned that and it was also really cool to see in one of the courses the day care facility as part of how we're thinking about public works and I absolutely think that things that are trying to integrate public spaces and care work as both elements sort of are public goods public services seems absolutely vital to me and like a really exciting place where some of the themes of this of today's conversation can come together so there's always more to say about labor but those are the two I'll say now so Hello, thank you this is very edifying my name is Judy Richimer and Ms. Richardson and a question for Mr. Cohen whomever would like to wrangle it my comment to Ms. Richardson is I am completely on your side in terms of putting greater emphasis on public transportation and downplaying automobile culture but I disagree that busways should be exempt from environmental review if only because the more democracy the more democratic process we have going for us the better our messaging can be and for Mr. Cohen pulling out from your very interesting observation about old buildings I know that preservationists and architects are very often at one another's throats when it comes to who is better and what is better for the environment architects say our new buildings can use this fabulous new glass for example that is better at retaining energy and preservationists say our old buildings have good old brick that has built in climate control and windows that open so my question is is the preservation department part of this school part of this concerted effort my name is Len Mel and you've done a great job making me understand how problematic the new green deal is even more than almost anyone would suspect you have a whole notion of reconceptualizing it that's not really but I think I applaud it but that's not really well known and so my simple question is the level of anxiety in other words all of these questions are raising levels of thought that really are not part of the public discussion and if you add to that things like the financial situation with the overnight markets freezing and other concerns I'm worried about the kind of demagogic situation that will arise even within a certain position starts to come out and that people start to look for simple you know strong men answers or strong women and so I wonder if any of you have just thought about the level of anxiety that's going to raise on multiple fronts and what we can think we did a great job of historically looking at this what happens historically when you raise so much anxiety and conflict and how we should deal with that so I think there's a mental level to try to deal with this before it spins out of control and I think it's optimism but I hope it's true which is that I think that perspective respectfully is a form of prejudice about the capacity for civic engagement I think that we can and this relates to my argument about the need for I don't know communication and political discourse to be more a part of our everyday life I don't think the public needs simple strong men narratives or strong women I mean I hope that one thing we can do I think everyone up here thinks that the Green New Deal is a great policy framework and what we're trying to do is I mean to some extent this is a sympathetic audience I assume that most of you are here because you believe in the project and so this is the kind of audience where we should be hashing out these differences and the details like doing this very detailed technical work but I also don't think that we should shield this from the public I guess the challenge for us is to try to figure out how to make complexity not not anxiety filled but to see it as necessary experimentation I mean the New Deal was all about experimentation and they said that very explicitly and it was contradictory and some programs dismantled the work that others were doing but they saw what they were doing as you know some things would fail and that was okay I mean maybe it wasn't okay to the general public but the policy culture of the New Deal was that it was okay to try things and have them fail and I don't I feel like I don't see that enough in public discourse and I hope that we can figure out some way to shift that conversation I'll just respond to the comment about bus priority projects and environmental review there is a bus priority project here in New York on 14th street that has been proposed since the Bloomberg administration and was finally put into action this year to coincide with the L train shutdown a group of folks that live near 14th street have essentially weaponized the environmental review process in order to hold up the project even though it was 10 years in the making a judge just rolled today that the project can proceed but that's the kind of stuff that we can't have happen if we have any chance of being the IPCC targets so yes democracy yes but some things just have to be pushed through just very quickly I mean yes we're going to have to learn how to have faster democracy and sometimes that means faster I'm not in a design school so waiting into a fight between preservationist and architects that's like going to somebody else's Thanksgiving and just like picking a side and digging in so I'll just criticize the whole thing and say I think from the outside design strikes me as having a very contradict the design profession say two things that are very contradictory one is we have magical tools capabilities forms of thought that allow us to solve problems that other mere mortals couldn't possibly comprehend and then the next thing that they say when you push them on it is oh well my private client wouldn't pay for that and so the best contributions preservationist and architects will never come to pass unless the model of the client shifts from the rich person who says you're going to get to do the coolest curves if you work with me or you'll get to preserve the coolest fireplace if you work with me and the client has to shift to the public and to social movements and to labor movements and racial justice movements so the big change that design school needs to make is not reallocating power within itself I don't know you guys can sort that out but to subject yourselves to a different kind of power which is not the power of private money or the idea that philanthropy is the way to you know do an end run on the market and get everything that you want um so I'm Rosalie I'm a PhD student in urban planning um I study buses they're great um but so I wanted to sort of take so when you said the future of the Green New Deal lies in the door knocking of the Democratic primary my heart sank the idea of like this one sort of national election determining the future of this policy is really scary but then Hailey said well it's okay because we're organizing in cities all over the country to make a lot of these things a reality so I guess I would like to hear a little bit more about the geography of a Green New Deal and in particular we've talked a lot about national the old New Deal was national we could nationalize Uber but we could also have it incorporated into every single city's municipally owned transit app so sort of how do we think about the geography and the rules that need to change in order for us to sort of change our democratic geography um I'm in the architecture program here and I'm from Vienna which is not what my question is going to be about it is it is very great but there's also a lot of problems problems that you didn't address but I will let everyone believe that it is really great um my question is for I guess Hailey and Daniel both of you said that housing and transportation should be or the Green New Deal should be looked at through the lens of housing and transportation I think you'd probably both agree that housing and transportation are linked very heavily and um you both have a big problem area which is the suburbs and I'm wondering how the Green New Deal or public works should address suburbs or low density high capital areas how do you satisfy the needs of these people with public programs do you do public housing that is single family or and and you make bus lines for areas that are really not very efficient in terms of public transport okay is it true that in Vienna public transit costs a euro a day if you get a subscription the guy showing me around was like you wouldn't believe it Daniel there are days when the bus doesn't even come in seven minutes and I was like wow sounds rough but no there are undoubtedly big problems in Vienna there's no question so quickly there are a lot of things that we can do in the suburbs and some of them we talk about in the book around like the idea of minivans that you would call because a big double bus obviously isn't going to work I have an article in Jacobin called seize the Hamptons where I discuss the pathologies of densification in suburbs in Ontario where the model is essentially Walmart Walmart A, Walmart B, Walmart C, a bunch of residential towers and then a bus rapid transit line where the hashtag in Ontario is the new hashtag the new me time that's how they're going to sell people on bus rapid transit so there is a form of even suburban densification which is all premised on consumption and I argue that an alternative form and I talk about a different suburb in Toronto which they've densified around a public theatre called the Rose Theatre in Brampton in which I argue it's like a different model where culture and cultural activity which is of course low carbon is the real model and you're like blah blah blah you should read the article it's really I think my best piece of work seize the Hamptons yeah you'll find it briefly I mean I think that it's obviously so it would be depressing if the whole thing hinged on the next election at the same time like we're in an emergency so like I wouldn't recommend losing that election but second yes I mean I think the organising has dividends beyond the national election I guess that's my point like there is a big national mobilisation that is just built into the political structure and we shouldn't skip it and then I guess the third thing is you know I live in Philadelphia now and it's different Pennsylvania cannot sell fund a Green New Deal and red states and purple states really are going to depend on national policy because you can do some things in Pennsylvania but New York, California there are states that can really do a lot with their own resources and there are a lot of parts of the country which tend to be essentially ruled by really horrible people who take advantage of the poverty of their constituents to ram through very right wing policies and without massive federal investment I'm not sure that you're going to get the changes you need there and the long-term danger I think is eco-apartheid so both within places like New York City but also between regions I think we really have to fight for the national policy when cities can lead sure but when you leave the rich blue states you really I think come to appreciate the necessity for federal green investment at a very massive scale to restructure the built environment and our social relations so I don't know I think it's good news because I think the Washington Post finds that 50% of teenagers are terrified of climate change and a quarter of them have engaged in some form of climate action in the last year so you know as we defer to teenagers it's amazing how good things could become yeah I agree with that at the talk was it last week at UPenn was that just last week? September 13th every day is a century yeah there was some talk about the idea that maybe enough states will do a green new deal of their own that will sort of force the federal government's hand and I think you're right we really underestimate how hostile some of these places are to public expenditures I'm really glad you asked about housing and transit we just had a panel about it actually so the first thing that we need to do is to make it legal to build more housing in cities and to enable anybody that wants to live in a city to be able to afford to do that. Minneapolis just passed really sweeping legislation that basically allows you to build any type of housing anywhere which is direct you know response to single family zoning that you know has prevented notification from happening and we really hope to see that in more places so in terms of suburban transit it's really hard to serve the suburbs that's just a fact and I think there are some transit agencies who are starting to respond to the suburbanization of poverty that we're seeing now by you know attempting to run more service in the suburbs and you know that's a choice and I think that we'll have to reevaluate what productivity means offer you know classic transit service in the suburbs but there are also you know things you can do to make it more viable like I was talking about building sidewalks adding curb cuts adding crosswalks are you know enable people to walk to transit there's also an interesting federal transportation program that would it's not very well utilized but basically you know cul-de-sacs are about the worst thing that transit could be asked to serve so sort of cul-de-sacs that would allow a bus not to have to make a trip into a cul-de-sac and then come back and so you know that would really improve efficiency but you know I'm not going to lie it's going to be a really difficult challenge there are you know folks who will stay oh with autonomous microtransit will be able to serve the suburbs and like that's totally baloney so yeah I just quickly add on the topic of what I was saying earlier also like Dolores Hayden is a fantastic architectural historian and has written books and discussions of what it would mean to both make urban spaces more feminist but also the different ways that you would transform suburbs like so she talks about how you would knock down all the walls between gardens rather than try to revitalize street life because there's actually more physical potential already for common spaces in the backyards if you deprivatize them so I think the work of Dolores Hayden in general is like under appreciated these days and speaks a lot of the things that we've been talking about and I'll just add that states like California are really thinking about how to densify around transit and there's a bill in the California State legislature that would mandate upzoning near transit and as you might expect is running into a lot of obstacles but recently the governor has said that he'll cut off transportation funding for cities that don't meet their housing goals so I do think that we have reached a crisis point where we're going to start to see some changes all right I think we have time for one last round of questions so let's see hi I'm Sushmita I'm an urban design student so we talked about how the federal policy and the FTA funding kind of delays most of their transit projects through like time consuming and expensive environmental reviews so do you think giving more power to local transit agencies could bring about a change and also if you give power to local transit agencies how do you think we can bring about a coordination between like different local agencies how can that work hi oh we're doing two hi I'm an M.O.C. student and I've got a question for Abby so you briefly mentioned the kind of dystopic scenario right in terms of the energetic industry and to clarify I'm not too sure I understood you but are you saying that the green the green sector of energy understood as an autarkic endeavor so a strictly American thing which is kind of what the green you deal is not what it says in the text but it poses America's leader in the industry so it kind of goes in that direction but so is that idea of autarky something that is dangerous if we mismanage it is that what you're saying and how should we regulate this new sector without violating kind of the core American values which is kind of what the green you deal does anyway I mean it's highly socialist but I'm sure there's a way of doing that kind of does it in a soft way if you see what I mean so yes absolutely we should just give transit agencies money and we should also give them money to run service so as I mentioned the FTA stopped providing transit agencies with operating systems in the 90s and so we're proposing to change that and to at least provide matching funds for operations you know so that agencies don't get completely on the hook to the federal government but that's one of the ways that we think that we're most excited about is just increasing the amount of transit service so direct money to transit agencies to run more service would change the game I was really just trying to draw attention to the the fact that the green economy still relies on resources and a lot of the resources that go into I don't know like electronics and energy efficiency like green energy projects still rely on global commodity chains that take advantage of extractive industries in countries that have different labor practices different regulatory regimes and different modes of ownership and so my question was if we're thinking about the Green New Deal as a time to rethink forms of ownership to think about more cooperatives in the US to think about municipal utilities maybe even nationalizing things like our electricity grid or our oil resources then how can we use those those politics around what ownership can do in a global sense so can we think about ownership as intersecting scales of all of the different entities that are at play in a commodity chain that stretches from mines in the DRC to the solar powered car let's say the solar powered bus in its own bus lane are there ways to think about ownership that transcend national boundaries and what would that look like so I think we're about our time I just want to invite the panelists to maybe if you have any closing remarks or final thoughts that you want to share with their audience before we wrap up there was a great quote that you guys have all seen when FDR said something like I want to do this but you have to make me do it I think it's so important to think about that we have to make this a problem for our elected officials we can't just assume they'll do it out of the goodness of their hearts that's not how it works I guess I would just make two plugs so the first is for our book and we have a whole chapter on the need to recharge internationalism and what we mean by that is look if you take lithium which is absolutely essential for rechargeable batteries which is kind of a big deal for an electric economy yes you have cases like in the north of Chile where the mining of lithium is extremely problematic and so we need we argue in the book both to reduce the energy demand in the United States we have to reduce the reliance on batteries through things like solar homes which allow demand response flexibility to govern energy use rather than just storing it up and using it but we also talk about the need for chains of solidarity all across the supply chain from communities in Chile to labor unions who would be fighting over the conditions of working here we talk about the need to redo trade relations there's already been a really interesting proposal for Geneva principles for global trade for a global Green New Deal so I think one could be surprised by how quickly these conversations are growing and how sophisticated the conversations are but there are decades of struggle already around efforts to the food sovereignty movement is classic decades of struggle already on how to change the way things are made all across the chains that connect consumers in the west producers in other parts of the world and so on our book takes it up, it's a really important question but there is thought about it and I think that's exciting and that feeds into my second plug which is just for the Green New Deal a year ago Alexandre Cazucortes was not a representative and we weren't even having this conversation 10 years ago in 2009 the Bloomberg regime in New York City tried to pass far reaching legislation to limit the amount of carbon emissions from buildings and at that time the real estate board of New York said we don't want to do it and it died and a decade later just before Earth Day and City Council a new bill even more aggressive to reduce building energy emissions in New York the most aggressive bill in the country to slash carbon emissions was passed and the real estate board of New York was still opposed the single most important political act in New York was opposed and the bill passed anyways 45 to 2 and a very important reason that it passed was the housing movement in New York got involved in this fight and the City Councilor who led this bill whose last name was Constantinitis on the floor of City Council said we need to pass legislation so that mothers putting their children to bed at night don't worry about rising sea levels evicting them from their homes and don't worry about rising rents evicting them from their homes and so they put together a bill that would dramatically reduce building emissions and protect affordable housing at the same time and the coalition behind that bill Labour groups, progressive groups, progressive politicians housing movements is the Green New Deal coalition so it's not enough but I think it is insane to actually think about where were we a year ago where are we now if we think about this rate of political change that is nonlinear and there is an ability that we still have to really really really shape this thing and to make it happen and I don't know it's not often that you wake up in this kind of like world historical moment now you are so like drink that coffee early in the morning and like get to work and we have like a whole world to rebuild and it's an extremely exciting time yeah and on that note I'll just say thank you for organizing this and that all of you who are part of this incredible academic project of coordinated classes around the Green New Deal should recognize that you are also part of this world historical moment and that it's a it's a policy framework that's being formulated right now and that what is happening here is unique and you should see that as an opportunity to really think seriously about how what you're doing in these classes could translate into policy and see that as an invitation to be creative I think that's a great note to add so please join me in thanking our panelists thanking our faculty