 Hello and welcome to today's session entitled America's China Towns Transformative Approaches to Cultural Preservation. My name is Di Gao. I am Senior Director of Research and Development at the National Trust for Historic Preservation and today I am honored to be in conversation with two incredible presenters, Ted Gong of the 1882 Foundation and Jen Loh from OpenBox. And I will briefly introduce them and allow them to do the presentations before we wrap up with a bit of discussion. Ted is the founder and executive director of the 1882 Foundation, which promotes public awareness of the history, consequences, and continuing significance of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Ted successfully led national grassroots efforts to have Congress apologize for the 1882 Act and prior to finding the 1882 Foundation, Mr. Gong served in various roles in public service and international affairs at the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, as well as US embassies and consulates in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Sydney and Manila, as well as other consulate programs dealing with operations in South Asia and Middle East. He has degrees from the University of California in History, the University of Hawaii at the East West Center in Asian American Studies and the Army War College in National Strategic Studies. Jen Loh is an integrative designer, educator and landscape architect with over 13 years of experience in the planning and design of public spaces across New York, California and Washington. Jen is currently the associate design director at OpenBox, which is the design and research studio where she applies her interests in the intersection of human-centered design and the built environment and sees the intersection of the authentic community research and power of place as key tools to advance the work of justice and equity. Jen has been partnering with the 1882 Foundation to curate the Dear Chinatown Project to spotlight stories and social histories of places within DC's Chinatown to identify projects that contribute to sustaining neighborhood placekeeping for long-term residents. She holds a BLA from the University of Washington and a master's design in integrative design from the Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. And today together we'll be exploring the preservation of DC's Chinatown through the lens of planning and community engagement efforts in Washington DC. So now I'd like to turn it over to Jen to kick off the presentation. Thank you so much, Dee. So as this is a start, an overview of our agenda for this session. First I am going to give a little bit of background in context to my partnership with Ted in the 1882 Foundation through the Dear Chinatown DC project and provide some reflections on authentic community conversations based on what I've learned being able to be a partner and collaborator with the organization's work. And then I'll pass it off to Ted to talk more about the context of DC's Chinatown in particular, the vast accumulation of different visions, plans and proposals for change that had been brought forth over the past few decades and also his work and the collective's work in connecting the dots. The everyday planning and design work of community leadership, storytellers and activists. And then we'll close with a little bit of conversation together. So first I'll start with our Dear Chinatown DC collaboration. And this started all during my graduate studies at the University in Michigan and Ted and I met each other in the summer of 2019. My background in landscape architecture and at the intersection of human-centered design and participatory design methods. I was really interested in sort of pushing what we can sort of do in terms of engagement and better understanding community experience and how that can inform different proposals for change. So the research question that really sort of centered this collaboration together was how can we connect existing cultural assets to better informed placekeeping in DC's Chinatown? And this question came up if you are familiar with Washington DC's Chinatown and have been downtown at all. You see a lot of different indicators of maybe of an indicator of Chinatown. You see some Chinese calligraphy on top of the La Colombe or the Equinox or the Farmers and Distillers restaurants. But after that, it's really hard to decipher why this Chinatown was here, who brought it here, what the history was. So what I had found out across looking at a lot of different old reports, existing cultural preservation efforts were vastly inadequate. I talked about signage, about visual motifs and the architecture and the different sort of entries and how we should treat different sort of dragon symbols across the district, but nothing about the people that live there. And fundamentally, I do have a really strong belief that city planners don't really design for engagement, they hold meetings. And that sort of like leaves a lot to be desired in terms of how we can facilitate and plan for and design for conversations that enable us to really understand the people who, you know, feel deep belonging to a place both who live there, who do activism work there to people who work there and so forth. And it's really important because these are the types of processes that each of us have to live with constantly. Each of us know the existing engagement processes, those checklists that we have to go through, the town meetings that we have. And all of that continues to drive and contribute to a lot of the ways that we don't want our cities to move it in terms of neighborhood change. And in D.C. in particular, gentrification is a major force when it comes to displacement, meaning that people are fundamentally feeling alienated by the places that live. And that's Chinatown, that's largely most of the neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., which was also once known as the Chocolate City, a majority Black City. So these conversations that we've been having are very close to both of us and our work together in our communities around Chinatown. But this is also a much larger, bigger picture story to tell about how do we foster conversations with communities in authentic ways to be able to feel like people can still feel welcome and belong to places in our city. So I really felt like the audience was important to this conversation, too. So this is really centered around community leadership, being able to express and expose and celebrate the work that they do and as well as emerging leadership. It's a generational effort that things can't be solved within the time that we're here. So how do we build momentum and inspiration for future leaders who are going to be doing this work? And also, presenting and showing city planning, we need to be also driving new methods, new ways of being able to do this work because the old methods have failed us. And a lot of this sort of conversations we've been having, too, I do want to draw the inspiration from this work. So it's both acknowledging and critiquing existing engagement methods in planning and design processes, but it's also getting inspiration and motivation from existing creative activism. If you look at in New York at the work of Chinatown Art Brigade and the WOW project, it's really about celebrating culture and everyday sort of social practice as a means of activism resistance and also demonstrating, you know, place comes from the people that are there and driving activity. And it also comes from, you know, intersection of arts and urban planning, Ross and Wu's work and also aspects of like social innovation theories of being able to, you know, bring forth the assets and celebrate the social, the public, the community histories of place to drive proposals and planning futures. So like, given sort of all this content, it was like, OK, what are we going to do together? Like, let's try to see if we can design something and some people thought this Dear Chinatown DC project was an art project. Some people thought it as a design project and it is sort of both. And it also is this sort of like a metaphor to what we shouldn't and should do. And what can we learn from, you know, more people centered engagement and outreach and conversations around placekeeping? So thinking about all the things I didn't want to do and being like, OK, what can I, you know, create a model or prototype of together with the 1882 Foundation to test something? See what see what we find out, what we hear, what we learn about place and what people think about a place through the lens of DC's Chinatown. So, you know, given that most engagement processes are about being reactive, it's about like, oh, no, like we need to get consent. We need to get some sort of like OK for this. And I didn't want to do that and like let's create a proactive model where we're going forth and activating a place. We're going towards an intervention in action that really has like no specific project actually in mind at this point. And I also wanted to bring two people together with the 1882 Foundation. The DC has an incredible community of public historians as well and additional community organizations that are doing programming work in the neighborhood. I wanted to a process that was adaptable and flexible. I want to be able to be something that Ted could leverage in the course of the 100 different programs and events and conversations he's having across the year. How could it plug into something that's already happening? And I wanted to leverage the existing assets. And that means, you know, the people as well and meeting them where they are at. It's not trying to give them a map to a location on a Wednesday evening at 7 p.m. to meet at a meeting hall. It's, you know, we go to the people. So with that, we started with a love letter, actually. And this is sort of not the first sort of like, you know, time that a love letter has been used in this capacity. There's a lot of different love letter and break up letter research methods to think about like how someone thinks about their relationship to a place, to an object. And I really loved the idea of using the love letter activity as an action to have people think about, you know, what do you love about Chinatown? Like what brings you here? What do you go to, you know, where do you walk through? What's special? And so I wanted to use that as a sort of a test. And we tried it once. I tried it with some students first who had relationships in different Chinatowns across the country when I was in Michigan. That's a scene like, what is this delicit? Am I going to find out anything in particularly important? And then I also tried it again with the 1882 Foundation at a talk story event and observed. We produce really beautiful love letters about different Chinatowns and also some interesting facts and stories about how D.C.'s Chinatown was also special to people. But I think more importantly, through the activity, we was able to elicit exchange and conversation. I heard additional anecdotes about people's personal experiences and stories about their relationships to their family members, to their friends. And then also at the 1882 Foundation talk story event, it was a lovely way to, like, engage and facilitate intergenerational conversation as well. And then so we then scaled this up. We took it outside and we went over to the Walluck House, which is one of the remaining affordable housing buildings in D.C.'s downtown, right in the heart of D.C.'s remaining Chinatown. And we set up a humanities truck from American University, a couple of tents with permission from the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association and the Walluck House managers to facilitate a Love Letters to D.C.'s Chinatown poster making event. So we had posters that kids can make. We also brought in the humanities truck oral history recording equipment to be able to capture those stories. And we also had a reel of the documentary that was made by the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum around Chinatown a few years back. So we had exhibit. We had a making event and an opportunity to be able to tell some histories that are often not seen at all in this particular Chinatown. And so we had the events, but I think the most important part, which I want to center for this conversation, is sort of like, what did we learn together from this endeavor? Like it wasn't, you know, in itself like a successful event. I think it was a successful in terms of what we learned from, you know, watching people engage with each other, the sentiments we heard about Chinatown and some also mechanics around engagement as well. So I think one is really powerful is like partnership. And I think we know that, but often we don't leverage it to its maximum ability of, you know, being able to put in different networks of collaborators together between the humanities, between Ted's work and also a couple of different organizations that have been doing a lot of work over the decades in D.C.'s Chinatown, forging those relationships and communication avenues is a success in itself. And again, being able to have that intergenerational convening and conversation, I found that sometimes the adults and the elders were very resistant to actually doing a poster making event, but they will love talking to younger folks. They'll tell them all of their stories, all of their histories. And so that was a really nice catalyst to be a place of sharing and learning together and storytelling together. And accessibility is a big aspect, too, from like the scale of the intervention is one aspect. I think what we found was the public event was a lovely spectacle to be seen. But I do see that it was less of a hospitable environment for sort of individual one-on-one exchange. Translation and how you're going to facilitate translation and interpretation in any given space are vitally important, not only just from like, you know, straight up mechanics of communication, but there is relationship building, rapport building that happens. And so I had a couple of friends that were really able to facilitate that for me because I don't have Chinese language skills myself and that can't replace, you know, we don't think about enough about how communication is a connecting tool. And also the type of activities. Again, I mentioned the elders had one, nothing to do with an activity that looked like a children-friendly activity, but they were willing to stay and like talk to us. So like one, if activity doesn't work out in itself, like what can it afford and what can it facilitate for bringing people together? And those five to ten minute conversations with elders from the Wallach House, who we don't typically interface or wouldn't have another avenue to communicate with, is not something we should also like undersell to. It's small moments as opposed to large moments, maybe some activities, engagement sort of things that you think are more fun, maybe fun and sparkly, but it may not be the fundamental core of what you're trying to accomplish. And data quality, fundamentally, what are we trying to find out? And I think this is also very much in response to a lot of post-it note conversations, a lot of questions that are really about, you know, what's the color of that bench? You know, what style of building do you like? And that doesn't tell us a why. It doesn't tell us, you know, why from now through 20 years from now, why this place is meaningful to people, what brings people together. So I think having open-ended questions and really also quality questions coming into conversations and how you might facilitate those open-ended conversations is something that we want to be driving more of because we live and work and exist in really complex spaces. And none of our sort of experiences about place can be really sort of, like, you know, distilled and abstracted down to like one single, you know, design intervention and to wrap up sort of like my sort of call to action and finding this around engagement before I hand it off to Ted to kind of talk about the big picture and why this is important, minimizing barriers to communication. Language becomes a major, you know, both accessibility and barrier consideration. The scale, venue engagement methods. When you're looking at participatory process, it's two, all of this needs to be thought of as longer time scales. Ted and I and the 1882 Foundation, I connected with them for a very long duration of time, and it really just started with me just showing up. I showed up to the talk stories. I kind of lingered around and like had lunch and just kind of stuck around for a little while. And we also there's such a value in being able to observe, understand and be around folks and have conversations and be in company with people. And being able to build upon and amplify existing efforts. There's no blank slates that exist. So how do we seek out new synergies, make connections, help facilitate those connections? Because it really is about interdisciplinary collaboration, because these things are hard. There's a lot to do. And I think there's a lot of different capabilities that contribute to it. So with that, I will hand it off to Ted for some more context around what these kinds of conversations feed into relative to DC's Chinatown work. So it's always good to be with Jen, and it's going to be great to have a conversation with Dee as we go forward. And I want to thank all of you for tuning in to listen to this program that we have. Now, you know, I've been engaged with the issues related to the preservation of Chinatowns for over a decade now. Many of you have been doing this much longer. And whether about Chinatowns or other ethnic in-clubs, the gentrification is reflexively cited as the big fear, you know, and that is articulated by raised and number raised or with buildings or the number of residents in the long to live in the area. But, you know, I have to say that how that the preservation of buildings has never been my primary concern. I'm more concerned about preserving the stories of people telling the stories of their own stories. Story telling and oral histories have always been primary to me. But for now, I want to focus our session. I want to talk about several approaches to the preservation of Chinatowns, and that is this DC Chinatown. I went through several different plans and guidelines that have come and gone. And in this session, I would leave the thought with you that and with the property developers or helpers and the city planners that they ought to examine these past studies regardless of where their property lines are and all elements of their preservation plans. Not necessary. It's not necessary to build new plans in isolation. And I also think that they should consider social factors holistically, both immediately around their property aligns in the district, which we are going to call Coal Zone. And we will talk about that further toward the end of the preservation. So next slide, we have two. There are two foundational studies and guidelines to DC's Chinatowns preservation. One is called the DC Chinatown Cultural Development and Small Area Development Plan. And the second one is called the Chinatown Design Guidelines Studies. Everywhere you see, whatever documents you see in late, they always cite these things or built upon these guidelines established probably around the 1980s. But these two studies and things around them have done. Because they have defined the boundaries of an area, the streets in which Chinatown is composed of. And it gives guidelines on how to make a building look Chinese. To reinforce Chinatown, and this term comes constantly in all the planning studies and discussion, is to make Chinatown a distinct cultural destination. And it's pinned with the archway as some within eight streets. You can decide for yourself how successful that has been. And the next slide, please. And but there are four other studies that we want to look at. One is the SLA Chinatown Green Street Project that was done in 2014. The Urban Land Institute realizing a new vision of Chinatown Park 2017, 1882, go back up to the other places. But the 1882 Foundation is a Chinatown eight-street project, which we did in 2020. And we have a current project with 1882 Mellon on something we call the 506508 project. So the first study we want to look at is this 2014 Chinatown Green Street project. And it was done by the American Society of Landscape Architects. And they said it was done in 2014. Just at that time, Monument Property had completed some of its programs, development, their work on each one. We're not going to talk about it, but I think a lot of the SLA project didn't get as much publicity as it should have in 2014. Anyway, next slide. What the project did is basically something like this, we're going to take a street or an area, we'll talk about it more, but it was a Green Street demonstration project to talk about drainage and how to make the street greener and the roofs and forth greener so that you have something that might look like the corner picture you have on that street. And it goes from that particular street, it goes right up to Chinatown's park. Next slide. So the second project we want to talk about quickly is something by the Urban Land Institute. And what they did was work with the Mayor's Office of Asian Pacific Affairs and looked at that park in the center. That is the Chinatown Park has a very fancy other name, but we all call it Chinatown Park. The green, the blue area at the bottom shows you where the Chinatown Green Street project went. It went up to that area and then it then the Chinatown Urban Land Institute basically took over started looking at the park and they want to design it to do what they were calling activate the park. The odd thing about that design was that you see all the little pink dots there, they just said this little square did not have enough things to attract activities. So they want to put little cables, big, mini-cables, things like that, as well as that circular thing on the right side of the corner is an architect, I mean, a monument of some kind. And what I never could understand that was that almost just two or three years before they complete this study, the park, which is operated by the park service, used park service, had taken out all those physical things like benches and so forth, because it was a problem with people occupying nets and making it unattractive for people to visit. So they took those those benches out and I never know why they didn't consider or thought about it. I remember once in one of their one of their uh this listening sessions, the listening sessions was Gene talking, and I said, why do you want to put anything in there? And the person says, well, you have to do something with the park. And I said, isn't it just good enough to have a green space and open green space? And they said, no, you have to have the of some sort. So that drove some of what they said. Let's talk about a little further. But what I want to note is that little brown tree where I street is that next slide. They made the great recommendation that they should close that street from traffic so that on the left side where the park is and where the buildings are, where the people walking in the street would be a what is the term they use? One street is sort of like slight. It's a closed street of pavers from one side one side of the street side and make a unified sort of plaza there. It might if it gets built, it might be something like this where the activity stretch from the street to the building side. The next slide, the third, the third project that we want to look at also to something that 1882 Foundation would doing and also with Gen we were collecting oral histories, oral histories. And this is what we call the Chinatown Off-H Street project. AARP helped us fund to collect oral histories of these three buildings. Actually, the main one that we were most interested in was the pink building in the middle, which is actually a very active Guanyong temple. And so we were in that that temple is very active, very very good. Have you ever been to Taiwan and Taipei? It is exactly the way you would see an urban temple. There. So that's in Chinatown in the next buildings, the red building on the very old acupuncture shop and Chinese verbal medicine shop, not doing very well and in business wise and the one on the right, the red brick one is a corner grocery store. You look and see the next slide. And many of the things that we were thinking about in terms of trying to preserve or collect oral histories of there is also things like Jenna had mentioned before, Wang Wou project at New York, which businesses and traditional preservation of traditions were maintaining in the same shop. There's a backside entrance. Look at some of that set of buildings. Those three buildings are on the, if you look at the long picture, that's still the current image of that block. And the area that we were looking at was the, where the brown building starts on the left of that row. So next slide, the thing that triggered a lot of what we were doing was an effort to build a hotel right behind the row of houses in the front. They're white, their picture is white or that's slightly off tan color. And that whole thing was being incorporated into a large building, a hotel. It didn't incorporate the three buildings we were particularly interested in. But what we did, what we were interested in seeing how much the developer can help us in the preservation of the three buildings we're most interested in. So next slide. So what that did was allow us to, the owners of the shops didn't want to sell their property. And those three properties were never part of the hotel building until we approached them about helping us sort of provide some funds to preserve those buildings. And what they came back was, why don't we buy the whole building or incorporate it into our design? The three owners, shop owners didn't want to do that. But what came out of it was that the building, the hotel owners were still so interested, they said, tell me what, will repair and fix the building if you give us a right to go through the building, through the temple, into the lobby of the proposed hotel? That also didn't work out for a lot of reasons. A lot of reasons had to do with the hotel being too, the density was too high, people didn't want it. So it never got beyond the city hearing stage. But what it did though was illustrate to us that it is possible to get together with property owners who didn't think about incorporating one part of an effort for historical preservation and then offer or make an agreement that could have worked if it had carried out. So this private partnership was an important principle for us to realize that could happen. What it did too, also was it addressed some issues like some of the clutter on the street, the main street of the temple in front of the urban shop and the convenience store. And they created an artist's rendition of what it might look like when it was totally reformed. That would address issues of sanitation, next slide, and other issues that were facing that corner. Now the next project we're looking at is the 506 project. This is actually something, 1882 has an office in this building at 506 I Street. And what we recently have is that we have a, we've got a mail in foundation grant to help us renovate the whole place. Make it into a social workspace, make the whole building into a social workspace. To show the next slide, you have a sort of a, this is our space, but the idea is to activate the activists. So the idea was to build a space where more than other APA organizations can come together and becomes a social workspace. The concept that we have is that you have to bring in activities. So you're not just reacting to the closure or the gentrification of places, but you wanna build in a place that attracts other organizations that have a stake or an interest in having activities, holding activities in Chinatown. So that gives more reason for people to come into the space. Next slide. So that's the 506 and 508 project. And what would have happened if we had done it? So our building is where you can see the church on the left side and the yellow house on the right side. In between is another part of the church and Chinese Consolidated Benevolous Association and us. It would have created, we were to, and we're going to build on it, but we would have reinforced the idea that entire block from the Chinatown, the church to the yellow house were made of nonprofit organizations or organizations that weren't designed to make money. They're not commercial properties or restaurants, that sort of things like that. And if you combine that with the idea of the Chinatown Park becoming part of a unified sort of front plus area, you can then create this area that is primarily cultural and humanities oriented. That presents an alternative or re-centering of the Chinatown from the H Street commercial area back into this area. Next slide. So our 506 project is in the upper circle and then below is the Chinatown H Street. So the Mellon Foundation is actually committing about $500,000 over a three year period to build out that social work space for us. And that block combined with say the H Street project and the corner bottom left of that block allows us to think about filling in that space of the whole block, right? With cultural and humanities programs that are not in the sense of being another sports bar or some other thing like that in that place. And that addresses another aspect of the, another China city proposal, which was figuring out ways that it can sort of more active and usable. That will address many of the other problems you have like homelessness in between the alleys or there were cells of drugs in between or behind the urban shop and things of this sort. That would then create this whole block as something that is oriented toward Chinatown revitalization without a commercial but still engaged with commercial interest. Next slide. Then interesting thing about this is as we develop the plan and we go back to the idea of what was, what do we want to preserve with the larger preservation? We go back to the Chinatown Green Street project where we first started. The street between where that red block is is where the ASLA building is and the part that we looked at was just that one block. So you see the Chinatown Park and then you see the street. But the proposal for ASLA program actually extended the Green Street all the way from the Chinatown Park to the park at the city center. They also had a cross street, the blue one which is called Civic Street which extended down from Carnegie, now the Apple Center, Apple and Carnegie Library Center and then down all the way to the National Portrait Gallery. That created this sort of like, I would say X mark space but it's more like a cross. And that in a way defined the space, right? Define a space that we want to think about earlier. You know, before I just sort of digress a little bit. You know, I'm gonna, this is the next last slide but you know, I wanna talk a little bit but when I first began advocating for the preservation of Chinatowns, a Chinese American architect and urban planner from Boston had asked me why do you wanna preserve Chinatowns, right? And we all know the standard responses but what the architect added had more impact on me and it's affected my thoughts and preservations of our stories and our space for over a decade of programming and projects we've undertaken in the 1882 foundation. And he said, preserving Chinatowns, he thought were boring because they're philosophical but the more interesting questions were imagining and visualizing and constructing how streets and public forums could be connected and the space is built to facilitate interactions among people. They're grieves to one another and their ideas. You know, that establishes this community and projects is how to be dynamically not to be restrained by preserving static things. So what we want is community-centric museums, community-centric urban layouts. And with that in mind, this ASLA Green Street project plus the Civic Street is creating a, or defines almost like a cultural zone. The crossing streets are like a linchpin to define a larger cultural zone within which Chinatown would be one of the several contributing elements. And other elements within that are including the MLK Library, the Shakespeare Theater, the Willy Mammoth, as well as the building museums and the Capitol Jewish Museum, which is just below us. You know, that sort of marks the space, cultural heritage zone and the city ought to celebrate it. You know, next slide, who would it be to have a space that defines the cultural, the nation, the national capital's heart? It's not something commercially dominated by commerce. It's not defined by privately driven interests. The commercial issues will follow, but it is defined as a cultural center or a humanitarian center. I think that would be great. I'm not sure other places can do that. But within that zone, Chinatown's preservation will fit and thrive better as part of a whole than it is simply by itself. Now, to do that then requires public policies that we can work on, whether it's city level and DC at the federal level. We have to define the zone and its boundaries. We have to provide for safety, sanitation and adequate shelter and services for the unhoused. You know, support infrastructure, the design of support infrastructures, roads and street lights as a cultural touchstone, not for the DC Washingtonians, but for the DMV communities, the community surrounding DC and even for communities that might be visiting Washington DC. Another aspect is we have to incentivize property development and commercial operations so that they embed a lot of considerations of community storytelling into their building design and their daily use. We should promote humanities and public education above visual arts within the zone. Why do I say that? Because it's a tendency, I see, where the humanities arts with their, you know, with statues and things like that get a lot more prominence or attention than us guys who are the historians since their storytellers. So I like the zone to focus on that, envision sort of national park story centers or neighborhood centers. In Washington DC, I don't know about, there's so much attention to building a large-scale national large-scale center where you have arts and you have stage plays and you have all this sort of stuff. But I think it better to spread this among all the districts and have small centers and neighborhoods can come together and tell their stories, right? And it's unique because we are a national capital that allows us to tell the stories to a national audience. Now the one thing is to, we don't have to wait for the government or a policy to do this. So one of the things that we're doing in Washington is we're voting that there's a fifth project we are looking at, that's something we call if buildings could talk. So the idea is you find these spaces and we've done this. I think where you look at the primary areas of your display windows and shops and so forth and incorporate into them these exhibits that tell heard in that space. So again, it goes back to the idea of community-centric museums or community-centric urban designs that tell stories and hold stories. Museums with out walls and things of this sort, history and places, that's another conversation. But that can be done now, you can do it now. So we can try to get together with downtown bid and then try to get that moving forward. Those are things that we can work again into principles, public-private collaborations and a dynamic storytelling process that can change, especially nowadays as we have digital and other electronic processes that make the product. The idea of telling stories, holding story, telling stories, much easier in my guy. So it's the idea of dynamic storytelling that's oriented toward community. So with that, I'm gonna give it back to Dee and maybe we can go on. This is by the way our last logo. We have talk-story events and we have public presentations. Every month we will have one presentation somewhere in Chinatown and part of that theory is that Chinatown has to have a purpose, not just for originally might've been a place to be protected from the racism that surrounded them. Might be a place where people with new immigrants can gain skills. Later becomes a place where you can get Chinese food. Now these things all change and it should be, and now I think, a place for cultural touchstone. People return to renew their sense of identity, renew their sense of community. It's the core of what Chinatown probably is. And we should make that happen. Wow, thank you both so much for sharing your work in this space. A lot of what I heard from both of you really resonates. And I love that taking this deep dive into DC's Chinatown really allows us to kind of explore these issues that have brought applicability to Chinatown's across the country. And I also love seeing in both of your presentations the collaborative efforts between Seattle's Chinatown, New York's Chinatown, and how that has influenced projects in DC as well. I think a few of the key themes that really resonated with me, that you both spoke of was kind of the sense of reclaiming space and also reimagining place in a way that brings it back to the community. I think a lot of Chinatown's have this phenomenon of their space being taken away. Even historically how Chinatown's were formed and how Chinese immigrants were only allowed to live in certain spaces. And then through eminent domain, through large-scale demolition, and today through gentrification displacement, there's all these pressures on Chinatown. And a lot of these processes that you guys are both talking about involve reclaiming that space and reimagining what it can be used for to support the community. And I think that's really powerful. Also, you both spoke of reclaiming the planning process. And Jen, in particular, you were saying this process has failed us. It was not designed in a way that really benefits or includes communities like Chinatown. So what can be done to fix a system that was not designed for these people? And I think you both provided really tactical strategies on how to reclaim that planning process and take agency back to support the local community. And of course, underpinning all of that is this need for the slow work of building trust, both with the community, between organizations through public-private partnerships, trusting property developers, trusting developers, or just fostering that sense of community. So there's so many intersecting layered themes here. And we have, I believe, about 10 minutes for discussion. But I just kind of wanted to ask you both, given all of these kind of competing priorities, I think there's a strong sense to support the local community. Ted, you mentioned this idea of creating a cultural zone or a heritage zone that then attracts people to enjoy the culture. How do you balance all of the current needs or maybe through community planning processes, but how do you find a way to balance and support all of these different consumers of Chinatown, so to speak, from the residents to the small business owners, to the tourists and visitors alike? Like, is there attention there or in terms of scarcity of resources, how do you prioritize the future vision? For me, and then Jen could also add these things, but I've always, when the normal development process, we have a piece of property, right? And the developer is going to develop it in the way they want within the boundaries of whatever the square footage or whatever it is. And they will, and the city will also help them go through that process, of course, and they will always have the section where they say, okay, let's take in consideration the cultural issues, the displacement issue, the heritage issue. They're all, in a way, good meaning in the sense that these regulations are in place where the property developers actually has to, if nothing more, has to check the box, but didn't try to do it. And the question then becomes, okay, one, as Jen has said, how do you measure that in the standard way that a government does that? Is it cause upon the usual civil rights organization they always deal with, right? And those people all great and good, but it's not really touching directly the people. So you're getting a filtered process, that's one. You have to figure out a way, as Jen and I have always, how do we make sure that these responses and these thoughts are reflective of the actual community, people who don't normally even engage with government except when they get a traffic find or something, but the other process, how do you, the development process can be very long and your first effort is a focus group that's at the very beginning of the project, 10 years later, you don't know if that is the same or if it's continuing to evolve. So that's one. Jen, maybe you could talk a little bit more about that, but the other part is that the developers, that's what I'm trying to say is the property develop and the government has to think of it holistically. You have to look at the whole area, which includes more than just that area where your property development is going to be. And in that process, you need to think that you also have some responsibilities for maintaining the safety and sanitation of the issues. You have to think about it. And it's not just within your own square footage, but those areas around that. And the more that we have defined this zone, then we realize that the priority is to maintain this cultural heritage zone and the property develop have to adjust. Thanks, Ten. I also think about like, I think as people, we have a hard time being able to like sort of exist in difference. And I think, especially in planning process, we want like everyone to get in a single file line and have like the same trajectory, the same sort of ideal ideology, the same, you know, the same person. And even working, you know, with the 1882 Foundation and getting to know the different communities in Chinatown, everyone is very different. There's more difference that exists in this small footprint of a place. So there is similarities. And I think in any given sort of like urban space, neighborhood, that's just, we hold that true. And so like how do we get out of the scariness of being like, oh my gosh, we're going to not see eye to eye. We're going to have difference and recognize and be okay with dealing sort of suspending that, you know, tension and, you know, making small steps to find where that intersection is. Like if that is one thing, for instance, if it is storytelling and we can all come together that we want a place that we want to tell stories, how can we like build on a small moment to be able to prepare some trust in this like a very big, scary sort of ecosystem of a lot of distrust and a lot of overwhelming feelings about a lot of different issues that are compounding that Ted had mentioned too, that we can't solve right away with policies and like systemic issues. But like, let's like find a moment and then move together there. And I think we undervalue the being able to, you know, appreciate the small achievements too. Like what can we like think about like, you know, three months down the line, six months, one year increments instead of thinking about this huge lofty vision that is supposed to take us from like now to 25 years. Like that's a huge jump and people get very disinterested and challenged by like these long-term things. So if you start to build in small like more human scale moments to achieve something and have conversations and wins, that's what I try to hold on to in order to sort of bigger, to like build bigger momentums. You know, I'm not the smartest guy but it's always like it's a paradigm shift. Everybody where every urban developer, every urban government is trying to do the right thing. So the emphasis always on the property developer, your focus on the idea that if the property developer makes money and changes his or her place from commercial development, makes use of the element to small buildings and so forth, that's the primary thing. The very way that we define what the Chinatown is for all its good intentions is that statement that says we want to make sure that Chinatown remains a unique cultural destination, a unique cultural destination. By almost defining that way, you're actually in the back of your mind, you're saying it's a destination for tourists, a destination for property development or for government, or things of this sort. But if you take that out and just say our zone, which there are so many representative office, so many historical things, there are five active synagogues within walking distance of my office in Chinatown, that space is shared with Chinese Jewish immigrants as much and as long as these has been there as it has been with Chinese, right? And the more we do our context today like Jean and I are talking, we're working on, there's a Filipino connection, there's all kinds of things there. But the idea is if you put emphasis, shift it, we're not gonna no longer are gonna think in terms of what property development is gonna bring us the most money, right? Or the most prosperity measured by financial return, rather that zone that large is so rich in heritage and history, that the city ought to grab it and make it, celebrate it and put that as the dominant that you wanna do, then the businesses will follow, right? And if you do that, then what you're doing is saying the importance of this heritage represented by community groups, individuals, is important than sort of building another hotel or another mixed-use office building, right? But you're not gonna, you're not gonna displace them. Those guys are gonna follow whenever you were saying there's public-private collaboratives, work on it and make sure that they work, we work together. But the focus is on community, the intersections, how do we allow them to exchange ideas? That really touched on my last question for both of you, of which was how do we know when we're successful? How will we know when we have successfully done authentic engagement or driven towards this vision of unique cultural and heritage-based placekeeping? And so, Ted, you shared a few ways to measure that success. Jen, do you have any final thoughts about how will we know when we succeed? Great question. Ted started to mention definitions, and I think that's an important aspect that any sort of start to a project together is I hear a lot of ambitions about community-centered approaches to planning or development or revitalization of neighborhoods of cultural districts. And in order to define success, you have to have the community to find the success at the very onset. So if we're not having conversations about what is the key objective of this endeavor together? What do we want to achieve? And for the communities that it's mostly going to affect, what do you see sort of as metrics of success? And that could be things that are very tangible, quantitative things. Like I need my spa business to thrive for the next 20 years because I want to pass it on to my kids. Or it's like, I just want to be able to sit on a bench and like for half a day reading my newspaper with somebody else enjoying and doing their thing across the street. So we'll start to see definitions of what people see as success if we start to let them in at the very onset. And we hear a lot of things of like, oh, it's community-centered, but let me get my plans in place first before we have a conversation. So how do we flip that, that's my takeaway, Ted. And you know, it's not discounting the bottom line, the financial bottom line. If the dodging department store are like in the middle of the DC Chinatown and probably one of the last of the old traditional sundry type stores, you know, gift shops and things like that can turn a profit, but still be like the long-awaited they're both profitable and they also are preserving tradition or participating in it. That is a measurement of success. It is not just that you have to show that you reserved all of tradition or that you have to show that you're making like X so much profit, but that could be there like eating hotel or any of these things, place like that. Or for example, the Chinatown Garden Restaurant which is one of the first restaurants in DC Chinatown was one of the first places for the on-the-own associates. If it can be maintaining its stories there and then at the same time be a profitable business, those are measurements of things. If I can have the Chinatown off H Street and the temple maintain perhaps it can't keep itself by itself as a traditional thing. But if I add a bookstore there or something that tells about Chinese American history or culture or about Buddhism or that and that becomes successful in terms of attracting businesses or if the acupuncture and your herbal medicine shops they're not doing very good in a lot of terms of businesses. But if it were to be able to this city we're able to reform like they have in some of the plans called the Great Tree Project in making those places stable to allow them to maybe modify their business but keeps the character of that Chinese store or tradition. And it makes it profitable. Those are measurements as can I change the city policies in such a way that they are cognizant and supportive of things that are culturally or humanities oriented and not necessarily based upon how much revenue they can get from that space. Those would be great measurements or if the we're happy because we have Smithsonian and the connections there but if their current project looking at things of how to stretch out beyond the National Mall can be connected with exhibits that are in our if buildings could talk project. That is a measurement we've expanded the audience of people that can be aware of Chinese culture at the same time made many more people walking them all or even around so I can reach out to UD in New York and have a portal between us and you. But why is that portal on my side have to be in a brick museum and to be at the corner of the Waltz office is right in the corner right there. That creativity will elicit its own excitement and develop other things that are both public education oriented as well as financially successful. Those are things that we can look at. Those are also inspiring. Thank you both so much. We are unfortunately out of time we've only scratched the surface here but I hope everyone has enjoyed today's program and that we get to continue to talk about cultural preservation in Chinatowns at future opportunities but thank you Jen, thank you Ted. We look forward to continuing the conversation.