 Okay, I think we can get started. If my clocks are synced to yours, I think we can get started. Welcome back everybody to the Planning Futures Conference organized by Hibbet Buakar streaming from all these places in the world to your living rooms. We are in the third panel of the day. We're rethinking planning from the margins and just been an inspiring powerful conversation thus far really looking forward to seeing how the conversation continues to expand and so on. So my name is Delia Wendell. I'm an assistant professor at MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning. And it's my pleasure to be your moderator today. I will be brief but quickly introduce our illustrious interlocutors in this third panel. And I will begin with Teresa Caldera, who is an anthropologist and professor of urban planning at the University of California, Berkeley. As you no doubt know, Professor Caldera's groundbreaking book, City of Walls, which looked at forms of segregation shaping the urban rich and poor on peripheries and fortified enclaves of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Caldera's current research projects are focused on new forms of urban citizenship and collective life across four cities in the global south, rights claims in the context of peripheral urbanization, and how artistic expression bears on our conceptualization of democratic public space. And I'm going to start with Teresa. We will next hear from Akira Drake Rodriguez, who is an assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Rodriguez's work and research examines the ways that disenfranchised groups make claims on urban spaces to access and sustain forms of political power. And urban planning politics in this way is critical, I think it highlights the continued marginalization of minority groups through urban policies that defund affordable housing and public institutions, while at the same time supports militarized police forces. And our next speaker diverging space for deviance is a study on the politics of public housing in Atlanta and is forthcoming I think in just a few months. Our next speaker will be James, when age Spencer, who is vice provost and Dean of the graduate school as well as professor of urban and regional planning at Louisiana State University. And his current research focuses on international urbanization and planning with a particular focus on water supply, infrastructure and inequality and infectious disease. Much of his research and planning practice has been focused in Southeast Asia, and his 2014 book, Global Urbanization tracks the everyday experiences and transnational dependencies of globalization and a comparative study across global communities. And last but certainly not least, we will hear from Libby Porter, who is a professor of sustainability and urban planning and vice chancellor's principal research fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne. He also leads research on the politics of urban land marginalized property rights and dispossession critical urban governance and decolonizing urban planning of her many generative areas of research her work related to unlearning the colonial futures of planning from an indigenous rights and history perspective is critical I think to the conference such as this that helps to locate conversations coming from that perspective. Professor Porter's most recent work in that regard is the co authored book planning in indigenous Australia from Imperial foundations to post colonial futures. Thank you all for being here and sharing reflections on planning from the margins. Thank you for joining in. Do add your questions to the chat and I'll do my best to facilitate the Q&A that comes after, but we will hear from the speakers in that order and my last task before I hand over the virtual for will be to kind of center a little bit some of the questions driving discussion in this panel. Our collective task. Our collective task is to rethink planning from the margins, conceiving of the quote unquote margins as both places, and also positions of power, exclusion and neglect. We conceptualize planning practice from the margins from those related experiences and knowledge. What new theorizations could thinking from and planning with the margins bring to light. So with that, I will hand over to Teresa caldera. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you very much for this introduction delian and I cannot not thank Heba for organizing this absolutely fantastic conference to bring us all together here and to create in this space for so many provocative questions and discussions. So, Hey, by your rock to this is fantastic so congratulations and thank you very much for having included me in this in this conversation. So, what I want to do today is, as I reflect on the questions that delia has just read. So, I, and one of the main was how new views of the center of the mainstream merge when we foreground productively marginalized perspectives or how can we reconsider margins. And so I certainly agree that to take the perspective of powerless people in into consideration and to, and to think from neglected sites are things that can disrupt dominant formulations. I think to unsettle the notion of margins as a position from where to formulate planning and political projects. And I propose instead that we think in terms of transversality. And not only to challenge many streams epistemologies but also to think without dualisms and binary such as margin center or margin mainstream, and to think from unstable and negotiated positions, rather than from fixed ones. To argue, the notion of transversality is more apt for the understanding of the complexity of social process, especially in the urban South, and more importantly for the construction of objects of analysis that may reveal the emergent and novel processes. Transversality may also allow new forms of criticism and to, and thus become a more powerful tool for political articulation for remaking planning and imagining alternative futures. I should start by saying that the ideas that are present here have been developed in conversation with three colleagues. One Kelly Gillespie and Abdul Malik Simone. During the last several years and especially since the beginning of the pandemic. We have worked together to analyze data we have produced individually in the cities where we work. We have developed concepts and perspectives to think of those cities one in relation to the other and simultaneously experimenting with forms of ownership that are collective. As I will explain a bit one of the dimensions of transversality that interest us refers to the type of intellectual work that we're trying to create. When I say we today I'm referring to the four of us and our collective work. In this brief talk I want to discuss two possible ways to engage with the notion of transversality. On the one hand, it can be considered as a feature of modes of urbanization, their common and the global south. And on the other hand, it can be taken as a methodological tool as a way of constituting objects of analysis that cut across different fields process cities. From both perspectives to think in terms of transversality can offer offer insights for politics and for planning practices. Let's me start with the first perspective. I began to use the notion of transversality a few years ago when writing about the process of prefer urbanization. This means a way of producing the urban that is quite pervasive in the global south and we and in which residents themselves largely construct their cities. I argued that prefer urbanization does not necessarily entail the growth of cities towards the hinterlands. It does not simply refer to a spatial location in the city, its margins, but rather to what way of producing the space that can be anywhere. I argued that one of the characteristics of this mode of production of space is that it engages transversally with official logics. The other characteristic of this prefer urbanization is that first it operates with a certain temporality and agency. The residents are agents of urbanization, and this is a long term process. It also generates new modes of politics and creates highly unequal and heterogeneous cities. There are two points in these characterizations that are important for our discussion today. First, although I continue to use the terms peripheries and peripheral, the focus of the analysis on the process of production of space, not on fixing it to a certain location. Peripheries are not fixed in two ways. On the one hand, these spaces are constantly being transformed and improved, and one day they cease to be peripheral. And on the other hand, the process of peripherization is constantly being displaced. It moves around in the city as some areas improve and become legalized and cease to be peripheral, while others more precarious become available for new developments. The fact that one area is regularized does not mean that the one adjacent to it will be creating the geographies of remarkable heterogeneity and inequality. Additionally, a crucial characteristic of this process is that residents are full citizens, agents of the construction and urbanization of their space and articulators of their own politics. Thus, to think in terms of peripheral organization is to set aside views of the city in terms of both spatial margins and social marginality. This has important consequences for considerations of how they can be engaged in planning processes. And the second point that I want to emphasize is the following. When I argue that peripheries engage transversely with official lodgings, I call attention to the fact that peripheries are a space that frequently unsettle official lodgings. For example, those of the legal property, formal labor, state regulation and market capitalism. And alas, they do not contest this logics directly, as much as they operate with them in transversal ways. That is, by engaging the many problems of legalization, regulation, occupation, planning and speculation, they redefine those logics and until doing generate urbanizations of heterogeneous types and remarkable political consequences. Cities that have undergone political urbanization are usually marked by significant spatial and social inequality. Nevertheless, because of this transversal engagements, inequalities cannot always be mapped out in simple and dualistic positions such as regulated versus unregulated legal residents versus Islam, formal versus informal. Rather, these cities exhibit multiple formations of inequality, where categories such as formal and regulated are always shifting and unstable. Thus, one needs to set aside the notion of informality and the dualistic reason it usually implies in thinking terms of transversal logics to understand these complex urban formations which are inherently unstable and contingency. To emphasize transversality means to realize that peripheries are improvised by necessarily chaotic or unplanned, but not necessarily chaotic and unplanned. Residents produce spaces themselves, but the state is not absent. It regulates, legislates, writes plans, provide infrastructure, polices and upgraded spaces. Quite frequently though, the state acts after the fact to modify spaces that are already built and inhabited. The conditions of irregularity and illegality regarding land and peripheral areas are numerous and vary widely. Moreover, they change over time as residents engage in different politics and relationships with the state. Residents bat on the possibility of legalization and regularization and most frequently either succeeding seeing it happen or live with the consequence of ongoing irregularity. Thus, there is a temporality related to legalization and regularization as well. The state is co-producer of this process of transformation and of peripheral urbanization. In sum, the attention to transversality allows to characterize a process that defies both the fixity of locations and the rigidity of classifications. To think in terms of transversality is to avoid arguments that usually come in binaries and that imply that what pertains to one side could be clearly separate from what belongs to the other side, the foremost versus informal for example. This process of production of space operates simultaneously, inherently and transversally with irregularity and regularity, legality and illegality, formality and informality. Moreover, all these conditions are constantly being transformed and the state and its several branches are crucial in these transformations. But to think in terms of transversality is also to open new ways of understanding the planning process in these areas. Planning intervenes in process of peripheral urbanization, not by trying to foresee and frame the future by rather by acting after the fact that I said. Planning in cities that are in large part produced by other construction much operate with the realization that will not create the framework for the production of space in the future. But rather we'll try to fix, repair, regulate, rearrange urban areas that were produced in spite of it following other types of blueprint. Planning thus comes to regularize, legalize, give amnesty to illegal occupations, mend, bring infrastructure to already built areas. As it does this, it must operate with the residents builders citizens, it must engage them in the planning process. This opens spaces for coalitions, intersectional configurations, struggles and the articulation of a counter practice. Planning must be modest in its ambitions and careful in its interventions. It must work with what exists instead of against what encounters. It should not operate in the mode of erasure and assuming a tabula rasa as is the norm in modernist planning. You should learn other practices. But let me turn now to the other way of conceiving transversality that my colleagues and I are both developer and trying to use. Here transversality is a tool of analysis, a method that we engage with, with intention of producing new forms of knowledge and of practice. My interest is put in Sao Paulo, Delhi, Jakarta and Johannesburg into conversation comes from various directions, but two are important to mention. First, our understanding that there are familiar process unfolding in the four of them in the four cities, but in quite different ways. Second, our conviction that tropes usually evoked in the analysis of the city such as violence density, failed infrastructure, etc. In addition to being usually dystopian do not take as much far either to reveal new and emerging urban process or to produce a new types of analysis. The familiar process detected in four cities that we study include democratization, its instabilities and its reversals includes the transformation in modes of collective lies that a generation of young urbanized born in the city are creating a days of as they are belong to the whole city, rather than only to a specific location includes the way in which young women are reshaping their femininity. But the focus on familiarities could not take us too far. Whatever was similar like democracy was out so deeply different. We have always been interested in the difference, but their exploration frequently leads into modes of knowledge production that we found problematic. One of them is the traditions of various studies in their consolidated modes of conceiving of what makes a Latin American city or a South Asian city or an African city and so on. So we go beyond air studies, located modes of thinking proliferate with their tenants to emphasize enclosed units, either Johannesburg or Africa, for example, but also either the margin or the center, the Islam or the formal city, and so on. In this mode of thinking the tendency is always to emphasize what sets poles apart, what makes each side distinctive, what makes the margin different from the center, what makes some policy different from Johannesburg. In psychology this is a deeply rude mode of imagining objects of analysis that can be traced back to cultural relativism and the assumption created to undermine evolutionism that each social cultural reformation is a kind of totality and must be analyzed in its own terms, if you want to avoid the scenes of ethnocentrism or racism for that matter. Even if we think according to other registers, we're more often than not direct to set things apart. The modern social fact that anchors theories in the social science is always imagined as a distinct fact, purged of its representational communities as Mary poofing so brilliantly argues. In reality, at the core of the social science or of efforts of thinking in general as structuralism would argue, there is classification ordering, and to classify, as Mary Douglas demonstrates, is to taboo the ambiguous spaces between categories. With the notion of transversals, we are interested in both getting ourselves immersed in and going beyond the impurity of these spaces in between. We're interested in drawing lines across what has been kept apart. Since Kelly got Malik and I started to work together, it was clear to us that we would like to bring Sao Paulo, Delhi, Jakarta, and Johannesburg into conversation in ways that both maintained and disrupted these specificities. His straight comparison was out of the question, as it would tend to protect his specificities. Just the position which I had used before in the analysis of pre urbanization was a possibility we considered. The case were dissimilar and it would orchestrate their juxtaposition in a way that they would, they could illuminate each other, force attention to different aspects of each other. We came to understand both comparison juxtaposition or we came to understand both comparison juxtaposition as modes of adjacency, as ways of keeping things alongside of each other. It seemed to us that although several processes might be illuminated in this way, like the process of auto construction and peripheral urbanization, it was still not the best we could do while trying to work through these different archives. Up to that point, we're thinking of each of us altering separate pieces and combining them in a volume, each one talking about the city she was studying. Transversality comes to us as a possibility as a space of experimentation and alternative transversals are things that are situated across, neither here nor there. In the recent panel we should present our work Kelly Gillespie defined transversals as lines drawn to cross other lines. To operate transversally means to select a few empirical entry points that allow us to talk about the urban and its transformation anyways. They are the perspectives from which to think ethnographically about collective life in the cities to operate transversally is to put particularities into conversation with each other. The way you operate is to select an empirical entry point from one city and give each other enough ethnographical information about the four cities, so that I can absorb it and think of each of our cases collectively and with the, and with the terms of the others. We write together and write and rewrite this regarding who is writing about which city, accepting our different styles and theoretical choices, and we altered the resulting analysis collectively as we did recently in the article about the pandemic. As we work transversally. Sorry, sorry to interrupt Teresa but we're over time I'm wondering if, if we might be able to wrap up a little bit. Okay, so I will. Apologies paragraph. Thank you. So let me just say this. As we work transversally we do not aim at arrive at general conclusions and models. We're not specially interested in a model of southern urbanism, for example, a model that fits all. We always talk about urbanism in the plural. We're interested in describing particularities and their processes in cities. Transversality is a process that take us away from area studies from cultural relativism from classifications from binaries from localized drinking from carefully defining and garden identities from comparison from juxtaposition. Transversality is a mode of operation of paying attention that requires that we start with new names new definitions new objects, which will have to remain fluid, unlocated woven across what are were originally different archives that we put into conversation with each other. We think of transversality is a method that can generate alternative epistemology that may anchor planning practice capable of unsettling formations of power and entrenched inequalities. Thank you and sorry for going beyond the time. That was excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you for your provocations. Allow me to turn over the floor now to Professor Akira Rodriguez. Thank you so much. Good afternoon to everyone and I'm really excited to be in conversation with this group on these topics in this moment. I joined others and thinking the organizers, Hida and Leela amongst them in bringing together such a wonderful event throughout this day I'm looking forward to the next panel as well. This afternoon. It's quite funny because I kind of feel like I can just say, like, same a little bit to Teresa's presentation because it feels like a lot of the issues that I have questions for were really answered through a lot of the theorizing that you just provided. And so I'm looking forward to the discussion as well. So I sort of offer these provocations that have emerged in my work of studying marginalized communities and marginalized spaces within urban planning. I haven't thought about this for a while and really couldn't figure out. Very similarly these sort of takeaways or best practices or lessons learned in any way that I felt like would be really productive and so I kind of wanted to flip it a bit and offer out these tensions that have emerged. I start here with a map. This is a map of public housing that once existed in the city of Atlanta. And I think about how this map of communities is essentially one could consider it a map of the margins, even though it's just downtown Atlanta. These developments replace the work progress administration's designation of slums, and yet they remain pretty adjacent to these very productive circuits of capital in the downtown area. So while they were marginalized again within the downtown, they were still relatively privileged to those whose homes they replace those who were excluded admission into these developments and those who would come in the later years of the program. These early residents assimilated with greater ease would have an expanding private housing market available to them were afforded an undue amount of federal, state and local support, public private philanthropic, economic and political, and benefited from better quality housing relative again to those who lived in public housing at the end of the last century. Of course to be marginalized is always relative, but I wonder if in constructing histories of marginality of the narrative must always focus on the incorporation of their interest into the mainstream. In my recent work, I find that these in tensions exist in my intent and practice. Those who are marginalized in the case of Philadelphia public schools the actual site of the school the institution of public schools, the teacher and the urban student want to have their perspective centered their voices heard and their priorities on the agenda. Working to co produce that work, the expert is forced into the middle if not the front to provide legitimacy. And the discursive material practices of planning the co production of marginal plans are iterated through the language of plan speak experiences are collated graph and map outliers dismissed and community reconstructed. If the expert is the center, then eventually the field and the plan returns to the four. The result is this plan which requires a bounding of place and time inherently creating new margins. So we begin to worry about the role of the plan and stretching out the protest, or the political rage as we stopped us at earlier into angle benchmarks, limited focus areas and ever competing visions. Another tension I reached early on in my work in Atlanta. This issue of representation as the endpoint of the marginal narrative. It appears throughout public housing history. There's always tokenism, these identity politics and descriptive representation, as shown here by the end of the public housing program in Atlanta for example public housing demolition. The program is positioned by as common sense by four black women leaders, the head of the housing authority, the chief of police, the superintendent of public schools and the in the mayor. These women worked alongside and against black women had households he range from the very young to a recently and still empowered senior tenancy striving together to articulate a coherent narrative of marginalization. The organization offered up the decayed environment of public housing, as the soul determinant of their social positioning. Hope six new urbanism and other markers of smart growth shaped a return to environmental determinism and the central role of the planner, who was now also a developer and later site manager and social service provider. Publishing a coherent narrative of marginalization rooted in environmental determinism that was co constructed through the legitimate planner developer, the descriptive representation of marginalized residents ended up being just a mirror of the status quo. Outside of these framing and method of methodological issues of marginalization and its study. I find my empirical work is challenged by these tensions as well. Finding them in public safety and the abolitionist futures in my work in public housing and public schools was also fairly central to some of the protests over the summer in the US. This tension and marginal spaces comes from being wholly devoid of public infrastructure, including state produced public safety from police officers to street lights to surveillance cameras. This literally creates opportunities for harm, also precluding the conditions for communities to collectively act towards measures of repair accountability and self determination. There's also a massive amount of state violence that materializes in the margins as interpersonal violence, the industrialization as a precursor to intimate harm. The violence of the state that marginalizes the person head of black women and its complicity and sexual assault rates. But calls for safety from the margins are often answered by the state produced public safety. So black women call for greater safety, which brings them into direct conflict with their family members and themselves who are targets of that excessive policing and surveillance. Young students call for police free schools, yet without local support these calls are subsumed into movements to reform and defund. Again, filtered through the lens of the planning expert. Many of the other speakers on the previous panel spoke at length about this tension here and this problem of decolonization. I return also to taking Young's work about the colonization as a metaphor, the tendency to romanticize and appropriate theories and practices that are rooted in repatriating land resources and autonomy to indigenous race and people. We take, for example, these moves to occupy as a move to unsettle while occupation as a metaphor can be a discursive way of situating marginalized perspective as taking up physical space. It's clear links to the settler project, particularly as a way of reclaiming private property, make it difficult to untangle from the larger project of racial capitalism. Repatriating resources and control requires a disentangling of the individual from the land, the land from the improvement, the improvement from the political economy. I can compare this to occupying housing authority offices for rent strikes that went on to improve the conditions of public housing for all. Privatizing these public spaces has thus shifted the terms by which and spaces in which we occupy. When you occupy and privatize you see the space to future occupation. This really came out during my studies of resident management corporations, tenant leaders who had mobilized at the margins about the central need to support and fund public housing for low income residents. A very collective good and project for suddenly enforcing lease agreements with the neighbors and surveilling household members taking on the role as the legitimate housing manager. Many years later disbanded these corporations to vote for the eventual demolition and dismantling of public housing in Atlanta. Many would end up in one of the mixed finance mixed income mixed use multifamily or single family units that replace the public multifamily developments. This summer Philadelphia had another occupation and two very public and prominent sites, the entry to Fairmont Park, the first and largest park in the city, and the area in front of the housing authority. These occupations were explicitly about the failure of these two public entities and creating space for those who were chronically experiencing homelessness while also embodying identities that were not accounted for in these public services. So the public housing agency does not recognize the non familial household as legitimate and does not service the 16 year old runaway. As the public parks expansive 800 plus acres have no respite for those experiencing homelessness, even in the many corners of wooded areas that go in touch in the middle of the sixth largest US city. Those seeking shelter in the park are subject to disruption and disturbance maybe even arrest, but far more likely will be subsumed into the mainstream homeless outreach social service system. Nevertheless, after many weeks of occupation leaders of these two movements, which while new allied and receive support from existing radical organizations in the city, reached an agreement with the city to immediately dismantle the encampment structures. The agreement included a number of arrangements that could largely be constructed as a step towards social housing. There were some rehabilitated units from the housing authority for others shelters or some more, and we even got some tiny homes in the mix. The scatter site units would be joined together in a land trust where the consumers would receive right at first refusal to all city land up for sale. This is what radical planning studios are made of. As part of the encampment occupants who are evicted to be clear, the state has constructed new categories for the marginalized, sorting some into existing programs and creating new programs of exclusion for others. The end of the social movement, a set of arrangements or policies, transforming existing social relations can result in creating new forms of categories and exclusions or new margins. American Philadelphia schools produced an immediate tension that may not be an actually existing tension, but certainly as an ideological one. While urban planarcy housing as a necessary and complicated land use a component of home values for most is directly related to school quality. In the early revival of us cities that we bracket in the 1970s or so, we see cities as hubs for the young and the nesters non families and artists. So many of urban amenities that centered authenticity experiences in place making created a familiar cookie cutter template of the 21st century revitalized city. As cities began attracting more affluent families public schools also became amenities in some areas, while others became sites of closure and secondly, often new spaces for new families to create new amenities. A majority black high school was demolished, the university adjacent to it is helping to construct a new elementary school for its growing young faculty family settling nearby. As schools and marginalized areas are shuttered long time families leave and their devalued homes are valorized by newcomers with new amenities, the margins return to the center. In doing this work with predominantly black women single married widowed partners serving as caregivers and not the ties to the service industry and increasingly the gig economy, clearly stand in sharp contrast to what can only be framed as an anti worker political movement. This movement resulted in the passage of prop 22 and the destabilization destabilization of attempts to center marginalized service care and professional gig workers priced out of cities. As cities grow into areas of amenity pleasure excess and escape marginalized workers commute from ever distant origins, spend less time and earn less wages at their work destinations, and are receiving the burden to the state's evolution of employer responsibility and workers compensation risk health and safety. This anti worker movement also foreclosed as one of the central ideas about cities as sites of accumulation certainly but also as sites associate economic mobility. Here them, we see the marginalized are not brought into the fold but marginalized even more to the point of outright displacement. Finally, a more recent problem emerging in the era of big data, but arguably was here all along. I spoke also about this in the beginning this urgency and planning to speak in this language of power. I often position improve my students to translate planning as a language of power, but occasionally we start to teach it use it, and suddenly it is the only language spoken. So our quest often my class to show a more representative more complete more full story using more data points from photos to stories to surveys is perhaps to focus maybe on the inputs and processes without thinking about whether we are truly transforming the plans are just accommodating more the marginalized groups with them. Thank you. Thank you so much, Professor Rodriguez. Next we have Professor James Spencer, I can turn the floor over to you. Thank you. And thanks for the prior to two speakers very interesting to see. I'm going to shift gears a bit. Yeah, this may be a little bit different but I, but I promise it's going to be in the same vein of the theme of the conference and and really because when I got the invite. I was excited to kind of, you know, share some ideas, but I also took to heart the centering of the theme on war conflict and violence that he but again like everybody else thank you for putting this together it looks like a great collection here. And also on planning, and the planning terminology that's also used in shaping this, this collection of speakers and ideas, and really center on bringing theoretical perspectives to action on a range of issues in and outside of the university. Right. And so in, in that sense, it's going to be shifting a little bit but I think a cure what you sort of ended with with sort of the use of data to really understand these kind of intense political dynamics is really the spirit I think that that we as try to strike that that balance. Now, what I'll talk about is three basic things but kind of who I am, what my motivation for research are and my research trajectory, because in order to understand the research trajectory. You have to understand the other two things. And as a, as an anthropology undergraduate major, I, you know, I can't really do anything conceptual without situating myself within the framework of what I'm sharing because it wouldn't really make sense otherwise I think. So let me just start off. You know who I am. I do and I, there's a number of people that I haven't seen the names in years since I was at UCLA and elsewhere. You may or may not me know me from the planning field and I buy that I mean the disciplinary planning field. But it was sort of later in my kind of professional life that I got involved in planning as an academic discipline. In retrospect, look at the other prior experiences and jobs that I've had as planning jobs, right as jobs in which the skills that I that I developed and started teaching and research on in planning are really sort of relevant beyond what we conventionally think of as planning. And again, given the spirit of what this what this collection of discussions is oriented towards how do we shape the future of planning. And I think that there's, we need to think about what planning is, and what are the relevant institutions. Now, I will put the, the, the qualification on everything I will say, while I do think that what I do fits into a post colonial neocolonial critical perspective. I would absolutely say that what the subjects that I work on. As critical, right, or post colonial or anti colonial in the subject themselves, it's actually more the location of the research itself that I see in that frame. And I think that's, it's important to sort of make that distinction because, because they both need to work in concert and pedagogically I think we need to understand that this their their multiple aspects of post colonial when we think about planning and the need for for bringing or bringing theory to action or, you know, whatever power you want to call it. So anyway, I'll let's say to to kind of critical critical experiences I think, shaped the way that I've approached my research in the longer term. You know when I finished college I worked in Vietnam I had a fellowship to live in Vietnam and in this was 1990 and 1991. And at the time it was a very sort of rare experience and following on that I worked for an organization called the, you know, sort of, it's called the US NGO form on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and more. You know, another name was the US into China reconciliation project which was kind of an outgrowth of an anti war movement. Right. So if you think about, you know, sort of post coloniality that the initial sort of experiences that brought me to were really sort of in the, the, the tail end of the almost the ideal type of an anti colonial struggle. Right. And perhaps the most widely recognized, you know, struggle that real war and conflict struggle against colonies and and the US included in that. So the second experience was working at the Ford Foundation, where, you know, it is sort of very much of, you know, a button down kind of, you know, capital based institution, yet on the other hand it is very radical in some ways, though it doesn't like to to promote that. And I'll come back to a bit of that in the past. So, so those are sort of that the, the primary kind of experiences that sort of shaped the ways that in which I professionally engaged with a, a colonial type of moment in the world. And, and approach planning. Right. And, and the perspectives that planning ultimately gave me, and then I brought with me into my academic career. You know, I mentioned, you know, my, speaking of my research trajectory at all actually started I did a project on the social impact and anthropology project on the social impact of Agent Orange in post war Vietnam. Right. Now that's not a planning topic. But why not. Right, this is this is something that has to do with land use it has to do with politics it has to do with, you know, human behavior, both, you know, sort of directed political violence but also sort of the follow on effects and managing development in in marginal areas and again sort of the theme of marginal areas. We tend not to think about those kinds of things as planning topics but but there's a lot of great skills that can be brought to that. You know, as a young 80 or 21 year old there's not a whole lot that that I could articulate in a coherent way on that subject but it but but I do think that if I were to go back it would be a really great subject for planning and post war planning. But I guess the other thing about the motivation first is that that whole period is that that I was exposed at a moment to a landscape, and by that I mean a physical landscape which is, which is the link to planning and a social and political landscape that in which planning was very much coming to the fore as an activity. And this, you know, in planning and planning theory we teach about utopianism we think we talk about, you know, this moment when you know, subjects for study for designing the future and in in a post colonial struggle. Right, you know, after 30 years of violent conflict and war. There's a relief when peace comes and after the five 10 years of peace. There's a moment when people realize well we've got to build things, we have to construct a new society. And so I came in in that moment when there was this where is this almost utopian vision about what what the world can and should look like and and very explicitly that would look like a post colonial society. And what I say is that thinking about and and and he I think in one of your correspondences you you said sort of what is planning in a future characterized by doom and gloom of pandemics war and conflict and which I largely agree with. To me that the background was at the moment there there's a certain moment when planning becomes more important and and and the voice of the planner who's thinking about 20 years ahead becomes more important than in the middle of the struggle. Right, and that's that's at that moment in you know so the early early 90s I think that that I just sort of happened to drop into. I will say that there's, you know, you mentioned theoretically and academically, you know, it wasn't sort of a one off thing I think because, because I am very interested in in sort of planning in this relationship to to decolonization, activism and and history writ large. And, you know, there's there are many stories out there that I think planners can engage with from a global scale that goes beyond sort of the diversity of global examples, and the unity of global approaches to capital. And, and I say that you know sort of not being this is not my academic area as a specialty, but it's a context again where a lot of the, you know, I, you know, as a child of the 60s and early 70s, you sort of embedded with a lot of the icons of civil rights and war and all these things and just exposed to at a very young age. And, you know, we talk about Ho Chi Minh we talked about the Black Panthers we talked about Martin Luther King. All of them are great and, and there's the narrative that we tell each other about them. But we oftentimes forget that MLK was very radical, right he wasn't nobody, you know that the general population was not particularly comfortable with his ideas. Nor do we recognize that the Black Panthers and this is something on a current project that I'm working on I've, you know, I come back to something that I reviewed back in the early 90s, the actually the Black Panthers offered to send military troops to the North Vietnamese government. And the North Vietnamese Foreign Ministry wrote a very nice letter back to them saying thank you will, you know, will will draw on your support when we need it. And it was a very real there, there was a very global perspective for anti capitalism anti colonial struggle. Now that's that's to say nothing of the origins of Ho Chi Minh himself, who actually he's the people talk about VQ which is overseas Vietnamese he's the first overseas Vietnamese, because at the age of you know 20 or something he went to live in France in the United States until he came back to to kind of continue the revolution and and one of the formative several of the formative experiences that he had were going to colonial Senegal and understanding that that the struggles of the Senegalese people in colonial France were very similar to the things that he faced up and grew up with. As well as living in New York, where he would go and listen to Malcolm X, and, and that shaped a lot of his thinking, and he brought that back to to his work in Vietnam that we all hear the story about. So, so there's, there's a larger history of decolonization that's out there, and lots of activism that that I think as planners we can sort of analyze these things and we can think about them from a more kind of, you know, both critical but also illustrative way. Now I will say, again, coming back to some of the other things beyond sort of my own personal experience there are institutions that were created at that time. Right that I think planners can really sort of learn from and learn about the relationship between theory and practice and you know I say that as sort of a buzzword kind of thing but but however we talk about it is sort of the concepts we discuss in, in debates in, you know, academic and other kinds of formats, and the actions that are done and I say this, you know, having worked at the Ford Foundation where you know it's interesting because the Ford Foundation was the first place where they funded the meat the first meeting between PT both and the African National Congress. And at the same time, they also funded an extensive meeting between the Vietnamese Communist Party and the ANC to discuss the value of continued struggle military struggle. Right, and these are for me these are planning. These are, these are long term planning investments. They are based on the same kinds of premises of how do we bring sort of global kind of conceptual connections and make them through a collaborative process how do we make them real and translate them into actions and decisions. Okay, anyway, all that to say that, you know, again, that in order to understand the kinds of things that I have done academically in a in this context you need to kind of understand that that background, and I will say that since those years and having those perspectives generated from my, my experiences, you know, my research trajectory has has been oriented towards, you know, sort of developing sort of the research skills and questions that that fill a gap in those things that what I see as filling a gap in those in those areas and admittedly it's very technocratic, right, explicitly so or intentionally so. You know, so for the first thing when I did my degree at UCLA, I worked a lot on, you know, urban economic development and really focusing on things like enterprise zones and empowerment zones and the earning of tax credit and, you know, in quantifying the benefits of certain things not not because I believe that that these were the absolute truths, but because in order to get the voice out there of a certain perspective in a in a policy conversation where everything was driven by economics. There's a certain kind of language that one needs to speak, right and and in order to kind of get a certain a certain voice amongst a certain group and that group I always thought as sort of the policy wonks. You know, and that's not the only perspective but it's a complementary perspective to two other things. You know, and also in terms of in terms of teaching I spent the first decade plus at the University of Hawaii. And, and again, you know, sort of. People often talk about decolonialization decolonizing the Academy and, you know, sort of knowledge systems all that stuff and I absolutely agree with them. On the other hand, in coming back to the planning aspects when we're training master's students for professional positions, and we want them to have those colonial perspectives in a functional way in meaning in a way that helps them rationalize and to our process information, you know that the some of the things that I learned outside of planning in political ecology, where we're talking about social facts, facts versus social facts and, and, you know, some of the work that was done on African national parks is is that, you know, statistics is a social fact. Sorry, I just interrupt you we were at time I'm wondering if you might be able to. Okay, thank you. Sorry about that. So, so it's sort of loosening up some of the technical aspects of what we think about in planning. And that to me is sort of the, the, the, the point of action, right, within my own research trajectory. Now I will say there's there's also institutionally we deal with government and we deal with universities, and in many ways those are kind of colonial institutions that we also are using our research and our perspectives to kind of change. And so there's more things I can talk about it on that front, but I don't want to take up too much time. So, thanks. Thank you, Professor Spencer. Appreciate that. Maybe turn it over now to our final speaker for the panel to be Porter. Thanks so much Delia and thanks everyone for wonderful comments. It's just a real privilege to join you all on this panel and, and looking forward to catching up on all the previous conversations that were a bit early in the morning to get up for so I haven't quite managed to hook into them all. And it's a, as I said, a real privilege to be speaking alongside such amazing people. You're, you're awesome. And I'm humbled. I want to share a story that will be a really familiar one in the sense of its kind of general arc as a story, even though it's a very local story from a region in my part of the world that's now called Western Victoria. But its proper name is Jaipurung country. And in speaking about this matter, I acknowledge I'm not a Jaipurung person. Indeed, I am an uninvited white guest living on stolen lands, reaping the benefits of colonisation every day in a place that's whose proper name is Birarunga or Nam, but its loud name is now Melbourne. My respects to Wurundjeri and Boonurung country, how to Wurundjeri Boonurung elders and ancestors on whose unceded sovereign land, my life and that of my family is supported. I'd like to acknowledge Jaipurung elders, ancestor and country who are currently in yet another fight of their lives. And also acknowledge that Jaipurung elders and sovereign people have asked others, including settler allies to speak about this story in appropriate ways to help find a proper solution. My respects to and solidarity with all people who are damaged by the violence of colonial capitalism and heteropatriarchy. So this particular story of the violence of colonialism is about a government transport agency and a bunch of transport planners who are wanting to widen a highway. So that they can shave a few minutes of driving time around about two minutes, two to two and a half minutes, they estimate of driving time off the trip between Melbourne and Adelaide. Now it takes about eight hours to drive between Melbourne and Adelaide. So I suspect that two minutes is probably neither here nor there when you've driven that far. But to achieve this widening around 3000 trees will have to be ripped out on a small section around 12 kilometers of this road in this little part of the world. And hundreds of those trees are highly significant Jaipurung law trees, including an 800 year old birthing tree. Here we go. 800 year old birthing tree that in the words of the Jaipurung sovereign embassy has seen over 50 generations born inside of a hollow in her trunk. And also a 350 year old directions tree that's been distinctively shaped to order the landscape and to order people's relationships within it. So to protect their country Jaipurung people and their allies established back in 2018, a series of sovereign embassy sites and have been on their country doing this work every day, ever since mid 2018. And that campaign has been continuously growing and has gained significant momentum. So this story then is really about the refusal of Jaipurung people as the sovereign people and protectors of this place to bow in the face of immense pressure impoverishment police raids racist abuse. Never mind just the kind of boring tedium of fighting through courts and land tribunals and media day after day, and to keep fighting in the face of heavy loss and very deep grief. When late last year in an act of what can only be described as utter bastardry occurring just days before Melbourne's long 2020 lockdowns coming to an end. Contractors for major roads projects Victoria accompanied by hundreds of police cut down the 350 year old directions tree and carded its body away in a truck. And they then proceeded to break up the camp at the birthing tree arrest everyone, cordon off the area and assert control. So the center had returned to the margin. The outpouring of grief and rage at the loss of this tree this irreplaceable beloved critically important tree to Jaipurung law and country was profound and Jaipurung people continue to fight through the law courts and the courts of public opinion. So there's much to learn from and with this story of settler colonial, ecocidal and genocidal intent it is of course, more than a story. It's the lived reality of Jaipurung defenders and the lived reality of country being continuously and permanently damaged. And I thought to share it because it in this context because it rather neatly encapsulates the possibility of reconceptualizing planning from the margins. And I want to share a few thoughts on that possibility here. But then I want to kind of try and problematize that possibility a little along the lines of what Teresa was saying before. Because I think actually it reveals some of the flaws in our current ways of thinking or at least in my current ways of thinking about and with the margins. So thinking about the story there's some obvious kind of margin center types of relationships so present to the kind of racialized margins of settler colonial society. There's the geographical margins of a tiny rural locality in Western Victoria at the nether ends of the world that nowhere else. You know it's thinking about this is hardly a place from which mainstream planning thinkers would think that the work of planning is being done or planning theories being done. And how those margins and centres are created and sustained is of course important. But I think they're obvious and well rehearsed and I won't unpack them further here. Instead I want to pay attention to the epistemological and ontological margins and centres at work here or perhaps in Theresa's terms the transversality of those ideas. So if we're serious about learning with and from so called margins, then that would require asking what it would mean to learn with jabberung laws and knowledge about what might constitute proper planning in this place. And we would see that jabberung planning knowledge and governance and law and theory has always been here and still remains. And that law governs relationships in an entirely different way. Whereas conbummery scholar, Mary Graham teaches the land is the law and you are never alone in that context because you are always knitted into kinship relationships with everything around you are intimately connected to country. In the words of going for Scotland alien Morton Robinson this relationship is embodied. So learning with the philosophies that come from this place then we'd see that this road cuts the body of country it cuts through the flesh and veins of country. It severs connections, it upends the normal order of things. It upends the law that's held and holds in flows and connections and relationships. And when that is damaged there's the potential to damage all of those who need country to survive which is of course all of us whether we're jabberung people or others and of course humans and other than humans as well. So learning with the philosophies that come from this place. I'm repeating that deliberately because I think it reveals something rather presumptive about what we take as assumed understanding for thinking about margins and centers jabberung law upends the assumption that jabberung is at the margins. For of course jabberung law and knowledge is the center here, not because it's recognized by mainstream society it's not in that sense it's fully marginalized. It's the center because it's here jabberung country is here it remains jabberung law remains jabberung people remain the relationship is sustained and he's at the center of the country. It's whiteness that doesn't belong it's settler colonialism that unsettles and established ancient order settling has always been unsettling a radical not belong saying this of course I don't mean that whiteness is somehow on the margins and not wanting to. Allow whiteness to give claim to being marginalized. I hope that's understood. So perhaps rather than simply asking how do we learn from the margins. I wonder if we might also need to ask how is it that a world view that doesn't belong here that is marginal in its relevance connection and relationship is both violently dominant here and perpetually sustained. What is our role in its perpetuation as planners. If we're serious about learning from the margins. What are we doing about the perpetuation of this centering dominance of things that don't belong a centering that I think most of us in this field are ourselves material to these are material to laws and world views and knowledge systems that are in their fact marginal. So I think we need to begin unpacking out a little bit of course with truth and with the root of things and thinking about how the tearing out of roots has structured the relationship between planning and indigenous people. Certainly here in this colony where I am at the moment since before the ships got here and learning the margins I think tells us how to look for how that relationship is perpetuated. And there are many analyses of that we could draw on here, particularly from brilliant indigenous scholarship on the liberal politics of recognition on the cunning seduction of settler law as a space of inclusion of the slippery ways that diversity politics co-opt and encloses exactly as Akira was was talking about before. I think these are essential for sharpening our conceptualization of how that which has centered itself perpetually wants to co-opt what it has produced as its margins. As Tony Birch, fabulous Aboriginal author here in Australia says, here in the colony that is Australia that the centres usually seen as benign. It's the apparently benign space in the planning context where you know transport planners do their so called consultation and inclusionary work. And this is of course present in this Jabron case where the transport planners kept saying that we consulted and we're just following the law while denying the kind of extant violent politics of a system where white law gets to decide who to consult with and who to ignore. So there's this kind of cultivation of symbolism in order to silence dissent and ulteriority and that's long existed. And I think it goes in its contemporary form to obscure how things continue. So back in 1985, tangent, but I'll come join it in a minute. Back in 1985, Audre Lorde spoke generously to an assembled group of white women, generously and pointedly as she always does to a group of white women in Melbourne who were fervent in their desire for difference, hence their invitation to her. And she pointed out that the absence of Wurundjeri and indigenous women who have always been speaking cannot be heard by their whiteness. Indigenous women are still in fact not there, as she says here back in 1985. They're still not there at the centres that white women insist on creating and taking up here in the colony during International Women's Day just this week. It was disappointingly predictable to hear of the many instances where indigenous women were overlooked or dropped from various International Women's Day programs, including strong warriors, Chelsea Batego, Marieke Onnes, Veronica Burry and my lovers. As Audre Lorde says, out of their mouths come what you have said you most want to hear, the centre desires the margins it wants to hear from different spudded what fails to hear, cannot hear. This begs a colossal question, how to think with and practice with the difficult politics of learning with the margins. When the capacity to practice this, for someone like me at least, is a choice sustained by the centre. I am in and of the centre epistemologically, materially, experientially. So for those of us who are sustained by centres of any kind and yet are engaged with learning with or from the margins, I think we might need to find ways to upend the organisation of margins and centres. It's too easy and too damaging to imagine that thinking with the margins means only creating space and bringing attention to the other stories that could be told or other voices that need to be heard, other ways of theorising and planning. While vital, I think it's our responsibility, certainly for someone who inhabits a body like mine, to notice how dominant regimes hold up the very inclination to do so and the capacity to turn our heads the other way when it suits less. So as Dwayne Donald says, if colonialism is an extended process of denying relationships, then decolonisation cannot be disconnected from the practice of relationships with material and lived realities in real places on real bodies and lives every day, including the body of country. And it can't be disconnected from the practice of dismantling the centre. So I guess I'm putting out a kind of a warning, I suppose, to those of us in planning who are held up by different vectors of privilege to be watchful for when the invocation to learn from the margins needs to be problematised and declared absolutely not enough. To notice when that move toward the margin might feed a kind of cunning move to innocence will be deployed as a convenient stand in for the very much more terrifying work of confronting and dismantling the systems that sustain those vectors of privilege. If learning from the margins is about creating presence and visibility in a way that serves the interests of an unchangingly white planning field, like, for example, indigenising the planning curriculum, scare quotes intended, which is very much, you know, day rigor in Australian universities at the moment, this may actively reaffirm racialised ecological logics, the same logics that are underway in Jabron country. Jabron people are not asking to be engaged with, they know who they are, and they know the law they stand in. They're asking to be in a relationship of obligation with those of us in the centre, and we're being asked to understand and practice that. And I think that in all its flaws and awkwardnesses and imperfections has to be continually practiced, if it's to be true. Thank you so much, Professor Porter for those provocations. Can I invite the audience to ask your questions in the chat or in the Q&A chat, and I will start to collect those and present them to the panel. And perhaps while we wait for those to come in, I might start off with a question of my own. I think I could take up something that Libby Porter just said around a question for us all. What is our role in perpetuating systems of dominance, particular world views, kind of logics, practices and inflection toward a hegemonic understanding of the world? What is our role in dismantling that perhaps if I could ask the panellists to consider within the realm of planning education? It's a big question. I'll jump in this and I'll put on my my other hat as an academic administrator. I think they're very clearly there is a certain kind of I hesitate to say this but I will because I think it's true is that the university is probably in my mind the most deeply European supremacist type of organization. And I don't say that in a in an offhand way, nor even in a purely critical way. But I think if we look at the history of the North American and European University, it is explicitly based on a culture imported from to North America from European kind of frame cultural framework. And that's, you know, that we see these debates about the canon, right? What is the canon in English literature? What is the canon in, you know, in history and these kinds of things. Now that that's all kind of big picture but I also think that when we are in an academy, we as planners we need to think about this intersection between theory and practice. And we don't have systems in higher education in our institutions that effectively value what needs to be valued to effectively make some headway against that that sort of colonial history of the institution. And I think particularly in terms of tenure promotion we're very rigid even within planning about what counts. And I'll say one thing, you know, I know there's some more interesting work these days being done on film, right, and planning and with communities using film and particularly indigenous communities I think Canada I think Leona Sandercock has written a lot and presented a lot about this. How do we incorporate that into our value system. Not in terms of, do we like it or not, but do we give credit on equal footing to a published article and something, or book in a in a in a university press. That's a challenge but it's something that we control. Maybe I'll jump in again deli I think James you that's a great point and and totally agree. And I think as well. We might need to think about how to expand the range of of our language around, you know, incorporate an inclusion and those kinds of things. I think there's a, I think someone mentioned before in a conversation I can't remember it was way too early in the morning for me to remember who it was said, you know, there's this can be this kind of gesturing to a kind of gesturing agenda by through things like citational politics or whatever now. I think some of those things are incredibly important. And the ways in which we send to certain voices and, and, you know, allow others to, you know, you know what I mean the extent to which we're going to cite dead white dudes right is we need to kind of let that go. And that's terribly important, but it isn't enough, I think. And I guess what what I'm saying is, how are we going to learn with voices that are telling us, telling me anyways, many of them, they're actually not interested in being included in our center because they have their own domain, their own law system, it's not about, can I come into your world. It's a different kind of conversation and I think that's a massive challenge for us particularly in planning education, because it kind of unpicks the nature of what we were doing in planning education that pretend to have any answers but I certainly think we need to create different kinds of spaces within our classrooms and beyond our classrooms to enable something different to emerge. I'm sure other panelists have much more insightful comments than me on that. Yeah, I may want to add something I, I really thank you for for your presentation from we are just said I agree entirely with what you said and I, I definitely think that the practice of citation, for example, although they are very important they are definitely not enough. And to me, more than practice of citation we have to change practice of ownership. And, and it's pretty hard to to change there I think that I talked about a little experiment that we're doing the four of us in collective but it's, but it's minimal I think that the main challenges will come from new practice of research. And I think that that's what we have to settle. I've always done research in the peripheries and in the poor neighborhoods of cities like Apollo. And I think it's what it is to work with those people and incorporate them in the process of research and give them credit out of with them. It's going to be like one of the biggest challenges that you have to have is not for us to be sitting here and just talking for them. And that's the, that will be the most difficult thing to to happen, and the one we have to work on. But that's the same thing for the planning process. Right. I think that is participatory planning needs lots of, of lots of work. So people, until we get to have real participatory planning processes will be really lots of works but it's probably where we have to go to. Thank you. So Kira, did you want to add anything. One thing that separates me from my students is that they are taking on more debt than I probably ever would for jobs that are disappearing and work precarious. And so, to test them sometimes with these like massive transformative participatory engaged in overwork and underpaid processes is also a challenge and a privilege that we have in the, in the like tower, you know, and so I just think about, you know, like obviously I always encourage my students to do all of these things to, you know, engage in communities in ways that do transform these relationships and power. But realistically, you know, a lot of their job is modeling or, you know, like paperwork or admin work and they they don't get to do any of these things. It's like a, it's a non mandated non paid thing here in the US so it's, you know, it's not going to be done by incoming new students who are, you know, $150,000 in debt. I do also think about that as the, as higher education becomes more costly thinking about how we are kind of like furthering and deepening these sort of privileges and marginalizations. Thank you. We've got a couple of questions coming in through the Q&A chat. I'll start with Muhammad Ali Sharif who writes, it is interesting to see how traditional communities nurture to healthy relationship and sustainable coexistence with land and with water, forest, wildlife and other peoples. The wisdom philosophies and practices of these communities is on the margins in contemporary planning practices. And this question is, if I can try and find it, the urge to formalize all informalities through a political planning process needs to be resisted. Any thoughts on this? Yes, I have many thoughts on this. We entirely, we don't have to necessarily formalize all informalities. Actually, I think that's the whole idea of operating through this transversal logic is that you find ways of participation in corporation and improvement without having to necessarily exclude what is informal or only negotiate with what is legalized. And I think that to have this state recognize that it depends, like the city of Sao Paulo, the master plan for the, the last master plan for the city of Sao Paulo, start by saying that that's a plan for the real city, which means that it's not only a plan for the legal city. And that, that mode. So it tries all the time to operate it with that the ideas that we have that the plan should include everything. It doesn't matter if it's formal informal, but you have to have like an environmental plan for the whole city doesn't matter, like the, the kind of a legal formal status of the land, for example. And I think this is a start, it's a way of, of operating across all those kind of old binaries that were all meant to exclude, and that we should just, you cannot transform them all but you can ignore many of them and, and operate in all the terms. Let me add a bit of opinion on this because a lot of the, the subject research that I do in planning is on informal water supply providers. My short answer to the question is yes or no obviously it's unsatisfying but, but it really is sort of it's a political choice, right does, does the formalization of something support a community and I'm not saying that we should, you know, tell people to or tell communities to to formalize an informal structure but, but resisting it under all circumstances is kind of a, you know it's sort of an all or nothing question. And that communities sometimes they'll decide like we need to formalize this because, you know, we, we like the disorder approach of, you know, getting access to capital. Now that may come along with all sorts of questions of inequality and, and, and this kind of stuff, but it's not really again for us to say we, they should resist it it's really just a choice about, I think, the politics of that community that the mechanisms should become formalized, you know and this comes very apparent when you talk about mapping right I mean especially with the ninjas communities is, do we want to actually, you know, sort of formalize our knowledge and it's, it's, it's an open question I think the best that we can do is academics is, is illustrate the choices and the long term implications of those choices in an engaged way. I think that's a really important point and maybe just to add. Isn't it interesting how we get stuck in this kind of language of, you know, formalizing and, you know, we're we're still kind of stuck in that a little bit even though so many people, including people in this call have offered other kinds of options for language and I think we are a bit kind of our imaginations are a little bit stuck in, in thinking about is it, is it you're always seeking recognition from the state and those kinds of things. What interests me I guess most in that is less, you know, should we shouldn't we. But and more kind of what's going on in that process of drawing in, because certainly from what I see here in this little corner of the world is when institutions move towards that sort of space of recognition so you know there's a huge movement at the moment to you know as I said before indigenize the curriculum to use indigenous knowledges to manage fire for example because we have this huge problems with bushfire as in many of the parts of the world that you're all occupying due to. And, and that's great stuff like that's really, really important because these are vitally important knowledge systems, but the moment they come into contact with with the state. And, and indeed I would say with just whiteness generally and the kind of settler colonial impulse things start to go terribly awry and and that seems to be almost always the case. So I think what we have to kind of be watchful for and part of our our role I think in the academic space is to really be looking at that what is going on there and noticing those dynamics and processes and really drawing them out and illuminating them is at least a step. Thank you, Libby, and thank you, Mohammed for the great question. I have another question here from Jennifer Tucker who writes thinking of Teresa's work with collective authorship and perhaps Libby's collaborations and the necessity to move against possessive individualism. Are there other collectivities we can center mobilize and build. And what does this look like. I see this as a question as much for Libby and for Teresa as for everyone on the panel. Maybe we should let the other speak first. Yeah. I'll say a little bit of thing again from it from the academic management side. You know these are the structures that we're we inherit right and I mentioned some of the, you know, film, right, we don't know how to count that very well as as a scholarship. And similarly we don't, we're just barely in tenure and promotion processes, getting to, you know, accepting co authorship as legitimate amongst academics. Right, I mean oftentimes you know I read all the time this person has not published enough individually. Right, so that's a, that's a structure that we create. Now let alone working with the community I think Teresa you mentioned, how do you, how do you involve communities and co authoring with with them and valuing sort of their input in a formal way. And I don't mean this in the planning right but in sort of the, the, the giving credit. I think that's a long way out from what our current standards are but I but I also think it relates to one of the other questions that were out there. I think Maria Castillo was saying what would happen in academia of community engagement or defining element of tenure. It has to do with what we think what we value as scholars. Right, but part of the problem is that we haven't defined. What does it mean community engagement right how do we know good in community engagement that we should count very well in in promoting somebody professionally, and how much of it you know what is it you know sort of like they showed up at a meeting and wrote 20 pages about it and, and are counting that as community engagement which wouldn't necessarily be sort of something that that has the same value. That's a lot of work to do but I think it's we need to do that if we want to decolonize the mechanisms for promotion and and institutionalizing kind of power relationships within a university. Jennifer, I just want to say, I just said something about collective incorporating with people we are researching with into the production of knowledge. I think there are lots of things we can say, but we can incorporate we can think of the classroom and and the exchanges that happen in classroom in much different terms than what you usually think like the professor and the students who listen. So those are spaces that can be transformed in spaces of co production of knowledge depending on how you design them and how you conceive of them. But I think that basically the way you put your question, what are the other collectives we can center mobilized and build. I think this is basically our political work is just like the work of the of the political communities we decided to be part of, and we want to engage with. It's not it goes well beyond the university and I particularly think that we cannot separate as our, our work as intellectuals university from our political work. I come from a tradition in Latin America and which intellectuals are primarily public intellectuals so there are. They are in the public sphere debating and and engaging politics all the time and I think that if we can change towards that tradition that would be really a great step. Thank you, Teresa. Any others want to add thoughts to this particular question here please. And yeah I'll just say that I've attempted to do some collective works. But I, the difficulty often comes with like James and others have eluded like this like 10 year attention that like I were not on the same timelines for it like, first of all I can take four years to write article and everyone's okay with it but like usually what I'm working with want something out immediately. So we have this one group of educators we've been working with, and documenting their experiences over the last year teaching public and private youth. And they, we've, we've kind of like just stolen like the op ed project and just like giving it to them as like a way of saying like this is a way of taking these discussions and articulating them in a way that gets your perspective out. I landed an op ed one of our educators got an op ed and the and the local paper and that's like wonderful. But it was a, it's hard again because I feel very much like shaping that voice right like oh this is how you have right at op ed you have to provide these countering points of views and you have to say, there's a transition, a pitch and lead and all there's like a a format that is not really going to capture the types of knowledge that I think we're trying to convey. And so they're still like this like the formalization of the informal like we said and I don't even consider this informal knowledge this is just undocumented knowledge right. And so it was. And so yeah, I am down for other collectivities that actually take us out of the picture entirely. But I still feel like they can result in kind of the, the same things because of those limits to the imagination. Thank you Kara. Jumping as well. Yeah, great. The such a great point. And I think as well the this is a question that came to me from Oren in the in a in the chat in the private chat to the panelists. And he's reminded me of course of the importance of building coalitions you know beyond silos of particular interest groups or whatever that might be and I know all of us have spoken about those things and I'm sure all of the conversations that this wonderful conference have been talking about that but you know linking those things together because the question of, you know, patriarchy is not separate from the question of settler colonialism and the question of capitalism is not separate from the heteropatriarchy that these are all interlinked so you know the question of intersectionality and I think finding spaces where. And they do exist certainly here in my context where people are coming together and finding those connections and speaking from the intersection is really powerful. And you know the work that we could do our political work to amplify or create space or, you know, put our bodies next to or whatever it might be those kinds of intersections and collaborations and coalitions is super important. Thank you for that Livy. I have a question here from Tyesha Redin who writes in 2018 the ACSP Committee on Diversity presented evidence that the American planning profession was getting wider and that it was a handful of schools mostly in Texas responsible for the bulk of non white planners. How do you think this phenomenon affects decolonization of planning training and curriculum. It makes it harder to make it a problem. That this is something we need to be doing and an effort we need to be working towards. I, I get, I'm like, oh, how do we read all those diversity statements in the fields getting wider. I know how it works. I think it's related to my earlier point about class, but I do think that certainly they're related. And I do wonder how long this moment's going to last, if it will just kind of be the year of it like it was last year kind of the year George Floyd statements right if this is just something to check and move on, or if this is like an ongoing series of conversations. Yeah, great question. I want to jump in because I would say we're at an inflection point on this I think the question is absolutely spot on in terms of what I seen from the programs I know. And it's not just that they're becoming more white they're just they're becoming smaller. And the planning profession as a field is is not a particularly lucrative job so it doesn't kind of get all sorts of people coming from from all walks of life. It's part of a larger kind of challenge. Now with that doom and gloom situation and you can go to ACSP and the administrators conferences and all this kind of stuff and hear more doom and gloom about that so I won't go into that but, but what I will say is I think planning is at an inflection point at the moment, given the way the field is field is organized at the intersection of again what I what I say as sort of large big picture thinking anti colonial critical theory and technocratic and and and I say that because right now you you mentioned a cure that there's a moment right so this year has been very hard right it's it's it's if we think of our global and national and local communities that there's been an unprecedented organizing of universally around issues are like the murder of George Floyd. You know to a lesser extent the pandemic, you know, issues around public health but, but there's a moment right now when there's great attention put on things. And again thinking long term the planners, they are not just criticizing or critiquing things, they are critiquing with the purpose of constructing. Right, that's why that's what makes the planner different from, you know, sort of the pure critical theorists. Right. Now there are urbanists who are your critical theorists but the planning aspect is to create something out of the criticism. And that's where I think, given that we have a positivist, a very strong positivist theme within our pedagogy. While at the same time, developing critical perspectives, it's incumbent upon our field to sort of, you know, sort of build up the field that Taisho was was describing as as kind of, you know, sort of going down a bad path. To fill that gap because I don't think anybody else is going to fill it. There's a couple of other fields that have that kind of mix of professionals within the academy but but it's rare. Thank you, James. I'd like to just elevate a comment that Mia Whiteman added to the chat that I think helps tease out a little bit more of what Taisho was mentioning in her question. And Mia writes, it seems that a key challenge is that quote unquote mainstream planning educators, having yet come to a place in which they can speak organically and easily about the mutually reinforcing histories of white supremacy racial capitalism colonization and patriarchy, and how these structures influence our planning imaginaries whiteness, including the fetishization of the individual of neutrality, etc, continues to be an ongoing challenge one where some colleagues misconstrue whiteness to mean white people and it can be pretty challenging. Just elevate that as a another dimension of the of the larger question. Thank you, Mia, and for the original question as well. I mean, I think I can't speak for ACSP because I don't know it that well but my observation, as an outsider from a kind of margin I suppose, is exactly that and that the conversations becoming harder. And in fact, Ananya Roy wrote a wonderful piece just we recently published in in planning theory and practice an interface bringing together voices around silencing and talked about not a little bit about ACSP but about other kind of planning institutions academic planning institutions that are actively involved in silencing so I think we, you know, this is absolutely a trend and a phenomenon that is present. And we need to be very aware of it but I think this point of the misunderstanding that is a misunderstanding that's kind of embedded in white bodies that that whiteness is about white bodies and not being able to see how that's true and not being able to see how that's true at the same time like that we that our privilege to walk around in the world in our whiteness is held up by by racial capitalism and settler colonialism, but that we're also can we can be involved in dismantling and having to actually dismantle our own bodies. I think that this is possible but we just don't have a sensible language and we don't have maturity, intellectually and conceptually in this conversation. I see it say we as people who who look a bit more like me. Because I think that exists that maturity exists out there, but it's kind of operating in another space and we're not working with it so that idea of learning with that material so that we can, you know, be better versions of our white selves might be helpful. Thank you, Libby. I wonder if we in the last five minutes that we have we might turn back to the question of the margins that we started with. We started by disrupting the kind of fixigness of that binary margin center. And I'm going to turn to a question by Oran, which he puts to Teresa but I think perhaps could be opened up for the entire panel. He says, beyond transversality and complexity. Do you find power relations in the production of the city that are persistent over time. Clear hierarchies for example, with this call for a more structural and stable understanding of the margins. Just answer to him so maybe I read my. Of course, there are power relations reproduced in the production of the city, and this production, as I mentioned, also means the reproduction of incredible inequalities. But I don't think we can understand this inequalities and this reproductions of power relations only in terms of margins and hierarchies, because they are reproduced transversely, and should be counter transversely, which to me means through the transformation of intersectional coalitions for example, they, because those those imbalances of power and those inequalities they are they come from various parts they, they combine to each other, and they are not necessarily from the margins. And I think that we have to understand that sometimes those coalitions. Like you can imagine like look at Argentina Buenos Aires with the biggest coalition they have in this moment is of women of all classes of all groups. And that is a transversal that has completely shaken the political system. So I think that, and how you form this coalitions how do you form those alliances as our conjunctural. You should work for on them but doesn't mean that they will come necessarily from what is pre established some, some kind of margin. So that's a fitting place to end. I'd like to thank all of the panelists for their provocations and for deepening our understanding of the experience, the knowledge production at between with marginal places and positions. And to remind everyone all the audience, everyone who's with us today that we will reconvene at five o'clock in about 15 minutes for the fourth and last panel of the day. One that will look at frontiers and their politics of planning, moderated by can go who is assistant professor planning at UCLA. Thank you everybody.