 The work of my studio has always been guided by the principle that urban space is public and democratic like air and water and it's up to us. We're responsible, I think, all of us to protect the public realm. Architecture is so slow, it's so geo-fixed. How can you imagine architecture of distinction without generic form? Diversity Plaza is a little patch of ground right outside the subway in Jackson Heights in the borough of Queens in New York. Now Jackson Heights really lacks for any kind of public space, there aren't any big parks, there aren't even small parks. This is space now, it's just got a few benches, really nothing much has been done to it. But if you want to know what's happening with the Bangladeshi elections or relationships between Tibetans and Chinese, you can go to Diversity Plaza and find little groups of immigrants and you find these people debating the politics of their homelands and you can pick up stories of these people. It's an incredibly human space in the big city. The idea was to take this piece of property which was unused and bring green space into an area that was really underserved by green space but also with an argument to serve as a catalyst. So unclaimed urban spaces can be transformed into inclusive places, rich in function diversity, places of resilience where despite the surrounding violence, young people like Lalo can teach their dance classes. This talented dancer might never be able to leave Fresnillo, but this place has given him hope, joy and an opportunity to share his talents and become a leader. Today there are more than a hundred kids playing there every day. It's become an active playground. Play has become essential to reduce insecurity and violence. We saw a really fantastic opportunity here which was to renegotiate the relationship between the museum of the street by taking the street into the museum and taking the museum out onto the street. The way that the public use the courtyard has been transformative. It's changed the way people see the museum and it's changed also the way the institution see themselves. It's sometimes the things that you don't do that allow the unexpected to happen and that's why we did not clutter the courtyard with all the paraphernalia that goes with an entrance and why we kept it as flat as possible so that it could be appropriated by the public. You could see that there is an invitation for the public to come in and use the public space in a kind of uninhibiting way, very, very different from other Moscow parks. Then all of a sudden came press about how this park has promoted sexual activities in the park. We felt like, wow, this is a success. People are feeling so free in the space that they can really enjoy the space in each other. So to us it was a victory. One of the problems we have in the cities across the world is that we concentrate where the rich live and the rest of the cities and the suburbs and the experts also deserve this kind of humanizing the talents of our best architects and planners and unfortunately right now they seem to be located where the money is. I think it's our responsibility as architects to spark these conversations to provoke debate about this kind of thing and maybe bring the private sector and the public sector together. Gorilla action is one, just take over a site and use it in an interesting way and then see if it takes. Two is become citizen activists, expand the agency of architects to actually imagine things, convince people, show them the benefits, what's in it for them and get people to do the right thing. And the last thing is it's really in the end a matter of policy and it's having a seat at the table and being able to influence the government. What has made us be here today is the short concern of rethinking urban spaces as places to meet and connect for humans to interact. And I think I can speak for all of us here that more than ever we all want to gather together. Through placemaking we're built with the community not only for it, our design substitute barriers for boundaries. Placemaking is understanding that the value of architecture is not only laying bricks but activating a social construction. Cities are also changed by the small interventions or acupunctures that once you're adding many of them you're changing the city. But the perfect storm of the pandemic combined with a trend for online shopping has forced many department stores to close. And I want to see if we can reimagine a new way of being within the shell of a vacant department store because integrating the urban and nature has never been more important. More than ever we need to think of how to humanize three places, the bazaar, the park or the playground and the library. In the post-pandemic world we were greater than ever need for us to connect. We must seek content in context, change barriers into boundaries, start with a shift of perception, approach the landscape as the program, resignify materials, work with temporality and hold beauty as a basic right.