 Hello everyone, my name is Leslie Quo, Associate Director of Development and Alumni Relations at GSAP. It is my pleasure to welcome you tonight to hear about this year's incubator prize projects on climate health and cities. Here to introduce the program is Professor David Benjamin. David is the founding principal of the Living on New York Bay studio that combines research and practice exploring new ideas and technologies through prototyping. David is a faculty member at GSAP and a graduate of the MR program. All of these factors have contributed to his success directing the GSAP incubator since the program was initially founded as a co-working space. David, thank you for joining us tonight. Hi Leslie, thanks for kicking us off and thank you to everyone for being here, both the presenters and the audience. So I just want to offer some very brief context before we launch into the presentations from our incredible array of prize winners this year. So just as Leslie mentioned, the incubator has been going on for a couple of years. In 2015, GSAP created the GSAP incubator to support alumni who are developing new ideas and projects about architecture, contemporary culture, and the future of the city. And for four years, the incubator was a co-working space at the New Museum's New Inc in Lower Manhattan. Two of the main ideas of this initiative were first to create a kind of productive gray zone between school and the profession, and second to support expanded modes of practice. So the physical space at 231 Bowery created a pretty unique intersection of an educational institution, Columbia, a cultural institution, the New Museum, and a neighborhood that was overflowing with creativity, arts, and culture. And it blended a professional setting and a culture of entrepreneurship, on the one hand, with the communal creative energy and rigorous discourse of GSAP that students experienced during their time at the university. During the first four years of the GSAP incubator, we hosted 131 members working on 59 different projects coming from all of GSAP's different degree programs, alumni from all these different programs. And the member groups developed a wide range of really interesting and cutting-edge projects involving things like virtual reality and digital technology, also critical discourse and publishing, as well as civic issues and public spaces, urban regeneration, emergency response, and beyond. Then in 2019, we transformed the GSAP incubator as a physical space into the GSAP incubator prize in order to offer direct financial support to selected recent alumni, both domestic and international. So transforming from a physical space to direct financial support as a prize. But the ideas were still roughly the same. We wanted to support projects led by GSAP alumni that would bridge critical discourse with active practice and engagement. And we also want to support the idea of engaging the challenges and opportunities that are facing the built environment today. The prize encourages a wide range of experiments while focusing on a very specific topic of inquiry each year. So in 2019, the first year, the school awarded six alumni prizes of $10,000 each to advance projects dedicated to the theme of climate change at the building scale. And the project spanned a range of approaches to tackling urgent environmental issues from material explorations to novel agricultural systems to resilient coastlines. Then in 2020, this year's cycle, the prize was dedicated to the topic of climate, health, and cities. And GSAP awarded 16 alumni prizes to support projects spanning from critical discourse to research to active practice in architecture and its related fields. And of course, you'll hear more about these projects in a few minutes. That's the main purpose of the event. The last thing I'll mention, though, is that for 2021, for our upcoming cycle of the GSAP incubator prize, 10 prizes will be granted to projects that advance racial equity in the built environment as outlined by the GSAP anti-racism action plan. Special consideration will be given to proposals serving Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities in particular projects that engage communities in Harlem. So if you want more information about that, you can see the call for proposals online at the GSAP website. And with that, I will pass it back to Leslie. Thank you again for being there. Thank you, David. So tonight, we have nine projects to hear from, some of them single presenters and some of them double presenters, but we will be splitting up the nine projects in groups of three by theme. The first theme will be focusing on hidden infrastructures affecting health and well-being. And the first presenter will be Meijer. The name of her project is Urban Micro-Environments. Meijer, I think we might be seeing, there we go. Great. Perfect. So hello, everybody. I'm very happy to be back in GSAP, even if it's a little bit. I'm very excited, actually, to having awarded the incubator prize and be part of the event today. So I'm an architect and also, since very recently, assistant professor at UCL1 in Belgium. And the project that I'll be presenting today, as Leslie mentioned, is called Urban Micro-Environments. And it's a work that I've been developing in the last few months, like nearly to a year, that has started from a collaboration with Professor Ligusev from Princeton University and a student in SHU. So my research focuses on, just a second, focuses on the study of the urban environment, reacting in a way to the challenging urban health conditions that many cities are facing today. So starting from air quality to microclimate issues related, for example, to the urban heat island effect. But while we very often hear about the insoluble conditions in cities, rarely we talk about the special temporal gradients, the environmental special temporal gradients that characterize the urban environment. And this is something that maybe we have learned more about in the last, you know, one year and a half or during the pandemic, when we've seen very many news related to how unevenly, you know, the death peaks have been distributed across cities, very often related to also pollutant concentration levels in cities or the socio-demographic socio-economic parameters. Also through recent advancements in remote and direct sensing technologies, we have learned that environmental inequity is present in cities that within a block resolution, there can be a very large environmental gradient. And so in this context, the research kind of evolves with some kind of big or high level questions and ambitions that I wanted to address. The first one being what are the urban design, urban socio-demographic and building usage metrics that modulate urban environmental gradients. So what do we do in the design of the city to make these gradients happen? And how can we as designers become active in the study of urban environmental phenomena and the strategies to improve urban health? So the methodology for the research has been a data-driven methodology. The first part has been the compilation of data, data coming from two cities. In this case, I'll be presenting today, even though I'm looking into other cities as well, but so far I have been able to compile these data sets. So data sets coming from socio-economic sources, urban design data sets, building usage data sets, and of course environmental data. I'll be presenting earth temperature, air quality, land surface temperature, agricultural community results related to these data sets. Then the data formatting steps are very important. Because I'll be, I have been looking into data sets that come from cities and science initiatives as well. And so for this type of data set, it's very important how you develop the data cleaning process. So after kind of the data formatting and compilation, of course, the data analysis part was developed. And the data analysis part initially, multivariate regression analysis was developed using environmental data as dependent variables and the remaining urban data sets as the independent variables to understand what were the correlations. And then also use those, you know, initial data sets that were considered useful for the development of a predictive model, for the training of a predictive model. And then applying that to some urban scenarios that I'll be showing in a little bit in this case for New York City and LA and showing some visualizations of some areas of the city, which I hope that will trigger a discussion here today. As I mentioned, I'm also looking into other cities. I'm looking into London and Seoul. And the way I'm choosing cities is not really because I'm interested in New York and these other cities. But the reason is that there is a data availability for these cities. So high, especially for environmental data was sought. So I have listed like very many data sets. I'll be pasting in a little bit in the chat a link to a story map where if somebody is interested in looking into the data, can go through and look there. We'll be containing these slides or these images and a little bit more information. But the two data sets that I wanted to highlight today are the ones related to our quality and microclimates. So to the left, we're looking at the New York City Community Air Survey. So this is a quite comprehensive sensing network in the city of New York that is collecting air quality and temperature data. This is a municipal project. And to the right, we are looking at the Citizen Science Projects, the Peripheral Air Stations distributed across LA. This is a picture I just took of the website this morning. So these are data sets that give us some location specific environmental data. So PM concentration, for example, temperature and relative humidity. And then we can use these locations to look into the urban environment around them and see whether there are correlations between the urban parameters that are contained within a boundary around these locations that we have data for and see whether these kind of parameters may be driving those concentration values either for temperature or for air contaminants. So this is what the initial methodology has been, which I call a footprint-based regression analysis. Basically, to the left, we see these footprints distributed in some of the stations in New York. And to the right, we see the same in LA. And I did that for different footprints. So going from very little to over three kilometers footprints to see where the correlations were happening at different footprints. I'm not going to get into these details now. If again, somebody's interested can go back to the story map I'll be pasting. But through this analysis, what we get are the correlations between the different study parameters here. I'm just highlighting some of them. So on the left plot, we see the New York correlation of some of the study parameters again in the middle for Los Angeles. And on the right-hand side here, we see a correlation with air quality as a dependent variable of some highlighted parameters that I thought would be interesting to highlight. So in general, both for New York and Los Angeles, we see that significant correlations, positive correlations are between air quality and temperature and building related parameters that is building height, building volume, building area. And also significant over 0.6 or around 0.6 minus 0.6 correlations against the greenery, three counts, NDVI index. And on the right-hand side, what I show is a little bit what I'm describing. So this is again correlation in the y-axis with air quality for building in the first two bars with greenery, followed in the second group, third group income, and fourth group population, New York being the green color and LA being the blue. And we can see that similar trends are observed in terms of the correlation between building volume, height, floor plate area, and air quality for LA and New York. Same for greenery, similar trends for population, even if there is a difference there. But for income, there is a quite substantial difference. For LA, there's a high correlation between income and a negative high correlation between income and air quality. And this is not the case for New York. Of course, we always have to kind of add the disclaimer that this is based on the training data we're using. And of course, if we change the training data, things may vary a little bit, but this is so far with quite a dense station network, what we are observing. And finally, for this kind of plots, Instagram distribution plots here to understand kind of the variation in the parameters, some of the variation in the parameters that I think are interesting to see. We are looking at population, the top left income on the top right roads and PM 2.5 below. I wanted to highlight at least the population one. We know that New York City is denser than LA. That's not a discovery. Again, we are looking at New York City in green and LA blue. And the vertical rates are the mean and the median. But I'm identifying here two possible ranges. And I explain why this is important for the next step. Like for New York, I'll be considering that over 5,000 people within a 250-meter footprint will be like a high density for the New York standards, while for LA over 1,000 people within the same 250 footprint will be considered high density. And the reason why I'm mentioning that is because probably all of us have heard many times that density is always highly correlated with contaminant, higher pollution levels. And this is generally the case for both cities. Most of the highest 10% concentration levels are observed in these high dense environments. Not always, but generally that's the case. But here where I'm marking with the circles, so you see the stations colored by based on the PM concentration value. And then with the white circles, I'm marking the high density points in the city. And with the crosses over the white circles, there are marking the stations that we have data for that are high density, but that however have below mean a PM concentration level. So unacceptable PM concentration level, let's say. And if we look at zooming of some of those locations, like you can see to the right-hand side, we observe that these environments while being dense, so over 5,000 people within this footprint I mentioned, they have a reasonable PM concentration, so not a high PM concentration for the city. And that's generally the case because they have a high greenery fraction. And because very often times the fabric is more diverse, both in heights and in the distribution enabling this kind of ventilation of the city to happen. So these are only some of the examples where that is the case. For LA the fabric characteristics are a little bit more difficult to distinguish, but the greenery certainly something that repeats for the case where the contaminant concentrations are low despite the density. So here in these plots, what I did is select some of the locations for New York City, and now I'm going to follow with LA. So the left top one located in the Bronx and the left bottom one located in Brooklyn are two locations that are low dense, talking about population, so below 3,000 where footprint again. However, they are amongst the highest highly polluted locations based on the NYCCAS database. And here you can see how these are locations with very low NDVI, high land surface temperature, and you can also have a look at their socioeconomic and health metrics. To the right hand side on the other hand, we are looking at high density locations on the right top, that's Chinatown, that it's a dense environment as you know, a typical scenario where the fabric is quite homogeneous, where there is a high density, low green fraction, and where the temperature and LSD is quite high, and the contaminant concentrations also are high. And the exception will be one of those processes that I was marking in the previous slides is this one located nearby Rockefeller University on the bottom right, that shows the highest population density of all instances over 8,000 people. However, it has a very high green fraction and also it's not very far from the water body that is enabling those levels to decrease. Similar plots for LA, for the case of LA, all of the highly polluted locations are over 1,000 in population. So here what I'm showing is three instances that are the worst in terms of or amongst the 10 worst in terms of PM concentration, which are the top left, the in Korea town, then in South LA and in the city, all with quite high LSD. And then we see a big drop in PM concentrations when we go to urban environments where there is a higher greenery fraction like the one we see in Hollywood Hills on the bottom right. After doing this kind of hotspot analysis, I started developing a trajectory analysis of these two locations, like the model was, I developed the model and then the model was trained. So this was an opportunity to test the model in two different scenarios. Of course, there was one model, two models per sea. And the one in New York we see on the left hand side, this is a fraction of Broadway. So I'm using Broadway from the beginning to the end on the right hand side, we see a fraction of Sunset. So we have Broadway Avenue and Sunset Boulevard to the right hand side. And in the same way as with the with the air quality stations that I mentioned, the footprint based analysis was done. So every 250 meters, a footprint calculation is done of all the one parameters. And then those are used as predictors for the model to obtain the environmental data on air quality and microclimate. So here we see some of the results and some of the parameters studied for Broadway. And same for Sunset, we can see that there are quite strong gradients. That's the reason why also these two trajectories were chosen, quite strong socioeconomic gradients, urban design gradients, and of course environmental gradients as well. And there is also this kind of echo of Fushka's work on the Sunset Strip, that now we in collaboration with also an alumni from from GESAP, Diana Bogosian, were developing into a more kind of elevation type of visualization of the environmental conditions that I modeled that I just described in the previous slides. So I think I'm going to end up with this video. I have also another video for Sunset, but I can paste that in the chat because it's in the story map. And I think I'm already over my time. So if anybody wants to watch the Sunset one, you can watch it through the link. Thank you very much. Thank you, Myra. I just, for people who don't know you, Myra received her PhD or earned her PhD from the Institute of Technology and Architecture, ETH Zurich. So I think we are, we have a special treat today from benefiting from all the research that she's done. She also recently joined the faculty at the School of Architecture at Northeastern University in Boston. In addition, she has a, sorry, I keep looking over here at my other screen. In addition, she has a practice with her partner in London. So she is definitely sort of a global citizen and bringing all her expertise to us here. So thank you so much for taking this off today. And I'm sure we'll be able to touch upon the intersections between your presentations and the next two, which take shift gears intentionally just to make it more interesting to see how these different ways of investigation occur. We are going to hear from Eduardo now who graduated last year. The name of his project, sorry, I've lost my screen now. The name of his project is Country Sewers from the home to the town. Thank you, Eduardo. Okay. Oh, thank you, Leslie. I'm really glad to kind of be back and share with you guys some of the things that I've been looking at over the past few months. And so my project for this iteration of the Incubator Prize is very much a, I guess a continuation of some of the last year at GSAP and some of those ideas of how can we address issues outside of architecture, kind of with architecture. And in a nutshell, what I've been looking at are maybe ways and kind of models for addressing smaller towns that have failing sewer systems and what are ways we can kind of remedy those. And kind of like a lot of things, this project of mine started with YouTube, you know, big shout out to the algorithm. And I had come across a series of videos on a particular part of Alabama, it's Black Belt, which is in the south, that kind of all focused on this particular place, Union Town, that is sort of suffering from various, I guess, years of sort of neglect in where their systems that are meant to deal with treating sewage are kind of failing at the moment. And so I'd kind of gone through a lot of these videos and kind of picking up things to try and figure out maybe where to begin. And one thing sort of about what they have down there, rather than maybe what a lot of us are used to with machines and sort of chemicals that treat the stuff that we flush. Instead, they have sort of large lagoons and pools that then distribute that sewage out to sort of the grass and the land. But because of their soil makeup, it doesn't really allow for that. And so what in turn you get is sort of what's shown on the screen here, where a lot of the sewage that's sort of sprayed out ends up pulling up to the surface. And so now I'm just going to play a clip from one of the videos that had watched that kind of detail some of their troubles. We have had some serious issues with our sewage. And this has been going on for decades, decades. And that's never should have happened. The sewer pipes that are supposed to take everything from all the houses, they carry all of that material to a lagoon. The lagoon has three cells where basically the material is supposed to get treated along the way. And then once it passes its way through the lagoon, it gets pumped to what's called a spray field, which is exactly what it sounds like. Most of the time in a spray field, it's supposed to get absorbed back into the ground or evaporated into the air. In Union Town, the soil has so much clay in it that the water just doesn't percolate. Where you're supposed to have a field with grasses where the water is gently absorbed, basically you just have a pond. And that pond, every time it rains, is just completely inundated. The lagoon damn have burst. So I'll stop that there and kind of continue. But the older gentleman in the video is Benny and he's a member. He's a resident of Union Town and also a member of a community organization there. And kind of a big thing, I had a chance to speak with him. And with some of the research has been kind of, well, what are other solutions at the scale of the town to maybe address some of this? And a lot of what they're doing and what he's doing is kind of collecting those stories, collecting some of the work that they've been doing to advocate for themselves, to try and kind of shed light on their plight and try and get some, I guess, attention, but also real sort of solutions to what they're dealing with. And one of those sort of came across in 2018, where they received a large, large amount of money to kind of begin to take on, well, how could they fix their busted lagoons? And in the simplest terms, what they've come up with at the moment is to kind of just pipe their sewage from Union Town to another city in Alabama. And kind of a takeaway that I've had after speaking with Ben and looking at some of these bits of information on the project is sort of how difficult it is to get clear-cut sort of plans and know exactly what's going on. One of the sites that that can be found on is this department site in Alabama. It's kind of a record of a lot of permit documents, a lot of reports, and sort of correspondence on the kind of status of the project. This is kind of one of those things that they have, a just brief summary of kind of where the status of the project is. This is sort of an ongoing thing. And so it's kind of tough to find, to know exactly what is sort of happening here. And so in light of that, but also the kind of strange year that this has been, I've tried to kind of recalibrate the project a bit, to maybe step outside of Alabama, maybe look locally, or to just look at other places that are kind of going through similar issues. And where that sort of landing me is kind of closer to New York. There's a small town just across the Hudson Oakland in New Jersey that is also undergoing a sort of similar project to reroute their sewage from their sort of small town to another place that has the facilities to handle it. And then so, I don't know, I'm thinking that maybe the project is changing, sort of evolving from my initial idea of kind of making up some new solution to kind of connecting pieces between places. And then so on here are two maps that I had kind of made. On the left is one that I made to apply for the incubator prize. And on the right is a newer one of New Jersey, kind of just looking at the land cover, what kind of takes up each place. The kind of red parts are the sort of more populated places. The green parts are kind of the more rural, less developed areas. And then instead of along that, maybe what are some ways to look at the use of the land with where people sort of live and where they're distributed. And so those are some of the things that I've been trying to deal with and come to terms with as far as, well, if there are solutions out there, how can we kind of connect people who have different maybe locations but are still undergoing the same issues. And to kind of maybe get to the scale of the home, I'm still sort of obsessed, I guess, with this idea partially, guys, because, you know, just a year out of school, but I think this is also maybe something where a traditional model could come into play. And then so at the scale of the house, there are a lot of homes, not only in Alabama, but across the country that have onsite septic treatment, where it's sort of the same idea where what you flush in the toilet is collected into a tank and that's then distributed. But again, in some of these places in Alabama, they don't work because of the soil. And what you get is what you get in Turner, where it pulls up just outside of people's homes. And this has led to sort of a number of health issues with people who live there. And it's not an easy fix, one because of the soil, but also because these things aren't super cheap. They're kind of an expensive endeavor. And so also in the kind of recalibration of the project and looking outward at different prototypes and models, as this program in Suffolk County, that's Long Island, you know, just out here in New York, that they have kind of at the county level, a program set up to try and help people upgrade their older systems into something newer, different technology. And part of that has me thinking, well, what are ways that that can maybe infiltrate the idea of a home? This is just a trace of a kind of home that could be made in a factory, a kind of typical floor plan layout. And these last few images to kind of end are just me again, kind of in the mindset of being in school, thinking through image making. And so in what ways could a typical septic system that's in the ground and kind of connected to a home, could other ways that that could maybe come out of it, other ways that it could maybe become one with the home, considering that it's sort of made in a factory, other sort of models of thinking about how that could come together. And so as much as this has been a kind of quick progress report of things that I've looked at and where I've come from so far, I guess it's also sort of like a long-winded help wanted ad, you know, I'm very much open to hearing and gathering things from other people who may be watching now, who may watch in the future, any guidance, information to shoot the breeze really, you know, I'm always down to hear more about what other people have to say about this. But with that, I think I'll end this and I'll pass it over to the next. Thank you, Eduardo. It's so nice to see how your research has evolved. And please type your Gmail address into the chat just for people to like be able to copy and paste easier. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'll do that. And next, we'll have two graduates from last year as well. This time from the Critical Curatorial and Conceptual Practice Program, Zoe and Alexandra. Hi, thanks, Leslie. I'm Alex. Hi, I'm Zoe. And as Leslie mentioned, we're both graduates of the CCCP program from 2020. And this year, we've been researching the Seminole American myth of the home as refuge. We are experimenting with video as a medium to work through our questions as we hope to make visible how the built environment, just like cinema, is a project of power and control. The expectation to be home so much this year illustrates the idea that home is a safe space, that it provides shelter from outside dangers. And while these are simple physical truths, they're also emotionally loaded ideas. In order to explore safety as an architectural phenomenon, then, we need to turn to affect as a framework to understand how the feeling and desire for safety is bound up with the architecture of the home. Historically, popular anxiety is about the post-industrial metropolis having a pretext for getting tough on America's poor and dismantling social welfare instead of investing in public infrastructure. This pattern doesn't just emissary those in need and exacerbate the wealth gap, but also redirects our political consciousness. Once we internalize individual responsibility, we lose sight of the need and desire for political organization and instead take comfort in finding solutions to our own problems. Wearing a mask and staying home are methods to protect and take care of our communities, but they have been framed as self-protection this past year from the possibility of you giving me the virus rather than the other way around. This self-motivated messaging doesn't just isolate us from community and care, but also from solidarity. The state gets to be relieved of its responsibility rather than be held accountable. This cycle of depoliticization exacerbates the disintegration of the social safety net, which, alongside a media infatuation with danger, have contributed to a climate of fear that we see as inextricably linked with the desire to have the home as a refuge. In a climate of fear, can the home ever live up to the expectation of home in the American imaginary? American faith and domestic bliss means believing that safety is always just one fix or one lice all wipe away. Over the past year, we have followed this endless chase for home comfort through moral panic, ecological threats, debt, decorating, and the racialized and gendered politics of home ownership and home maintenance. As historians, our project is rooted in the archives. When we set out to begin, we intended to source material from the Vanderbilt Television Archives, the Oscar Newman Archives at Avery, and the New York Historical Society to name a few. Though we were able to access parts of these collections remotely, much of the material we hoped to see had not been digitized, so archival material often felt at an arms distance. Instead, we turned to media we could find online. News clips and advertisements, home videos, security footage, YouTube channels, PSAs, government sponsored videos, and the wonderful genre of shelter TV. These media types all had a sort of predictable tone and texture where everything felt staged. We realized that the arms length that we felt with the archival material was not just because of pandemic restrictions, but was actually ingrained in the material itself. The sociopolitical threads that we have been chasing, like privatization, atomization, and the fortification of the home, themselves act as distancing measures. The superficial quality of the media was a feature and not a bug. And embracing that meant working experimentally to critically analyze our source media. So we started putting together short videos responding to our research themes as a semi-weekly exercise. This process has helped us begin to articulate some of our theoretical ideas and let us practice our editing software. While it's just one clip out of many, we thought we would share one of our process dual experiments to illustrate how we've been working this year. The modern home cannot be thought without the television. In the mid-20th century, the TV entered the home as a new kind of window, not onto the immediate surroundings or the neighbor's yard, but brought into the living room a whole array of alternative environments, broadcast studios, sound stages, and the interiors of others' homes. A doctor named Edith Farnsworth was living inside an all-glass Mies van der Rohe designed residence. She described her experience, the truth is that in this house with its four walls of glass, I feel like a prowling animal, always on alert. I am always restless. I feel like a sentinel on guard day and night. The house comprised entirely of windows is one that causes problems. Hypervisibility, fear of voyeurism, lack of privacy and security that one might tend to think home should provide. Television and windows share this quality. Looking out goes hand in hand with looking in. Along with the TV into the home came the TV cameras. The home was forever transformed into a place of potential, if not actual, televisual performance. This feeling of being watched at home wavered between the realms of entertainment and security until the two became indistinguishable. So the clip that Alex played is not our final product, but rather a documentation of our process this past year. We're still scratching the surface of the ideas we hope our film and film practice can ultimately explore. And we plan to continue this project past the end of this incubator cycle and beyond the landscapes of our homes. With archives reopening, we're eager to return to our initial case studies with the theoretical framework we built this year. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Alex and Zoe. I know that was a new medium for you guys, and I'm happy that we had the pleasure of seeing the first presentation of it. If I could ask the presenters to just turn on their cameras for a brief, we're going to take a pause now between presentations for a brief discussion. Sorry, the last project presenters. So, Midar, Eduardo, Zoe, and Alexandra. I thought that it was so interesting and representative of the programs at ChESAP to see the range in just three projects of the types of investigative methods and how you were all able to pivot during this very strange year. I know Midar has prepared a question to kick off the discussion. Well, not really prepared, but yeah. So it's a thought maybe that I wanted to know what your thoughts are more than related to a particular project. It's related to the title of Hidden Infrastructure, and it is true of my topic, but I think also yours for three of us, that one of the main issues of these topics is that it's very difficult for us as designers or for anybody really to get a sense of what is happening. They are complex phenomena in many ways. The data sets are very diverse in different formats. So how do you see our role as designers in this context? What is the role of visualization, for example? How can we, in my particular field, developing visualizations of urban microplimatology, for example, can bring along discussion possibilities or can bring along even engagement with citizens, civic engagement. And so how do you see this in your projects? What do you think our role is in this context? That's a really great question and a lot to think about, especially in terms of all of the projects. And Eduardo, I really liked something that you said in your presentation about learning or thinking through visuals, which I think has really been part of our process as well, and working in film, which as Leslie mentioned, is a new medium for Zoe and I. And so thinking about the different, particularly emotional resonance that film can bring to people as a method of understanding like architecture and design has been really interesting in our process that feels like a different sort of engagement with what a visual architectural practice can do. And I know that's been really exciting for Zoe and I over this last year is to really sort of push what the visual capabilities of communication in architecture are and what those boundaries are and sort of pushing against those. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. I think for me, I think a lot of what I guess I learned was how to kind of get a lot of things together and then maybe figure out what things go together, what things don't go together, and maybe how to sort of draw connections to it. I'm just like a very advanced kind of strainer, just like how do we kind of parse through all these different things and kind of make something of it that kind of drives a narrative. And I guess that's part of my question for I guess you all as well is like we've kind of been stuck at home and we've kind of had to get creative in the ways that we get information and even the things that we get or maybe not exactly what we might have envisioned to begin with. And I'm wondering for you all if that's maybe changed what you've made, like so for example, maybe not for example but just maybe it's not the ideal kind of data or information or sort of photos in archival material and has that in turn maybe changed the kind of products you I guess make as a result of that. I'm not sure if I completely understand the question but I mean for me the situation has changed the research methodology a little bit but I don't think I'm answering your question but yes the way you engage with data I think for me has changed. Usually I do more like you know like sensing experiment and so on. In this case I was using more available data so in a way I got a better sense of the data set that is out there how these are formatted how you know the openness of data in different cities. So in a way you are isolated but you are more aware of the global scenario. So for me it made the project you know more just like I started looking at any city that have data while you know the in other scenario it would be looking into what is happening in the city where I am to to to study the local environment so that isolation made the whole you know research field or research scale become much larger but I don't think I'm answering your question exactly. Well I mean that's fine I think that gets to kind of the point and just like how we have to kind of adapt I mean both of your projects are kind of like we're in that moment I think but that's going to be super interesting to see how they can evolve when you sort of are able to leave that sort of restricted but open kind of scenario. Yeah so if I can jump in sort of tying both your questions together I feel like initially we had wanted to work with a lot of formal archival material which is is so rich you know always and a part of one of the reasons we wanted to work with that in particular some of the video material that's in in Avery is because we our topic is super big and I think we're we're interested in as much a kind of public audience as we are the kind of academic architectural audience and and narrowing our our sort of yeah who we were addressing to the community that were really in and so yeah just trying to kind of poke holes or push on ideas within the academy or within sort of architecture as as a limiting ourselves and trying to yeah be really conscious that we're not going to be you're making a film that speaks to everybody or that even reaches everybody and so thinking about our what both like how our brains are also the communities that we're in yeah just really trying to keep it focused on speaking within within architecture and so yeah it's been interesting to still try to do that without using academic archives but I think we'll we'll we'll keep going with what we're working with and then more as archives open and YouTube very very important as I know it was to you Eduardo as well yeah the algorithm thank you everyone thank you for exploring these issues around health and well-being when when the theme was announced for for this year you know it was just who knew how rich the real life could be in the way that each of your projects must have been informed this year so thank you and I I hope you do continue your research in this direction I know it was a challenging year to to develop the projects so we welcome you back in in the future for updates into speaking of this year I mean we we know how important community always is but particularly this year the empowerment of community and the how we define our own communities has been especially important so this next group of presenters are going to be talking about their projects that are powered by community starting with the project lots of people so a nut and Ila from the AUD program will be presenting thank you thank you thank you hey everyone so this is the project we're working on Ila and me it's called a lots of people and actually it started in the summer semester of the urban design program last year and we really like this project and actually the incubator gave us the opportunity to kind of like take it one step further and kind of refine the research and kind of like make it happen hopefully in real life as well so the project is dealing with the increase of population in cities and the lack of open space per capita and at the same time we identified a lot of privately owned vacant lots around 18 400 that are waiting to be built but for now they're just empty in the middle of the city we'll share with you a short video that we prepared that basically summarized the project something for the kids they don't have anything that's what they do with bad things selling drugs and all that stuff there are a lot of empty lots that are just like seem to just be taking up space and no one's using them for anything our little recreation or something where they can play pool and play video games and stuff like that they need to fix it they need to carve up or fix all the holes around here too so with that being said it can be some things that can be used besides building more condoms for people in this area to not be able to live in and they can utilize these spaces for sprinklers like arcade they can use it for something to give the children something to do rather than not having things to do so people can talk about they're making it accessible for people to use for stuff in their own for it to still be a problem while my kids is grown is an issue that needs to be addressed so this is kind of summarized the project and we kind of like tell a bit more about that so we look at the population protection in New York City and as you can see according to the report of the Department of City Planning Brooklyn and Manhattan especially has like growth rates of population at the same time we look at the open space per individual in different cities around the US and you see for example Washington 55 square meter per individual and we see that New York is pretty kind of low on that so obviously there is a need to kind of more open space in the city and then when we looked in data about like privately owned vacant lots in the city fund 18,400 lots vacant lots in New York City which is total was 13.4 million square meter which is just to give you kind of a scale it's like four times of Central Park so of course we don't say that we need to take all of that but there is a lot of potential in those kind of empty spaces and then we came up to this kind of idea of like creating the platform of kind of boring private vacant lots to be used for the community and kind of a temporary use for the amenities to give to the people so basically as you saw in the video it's like start when there's a vacant lots that are available for like you know a month 10 months a year it's being there and someday there will be a permit but in the meantime we think there is like opportunity to kind of borrow the space with kind of like a policy that basically the community could benefit from it so we came up with different design interventions this is just like examples and of course when we have a lot we tend to kind of do a pilot project and look as the community exactly the amenities that they need in order to kind of occupy the lot but this is just ideas of what we can do in those slots like pop-up play and different kind of library use this example we kind of collected that with very kind of low budget and very basic you know materials we can create those interventions for example paint and graffiti as kind of design tool to create a kind of a basketball court or vegetation that could help also for kind of like more shading or even kind of temporary structures and this is like the design tool that we made from small medium large to extra large and it could be kind of outdoor gym and it could be kind of movie nights you know a place that screening video for the community and while we were articulating these kind of interventions we thought of different kind of like audience so it could be something maybe more small sketchy the children maybe kind of more softscape if you want to kind of have more kind of a park or community garden maybe more privacy if you want kind of a reading place and as you saw this is kind of like just an example of how this kind of lot could be occupied and also we're thinking how you assemble a disassemble very easy so it should be like you know a kit of part that you just come with a truck put that and after like five months or something like that just disassemble that and while we were looking at intervention we thought how we can you know address also the climate strategies create the climate strategies inside the project for example because we know that like their heat island effect maybe we can you know create more shading like with shade structures or collecting water and use it as kind of a mister cooling system or even like community gardens create this kind of a hydrophonic system in terms of like even education for for the communities intent policy and stakeholders we see it as like a win-win situation so of course the municipality could gain more public space to you know use and give for the different communities the developer first of all kind of like bring back to the community where he's going to build and get incentives from the municipality and basically also increase the value of the lot when it's just emptying out and in terms of community of course this is the most beneficiary of this this thing that it's kind of a create more public space and also be engaged in what is going to be built in your neighborhood should just quickly how it works so the community has a need they ask the municipality if they have a space great but if it doesn't have space then they go into privately owned lots hopefully with kind of tax incentives of real estate taxes and property taxes the community can borrow the lot until the permit is until the permit is yet and then bring it back to the developer we do see a potential to have kind of a pops like privately owned public spaces in those lot that may be a remain of this idea will you know be keeping to the community as a community garden or even amenity on the ground floor but this is of course kind of up to the developer in terms of implementation so we understand that we cannot start with the policies so it's a more kind of bottom up approach we need to find a pilot project and then we see it expanding to kind of a network in the city so in order to find the first pilot project we kind of did research about like the most populated areas in your city of course Manhattan and Brooklyn then we kind of break it out into neighborhoods and you saw Betts Die, Brownsville, Lower East Side, Holland these are kind of potential places for intervention we also kind of overlap that with the low income areas in order to understand how we can these are places that really need those open spaces and these are kind of like overlap with the specific neighborhoods that we choose and then we overlay that with the vacant lots so all these vacant lots inside those boundaries we kind of map that and create a list of 4600 lots and we're in a process of sending kind of emails and reach out to the developers we have the owner name we have like the company the area and we create this kind of one pager to kind of reach out to people and try to to see where we can create this first intervention we also went on site this is for example in Brooklyn to understand which slots are more easy to kind of address in terms of like you know topography and accessibility and yeah let's go to the logistics as well. So in terms of logistics we did some research on liability sponsors and documentation requirements first if we want to build some temporary structures or have events that place on private property then we might need this temporary use and structure permit from new york department of buildings the application process really will take four to six weeks and if there is any other types of activities such as plaza events mobile units or fares we might need some extra permits and in next page in order to protect the properties negotiating and coordinating different services and security issues we will need different kinds of liability insurance depending on the type and duration of the pop-ups also in some big private entities they can provide some sponsorships and support for public goods programs that we are trying to apply and reach out to them see if we can get any sponsorships from these big private entities and we are also looking on collaboration with local bees and non-profits to see if we can get more connections with developers or landowners which can give us more support and help to our first pilot project. In the community engagement aspect we have been to downtown brooklyn lower east side brownswell and bad study and did interviews and asked what do people think about vacant lots in their communities once we got a pilot side we can definitely have more specific community engagement activities and let people speak out and share their thoughts for instance we intend to hand like a big canvas in the community and people can just come do though and draw their ideas on the canvas talk with us about their concerns or interests and moreover we create a website of pop-ups design competition so people can share their thoughts their needs and design ideas for vacant lots through this website we can also know the specific problems they have and what kinds of programs residents want the website can also be a good platform for developers to get inspirations and receive more different thoughts about what they can really do to their vacant lots since last november we have been refining the narrative and research reaching out to professionals from public to private sectors and in this year we talked with more people such as developers landowners communities non-profits etc and we are looking for more potential pilot projects and trying to find a nice lot to be our first pilot site from thousands of vacant lots in New York City so if you want to be involved or have any ideas for a vacant lot please contact us with these two email address let's make it happen and make our city a better place thank you thank you thank you so much and let me ask you you as well to drop your email addresses in the chat for people um and ilah you you ended with a great line for a segue to shan's presentation make it happen dot city i think ilah and inats project sparked our imagination about what is possible and i think shan will be presenting a tool that he is developing to make those those imaginations possible shan i think you might be muted sorry you see my screen right now yes perfect yeah so at the core of urban planning is the mission of creating a collective vision for our cities and how we'd like to live and then working to allocate resources and energy towards these ideals to create a truly shared and equitable future is essential that we take part in shaping and executing this vision in 2019 and 2020 i developed the make it happen platform to address shortcomings in the community engagement process i'd identified from over a decade working in community development urban planning and from my studies while i g-sat i focused particularly on comprehensive plans extensive blueprints for the future of places that all too often want to sitting on back office shelves one of my main goals was to open up this process an eventual product by tackling the above issues i began using this platform to collect public data and conduct interactive visioning sessions in communities around york i was either test various methods of data collection qr codes in person versus digital etc to see which approaches might yield the furthest reach and detail with the input of prior surveys the public was then guided through brainstorming exercises to get goals uh identified priorities and also outline next step towards achieving these goals uh here's a sample of one of the uh previous dashboards all these ideas were then adding a real time to the platform where residents could continue to expand act upon these goals and track how initiatives impacted the community both during these initial meetings and any time they're out there uh here's another picture of expanding on one of the local goals that was developed uh just as the platform was getting momentum however the outbreak of COVID-19 forced all typical planning efforts to a halt perspective city clients faced budget uncertainties or really cutbacks and everyday survival became the most pressing concern for most people uh in response to this crisis the platform was briefly recalibrated to try and help address acute issues first by aggregating possible solutions to the COVID-19 crisis and then by helping with grassroots efforts uh mutual aid efforts such as mapping and encouraging the creation of uh community fridges throughout new york city well like many others all the chaos and dysfunction of 2020 revealed a larger system of crisis with cracks that have been brewing coming to the surface rather than returning to normal it has become clear that we need a new uh better system moving forward one that is far more resilient equitable and empowering in order to create a better system the above three steps are central first we need to create a clear idea of where we'd like the ui d to be going such a vision needs to be both specific specific and compelling next we need to be able to take action toward these ideals such efforts can be an after can't be an effort but we should be embedded in everyday actions and as widespread as possible for their implementation we cannot just rely on a handful of agencies organizations to change course from our current destructive trajectory lastly we need all we need to do this all in a way that allows us to increasingly operate independently in the constraints of the current system if many of our collective goals are neutral unit odds with our current modes of production we need to create new ones to reach the scale needed for a system of change the platform leverages an open source slash pure production type of model the majority of content is generated and governed by the users themselves similar to projects like wik p or the linux operating system this kind of distributed production model is both a means and intended end for the project as well creating a system where power is far more accurately shared to begin the platform is largely based around pursuing more ideal conditions for nine major goal areas these are very similar to the ui system development goals or other alternatives to gp for measuring societal well-being these goal areas include categories like knowledge and education economy and livelihood etc for each category the platform then looks at what any community would like to have ideally for example everyone would like to have a good work-life balance the user profiles and surveys which will be shown shortly and by pulling in other data sets the ideas to establish a set of baseline metrics that are constantly updated to guide our priorities with the goal of having every community reach 100 satisfaction with each each of these goal sets also strive to maximize local sufficiency resilience and equity lastly for all these goals the platform aggregates the best solutions available and prompts users to adapt these solutions in their communities and everyday lives in addition users are prompted to share these solutions work how they work for them and where they might be room for improvement functioning as an open solutions toolkit these solutions are also regularly shared throughout the network and in daily blasts in order to provide constant positive feedback in order to maximize the platform's reach for most people will be marketed as a place to work on us not on a city's plan but as a place to work on their own dream world for each user their experience will be customized giving their personal goals and the platform can help them discover expand upon work toward these goals given the user selections that are led through a series of steps to further identify their goals and create plans of action among these different possible steps all users are encouraged to go through a profile quiz that helps them to create their ideal world a set of questions prompts gather as much of the key data mentioned earlier for the local indices the idea is to bring up these questions in a simple and even fun way to make the eventual goals more meaningful to the users as more information is gathered about each user they are matched to additional goals and encouraged to start versions of successful goals in their own communities with many of these shared goals helping them to accomplish their own personal goals as well all these goals are and relative well-being indexes are gathered on the user's dashboard and all shared goals are on the community dashboards shown earlier this kind of central command partnered with carefully time prompts and notifications helps the users follow through with their own goals stay connected to share goals over time next for every goal created on the platform the users guide up to each step of project development triggering different tools and interactions at different times like again the user is encouraged to unlock next steps to add necessary details to their goals they are specifically encouraged to build the impact value of their goal especially essentially by tagging the targets mentioned in the vision section earlier to its goals and specifying slash quantifying the potential impact of their goal this whole process can help to figure out personal goals that otherwise struggle to find such a range of support for and also helps form a strong pipeline for new projects and businesses as people can essentially vet validate and flesh out their projects before having to see conventional investment as tasks are identified the creator of the goal can start flagging certain tasks for broader community support this could range from advice tools physical space or even larger time commitment support and several credit system helps determine which tasks will receive greater support for the overall community a task is highly valued and more visible throughout the platform if it comes from a high impact goal or if a user decides to boost that task by using some of their credit such tasks are also matched to users with complementary skills goals etc helping to adjust these highly valued tasks in turn give other users credit which they can then use to highlight their own tasks this personal credit also dissipates over time encouraging everyone on the platform to keep doing good deeds and preventing excess power accumulation by any individual the system is similar to old peer-to-peer file sharing systems like Mapster rewarding people who contributed to the community as they can then draw on the community more to greater support not only does this credit system strive to embody a new system of valuation essentially by internalizing externalities and economic exchanges but it also aims to make public participation more equitable by rewarding and helping those who might not otherwise have the luxury or free time to engage in community development activities lastly the platform works to make it easier for us all to create more positive outcomes outside the current constraints of our system moving forward as shown in previous slides the first step is finding alternatives for goals and might otherwise have excessive barriers to entry expertise resources etc this then reduces dependence on solely securing conventional capital to turn ideas into realities next some financing will often be needed for goals beyond the certain scale again the platform provides alternatives by allowing users to tap in the crowdfunding as well as an upcoming involved in loan fund that will invest in high impact projects even all the community vetting and validation such loans will have a greater degree of security than usual as well the upcoming release users are also encouraged to join cooperative institutions during the gold discovery process like communities for agriculture farms credit unions etc in the future the aspirations to set up a network between these cooperatives to better share and pull resources something like a digital version of the cooperative cluster in mandrago in spain lastly even though the current version framework goals that create lastly even through the current vision framework goals that create local self-sufficiency and resilience are especially valid any independence and energy production local flexible manufacturing capacity etc would be game changers for local economic development such projects will have preference through the loan fund and the tools will be developed to facilitate their development moving forward thanks to the G7 computer i was able to partner with additional designers and developers to create the next version of the platform which will be launching in the summer this summer 2021 if you're interested in being a test user or collaborating anyway please feel free to shoot me an email info and make it happen dot city thanks thank you so much shon that is really exciting and please just put your email in the check for people to be able to copy and paste and i'm excited to introduce raffaella and urnesto who are speaking from chile today about the communities in their region okay um hello everyone we are very happy to be here i'm very excited to share ah the presentation sorry there so very we are very excited to share and discuss the different proposals with you today so as leslie said my name is raffaella olivares and i graduated from the ad in 2020 along with me es el nesto silva ad class of 2013 we are partners in architectural firm called estudios en abellillo and we are interested in investigating everyday situations where there seems to be no architecture but where there are different systems that can inform the generation of architectural projects hello everyone our research project is framed within the study of a specific urban typologies of chilean popular culture with the aim of developing a catalog that defines the guidelines to generate an evolution of daily activities into a design project typology is a way of classifying architecture and is used to design by past architects to this day architecture is not only described by types it is also produced to them architectural projects are commonly identified within a precise type because it is the form we have commonly known urnesto i hate to interrupt you but i just want to let you guys know that we're seeing the version of your screen that has it's uh not full screen shared once i wanted to make sure that we got the image that you wanted us to see one small second um there perfect okay thank you very much thank you we define non typology as the combination of different types in the same ecosystem in which there are certain scenarios and relationships that call our attention because of what happens in them and because of the relationships that take place between the different typologies everyday situations and uses that are informing programmatic relationships that challenge establish organizations and systems in other words that challenge the very notion of typology as an example within this idea of non typologies we present today our case study made up of a soccer field a community center and a square these are the urban typological elements that have conditioned most of the public spaces on chilean popular neighborhoods these are the spaces where interaction between people takes place that's enabling an idea of community in which leisure sports entertainment cooperation happened we started studying this phenomenon a few years ago documenting these three urban typologies while working in five worlds in the city of santiago recoleta con chalice and ramón reflejo and san juaquin to better understand the magnitude of the city urban system santiago has 32 worlds and only in five in the five above mentioned there are 231 soccer fields that is nearly 100 000 square meters and a square usually with benches and a playground accompanies most of them the number of community centers another neighborhood organization is much bigger only in those five worlds there are 2 259 communal spaces due to the pandemic the white spreads lots of jobs and the insuring economic crisis that the pandemic brought with worsen a social crisis that had already exploded before the pandemic with the uprisings in october 2019 this means increasing numbers of vulnerable people that lack access to food and sometimes even shelter this has led to an increase of different activities related to the kitchen domestic realm especially within the organization of communities and cooperation between neighbors bringing the daily routine of cooking into the public space a well-known phenomenon in chile and latin america as the communal pot for oyago moon in spanish this experience is not new but it really appeared and intensified significantly due to the pandemic the communal pots have been historically related to the economic and political crisis that affected chile since the beginning of the 20th century in the 1980s under the military dictatorship of august opino chip the communal pots reappear as a means of alleviating the inequality produced by the economic crisis that followed the implantation of the neoliberal economic system communal pots should not be romanticized still they exist and allow us to understand social economic political spatial historical and programmatic systems of organization the soccer field often associated with squares and community centers are since last year housing the communal spots these common spaces are full of information of interactions and uses we are interested in the possibilities of programmatic organizations that are being triggered in this non-technology an architectural system of elements devices and an infrastructure of uses we identified some of the points in which these three typologies plus the oyago moon intersect in the city and in order to study the situation we chose a specific case an archetype that due to archetype sorry that due to its conditions can be used as a means to understand a recurring phenomenon that belongs to a larger system not only in san tiago but also in chile and latin america the chosen case is one of several that we identified in the catastrophe which will use as a prototype to test a way to collect information but to do so in in an analytical way that can trigger design the soccer field the community center and the square this case is located in recoleta at the north area of san tiago between the blanco and san cristobal hill specifically in a neighborhood called via san cristobal this complex was built in 1971 under the government of president salvara yende this system is not only related to actors close to the soccer field this ecosystem is complex because it involves different actors that belong to the neighborhood as well as some that are located in neighboring books this archetypical case of the non typology hosts a series of activities that are donated from the physical and programmatic crossing of the urban typologies and other contextual actors at the mustaki foundation the housing complex nearby small businesses and so on like a children children's home that uses a soccer field the soccer field every week in addition to working in the community or church or the small or the small business of mrs maria which plays an important role it's because it serves as a collection center for the supplies for the oya common uh mineral water company and me park a foundation organized a campaign to remodel the square a project that is is in process also the municipality of regulator regularly organize a series of social events in the soccer field this series of activities mentioned before are associated with the different physical typological supports that integrate the system which have which we have identified as the non typology these activities occur with different frequencies and schedules some are permanent and other are more sporadic we were able to identify a series of devices and objects that together with the physical support allow some of these different things to happen at the same time the communal pots are part of an even larger system that starts with the supply of ingredients the preparation of the food its distribution to the act of eating itself the soccer field is one of the supports with more where more things happen it becomes a kind of multi-purpose base where activities of many different kinds takes place like soccer games almost every day Christmas fairs municipal municipal activities artistic and cultural interventions the square also hosts a wide variety of activities such as being a playground for the children or more sporadic activities that take place when the square is not being used for playing such a political and social assemblies the community center is a place where solidarity activities are frequently helped to help neighbors and serves as meetings for smaller organized collectives such as mother groups meetings with children are early reunions in addition this community center has a library of 700 books and a community orchard the relationships within a space objects activities and their time frequencies allow us to understand how these different activities can happen in the same way that not all at the same time our proposal so to understand the relation within this non-technological ecosystem documenting the speciality of them interaction the devices that take place around them in the form of a catalog this catalog or rather systematic analysis is not an attempt to solve the speciality of the communes but rather a way to define guidelines to generate an operating manual for designing new spaces for the multiplicity of uses that arise from the community's interactions understanding a catalog not as an order released or a compilation of parts but as a tool for analysis and especially one that allows you to understand relationships we decide to challenge the book format which usually document it at each activity element or character separately in attempt to emphasize the relations within a system that they place in a physical environment in this sense our catalog is closer to a map where all the parts of the system and how they relate to each other can be understood simultaneously as we understand it the study and analysis of this particular case already give us tools to understand and work in other places where this not topology exists and finally we want to show you a first attempt to think of a type of intervention that would allow this mix of permanent uses understanding the soccer field fence as a social infrastructure the fence as a day as the device that could allow this constant interaction of activities associated with the non-technology this new infrastructure turns the fence into a space that becomes a programmatic support for the social system of the neighborhood we didn't invent or propose the activities that they place here we learn from them we are not inventors of the three defense but the interesting thing is that by understanding understanding what happened here we can borrow and design some alternatives that will further support and enhance what is already here we are sure that there are many more possibilities of course and we hope to develop further based in the map catalog thank you very much thank you very much thank you if i could ask um shawn illa and inna to uh come back on on screen thank you i i loved hearing the different tools that you have um have developed and how you each of you plan to advance them um i think shawn is going to kick us off for this this uh discussion and uh we will resume for the next presentation about uh 10 minutes sure yeah um you know i was thinking given how engaged or embedded all these projects are in community i was wondering if everybody could share maybe a you know particularly uh difficult or challenging experience they had with community engagement uh or alternatively uh unexpected success to answer for us i think that as i think that for you it happened also it was very difficult to visit the places at the beginning because we were here in santiago at least last year for i think that almost six months in quarantine without even go outside of the house so for us at the beginning was very difficult to go to the to this specific archetype that we chose um but i think that in our case we could like we contact the community through social media first and then we had a lot of like some meetings and then we were able a few months or few weeks ago to go to the place and interact with the neighbors but at the beginning i think that that was the most difficult thing to really like visit this case and work around and talk with the neighbors i think that that was the most difficult thing yeah i think maybe with our project have the same problem because we are trying to go through the communities in brooklyn and the lower east side but not like last summer there might because in some weekend last there are not many populations here and because of the COVID we cannot gather so many people to have the community activities our community engagement to give us more feedback and ideas so i think it might be the most challenging to our project i think also that like this part of community engagement of course it's challenging but i do see like a lot of enthusiasm around it like people want to kind of make a change or to to benefit from like a change uh so they have ideas to share but at the same time i think like for example in our project that we think i think someone mentioned it in the chat like about maintenance um and like if you create this kind of open space how you make sure like the community take care of it like uh you know the other um beads or non-profit or the developer so this is also kind of a question how you give something to the community but make sure that like you keep like for the for the duration it's there that it's still like benefit them so maybe this is kind of something i mean i think um you know prior to obviously the challenges of doing this all online you know in a lot of community engagement sessions there seems to be you know some people will come in with kind of wanting to naysay a lot of things or you know kind of poke holes in some projects um and you know one thing i found that was pretty helpful would be to actually try to kind of guide people through thinking through how they're problem solved for those same issues they're proposing and kind of you know almost problem solving real time so and bring on everybody as a problem solved rather than just kind of a you know gesture of the information that we're seeing um i think that we have a more like a comment uh for in that and you too um because we were uh we were chatting while you were presenting guys because there there was a case here in in Santiago and where a lot of cases here in Santiago like projects that were called plaza de bolsillo that it's um the translation is pocket square um that were built they were like also temporary and very sporadic like for i don't know a year or a little bit more probably but um it was very similar i think one more with a low project probably but um and we we were thinking that maybe you can like look this project in Santiago because it has a lot of information on a lot of ways to connect with the city that maybe could be useful for you i don't know i can i can write the name in the chat later for you but we were thinking about that yeah that that would be great like every kind of idea understanding how you implement this thing like would be great like there's so many aspects to this kind of actually come and you know especially when it's privately owned so it's it's also kind of challenging so everything yeah that um and reference will love to kind of hear and i think that in this game was different because they were like public um lots but they were like more like abandoned so maybe they have like some things in same thing common but maybe it's useful too so i will put the name in the in the chat sure thank you thank you um it's exciting to hear how the challenges and the opportunities can be similar in different communities in these different locations so thank you so much for sharing and i hope you guys have a chance to collaborate in the future maybe i'd like to introduce the next group of presenters we're going to shift from the community scale to global scale and examine global climate so the first presenter is sika who has brought on her her climb hub partners if i could invite you guys to turn on your cameras thank you uh sorry um so just for the sake of time it's just going to be me presenting but when we have q and a all of us will turn on our cameras is everyone able to see my screen perfect okay great my name is sika i'm osika sedro i am an alumnus um m up 2013 and i will be walking you all through today through a prototype we built that is focused on coastal cities in sub-saharan africa but this specific prototype was built for ganna so um the idea or the call to action that we were responding to when we built the climb hub app which is supposed to be a portal where climate related data and case studies can be crowdsourced downloaded and visualized um was just a call to action from the world bank blog um to developers to develop a centralized repository um to actually asset and risk map what is the assets of coastal cities across west africa and this is because of their economic importance and they tend to be the population centers in all of the west african countries um and so the emphasis was really on coastal habitats that um are important to the livelihood and the economics of the cities and basically um according to the blog it was saying that about um 56 percent of the gbdp um that are generated in these countries come from or in the west africa sub region come from coastal cities so um in terms of climb hub our goal is to actually um hopefully create a platform that's used all throughout the sub-saharan sub region but we are starting in west africa and and we focused on ganna specifically because of three factors um it's political economy um the fact that it's actually had stability for a while and we felt that because it's a middle income country that's very close to the actual um largest economy in sub-saharan africa which is nigeria um it's only about a 45 minute play right away from akra to legos so those are the two capital cities um we really felt like this was a great place to start so what you see in front of you are the maps are a map of southern ganna with um the the yellow triangles indicating the coastal cities that we are trying to get a sense of what is happening there so um what we were trying to do is basically as i mentioned before look at the assets and also some of the risk um that are the risk maps and understand what's available and what um what we could do to help centralize and improve the user experience for so the two research questions that kind of guided us as we started to actually do investigation do the data mining and start to actually piece together data sets were these two and it's really about understanding how decisions are being made and how what are the the data and resources used to actually understand how risk and assets are distributed um and for those of you who don't know um sub-Saharan Africa has a lot um the the least accurate climate models and it is one of it is the continent that has the most vulnerability when it comes to climate change and so with that we we felt that this is a very important um set of data and these are very important questions to be asking in order to actually understand what mitigation could be done and help contribute to that that field of research so our initial goals after setting out those research questions were broken up into sub-goals where we were trying to understand sort of what's the data that exists and then what's the culture around that data um and from there um this is shout out to our team who did a great job um bless who it was doing a lot of the data mining on the ground in Ghana and then JP and um Quabano who are both in North America um were instrumental in getting the prototype and the demo that we have together so our hypotheses were that you know there would be something there it might not necessarily be that great but um we would at least be able to get some climate related data and be able to actually centralize it and we were trying to also investigate what are the institutional partnerships that exist and um from there figure out how we can add value to what was already there in the ecosystem so in front of you is a screenshot of our prototype and this is the actual initial screen that you get when you log in you are able to choose the sub-region and for the purposes of this presentation we're focused once again on West Africa and the country of Ghana in order to basically make sure that we were providing information about the country some very basic demographic data we had to overview um and then we created some different layers and filters in order for people to understand um what where human settlements are transition zones ecosystem services um and then also create filters um that um look at the district maps the political maps the administrative maps and then also the population and some of the infrastructure this in front of you is an example of some of the infrastructure maps and visualizations that we have been able to build within the prototype um and then this is um a density map for human settlements um so the value that we found after we built the actual prototype um that we felt well through investigation and through talking through various stakeholders is this um information about climate data um what you see in front of you is just like rainfall averages um what we found um after building the platform demoing it to a group of six folks within one of the coastal cities of focus which is Winneba so we talked to a bunch of researchers and also students that are at the University of Education at in Winneba Ghana and we were able we were shocked by what we were told so we we we asked some very simple questions about okay where do you get data how are you able to get data and what what what data what tools do you use that are online and um the last question was what what are the tools that you would need an overwhelming the overwhelming response was rainfall precipitation and temperature data that's not a bit easily accessible and we were kind of taken aback by that um and so what you see in front of you is the tabular data that we were able to find it's around we were able to find 10 years but these were um sort of monthly averages what what would actually enhance climate models is to actually have some of these data sets that are more on a day to day or month to month basis so that the actual climate models and also the research is a lot more um more focused and accurate um and we are so in terms of revisiting the initial sub goals that we actually found when it came to the data sets we found that often they had to be purchased um through a municipal authority or through the Ghana meteorological services and that's not ideal because there's variability in what people pay and also how long it takes them to get the data um in terms of micro data sets we found that there wasn't really a culture of sharing or institutional coordination around data um and our our prototype was actually pretty well received which we were surprised about I I thought people already had access to a lot of data but we we found out that that's not the case and if they are able to access data there's a lot of hurdles they have to actually um they actually have to jump over to to get that data so um also us trying to understand how case studies are being shared it's primarily right now um especially in this part of the world through conferences which have been kind of halted with COVID um or brought online but um in terms of the the frequency of data sharing excuse me of actual case study sharing it is not as frequent as pre-COVID um and we did find that there were centralized data sets from the World Bank from NASA from USAID and then from the GIS Institute over in Ghana and they were all open source and even Ghana has an open data platform the what we didn't find is a lot of climate data um and so that is where we see the opportunity to kind of take this and really provide um additional um value to the researchers who are really focused on this part of the world um and so in terms of where we're going from here our key tasks moving forward once again is the historical rainfall and temperature data focusing on identifying micro data sets and embedded in that is trying to um through one on one um interactions with um our our um company on CUTLAB and um these institutions trying to actually foster uh um at least a culture of data sharing in our our um our cities of focus um we also know that we just kind of provided the very baseline data that is needed um but really trying to start start to create a tool that can actually do more comprehensive risk and asset um mapping and um connected to that is the spatial analysis and data visualization features and then um the creation of historic land use maps based on satellite imagery we would be doing that um through um our own human resources and we still have three very general questions that we'll be guiding our work moving forward which are you know where the data um and and basically um at what scale should we be looking at and um what should visualization look at like so with that said we want to say thank you to GSAP um big big thank you to Dr. Kujo at the University of Education at um Winneba and Ghana and to my team Bless and JP who are on the line who worked tirelessly who didn't understand the space we were getting in before we started but continued to plug away at it and created a really beautiful tool that is much more accessible than what's available right now. Thank you so much Seika it's always exciting to hear updates on your on your project um we are just doing a time check we're at 8 p.m and we have two more presentations uh tree dot three with James and Eric if you could turn on your cameras uh they have also developed a web-based data visualization platform and um I'm excited to introduce you to to what they've been up to. Hi um my name is James um I'll be presenting uh tree three along with um my partner Eric. Hey how's it going? Let me quickly share my screen let me know if that worked and then I'll go ahead and get started. Let's get it worked. Excellent thanks um so like I said I'm James and I'm presenting uh with Eric um all right the increasingly urban future is all but certain estimates suggest the amount of new construction required to accommodate the population in 2050 will effectively double the amount of all built space that existed in 2020. Around the world timber harvesting and use in construction is rising dramatically as a core part of this continued growth. Conventional and new engineered wood products are more popular than ever. They are heralded by leading architects and construction advocates as environmentally sustainable alternatives to steel and concrete due to their carbon sequestration properties. Yet the discourse on material sourcing and the larger climate and health implications of timber based cities has been insufficient particularly in relation to forest health. 3.3 seeks to investigate two questions related to the global timber trade. First where does our wood come from and second what are the global impacts of local architectural interventions. It does this by merging valuable tools and data sets from related fields that have remained disparate for too long. These are tools for environmental advocates to study forest change, tools for planners and economists to study the trade of goods, and tools for builders and conscious designers to assess the life cycle and energy of their products. What's missing right now is a cohesive intuitive and free tool that connects these threads together. 3.3 aims to solve that problem. It provides users with the ability to explore and learn about the broader global implications of local architectural interventions by putting all of this in one place. Before we dive into that let's back up and just get some quick context. Wood is ubiquitous in architecture. So much so that it is the focus of American framing, the US Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, designed by Paul Anderson and Paul Preissner. The project among many other things is an exploration of the analog and ambiguous quality of this so-called humble material and its domestic applications. But wood is anything but humble. Though outside the scope of the focus of the Biennale, wood's ongoing popularity as a building material has had major consequences. Industrialized harvesting has devastated the world's forests, particularly in tropical regions throughout South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. While global deforestation rates have slowed in the past three decades and are primarily linked to cattle and agriculture, the increasing demand for engineered wood construction products means that architecture will be responsible for a larger volume and larger percentage of deforestation in the coming decades unless alternative practices are considered. Rock-carbon metrics and on-site sustainability are ultimately meaningless if they result in devastation at the source. Roughly one-third of the world's land is covered by forests. And while there has been modest growth over the recent decades and some of the blue areas you can see here, there has been overwhelming loss due to natural and artificial deforestation. About one-sixth of the world's forests has vanished in the past 150 years, over half of that just since 1980. When we try to evaluate the efficacy of wood-based construction, what do we miss when we ignore the costs at the source? How can an individual understand their relationship to this larger picture? The global trade of wood is immense. In 2018 alone, roughly 6 billion cubic meters or 200 billion cubic feet of wood products were harvested and traded globally. This does huge economic implications for exporter and importer countries. This example from China, the world's largest importer of lumber, illustrates some of those implications. While its biggest partners by dollar value are mainly large stable economies such as Canada, the US, and Russia, its partners for whom lumber represents the majority of its trade with China are primarily global south nations with vulnerable ecosystems. This economic imbalance means that nations such as Gambia are beholden to their alliance on exporting wood commodities to the detriment of their local ecologies. The builders and designers lifecycle assessment tools provide a way to track and quantify these environmental impacts for their projects, including wood products all the way back to the source. Life cycle assessment tools enable high fidelity metrics for sustainability and global warming impact, but they only tell half the truth. Current LCA tools focus on the bottom line numbers at the local site of intervention. They can be robust and detailed factoring in every gallon of diesel, every inch of steel, every mile traveled, but they don't tell you a story. They don't provide qualitative and more fundamental concerns related to the sourcing of those materials. A wider picture of the global wood trade is missing. An additional cost such as deforestation, habitat loss, exploitative economic relationships, and others are not considered. We've tried to combine these various data sets from these tools and others, forestry models, global trade data, carbon and energy tracking, the Great Tree 3, a timber trade tool, like converting data charts, complex programs and a static map into an interactive web tool. So like I just mentioned, Tree 3 is an interactive portal for education, exploration and advocacy. It shows who is producing and consuming specific types of wood products and how wood in all of its forms moves around the globe. Next slide, please. This is the map portion of the tool. Here, users can explore different countries and engage with different UI elements on the map like pop-ups. Next, please. This is the input panel. This is how users control the portal. Essentially, they're able to switch layers and filter for types of flows like import and export and also filter for different types of timber products. And here, this kind of allows the user to begin to dissect what is otherwise a very dauntingly large data set into manageable chunks. Next, please. This is the output panel. Here, key information is displayed about what you're currently seeing on the map. It also highlights important statistics and has some nice visualizations so the user can begin to stomach those numbers and statistics as well. Next, please. Here, you're seeing the forest coverage layer of the tool as James has just shown. And you can explore around, for instance, we can click on the ivory coast. Next. And then this will pull up all of the details for that specific country showing forest coverage as well as forest loss. So we can see here between the years 2000 and 2020, approximately 40% of forest coverage in the ivory coast was lost. And we wanted to make sure to connect forest coverage info with global trade just to begin to bridge the gap between these two so that we could connect the global wood trade and environmental conditions at the source of wood extraction. Next, please. This is the global production and flows layer of the tool. Here, users can filter for specific flows as well as products and see which countries are important players for those products. And also click on and explore around and click to see which countries interest them. For instance, here we're looking at the flow of plywood into the United States. You can clearly see that the U.S. is receiving plywood from many countries around the globe. And also, we show the top five trading partners by volume. So here the usual suspects, China, Canada, Russia, kind of big timber producers are the U.S.'s top trading partners in terms of receiving plywood. Next slide, please. Likewise, we can easily switch the flow to export. So here we're seeing the export of plywood from the U.S. to different countries around the world. Again, the U.S. is a big player in the plywood exporting game, exporting a lot to countries in Latin America, with top countries being Canada, Mexico, interestingly enough, the Bahamas made the top five, which I was not expecting to see. Next, please. And then also with this tool, something that we found very interesting is that if you look at more specialty wood products like tropical hardwoods, there's some really kind of interesting findings to be had. Here we're looking at the export of tropical roundwoods. Roundwood is just logs, for lack of a better word, from Ghana to countries around the world. And with some very kind of minor exceptions, the lion's share of tropical roundwood from Ghana is going exclusively to India and China. And this portion of the tool we find really interesting because it allows you to begin to spot trade imbalances between certain countries in the global timber trade. Next, please. There's another portion of the tool where you can investigate the interaction between trading partners. Here we have highlighted Ghana and China, and you can see all of the wood products exchanged between the two countries. For instance, here the trade between these two countries is characterized by raw wood commodities flowing from Ghana to China, most notably the tropical roundwood, and then more fabricated materials like plywood and veneer flowing in the reverse direction from China back to Ghana, albeit in a much smaller volume. Next slide, please. The kind of last piece of the tool is a case studies component. And for this portion of the tool we wanted to include it just so that the more kind of number-centric, heady parts of the tool are grounded in real-world projects. And this portion of the tool allows for single narratives of specific wood products to be told from source of extraction to the site. And we have three different types of case study sites, project sites, so that's where buildings are happening, production sites, that's where wood is being manufactured from raw materials into the various products. And lastly, harvest sites, and these are generally kind of forests where wood extraction is occurring. One such case study is Ritter Ranch, which we have highlighted here. This is a 7,200 track home development outside of Los Angeles. If the user clicks on that case study, you will see this. And this is showing all of the key wood products that we've chosen to highlight for this case study here. That would include plywood, dimensional lumber, and OSB. And what this is doing is tracing those products from the project site through sites of production all the way back to sources of extraction. For instance, here you can see four plywood that was used at Ritter Ranch coming from a production site in a city in China and then being traced back to a forest in eastern Siberia. And then also included is some volumetric statistics about those different products. Next please. And then lastly, for each of the products, we show the embodied carbon and emissions data for each of the commodities at the different stages of extraction, production, and transportation. Ultimately, 3-3 is a platform for exploration education. The timber trade tool can provide better access to the complex and overlapping data that represents the process and effects of timber products. The current fragmentation of individually robust but narrow data sets and tools available to environmentalists, economists, policy makers, planners, builders, designers, and developers has left each of those groups underserved to the detriment of all. We hope that 3-3 can be a useful tool to help connect the threads of each of their roles in a larger story of the global timber trade. Thank you. Yeah, thank you guys. Thank you, Erik and James. And now I am excited to bring on Linda and her partner, Claudio, to talk about extraotopia. Can you guys hear me and see the presentation? Perfect. Perfect. Okay, so my name is Linda Tilling. And I'm Claudio Stolillo. And we are both architects from Chile and we are Aura. Aura is a research and design practice based in Chile. And in October 2020, when we started thinking about extraotopia, a research idea to challenge the extraction economies deployed throughout the Chilean landscape. The goal was to visualize the extractive machine of a copper mine in the Andes, in this case Los Palambres, with a very straightforward proposal. Let's visualize it and contest it. But as in any research, nothing is straightforward. This quote is by Freddie Perlman and he spoke against history against leviathan. And it goes, the beast knows itself to be a machine. And it knows that machines break down, decompose, and might even destroy themselves. A frantic search for perpetual motion, machines yield no assurances to counter the suspicions. And the beast has no choice but to project itself into realms of beings which are not machines. Those who are not machines, human, non-human, and entities belonging to more than human realms, their entanglements, and the ways we collectively move forward into a future scenario post extraction, is what we're researching. To understand copper or entanglements, we asked, when does Los Palambres start? It starts 5.3 million years before present time. We're in the Pliocene epoch of the geological scale, at elevations between 3,200 and 3,600 meters above sea level. Los Palambres and Frontera, along with the copper molybdenum deposit at El Pachón in Argentina, constitute Los Palambres El Pachón por recovery cluster. It's the 18th century. We are in our most common historical scale. The Spanish Empire starts mining along the Andes to bring the riches of the West Indies to Europe by using indigenous labor known as mitas. Theodore de Bray, a Belgian engraver, depicts the circumstances of a famous silver mine in Potosí, current Bolivia, referred to as the mouth of hell. Silver extraction with boiling mercury led to the forced laborer's poisoning due to refusal by the Spanish Empire to dig ventilation shafts. Moving between the depths of the mine and the surface meant pneumonia and respiratory infections for the Indians. Potosí, once the economic center of the Spanish Empire, helped fuel the globalization of the economy. Silver found its way to every corner of the world. 70 years after its opening, the ore was exhausted. It's 1914. William Braden Buford, known as the King of Copper, discovers the copper ore deposit with Los Palambres. Braden, an engineer for the Omaha and Grant's melting company, was sent to Chile in 1894 with the objective of seeing the international mining and metallurgical exhibition at Quintanormay, Santiago, and to inquire about the possibilities of mining in the country. This exhibition is considered a cornerstone for industrial mining in Chile because it introduced foreign companies and their machines and technologies to a society eager for development. The exhibition was ready to be held in April, but got postponed until late October because machineries to be exhibited at a mock-up level were later decided to be exhibited full size. In a pavilion, Chile reassembled after its inauguration at the Paris World's Fair in 1889. Braden never got to mine his copper out of Los Palambres, but was the successful mastermind behind El Teniente and Potrerillos, which he later sold to the Guggenheim brothers and the Anaconda Copper Company to cash himself out of financial problems. It's 1967. The Instituto de Investigaciones Geologicas prepared the first geological report for Los Palambres, which formally identified the perforary copper affiliation of the prospect, created in 1950s to support research and publication of scientific texts related to geology. In 1980, the Instituto de Investigaciones Geologicas merged with the mining service to form the geology and mine services, currently known as Cernajumín. Two years later, in 1969, Los Palambres Exploration resumed under a joint program conducted by the United Nations and Enami, the state mining agency. But no further exploration took place until 1979, when Anaconda South America purchased the property from the local owners and undertook detailed exploration, culminating in 1983 with a completion of a feasibility study. But with the copper prices at the time, such a large-scale project was considered uneconomic, and all work was discontinued. In 1985, Antofagosta Minerals purchased Anaconda Chile and the rights to Los Palambres. Securing in October 1997, the Environmental Resolution No. 71 from the National Environmental Commission, Conama, extraction was about to begin. The company was officially inaugurated on April 5, 2000. Okay, the mine. It took 86 years since its discovery to start an extraction process of 37 years. In 2037, the mine will exhaust the mineral and in 15-year period of dismantling will take place. This is where and when extractopia starts. The mine describes itself through four operation areas. Each of them seemingly disconnected and confined, but further together by the squid infrastructures that carry the copper slurry out of the Andes into vessels on the Pacific Ocean. Via pipes 120 kilometers along that run across beaches are buried alongside highways run beneath sidewalks and hoover about towns. The structure machine owns a collidery system. The mine is not only a structure, but also mudded out of place, which constitutes its environmental liabilities. Each of the mine's operation areas leave behind new landscapes comprised of waste and co-opted nature-based solutions that are re-chaping landscapes. From the desalination plant facilities that during operation will hold their debate ecosystem at Puerto Chumo and is already doing so by introducing Red Cask Hill as a mitigation major. A utility plantation to rival the city of Los Vilos footprint. Regionally designed as a 70-hectare evapotranspiration zone to deal with the water taken out of the copper slurry in Puerto Chumo. Now a 141-hectare zone. Tailing ponds at the Mauro Anky Is that will leave behind two million tons of tailings. These tailings will forever remain as a legacy of our own geological epoch. And slag hips on top of the rock glaciers and high mountain wetlands and re-chapes that re-chapes our borders with Argentina. These types of extraction and the environmental liabilities left behind are no stranger to Chilean geography. Mostly concentrated in the central region. A recent survey indicates that 389 of 757 national total tailings are found in the Coquimbo region. In the province of Chihuahua where Los Belambres is located, 13 are active, 52 inactive and 26 abandoned. The Mauro is the fifth largest in the country and along with the Iyayes amount to two million tons of tailings. Both of them closely monitored but an earthquake away from disaster. Or at least a strong wind. Like the one this time last year that a blue toxic a toxic dust of particularly heavy metal on the town of Taimanes. So after our trip we decided to retrieve more information about the massive environmental liabilities that develop as the fleshy bodies of the structure machine. Knowledge about this new landscape can only be retrieved via their environmental impact assessment. 22 projects in the last 21 years with more than 20,000 pages of content developed by consultants hired by the mine are available online at the environmental impact assessment website. And what struck us the most was the way this ecosystem impacts were drawn and the seemingly interchangeable nature of non-human species like trees, fish and waters. Remove one and compensate somewhere else. The open pit, the slag heaps, the tailing ponds all take advantage of the high ground low ground topography or sit on top of areas that saw water run. Water that is not caught before it reached low ground and is bypassed to the nearest town. It also revealed the ways this content is explained to community members in the mandatory community participation meetings avoiding complexity via presentations no conversations. And how ecosystem concerns are presented by participants to to these meetings but hardly ever addressed. The pages on this library I can hear the frogs at night anymore or my whole life I got trimmed. I've sent my kids to school and support my family because of it. Now there are no trims in the river. This is the moment we realized we needed to build a network of advisors to understand what our own discipline is unable to grasp. That is how we approach a marine biologist, a forest engineer, a microbiologist and a glaciologist asking them what concerns they express around these massive environmental liabilities. To our surprise, much of the current literature doesn't address co-opted nature based solution at this scale. So for whom do we draw? As we started to develop the idea of speculations, we saw a much urgent need around the ways we visualize what the mine is and what it does. How do we draw what is there but can be seen because of scale? How can the biocultural heritage of a place be put front and center confronting the idea of managerial development? This past May 2021, the mine submitted for review the environmental impact assessment for a new and final stage of its development, which introduces a desalination plan to Los Villos Bay. And following Chilean environmental law, we are currently waiting for the official community consultation to participate with drawings that would translate the concerns the subject matter experts expressed. So in partnering with the NGO Surgencia, who do outreach and environmental education in Coquimbo, we've been discussing the impacts of Brian in the introduction and the introduction of Conger Eel in Los Villos Bay, understanding what do the documents inside the AIA not show. These discussions are for the development of a portfolio of drawings to be printed out to bring to the official community consultation and start a conversation rather than a presentation with the mine consultants that run these meetings. With the prompt, what do we know? With the information obtained from the official reports and a follow-up set of drawings with the questions the subject matter experts expressed related to the mines submitted baselines. And we're doing the same with the eucalyptus plantation and a forest engineer, charging the drawings with what we know from previous EIAs and current academic knowledge production. This is an ongoing exercise since going through all the information submitted takes time. This strategy follows Javier Barangueran's work where she suggests revolutionizing AIAs. The proposed strategies differ but entail the need to put the uneven ecological and legal outcomes of previous environmental assessments at the forefront of the baselining processes in the present. These drawings are part of an action that recognizes the EIA documents as a landscape ledger that mostly registers the mine's input. Knowledge about our territory, it's captured inside the reports of private companies that hire consultants to enable extraction, leaving the state with no capacity to contest them. To bring these representations to the meetings is a strategy to secure that the community's concerns are not only voiced but also seen. And that the drawings get archived within the official community consultation document, which usually just displays content as text. This time, a visualization will tag along and remain forever embedded in this ledger. In 2013, Archelisiones, an architecture published in housing in Chile, in conjunction with GSAP, published Who Cares for Chilean Cities, we ask Who Cares for Chilean Landscapes. The development of our extractopia research related to studios and exhibitions. And our other research threats that started with the incubator price financing can be followed via our social media channel and website. Thank you. Thank you so much, Linda and Claudio. That was so amazing. And I know that Linda, who teaches in Chile, has a number of other initiatives that are embedded and interlaced with this research that is supported by the incubator. So I love that it has continued life in other forms. If I could ask James, Eric, Sika, JP and Bless to come back. We have time for one question from James for the group. And then we're going to have to wrap up, unfortunately. James? Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. One thing I found really interesting in both the projects is sort of this pursuit of connecting various methodologies and ideas like extraction, harvesting, tracking, modeling, visualizing in pursuit of sort of propelling immunities. And you both explore methods that kind of relate to this on the ground expertise and connect them sort of in tandem with wider data analytics and data visualizations. So that was something I found really interesting. I wanted to ask both of you sort of how you understand how to choose between those methods or how you choose to combine them, how do you sort of balance the kind of multi-scalar approach in terms of developing your projects? Sika, I don't know. You can go for it. Thanks. Well, in our case, the multi-scalar approach of collecting data, it's been a challenge. This is actually why we switched from we're going to just go ahead and do a speculation. And then we realized there's so much data that goes unacknowledged because it's not visualized properly. It's needless to say we mentioned in the presentation, it's 20,000 pages of information. Right now, there are several initiatives in Chile to understand how the environment data gets visualized. There is an initiative in a university in Santiago called Observatorio Ambiental who actually asks those questions. How do we actually empower communities through the publicly available reports that private entities put out but are somehow the only knowledge we have about our environment? So the multi-scalar situation, it's a challenge. But at the same time, I think, and we both feel right now that it's a very, it's we're at our crossroads here in Chile. Last weekend, we elected people to write our new constitution and the rights of nature are being put forward and centered. So there's a lot of scientists that got elected to rewrite the new constitution. So environmental concerns and the ways that we engage with the data sets, I think, are going to be discussed more widely. And we hope to also participate in that conversation here. I don't know if that actually answers the question. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting. Sorry, I don't want to cut you off, Sika. Yeah. For us, I think we, because we still haven't necessarily explored all the stakeholder groups, each of the real estate developers are interested in parcel level data and solar banks while, and their stakeholder group, while, you know, climatologists are kind of interested in the macro level stuff. So for us, we're, we're letting sort of how things evolved and guide how we approach the scale question. And for me, I had these grand ideas that we would be able to cover West Africa within, like in one or two years. And I'm realizing that if we're talking about scale and the interplay of scale and these climate models and data, that we might be spending a lot more time developing our relationships, our partnerships, than I originally anticipated, because the data isn't there. So we're talking about digitization of information. We're talking about making it, negotiating contracts to make the, the actual data publicly available. So that is all what we're now as a team trying to sort out as we move the, hopefully the project to a new phase. Yeah, it's super interesting. Oh, go ahead. Just, I was thinking also that you guys both touch on the, the problems of like, securing data sets. For us here, it's not that the data set, it's not there. It's like who built the data set. And that's the thing that we're kind of like challenging. We've been talking a lot about at some point of our research through one of the research threats to actually enact some sort of citizen science collection of data, because there's so much information that lives within the communities, but it's not part of the the information that gets placed inside the baseline that the mind develops. It's usually consultants, private consultants, colder, that build the baselines. But in the process of doing so, neglect to incorporate community data also for their changing landscape. So there's an interesting concept there because the baseline somehow fixates a moment in time. And there's a counter argument that we should be looking at baseliding processes of like, how do we collectively construct the data set? I don't know if you guys have given any thought to that regarding your own project, because I was very interested. We were talking where do you guys find the the data sets for the for the timber trade? Well, you bring up a very good philosophical question, which is the way we we think about data is this objective thing, but it's not because it's very much influenced by who creates it. And it's not something that I had even thought about until you actually brought it up. So for us, we are thinking about how do we even use what's available and use AI and other techniques to actually fill in the gaps because of the simple fact that maybe some in some countries, this information is not going to be there. But we never even thought about what is the actual sort of legitimacy of what the baseline that we're actually feeding the machine. And so I think you bring up a really interesting a really interesting area of inquiry that we need to kind of dig deeper into as we move forward our project. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's similar sentiments for our project. I mean, one of the challenges we had because our fundamental goal is to try and combine pretty disparate datasets, we spent a lot of time sort of investigating what it would mean to overlap them. Do they even overlap if they do how what does the reduce data set? And there's certainly a bit of authorship there. But we're also, because of the nature of our data sets and sort of the scale of them, we're a little bit kind of beholden to what we can find certainly with large timber trade data sets coming from huge institutions, World Bank, UN, etc. They sort of baked in a level of uncertainty with that. But there's also, it's very difficult to kind of evaluate that level of uncertainty. So we knew going in that we had to really be a little bit. We had multiple data sets that were sort of showing related ideas and we knew that we could overlap them. And if certain things didn't line up or certain things really stood out, that didn't make sense, we could investigate that a bit further and say, okay, maybe some of these numbers are wrong or something needs to be investigated a little bit further. Why are certain countries seemingly producing more than would make sense? And that's something that we spent a lot of time. Eric was really like a kind of dated whiz was really able to investigate a lot of that stuff super efficiently. But yeah, it's obviously a challenge to try and balance that ultimately because we want to make the tool, but we have to work with the data that we can get. I think one of the other issues that we've been dealing with our project and a lot of other projects that kind of operate from 30,000 feet looking down on the earth is how do we tell the story of the data that we want to tell without getting lost in space for lack of a better word and how do we ground it? And what do we lose by only staying kind of at the level of that data? I mean, of course, we're kind of missing out on all of the kind of community knowledge and knowledge on the ground that you had mentioned. And I think one of the ways that we kind of willingly tried to mitigate that was by incorporating the case studies in our project and in that way kind of grounding it a little bit. Of course, that's not a super exhausted way to do it, but it's something that I think at least when I do these types of very data heavy, big data set oriented projects, something that I'm aware of that I don't want to leave the audience kind of lost in space and disconnected from what the actual project is about. So that's another kind of balancing act that you have to play in my mind. I have one more question. I'm sorry, Linda, this is for you because you are doing a lot of what we are trying to do. Our aspiration is to make our platforms a crowd-sourced data set. Micro data set. Sika, I'm sorry. You know what? I actually would love to let you guys continue this discussion. So let me wrap up the formal program just to let everyone else go and we can let you guys stay on. Because I love hearing this discourse and this is the part of the goal of the incubator prize is to advance this kind of interchange of ideas and fostering this collaboration. So I love this, but I also want to thank everybody else who presented tonight. I want to thank David Benjamin for his leadership and Lyla for helping us as always getting every program out the door. So thank you and please stay in touch. If anyone watching the program has a question about the incubator prize in the next cycle, please feel free to email me at gsapalumni at columbia.edu. The applications are open in August for the next cycle and the class of those graduating 2007 to 2021 are eligible. So look forward to those applications. Thank you, everybody.