 Hello everyone. Good evening. Good morning wherever you are. I'm Wei Ping Wu at GISA, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. It is really my pleasure to introduce our speaker today and someone who's truly a public intellectual and public scholar. Dr. Philip Thompson, a longtime faculty member in the MIT's Urban Studies and Planning faculty, has long been doing research on community-based planning, development, centering social justice, and focusing on the struggles of black communities, especially in his book in 2006. Dr. Thompson also has deep ties to New York City, both from his graduate school days in his master's degree and doctoral studies. And then afterwards, once he began his teaching career at MIT, he came back to New York many times and remained here. And he worked in the Manhattan Borough President's Office and then moved on to work in the Dinkins Administration as the Deputy General Manager for Operations and Development. Now he is a Deputy Mayor at New York City for strategic planning initiatives. In that capacity, Dr. Thompson is responsible for spearheading a diverse collection of priority initiatives. This includes Democracy New York City, the Minority and Woman Owned Business Enterprise Program, the Mayor's Office of Workforce Development, the Office of the Census, and the Young Man's Initiative. In addition, his agency portfolio includes the Department of Youth and Community Development, the Department of Small Business Services, the Commission on Human Rights, the Department of Veterans Services, the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, the Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities, and the New York City Public Engagement Unit. So as you can see from all of that responsibility, he's putting many of his research thoughts and deep beliefs into his policy responsibilities. And as I said, truly a public intellectual and public scholar and dedicated public servant. So with that, I want to give Dr. Phillip Thompson the floor and to walk us through some of his thoughts, ideas, and experiences in the New York City government. Thank you very much, Wei Ping. And I met Wei Ping last October and in South Carolina, and it's a really a great pleasure for me to be able to reconnect and to speak with you all virtually at GSAP. As you all know, our country today is deeply divided over race. Again, it's not the first time. President Trump has made race the main issue of his reelection campaign. And I want to talk about why it is we're so divided as a nation still. And what role does planning and design have in overcoming this division. But I want to begin to address these questions in the context of history. The United States started as a capitalist slave economy with a constitutional commitment to democracy. This was obviously a precarious foundation for a nation. The largest church denominations at the time, the Methodist and Presbyterians said continuing slavery was morally wrong. The Baptist Church of Virginia said slavery was quote inconsistent with Republican government in quote. Jefferson, Payne, Henry, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, Monroe, and many other founders thought slavery needed to end. George Washington said quote, there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see some plan adopted for the abolition of slavery. Jefferson said quote, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just that his justice cannot sleep forever. Yet these more enlightened founders lost greed and expediency one. Many hoped at the time that concerted efforts to educate and morally uplift the citizenry would undermine slavery over time. Slave owners countered this by establishing a series of protections against popular democracy. This is how we ended up with a grossly malapportioned Senate, the Electoral College, and with state governments that fully dedicated themselves to slavery and segregation for well over a century in fact for centuries. Slave owners also worked tirelessly to shape the nation's culture and ideology to comport with slavery. The concept of whiteness barely existed at the time of the founding. Slave owners successfully promoted white identity after the founding to win support from poor European immigrants. Poor quote unquote whites were eventually offered the right to vote and the promise of land ownership in exchange for their help in repressing non whites. Above all, whites were guaranteed the quote unquote freedom of not being made a slave. Freedom whiteness and democracy all came to mean the same thing. Needless to say this kind of partial freedom didn't protect democracy, which is why the country needed intensive racialized policing from the very beginning. The reality of democracy is that every part of the population protects the rights of every other part, and thereby no one has legitimate grounds to attack others. This is why the Constitution names justice in the very first sentence as governments guarantee of unity promises aside, we never enacted those values as a nation. Frederick Douglass the runaway slave and abolitionist leader said in 1857 quote slavery lives in this country, not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people who persuade themselves that they are safe, though the rights of others may be struck down. Many founders thought the American system was unstable for an additional reason. It did little to prevent the rich from becoming a permanent aristocracy or to prevent the poor from becoming a downtrodden and exploited class of people. Many believe that democracy required widespread distribution of property and prohibition of wealth transfers from parents to children. The property they argued gave people a stake in the system, owning property would also help train citizens for democracy. Farmers who own their land or semen who own part of their ship regularly have to plan for the future, execute on their plans and take responsibility for outcomes. Many founders agree that voting citizens ought to have the experience of ownership in order to make good and independent political judgments. But rather than distribute property, they prohibited 90% of the population from voting. Soon this limitation of the franchise became untenable as poor whites threatened to join slave rebellions. The owner's counter argument to widespread property ownership was that maintaining a thriving economy required dictatorial rule of laborers and the single-minded pursuit of profit unburdened by obligations towards social justice. This was the origin of the idea that business has nothing to do with politics and holding business to standards other than profits will cause economic ruin. This was an expedient argument in 1787 when slavery was the main economic driver in the United States. What's harder to explain is why this ideology has received so little scrutiny since. Radical Enlightenment Enlightenment thinkers and abolitionists also tried to shape the nation's ideology. They argued to poor whites that slave owners were aristocratic enemies of democracy. And if left in power, they would soon trample the rights and aspirations of poor whites just as they had done to blacks. When the United States acquired land west of the Mississippi in 1803, the abolitionists were proven correct. Slave owners demanded the new territory to expand slave plantations. Poor white people wanted land to realize the American dream of property ownership and independence. That clash along with slavery itself led to the US Civil War, one of the bloodiest wars in world history. The Civil War was about slavery, but not only about black slavery. The war was about democracy itself, including within the idea of democracy, the economy as a whole. Would poor whites be able to own land and prosper? Or would the country become a de facto money aristocracy? The 13th Amendment to the Constitution passed during the war stated that, quote, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, end quote. Involuntary servitude in 1865 was widely understood to mean being compelled to work for another person because there is no other means of survival. The 13th Amendment can thus be understood as an implicit guarantee of universal property ownership. The idea of universal property ownership was part of the broad political sweep of the Civil War and the hopeful possibility it embodied of a regeneration of democracy. After the Civil War, the federal government established reconstruction governments in the South to rebuild its institutions. Former Confederates were disenfranchised and former slave men got the vote. Union troops stayed in the South to prevent a return of Confederate rule, but the reform process was cut short after only 12 years. Northern liberal politicians spurred on by sweetheart deals offered to Northern businesses by former rebels ended reconstruction. They restored Confederate voting rights and withdrew federal troops. Thousands of blacks and progressive whites were massacred for attempting to vote or exercise any kind of power. Few blacks could vote in the South for the next 100 years. The Confederates regained control of their plantations, leaving 4 million black people penniless and landless. More whites were also left poor. The widespread hardship this cause gave rise to a counter movement in the South called populism. Populists began organizing in a racially and nearly gained control of Georgia and North Carolina state governments in the early 1890s. The populists challenged the nation's economic hierarchy, and in 1896 ran a strong national campaign for the presidency. The frenzied response of conservatives was to split the populist base by whipping up racism. The Supreme Court joined in. Their 1896 Plessy versus Ferguson decision legalized racial segregation across the United States. The aim of racial segregation was political. It was to physically separate poor whites and blacks to prevent another populist movement. Legal segregation was a massive politicization of space. It was a coercive planning exercise, rivaling wartime planning. Planning textbooks say that the planning profession began during the progressive era as a way to protect public health. That's just wrong. Yet another whitewash of American history. Segregation was planned extensively before the progressive era. It is revealing that in a country dedicated for at least 150 years to racial segregation in housing. Schools, churches, trains and buses, bathrooms, water fountains, even separate Bibles for swearing in witnesses in courtrooms. There has been very little academic attention to the origins and effects of racial segregation. While there are widely accepted theories and political science about basic procedural requirements for democracy, such as one person one vote, equal voting rights prohibitions against interference with the ballot. Nothing of the sort exists when it comes to the racial politicization of space. What does a democratic society look like physically? Where do citizens from different backgrounds interact with one another? And should physical interaction be mandated the same way racial segregation was? There are questions that impact on democracy as much as voting, yet planning and design theory have remained silent. The architects of the civil rights movement focused on ending segregation, but not because they were enamored with having lunch in restaurants with white people. They viewed racial segregation as a uniquely powerful means of dividing poor people and disabling them from challenging economic hierarchy or achieving genuine democracy. They believe that racial integration required vigorous efforts to enable people of different races and economic classes to know each other under conditions of social equality in all areas of life. This is something far beyond desegregated housing alone. They created their own urban martial plans to reimagine cities this way. Some scholars call the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s the second reconstruction. For the most part, the second reconstruction failed. Of course, this is not what school children are taught if these subjects are discussed at all. Students are taught that the Civil War solved the slavery problem, and civil rights legislation solved the racial discrimination problem. This is why so many Americans do not understand race. They haven't been told the truth. The Republican Party, starting with Nixon, rebuilt itself as a party by resisting racial segregation, racial integration. Republican politicians maintained that the civil rights movement wanted to take away white workers hard-owned possessions and rob brutalized and murder white people. Instead of guaranteed employment for all, which was the main demand of the civil rights movement following desegregation, black communities were targeted for police repression and mass incarceration, justified under the guise of the war on drugs. Much of the white working class, few of whom ever had anything approaching a balanced and thorough civic education, left the Democrats and joined the Republicans to defend their quote, way of life. The Republicans have continued feeding white workers a steady diet of racial fear mongering for the last 45 years. Meanwhile, corporations decimated unions and well-paying manufacturing jobs on which many white workers depended. Democrats competing with Republicans for corporate money and white voters often took on the anti-poor people, anti-worker agenda as well. This was our dominant politics until about 12 years ago. 12 years ago, Obama's election opened up a new phase in American history. Some call it the third reconstruction. Obama's election highlighted the nation's rapidly changing demographics. A majority of large and medium-sized cities have been majority people of color populated for more than a decade. In those same cities, 80% of young white voters supported Obama twice. A new multiracial coalition is rising in America. The new coalition is pushing on health care reform, climate change, criminal justice reform, immigration reform, women's rights, LGBTQI rights, and on labor and economic reform. They want a different country. They are also challenging the stories that have been told to justify inequality. In this process, Americans are beginning to get the civic education they so badly need. Donald Trump's main goal, as he himself says, is to stop this movement for change. I want to shift now back to planning and design. Because the third reconstruction movement needs planners and designers. There is a deep anti-planning bias in the United States that limits our ability to tackle current problems. Planning is often framed as undermining personal freedom. The influential conservative economist Frederick Hayek argued long ago that planning implies social cooperation. And social cooperation requires the centralization and control of information by planning elites. Thereby, planning causes loss of individual freedom. Hayek argued that markets operating behind the backs of citizens do a better job of allowing individual choice and facilitating coordination than planners. Hayek ignored some important realities in real life big corporations do immense planning and not for free markets. But Hayek drew on the powerful experiences of fascism and Stalinism in Europe. Both of which gave a bad name to planning. Hayek's anti-government anti-planning bias also meshed well with America's traditional conservative opposition to government regulation, which as I noted, goes back to slavery. We planners have to take up Hayek's challenge. For starters, Hayek had a low opinion of ordinary people. Hayek's theory rested on the belief that ordinary people cannot handle much information or do a lot of independent thinking. This is why he believed that planning was impossible without the centralization of information in the hands of elite experts. He thought that community organizing would quickly turn into mob action, which is why he put more faith in markets as a democratic mechanism than in citizens coming together to reason with each other. Hayek believed that the masses of citizens could be comforted enough by capitalism's material comforts to reject mass action in politics. Hayek's assumptions don't hold today. All sectors of the American people are in political motion right now. Planners can engage and try to provide options and plans for movements. Or planners can try and avoid movements. Those of us in government can't avoid movements, and I don't want to avoid them. I believe that most people are educable. In New York City, for example, we have learned that if we inform ordinary people about the basics of infectious disease and make resources available, the vast majority of people will adjust their behavior for the good of society. If we had not shared information and left control of COVID, just to the vaccine specialist, many more people would have died. Planning should focus on making popular movements as educated as possible. Hayek argued rightly that capitalism was a cunning information system that allowed individuals to coordinate economic decisions without knowledge of other actions in the world based simply on consumers' individual material wants and price signals. Capitalism did organize, if brutally, the entire world to use simple metrics of price and profit to conduct production and world exchange. There have been tremendous benefits from capitalism for lucky people able to afford products from every corner of the globe. Yet, the goods this system has developed or out of reach for much of the world's population and abundance for some comes at the expense of common goods we cannot live without, such as a livable climate and health. Rather than addressing these failures, big corporations have increasingly sought to operate in authoritarian regimes that stifle worker voices, or they manufacture in places that have weak environmental controls, or they set up phony offices in countries with low taxes to avoid contributing to the public welfare for necessities such as universal health care. Because of this, capitalism is increasingly losing its attachments to democracy and its contributions to human progress are diminishing. Hayek conceded that human beings are by nature social beings, but the operative emotion for his theory remained individualism and self-interest. This is the instinct that free market capitalism celebrates, yet it is rebuked by modern psychology and behavioral science. Hayek also operated at such a level of abstraction, it allowed him to avoid real life contradictions in his theory. The free market has it, as Hayek predicted, been a universally democratizing force. It neither weakened slavery nor made white Americans anti-racist. Capitalism today is thriving in very undemocratic countries. We urgently need planning and design to help avoid environmental catastrophe, improve public health, and to engage in support disconnected youth, and to ensure economic security for all. All the things that markets are not doing. Hayek's challenge is whether such planning compels us to operate our societies more undemocratically, either through authoritarian state capitalism or a big brother socialist state. In other words, Hayek asked if more planning will make people feel more powerless than they do already. I say just the opposite. Planning can make people more powerful. Yet given the modern world's complexity, the question of how much more information we can sensibly convey to citizens for decision making is a challenging one. The answer depends on our ingenuity and technology. Technically, it's never been easier to convey information to ordinary people than now. Inexpensive technology exists like smartphones that can make information that was once difficult to obtain widely accessible. Technology can also enable ordinary people to coordinate and collaborate and act on their higher values and principles, not just on price and immediate self-interest. Ingenuity exists too. For example, a group of progressive bankers in England and such things as progressive bankers exist over there, developed a mobile phone app that allows consumers to scan items in a supermarket. The app shows what the producer of the item on the shelf pays their workers. It shows the producer's carbon footprint and where they get their financing. Consumers can choose to support the green producer or not, or choose to support a pro-labor employer if they want to. These practices embody solidarity through choice. In fact, only having price and ingredient information on consumer items when people care about so many other things is itself a form of coercion, not the freedom that Hayek claims. Building that app took a lot of meetings and planning sessions between labor and green activists along with the bank. Other than trying to pass government regulations banning bad employers and dirty companies, they took a quicker route of simply allowing people to choose green and labor products in the market. This is a way of democratizing the market. Democratizing the economy is under-explored territory in America, but it's the path many of the founders envisioned. It's what the abolitionists wanted. Our options for structuring the economy are not limited to markets controlled by big corporations or government control. We can also help civic groups and socially oriented businesses to shape and control markets through solidarity. The mayor's office is creating pathways to eliminate poverty and promote democracy through how we engage the economy. Here are some examples. In August, Mayor de Blasio announced a new project labor agreement with the building trades. A new project labor agreement covering $20 billion in construction stipulates that 30% of all hours on the job be done by workers residing in zip codes with 15% or higher levels of poverty or by residents of public housing. This project labor agreement alone will generate 26,000 good job opportunities and low income neighborhoods in the next four years. We're pushing for state legislation as well to allow us to include these requirements in all of our city contracts, which is over $50 billion a year. This would create more job opportunities in our poorest neighborhoods. Programs like this can be expanded as we ramp up infrastructure spending to deal with climate change. This program, by the way, doesn't cost the city a dime. It just takes a commitment to justice for the poor and some planning across agencies. We can also do something similar in healthcare. A key reason twice as many blacks and Latinos died from COVID is because of pre-existing conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes. The main problem isn't lack of health insurance. Half of Brooklyn and the Bronx are on Medicaid and they are still disproportionately sick. The problem is that Medicaid and insurance generally is geared towards helping people after they get sick rather than preventing sickness in the first place. This backwards approach makes more money for the health industry, but it makes little sense otherwise. Studies show that more than 80% of disproportionate rates of chronic disease and communities of color have to do with social factors and environmental conditions. Stress-producing things such as poverty or homelessness or limited access to healthy food and exercise or housing with mold and rodents and roaches or violence in the neighborhood. Planners and architects can help deal with these issues. Our nation could save a ton of money preventing sickness on the front end and this would usher in a golden age for planning and design. A third area where we can open up a lot of opportunities is in technology. Everything from building broadband communications infrastructure to app development. I'll give two examples. If we provide an option for communities to own their own micro grids, which produces energy from local generators in the neighborhood, communities can make money and then decide democratically how to invest in neighborhood initiatives. The key is organizing residents not to use energy during peak hours of the day. They can then sell energy from their generators to the citywide grid. A blockchain system could keep track of which residents actually reduce their energy demand during the peak hours so that they can receive some kind of reward. It takes planning and community education to make something like this happen, but it's doable. It builds agency and democratic capacity in communities and it will definitely get low income communities a lot more excited about the green movement. Another initiative we're working on is helping create worker owned businesses. This is especially important as the digital economy expands. Amazon, for example, is using robots in warehouses. More robots means layoffs for workers. Despite higher short term returns for Amazon investors, layoffs hurt the economy as a whole because unemployed workers don't buy much. Robots and AI, artificial intelligence are especially threatening to low wage workers whose jobs are most vulnerable to computerization. That's why many communities and unions oppose technology companies. Worker owned companies, on the other hand, have different incentives from investor owned companies. They can use robots AI to reduce work hours or give themselves a vacation or finance worker retraining, but they are highly unlikely to lay themselves off. In conclusion, we're on the precipice of losing our democracy because we have failed to uproot the racism within our polity. The aristocratic nature of our economy has only worsened. Prior to the Civil War, abolitionists decided not to dissolve the Union, but to reclaim the revolutionary principles of the Constitution of the United States and to fight to change the slave holding cell. Frederick Douglass said, quote, the Constitution, as well as the Declaration of Independence, and the sentiments of the founders of the Republic, give us a platform broad enough and strong enough to support the most comprehensive plans for the freedom and elevation of all the people of this country without regard to color, class or climate, end quote. Like Douglass, I believe that the changes we need to transform to make to transform our country are consistent with the aspirations of our more far sided founders, even if they lost many key battles and efforts at implementation. We are in a fight for the heart and soul of America. Fighting for true democracy takes faith in our fellow citizens. Such faith is hard to find, because greed and centuries of moral blindness have destroyed bonds between us. Yet, without belief in our fellow citizens, planning for the common good is a waste of time and effort. Why speaking as a black American would rather cast my lot with poor and miseducated white people than with the charitable rich who may feel sorry for black people, but mainly seek to tamp down our advocacy. Why do I say this? Because poor white people are suffering and want major change. And black people also need major change. I am fully aware that two thirds of poor white men support Donald Trump, who aims to repress black and Latin X and Asian communities, and to deny us resources. But I also know that Trump's hardcore base of 60 million people aren't going anywhere. Regardless of who wins in November. If we don't like where poor white people are heading, we can either talk with them now, or we must fight them later. I believe we can talk. Being African American and growing up in a working class neighborhood, I know what it's like for people to be ignorant or miseducated about how the system works. I know what it's like for people to feel desperate and ready to accept all kinds of false narratives and empty remedies for their oppression. I know too, that people can become better. Frederick Douglass described his own moral progression, near his life's end. He said, quote, when I ran away from slavery, it was for myself. When I advocated emancipation, it was for my people. When I stood up for the rights of women, self was out of the question. And I found a little nobility in the act. I believe there is a little nobility somewhere in all of us, including in desperate white men who used to think of themselves only as individuals. But now they're thinking of themselves as a group under appreciated and believer. They want them to understand the suffering of others. Hopefully poor white men will come to see that black and Latin X and Asian people are not their enemies and take up our causes as their own. That has never happened in America, but neither has it been encouraged. Human potential for nobility or inner goodness needs nourishment. Any parent knows that. Planning and design cannot become an important part of our country's future, simply as technical fields, and certainly not by acting as courtiers for the for the wealthy. Planning and design have to stand for something weighty and vital to the American people. Something is cultivating the social understanding infused through our methods of practical engagement with communities and problem solving that it takes to build a multi racial democracy. That something is redesigning and rebuilding our segregated and divided communities with a vision of a fully integrated America. Something is put is purging poverty from the richest society in world history. That's something is creating new infrastructures and plans that protect our planet. That's something is having the courage to enter the darkest corners of hate filled Trump country with offers of friendship and dialogue. If we do this, there might be a bright future in front of us and a powerful movement with us. If we do not, Jefferson was right to tremble at what lies ahead. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Thompson. Very sanguine remarks. And if I may use my privilege as a moderator to perhaps ask you some questions and get your thoughts on some questions that you have raised through your talk. Towards the end of your talk, you really give us a alarming, but also encouraging picture of what is at stake, right, both for us as a society, as a country as a whole, but also for planning as both the profession, as well as as an academy. Right, so, particularly for those of us who are in school, either teaching or as students or as researchers. So I find those words very, very, you know, so thoughtful and getting us really think through. If you were talking about how the black, the Latinx and Asian communities are perhaps in the same place as the poor white communities. How do you see these very often time conflicting interest of these different groups come together. So I can you give us some examples of on what issues you think that we could as activists as planners as designers that we can unite these very different interests and right now they are at war in some ways, right. So I would love to hear your thoughts on what might be some issues that our interest could converge and could provide the seat, you know, to for really looking, you know, into a similar future, or share the future. So I can give you the example that I mentioned in my talk of our recent project labor agreement with the building trades and the leadership of the building trades and those are carpenters plumbers HVAC technicians team fitters. You know who they are construction workers, the leadership of the building trades are almost entirely white. Traditionally the building trades have been overwhelmingly white. These are workers, and they voluntarily supported the project labor agreement that requires 30% of everyone on the job to be from a high poverty neighborhood which means predominantly black and brown. They committed to bringing them into their apprenticeship programs. And they're actually excited and join the press conference with the mayor and me to announce it, and they are promoting it amongst their membership. The reason they are doing that is because we engaged in conversations about our future together. We talked about how many jobs there could be in New York and beyond, if we seriously tackled climate change, if we seriously retrofitted buildings for energy efficiency. If we really had a plan for dealing with 520 miles of coastline, which is what New York City does in the context of ocean level rise, and how if we work together, we could get to work on these things much sooner than if we fight against one another, which for 100 years almost, and they actually agreed with that message and said we can be stronger together, and it really came through reaching out. And a lot of dialogues and I just think we have to do a lot more of that and talk about not just all the things that have divided us in the past, although we do talk about that. But what we can do together in the future. And one of the things I told them was that black people have never been anti union. Historically, Martin Luther King wanted to bring the entire civil rights movement into the labor movement. He said, I just want the unions to desegregate so we can do that. And only four out of 72 unions supported Martin Luther King and that initiative. So, they were really struck by sort of learning about their own history. I told them black people understood that the Civil War was about labor. We didn't work 250 years without a paycheck and not realize there's a labor issue here. It was the labor movement that didn't embrace the Civil War as a labor issue, not black folks. And I asked them to embrace Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass as leaders for them. Not just a black people that has people who were standing up for the rights of all workers and I told them about the 13th amendment and on and on. And a lot of it is reeducation, and I think planners, we just can't go in and be technical we have to help people understand why they are where they are, how they got there, and how these various systems impact on them, and how they can actually we should create options and choices for them to improve and increase democracy, including in the economy. Thanks. Yeah, your response also touches upon another question that I was going to ask you but you kind of address that in this complexity and the multiple crises we are facing. Climate change, right, you know the COVID crisis has brought us in some ways to a halt in terms of the competition for resources and the worst heat, the worst hit communities being the most vulnerable on all fronts. So, really, for black and Latinx and the poor communities you have the triple whammy. And so in the office of deputy mayor you are in. How are you juggling these kinds of competition for resources and how do you ensure that the long term climate change goals continue to be built into some of the day to day programming and some of the day to day resource allocations. So we're having a great deal of difficulty with the Trump administration over resources, both in terms of continuing to fight the COVID virus but also to clean our schools and create safe places for people to work and we have provided over 130 million individuals to people who've lost jobs and they're hungry and we're not getting reimbursed by the federal government so we're having tremendous fiscal problems. However, part of what we're doing we're continuing to do this work regardless part of what we're doing is we engage people around COVID. We also talk to them about New York State spending $82 billion a year just on Medicaid. And how could those resources be redirected so that black and Latinx communities are healthier and not as acceptable to viruses like COVID. And what that has to do with is fighting to use Medicaid money for things like quality housing and affordable housing, because not having quality and affordable housing is one of the leading causes of stress, which in turn increases hypertension, diabetes, and all the other things that make black and Latinx people so vulnerable to COVID. So we try and introduce ideas about how if we redirect Medicaid funding, it would actually make people healthier would save Medicaid money. And that means crossing silos where housing is in one bucket, health is in another bucket, and we never look at the interrelationships between the two, and the dollars that are in one bucket can never be used in another bucket. So we challenge those ideas as we are developing our work and coming up with new strategies on how to better protect the city from virus future pandemics. And at the very same time, how can we do things like retrofit for energy efficiency and better health at the very same time. If we're going to tear open the walls to put an insulation to for conserving energy, we can also protect against asthma and better increase indoor air circulation and do other things at the very same time and if we do it together. It's cheaper than tearing open the walls twice. It actually makes more sense. So we just try as we're engaging in our day to day problem solving work to introduce new ways of doing things new ways of making connections between different things. And my last question then we'll open to questions already from the audience. So my last question has to do, you know, as a public scholar you were already working on the so called, you know broken window policing policy not really working. Particularly now with black lives matter of the protest and movement, the call for reform in our criminal justice system has been, you know, really unprecedented until now. And so how do you see the practice and ideas of community based policing take hold, and especially in New York, you know New York City and I mean I guess let's be somewhat sort of honest that the police force and the police union have not been always on board with some of these community based and human based policing practices right so where do you see New York City is going and where do you see that we need to be going in terms of specially for the more vulnerable communities in the city. So I would say that sense of blaseo de blaseo became mayor. The police department has changed a great deal. There's been a big push for neighborhood policing and because it is neighborhood policing and because we are dealing with, you know, dozens and dozens of police precincts and different personalities different captains the practice varies across neighborhoods, but overall, there's been a lot of change within the police department, but since black lives matter. Yes, there's been even more change and more public support for addressing issues in neighborhood policing and racial discrimination and policing and criminal justice. And one of the measures that was taken that I'm involved in was transferring 5000 school safety agents from from the police department to the Department of Education. And we're involved in and working on retraining them from a sort of criminal justice or policing kind of treatment of young people who are causing problems for others or themselves in school to a restorative justice approach and changing the structure of schools. And I think that process of retraining and and deep engagement in schools and with these officers is really important in breaking the school to prison pipeline. It's the kind of thing, you know, very often people engage in protests and then they forget about it or move into another issue. A year later, but the implementation is where we're going to see the real changes and real results. That's one thing. The other thing I would say is that the only way to really deal with racial bias and criminal justice and policing is to get to the root of the problem, which historically has had to do with denial of equal opportunity. And for people of color in this country and black people in particular, and that is what created racially biased policing in the first place. And I recently I heard a talk by the former police chief of Philadelphia who said Sylvester Johnson I think his name was, and he said I was a cop for 30 years and never once did I see a teenager with a job, or a young person with a job kill a young person, not one time in 30 years. And I think we have to get to these root issues, which is I look at so much in my talk on economic democracy, and how we have to address what was the main demand of the civil rights movement, which was employment and quality jobs and fairness and equality if we deal with that will have a lot easier time dealing with crime. Thank you. So, from the audience. Thomas main professor at the Max Marks School of Baruch College has a question. Mr Thompson as deputy mayor, you are responsible for career pathways. I'm writing a book on that initiative. Several nonprofit actors in the workforce policy network have told me that the implementation of CP has been lackluster. And that workforce policy remains highly fragmented. How would you respond. And can I get to interview you so I have your side of the story from a book. Sure, you can interview me but I suggest you interview. Amy Peterson and some who said of workforce for the city. As well. I would agree that the work career pathways has a long way to go. There are three dozen different workforce programs that the city has had historically and they're not integrated. And so, since I became deputy mayor that's been a priority. And we are building a system to even track what happens to people who are engaged in various workforce programs because now we don't even know we don't track what happens to people. And that's going to take a lot of effort and investment. Unfortunately, I think it's in some way slowed down in some ways sped up by coded. It slowed down because the city doesn't have money right now so even building a new computer system to track everybody who's involved in a workforce program and track outcomes and all of that takes a lot of investment and we're struggling right now for resources. However, we are going to create a workforce plan we're in the middle of it around how to deal with the pandemic and contact tracing and other things and we're working with community groups and workforce providers on creating a system for doing that. And it's a start and secondly, with the community hire program that I announced the project labor agreement and the legislation we're pushing for an Albany, which would allow us to put a requirement of 30% local hire from poor neighborhoods and all city contracts. That is enormous. It's many tens of thousands of jobs. That the city can leverage its procurement power to create opportunities and low income neighborhoods that has not been done by any mayor previously. And so in that sense, I think we are moving in the right direction in a pretty significant way. And the biggest problem with job training programs that I've seen historically is the lack of a job. And when there's no job at the end of the training people become discouraged, become cynical, they really don't work so hard at it. And so I think we're tackling both supply and demand. So from Jonathan Marty, a student in an urban planning program. How do you navigate your role as a scholar scholar practitioner. How can we better navigate that the Academy towards positive effects on real world policy. That's a great question. Thank you. First of all, the reason I think planning has such a bright future. I'm really hopeful for is because planners do work on implementation. They just don't work on ideas disconnected from feasibility and disconnected from complications and implementation. And so I think that is a particular kind of knowledge that is urgently needed now. So in the area of community health, for example, we just don't need to know that people were sick, and they're not getting better. We actually need to know what kinds of interventions in neighborhoods actually improve health outcomes, and how can we bring those innovations about. And that kind of knowledge is precious. And I think we can share those lessons in real time using, you know, the internet, not just relying on academic journals, which can take a very long time to go from to publication. I think we can create, you know, new ways of learning. All of those things are very excited to me, exciting to me, and I think urgently needed. I work in community health a lot. And honestly, hospitals are crying. And for planners who can help them figure out how to keep people out of hospitals because the way the federal reimbursement system is working, hospitals are going to be reimbursed from here on kind of like a block grant. And if you're able to save money by making people healthier, you get to keep the money. And if more people get sick, then you're going to lose money. So they're looking for whole new ways to be involved in improving community health hospitals are and planners are their best hope of figuring out how to do that. So I think there's a big future there. As far as traditional the Academy goes. I would say the problem is not just disconnection from actual implementation and feasibility. The problem is segregation. I mentioned that earlier. The Academy, particularly the elite schools are 95% white. And I'm not saying that to criticize white people I'm saying that that's segregation. It's a legacy of segregation, and folks who don't live in a community who don't understand problems in neighborhoods that are different from theirs who don't even speak languages. Very often that a majority of people in our cities and worldwide speak who don't interact in those places. They're just not in a good position to tackle crucial questions. And if faculty was more diverse, they would be exposed they would be able to do more relevant research. So I think that integration applies the need for it applies to the Academy as well. And I'm not just talking about black and white I'm talking about a variety of different people, including poor white people. You don't see many people from working class white backgrounds in Appalachia at Columbia University or MIT or any other elite school, you don't see them, and you don't see people doing practicum in Appalachia very often either. That's really quite the case here and I think the black lives matter protests and movement really have given us another big job to really look at, you know, racist practices and racism. And within Academy and you know, I think colleagues in our school and in our program are really helping us what the so called on learn racism. And so thank you for that comment. We have another question and comment combined from Bernard dead birds are a PhD student in the planning program. Thank you for such a tremendous and far reaching talk I really appreciated your specificity and clarity on the call for planning to fully embrace its identity beyond technology, something that's been long in the making, but still not fully realize a modest question or process. How politically feasible, do you think a Medicaid waiver program, like Vermont Maryland, etc, is for New York State that enables usage of Medicaid funds for supportive housing, for housing related services. I know it's been on the agenda for the city for a long time but hasn't happened. How do you see the work of small scale community planners and housing advocates with the future possibility for this type of state change in a New York City, New York State context. I think it's quite possible, particularly now, given the focus for the last seven months on racial inequities in health and growing awareness amongst everyone of if parts of our community are sick and vulnerable to coven then all of us are at risk. So I think that the time is right. What I think has been lacking and advocacy around using Medicaid to do new and different things. There's a data gap. That's enormous and I think academics and planners can be very helpful here. For example, Hawaii had a program where they use Medicaid to provide affordable housing for people who have mental challenges and were homeless. And I read that that program saved 40% and Medicaid spending because people who had stable housing if they were mentally had mental problems and they were much less likely to end up in a hospital and it saved a lot of money. So those kinds of initiatives gathering the data showing the results would be tremendously, I think, useful in the policymaking process because the big argument against doing this is that, well, if you take money away and use it for things like housing, then they'll just be less money available for health care and more people will suffer as a result. And I think the data shows the opposite, but someone has to gather that data and present it. And that's often what advocates lack when they go into the policymaking process. So I think a partnership with Columbia and other universities to really work together on providing evidence and state, you know, science on what works and what doesn't work, I think would be probably transformative. We have another question from the audience. What do you think that the average citizen should be reading to understand these histories that have been purposefully obscured? How can we address the lack of civic education in the US at our own local level? That's a big question. I'm not sure articles are the immediate answer. I think that those of us, those, you know, in the academy, I'm on leave from MIT so I still say us. Those of us in the academy, I think ought to invest a lot more time and effort in doing things that are accessible for the broad public, including high school students and just ordinary people. And I think we should make use of MOOCs, massive online courses and design MOOCs for popular audiences and for high school students and for others. I did one five years ago called Just Money and it was, I did it with some colleagues, a colleague at MIT and we have cartoons. We had, we went around to seven countries and just film people who were doing innovative things in community events and it was actually like a fun and exciting MOOC. And the very first time we showed it, we had 7,000 people. The very first time with no advertising, we had 7,000 people take that course from around the world, 18 countries. And my colleague who I worked with, their MOOCs now have over 100,000 people who take these courses. So I just think there are ways we can reach far beyond where we are now and we should really be developing those things. So this comment and question are from Katie Flamiea. Great talk, Phil, so nice to see you. Seems to me the problem with non-privileged groups is lack of power. Getting jobs is the first step. But how can we look at getting underrepresented groups into places of leadership? Positions of power? Maybe not a thing planners or architects consult or can we? I think that where leaders develop is really in the course of problem solving in their own neighborhoods and their own communities and their own workplaces. And this is where planners, designers and others interact or can interact with people. And this is where folks gain the confidence and the skills to actually run for office or take other leadership positions in society. So I just think planners and designers have to be aware of this. And have to build into our own practice leadership development and understand that we are training folks, you know, to go on and take responsible and important positions in society. And one of the things I think we have to do in particular is expand people's understanding of what's possible and what's doable. Not just training people on how to follow rules and programs that are designed by others that government has issued or, you know, what developers want, but help them create new ways of doing their own development their way. Maybe they can crowdsource financing and do a building that they want to see in their neighborhood. I gave an example in my talk of community owned micro grids. That's an option. But most people don't even know in communities that that is an option that they could actually own their own energy generator and that they could sell energy back to the grid. If they're organized to do their laundry at seven at night or seven in the morning, during the peak hours when energy prices are highest, they can make money selling energy to the grid if they own their own cogen plant or own their own energy generator. That's an option. And so planners should be helping, I think, show folks build agency in the course of their work. We have a question from Samantha Lewis. Along with the COVID-19 crisis, the climate change crisis is another issue that a lot of people are increasingly concerned with. What other strategic initiatives are happening in New York City to address resilient resiliency. Is there any way to combine the fast paced changes to address both. Well, that we have a multi billion dollar initiative we're doing with the US Army of civil engineers. Several projects are beginning both in Queens and in Staten Island to deal with rising ocean levels and storms. The city council did pass legislation with requirements on energy retrofits that will be kicking in over the next 10 years. But I would say that all of these initiatives are going to be on a fast track over the next several years, because they have to be. The climate change is, it's just happening before our eyes, everywhere. And so the city is urgently in need of partnerships and I think it has to be with the Academy on how to address all of these issues so New York we have 520 miles of coastline. I personally don't think building a wall around New York City is the solution. I personally think I'm more inclined towards turning New York into a Venice kind of scenario where the water comes through, and we even tap the water flow the tidal energy to create electricity and meet our energy demands. But I think the floor is wide open for ideas and imagination. But one thing we know as a city, we're going to have to do a massive investment on, you know, our infrastructure just to survive because the oceans are rising. However, New York could be because we have more seacoast territory than it all the cities on the West Coast and East Coast combined. We could become a world center for technology and innovation and knowledge on how to deal with rising sea levels and two thirds of the world's people live on coast. So this could become an economic engine for New York. But the planning for that is lacking. It's not enough. And our agencies are really struggling with it. So I think the Academy it's a big opportunity area, just like in health care for planners and designers. Just to follow up that really quickly. Why was planning lacking on those fronts in New York City. Well, I think in the area of community health planning. It's because of the politics and the domination by hospitals and doctors in the politics and pharmaceutical companies and politics. So preventing sickness doesn't pay well. If you're trying to sell drugs, or if you're running a hospital, it's like you want your beds filled. If you're running a hospital, same as a restaurant, you want your tables filled. And so the Affordable Care Act actually tried to change the incentive structure for hospitals to say that we're going to give you as much money as you may as for your patient load last year this year. And if you reduce the number of people coming into your building, you keep the difference. If the numbers go up, you lose money, you have to eat the loss. And so that is where the Affordable Care Act is trying to go to change the incentive structure for healthcare providers. But the way the system is structured is not been for in the direction of community health. It's been basically market driven. And I would say, as far as climate change goes, city agencies just tend to be routinized and to go on what the past has been like. They don't have a lot of folks who really trained on how to interpret climate science and then retrained on how to digest that and turn it into new policies and programs. And they just struggle with that. And this is where I think the university could be a really helpful partner. Yeah, actually, on that note, you know, Columbia is creating a new school called the climate school. And I think we're also introducing much more into the curriculum. To wrap up our conversation, I would like to ask another one last question and also to open the floor to you if you want to make any concluding comments. That is for someone who has lived and worked in the city and who cared about the city. All these years, what are your prognosis for New York to come back? You know, if we are going to overcome COVID in the next few foreseeable years. So I'm very optimistic about the future for New York and for this country as a whole. And the reason has to do, mainly with young people, but as I mentioned earlier, a majority, over 80%, according to the 2010 census of American cities were predominantly black, Latino Asian. And if you add young urban white voters, as I said, 80% of those people voted for Obama twice. And if you look at who's participated in the black lives matter movement. It was mostly non black folks, it was like a broad movement. And that coalition of people is just growing across the country. America has never seen this before. And America is on the verge of creating a multiracial democracy where there is no majority of any group. America has never been that way before. And so I'm very optimistic that we're going to recreate reimagine and rebuild America. And it's going to be better than ever. But it's not going to be through having billionaires where 59 Americans made as much money as the bottom half of the entire population last year. It's not going to be that kind of an America. I think it's going to be an America of wide broad prosperity innovation, wide broad and accessible education for everybody, less money on things like crime and policing, because we won't need as many police. I think New York is going to rebuild itself based on its people and investing in people and investing in the new inventors of technology and apps that the whole world will want are in our public schools right now. They're kids who speak over 100 languages, they come from every part of the world, they know what the problem of the world's peoples are what and what they will want apps for. And we can, we have 900,000 buildings that need to be retrofitted. So for energy efficiency so we have an opportunity to become the go to place for technology and methods and training on how to really bring your carbon footprint down. And the same goes for ocean level rise and how do you tackle that as a city two thirds of the world's population is dealing with that. So I just think the future of New York is going to be in solving problems that affect the vast majority of people, and it's going to be different from before, but I'm very excited about it because our young people are smart. They're great, and they're from everywhere. And that's what our future is. It's really our young people. Thank you so much, Dr Thompson. And thank you all in the audience for the questions and for being part of the discussion. And we look forward to seeing you in person Phil, and we look forward to seeing New York, as you so hoped and promised back to an even more engine energized. I hope we can work on this together. Yes, we all need to join in together and thank you so much. Thank you.