 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Counting Land, the second of the BUILD's Conversations on Architecture and Land in the Americas with Alma Steingart and Benedict Clouette. My name is Lucia Allais. I'm the director of the BUILD Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University. There will be one more of these conversations in the spring in two weeks with Tim Mitchell and Stefanie Baral, and I invite you to check the chat for details. Let me share my screen grade. So I'm joining you today from a campus on an island that lies within the ancestral homelands of the Lenny Lenape people. Until about 1650, the Lenny Lenape managed the forests, marshes, wilds, animals, floods and paths of this place by stopping in as they navigated what is now called the Hudson River. Seasonally staying in small encampments, growing food, perhaps also harvesting crops, hunting and fishing, some animal species, while conserving some others. Periodically setting fires to control growth and generally maintaining a resource ecology that stretched all along the Atlantic coast from what is now Western Connecticut to Delaware and including most of New Jersey and Southern New York. By the end of the 17th century, the Lenny Lenape have been largely driven out of their homelands. And in the century since, their communities have been decimated, their humanity denied and their descendants dispersed. The European settler state that was responsible for this erasure and diaspora relied overwhelmingly on the institutionalization of land. Columbia University, a land-based institution is a legacy of this urge to settle and appropriate. In fact, the red brick building in which I sit today, which is shown here on the bottom, embodies architecture's implication with settled land in a particularly vivid way. Buol Hall, as it's called, is the oldest building on campus, so old that it precedes the campus, precedes the university's arrival on this site. It was built in 1885 for an earlier institution, the Bloomingdale Asylum, that had existed on the site since 1821. So central was architecture to maintaining institutional legitimacy on this land that not only did Columbia decide to keep this building when it purchased the land in 1892, but the building was preserved and moved twice, 42 feet vertically and 97 feet north, in 1895 as the campus expanded and the trustees negotiated with the city where grid and campus could intersect. In other words, the institutionalization of land produces architectural legacies, some of which are more honorific than others. For example, and it's the example that is significant to us, at the same time as this campus was being built, indeed the same year as the first class, the class in Greek was taught in this building in 1897, the General Allotment Act was signed by the United States government. Its goal was to break up the large reservations of land into which indigenous communities have been gathered since the 1830s after fleeing persecution. The Lenapean communities today reside largely in Oklahoma and in Texas. The Allotment Act also had far-reaching consequences. It shrank the land base of surviving indigenous communities and compelled them to adopt Western institutions such as that of private property and of family farming. I recount this history today, not only to acknowledge the role that our hosting institutions have played in these communities' displacement, but also because the relation of land to an architecture is a theme of our series and it takes a form of an open question. How do we tell non-objectivizing histories of land? How do we heed the insight on the part of indigenous scholars and activists that land isn't an object but a relationship? The title of our conversation today is Counting Land and so I'll just explain this title briefly. It seems perhaps self-evident that to count land is to objectify it, but less obvious perhaps is the role that this object would place in the political process of the United States. Representative democracy in the United States requires counting people and there has never been a way to count political persons without also counting land. So today we'll hear stories of gerrymandering and I'm showing you two images from our speaker's presentations. It's a particularly contemporary topic which is usually discussed as a problem of cartographic representation, a problem of how the political ideal, one person, one vote should be mapped in space. But as our two speakers will discuss, gerrymandering is in fact just one symptom of the kind of friction that exists between political boundaries and physical boundaries and one way that they have been made to overlap or not through various real and imagined calculative processes. And so just by way of introduction, we should remind ourselves that the tools for making political geometries consists not only of districting maps but also include many other spatial apparatuses that are familiar to an architectural audience such as ours. So to continue with the history of this land that I'm standing on today, property surveying, for example, has long served to furnish the kind of political geometry. For example, in 1801, the land that I sit on today was made to count politically by being surveyed. First, it was measured with this instrument on the left, a gunter chain whose size was calibrated to 20 meters. And then the plot size and its regularized shape were recorded in a ledger along with other kinds of property that was owned by the De Pester brothers, such as the number of their family members and have enslaved workers. The brothers within they themselves counted as part of the United States census which recorded them as property owners, a precondition for their being able to vote at the time. Second example, planning and infrastructural devices have also served to provide political geometries, allowing a speculative kind of counting. Again, taking the example of Columbia when the grid of Manhattan, there are many other kinds of infrastructures which are used today to make political geographies and geometries. In the case of Manhattan, it's the grid. Just as Beow Hall proceeded Columbia on this spot, so Columbia University preceded the United States as a corporation having been incorporated at Skink's College in 1754 and also moved three times over the course of the next two centuries. And with each move, the university's trustees of which they're 24 negotiated the political personhood of the institution, not only by counting land value, tax exonerations or the size of their student body but also by using the grid as a kind of speculative technology to estimate their own capacity to populate an entire neighborhood of Manhattan. So here on the left, morning side heights had exactly one inhabited house before Columbia moved and on the right, as soon as Columbia moved then the entirety of the grid became a residential grid full of people. This leads to my last example address. Address is an eminently architectural device that grants people a political power through calculation. Still today, the trustees of Columbia to use the example one last time are the largest land owners in New York City. If you count the number of addresses. So while the tendency is to think of an address as a singular location in space that gives you your singular individual vote. In fact, this map, which is a map of what Columbia owns around this campus shows that its political relevance may lie in an adjoining empty space. So our two speakers today bring us stories from the tail end of this history between counting and locating people drawn from the middle of the 20th century. This is before addressing was an internet protocol before the grid was negotiated through computers and before property records were available to everybody's fingertips. And this leads me to my last acknowledgement. We are meeting today remotely. This remote list is made possible by hardware and software that consume immense amounts of energy which is being supplied to each of us somehow extracted from land somewhere on the earth somewhere we ourselves are not. So without further ado, I'll stop sharing my screen and introduce the event to us. So this event today will take the form of two presentations followed by Q&A. So add your questions in the chat. If you have them, although I will let our two speakers ask questions of each other first. So our first speaker will be Alma Steingart. I'm very pleased that Alma is accepted to share her research with us. She's an assistant professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. Her work concerns the interplay between American politics and mathematical rationalities. Professor Steingart's current project, Accountable Democracy examines how mathematical thought and computing technologies have impacted electoral politics in the United States in the 20th century. Her first book, though, will come out first. It's titled Axiomatic Mathematical Thought and High Modernism and its forthcoming next January from Chicago Press. Before joining Columbia, Steingart was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, a pre-doctoral fellow at Max Planck Institute in Berlin. She earned her PhD in STS from MIT and her work has appeared pretty much everywhere, including in Grey Room, Social Studies of Science and the LA Review of Books. So Alma, go ahead and show your screen and I'll let you have a go at it. You're muted. Of course I'm muted. Okay, thank you. So thank you, Lucia, for this lovely invitation and for the opportunity to participate in this event. And thank you for Jordan and for Jacob for helping to organize. And finally, thank you for Benedict for presenting his work alongside. And I'm very much looking forward to our conversation following our presentations. So in 1963, political scientist Alfreda Grazia published a book, Portionment and Representative Government, which offered a sustained analysis of the history of the politics of apportionment in the United States. The impetus behind the Grazia's analysis was in 1962, ruling by the Supreme Court that malapportionment are justiciable, that malapportionable cases are justiciable. The case originated when citizens through the state of Tennessee, claiming to the state legislator, violated the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protections under the law because it's failed to apportion the state general assembly since 1901. And of course, at that time, there are great demographic changes that 60 years. The Supreme Court ruled that the appellants had standing and that their claim could be heard in the district court. A decision that overturned the court earlier position, the districting and apportionment were legislative matters and thus, behind the judicial branch ambit. Now the Grazia was worried that the decision of the court will bring forward a day in which the dominant and even the only guide for redistricting will be population equality. Geographical, local, ethnic and religious interests have all been taking into account informing constituents in the past and properly so in his view. If the only criteria for apportionment was numerical equality, then you might as well randomly draw names of residents from the half and assign each to a given district. So to note how absurd such principle would be, he invited the reader to imagine a computer algorithm, a computer algorithm that will divide the population into district. The outcome might be perfectly legal, but there will be no guiding principle behind it. Until a machine can do human work, it is best to limit its use strictly. And so almost so limited to the use of machine-like theories to try to organize society. American society is not a collection of basis particles. It is composed of highly diverse and yet interconnected sets of people. A political theory suggested that people are interchangeable, like nuts and bolts, is likely to both be fallacious and detrimental to the personal happiness of the citizen. Now in the years that passed, the Gracia parody turned into reality. Almost as soon as the Supreme Court's 1962 ruling about malapportionment cases, the case was Baker v. Carr, was passed programmers and social scientists began turning to computers to see how they might be used to redesign, quote unquote, fairer redistricting maps. So I want to describe three early such efforts. And I bring up these examples in order to probe how political boundaries, natural geography, and social and civic borders were mapped onto one another in light of this relatively new technology. And I find the 1960 especially interesting because it's a moment when computer technology was still it's an infancy. Computer displays were available, but only rudimentary ones. As such, it is easier to see how the calculative logic of the computer redefined political geographies. So one of the earliest paper offering a computer solution to apportionment was published by James Weaver and Stephen Hess in 1963. The two met when their work together in Atlas chemical industries and they began collaborating on the problem. Weaver was a member of a committee named the committee of 39. It was a civic group in Delaware that gathered historical data and information about apportionment to inform the apportionment battles in the States. And Hess was his younger colleague and was also a recent PhD in operation research from Case Western University. So the first question they had to face was what measure of compactness should they use. So from a mathematical perspective, the most compact figure is a circle because it maximized the area to its parameter. However, there was no agreement and I should say there is no agreement today either about how compactness should be measured when it comes to redistricting. And I should also know that not all States even require the district will be compact as part of their redistricting requirements. So Weaver and Hess decided to redefine and expand the definition of compactness. As they explained, quote, compactness is not solely a geographical measure because we're attempting to reflect at least at some extent popular interest in districting and because population patterns may coincide with interest patterns. The principle of compactness is here defined as a measure of population as well as geographic concentration. In other words, the two wish to define compactness as combined spatial and demographic measurement. The larger term you can say is that they argue that compactness when it comes to districting cannot be separated from the geography and demography cannot really be separated when we think about how we think about compactness for districting. And the benefit, as they explained, is that district would be organized or at population centers and hence would respect communities of interests. So having settled on a measurement, the second problem that Weaver and Hess confronted was how to write an algorithm that would produce a districting map with optimized compactness. And the breakthrough came when Hess realized that this optimization problem was structurally similar to a well-known class of problems in operation research, a problem that's known as warehouse allocation or optimal transport. The algorithm began by making an educated guess as to where the center of population should be. Using information from the census, the algorithm will then assign each enumeration district. And here, all of this, of course, is based for the level of information that was available at a time for the census. And they decided to use with the enumeration district, which I remember correctly, had about a thousand people in it. So the algorithm will then assign each of this enumeration district from the census into one of the legislating district. When the process ended, the districting map is checked and new population centers are calculated. As long as they differ from the initial map, the process continues. And the goal is to get to some kind of equilibrium. The population centers do not move that much. So at the end of the process, users are left with a set of districting maps, each with its own compactness measurement. Now Weaver has titled a paper of procedure for non-partisan districting. The promise of the computer, as we saw it, was that it was, quote, blind to politics. In the wake of Baker v. Carr, the author explained, courts may strike down representation scheme as unconstitutional, but there was no clear guidance as to how to administer relief. More often than not, the courts would choose to give the legislator another opportunity to draw a districting solution. But in cases when the additional temperate fail, the court needs still to come up with a map. And it is at this stage that the court might wish to appeal to computers to produce a map. Since redistricting usually affects the political balance of the legislator, a court undertaking affirmative apportionment and redistricting is likely to become the subject of a highly partisan appeal and criticism. To avoid this political thicket, a court may desire to limit its own discretion in creating a new legislative district. In other words, the computer was this objective tool that will be removed human discretion. But not everyone adhere to such a concept of mechanical objectivity. Chandler Davis, sorry, Chandler Stevens, himself representative in Massachusetts House of Representatives between the years of 1965 and 1968, so the computer as augmenting humans not replacing them. There are certain criteria, he believed, which could not be quantified or computerized, but which were nonetheless important. As an elected official, Stevens maintained that additional criteria besides population equality, compactness should enter into legislative decision making. I personally feel that we need much better correspondence between election districts and other districts used to original planning, mass transportation, mental health, pollution control, welfare and employment services, and a myriad of other programs. Using the visual display, and this was one of the kind of innovative moment for Stevens with the idea to actually use a visual display, basically a TV monitor. Steven envisioned a system in which the user chrome project on top of a given map slides of additional information such as, and this is his example, newspaper reading patterns or commuting patterns. Considering the state of computer graphics at a time, it was literally a plastic overlay on top of the screen that Steven advocated for. Each overlay does, represented another type of land boundary. The computer might generate the political boundary of the state, but the overlays represented social and civic boundaries superimposed one on another. So it was men machine interaction that Steven thought showed promise, not full automation. And like Hess and Weaver, Stevens believed that not only was there no room for subjective, was there room for subjective judgment, but that such judgment was in fact necessary. He had asked this view when he declared that, quote, there is an art as well as science to drawing election district. Now Steven didn't mean art in the regulatory sense to refer to gerrymandering, but his mind was quote, the art of decision making for the qualitative as opposed to the quantitative. Now, as Stevens was developing his program, the United States District Court for the district of Massachusetts ruled the state's current congressional plan was unconstitutional and instructed the legislator to produce a new map. Stevens had a chance to put his program to test sooner than he planned. He was the sole independent lawmaker in the assembly, and he tried to convince his colleague in the joint legislative committee that, and that was the committee that was tasked with producing the new plan that they should use his computer program. His goal fundamentally was not so much to suggest a new plan, but rather to use the computer as a tool would reach to evaluate the existing proposals. So Steven ended up renaming Weaver and Hess measurement of compactness as the gerry index. And in a public demonstration at MIT, Stevens sought to expose to the joint legislative committee, and you want to show them that their plan was actually the least compact. This type of public exposure he later wrote, quote, should help pass in the day when state constitution will revise and or courts will be armed for the force of fair districting. So rather than simply serving as an aid to mathematical or calculative equality, Steven also put computing to work as a tool to oversee, evaluate, and even expose unfair apportionment and districting. A third approach to computerizing districting came from a political scientist named Stuart Nagel. Unlike Weaver and Hess, Nagel promoted use of computers and districting as a bipartisan rather than a non-partisan tool. Nagel believes that computers could help solve legislative deadlocks. Instead of helping the court, Nagel wanted to help elected officials. So in Illinois, Republicans and Democrats inability to agree on new districting resulted at the time that Nagel was working in an at large election. At the same time, the parties were coming to similar deadlocks around the country. And Nagel envisioned a computer program that would save time and money by letting politicians examine a set of possible maps. Working with these maps to arrive eventually to some kind of a compromise. He explained that this program was, quote, designed with realistic politics in mind. It therefore included passive voting records for each district and could in principle either produce a plan favoring one party over another. Or it could also remain neutral. Such parameter Nagel explained, quote, might be needed to convert a compromise between the political parties into a redistricting pattern. Democrats and Republican Nagel would need to be able to predict how each party will fare in future election before they would be willing to sign off on a new districting map. And here you can see this is from Nagel paper that there's information about voting patterns. Nagel's belief that computerized districting should be used by politicians to shape the algorithmic approach he proposed. Unlike Cassin Weaver, Nagel's program aimed to improve upon already existing district. He didn't want to overhaul the entire district plan. So instead of starting from scratch, at each step the program created new maps by training a geographical unit from one district to another and then checking if the quality and compactness were improved. Nagel decided to adhere as closely as possible to states existing map because it's aligned with his, quote unquote, realistic approach. It is naive, he wrote, quote, to think that incumbent politicians are likely to want to upset the statue, quote, well, any more than the minimum extent required by state constitution and courts by the federal, by the federal courts. So Nagel, in other words, never forgot that it was politician who approved new districting maps. Even if the computer had drawn the lines, fairness for him was a programmatic method, rather than a theoretical concept, a compromise aided by computers. So the computational approach pursued in each of these three cases was strongly determined by the researchers understanding of the nature of the problem. Weaver and Hess, who are operating outside of the political process, believed that districting can, and in fact they should be reduced to a purely technical problem. A state elected official, Stevens held that human judgment had a place in districting process and hence emphasized human-machine interactions. And finally, Nagel, as a behaviorist political scientist, chose pragmatism over optimization. Computers were a tool for negotiation, not for full automation. Despite the differences, each of these early researchers which to eliminate, eliminate direct human intervention from some part of the districting process. Computer they believed were apt for the job because they fundamentally subsumed human intentionality to some part, some kind of program randomness. Now, this is the 1960s, all of these examples. And on the whole, the early attempts were unsuccessful. The existing computational capacity at a time was very, very limited. And legislator, and they worked with different legislator on the countries, but at the end of the day, legislator on the countries put more trust in their hand drawn maps. It's in fact only in recent years, in recent decades, that we're districting has become a fully computerized process. Nonetheless, the impact of these early attempts of computerized districting has been profound. So early decision did not call for perfect numerical equality. As Chief Justice Earl Warren, Warren in Reynolds B. Sims, it's a 1964 case on the districting after we take every car, quote, we realize that it is practical, practical impossibility to a practical impossibility to arrange legislative district so that each one has an identical number of residents or citizens or voters. Mathematical exactness of precision is hardly a workable constitutional requirement. Now, what happened is that in the following years, 1964, numerous cases arriving state and federal courts, basically testing the limits of and the justification for permissible population deviation between different districts. And it is exactly in this great zone between mathematical exactitude and practical consideration that researchers first held computers as a possible solution. Legislative fund computers attractive exactly because they could quickly compare how different district implants deviated from total equality. The preservation of counties, historical and natural boundaries gave way over time to statistical equality. By the end of the decade, the Supreme Court began to tighten its expectation. When it struck down the New York Congressional Districting Plan and then in the case as well be Rockefeller from 1969. And it's tracking down for what they tend to excessive population deviation. So there was no clear standard to a set, but following the ruling, legislator surmised that congressional district could be not deviate from one another for more than 1%. So now more than a yardstick or metric would reach to gauge equality. Mathematical equality became a guiding democratic principle in itself. Population equality became its own end, rather than an indicator of fairness. In his dissenting opinion in Wells v. Rockefeller, the New York case, Justin Carlin wrote, quote, the courts exclusive concentration upon arithmetic blinded to the realities of the political process as the Rockefeller case makes so clear. The fact of the matter is that the rule of absolute equality is perfectly compatible with gerrymandering of the worst sort. And he then noted from his opinion, quote, the law of absolute equality is a fundamental piece of the law, and the law of absolute equality is that if a computer may grind out district lines, which can totally frustrate the popular real on an overwhelming number of critical issues, the legislator may do more than satisfy one-man-one vote. So would you see here is Justin Harlan recognized that the mathematical exactness was a byproduct of countless plans for absolute population equality, one differing very little from one another, but each having its own very different political ramification. So if the governing criteria for districting with population equality, then computers, so the logic went, could easily and more efficiently than before, produce numerous configuration that would satisfy the legal requirement while allowing for political manipulation of any kind. By the early 1970s, Justice Holland's critique was taken by some political scientists as fully just. So Gordon E. Baker, a political scientist wrote, quote, the single-mindedness quest from a mathematical equality of district at the expense of some adherence to local government subunits cares with it the potential for excessive gerrymandering. Baker dec-celebrated the Supreme Court decision allowing a less strict numerical standard for state as opposed to congressional districts. I said, this development could help minimize some of the computerized equal population gerrymandering that ignored local governmental subunits as well as communities of interests. The computer seen as first as a solution for gerrymandering had within 10 years came to be its source. If numerical equality was intended as a constraint on lawmakers ability to construct district map to favor their own interests, in the end, the implementation of population equality through computer technology increased their power to do so and all within the law. So in keeping with the Buell Center theme, I was asked to use the history to comment on what might dismean for how we might think about land. So as a political historian and historian of mathematics, my work is somewhat removed from the pure view of architectural history. But I was reminded however, that Henry LeFarge opens his, the production of space, the production of space with a short account of the history of geometry commenting on mathematicians invention of numerous spaces mostly at the end of the 19th century. From any in the book, he talks about non-Euclidean geometry, curved space and dimensional space, infinite space, topological space, just to name a few. And Farber writes, and this is a quote, the proliferation of mathematical theories, apologies, thus aggravated the old problem of knowledge. How are transition to be made from mathematical space, from the mental capacities of the human species, from logic, to nature in the first place, to practice in the second, and then to theory of social life, which all presumably must unfold in space. I quote. So perhaps then we can think about the scholars I hear described as offering one answer to this old problem of knowledge, turning to computer technology day. And I should say, mathematicians who work on the problem to this day, and there are many mathematicians that are still very much engaged in this question today, have tried to bring the exactitude of abstract space onto the thickest of political and social problems. And they did so by superimposing overlaying and at times refusing to fundamentally separate the space of the mathematicians from the space of social practice on the one hand and geography on the other. Thank you. Thank you, Alma. I have many questions, including whether your overlay slides are the kind of reading of that Lefebvreian interpretation of the space of mathematicians, I should say. But I will hold my questions until later and we now welcome Benedict Clouet. So Benedict Clouet is a doctoral candidate in architectural history at Columbia University's own Graduate School of Architectural Planning and Preservation. His writings and interviews have appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Vol. Domus, the Architect's Newspaper and San Rocco, and he's the author with Marlisa Wise of Forms of Aid, Architectures of Humanitarian Space, and that's from 2017. Welcome, Benedict, then thanks for joining us and I'll let you share your screen. Thank you. Thank you, Lucia. Everybody can see this? Yep. The preview, there you go. Okay. So thank you, Lucia, for the invitation and then, Tom, for sharing your really compelling work. As a noted by Alma's account of the political geometry of electoral redistricting, I'd like to indicate some potential directions for research in the history of architecture that consider administrative geographies in relationship to the politics of urban land. And to test some possibilities with just a balanced research in relation to my own work as an architectural historian who studies the uses of statistical cartography in the planning and design of large-scale urban projects in mid-20th century America. Specifically, I'd like to consider the status of electoral maps in the political maneuvering and negotiations over the siting of public housing in Chicago, circa 1950, as part of the larger complex of means, for instance, racially restricted covenants, discriminatory financing and insurance practices through which residential segregation has been reproduced in American cities. I'll consider how the administrative geography of the city, in this case, the map of city council wards as local electoral districts conditioned the positions taken by the Chicago Aldermen in negotiations with the Chicago Housing Authority. Under the authority of the city council, the selection of sites for large-scale public housing in Chicago could be seen as a form of gerrymandering by other means and suggesting moving populations rather than district lines, demolishing and building areas of the city with an eye toward the electoral map. The politics of the council in the debates over the selection of housing sites may be seen not only as an outgrowth of their constituents, presidents, prejudices, and fears of the encroachment, so to speak, of black families on white neighborhoods, identified as white neighborhoods, or in deference to white-dominated real estate boards. These are two, let's say, now conventional, perhaps positions in literature, but also in relation to the geographical administrative logic or following almost term of the political geometry of the internal boundaries of the city's wards. This is not to discount other analyses of the structuring effects of the racialization of the city's populations in the politics of urban renewal for existence. For example, by Yomar Taylor or Preston Smith, but rather to extend those analyses in considering how ethno-racial categories codified statistically in local and federal housing censuses, surveys of housing and urban research in the social sciences were brought to bear upon the politics of urban projects through the administrative map of the city. Maps of plight and redevelopment constitute another administrative geography overlaying the Chicago award map. One similarly derived from the census and other surveys of populations distributed over land. And this image on the left is from the Chicago Planning Commission in 1942, showing areas as blighted and to be rebuilt. And in the same image as it appears in the big Hilberg Seimer, the architect Hilberg Seimer's book, The New City, or sorry, The New Regional Pattern Model. So turning to the case of Chicago, in planning politics in the public interest of 1954, an early assessment of the political machinations of the city housing authorities in the wake of the Federal Housing Act of 1949, the planner Martin Meyerson sites an anonymous Chicago politician who provides a summary of the biases of the city's voters in choosing candidates for alderman. This is quoting Meyerson or quoting Meyerson rather quoting this local politician who says, a Lithuanian won't vote for a poll and a poll won't vote for a Lithuanian. German won't vote for either of them, but all three will vote for an Irishman. Meyerson introduces this anecdote in explaining the composition of the Chicago City Council, which he defines principally through racial and ethnic categories. One third of the council says Meyerson, including most of its leaders were Irish Catholics, making them quote dominant in politics with the remainder of the democratic majority divided between alderman, Polish, quote, Polish, Italian, Bohemian, Lithuanian, Slovak or Greek extraction, he says, along with a few German Republicans and Jewish aldermen of both parties. Meyerson notes conspicuously that the council had only two black aldermen in 1950, Marchwell Kerry, a Republican and William Harvey, a Democrat, a disproportionately small number in a city with black population at that time made up 14% of the residents. He suggests that the disparity between the population of voters and the few black representatives in the council resulted from the residential segregation of the city, which concentrated supermajorities of black voters in a small number of wards, mostly on the near South side. So says Meyerson, they had not been so much concentrated in these few wards, if instead they had spread evenly over the whole city, he says, that black voters might have exercised greater influence on the electoral outcomes of a larger number of aldermen, which were often decided by only a few hundred votes. Meyerson's analysis suggests affinities between residential segregation and the technique sometimes termed packing in discussions of electoral redistricting. Packing here refers to the drawing of administrative boundaries to create overwhelming majorities of a group of voters, whether identified by racial categories or by political parties in a smaller number of districts, thereby guaranteeing that group or party a few landslide electoral victories rather than a potentially larger number of representatives elected across several more competitive districts. Packing is generally understood as effectively disenfranchising voters who side with the supermajority and diminishing the influence of their party in legislative bodies. Analysis of cherrymandering and the redistricting algorithms that Alma discussed received from various often implicit assumptions of the natural form of political communities seeking to align the organic boundaries with those of the administrative unit. At the University of Chicago, sociologists working with the local community research committee in the 1920s and 30s under the direction of Ernest Burgess and Vivian Palmer in cooperation with the regional office of the U.S. Census Bureau sought to define the natural extents of communities as a geographical subunit of city organization dividing the city of Chicago into 75 community areas that were officially adopted by the city for use in planning and by the U.S. Census in analysis of its data as well as being used by subsequent University of Chicago studies by Burgess and his colleagues. The community areas were determined by mapping patterns of race, country of origin, income levels, family size, and so on based on extensive surveys of residents connected by the LCRC, the local community research committee as well as by data from the census and local public health records to determine the natural order of the city as distinct from its arbitrary and artificial political boundaries. The impetus for the project was the recognition that the ward which had been a statistical unit used to report U.S. Census data since 1910 was useless in the eyes of the Chicago sociologists for studies of the city subject as it was to distortions by political interests that would cause it to deviate from the natural geography of the community. Vivian Palmer who worked with Burgess on the project specifically cited the intricately gerrymandered districts of the Alderman. She said, practically ward districting early became a profitable sport by local politicians who gerrymandered adroitly in an effort to so split the city that they could distribute their majorities and carry the maximum number of wards. To achieve this end, they frequently maneuvered lines to cut across the natural groupings whose strength they wished to destroy. The city's first charter established in 1837 established the offices of the mayor in the Alderman and by the Chicago, like all of all, says Vivian Palmer, into three parts, south side, north side and west side which were further divided into two wards each with two Alderman elected for ward. The number of wards increased over the course of the 19th century as the city incorporated surrounding areas and the map that left shows a map of 35 wards which was the state between 1889 with a round of initiations and 1923. And in 1923, the system was changed to 50 wards with one Alderman representing each ward in the city council with the redrawing of ward boundaries required by Illinois state law after each federal census to ensure representation on the basis of equal populations. Meyerson's intimation that efforts to restrict Black residents to a few south side neighborhoods and corresponding wards might constitute a form of electoral packing established through the physical and social segregation of residents in their homes rather than by the moving of boundaries on an electoral map was made in the context of a year-long struggle between officials at the Chicago Housing Authority and the Alderman over the location of 12,000 units of public housing at the first round of a total of 21,000 units in Chicago to be funded through the Federal Housing Act of 1949. Despite having secured $210 million in federal funding for land acquisition and for some slum clearance and reconstruction, the CHA was nonetheless bound by an Illinois state law past that same year, which required the CHA to receive approval from the city council on the siting and redevelopment plans for public housing. In developing Chicago's first public housing projects in the late 1930s, the CHA had employed methods for surveying and scoring neighborhoods that were initially codified by researchers at the Federal Housing Administration for the purposes of assessing risks in underwriting federally-insured mortgages, and that's the image on the left, part of the complex today known as redlining. This map produced in 1938 as part of the planning of the IDB Welles Homes uses the D-grade districts extending over much of Chicago's central wards and central areas as a proxy for blighted areas requiring demolition and redevelopment. The transition from the D districts of Chicago's of the CHA's 1938 map based on the FHA's mortgage risk maps to a definition of blighted areas would legally offer us condemnation as accomplished by the research division of the Chicago Plan Commission in preparing the 1943 master plan for residential land use in Chicago on the basis of the findings of the Chicago Land Use Survey of 1942, which was jointly connected with the WPA. The CPC's research for the master plan, including the definition and mapping of blighted areas was directed by Homer Hoyt, who was by then the research director for the CPC, but who had previously led research on the FHA's mortgage underwriting manual and risk maps in the 1930s. And these slides just show on the left the types of planning areas categorized by blighted and conservation. And then in the middle, an image from the Land Use Survey that documents the methods used showing the use of these acetate overlay maps where they actually also describe how these overlay maps could be combined and recomposited to create different valuations depending on different planning uses later, noting that they're all drawn at the same scale and on acetates that they can be recomposited. And then on the right images of the survey forms, the survey schedules, which were taken out of the field and used by the 1500 surveyors who were part of the survey effort with the CPC and the WPA. And then on the bottom, the whole of the cards that were actually used to encode those into a form that could be used for further calculations. The CHA under the leadership of Chairman Robert Rochon Taylor and Executive Secretary Lisbeth Wood made broad use of its powers to clear blighted areas so called blighted areas for housing. Their initial group of developments in 1938 to 1940 used some clearance in both majority white and majority of black neighborhoods with the housing of a so-called neighborhood composition which specified that new public housing developments should not alter the racial demographics of their surrounding area. Yet by the 1940s, the CHA was also increasingly defending itself against accusations in the city council of using public housing to pursue integration following the award of funds from the 1949 Federal Housing Act, CHA's initial proposal to the council included a mix of vacant and clearance sites, 5,000 units on four clearance sites, three of which were in predominantly black neighborhoods and 5,000 units on three vacant sites in majority white areas on the outskirts of the city. This proposal was rejected by the housing committee of the council. And more importantly by a group of small but influential aldermen including Johnny F. Nafi whom may nearly delegated the negotiations on the sites between the council and the CHA. According to Meyerson's account, several aldermen and Nafi's far south side plot could be expected to win only one more election in their ward due to the rapidly shifting demographics in their neighborhoods. The counter proposal of 12,000 units all of the areas designated for new housing were located on clearance sites in black neighborhoods. And so this is one of the results of those considering the built consequences is the Robert Taylor Holmes ironically named after the Chicago housing chairman who lost this battle against the city council. In the now canonical account of historian Aril Hirsch in his book Making the Second Ghetto, the council's position on the public housing sites constituted a quote strategy of containment, a term that Elizabeth Wood of the CHA had herself used of the black population. But as I suggest, it also reinforced the political rewards of segregation alongside the political rewards of segregation alongside the gerrymandering of wards. The built consequence of the council's negotiations was this two mile long stretch of public housing projects in the south side, including state way gardens and Robert Taylor Holmes shown here. The conflict between the CHA and council took place in the context not only of the 1939 federal housing but also in the wake of the 1947 Illinois state law the Blighted Areas Redevelopment Act which allowed local authorities to form partnerships with private development to construct privately funded housing on land acquired and cleared by the city. Yeah, in the creation of the Chicago Land Clearance Commission led to partnerships between the CHA and the South Side Planning Board which were the group formed by Michael Reese Hospital and the Illinois Institute of Technology primarily but also integrating other local leaders and city booster or civic boosters in the South Side. The South Side Planning Bureau was initially formed to protect the institutional interests of IIT and Michael Reese Hospital by combating quote Blight and advocating quote some clearance working at times closely with the CHA and Chicago Plan Commission with Walter Gropius as an architectural consultant and with the recent GST graduates, Martin Meyerson wrote the book that I was citing earlier and Reginald Isaacs at Michael Reese Hospital. And this is another image from this report from the South Side Planning Board showing these two super blocks including a CHA housing site at the top right here which would replace this so-called Blighted Area which is identified as a study area for this project. And this document was seen by the CHA sorry by the CHA but also by the South Side Planning Board helping to attract the New York Life Insurance Company which constructed on that site on the same site. Eventually the lake made those housing by SOM on the left and so this is what replaced the red square or the super block showing that previous image. As well as the Dearborn Homes which were on the right, Lowell Schlosman and Bennett which were the first outcomes of the partnership between the Chicago Housing Authority and the South Side Planning Board and the Dearborn Homes on the right were actually built to re-house residents who were displaced by the Lake Meadows project on the left as well as other projects of so-called slum clearance in the South Side. So in conclusion, in considering the maps of the electoral redistricting and Blight and slum clearance so-called and the redevelopment projects of the CHA in considering these maps as in forms of administrative maps that define boundaries of local areas that differentiate and establish forms of legal and political authority in relationship to the people, land and buildings that reside there. I would suggest the questions of how the media of Blight maps, specifically the use of scoring and thresholds applied to quantitative or statistical survey data to differentiate areas of the city rather than single buildings. How those Blight maps link up with other imperatives in 20th century urbanism that also favor forms like for instance, the super block and those would improve criteria like economies of scale or constructability of large scale and automobility. And further, following almost research in accounting for the role of Blight maps as a form of administrative map, I'd like to consider the entrainments of political and legal boundaries in urban renewal as they intersect with the racialized politics of cities. As is mapped by the Chicago Urban Leagues Research Department demonstrates, and this was actually submitted as part of a hearing on housing in Chicago in front of the US Senate subcommittee on housing. As is mapped by the Urban League demonstrates the administrative map of areas of the city designated for quote, some clearance and redevelopment under urban renewal are a product of the already racialized geographies of the city. And so this is showing, just to kind of break this down a little bit, areas that the Urban League understands as black residential areas and orange and the dots are all the different projects undertaken by the Chicago Housing Authority and other urban renewal affiliated organizations. And so what they're showing is the relationship of these geographies in the city and how they correspond to the already racialized geography of segregation. So thank you. Thank you, Bayendik and Alma. And if this were a live event, we would be clapping. I hope that the seminar audience who we cannot see are clapping in the privacy of their own screen. Thank you both. And it's thank you especially for having brought what to my mind is a somewhat consistent depiction of the graphic universe that was being banded about in the 40s and 50s and 60s in the United States. I'm particularly struck. I'll let you kind of gather your thoughts to ask questions to each other. But one thing I'm struck by which will eventually beg the question of a kind of literacy on the part of the public what visual literacy existed on the part of the public vis-à-vis these kinds of graphic representations. I'm asking specifically because, of course, today we are the New York Times Infographics Department is very well equipped and they periodically get on the front page. Whereas one imagines that there are some techniques that are remarkably consistent that seem novel maybe to the people you were talking about. Both of you have moments where an overlay is clearly the sort of most up-to-date graphic technique and a correspondence is promised. And this strikes me as it must be novel in some way. I see Benedict, your architects are still posing in front of models and it's a model of the Chirada Guyana. So it's clearly not really what they're doing but they feel the need to depict themselves more maybe more traditionally as moving blocks around. Whereas what they're really doing is flipping transparencies on the page. And the idea that what you do is that there's an overlapping of things. So just the idea of overlay. And the second thing is the distinction between a straight line geometric in the sense that it's a Cartesian grid and a soft line. So Alma, you spoke about this conflict between, to what extent is the hand line already seen as preferable as part of a critique of high modernist mathematics, let's say, or is this purely accidental? And you too, Benedict, your super block plans in the end have kind of soft patches of the last, not the very last image you showed but the one before at the architectural scale we have the grid but then in the end we have kind of soft edges. So I wondered to what extent this was already a critique of kind of gridded boundaries. So anyways, those are my questions. You don't feel you have to answer them now but I leave you to sort of ask each other questions and to the audience, if you wanna put your questions in the chat we'll also gather those and read them out loud. Well, I mean, if I could just speak to the question of literacy and how that maybe intersects with some of the stories I was telling. You know, one of the ambitions actually in the creation of the community areas that was part of that mapping process that I showed by the local community research committee of the University of Chicago which became the social science research committee was to actually publish this book which was released in several editions from the 30s forward every 10 years called The Local Community Fact Book which several editions of it were edited by Lewis Worth. And it was deliberately conceived as this kind of a reference for citizens in the city of Chicago to understand the city better and be able to use it in exactly the types of electoral processes presumably electoral but also just I guess any other form of democratic debate. And so there was that agenda at least and even behind these very seemingly kind of technical and sophisticated mapping methodologies to create some kind of public facing version of that and the idea of these community areas in the case of the University of Chicago research was part of that. And on the overlays, there are examples of earlier mapping in the context of planning processes that use transparent overlays and create composite maps out of those. What I think is distinct and relatively novel in the use of these acetate overlays in the case of the maps by the Chicago Plan Commission is the way in which they're understood to correspond the correspondence between a visual layer and a data set and the way that those can be recomposited and effectively visually re-scored depending on a different set of imperative for the different planning process later. And that was the ambition of these maps would be that they could be the layers could be separable and recombinable in different ways depending on what the mandate was, let's say later. And I think that's something that is relatively early in the emergence of these techniques. I mean, if I can jump in a little bit again on this question, both of this question of the overlay and on the question of a kind of visual literacy. I mean, in terms of visual literacy, it's interesting because at least for the early 1960s, a lot of the information that comes out especially from these attempts to use computers is in fact just charts, tables with numbers, right? It's not actual maps. It's then there's an extra step. And in fact, it's very hard to find I've had a hard time finding until now a lot of attempts to kind of popularize this different districting in a visual medium, in a truly visual medium. I think that this is where I think that when it comes to the kind of overlay, this is again, one of this moment I think this is what was so exciting at least for some of those researchers is this idea that when you use the computer for example can change, but the overlay can remain the same. So you can, if you use computing patterns as an overlay, but you can now rearrange district. You can rearrange things. So you can keep one thing static, one kind of one overlay static, while rearranging another and trying to see how boundaries really kind of correspond to one another. And I think that was the most exciting thing at a time in terms of the kind of capacity of the technology. But can I go back to kind of one of the last thing that you just said, which is I think it's so interesting because it goes to some of the things that comes up a little bit in my research is exactly what you're saying about this tension between the kind of data sets on the one hand and their mapping kind of visual. And can you tell a bit more about in the different cases that you're looking at and how that process is done and how the people involved actually thinking about that? Yeah, so which of those maps would be the most, I mean, so many of the, like even the first group of maps that I started with, which were from Myerson's book, planning politics and the public interest in the notes he cites that these have been redrawn from maps produced by the city planning commission and the city housing authority. And so that was actually in the case of the maps used in both by official local government agencies and by architects working sometimes on behalf of either private developers or public private partnership type organizations like the South Side Planning Board, that was really a source that was used quite extensively in the replanting. And so that was in terms of the relationship of the collection of data to that group of maps which were part of this land survey, the report of land survey commission in Chicago that came out in 1942 and that was followed immediately after by the Chicago plan commission's residential, a master plan of residential land use in Chicago. So that set of data and those maps corresponding to the data were produced as part of this joint effort of the WPA and the Chicago plan commission the mayor in Chicago had sought funding related to money being made available through the WPA through the afternoon deal to undertake this. And this is actually something that was greatly sort of advocated for by the Chicago housing authority to use this WPA money to hire, in the end it was 1500 surveyors to conduct these block by block building by building surveys in the city. And so that image that I showed of this card which is that it's a, so there's the whole of the card but then there's also the survey form. So that was something that in some ways similar to the surveys that the Chicago, the University of Chicago sociology department had undertaken. They were blocked by block surveys where they did interviews with residents and recorded things like the age of buildings, the racial categories to which the residents were understood to correspond and the percentage of buildings that were rented versus owned the levels of rent that were received, et cetera. So that was all done by surveying block by block and then those forms were then encoded into these hollereth cards. That's the piece actually that unfortunately, the report by the land use commission says that these were an important product, the hollereth cards themselves were a major product of the process. I'm not exactly sure yet at least I haven't found really evidence for how those cards were actually used subsequently but at least at the time they wanted to build them as a significant product of that survey. So that was more or less the process. And then at the same time maps were drawn, the acetate sheets that I showed showed the base map and then an overlay which was drawn on top of that which would reflect the data that was collected on those survey forms and would break it down. So the land use plan or the report of the land use survey parts of which are included in the land use plan breaks down all of the different racial categories of neighborhoods in the city, areas that have a majority of houses that were built before 1895 which was one of the criteria for designating the neighborhoods. So all of that is basically part of this WPA CBC process that then goes into the report on land use and then goes immediately into the master plan for residential land use. So it sounds like statistics, it sounds like the survey is a layer that is sort of factual let's say, using Alma's model that there's one layer that's fixed and another that is used. It sounds like there the calculative fact is the survey done by humans door to door, et cetera and then eventually a kind of second stage statistical thinking, density of people, likelihood that they would move, that they're voting behavior, et cetera is overlaid and that's when spatial patterns also that's when planning occurs. In your case Alma, I was struck by that by the fact that the spatial aspect comes almost by accident, like land if this is our theme, by accident they start drawing land but in the original when you described that they basically have lists of numbers and you can hear it in their fear, the fear of the number, the fear that people will be interchangeable. It must be because they see just lists of numbers but I suppose my question is, so is there any aha moment at the moment that they realize what they're doing is they're figuring pieces of land or is there any ways the map is there already and so that's seen as part of this shift that you're describing from a kind of abstract model to more applied oversight, like that the computer's there to make oversight rather than actually give you something from scratch. No, I mean, I think that there is this worry at least at the beginning of, and there's this worry that if you treat people just as number, right? And you kind of do, they're interchangeable, right? So there is some of this worry but that is where the kind of, I think that this is where there are all of them, I think to some degree and all of them, and I just gave three examples. There are many more practitioners at a time that try to think how can you use computers to deal with this question. They're, each one is trying to come with a different way of now combining in some way, the kind of geographical and the more numerical information. And it's about the imaginations, for me what's interesting is the way they kind of, the sort of imaginaries that they come up with of trying to think about new measurements, new way of thinking about the land and the people together as what I find so interesting about those early moments. And again, they are all, they all believe, that the computer offers something, right? I mean, in part it's this shiny new tool probably, but besides the fact that it's just like shiny and new, I think that they believe that the computer offers something that there is something that the computer can do that humans cannot do. And that point really is about the ability to calculate, right? I mean, it's not, it's still not the graphic. So it's the question of how can you utilize that calculative capacity to then imagine those geographical and, or civic boundaries and demographic boundaries completely, a little bit different. And yeah, I mean, it's exactly this sort of tension that I think is so, it's kind of so interesting at that moment. And then did you want to direct a question at Alma? Yeah, so I actually, my, thank you so much for your presentation. This one aspect that I really found curious in the discussion of these different algorithms for redrawing boundaries, I understand the political sort of theoretical basis of the idea of equal representation as being measurable by numerically in relationship to population. So that's sort of one criteria that all of those algorithms are working with is the idea that there should be some kind of relatively equal population and equalization of population between different histories. The other criterion that most of those algorithms are prioritizing, I think actually all of them prioritize it and some of them add other criteria as well is compactness. And compactness, I mean, I'm thinking about this in relationship to what I was describing about the research on the natural form of the community that compactness seems like a kind of much less interrogated assumption at the basis of all of those algorithms. And you see this as a criterion in the drawing of national boundaries after civil wars or after independence in some countries because national boundaries compactness is important because you can minimize the amount of order which is from a national security standpoint seen as good. But it doesn't really make as much sense when you're thinking about electoral districts like why does it matter whether you have a long border or not? And so at least in reading your essay that was something that really seemed to me that for whatever reason the people working on these algorithms somehow didn't have to demonstrate the relevance of that as a criterion. Almost in my hunch let's say is that it has something to do with like the original political cartoon of the gerrymandering that's kind of like a monstrous bird lizard in Massachusetts. There's just something that is aesthetically, let's say objectionable about the form of the gerrymandered district that makes compactness a kind of a criteria that requires no external justification. But I know there probably are other reasons that that was foregrounded as part of the algorithm I just wonder if you could kind of expand on that. Yeah, I mean it doesn't come right. So the idea that compactness is important doesn't come from those researchers that has a kind of longer legislative history. This idea of compactness. I think in part it's kind of goes you kind of hit there the exact point when you brought up the lizard, right the gerrymandering lizard which is it's I think it seems it's seen in the most minimal sense as a test against gerrymandering, right. If you that in a way that if you say that the district needs to be compact it's a way of kind of protecting against complete randomness, right. This is actually the example exactly that the graduates say if you don't care about it all about any kind of if you forget about geography and if you forget the kind of the geography, the kind of broadness of the land then you can just decide that there are there are 10 district in a state we're gonna draw numbers from ahead each you will be in a district with somebody in you'll be in a district with somebody in upstate New York and somebody all around the States it just it will be completely random. So once they bound it, right once there is this idea that the district should represent actual kind of communities I think that the that's where the notion of compactness comes in as a as a first first kind of line, first line of protections against against gerrymandering and again, not all states have to be said to it's not all states today but not all states have that as a requirement for their district team and even though and the other part of it that even though compactness is something that again, like have quite a long historical just a long legislative history there is not agreement of what it is that okay, so everybody can say that a circle is but that's once you kind of give up on the idea that you can use perfect geometry then again, the kind of question of how are you actually gonna define compactness is not obvious at all. So in some way, yeah, go for it. No, I mean, I was gonna say that it's so interesting that I think what's novel is what you're describing that compactness keeps you from complete distribution the idea that you could potentially have a completely distributed randomly, that's wonderful. On the other hand, if you study cities there are many cities that are linear because and there are many settlements that are linear because they obey a certain geographic feature. So there are cities that are along river not, you know, I wonder if there's not a kind of assumption of a kind of central place theory almost in both your cases actually that basically a neighborhood is something that isn't, you know, looks pretty much like this and that and even the critique of the gerrymandered bird of course, one understands it but linearity is one of the crucial things in bad districts, right? Districts look gerrymandered when they're very linear but there are quite a few modes of settlement that are linear. They're just not sort of modern they're not germane to modern urban planning. So in a way one would want a critique that would not be applied to cities like Chicago because of course there's also an assumption there one could say there's also an assumption there that basically the best thing a grid could do is to make neighborhoods that still resemble villages with a center and that are compact, you know, like a circle but they're modern and in a grid. So one would want a case study that, you know rural community that is along a geographic feature that's really strong like a geographic feature that really pushes pressure on where people can or cannot kind of settle. Yeah. But so this idea Ahmed that you could pick people out of a hat, that's purely a counterfactual, right? Nobody's actually- Yes, yes, completely counterfactual. Because in fact the computer in your case is not really being asked to do anything except iterate like get to the answer faster, right? Can you say more about that? I mean, yes, the idea is that you and they even in some of the papers themselves the kind of the authors will say this could potentially be done but if you try to do it with human capacities it will take forever. So the idea is that what the computer can do is continuously iterate and offer this kind of small iteration but a lot of those small iterations so that by the end of it you will get some sort of a solution that you wouldn't be able to do if you weren't using the computer. But that's exactly what I'm saying that in the 1960s, at the end of the day most of the state, some of them even in New York for example, they work with certain companies that offer those kind of computer districting. At the end of the day they said, no, they even said there's certain things that you can just do by hand much better. And they still trusted because having those kind of knowledge of the state and knowledge it was seen as something that was still something that certain kind of individual had those sort of expertise and they knew the district, they knew that kind of right there, the kind of politician that actually knew the district, knew the state understood it all enough. It's something that couldn't be mechanized something that couldn't be just moved into this statistical data. I mean, it's actually something that made me think about Benedictine in your talk. I thought it's so interesting about the University of Chicago survey, where they come up with those community boundaries, where does this idea of that the boundaries of the cities needs to be kind of redrawn or really come up, right? Because that's again, it has to do with knowing you can't use the census. You can't use the statistical knowledge. Well, so I mean, the reason that this becomes a kind of obsession for sociologists at Chicago has to do with the fact that since 1910, after 1910, that when the census, the US census, when it would report its results, it would actually use the ward map. The ward map was treated almost like it was, you would see these kind of choropleth maps, where the statistics of the census would be then mapped as shading, hatching levels of gradient on the ward map. They recognized that the ward map was in many ways something that was constantly being manipulated politically. And so this is something where there is this dichotomy that's posed in the writings around this local research committee's work in collaboration with the census between the natural form of the community and these kind of administrative political boundaries that are constantly being redrawn in favor of different electoral interests. And so that's, yeah. Is there a sense that the community has this kind of natural boundaries? Yes, I mean, that's entirely what, so it's curious because on one hand, yeah, so they're using census data, but also they are also doing one of these kind of block by block building by building survey processes and using that to identify criteria that will allow them to create those 75 groupings. And then those 75 groupings are then adopted officially by the city for use in its planning, but also by the US census, along with the census tract. So that same process, it's a project that comes out of that local community areas mapping and surveying process that develops the census tract as a format that's still used today by the census. It's really incredible that this idea that there's natural boundaries and those can be devised by a team of people with clipboards knocking on doors, going up, you know, tenement housing. I mean, it's really incredible the amount to which architectural typology basically feeds right into what is understood as a natural dataset, basically. So we are out of time, oh, we have two minutes left. I want to ask someone, one of you to tell me, when is it that statistics are a probability, let's say prediction are used to actually make the census and begins to be seen as preferable to counting people one by one. Do you know this? So it's not used, so there's a Supreme Court, so you cannot, so part of the problem with the census is that for, at least, so actually I'll, so for the purpose of apportionment, there's a Supreme Court case from 1999 or the 2000, I don't remember that you're not allowed to use statistical sampling. In fact, you have to count everyone. So even though, so certain purposes of the census you actually can use, but not for apportionment or congressional apportionment, even though it's less accurate. So even though they know for fact that it's less accurate. So essentially the question for another conversation perhaps is, at some point it becomes obvious that actually imagining that you can have a record of each person in their space that's less easily done than by a computer. And one wants to know to what extent does computation use spatial knowledge to do this, whether natural ones or not. So all right, I see that Joseph Bedford has asked a question to which we clearly don't have the time to answer. His question is the methodological. How does Benedict's work? How is it affected by his being an architectural scholar as opposed to another one? Hopefully Joseph will join us for the next event that we can answer that question more broadly. And in general, I wanna thank Alma and Benedict so much for playing along, sending papers to each other, responding to each other and indulging us in our theme for the semester. So thank you and thank you to the audience for joining. And we will see you in two weeks for Tim Mitchell and Stephanie Bahl. Thanks everyone, take care. Thank you.