 why urban design in practice and why Matura de Kuna as our lecture series and for our first lecture. You know, in urban design, we often talk about theories of urban life or history of urban life without a true focus on the practice where ideas hit the ground and what are the sort of social, political and frankly material contexts in which we work and how do we develop not an ideology but a set of practices to push boundaries and advance new thinking and social and ecological urban design. So the idea of practice is something that we are truly exploring this summer during the summer semester and we welcome all of you to explore that concept as well. So I also wanted to just thank Professor David Smiley who is the assistant director of the program and you can see here and also Paul Fuerst for helping to organize and guide this series as well as collaborators and friends around the globe and everyone is so welcome and we are so happy to bring us all together around these very important questions and topics in not only climate and social life and around the globe. So quickly, I have the privilege to introduce my friends and colleagues, Dilip Dukuna and Anu Matur, their practice, Matur Dukuna, how can I say it? Has played a, has had a totally outsized large role in the trajectory of frankly planning, architecture and landscape thinking for the past decades. They have developed truly a special way of I would say working in and on the world but through an incredibly consistent and clear critique and that critique that has been sort of centered around this sort of water and what they call the critical zone of wetness which is between clouds and aquifers rather than on surface divided by land and water. This has been explored in projects and publications that span the globe and span many, many different conditions. So through their publications, drawing and pedagogy they have truly sort of advanced a completely different mindset, different way of seeing and thinking about the world and those kind of ideas have been represented in their teaching with Anu at the University of Pennsylvania and Dilip at Columbia University, a beloved professor here and at Harvard as well. And of course, one would be remiss to not mention their incredibly influential publications namely Mississippi Floods designing a shifting landscape which is a key source for the urban design and Columbia's summer studio on revisioning the Mississippi River this semester, Deccan Traverses, Soak, Mumbai and Estuary and Dilip's recent book, The Invention of Rivers, Alexander's Eye and Ganga's Descent. And I just wanted to note that this publication has received two major awards, the ASLA Honor Award and the JB Jackson Book Award. So I don't wanna give a traditional introduction to you and Dilip and Anu because I think your practice is well known how it spans Philadelphia and Bangalore, the methods that you've used that have truly been transformative. So I would like to stop here and just give you the floor and say welcome again and thank you for kicking off this lecture series. We're so happy to have you, thank you and welcome. Yes, thank you so much for that introduction, a very generous one. And I just also wanted to thank David for all that you have put into sort of bring this event together. You know, it was really fascinating for us when you gave us the topic that in practice and we were also wondering, how do we fit in to the semester? And we realized it's sort of a question that keeps coming up like what is our practice is something we ask over and over again. And maybe in the sort of collage or maybe a ramble of what we've put together today, you will be able to sort of pick out what that actually means. Working through materials, working through ideas, working through projects, not as separate entities but sort of being very interwoven. So what we want to really do today is that we want to, I mean, we will start with Dilip actually presenting a few very fundamental questions. And if anybody knows Dilip, you know what fundamental means here. So with that, then we will sort of go into some of our other works. So I'm going to hand it over to Dilip again. So you see the screen now. Yeah, thank you so much. I mean, it's wonderful. Also to be, I just want to add my thanks and pleasure to be speaking to students and former students and colleagues. So yeah, as I said, one of the things we're going to do, we're going to go back and forth through the hour. So I want to start with these two propositions, two propositions that have directed much of our work and thinking. And they've sort of been formulated through our practice really. And more and more, they're not propositions so much as conventions. One is that the earth's surface exists by design and the other is that the river exists by design. Like this, I don't mean that it is engineered, that the surface is engineered or the river is engineered. We all know that it is, I mean, both these things are. But more than engineered, these are conceived, invented and reality constituted on their ground. And as you will see, it is to the disadvantage of certain populations and we'll come back to that. So it raises two fundamental questions. I mean, if you consider these propositions seriously, you have to ask these questions. What are the earth's surface and river designed from? And what are they designed with? What are the tools basically of design? I want to suggest that they're designed from wetness, ubiquitous wetness. And by ubiquitous wetness, as you will see on the left here, you get a sense, I mean, that what we live in is actually wetness. There is no such thing as dryness to us. And we'll talk about this, with an example from the desert that will make the point that these are all unique wetnesses rather than dry places or it's just less wet. So like we like to say that the sea is very wet, the desert is just less wet. So we inhabit this zone, as Kate mentioned, this critical zone of wetness between clouds and aquifers. And that zone thickens where we are and what we might mistake for a surface, but it thickens around our area with the trees, with wells and so on and so forth, plants and vegetation. So this is what we design from. And the second thing is we design with, we design with two, what I call design devices. Design devices meaning that they provide the agency with which we consider possibilities. So we can work with these two design devices in the mind. The one is the surface and the other is the line. And by surface and length, I'm talking about geometric concepts. These are concepts that we hold in our head. So the surface is an area that has got length and breadth, but no depth. So you will see it in that second drawing when we posit a surface. So it divides waters above from waters below. And this is the same, I mean, if you follow the book of Genesis, you might find associations with these terms that are made with a God, but it is very, very human. So a surveyor, when a surveyor goes out to survey land, the first thing they do is to posit a surface. And that surface, like I say, divides waters above and waters below. I've had to tell an indigenous person or person not educated in geometry that there is something below the surface, they will, they'll wonder what you're talking about. I mean, what do you mean below the surface? So the surface is a very, very deptless thing that we conceive and we assert before we basically design. So all of us educated in geometry do this and educated in geography. Then once you separate these two waters, you have a ground and so you have earth below and you have sky above. So you've separated atmospheric waters from ground waters and then you exercise the agency of a line. A line is a breathless length as Euclid defined it, it has no breath. So it is invisible, it's really invisible. And with that line, we exercise another separation and this is between land and water. And so what we have now is an articulated surface. So these two design devices are prior to infrastructure and you want to open up what they exclude and then what they include. But if I can just take a stop sharing for a second just to make a point of what one means by a surface and how it is used. I want to show, this is a map, and this is a map that just happens to be in the house right now, it's a map of Amsterdam. It's a map of Amsterdam. And now you're all familiar with maps and they are informational representations. They tell us where to go, they're spatial representations. There's a here and a there to the map, but then there's a huge critique of maps. I mean, they're made with an eye that is an eye in the sky that looks down at the surface of the earth and not everybody is gifted with this eye, but it is still considered an important instrument of communication. So besides the God's eye view, there's an orientation to the map. There is a selective information on the map and all this has come under criticism. And that maps are colonial tools of power and the cases made by Baudrillard and Borges and others that the map precedes territory. In other words, the map tells you how to divide land from water, how to extract resources and so on and so forth. So there's a huge move now to educate indigenous peoples into reading a map or I would think the urban poor also to exercise their rights on land. But now this is not what I want to draw your attention to. It's not the surface of the map. What I want to draw attention to is this, the thickness of the map or the lack of thickness of the map. The word map comes from mapper. Mapper meaning cloth, tablecloth in Latin. And so it draws attention to the surface and this aspect of the map, you know, like even when it is drawn on marble, it is not the depth of the marble that basically engages in representation. It is only the surface that engages in representation. So this map is a good illustration of a surface. This is a surface that is in trouble today. And we must ask seriously the question that if it exists by design, can we actually continue with it and for problem solving on the basis of this or must we follow Einstein, you know, and seriously ask him, can we solve our problems with a paradigm that has basically created those problems or must we look for something else? So in other words, is there another way to engage the wetness and not basically through the map. So the map just manifests the surface and it's a tool that we use but the actual tool is the surface on the ground. Every surveyor draws the map one is to one on the ground before they represent it on paper. They must draw the line, actually separating land from water on the ground before they replicate it on paper. So this is something that remains, you know, it's left to be critiqued as it were. So the question that I want to take you through is how is the surface posited and the river drawn? So how are these things designed? And I'll take you through this within a minute. You know, it has to be something ancient and this goes back to the 6th century BC when we all understand to be a river was engaged by Greek academics of the School of Miletus led by Thales. What they saw was a river and a river that then raised a couple of questions for them, the first being, what is the normal map? Is it the one between the... Sorry. Is it the one that is between June, between June and September when the Nile occupies the entirety between two deserts? The Arabian desert on the East and the Libyan desert on the West or is it the Nile between October and May when it is narrow and flowing between two river banks? They decided that normal Nile was between two river banks. Now you might think of these as natural levees at the time or whatever, but they drew it in this manner. So they defined the normality of this particular object. But there was something that they had done before this. They had articulated a surface. They articulated a surface in a louvial plane that had settled and the deserts which we'll come to later on the two sides were unsettled. Were unsettled. And so they were the place of the barbarians. So this was a place of civilization and with the name Egypt. But having defined the neural Nile basically as the normal Nile, they could do this by drawing a line. They drew a line. What does this line do? Basically the line separates. It contains water to a channel and it liberates a flow. So without a line, I will not know a flow. A line sets up a moving water against fixed land and allows me to gauge speed and this thing of flow. So the line is playing a phenomenal role in our understanding of place. There is something to the Nile that is also something essential to the river. So the line that's essential to the Nile. And so you see the line flows like a river flows. It starts in a point. And then you erase a line as a river floods and then redraw it. So there's something about river literacy that is the same as a visual literacy of the line. So the source is the start of a line. The course is the flow between two lines and flood is the invasion of the world. As Dave mentioned, I've sort of written a book on this on the subject. I mean, because once you question the river, you literally question civilization. And then you realize that each of these source course and flood has a particular idea from which they, from which they come, you know, because of Eden or, you know, river of rivers, oceanous, you know, or the deluge, which tells us a lot about how the flow was perceived. But I'm not going to give you the idea of how the flow was perceived, but I'm not going to get into the details of this. I just want to take you through what this sort of does for us. The drawing of the line, interestingly enough, was raised, and raised two questions for these Greek scholars that they put to the Egyptians, to the local Egyptians. You know, one is where does the Nile begin and why does the Nile flood? And the answer from the Egyptians, which is very interesting, and I think we really have to pay more attention to this. Why were they not given an answer? You know, and what they saw was ignorance. You know, they read it as ignorance that these people did not know their place. But we have another possibility. We have another possibility that the Egyptians saw another Nile. They saw a Nile that flowed and flooded. They saw a Nile that rose and fell. They saw a wetness as opposed to the Greeks who saw a water, you know, so water flows, yes, but wetness does not flow. Wetness soaks, it saturates, it osmotes, it evaporates, it precipitates. It is what they called an ocean of rain. And they knew it was rain. They called it Nile in the sky. It came from Ethiopia, you know, and that's what made the Nile rise. They had this knowledge, but why would they think of a source, you know, and why would they think of flood? Flood is water crossing a line that one has drawn. So flood cannot be natural. In fact, it's something that we will return to with the Mississippi, that flood is a constructed event based on this feeling. More importantly, what I want to point out to you is actually how the habitation of these two grounds are very different. But when you consider the Nile as a river that flows and floods, you have embankments. You build embankments that, you know, that only grow over time. And you settle and free for system. So you contain water and you free land for system. If you are in this other mode of habitation of wetness, you know where the Nile rises and falls, then what you do is you allow for wetness to be free and it rises with rain and it falls when the rain passes. And this is what the Egyptians did. They cultivated the ground when the Nile rose and it rose very gently for them because they were 2,000 miles away from the rain and there is not much rain in Egypt. So it just rose very, very gradually and they let it into their fields. But there's another element to this that is very important and significant and that is that these are not just two grounds of habitation. They are also two times of habitation. When you talk about a river, a river is drawn in a particular moment, in a moment of flow formation. So if you follow the hydrologic cycle and the hydrologic cycle is here, there are four moments in its most simple form. So for those of you who do not know, the hydrologic cycle is the cycling of water through states and places, always with the possibility of returning to the same. So what you have here is the simplified version of the hydrologic cycle in four moments. One is rain, two is flow formation, three is evaporation and four is cloud formation. What we have done with the river, when we design rivers, when we draw a line, we can do it only when there is not raining, when there are no clouds and when water is not evaporating or we don't consider water evaporating. We only consider water on the surface of the earth. So a surveyor cannot go out when it is raining. They wait for the rain to pass. But in that moment we have constructed maps, we have marked our properties, we have designed our infrastructure, we have described our past, history happens in this particular moment, we experience the present and we envision the future. So this is something we might want to think about as designers. On the other hand, you have the hydrologic cycle engaged in the moment of rain or throughout its cycle. So the moment of rain is the initiation and most indigenous communities inhabit this particular moment and move with the cycle. So what you have on the one hand is design that happens on the geographic surface. When we talk about cities, when we talk about settlement, you talk about fields, you talk about landscape in general, you're talking about an earth surface paradigm. An earth surface paradigm has been constituted in the time of reality that is one moment in the hydrologic cycle and all the other moments are made into visitors. So rain comes and goes, the fog lifts, the dew disappears, the morning dew disappears. So these are all events that we have constructed based on our fixity of a particular moment of time. Whereas on the other side, we inhabit an ocean of wetness between clouds and aquifers. So the whole cycle is operating within clouds and aquifers without the articulation of a surface. So there is a lot more freedom. It operates more by negotiation of wetness rather than the separating of water. So if you look at the model that we're working with currently in this time of reality, in a moment of flow formation, we have this attitude of separating water and we are modeling the seas today. So we have really separated land from water. That is through to scale, that's the amount of water that covers the earth or that we have to work with. But that's the paradigm is one of separation. Whereas the other one is much more negotiation and it thickens, like I say, between high grounds and low grounds as the Egyptians lived with it. So we're going to take you through this, through a few projects that we have singled out from our work. But what we ask in each of them is this, is any one of these places when we're talking about Rajasthan, they're talking about Jerusalem, they're talking about Badanasi, we're talking about the U.S. Mexico border. Is it on the geographic surface or is it in ubiquitous wetness? It challenges everything, including politics. It's not just about water and wetness, it's about politics and metaphysics. So the first thing that we're going to speak about is the Mississippi and that is what we're working on. For us it's really like going back in time also to our work in the Mississippi. That was in the, you know, believe it or not, but in the last century. So here, you know, I mean, you heard from David Muth last week, you know that the European settlers came and tamed a river. We say no, they did not. They tamed a river. They tamed wetness. They tamed a profuse wetness. So the assumption we make generally that the Native Americans knew a river is a huge assumption to make and be hesitant to make it. We prefer to see them as actually inhabiting a wetness in a unique way rather than inhabiting a surface. So when the European settlers came here, they posited a surface. They divided land from water and that's what you see with the Mississippi. They contained it to two lines, between two lines, and then they designed it. And that is what we live with today. We live with a river that is designed, but more importantly, we live with a river that was conceived and imposed upon indigenous communities over here. So these three moments, just before I pass it to Anu, these three moments just show actually how the line has played out. In the first one, you have the European settlers define the river and then we define the flood plain. We define flood. Why is it that we contain that European vision actually of a line that contains the Mississippi to a channel and then define a flood plain? Why is it that we don't see that entire blue on the left as the Mississippi? Why is the Mississippi not considered wetness? Why is it considered a river? And did the indigenous communities here see the Mississippi as wetness and not a river? Then you have Fisk, who's basically chasing a line, that he's identifying in the soil and fixing them in particular moments of time. Now that is a questionable exercise, but it is becoming more and more prevalent with our mapping facilities today because we got satellite imaging, people are selling books now on shifting images of the Ganga and Mississippi, that it's a lucrative business now. And in the third one, you know this image of project flood, which is really the containing with a line of volume of water that you can then measure and direct to wherever you want. I'll pass it to Anu now to take you through the Mississippi. Yeah, I mean, it's exactly was fantastic to sort of go back to many of our drawings and images that we haven't looked at for a while. And as you can see that we've even some enveloped ourselves in the milieu of the Mississippi, you're seeing some of the prints at the back, which have been up on these walls for a long time actually. Yeah, so I mean, if those of you are not familiar, I mean, this really was an exhibition to begin with, and then it sort of turned into a book. So we were really working with the idea that the visualization is what speaks more than the text that we have actually written. But just to give you a sense of it, I mean, what you're seeing on your right is is a map of the lower Mississippi, which is black and the same map that they'll have showed in blue in the flood. So the focus of our work really was the lowest Mississippi because we felt it was the most dynamic and we were also involved with this whole idea of shifting landscapes. I mean, more and more we sort of steered away from that being the final question. It was really a starting point of some of our inquiries. And just to give you a sense of how we started to look at these, what you're calling site one, two, three and four, one being the delta, which is actually not the delta, delta in terms of the sea in Mississippi, it's the Yazoo delta, which is also known for its blues to a place called flows, which is really the Achafalaya swamp area with a corridor, which is three and four, which is really land's end. And some of these questions about, what is the measure we bring to the Mississippi and how are these measures actually put in place through design? So I just want to actually begin with you with site zero because that really was the, is a fascinating starting point, especially in terms of the maps and the surface that Dilip was just talking about. So for site zero for us was really this huge map, which was huge, but it is discussed as a miniaturized map of the Mississippi. It's 40 acres of concrete in, I mean, they were sort of precast and then put in cyber, it's 40 acres of concrete. And it's fascinating because it was really built in the 1940s with the help of 3,000 German prisoners of war who happened to be here. And it was in operation till 1973, which is the image on the left, where there was a major flood and though they closed down the Mississippi model, they actually reopened it. The shot you're seeing at the bottom right is actually us and our students who finally found this model and have jumped the fences and encroached on this territory a lot. But what's really important in this is, I mean, we can go on and on talk about the making of the model. It's, what is it made from? So what's fascinating is that it's actually made from a true sort of plan, if you know. I mean, it's sort of proportionate in its plan dimension. So like one step on the model would be one mile. And in terms of its elevation, it's like one foot is 100 feet. So you can imagine that it's exaggerated extremely, but it was really, it is the epitome of the surface being cast on another topography. So what was important was that concrete surface and the way it's constructed, it's actually doesn't touch the ground in many places. And it's actually been supported on these pinons, really little ones to find the balance because it was ingenious actually the building of the model because water had to flow. So they had to get their grains and their sort of continuity is perfect. And you know, even as it is growing up, I mean, being eroded, we were told often to be really careful when we walked on it because snakes and all kinds of wildlife live underneath the model. So in some ways it sort of exemplifies the surface. But what was more important to us also was that this question as to what is the Mississippi? Is this the real Mississippi that is actually being played out out there in another scale? Or is that the real Mississippi that's being played on the model? And I think both actually opens up a huge dilemma. And these are some working drawings that we found actually, which are not really regarded anybody as being important, but on the left, you see actually the whole basin of the Mississippi, which is sort of drawn on the site, which is a 200 acre site. On the next middle drawing is actually a contour where they are working the contour slightly to be able to receive these concrete units. And on the extreme right is the actual diagram of the concrete units on which they have cast the Mississippi image. So it's really like an imprint of the Mississippi has been put. And the only thing that's important is the surface. Next. Yeah. So I mean, the question about these constructions, which many of you are aware of today, the building of levees, the revetments which are under the waterline, the constant pumping, you know, from the levee from one side to the other during flood. I mean, they are really playing out what was happening on the model. So the model is the reality. And this is really experimental or demonstrative site for whatever has been happening. There's also a public relations to it's fine. So they would actually bring farmers and other people to these models and try out, you know, raise the levees this much and then say, you know, what would happen if we didn't do this or that? But just to sort of, I mean, so our learning, I mean, even though we had looked at all kinds of other resources, you know, our learning came as much from the model and what they were really doing on the model. What's really interesting about when you look at, you know, an image like this, you know, immediately, at least for me, the word meander comes into my, you know, sense I, you know, as a landscape architect, maybe I don't look at this as curves just that it is a curved line. I look at it as a meander. When you think of it as a meander, it's a very different thing than just a curve because meander is really a process by which the Mississippi is actually pushing itself forward. And what that I mean is that, you know, in the lower Mississippi, this is really quite flat. I mean, the degree, the gradient here is almost non-existent when you look at the 500 miles, you know, to the Gulf of Mexico. And so what is really happening is that the force of the Mississippi from the upper reaches are pushing at this point. They're pushing the Mississippi. And so when you have that push, in order to accommodate itself, the Mississippi starts to take territory and meander. And so it's really, so if you sort of cut off any of these meanders, it just finds another place where it needs to accommodate that slope. So it's just fascinating to us because, you know, when we met the engineers, they kept saying, oh, the river likes curves. So we are going to give curves, different curves. But when you look at it as a meander, it becomes a very different thing. And it also demands a very different sensibility. And for us, like, you know, we were trying to say, how do you capture that? How do you capture that sensibility? And we felt that, you know, looking at the blues, the Mississippi blues, which was also something of, you know, it's a genre of music, I would say, that is very difficult to capture in a formal score. So when people sing, it really demands a lot of improvisation. It demands, you know, a spontaneity, you know, in how you negotiate it today. And we felt that the meander very much was doing that. And so we called, you know, the set of prints, you know, one of them was called Engineer Curve, and the other one is called Blues Meanders. You know, because this is also the plot, you know, as Dilip mentioned, you know, in the Delta where there were, you know, some of the blues really came out of the slaves, hollers at their music. And it was really a very important part of our sort of travels also, to think about this landscape in terms of the blues. And, you know, we've often talked about Indian mounds. I mean, we haven't sort of brought it in before, but in this presentation. But if you look at the diagram on the left, what you see is you're really seeing a kind of continuous line, which is the space given to the river, you know, and you know, as Dilip mentioned, that's what's allowed. And even though the river is even seen as within that, that's the maximum. And on the outside are all these dots. And what we are looking at these dots are only what is left over today, but this whole landscape was profusely full of what are Indian mounds. And for us, really it became a moment of reflection, a moment of recalibrating how we were looking at the Mississippi. And we thought that what we are looking at are actually two paradigms of design, you know, one in which you've drawn a line. And, you know, of course, in this image, which is from the 1927 flood, which was quite significant, all the infrastructure that has come about today, you know, you know, a wetness is meant to be on one side, but we have water on both sides. And it's a line which is trying to contain, and when it couldn't contain, it becomes a big disaster. While on the right, you see the remnant of just one or two of the mounds that are left today, because this area was almost mathematically flattened. And these are the mounds that it opens up a whole idea of rising and falling. So, you know, so many of these mounds, when there are multiple cities of them, you can imagine that you let the Mississippi have its place at certain times and you go up. And so, you know, we were sort of speculated that the Native Americans didn't see rivers necessarily, they really saw rising and falling waters. And to some extent, this is what we are trying to capture by these two lines, which are very different lines, you know, a line of section, a line of the horizon that moves up and down, and a line that is dividing between land and water. I think I have to sort of move fast, because we have a lot of things you want to show. We put in a lot here, but just to give you a tour of it, and maybe some of you can look at them in more detail, this set of drawings are actually starting to talk about the arpent measure. And this is a territory between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. And, you know, I know Kajia's here and she's done a lot of work on this, you know, after we had sort of looked at this a long time ago. And, you know, it's a place where, you know, all the properties were divided in terms of the riverfront. And from, and one of the earliest places that got so-called settled. But what's fascinating is that the whole land division is happening on the arpent, which is a French measure, where the property was divided by the extent on the, what was, was seen as the channel or to seen as the riverfront. And so you start getting what are called long lots. And so even when these antebellum homes and other places started to, you know, sort of get destroyed or ruined or abandoned, the same sort of property has been adopted by all these refineries, oil company, petrochemicals. And, you know, we call this set of prints that are cultivating, cultivating banks. And so it's a very different type of cultivation that's going on over here between the cultivation of sugarcane and other things. And it's not that the other cultivation was not contentious. I mean, it was a cultivation that was really pushed on the back of slaves and there were some horrific practices. But we have a whole other issue today with the kind of cultivation that's happening here today. And just the extent of construction. I mean, today we don't even see it. I mean, you know, we may see the levees, because, you know, as you see the diagram in the 1800s, 1882, they were just about five feet and rising. Today they are 50 feet and we don't even know what the end of that would be. But this whole idea of sort of gathering this, making this boundary and sort of saying this is the place of the Mississippi is visible. But what is not visible are these concrete revetments. So there is a whole series of maps which are under the waterline and they appear once in a while. And you can imagine that this whole idea of work and it's a kind of practice on the Mississippi is ongoing all the time. I mean, there are barges which are, you know, one area gets repaired one year, you move to the next area, you know, levees, crevasse, like they break down with even a crab or a crawfish going through it or a major storm event. And, you know, we keep finding this, there's a constant maintained when you've actually defined it so tightly. What really is going on here, I mean, in fact, this image on the left which was some document we found in one of the offices of the call and we hadn't seen it for a while, is the Riker plan. And, you know, this is really what is the imagination in people's mind. And if you could just have a channel and just let the Mississippi do its own thing, it would be perfect. And, you know, maybe this is the image by which we are trying to train the Mississippi and, you know, these images, the print, the detail of the print on your right is really talking about, you know, keeping the Mississippi in its banks and out of politics or, you know, keeping the father of water in its narrow path. And so it's really this whole way of visualizing was already presupposing this kind of situation. And today when we look back, we tend to very quickly blame the Army Corps of Engineers for, you know, making the Mississippi what it is. And we feel it's a larger milieu. It was a whole milieu of culture, of practice that actually legitimized, actually looked at it this particular way. There were, there are whole structures which are still managing the utter flier and the New Orleans track. I won't go into details, but if these sort of structures fail, Mississippi, New Orleans is lost in a way, not so much because it did get flooded only. It'll get lost because all the shipping and all the water will go through the utter flier and it'll lose its ports. And so there is a whole project which is, you know, what we call 3070, those gates manage day by day, this proportion of what has to go into the utter flier and what into the Mississippi. And for us, the utter flier is again a fascinating landscape. And you know, for us, we were really inspired by the essay written by John McPhee and we literally followed his essay and just literally, you know, went into the Bayous with him, actually. And it's amazing that Bayous themselves are this whole idea of negotiation because, you know, some days they may, Bayou might flow this way, the other day it might flow the other way. And it's happening. I mean, if you imagine, it's like this huge tub, the way you look at the oceans and these are actually movements because of some other force here, things are starting to shift this way or shift that way. And people who live in this landscape really know which way it's going to go. And so they, you really need a certain knowledge of this landscape to even negotiate it. And there are many stories I could tell you about us getting lost and not being able to find the right value but that can be for maybe another time. And just a quick image of what you can't read is all the agencies. And there are at least hundreds of agencies which are fighting for plus water or minus flow. So you can see the shrimp farmers want a certain amount of wetness in Syria, while the, you know, the ports want a certain amount. The fishers want something else and, you know, people who are hunting want something else. So every year the general would take a boat and go through the achaflayah, just hearing everybody's requirements and deciding which way to turn, you know, the gates and the Mississippi. Just some sketches while we go on the bayou with Charlie Freiling. And here are just an image of the, you know, the bird foot delta, which shows you again this black and white actually means nothing because we don't know what is liquid and what is solid. And even when you're looking at the image on, you know, on your right, which is green and blue, we are in a completely liquid world. You know, there is no, I mean, whether this is all land, this is all water, but the idea is that once we draw it in a particular way, we try and reclaim it as such. So we try and make what is white into solid land. And, you know, you've heard about today, there's a lot of work and conversation about the soil boom. It was quite invisible to people even 10 years ago, I would say, and their colleagues in other institutions starting to work with, how do we hold the sediment back? And you're seeing an image of the mouth of the Mississippi, which is, you know, coming from the Gulf of Mexico into the mouth. And it's really so much sediment. I mean, you could, you know, it's what we call eroding continent. It's completely washing out the good soil of the United States. And Eads was a great character. We're not going to go into him right now, but he built these jetties which were working on a sustainable system. I don't know if you want to say anything about it or should we just, I think we can just move on. Yeah, maybe there is other stuff that we could talk about. And for us, it was also kind of working with wetness when we were doing our own modes of drawing. We don't want to call it representation, we call it presentation because we were synthetically bringing together stories and ideas. And by working with screen printing, we became very aware of the viscosity of the inks, you know, of what was drier, what dried quickly, the inks which were wetter. I mean, white was a disaster. It would dry very quickly. And, you know, we were sort of urging ourselves to use that color. But there was a whole process, but also this whole process of layering that we were not looking at the image just as the surface. For us, when I look at the print, I see all the layers that have sedimented and actually built that and some of our lost, I mean, those images are lost in other layers. And in some ways that was okay. There's only one person who's gone gray, I think in that particular image. Anyways, so here, I mean, we just wanted to end the Mississippi segment with, you know, touching on Katrina. I mean, it is, I mean, you know, when you try to hold water to a place, you know, witness defies it, you know, and what you see over here is, you know, not water somewhere, but witness everywhere. But what happened with Katrina that it was, you know, it was an event of course, five years after we published the, we published a book and we sort of hesitated to get involved in any of the discussions that followed. What was absent in the whole conversation, you know, in dealing with this hurricane was a Mississippi that has set the datum of this landscape. It has, you know, and this is where you realize that the articulation of a surface then, you know, creates its own surface and levels. And so with the floodways, you know, I mean, New Orleans got placed in a bowl, you know, so the levees extended around and around because, you know, once you had the floodways, you had to protect the back. And then, you know, you're protecting the back, you build levees around, and then you created a bowl that you had to pump out of, you know, so nobody lives, you know, on earth, no one, I mean, even the Dutch don't live, you know, in some kind of natural condition below sea level. It's always by design. And it is one of the most silly things you can think of, you know, to live below sea level by design, but that is because of, you know, the destruction of sediment and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But this is where, you know, the hurricane, you know, cannot be called a natural disaster. You know, it is, it's nature. Nature does what nature does. You know, we are the disaster. You know, design is the disaster. So, so, so natural disaster like flood is a, you know, is an oxymoron. So just to return to the, briefly to the mill and to Egypt, I want to draw attention now to that second set of lens before we go on to the desert. Here, this line that I'm drawing attention to is the distinction between a settled surface and an unsettled surface or a non-surface. And the early Greeks could not deal with the desert. So the desert is obviously a banking map and still is a banking map. What you will see in the desert, like you will see in the ocean, are only infrastructural lines that are held still. But the desert, the ocean, the mountain sites were all considered places for barbarians, you know, barbarians or people who were basically non-settlers. And so the desert was a place of exile, you know, it was a place for outlaws, it was a place for outcasts and so on, you know. So this demeaning of a whole ground of the surface based on what you consider to be normal surface, you know, has led to our whole culture of river, river civilizations, you know, that cities began in rivers, you know, on alluvial plains, et cetera, et cetera, have marginalized communities, actually, who have inhabited plateaus and inhabited places that were not, you know, going by the same measure of wetness as a river landscape. So what we want to suggest here is that the desert is as demeaning as a wetness as a river is demeaning of wetness. And what we would like to see, I mean, it says that the Sada, for example, using the proper name, is a unique ocean of wetness, is a unique ocean of wetness and, you know, other than the desert. With that we go to India. And you see this rectangle on the left, the red one is where the Thar, the great Indian desert actually is in that territory. And even in this map, you can start to see that there's very little information actually on the map because I guess even the 1700s, while Reynolds was making detailed maps of the Sundarban in other areas, they actually knew very little about this territory. And, you know, as Dilip said, the infrastructure lines, maybe some of the hills are sort of done as a stamp. But if you note this, what they say, parts of the very sandy desert, little known to Europeans, is something that scans out. And it was, you know, it was really of no interest to most of the people because they couldn't see its worth in terms of minerals, other things. And so for us, of course, the desert, as you know, is full rather than being empty and we sort of ventured out into these territories. I've done it with some of my studios in the last three years, I would say. But Dilip and I have been traveling there for the last four years, actually, and we started to build up a whole, even idea as to how can we even discuss the, you know, this territory and not call it a desert. What you're seeing on the slides are because we think it's lesser and, you know, that every place in the world should actually be the same greenness we need. We need the same water amount. You have these canals coming in, which you see on your left. And one would say, but why not? You know, they are short. There is a shortage of water. But you realize that when you think about wetness and look closely at the practices of people in these areas, there is a very fine-tuned sensibility with how they live. And the more and more the canals are coming, that sensibility is getting lost. And when there is shortage in the canal, it becomes a bigger disaster than these people have ever lived with. I mean, they have gone through many, what we would call droughts, but there have been means by the way that plants were cultivated, the way the agriculture worked. It was all rain-based. They were not dependent. And once you start to get that excess, I mean, the middle, there's rice being grown in the desert. I mean, you know, that's really like a ludicrous innocence. And in an extreme right, this is just outside one of the major cities in Rajasthan, because I jeep would wear, this was just a gentle swale and a very important one because there's a certain time of the year where wetness and water gathers and goes down it. But to start seeing it as a river from development and concreting it. I mean, in this group, you don't need to be told. I mean, that's the, you know, we are in for a disaster and all the people who live on the other side, it's just a matter of time. And then we would say it's climate change or something else, but this is a design disaster actually, you know, in the works. So what we just want to, we're going to almost quietly take it through some of our travels. But we started to look at particularities of landscape and this whole notion of how people dwell. And, you know, it's not necessarily divided between urban and rural. I mean, there are these settlements called Dhanis, which, you know, families live. They are these amazing musicians who, you know, today they are going all over the world and performing, but they always come back to those dunes and to their Dhanis in order to sort of be home. The potters, who have been sort of, I mean, these pots are actually quite famous across India because they hold moisture and transpire in ways that are unique because of the materials by which they are made and the process by which they are made. And you find them everywhere. You find them under trees. You find them in the market places. You find them in places, you know, the whole idea of offering water is actually almost sacred. I wouldn't say sacred in a religious way, but they'll be, old ladies who are doing nothing else, but in a little shed with, you know, with a particular, you know, matka, which is what those, you know, clay pots were called and giving people water. So in some of our traverses, we started to identify and look at certain kinds of landscapes which gave us an idea of resilience and about how do we build our own sensibility. So it's not so much about documenting something that we do believe is going to be lost very soon, if the, you know, canals keep coming, but also something by which we learn not to apply it, you know, aimlessly somewhere else, but to just start to get fine tuned to the sensibility. So in our own work, I mean, we've been also trying to, you know, push how do we draw? How do we work in materials? And, you know, you've seen some of the Mississippi work and you can see that these are actually screen prints that behind us, you know, very large screen prints that were done, but with, with thinking of wetness in the desert, we really got fascinated by how there's wetness in processes like the printmaking, the block printing, but it could just become a way to play with some of these photo works that we've done and to start talking about wetness which is not only above the horizon or below the horizon, but transcends the two and starts to give you different qualities. So these are just some studies actually which were done on the table we are sitting on, just, you know, two other images, but I think in the process of making, you know, you start to, almost draw out this wetness from these sheets. And I think for us, you know, you know, we don't start with an idea that this is the way we're going to represent this. There's a lot of trial and error. And some ways this language has started to find some kind of, you know, place in this model of work that we are actually been producing. Next. So, you know, we think this is part of a larger project on which we call emotional brain that engages different parts of the subcontinent. And there again, we're asking the question, do we live on another surface or do we inhabit a portion of wetness? So here, what happened was, you know, once the British had defined a desert, you know, in this place as a desert, they were then burdened by having to explain how millions of people lived in this abnormal place. So they have been looking at these people with some sense of pity, you know, but also some in, you know, wonder, you know, as to how they survive. But one of the ways in which they survive is the Oran. And the Oran has been, you know, sort of explained as an oasis. But it is so far from an oasis. An oasis is something that is clearly divided, seen in plan as a spot, as a spot in a desert of sand. So you can, you literally, you know, almost convert from dryness to wetness. It's a very classic earth surface reading. But the Oran is something else. You know, you, it is on a gradient, you know, between clouds and aquifers. You enter and wetness comes toward you, thickens around you, and as you exit, it leaves you. So just to take you through what, you know, this is a photo work that we put together of an Oran, or what people there call an Oran. Yeah, at times there are bodies which gather, you know, even in the dry season, they have what looks like water. But even the just plants and everything is holding a lot of wetness here. This is a place where, where you can only, you're allowed, the community allows you to forage, but not to extract, not to grow, not to cultivate anything, you know. So you can, you can, you can take your animals and plants there, but this is the way this, this, this Oran lives between clouds and aquifers. And there is a silent, kind of silent stewardship that happens in this, because you know, the rest of Rajasthan or the Tharvi were traveling, it's just overtaken by Prosipus dulephora, which is the Mesquite, which is sort of invasive. And you find that only in the Orans, they are not present. So obviously people are sort of maintaining it, even though it looks, you know, to our eye, if we hadn't gone with somebody who had the eye to show us that this is an Oran, we would have driven right past and not even, you know, noticed that there was something different here. So there are two tendencies when you engage landscapes like this. On the one hand, you move towards singling out things, you know, singling out things, separating them, you know, trying to understand them the way we understand landscapes. And on the other hand, you engage this witness, you know, and so we call these two directions, one toward India and the other one toward Sindhu as two, you know, movements that are possible actually in design. And yeah, I'm going to do a quick one for this also, because we may have to even ask, it's almost fine. But anyway, you have to hear about the Luni, because Luni is just this fascinating place in the Thar. And looking at this image, I mean, Luni itself has a couple of meanings. It's a salt. It means salt, but it also means a kind of a Hadi in, you know, in another interpretation. But for most of the year, you know, you'll find goat herders, you'll find salt, you'll find activations happening, even fares. And so for us, the question was that only there are, I guess, three months when rain comes, and again, it's very sometimes scattered rain, sometimes it's a flash flood, but it has actually water in it. And we still find that the only anchor that the initial surveyors found in this landscape in their surveys was the Luni, because they were looking for a river. They were also looking for a flow or something they could fix. And just looking at that image, you know, it's not something you can really fix. So some of these drawings come from James Todd, who has written something called the Antiquities and Annals of Rajasthan, which has a lot of cultural descriptions with all of drawings of Rajasthan actually in this. But we'll just take you through our sort of, this whole idea of source, the fact that there is a place where it begins, it's almost sort of mythological. But as you go through the dials are working on it, you know, the Siberian cranes come, there are fares that happen in a particular town called Tirvara, where horses are being brought and sold and cattle are being brought. You can see in some of these extractions, you can see all the sort of agents and characters. There's also whole practice of making salt, which you see in that pit, also the cycle of all these sort of traverses and crossings that happen here. Gali, I mean, this very quickly, when Mark Twain visited India, after he had dealt with the Mississippi, he traveled to India in the 1890s and he described, you know, the city of Anasi, but we seen as any city in India as a gate that basically cracks and the cracks pass the streets. Those streets are called gullies. The gully is the English understanding of the gully, you know, as a rain, as something that was created by rain erosion and the streets were seen as this appropriate sort of, you know, natural configuration rather than a rational configuration of a native town. So the gully that we saw is a remarkable place. I mean, this is a place where multiple activities happen simultaneously and they negotiate with one another. So it's not like each has a territory, each has a time. It's not like that at all. Over here what happens is that each one creates their own place as a bird. But most of all, the gully is a place of water. It's a place that gathers water from the high grounds of Rajasthan. This is basically Jodhpur, from high grounds to low grounds where they catch. But they're actually taking out water that creeps out of rocks, water that seeps out of the earth and into the air. So it really captures the moment of madness. This is our studio, at least what we've been able to do in COVID-19. Let's say this is our home studio. I mean, we sort of emptied out a room and my colleagues in the finance were generous enough to get me screens. And every time we need to expose some, we sort of drop it outside the door and pick up the exposed screens. So it's amazing to be able to do this work at this time. And there's a very much work in progress as you saw the moment of our sense. The third length to be able to draw attention to... Let me just talk for a second. So I know that we are... This is probably the time you had wanted to end it. Do you want... Would you give us another 15 minutes or is that too much? Keep going. Keep going? Okay, thank you. So the third length to be able to draw attention to is the coastline. So we've been with the river banks, in a sense. So the coastline is a human articulation. The line of settlement and civilization as a second articulation that has marginalized whole populations who inhabit places that we consider to be abnormal. And the third now is the line between land and sea. And with that act of separation, we have created the sea as something outside of us. So we are basically land designers, as it were, that treat the sea as a place... The sea and rain we treat as outsiders. I mean, many of you have heard us talk about the Mumbai project quite often. So we just picked up a few slides to sort of connect the idea of how that body of work really fits in with this trajectory or how we've been rethinking it and reworking each one in order to start thinking about wetness everywhere. So it's interesting that the coast, when you look at the coast and when people talk about estuaries, which the west coast of India, which you're seeing a line drawing on your left, and the other drawings which were done early by navigators and the Pozolan chart, which have a different quality. But when you think of the estuary, we tend to think about it as a meeting of a river and the sea and that there is time for that to meet. What we find that actually when you look at the west coast of India because there is a sharp escarpment over there, when rain falls, it is so fast, it's coming down so fast that while there are streams, they kind of lose their place. And so in some ways the whole west coast becomes an estuary because it's almost one would say that the rainwater doesn't have time to find the streams that it needs to use. So for us that these drawings also were important because you're looking at the drawing on the left, on the Pozolan chart, we felt that there was a much more porosity, openness in the way these surfaces were looked at, coming down to becoming a really hard line of the coast, to this map, which is the brown map, which is by McLeer who kind of talks about this particular line. And for us, it's not any line. I mean, this line is such a powerful line between land and sea. And to turn it into section, it's not that we were forgetting that it was this, we're actually starting to open it up to a completely new reading. And in this sort of at a different scale, while we're talking about the scale of the whole coast, you look at the scale of Mumbai and Mumbai Island, the same kind of sort of capturing of it as land. And so Mumbai Island from being this much more porous, open a kind of terrain, a terrain which has wetness seeping through it above it and below it has really become this flat disc or this flat territory which keeps growing. And for us, this was really the important part, to sort of move away from this image of Mumbai as this flat land wasting to start opening up the estuary. So by an estuary, we mean a place between land and sea, that negotiates the ocean as well. Whereas land is something that you think of as its brain to the sea. So Mumbai, the island city, which is really a colonial construction, really sees the monsoon and the sea as outsiders, the monsoon as a visitor and the sea as basically an outsider. So what we did was we said, why can't we think about Mumbai as an estuary? And so for us, it's important not just to actually see this as something for the future. We also see it as a reworking of the past. And we say that when you have Bombay Island, it's very much on British terms. So you have a fort as the origin of settlement, et cetera. Whereas when you look at Mumbai as an estuary, you see actually that people over there lived in coconut groves and they were the first places of habitation. So you get a completely different history and you get a completely different post-colonial politics, if you will. So here you have, it sort of stretches into land uses as well. The Bombay Island is divided further into smaller islands. And this is really land use thinking of the plunder. So islands within islands, within islands, and that's the way they design Bombay. So this is a very classical approach to urban design on the one hand. And this side, when you talk about Mumbai as an estuary, you have practices. And these practices sort of evolve in time, but they also engage in time. And so there's a, whether it is water, whether it is a game of cricket, or whether it is pulling up of a boat, fisherman's world, I mean, they're all practices of a kind. So it demands a completely different kind of an engagement of place. So here is just one demonstration project of what it means to think through practices, to think through estuarine sort of theory, rather than to think through designing an island. And so we devised ways, you know, thinking sectionally, working with practices in time is what you see in this work here. So they're all working with some element of the estuary between land and sea rather than working only on a Bombay. Yeah, and I think as many of you know, I mean, it is a book, but it was also an exhibition, and it's first opened as an exhibition or simultaneously. You know, we wanted to say a word about the Sundar Bhanswanti in comparison to Mississippi, but also because we were just invited yesterday to be a part of the think tank, to rethink the embankments of the Sundar Bhanswanti after the hurricane or typhoon yas that has destroyed quite a lot of the Sundar Bhanswanti. I mean, this is a subject that we did in the studio a few years ago when we did Alcatra. Gita and Keith will remember that. So here we have, you know, the possibility of reading the Sundar Bhanswanti. Sundar Bhanswanti is called the biggest, you know, the biggest estuary. One of the biggest estuaries is like the actual layer, but in larger than the actual layer. People see it as the mouth of the river, and when they see it as the mouth of the river, they see it as a delta, as a delta situation. We don't see it as a delta, you know, because a delta is something that is defined by the river. But if you see it as an estuary, then we're acknowledging rain and sea. So the estuary is between rain and sea, between the Mansoons and the Bay of Bengal. You know, so for us, these are two vastly different places. One is really an ocean of wetness. The other one is a river system. But when you have a river system, this is what you have. So you have the maps that evolve into defining channels and defining islands, and people live on these islands behind embankments that you see over here. They're clay embankments, and they are created a bowl, and this is again a repeat of New Orleans, except that these are made of mud, you know, and so they don't last. I mean, these are people who are gone, really. And the, you know, there are engineers over there with World Bank Funding trying to turn these into concrete embankments, concrete embankments, you know, and so you can imagine the disaster that is about to unfold in this particular place. You know, and in the drawing on the left side, you see actually how these so-called, once they've defined islands, they have then separated them from mangrove forests that are so open actually to the ocean, you know, and very much estuarine plants versus the settlement that is defined by rivers. So we said, what would it be to inhabit an estuarine system, you know, where you put together a different set of maps that gave us clues that this is an estuarine and not a delta situation, where the sea has much more of a presence than the so-called river. So it's between rain and sea, and here people live on high grounds, on high between high and low grounds rather than, you know, in islands behind embankments. So I won't spend too much time over there, but we'll move on to Norfolk as our last, you know, very quickly we'll just skim through this, but this is where we sort of used the Indian mounds as a strategy for raising ground against the sea, but that would be more welcoming of the sea. Also, in terms of the Sundarbans, you know, I just want to add one thing that, you know, what these colleagues were asking was, can we design different kind of levees? And we wrote back saying that that debate has been happening among landscape architects and architects for a very long time, and to some extent that's not what we are talking about. We're not talking about, you know, levees with functions or nature-based levees. I think the whole idea of levees has to be questioned, and there are other configurations by which in time we can actually do that more easily in Bangladesh than maybe in Norfolk. And so we feel there's certain synergy that goes between these projects or observations that we just wanted to share. And so what you're seeing here is, you know, the whole difference between seeing the coastline as a firm line by which you actually barricade it or you move from it. So even retreat is seen as a, or on the other side, you know, is it an open line which is working in the other direction? Like, you know, the ships, the fish, the, you know, all the other aquatic animals all move east-west. They don't move north-south. And yeah. And so it works much more with the gradient of rain. So yeah, this is what, you know, so there is one image of the coast which could reverberate. The other which completely changes the axis. And we feel it is almost necessary to start looking at this other direction, which is not so absurd when you actually look at even what was happening in the Chesapeake. I mean, when you look at it at different scales, you'll see that almost practically there, there are these sorts of, you know, valleys and ridges and rills and streams. And so there is actually a whole system of ridges, you know, what we call high grounds and low grounds that is kind of prevalent there. And rather than seeing it only as a shape as a black and white, if we could start to look in Norfolk today at potential situations and, you know, we're not only looking for the natural ridges. It could be there are actually areas which they're geologically like that. There's infrastructure like roads, there are other. And what we're really calling these were fingers of high ground and with associated low grounds. And if we sort of thought about converting these places rather than a levee sort of surrounding us by working with, you know, sort of high ground and low grounds and a high ground can become a low ground as it meets the sea or it could be next to the high ground. So there are many ways we could start imagining it. But the fact that, you know, and this is actually what you're seeing on your left that red outline is Norfolk. And we were just doing some sketches, literally, which opened up the efficacy of the idea. And, you know, the top you're seeing a system of multiple levees because this, you know, it's a complex rigged system. One levee was not going to save Norfolk. And so there would have to be many. And of course the biggest one here is around the naval, the Navy. And what you're seeing at the bottom is an incremental approach to starting to build up on ridges, starting to build up on post industrial sites, existing highways. So it's not only the natural features. It's also constructed features. It's not to give us a different kind of fabric on which settlement can start to happen. And in order to demonstrate that quite precisely, you know, those are just diagrams. We took several sites and we just give you a glimpse of one. And this is Lambert's point, which is a, you know, cold port right now where there is cold coming from China and brought in. And just to demonstrate how in an area which does get inundated, but is already a slight ridge and is a post industrial site that is going to be transformed. Can we insert a fingers of high ground project in a place like this? And, you know, it works on many scales and holdings. Next. You know, so even, you know, it's not difficult to orient you quickly, but this is by on the left, images by right, by Elizabeth River as it meets the ocean, as it meets high ground. And there is a need there for cleansing the, you know, the gray waters from the city. And there is a plant over there. How that can become part of the system. The park, which brings in wetness, which was earlier used to be a creek, which has been buried through this whole ridge, which is a place of actually holding rain for a while before it is allowed to flow. And so it seems counterintuitive to have a ridge and to hold rain underneath it. But he felt that that is what the need of the R really is because there's nowhere for rainwater to go right now, especially if you build levees. So people are more afraid of back off backed up rain. And they're really afraid of actually the hurricane. And just to give a sense of the two, you know, the change is quite subtle actually, you know, in what you're seeing with the existing condition on your left. And what could be a possible condition that would, you know, withstand a fair degree of storm events. To explorations of how soil would be used and made. To just bring back the dialogue about systems which are collecting rain directly and systems that are working with the tide. And for us, this image itself is really what the design sort of program is all about. This is really again about the same between rain and rain and tide. So we call the project learning the coast. And we're really done, but I'm going to show you three images. It's an exhibition that is up right now in Germany. And it was curated by Bruno Latour. And, you know, it's, it'll come down, I think in July or August at some point. Yeah, just some. This is on the left. Yeah. And some of this work is online because there is a whole digital exhibition of it as well as a physical exhibition. So if you're interested, you can go through that. And we've even taken some of these ideas to, you know, a particular very interesting school in the Philadelphia area where they brought their grandmothers, parents and kids. And they all worked with the witness in the environment. And so that's the thought that we would leave you with. I mean, that is everywhere. What do we see it somewhere? You know, and do we need to see it somewhere? And does it open up a whole new possibilities for this design? If you begin to appreciate a critical, critical zone of witness as the, as the place is our place of, of habitation rather than the earth surface. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you for your patience. Thank you so much. Dilip and Anuranda. We are so overwhelmed. And we, in part, the comments I'm seeing in the chat are, we're overwhelmed with your drawings. And I think that everyone is hungry to, to learn your magic. I'm just going to ask a first question. It's perhaps just a, what's comes so strongly to my mind is that there's, there's a statement by Heraclitus. You can't step into the same river twice. But in many ways that's based on the, the stability of land and the separation of land and river. And so you're really basically asking Heraclitus to like, take a step back and say, sorry, sir, it's even worse than you thought. There is no stability and stability is, is very much a social construct. And I think that's why that's what comes across in your drawings is that the flux of wetness as a, as a kind of, as a key principle and to catch that in representation is something that is, is quite, quite difficult task. And so I think everybody wants the websites or the links for your images, which is a great compliment, you know, just don't copying. David, can I make a request? Actually it would be great if people turned on their cameras. I mean, it's quite debilitating talking to a blank screen with no human expressions. Yeah. To start seeing some people. Thank you very much. Fair enough, fair enough. I mean, you're smiling at our jokes, you know, so anyway. So there, sorry, go ahead. There's a question that I think is relevant to this idea of the estuary. Someone asks, you know, with the climate emergency and the dramatic pace of change in, in borders of wetness, is there something that we need to do differently or something we need to do more of or less of, because this fluidity, if I may use that term between wet and dry is actually becoming more difficult to, to live with. I could just say the thing you can continue. I mean, if I understand the question correctly, I mean, with the way I mean, you said the fluidity between wet and dry. I mean, to some extent, what we're saying is that that is an artificial construct actually, that we live in gradients of wetness. And I think that maybe that's what you meant. And, and if we start to acknowledge it, and it's, it's, it's much more simple if you actually look around and think about your life, think about, you know, what you're touching. I mean, you know, I'm on this wooden table, which is a little more wet than the concrete floor, you know, like, I'm just, you know, it's all around us and how do we start to bring that sensibility, which can go to many other things, you know, between this is architecture and this is landscape. You know, this is a planning and this is a building, you know, we make these divides and I think we feel that it's not why I'm sort of struggling with the fluidity word is that it almost says a sense that there are already these categories and we are moving between them, rather that we actually work with a certain sensibility that accepts them as co-existing. If I can, if I can sort of extend that a little bit, I mean, I think that to think wetness is to, is to go beyond, you know, the conception of H2O, you know, we, the way we work with water, interestingly enough is, you know, through reservoirs, catchments, you know, things like that, you know, and I mean, even if I had to include rivers and lakes and stuff, but when you work with plants, for example, I mean, plants are, I mean, especially in a place like India, there's such a tremendous biomass shift with the coming of the monsoon. I mean, I'm convinced, I mean, and I've got facts to show it actually that the river in Varanasi, you know, 2000 years ago did not rise more than a foot or two. Today, the river rises 40 feet, 40 feet and with glacier melting, I mean, it's going to rise more and that is only because we have destroyed our holding systems. We have destroyed the forests across the Himalayas. We have destroyed our tanks, you know, and so you can imagine this shift in 2000 years. I mean, and this is mentioned to students the other day, the multiplicity of the small, our actions and our disasters have been created by the multiplicity of the small. So I think that the move to wetness also comes with an appreciation of materiality, a big shift perhaps in materiality and understanding actually that we can solve so many of our urgent problems by just cultivating something like plants and thinking about them as holding rather than thinking of them as only, you know, greening and shade providing and thinking of water as a separate from plants. So wetness also just expands the actors that we work with. Yes. Yes. It's a kind of different language perhaps that we need to learn. One student, something very timely is, you know, we cannot at this time travel and we do not know what the future will hold other than more pandemics. And so how does one engage a site in the ways you have in a world of new restrictions on movement, whether we like them or not or whether we are allowed to interpret them or not. There really is no substitute for being in place. I mean, I just keep thinking of some of the trips that we have made like last year to the Rift Valley and then before that to Pune and I mean, the kinds of things that we see, the complexity of being there and of actually negotiating, even the simple crossing of a road, I think there is no substitute anywhere for experiences like that. Certainly. But having said that, having said that, you know, we have to go for the next best in the situation that we are in. And we are doing that to some extent with, you know, of course, we are right now working a lot on stuff that we have gathered like three, four, five years ago. But Anu, you have done studios where you haven't gone to places. You know, I was just thinking about that and, you know, and done them both ways. Like, you know, when I used to take elective studios at Penn a while back, there was no funding. I mean, we had no funding and, you know, especially to go to India seemed like impossible, you know, like we did a studio and I remember there was one year in which, I mean, there were two things happened. One year, I think we just finished Deccan traverses and I mean, Dilip and I had a lot of documentation and a lot of activity about that landscape. So at some point I was forced to do the studio without being able to take the students there. And I think what we did was we changed the way we look at the material we gather. I mean, to some extent going to site is very easy. You go to site, you identify a place, you bring it back. When you can't literally go to site, you have to work analogically a lot also. You know, literally, you know, people can give you maps and things like that, but you have to sometimes work analogically in the sense that I remember you know, students started to build collective models started, we started to do a whole series of works that gave them different sensibilities. And so, and sometimes if it's done well, I mean, I'm sort of rambling on here. It can be more productive also. And I mean, my own experience is that, you know, again decades ago, I was doing a thesis studio, my final thesis studio on DACA. And there was political unrest and I couldn't go. You know, there was just, and I just had one map which somebody gave me and, you know, things I had read about it, things Khan had written about DACA. And with a very simple set of tools, I started to build things in the studio. You know, started to build with bamboo, which I found, you know, so there was some analogous way of working. But of course, I am from India and I have spent a lot of time on it. So there is already a certain connection. I feel that if there is no connection, it's, you know, you can do a studio, but you don't know who you're doing it for. But I felt that there was ways of working that are more material than sitting on the computer. So I guess what I'm saying is the knee jerk reaction is that we can get everything digitally. We can at least get the maps today. We can go research. I just feel one has to push back against that a little bit. And that's the other pieces of work. So I mean, it does happen in life. So it's happening to everybody collectively right now. That's the difference. Yes. Our sense of mobility is being challenged. And many groups in the world have always had limits to their mobility. So in some ways, the concept of the border is exerting itself in all the problematic ways that it can. Also, which encourages us to adapt a language of ambiguity that goes against systems of property and systems of surveying and systems of capital, which require precise boundaries. I mean, think of the description, English descriptions of property. You know, walk forward, you steps this way, you know, turn three meters that way to, because always the property line, the line is always a restrictive device of the powerful. And so I can see how some of this work might come up against some political questions when you're challenging boundaries, which is even in the U.S. where, you know, there's different agencies with power over, over how things get done with, with levies, with property, with businesses. That's all these things put into question. And especially when you have communities who are in the way, as it were, of certain borders and certain changes in borders. Just one thing, David. You know, you sort of reminded me of one thing when you said ambiguity. I think that there's a real working now just because of the complexity of these places. Even when we are there, we encourage students to think about possibilities rather than to think of a solution, you know, as such, but to think of possibilities. So to seed change and allow that seeds to grow and transform. What this is doing, what the pandemic is doing, and I think that there's a way of working now just because of the complexity of what this is doing, what the pandemic is doing, and our inability to go there, I think is encouraging us to think more in terms of possibilities than, you know, that one kind of solution. So, so it is in that sense, a good thing, you know, that sort of allows us to sort of receive from there and work with a larger palette without any conclusive, you know, sort of kind of direction. Yeah. There is a question in the chat about which are the extents from this, which about, you know, photographic data, you know, a lot of our work depends on photographic data, which seems essentially what we do, but with the current global situation, many of us, having a connection rather than, you know, it, the way I would look at it, it so happens that we have used photography or deployed photography as a way of our starting point in many of these places. And sometimes it's not even been that we have done a lot of archival research before we went to the place. It may look linear in the terms of the way we present it. And I just feel that it shouldn't be debilitating because there are other ways of starting to see and draw from the kind of documents and research you can do. And it may give you a lens, because, you know, sometimes when people go to site and they're just taking photographs. And you know, in fact, even when we were together in Vietnam, yeah, I mean, it was very interesting to tell students how to take photographs, like in the sense that you have an idea, like, is there a certain lens through which lens literally by which you're starting to record certain things and not record anything else. So for us, photography became like, you know, it started with the kind of walking, you know, we were walking. And I think in our earliest work, Deccan traverses photography wasn't even that important. We hadn't even used it as extensively. So we've found other ways of drawing and making. And I think there's such a wide range of possibilities that I just feel that nobody should feel that you can't do something. You just have to do something equally powerful. You have to say that what is at hand and what can you use as a starting point of of your research becomes a question. That leads into a different students question, which is related to the idea of how we can change existing infrastructures and how do you approach existing systems, which are probably the bigger problem than the, any new infrastructures we have to revise some, so many other things. I mean, to some extent we are addressing the existing infrastructure. I mean, that's where all these projects start actually is because of the conditions that have been, that have arisen because of the way we have built certain infrastructures and the attitude. So I don't know. Yeah, I mean, even the, I mean, it's not easy for, if you're not familiar or have had time to look at the Mumbai book carefully that all those projects sit very squarely on existing conditions and infrastructures. And I'm not sure I got the question. The thing that you, you know, isn't it harder to address existing infrastructures than new things you're proposing? Yeah. I mean, if I can, then, I mean, I thought I got that. Yes. You know, the, I think the challenges that if you are operating at the level that we're suggesting that we operate so that we, you know, we're talking about a different paradigm of habitation. We have to design with a sense of transition. So even in a place like Norfolk, for example, where we are encouraging the shift from, from levy systems or sea walls and, you know, and containment systems to fingers of high ground, we are constructing a transition, you know, between them. So we are, if we construct high ground, it will operate in the near future as a levy system, but then move toward a finger of high ground, you know, and so on. So that way, I mean, for me, to some extent, that is where design intelligence lies, that, that we construct the basis of a shift in, in, in infrastructure from what is taken for granted today to a new infrastructure. So even in Varanasi, a number of student projects, you know, we worked with flow systems, with flow systems, but flow systems that then became holding systems, you know, so over time. And, and, and that was key actually to the student, to student projects. So we're working with one kind of infrastructure, but converting it to another infrastructure in the, in the, in the long term. So it's not that we're ignoring the current situation. On the contrary, we're taking it as a point of departure. So no, we are not being idealists at all. You know, it's just that what we believe is, it should be, you know, taken very seriously is that we need to question the surface and to question our water bodies that we consider to, to exist on a surface. That is what we need to, need to question and, and, you know, and then we need to transition. Someone else asks, I'll just read this. What is the best way to model the integration between land and water systems? It goes on to say that representing the reality affects the way you find ways forward. I think that's both a question and a comment. Okay. I'll take a short of that. You know, you know, it's a, it's a very interesting question at a number of levels, but I'll just take the issue of representation first. You know, representation already acknowledges the designer as an outsider. That we are representing to ourselves or we're representing to someone else. So it becomes a medium of translation between place and, and the drawing board, if you will. And then from there on to the politics of the project, et cetera, et cetera, you know, so representation, especially in a post-colonial situation like, like India, but I would think that even over here, you know, with the Native Americans, that their voice never quite appears. I mean, this is where I would, I would, you know, embrace Gayatri Spivak's observation that the subaltern cannot speak, you know, and it's only because we cannot hear, you know, because of our colonized, we are steeped in a colonial, a colonial mindset. So when we say that when we try to represent the Indian mounds as a rise and fall, as opposed to a river system, as to inhabiting a river system, we are definitely challenged representationally, but more importantly, and this is where we are, we are, and where we are today, we are trying to move away from representation as an act, and we are moving closer to demonstration. So the final, the drawings that you see with ocean awareness is, is, is an act of demonstrating the Indian mounds as a rise and fall, demonstrating, of demonstrating wetness rather than trying to represent wetness, we are demonstrating through the use of paper and, and a stain, for example, of how a practice might be perceived in the ground. So a holding system could be seen as a staining system. So there is now a gap. So we're not representing and we don't acknowledge that because that is, that is a way of power, you know, when we represent an other. So instead of that, we, we are moving to demonstration and, and analogy. So A is to be as C is to be. I mean, we will discuss this in studio at some point, but, but you will, I mean, if you, if you understand that aspect of, of our acknowledgement of representation being problematic in itself, you know, sort of removes us from this, from this urge of trying to, of trying to, you know, represent another system, you know, and, and so the speculation is totally ours, you know, and that's the way, and that's the way we, so we admit that we are political actors in the field, you know, rather than to say that we are, you know, working a politics out there. I mean, last year's studio was also fantastic in the Rift Valley because we encourage students to inhabit the Rift Valley. We also encourage students to inhabit the Rift as opposed to, as opposed to bring two sides of a Rift together, you know, and you take a third position. So to inhabit the Rift is to acknowledge your own politics in this thing. So when we demonstrate, we put our demonstrations out there and we encourage others to demonstrate the same and not to represent anybody else. Thank you. The challenge to representation is a line of, of approach to what we all do all day, which is to draw. At the same time, I really appreciate the idea of demonstrating to show what, rather than to discuss as it were. I think we need to wrap up now. And unless Kate, you have any thoughts you want to add? Thank you so much. And it's sort of overwhelming gratitude in the chat. I hope you can see that. And I just appreciate everybody joining today. And we'll close now with a bit of applause. Thank you so much, Dilip and Anu for joining us. And I want to thank everyone from wherever you are for being with us today. And you can continue. If you have other questions, you can basically email me. And I will pass them along. And we're so glad that we've had so many people on today. It's really thrilling. And we will see you next week. Have a good day, everyone.