 You're doing well. Welcome to day two of the California Bicycle Summit, or day three, I guess. We start with our opening on Tuesday night with the ovarian psychos, and I hope lots of discussion. I got in late. But I'm happy to welcome you here. I'm sure folks enjoyed last night. Open streets, I know some of our youth leaders were tearing it up on the tricycles, things that I couldn't do. I'll cut the spin outs and things like that. I have the pleasure of welcoming Donia Lugo to the stage. Donia is a real leader in my mind around how to create more just and equitable streets, communities, and places. Donia is an urban anthropologist and she's co-leader of the Global Sustainability Resource Center at UCI. And she's also a convener and leader with Cerebicola BC Cultures, and along with other advocates nationally who convene the end-tokening and will be reconvening in California on November 4th. So honored and I have the pleasure of introducing Donia to the stage. You guys hear me alright? Well, I want to thank Esteban and Cal Bike for inviting me to be part of the summit. I don't have to use coded language like mobility or other things like that. You guys are into bicycling. And so we can just be a little bit about that. I know we all do so much translation work and trying to figure out how our rabid enthusiasm can be translated into something more approachable for people who aren't there yet. Hey Chama. So excited to be here in a bicycle space and what I'm going to do since I'm getting the day started is not talk for too long. I just want to share with you guys some of my work on this concept of human infrastructure, which is a pretty straightforward concept that if you're not already familiar with, you'll probably get pretty quickly, and then go into more of a Q&A dialogue. But to give you some background, so I started an anthropology PhD in 2007 and when I got started with that program, I didn't have any relationship with bicycling other than being a bicycle commuter. I'd been living in Portland, Oregon for the previous six years and became a bike commuter there in a city where being a bike commuter is really not that much of a statement of anything. It was just kind of a, honestly for me, trendy thing to get into. And then in returning to Southern California, where I'm from, to go to grad school at UC Irvine, I encountered some pretty intense culture shock around how differently people interacted with me when I was riding my bicycle in Long Beach, the first city I moved to, as opposed to how they interacted with me in Portland. And so that weirdness, that shock, and then some other elements that I started noticing really just obsessed me and I ended up making the subject of my PhD bicycling and race in class in Southern California. And what was going on with transportation? How are we communicating things as we traveled? What was it that made it okay to treat people outside of cars like they really didn't matter? And so it was through that work that I started to get involved in bicycle advocacy. So I learned, first of all, that there is a thing called bicycle advocacy, which I hadn't known about before. And I got to be part of some pretty cool projects in Los Angeles during my field work, one of which was starting Ciclovia, which is an open street event down there. And the other one was called City of Lights, received out of the Lucids, where we were doing Spanish language outreach with day laborers who rode bikes. So looking at some of the people who were out there biking, who don't necessarily match the image of what a cycling future looks like or the kind of idea that we want people to be choosing bicycling or that bicycling is something desirable. Well, actually, most of the people who are out there riding today kind of have to be riding. It's not necessarily something that they would choose enthusiastically given the option of having a car. So I was involved in these projects that were very tied to bicycle advocacy. Both of them had roots with the L.A. County Bicycle Coalition. And what I started to notice as I was spending time with people, going to meetings, doing interviews, which is what anthropologists do for our research, is just talk to people. I started to notice that everybody was really focused on infrastructure and infrastructure change. And there's this really strong idea that we're familiar with, if you build it, they will come. And if we redesign our streets, then we're going to redesign how people use our streets. And that's all well and good. But I started to notice that there was something else that was happening in our spaces that we weren't talking about as much. And that was more of this human side of things. The fact that as advocates, we develop networks where we share ideas with each other. We find people who validate where we're coming from. And we look for ways to amplify our voices as collectives and in organized senses and trying to make a political and cultural change. And so in the literature I was reading for my PhD, there were a number of scholars talking about social infrastructure or human infrastructure. And it just really clicked for me around 2010, like, huh, okay. This is a way to describe the people of work that we do. Because even though we're trying to promote bicycling, the work of promoting bicycling is all people work. We're trying to change people's minds, whether they are engineers, elected officials, our neighbors, our family members. You know, the really activated local activists who just don't see eye to eye with us on transportation or what should happen in streets, it's all people work. It's a basic concept of what I mean when I say human infrastructure. There's also a lot of fun that you can have with that concept in terms of looking at the actual spaces that we navigate when we're traveling and how our fellow travelers become part of that physical environment through which we're passing. So our bodies are part of the human infrastructure. And then the attitudes that are carried in those bodies, like what I was encountering in 2007 when I started riding a bike in Long Beach, are sometimes more welcoming or less welcoming to bicycling than other ways of using streets. And so those relationships that we have, the webs that we're part of through our families and where we grow up and all that kind of stuff, is also a human infrastructure. And so I started to see that the work we were doing as advocates was really focused on shifting what ideas about transportation and bicycling in particular were flowing through all these networks that were part of. And then in about 2012, 2013, as I was writing up my dissertation, I started to get more engaged with conversations about these rooms because since I started to focus more and more on the people who do bicycle advocacy as opposed to our end goal of promoting bicycling or getting more people on bikes, I learned that I wasn't the only one who was looking at these spaces and I wasn't the only one who was starting to notice who might feel more at the center of these conversations and who might feel less at the center. And so even though my starting point has been anthropology, a lot of the work I've ended up doing since 2013 with bicycling is focused on questions of racial inclusion and diversity in bicycle organizations and bicycle spaces. Because at events like this, we are affirming and furthering the human infrastructure that is at the heart of where we're getting our ideas for what we should be advocating for next or whose problems are going to be the ones that we're responsive to. So I want to do a quick activity before we go to the Q&A that I've been developing this morning with my collaborators, Sarah McCulloch down there, which is to, does everybody have a pen or access to something they can write with? It's going to be a little writing activity. So the first prompt is three quick prompts. What I want you to start with is writing down who or what spurred you to get into bicycle advocacy. So not getting into the full story of it, but just sort of for you snapshotting. What was the thing that made you decide you wanted to support something as fringe and bizarre as bicycling? So I'm going to give you just a short little piece of time there. I think for most people that's a very quick answer because it's something you've thought about quite a bit. The second prompt is to write down who do you turn to when you want an action done? When you're like, I need to make this thing happen. Who are a couple of the people or organizations that you would turn to? Make something happen. So then the third element is who do you turn to when you're wrestling with a problem that you're not sure how to define? It's not ready for action because you're not really clear on what it is that's going on. You just need to talk it through with someone who you trust, who you really think that they have a good sense of the landscape and how to get a read on things and help you to plan that action. Who is someone or a few people you turn to there. So what I'm curious to learn, maybe we can just do a show of hands, is for how many people are those different answers? Great. And then for how many people are they the same answers or there's like significant overlap? Cool. So I think that's a pretty good illustration of the fact that, you know, each of us is embedded in actually quite a few different networks, you know, from our families up to the communities and places where we live, up to the professional kinds of engagements we get into. We know a lot of people, but we don't interact with all those people we're encountering on quite the same terms. We turn to different people for different sorts of advice and different sorts of consultation. And what I've learned in studying human infrastructure and bicycle advocacy, along with lots of other folks who have been, you know, bringing up questions of equity and diversity in this space for a number of years, is that it can be very difficult when you've got a movement like the bike movement that is so spurred by a sense of urgency and so spurred by a sense of wanting to stop harm that's happening to people. It can be very difficult to make us feel safe enough together that we actually take a few steps back and start strategizing at a level that allows for the complexity of experience that we all bring to the table. There's a much bigger tendency to want to look for collaboration at the political level that, you know, if we want to get a bill passed or if we want to make some kind of action happen, then we find partners in that sort of landscape who can help us move it forward. But in that landscape, there's a lot of compromise that happens. You know, politics is all about compromise. It's not really a place where people get to express deep values. And I think that in bicycling, there's a real need to foster more spaces where we can do that sort of deep values conversation and get to a sort of space where strategizing together feels more comfortable and doesn't feel as much like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, but let's get on to the more important stuff. Because that's a response that me and lots of other people I know who brought up different communities or cultural focuses that are important to them into bicycle advocacy, we felt shut down a lot of times around those things that for us feel so crucial, for some reason aren't treated as crucial in bicycle advocacy in the same way. So I want to wrap up by telling you guys briefly about this thing called the untokening, which we're going to be having a conference on November 4th in Los Angeles called Untokening California. And the basic idea there is that there's actually a ton of us. This is like kind of bizarre to think about because a lot of us feel isolated at an individual level. There's actually a ton of us who are people of color or come from experiences of marginalization who have been thinking together for a number of years and we decided that there was value in creating convening spaces where we could kind of be the main event. A lot of us have been invited over the years to be panelists, be voices in workshops, things like that, but usually our approaches are not the central focus. So with this concept of untokening, we're trying to work past the experience of tokenism or tokenization lots of us have been through and make ourselves the main event and see what emerges from that. So I want to thank CalBike for being one of our leading sponsors for Untokening California and thank you very much the way that even though we're at a stage in the bike movement right now where some of us have recognized a need to want to be working kind of more in our own space, we're also really aware of the fact that there's a big tent that we all want to be part of. And so Untokening California is going to have outcomes that help us move toward figuring out how can we bring even more of that impact back into spaces like this. And I know you guys have been hearing for the past couple of days just you know evidence and speakers and all of these good things that are happening because this shift is happening. We have been expanding the human infrastructure of bicycle advocacy for years now and I think that work is really great and it continues to happen. So with that I want to kind of wrap up and see if there are any questions before we get into the exciting next panel that's happening this morning. So thank you. The structure can broaden or deepen the human-based work in a lot of the organizations and industries and stuff that are represented in this room. You know which I think a lot of the way work is done in government and business and nonprofit is a very specific way of being human. You know a very specific human process that I think we take for granted as broadly human is actually a kind of certain way of being human. So I mean I think of that general idea I love the concept of human infrastructure. How do you think that that can broaden and deepen the way that these industries and organizations and governments do the work of creating spaces and places and movement? Well I think that what we're trying to develop with the on token aid is going in that direction which is that there's so much work that can be done at an individual level in terms of people being able to gain a greater awareness of where do our perspectives come from? What are the things that shaped what feels right to us or what doesn't feel right? What are the opportunities we have, the privileges that we have that other people don't have and vice versa? What are the opportunities and privileges that this person has? I think that in a movement space there can be an emphasis on kind of everybody knowing the same thing or like getting everybody up to speed on the same vocabulary but actually the way that change seems to happen is more you know we have different abilities and we play different roles and so getting to a place where we both know what our abilities and limitations are individually and we're operating in an environment where you have enough trust that you can be honest about that it would be hugely impactful and again that's very personal work that people have to commit to at that individual level and so we're trying with that token aid to figure out like okay how do you foster more of a space where people are doing that work and connecting it to mobility advocacy but it's still very much in development but yeah overall I think just oh man more people being able to learn what their strengths are and what their limitations are and then looking for partnership around the areas where they have limitation would be hugely transformative for bicycling and that can be really hard because again so many of us get into this space because of the sense of urgency you know for me it really had to do with my fear of ecological disaster that's what happened like I started out being a bike commuter then when I became a bike commuter in a place where it felt not great to ride a bike I just was like torn apart at this idea that this thing that I was doing that was the right thing you know we're supposed to be moving away from fossil fuels we need desperately to move away from fossil fuels and so I was doing it I was doing the thing that I was supposed to be doing and people were reacting to me like I was a jerk for doing it and you know we're still dealing with that and I think that you know for all of the reasons why people have focused on trying to integrate bicycling into other kinds of political projects or into urban development and make it you know part of larger kinds of changes that are happening I think that when we lose sight of that activist desire for change or when we're not able to remember that what we want to do is actually pretty revolutionary I think we lose a little bit of our power and I think that right now the state that our country is in and the state that our world is in people need a sense of power they need a sense of what action they can be doing and bicycling is a pretty good action so that kind of went off on a tangent there but thank you so I think we are going to wrap up and move into the next panel so thank you everybody for being awake and here this morning we'll see you in the next video