 So hello, everyone, it's so nice to see you all here and to convene once again to talk about pandemic urbanism. So in this video, we will be discussing the approach we collectively took to put together an open access reading list on pandemic urbanism. So the reading list is the result of the collective effort of PhD and master's students, along with faculty in the urban planning program at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. So the people you see here on the screen and many others who are not here were generously volunteered their intellectual labor and time to work together on the reading list. And they were mostly enrolled in my spring courses advanced planning theory for PhDs and planning and spatial exclusion for master's students when COVID-19 hit. As we learned how to communicate over Zoom, we also start wondering about the ways we can contribute as we collectively face a global crisis. So we started working on the reading list as the COVID-19 virus started ravaging through cities and communities around us in March 2020. At that heightened moment of uncertainty, we felt that we lack the knowledge and tools to think about the pandemic as it relates to urbanization. Our aim was to put together in one document material that could help us as well as help students, scholars, activists, practitioners everywhere as they start trying to make sense of the pandemic as it relates to the built environment. Many of us have been living in New York City where we've witnessed our lives transformed by the COVID-19 crisis as the city became an epicenter of the infectious disease that so far has killed more than 24,000 people in the state of New York and 17,000 of them are actually in New York City, 110,000 people, at least in the United States and more than 380,000 people worldwide. Using a method and a process of collaborative co-writing that we had to develop as we worked on this, we developed an active archive of scholarly material on the pandemic engaging a range of topics that we thought are important to think about and discuss as we start thinking about COVID-19 and the implications for the future of our built environment. So the sections include the urban history of the pandemics, urban planning and the specialty of crisis, political economy, labor and the development, housing and formality and homelessness, urban governance, governmentality and political theory, architecture, design and innovation, conflict was conflict as they're able to cope with COVID-19 and data and privacy and a general section on academia. Within each section, we included like an academic contact but also long form articles, short form essays, journalistic content and the aim was to bring together different points of views, different kinds of engagements from different venues to try to start thinking about the issue, to engage with these topics and to try to think about the issues at hand. Our readings so far show how space has been historically key to understanding and combating diseases through disease mapping, for example and special techniques to contain illness. We also learned how historically, diseases have impacted this advantage as disproportionately impacted this advantage communities more severely and have often been blamed on racial minorities and immigrants which we have also been witnessing during COVID-19. Our readings also reveal how many responses to disease actually eventually end up further excluding and segregating marginalized populations. Based on this collective work that the current pandemic, based on this collective work we're saying and based on our readings, the current pandemic will not be different. So urban planning and policy will face major physical and epistemic disruptions as theorists, practitioners and educators. We feel like we must rethink best practices and adopt longstanding ideas to this new context learning from the past, observing the present and giving voice to alternative narratives of what the future could hold, especially that we are making this video at a very important and critical moment of high racial injustice. And as protests have been taking over the streets demanding forms of racial justice, spatial justice and equality. Our call to transform this collaborative co-writing process into a living document has received positive responses across the globe making the document broader and more exclusive. We actually hope that this will continue to be the case, that this document will continue to be a living document that people can take the liberty to update with relevant entries and as new things come up and intersecting with the pandemic like racial injustice and mass protests in the spirit of providing a collective resource for people across the globe interested in the implications of COVID-19 for our built environment and for spatial justice and social change at large. The first section which is entitled urban history of pandemics and it concerns readings about the history of pandemics and shaping cities to help us understand the current moment of COVID-19. There is an expensive urban history actually on disease that relates to the built environment, like it's not even possible to even summarize it, but we tried at least to focus on three axes that we divided in three sections. So the first section is history of disease containment and its mappings. The second section focuses on disease discrimination and the rise of urban regulations and things like urban parks. And the third one focuses on disease and colonialism which actually is a vast topic, so we just briefly try to discuss it and summarize it. So in the first section in disease containment and its mapping, most authors discuss the different geographic and urban approaches to the containment of disease. Some of the entries here make the argument that approaches to contagious disease went through three spatial approaches. First is exclusion, for example, by forcibly removing infected people to remote places as chronicled in the tragic stories of leper colonies, for example, in the United States. And the second one would be a form of inclusion or described as inclusion, which didn't involve sending people away but confining them to quarantine spaces inside cities. For example, by establishing something like containment zones. These spatial practices were always rooted in class racial and gender discriminatory practices, such as containing the poor from infecting the rich during outbreaks, because the poor were assumed to harbor the disease due to their poor living conditions or unsanitary spaces, halting the mobility of racialized immigrants who were thought to carry the diseases across borders and the tragic events like the burning of a Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles during a Black Death epidemic or the mapping of Chinatown in San Francisco as a public health threat to white Americans. Or more recently, during the AIDS epidemic, the circumscribing of the mobility of gay men during HIV epidemic for fear of infection. The third would be a move from exclusion and inclusion to more towers normalization through public health measures such as mass vaccination, widespread of clinics, et cetera. However, authors also agree that the three strategies are not mutually exclusive. So it's not neither spatially nor temporally. So responses to the pandemics and disease uses all forms still of spatial approaches, as we are seeing, for example, in the establishment of containment zones in Indian cities as India tries to approach the COVID-19. So reading for this section, it was eye-opening for me basically to see how much disease and its containment has shaped the histories of urbanization around the world and how many elements of our contemporary built environment and cities are actually rooted in that history of disease spread and its containment. That have always, as I said, had a racial, gendered and class dimension intertwined with the spatial approaches to containment disease. This section titled Urban Planning and the Spatiality of the Crisis engages how public health imperatives have long shaped and continue to shape urban form, density, zoning, land use, and planning in cities. The readings in this section describe the urban planning dimensions of past crises like Ebola and HIV AIDS and the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic inequalities in the built environment as they map on to public health inequalities. One specific contribution or article that I might recommend is the piece by Malo Hudson et al that examines metropolitan fragmentation and its relationship to public health outcomes. The article shows how fragmented or non-existent local government structures in American metropolitan areas map on to public health outcomes that are negative, particularly for minority populations but not for white Americans. This section has major implications for our understanding of pandemic urbanism. It reveals how planning is implicated in public health disparities and how seemingly banal or bureaucratic rules of zoning, land use control, density, or development and decision making are in fact very political rules with very political consequences. This section is called political economy, labor, and de-development. And the readings in the section focus on work and workers. There's a particular focus on what it means for a category of labor to be deemed essential and the worker exploitation but also worker activism that has arisen in the pandemic's wake. The readings look at the inequities that determine which people and which types of people are required to put their lives on the line every day versus who is allowed to work from home out of harm's way. A specific article that I recommend is Sarah Jaffee's interview with Titi Bhattacharya in Descent. Bhattacharya discusses what the pandemic tells us about the importance of effective labor, the type of uncompensated or under compensated care work that's essential to social reproduction. And the section has implications for urban planning by asking how the urban economy might be restructured post-pandemic and how moving forward, planners might reveal and center the labor and work that's required for a city to function. We have witnessed how orders to shelter at home to curtail the spread of the virus have laid bare the most perverse effects of urban informality. The contradictions present in the treatment of homeless populations and informal settlements illustrate the precarious nature of housing for the urban poor. This section called shelter, housing and homelessness aims at framing a situation exacerbated by the pandemic but caused by the political economy of cities that transformed housing from a right to a commodity. In that sense, as Marcuse and Martin argue in an idea that must be expanded to include the effects of the pandemic, the housing crisis is not a result of the system breaking down but of the system working as it is intended. This section, urban governance, governmentality and political theory considers how the pandemic builds on a moment of already fractured and unequal urban governance with low perceived legitimacy and a solidly neoliberal regime of political economy. The section's readings describe how state actors and private firms are engaging in new technologies and techniques of biopolitics, the state ordering, managing and regulating human life who gets to live and how. In the current moment, we also might consider the concept of necropolitics the ordering management and regulation of death. One specific contribution in this section that I might recommend would be a set of articles by Roger Keele and Harris Ali. They investigate in great depth the 2003 SARS epidemic in Toronto. And they find, unfortunately, that the outbreak led to xenophobia and anti-Asian racism as well as a retreat from a global collaboration and not collective solidarity. This section has implications for our understanding of pandemic urbanism. It shows the consequence of an historic set of changes from top-down government to dispersed multi-sector and corporatist governance. Some of the consequences of that include a shredded social safety net and eroding trust in institutions. The section on architecture, design and innovation addresses the implications of COVID-19 on the future design of the built environment. This is not the first time where design is referred to public health to advance its ideas. Disease outbreaks have always been drivers for new innovations and pandemics often expose spatial inadequacies and highlight the need and changes in how societies are spatially conceptualized and organized. The world of design today is already witnessing solutions at multiple scales. These solutions include the lineations in public spaces to ensure social distancing, such as the circles drawn on the lawn in the Domino Park of Williamsburg in New York and other parks around the world. Hospitals are rapidly constructing extension spaces by using modular designs, such as ship containers or temporary structures. And as cities around the world begin to reopen, restaurants and other service industry establishments are using separators to slow the spread of the airborne virus. The readings in this section contain academic essays and newspaper articles that we felt provide as much of an overview as possible on the historic link between the role of architecture and design in helping to cure diseases, as well as the more recent adaptation of spaces to fight the spread of the virus. One article that I might recommend from this section is titled the impact of COVID-19 on public space, a review of the emerging questions. The essay discusses how restricting the use of public space and enforcing social distancing have been key policy measures in reducing the transmission of the virus and ultimately in protecting public health and life. This section is called gender, space and the pandemic and it concerns the ways in which COVID-19 has expanded physical, political and social spaces of inequity and gender-based violence. The readings in this section range from pieces on how COVID has led to the further feminization of labor to ways in which misogynistic and heteronormative agendas have informed healthcare policies and response. Before I recommend one specific article, I would advise a reader to skim the titles or headlines for a sense of the range of issues to be considered as a gendered experience in the pandemic. And of course, this section is nowhere close to comprehensive. To highlight one reading though, I might recommend Amanda Todd's piece in The New York Times which documents a horrific rise in domestic violence worldwide due to lockdowns. This section has implications for our understanding of pandemic urbanism because in more ways than one, COVID-19 threatens to fortify and expand our city's preexisting systems of patriarchal oppression. The section, carceral spaces, race and settler colonialism addresses how the spread of COVID-19 through spaces of incarceration and settler-occupied areas has left already marginalized communities with regards to race, income, religion or immigration status most vulnerable to the effects of the virus. The readings in this section show that this doesn't occur in a single geography but across the entire globe. High rates of infection, the rapid spread of the virus and the looming threat of devastation occurs in places from US prisons, jails and immigration centers to indigenous communities in the Amazon to Native American reservations to Gaza and occupied Palestine. Yet the spread of COVID-19 through these spaces of incarceration and occupation also highlights how these physical spaces fit into larger systems of state power, particularly around policing and mechanisms of enforcement. One article I would highly recommend is a piece by Keonga Yamata Taylor titled Of Course There Are Protests, The State Is Failing Black People. Here Taylor links the US protests against the killings of black people by white police officers and white supremacists to the pandemic's disproportionate toll on black lives, the failure of the state to protect black people and the preying on black people by the police both in the pandemic context and outside of it. In terms of its implications for pandemic urbanism, this section clarifies how the pandemic disproportionately impacts already marginalized communities and ultimately that carceral spaces and occupied areas serve as physical reminders of the broader power structures that allow them to exist at all. The section, conflict, post-conflict and COVID-19 concerns the kinds of issues COVID-19 presents in countries, regions and contexts where conflict is present, looking at how COVID represents yet another frontier or conflict in these societies and also in turn affecting conflict and political realities themselves. This section looks both at situations unique to specific countries as well as more broad questions around how COVID-19 is affecting various dynamics of conflict. One specific piece I find useful as a starting point is international crisis groups, seven trends to watch. It gives a solid overview of the basic questions running this issue. This section on conflict and COVID-19 also has implications for our understanding of pandemic urbanism given the omnipresence of conflict around the world from the small to the large scale, not least within the current context in the US. As the politics of COVID-19 became a renaissance of conflict themselves, the ways in which we need to understand conflict in the context of the pandemic have also multiplied. This section is called Data and Privacy and discusses some of the promises and pitfalls of leveraging big data in the age of COVID-19. Other readings in this section highlight how municipalities across the globe have on the one hand leveraged open source data to do things like improve emergency response and help us better understand spatial inequalities and COVID-19 risk and infection. But on the other hand have also implemented digital surveillance programs that have raised troubling privacy concerns. I'd recommend reading the singer and saying hon piece in the New York times because it gives a good overview of some of the privacy concerns that have emerged when cities have tried to use big data for contract tracing. And finally, I think this section contributes to our understanding of pandemic urbanism because it underscores how applications of big data that are carried out in the kind of supposedly neutral name of public safety can in fact raise troubling civil liberty concerns. In 1948, Horace Mann said that education then beyond all other devices of human origin is a great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balanced wheel of the social machinery. We know the statement is increasingly false at every level of the American educational system. How does the coronavirus pandemic change these dynamics and how does it change academia's responsibilities to its students? Across the spectrum of institutions, how do we plan for a longer term future that simultaneously promises both more interest and participation in the academy and fewer resources to fulfill this? Many of the articles in this section approach the governance of academic institutions from a practical perspective. New modes of learning, the sharing of administrative resources and the creation of academic collectives are suggested. A thread that pervades throughout the articles is the consensus that as with unequal social dynamics that become exacerbated during the crisis, the disparities and resources across academic institutions will likely intensify as well. Let's start with a pretty simple one. What did it mean to each of us to collectively work on this reading list at this time? I enjoyed the process of collectively working on it, but I also really enjoyed the process of working on something in a comparative manner and across different types of writing. I really enjoyed switching from mass media articles to high theory and back and forth and really utilizing all sorts of sources to try to get the picture of the topic that I was looking at. It was also very inspiring to work on something that was unfolding and changing with every day and sometimes articles that we had collected stopped making sense a week later and we had to update that and that's what make this document a living document and perhaps we will look to this a month later and see that things are completely changing and unfolding. I think that's indicative of pandemic urbanism more generally is just the degree to which I personally struggled at least with the gender section was finding something that so neatly fit under that umbrella and not somewhere else and I think that speaks to the intersectionality of everything that we've all discussed. I think each one of us brought it up. I think in our field, we kind of talk a lot about sort of different ways to bridge theory and practice and so for me, I felt like this was a good exercise to actually engage in the more practical aspects of our field and feel like we were actively contributing to a dialogue that was kind of unfolding in real time and kind of helping us understand what the implications of the pandemic were for urbanism. The real value for me in working with this was the notion of outreach and digestion and trying to make information accessible to people who might just want to get a quick overview but just there's a fundamental democratic and quite optimistic way of collaboration. I think that was really good to see in these trying times. For me, it was like heartwarming and beautiful and this collaborative work became my lifeline as like you feel people are dying around you. It's not like the reading list will do something to that but I feel like from relatively a place of privilege of being like affiliated with the university with not like being essential workers and I felt like it was great to see everyone volunteer their time and be passionate and critical and stuff to try to at least do something like contribute to a collective dialogue, make it open source, make it accessible to people, make it a living document, engage with others who are thinking about the same questions and it was very heartwarming to me pedagogically also to see how students who were students in my classes just shifted gears and they're like, okay, we're gonna make extra time, we're gonna work on this, we believe in creating a public good that might be helpful to people at this difficult time on how to think and contribute to our surroundings and so that was, I thank you all for making it for making it such an important and life-transforming experience for me actually as a teacher because it felt like it's like the classroom came to real life and like how then you pedagogically collaborate with people who have read, we have read throughout the semester different issues on discrimination or marginalization on what we think about subaltern about racialization but then to see how that knowledge then shaped the way we put this together and your approach to different section was really a transformation for me as a teacher and I thank you for that as well as being my lifeline for several weeks. So thank you. So let's maybe move to a second question which is, given our insights from the reading list, how should we think about pandemic urbanism and its consequences? In other words, what are some of the top line highlights that we've learned? I would like to start by framing the pandemic as perhaps as a catalyst of other more profound urban issues that we have been studying for some time that the pandemic has brought to light and has exacerbated and has transformed their temporalities and their effect on the built environment. And not only it has caused these issues to become more clear and more dire in situations but it also has sped up the creation of resistances in many instances. In favelas in Brazil where informal settlements have created their own health services or street vendors that want to reclaim the streets or other types of very clear relationships to public spaces and cities that are now vital for the survival of many people. COVID has sort of obviously become an issue of difficulty in contexts where conflict is present and also kind of become a factor in itself in affecting these. But I think what I read was this understanding of there's a sort of back and forth where sort of COVID becomes an actor and actually exacerbating and making contexts even more dire. And in some cases even creating contexts that didn't exist before. So I think that was something that I learned like that how a pandemic in this case can almost have an agency in a weird way and how there's a really weird dialogue going on. For me, especially focused on the urban history as a section, as I said, it was eye-opening to having not thought much like it's not my area of expertise having thought much of disease in general as it's urbanization. So it was really eye-opening for me to see how much constitutive it was of the geographies that we live in right now and their inequalities, their injustice. Or even if we wanna talk more on the up to size some of the good qualities of the urban environment have been rooted in kind of disease. But also how the violence of something like the disease that it's ravaging to communities builds or it makes it exacerbates already different forms of violence. Whether we're talking about conflict or whether we're talking about health inequalities in cities here against African-American populations about Latino populations and how then the pandemic shows the sheer that inequalities that existed before and making them like obvious and stark for those who think that they haven't seen them before. I read recently that the word apocalypse literally means lifting the veil or something like that. I thought that was so amazing. And that's definitely how I'm I also sort of feel the same way about the pandemic that it's there are the unique things that are specifically related to coronavirus but a lot of the impact of the pandemic is just revealing things that we all knew were there and but sort of forcing us to confront them really lifting the veil on all sorts of things that have been sort of hidden or pushed aside. And I definitely felt that similarly in the labor section that there is invisible labor that we're all aware of but I think when you're at home all day or when you're waiting in line at the grocery store you really all of a sudden that labor really becomes real and is revealed very starkly. What was eye-opening for me is this coupling between public health and the physical environment and how space has been shaped throughout history using public health as a tool and how that tool sometimes led to more positive results and sometimes led to more segregation and seclusion and exclusion of minorities and the communities that did not have as much of a voice. And one thing that I also recently read maybe this is common knowledge, the quarantine refers back to the Latin word of 40 days when ships dock in new ports everyone on the ships stays there for 40 days to avoid spreading diseases. So the notion of being satially isolated from others was not new, it was just new to us who haven't experienced a pandemic in their lifetime. Moving forward how should planners, public health officials elected leaders, ordinary residents of cities how should these folks moving forward rethink planning and public health given lessons learned from the pandemic? I think going forward it will be important for planners designers and public health officials to sort of continue to reframe the debate about the extent to which density led to the spread of COVID-19. Over the past couple of weeks and months we've seen some elected officials and media outlets kind of blaming density especially in places like New York as the reason for why the disease spreads so quickly. But as we as kind of proponents of urbanism we know that there are a lot of positive benefits that can flow from density whether that's creating more agglomerative economies or creating spaces where kind of talent can come together. So I think going forward if there are ways that we can kind of redesign spaces in ways that are safe but also kind of continue to take advantage of sort of all the positive benefits of dense urban spaces I think that will be important going forward. I think there's also kind of an important thing to be said that of course there's a distinctly spatial component of the pandemic but going forward and just focusing on redesigning spaces to be most disease resilient or dealing with these sort of questions around how you limit the spread of disease and save lives doesn't necessarily address the underlying conditions that create disproportionate experiences between communities of how people are actually experiencing and suffering from the virus. So making sure that the discussion gets framed around power structures and inequality that exists already in society and that the pandemic has just exposed and like Joe had said, lifted the veil on some of these issues that we had chosen to ignore or potentially not been aware of to their folded extent before. You know, in past pandemics we designed cities differently with large scale public infrastructures whether those were parks or different regulatory regimes like minimum airflow corridors or zoning limits and hopefully different public officials and planners and public health experts come together and think about what large scale public interventions might make sense after the lessons we've learned from this crisis that might take the form of universal healthcare or paid sick leave or childcare and universal childcare but ways to really think about interventions for everyone based on the real failures that we've seen in the COVID crisis. One thing I also recently read was architects and designers are conceptualizing new spaces and new smart homes to try and capture diseases when someone enters a home. And there is this, you know, this idea that your home would be smart enough to detect your temperature or detect whether you have caught something and inform you upon entering your home. And I feel although this may sound really exciting for some people these types of innovation will definitely be for an exclusive population moving forward. And if society ends up relying mostly on these types of design it is clear that many parts of societies will fall through and not being able to be in these smart homes for a really long time. We have to address all the structural inequalities that have caused more deaths in certain parts of cities and among certain populations. So I felt like just targeting policies to pandemics maybe on certain levels like social distancing have to do only with the pandemic but I think we need a more comprehensive more intersectional approach to thinking about the pandemic especially as for example class and class socioeconomic inequality and racial equality for example speaking about like what Marina was describing about the design of houses but like for those first who stayed in New York we witnessed the how many, many people that can flood the city actually. And at some point during the days where we were like just heartbreakingly watching the death numbers being close to 1,000 it became clear if you go for a walk, short walk in the streets who stayed in the city and who was able to leave. And I feel this is not related to the protests and the riots that are taking place for example in New York City because I feel for two and a half months when we were like watching images from hospitals in the Bronx and the Queens of high infection rates among people who cannot social distance among families who have to live in two bedroom six people have to live in one or two bedroom apartment and the inability of accessing healthy food the food deserts, et cetera. It's not very much I don't, I cannot now and previously even as you're watching it separated from the protests and how people are feeling right now after witnessing that about racial injustice. Yes, police violence have been going on for a long time racialization have gone around time. I think the pandemic as we've talked about lifted the veil and I think made the protests a much wider, much more global anger at this form of racialized and socioeconomic justice. Does anyone else wanna discuss how and why or to what extent the pandemic and its response has led to the large scale urban uprisings and rebellions that we're seeing in American cities across the country and across the world right now? Yeah, I'll just backtrack briefly to what Hippo was just saying about who can leave the city that is white upper class folks or high income folks and who inevitably has to stay in the city. Because I think that sort of mechanisms of policing really exposed that inequality. I mean, in New York City alone, I think it was 93% of COVID related arrests were black New Yorkers, which is obviously way higher than the percentage of black folks in New York City. And so those sort of existing structures that already incarcerated black folks at higher rates made them more vulnerable to the effects of the disease, both inside spaces of incarceration and then outside of it as well, just came up again through not even the spaces themselves, but the state power and mechanisms of enforcement that are baked into the physical landscape and the physical built environment of the city and certainly didn't disappear, but we're just further exacerbated when in this crisis, new mechanisms and policies have to arise to confine the disease. And suddenly you end up with these really disproportionate ways of policing where of course, black people end up suffering disproportionately compared to the rest of New York. The reading list was amazing and it's comparative, but we read about all sorts of things and places. But I also, in terms of more direct immersion, I am in New York City and my family is in Beirut and so all the time I cannot dissociate from thinking at these two places simultaneously. Like of course you're worried about your loved ones here and there, but also like thinking about the forms of inequality and also having the privilege of participating in the popular protests and the October 17 revolution in Lebanon that exposed just before people went to the streets, the economic downturn that the country was taking has exposed all forms of structure of injustices and now participating in the protests here after COVID unveiled all forms of structures for, I mean, I think for people like us who study cities and people who live in reality, it's not foreign, but I think for many people who suddenly found themselves sitting at home and watching it, they suddenly feel like they have the duty to go down on the street and protest. So thinking about these geographies, also forms of solidarity, for example, watching the with Twitter sphere from Lebanon, supporting what's going on in the Black Lives Matter protests right now, which is something you wouldn't have seen before because of racialization and the complicated historical narratives, but it is heartwarming in one way, but also to feel like, to also think collectively about this current moment we're in in which like you wanna think about the dispossession and the injustice happening in your neighborhood, in your city, in your country, in the country you're living in globally and how these things are all interconnected. So I think this moment is giving us a moment of solidarity globally, but also about thinking of exceeds of injustices and how they move globally. But at the same time, at the same time, I think the particularity of the US historic moment of police brutality against Black bodies that is give also the specificity of the moment in these cities and how we talked about that happened through the pandemic of more Black people dying, of police imprisoning more Black people through that time, through people calling on the police when there's no violent act on Black people knowing. I mean, I don't know why would you call the police on Black men knowing that if you live in the United States, the likeness that the person will end up in jail or killed is very high. And so I just trying to think about, I mean, I don't have a coherent thoughts about how all this coming together, but I just feel this is what we need to be pushing at is how do these things get together, what to do about them as scholars, as practitioners, as teachers. I mean, this was experiment with you guys have been an amazing pedagogical moment, but also pushing me again to new ways into thinking of how I teach my classes in the future even more. I mean, I do think intersectionality and the students always bring that to the classroom, but also how to bring it to a new level, how to collaborate with others, how to think about beyond one immediate, like how to call one immediate need or gain and how to collect, how to create collective things, how to do public goods, how to use whatever privilege you have to support others and for others to support you. So these I think are conversations that we should continue to have for sure. One line from the article that I recommended earlier in this session that really stuck with me and I think gets to the idea of solidarity that can come out of not only the protests, but also the pandemic generally is that Black Lives Matter only because we will make it so. And I think that gives us the sense that there is a moment for us to come together and that solidarity has to be anti-racist, has to be feminist, has to be decolonial, that we all have power in this, but it requires solidarity. And I think thinking about the structure of the protests which often are people packed together in small spaces and it's that physical closeness that creates that solidarity when faced with a pandemic and trying to figure out how to both remain safe and protect people who are immunocompromised and would be at higher risk from being in these densely packed spaces, also realizing that this is a moment to deal with those main issues because we have to address the inequality that exists in our society by finding some way of coming together. And obviously the protests are extremely important for that. As someone who is not American but who's been living here for a few years when we were putting together this reading list, it was also heart wrenching to read especially at the beginning of the pandemic that the majority of people being hospitalized and dying were black men. And it just didn't make sense at the beginning to me. But then when the mapping exercises started showing where these, which areas in New York City were being hit hardest by the virus, it explained the, you know, it highlighted and it showed and it uncovered the enclaves and the, you know, the areas where our underinvested and where poverty is concentrated and showed where, you know, which spaces were neglected in the city and which spaces had it better. And I think that was a moment for me as someone who is foreign, who's living here that was very eye-opening. I mean, one of the things that I would like to follow up on this is actually for someone who works on planning and the contradictions in planning and how planning is not only a tool of peace, like everyone would like to talk about it and progress and order, but also a tool of conflict, a tool of dispossession and times and trying to take that seriously in order to push the discipline forward towards more equality. What was intriguing to me and actually sometimes really upsetting is to watch these, for example, the governor's daily press conferences and when it became clear that more black people, especially black men are dying in specific neighborhoods, he kept saying, we need to study this, we need to study why is this happening, we need to have more research. And I kept thinking as a faculty member at like urban planning GSAP where many studios happen in New York and many conversations and research happen in New York, I was like, there's no shortage of, there is no shortage of studies. We actually really know what is happening, but we decided we opted not to use planning and urban policies and whatever, like in terms of approach to homelessness and in terms of approach to health and our gender racial equalities, we opted not to include them and our approach to the physical environment in the city. I mean, speaking of someone who had just been here for three years, this was stark for me. So it's not like we don't know, we can't always know more, but it's also, so the failure of planning or not only in the failure of planning, the fact that planning is used as a tool of order and progress even was exposed here because it is for some, but for many others it is used against them or excludes them from the benefits of progress that is usually assumed to be about planning. And I felt like an urban policy and I felt that was clear and just saying that we don't know was misleading because we do very much know, everyone knows, especially urban people who work on urban issues, they know what's going on. And so it just, we didn't act on it or we even made it worse.