 Hello, hi, hi. Hello, I'm Reinhold Martin, and I direct the Temple Hawaiian Bule Center for the Study of American Architecture here at Columbia, Columbia University, and I'm here to welcome you to the panel, Creative Extraction, a conversation on concept development in which Danielle Purifoy and Louise Siemster will present their conceptual framework for understanding Black towns with an extractive white space, highlighting questions of citizenship, extraction, and exclusion as they focus on how legal, spatial, racial, and economic systems structure Black spaces access to infrastructure and facilitate environmental violence. But before we begin, two things. First, I want to note and acknowledge that dispersed as we may be here on the screen, there is a very good chance that most, if not all of us, sit on occupied land. The temporarily de-centered Bule Center along with the Columbia campus and its New York neighborhood, Morningside Heights from where I join you today are located in Lenapehoking, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenape peoples whose violent displacement was central to the colonial establishment and growth of New York City. As you'll see, land will remain in the frame for this evening's discussion. And so I invite you to think about the, let's say, manifest and latent connections. Second, I want to say with really sincere gratitude to our guests of honor, Danielle and Louise, that this conversation is among the outcomes of several years of collaborative, if intermittent, but always sort of present exchange, beginning with discussion of the use of emergent, that actually began with a discussion on the use of emergency powers in Flint, Michigan, but evolved in a variety of ways to the topics that we're going to discuss this evening, during which exchange we at the Bule Center have learned enormously from Danielle and Louise's work. They'll explain to you that work's central concept created and they do do the same in two articles that we want to share with you. I think we can put those in the link that were supported have been over these years supported by the Bule Center's Power and Infrastructure project. The first article is titled What is Environmental Racism for in Environmental Sociology? And the second is titled Creative Extraction Black Towns in White Space in Environmental Planning D, Society in Space. These articles focus on the case of Tamina, Texas, an unincorporated black community dating back to 1836 to demonstrate how mundane or at least apparently mundane local development practices. And in a sense, this is the learning in which we've all engaged seemingly mundane local development practices such as municipal utility districts, planning jurisdictions and sales tax structures are routinely used to leverage the value and resourcefulness of white places at the expense of black places. In our conversation, Louise and Danielle will discuss how their individual research on seemingly disparate black places, rural black founded towns and urban majority black cities led to a series of inquiries culminating with what we can call the creative extraction hypothesis. So I really wanted to acknowledge and appreciate the sort of the sort of background culture that we've shared in the conversations over these few years with Louise and Danielle in a variety of contexts. And now we're very pleased and quite proud in fact to be able to share them with you and to invite you into the conversations as well. So that conversation will I will recede from all of this for the time being and the conversation in fact will be led and moderated by my colleague Columbia Colleague and our Buell Center member of the Buell Center advisory board, Catherine Fanelle. And so after which there'll be an opportunity Louise and Danielle will present their work and then Cassie will ask a series of follow-up questions. They'll engage in a conversation and then there'll be an opportunity for a kind of Q&A exchange with participants, audience members after that. So that's just basically the structure of the evening. So now I'll just quickly introduce our guests and we'll go straight to that conversation. So Danielle Purefoy is a lawyer and assistant professor of geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on environmental justice and the racial politics of development in black towns and communities. Danielle serves as board chair of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network and on the leadership team of Durham Beyond Policing in Durham North Carolina. She's the former race and place editor of Scallowag as well a media organization devoted to southern storytelling journalism and the arts. Louise Simster is an assistant professor in sociology and criminology and African-American studies at the University of Iowa. Dr. Simster's research centers on racial politics and urban development, emergency financial management, debt, and the myth of racial progress. Another line of research for example examines racial disparities in debt and in fact in debt and in fact worth mentioning is her work on predatory inclusion in student debt that has that led has led to extensive policy advocacy including research informing Senator Elizabeth Warren's student debt forgiveness plan. Louise's current book project investigates the financial and political causes of the Flint water crisis so that really brings us full circle to where we began this conversation as as I said and so again to to to moderate and and to engage in in the discussion with Louise and Danielle after they they present that they basically summarize their arguments and and present and summarize that the sort of results of their research is is Catherine Finnell an urban anthropologist and associate professor of anthropology at Columbia University with a joint appointment in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race also here at Columbia. Cassie's work examines how the social and material legacies of 20th century urbanism shape the policies of social difference, collective obligation, and utopian imagination in in the United States and and her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the University of Minnesota Press, and the Russell Sage Foundation. Finnell's first book I you know which must be read from everybody in this audience I really need to say as a study of public housing reform in Chicago a really landmark piece of research and and a sort of exposition of kind of an elegy in in many ways at least as I've come to to understand this work to public housing in some ways its attempts at reform and then in particular the lives lived there in in Chicago in in these large public housing projects the title of the book is last project standing and and it won deservedly the 2016 book prize from the Association of Political and Legal Anthropology and in fact Cassie is now currently at work on a new research on new research concerning the aftermath of private homes in the late industrial urban Midwest and so now I I offer a I give the screen to Danielle and Louise and I think they're gonna sort of take it from here and welcome so much to the Decentre Buell Center to our ongoing conversation. Thank you so much Reinhold and thank you to yeah thanks so much to all the folks at the Buell Center and particularly Reinhold Jacob and Jordan it's been really tremendous to collaborate with you the last few more than a few years at this point so yeah thank you for all of your support and for bringing us together today. Danielle's gonna get a setup with sharing the screen okay cool all right hey Louise all right so let's get started here oh wait hold on okay play for the start all right cool so the way we're gonna do this today is we wanted to show some slides less to do a formal lecture and more to have images that we're sharing in common when we're thinking of these places and because we have been thinking visually about these ideas and and you'll see how and and so we're gonna kind of switch off telling pieces of this story tonight and then and then we'll hopefully segue as smoothly as we can into like a broader discussion. So where we started with our separate projects as Reinhold said I well first started conversations with Buell Center in 2017 based on my work on emergency management my dissertation was on a city in Michigan that had been taken over by the state you probably have heard of Detroit's bankruptcy which was a much more famous iteration of the same process and Danielle and I actually went to college together a long long ago and then met back up when Danielle started the PhD at Duke where I was already getting a PhD at Duke and and then like actually after I moved away we realized that we had a lot in common in how we were thinking about our respective dissertation projects and we spent a year or two just talking through why we felt like we had so much in common in our findings and then outcomes in the different cases we were looking at when according to the literature we shouldn't be so I was looking at majority black cities in the Midwest that are more like what we think of when we think of as a city but that had a history of black governance and also of state receivership and so these were cities that were formed as black cities through white flight and this image on the left is from William Bung who was a radical cartographer in Detroit and he was showing contrary to this image that we have often of places like Detroit as like kind of a drain on the rest of the state he was making an argument about how look at how the resources of Detroit are being sucked out into the suburbs and especially into the the wealthier areas and you you know feel free to google this on your own sometime but you can you know in these little arrows you can see all kinds of vectors of resource flows that are moving out from the like opportunity cost of having to take the bus three hours every day to exploitative rents to taxes to all kinds of different ways of conceiving of resources and this has been a useful image in my work to think about what I was describing as extraction in Benton Harbor and how a city that was construed of as like not having resources from within people were saying we have lots of resources and lots of attention and interest in taking them all and that is why you know it's not just disinvested in but that they were describing an ongoing process of exploitation and extraction and then on the other hand and yell was studying the case of these unincorporated majority well often all black towns in the south they're often very small often just a couple hundred people and and these technically shouldn't be the same place like they shouldn't be having the same experiences because we're supposed to you know we keep getting told these two places have nothing in common how can you relate to them to each other because this experience of unincorporated black places should not look like the experience of incorporated white flight derived black cities and yet we kept seeing like oh yeah that was happening here in my in the town I'm studying this was happening over there too and just and so we're we spent a long time trying to just identify what what was the what why are they why they had something in common to go beyond you know in my work I've been studying towns under emergency management but not emergency management directly so much as trying to figure out what is the case that I'm trying to identify and that was what where we came from great yeah so as Louise was saying you know we're trying to connect these places that seem incompatible and I guess one other thing about my own research is that a lot of these places you know that I was looking at these unincorporated black communities were in the south often situated on the land of former plantations or quite close to places where the people living there their predecessors were or ancestors have been enslaved and then often right directly kind of adjacent to a lot of white communities in white towns that had some historical right relationship to to the black communities there and so this sort of extraction machine that Louise is describing I was noticing similar processes happening resource flows out of places like you see here this is in North Carolina Jackson Hamlet and Monroe town the places shaded in black um two places that ostensibly are considered good places to live right like solid well-to-do places like Pinehurst and Aberdeen which if you know anything about golf is where a lot of they host like the US Open and those sorts of places those sorts of events um so we you know after um you know this took a while for us to kind of situate ourselves um around some key questions um and to connect these things to um literatures that we knew um on uh like Charles Mills's The Racial Contract um and uh Cedric Robinson's racial capitalism um and so three um sort of main questions emerged for us um the first was just what are the common development patterns observed in black towns and when we say black towns we are um we're not referring to kind of how you might imagine a town necessarily right um just as a kind of municipal a small municipal unit um we're really referring to the kind of full spectrum um of uh black places whether they are black founded right communities like the ones I work in or black um places kind of created by white flight um the second question um was how do these those development patterns compare with those of white towns so we were really trying to understand um what's the relationship there um between um the black towns in the white town sort of um getting uh down to the brass tacks of um some of what uh Louise was talking about with the urban extraction machine um and then third um thinking about how existing theories um that we knew about right of like racial capitalism and development um helped to explain right the um uh what is commonly termed in my geography um and in sociology as the uneven development between black and white um towns and places okay um one other thing that was very clear um and this is kind of funny but also ended up being really generative for us um is that um as you know contemporaries um we both grew up um thinking about um placemaking and particularly at this kind of scale uh through Richard Scarry's uh busy town um and we were um you know trying to we came to this by trying to think about um kind of trying to answer the question like what is a town how do we think of a town um because this research has really made us have to really scale back a lot of our assumptions right about what um these place designations that we have are um and so we um we pivoted we were just like well you know our earliest memories um of thinking about towns um are through you know it's through this children's literature um and one of the things that was super generative about it was um the way that it um portrayed a kind of uh common wealth right and a kind of um uh principle of development that was for for all people right um um a very kind of common or dominant kind of construction of how we think about um a town or why people will want to come together to form um some form of town and so it was really helpful for us to kind of go back to how a town is even created in our own like our earliest imaginations um and to sort of build from there to get from there to what we were actually observing in our research um so and we'll show you um a kind of other rendering um another illustration later that gets at more of what we were seeing um so so Louise and I um ended up looking for a while for a a case that um really kind of captured or had some elements of um the various issues that we had been talking about in tandem so um we wanted to learn more about uh black place development uh we wanted to know a bit more about what incorporation municipal incorporation right like what is its real tie to um development outcomes there is a in my own research there's this sort of dominant conceptualization of the municipality that um that is really kind of synonymous with development right you you form a municipality with every intention of having some form of development and if you are unincorporated there appears to be some kind of um uh you know individualization right of or atomization of um your sense of space right you're not necessarily belonging to a um a community or a commonwealth um you don't necessarily have the public resources available to you to develop how you will so we wanted to really understand um what are the racialized dimensions of of incorporation so we were looking for um we call it a negative case right we were looking for a white unincorporated place um that could help us understand something about uh development um in um under uh regime where you don't have a municipal government and we landed um on this place called the woodlands which you may be in texas which you may be familiar with it's about uh I would say maybe 40ish minutes north of houston it's part of the sort of greater houston suburban area and it's one of the um the HUD model communities of the 1970s um that was formed by an an oil baron named James George P Mitchell um and so yeah the woodlands didn't look in in louis will talk about this a little later the woodlands looks nothing um like any of the unincorporated places that are discussed in the literature namely um you know those places are discussed discussed often as places that don't have very much infrastructure um that really lack um a lot of basic services um you know and sometimes they're when they are a little wealthier they can provide some of those things by themselves but the woodlands is a is a different kind of um animal even than just a kind of wealthy right wealthy ish right unincorporated place it really has the feel of a of a city actually not just a town um but what we also found um right adjacent as it turns out to the woodlands is another unincorporated uh black founded community that dates back to 1836 called Tamina and very quickly as we did this research just cursory research online found that Tamina had been in an at least 20 year fight actually 30 years if you can include fights against land grabs um but a 20 year fight um at least against um uh the small unincorporated city of Shenandoah and the woodlands around um access to basic infrastructure now Tamina proceeded the the woodlands in all of these other places um by well over a hundred years um and it actually established its own water utility company um just as the woodlands in Shenandoah and those areas were developing and so it actually had water rights that you know predated these places but um as we learned um as these white places started to grow around them they ended up encroaching on those water rights um and and as you know if you you know have um if you don't have access to basic water and um sanitation systems um you know your development is essentially dead in the water um so we decided that this was a really interesting um case to really kind of triangulate three places that we mostly focused on um the woodland Shenandoah and Tamina um no Shenandoah is a kind of place that is uh um it's it as our um the attorneys for Tamina said they sort of are aspirational right it's an aspirational white space um that is really um striving uh to be like the woodlands um and Tamina really represents a kind of barrier uh to its development um so we um yeah so we in 2018 um traveled um to to this region in Montgomery County Texas to really um to do interviews um to do some more archival research and actually to kind of look around to to start to understand um what the feel of these places were how close they were um and we attended a couple of um public meetings in Shenandoah as well uh planning commission and city council meetings um to really understand how they were thinking about development um okay um so this is just to give you a feel um so this is the entrance um around the entrance to Tamina um it is like so many um we think of um black communities cut off or segregated black communities um separated um by uh from Shenandoah and the woodlands by a railroad as you see here and then also um I think it's interstate 45 uh which is also kind of runs parallel in a sense to the to the railroad tracks and um one of the things that we noticed um coming in um and I you know in particular noticed as someone who studies environmental racism is that you know you really can um you know Tamina is a very easy case right of um how we think of environmental racism um this is the sweet rest cemetery uh which um is now pretty consistently underwater and has been um since uh the early 2000s or the actually mid to late 2000s um and part of how this happened was because of um construction waste um and illegal dumping that was happening from the woodlands into um into Tamina basically kind of shifted um a bit uh the geographic landscape and um basically causing this this flooding to recur pretty consistently so they haven't been able to bury any um uh any of their dead since 2007 and and I'm gonna turn it over to Louise to talk about the contrast with Shenandoah and the woodlands. Thank you um so so Daniela's just laid out Tamina a little bit of its context um in in this present tense but um if you're thinking back to that map that Daniela was just showing a few slides earlier um in Tamina's pretty small the woodlands is pretty big um Tamina's historical footprint actually covered all of this area so what is now Shenandoah the woodlands Chateau Woods and even beyond was all the town of Tamina so all of this development is is literally built on land that used to belong to Tamina and um the the closest town um that is incorporated to Tamina is Shenandoah and when we were just studying this place from afar we were framing this more as a Tamina woodland scenario but when we got there we were like Shenandoah is the one right in the middle Shenandoah is the is the town that is like the the most open aggressor against Tamina it had cut off Tamina's water line and moved it to convenience itself it had overlapped its water certificate um like uh rights provision map so that and that was what had caused like some of the most recent legal battles where um Shenandoah was the direct um entity preventing Tamina from getting full water coverage coverage and sanitation hookups so um we wanted to understand like kind of what was the psychological profile of Shenandoah and like why it was how it was and um which is partly why we were there for these town meetings where you know in the town hall is a this framed picture of their mall which is their main source of income through sales tax and is also just directly across the street so you could walk outside and look at it or I mean by the street I mean across this twelfth lane highway so if you could see it from afar there it is but they also are so proud of it as this beautiful object and so we've been thinking a lot about like what this form of development means um for these towns not just financially in terms of the resources that it brings to them as far as a regressive way of funding their town but also as an aesthetic um you know feeling about what it means to be Shenandoah and they're they're trying to be like the Woodlands despite being a town of 2000 people that has kind of little hope of becoming a uh having all of its rights um because it's its growth is dependent on Tamina basically ceasing to exist because that's its only direction it can expand into and um so we've been thinking about what it means to feel like they could at any moment become the Woodlands but they're not going to become the Woodlands anytime soon and and um why you know what part Tamina plays symbolically and materially for for this small town um and and then we also were thinking about the Woodlands in this as well so if you will move to the next slide Danielle thank you um I will just set up a brief clip I feel like the best way to introduce this the Woodlands itself as far as how it looks is to show you this promotional video that um the Woodlands has of itself so remember that this is an unincorporated place um it's technically not a city or a town it's but it's got over a hundred thousand residents it's one of the wealthiest places um in the country and um it won't incorporate because it doesn't uh want to have to provide all of the services that you will see in this video have to pay for them themselves through city taxes they currently get a lot of services provided by the county like road construction and repair but they don't want to not incorporate because they're afraid of being annexed by Houston so this is this kind of perennial problem where um they're trying to maximize both the benefits of unincorporation and and think about uh you know avoid the the harms of being unincorporated um and I and so you know I think this town is kind of a common like planning case study town that people pull out as like this was an intentionally planned master community it had federal money to get started in the model cities program when people kind of study it as an exception in an analogous way to how they often study black unincorporated places as exceptions so we wanted instead of um thinking of them both as as like unusual categories but to think how does this look like a lot of places that we've been and if so why so why does this I was just in Chicago this weekend this is plausibly you know an area of Chicago too and like so what how did they make an unincorporated area look like a real city and what does that mean about our legal designation supposedly producing a city if if it can do so um and how do we then you know watch this and keep in mind not only you could count how many pieces of infrastructure you could see like not just limited to roads but like waterways transportation um water provision um uh you know biking trails um but to think about them relationally which is kind of a social science concept to think not just about a disparity of one place to another but how did this place come about at Tamana's expense um I mean in Danielle was just talking about showing pictures of sweet rest cemetery the refuse from the construction of these buildings that we are looking at may be in the landfills that are causing the cemetery to be flooded so that's an example of what it means to be thinking relationally and not just seeing we're used to seeing these videos kind of floating in spaces of these cities are kind of born out of nothing and what we're doing is insisting that they're never born out of nothing and they're often built out of whether it's in Tamana's case literally built out of a black place but often more metaphorically just built at their expense so if you start the video we will watch it it is two minutes long I'm going to turn things over to Danielle to uh um switch to the imagery that we were working on instead to show that relationality and then basically to bring us home awesome so um um yeah so we you know as we um were looking at the woodlands and looking at Tamana and talking to um talking to the residents in um in Tamana about um yeah the history of their fight um against Shenandoah the way that the woodlands actually kind of inserted itself as a kind of a benefactor in this kind of interesting way despite this history right of dumping in the community um uh there was actually um an organization they formed that I don't know if it's I don't think it still exists called the Friends of Tamana um where uh the woodlands actually kind of inserted itself in to Tamana's fight against Shenandoah for its water rights um but then subsequently advocated right for Tamana to essentially give up its water rights in exchange for getting access right to um access to the access and expansion of the water system that it wanted right and so there is this um yeah we just saw this way that these white places even at different scales different levels of wealth that were surrounding Tamana had kind of um had this sort of covenant it appeared right to um to ensure that um that Tamana couldn't have any kind of um couldn't maintain any sense of independence right so in one of our interviews with um Mr. James Leveston who's the president of the the old Tamana water supply company and a lifelong resident of the town um you know what he had uh what he told us um you know essentially was that uh that water right right like that's that's there one kind of thing that gives them an identity it has some form of state recognition um and they were um you know even the people who were trying to help them right were trying to get them to give it up um so yeah so we took um all of these um you know the the media archives documenting this fight the legal documentation these interviews sitting in um Shenandoah's planning commission and city council meetings um we um decided that you know there was um what we really needed was uh another rendering right um kind of like using taking the busy town um model um and um rendering it so that it reflected more of what we were seeing um in terms of the relational development of um of Tamana and you know Shenandoah the woodlands whichever and um you know we have observed these sorts of patterns before incense right in other um in other uh historic black places black founded places and so um you know we wanted to actually make this as kind of general as possible um but to sort of insert the elements of how development happened so um if you can kind of um so we commissioned an illustration but amazing artist named Billy Dee um to really help us to render this and so um you can see the um though the white town trash company right dumping um illegally into um uh into black town you can see the the graveyard flooded you can see the black town's water tower and then you can see over here right white town official cutting the waterline um as a means right of encroachment right as a means all for the sort of future expansion and development um of white town um you can see um white city white town city workers taking um black towns um uh um signage right to the entrance away in preparation to expand um we actually see saw this happening in Tamana um where they um you know Tamana um leaders told us that um they had been sort of encroaching and sort of taking down their signs and sort of moving them um Shenandoah had and then we were at a Shenandoah uh county commission sorry uh city council meeting and the mayor was talking about um you know literally that day like reorienting right this area around the I-45 um like highway this sort of really tricky area and and beautifying it because it was the new entrance to the city um and so you could see we were like observing in real time just it sort of one meeting right like how um these development aspirations of this um of this white town um were so predicated right on um the disappearance in erasure right of both the identity and the actual existence right um of um of Tamana um so we want to just emphasize right like that what this means um uh is that you know this isn't just this image isn't just about environmental racism via nimbyism right it's not just oh white town doesn't just doesn't want its trash in its own town it's going to dump elsewhere and that hurts right black town it's that like white town creates value right more value in its place and more capability to develop in the way that it wants to um uh at the expense of of black town right and its actual um value right like how it views its value is always relative right to the space that it can use as its dumping ground so um this is how we think of this as a a model right for um white place development and we came up with a conceptual framework to um uh to outline it hi i forgot that was me um so um for more you'll have to read the papers uh both in both of which we um do a lot more to define creative extraction but we've kind of been talking around this concept this whole time as far as a a framework that can encompass all of these different things we're talking about um and focusing on the process and the relationships rather than the specific areas in which it might appear um it allows us to talk about things broadly and you might have encountered this you're like why does this town it's facing gentrification and this town is dealing with urban renewals after effects and this town is facing infrastructure problems why they feel somewhat similar but i don't have you know the language to put my finger on how and so that was why we have been um thinking about creative extraction as a way to think about this relational form of development um and in the many ways in which it can be at the cost of of uh black places to create white development and and and to not just say white cities often develop that way but to say it's kind of foundational to white development which we can um you know make sense of through these lenses of racial capitalism uh colonialism that we you know since since the foundation of uh the united states is a colony that it has been predicated on taking resources labor and land um from others and valuing that all of those things in relation to each other so one thing is valued because the other one is devalued um if you move to the next slide we have three main mechanisms and then a lot of different processes fit in under these various mechanisms or you could watch them play out over time um you know moving from one to another um but but most of the different forms of creative extraction we've observed fit into one or more of these categories whether that's outright theft of resources so that could be um using legal trickery to just take land um or steal it um uh that could be um appropriating finances that don't belong to you it could mean uh moving the the line on the map and cutting the water line um the second is gradual erosion so that that is often over a much longer time scale um but it could mean kind of um depriving for instance Tamina from being able to access it build its own water infrastructure system um which means that over the long term it's not able to develop in that and that it might have other downstream effects of not being able to build that and so it can't you know people individuals can't get loans to fix up their homes because they don't have the preconditions to um to to accomplish that and you know so these have all these um like feedback loop effects um and and and so we're putting kind of the the degradation of the environment within that within that uh category as well and then thirdly um we are thinking about political relevance as a major mechanism so that is usually um uh there alongside these two other dynamics there is often also a third thread in which um uh independent sovereign black governance at any scale it could be like actuals elected officials in as it is in the case of emergency management or it could be in Tamina's case they don't have a city hall but they do have um a water corporation and so it can be um both direct opposition to the water corporation or it can be more of just um like an ongoing um narrative that black governance is actually to blame for the lack of development uh management is the problem uh and in kind of devaluing the significance of of any form of black governance um so just to wrap up here there's a ton more we can say and hopefully we'll be able to say more in the the Q&A and discussion um kind of where we landed um so um yeah so for us um in this research we found um that in the environmental conditions of black towns are immediately explainable through a critical race framework um and so we think about the racial contract we think about plantation power we think about racial capitalism and so we are trying to um think about how those things manifest through the kind of ordinary processes of local place development um and how those always land right pretty reliably right with these really degraded um environmental conditions in um in black towns and so creative extraction um is our relational framework um that demonstrates um rather than what um you know louise was um you know demonstrating in the beginning right rather than the dominant um narrative that um places like tamino right are a suck right on uh public resources um that actually the opposite is true right that actually um those those places don't have the resources because those resources are actually um taken from them um and the white places actually are the ones that are dependent upon those resources for the creation of wealth and um and development um it's a standard um development local development model that has a very long history um and so creative extraction you know really importantly for us refutes any notion of an independent development independent white development um and that's so important right because um if you know if you think about how um any um planner um any advocacy group right approaches um this question of uneven development so much of it is that is this um is this push for the disenfranchised community right often like the black community right to get to a space where it looks more like the white place right that has all the resources but if we take seriously right this relational development um we have to notice that that in itself is um a farce right like that idea that you could actually have the black place look like the white place when the white place like looks like it does because it's been extracting from the black place um really helps us to understand right like the the the reliable replication um of this and to understand like why we don't like um we never quite get there right right we haven't seen right these um black towns like get to a space of thriving and if and if they do right like there's very you know this is you know the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre right if they they do get to some measure of wealth um we see that destroy it right there's a really long history of that um so it creative extraction refutes the notion of independent white development as much as it rejects this narrative right that's also part of this story um of dysfunctional black places right so many of the black places that Louise looks at and I look at um when you know the the story about them is that they don't have the resources because um they're dysfunctional or they're corrupt right um they they're incompetent right um and um you know reinforces some narrative about white um competence and functionality um rather than actually looking at how um development um fully operates so um we will stop there oops um and just say thank you once again to the Beall Center um for supporting this research um we um yeah we just could not have done it without your support and um we're gonna keep going um uh you know on and on we have so many more um elements of this to unpack um so we're excited to um move forward and um yeah and we couldn't have gotten here without your support so um yeah here's our contact information if anyone wants to be in touch about the papers um but um yeah we'll stop there and take any questions everyone ready for a conversation I hope I hope you are right you were the most important people in the room I just want to thank you for this lovely presentation I have to say that I have been excited about this work since 2014 when I I heard Louise present I think an early version of this I was like oh this is where this is going and then I got to hear Danielle and Louise start throwing around ideas in 2017 and so this project has been long in the making but I want to stress hopefully the audience understands how timely it is to be engaging these topics right so we are at this moment where we're having an explicit racial reckoning in this country and the way that that racism is built into space right in our country and um you know this isn't news for a lot of people who live under these conditions right so I think that having a set of conceptual tools that force us to think relationally as opposed to on terms of dysfunction incompetence corruption the list goes on is really critical to make sure that this racial reckoning isn't a blip right and that it can actually affect the production of policy right because these are not contingencies right these are policies right the production of policies and the rethinking of policies are really concrete terms right which graveyard gets flooded right where does the shit flow where does the etc right really concrete terms that are questions of policy and not questions of incompetence right so that's just my broad framing for how excited I am that this work has gone where it's gone and I want to congratulate you both on it and I look forward to reading the books that will emerge and celebrating them and and putting them in front of students but also policy makerspace all right so that that's that so my job is a very delightful one I get to kick off a conversation and I have a couple questions that are broad and I hope that they inspire questions from the group which I think you can put in is this right in the queue there's a kind of Q&A box that is accessible to the audience and I think that will be monitored by right now all right so to start us off I have some questions so you to start where you may be ended right you your work is clearly building on some really critical right kind of established but critical and emerging paradigms that are getting a lot of traction in the world of you know critical race studies critical sociology critical critical anthropology critical geography so plantation futures the racial contract racial capitalism right so you're really uh environmental racism clearly indebted to these and thinking creatively with them and I wanted to hear you you touch a bit on this in your articles but I'm hoping you can talk a bit more about um what the concept of creative extraction brings to the table that is perhaps you know on the edges of these other important conceptual frameworks but that you think is really important and needs traction at this moment so I wanted to invite you to think about that not of course to dismiss these really important frameworks they are central to how critical race thinking and thinking about racism is happening but also just where you want to take the conversation I think this this creative extraction framework is really promising so I hope you could talk about that a bit um I'll take a stab um and thanks Catherine thanks for um bringing up the the long trajectory of how long these types of projects really take um and and I appreciate you Catherine as as the person who put us in touch with Buell in the first place or brought uh my and our work to to Buell's attention so I um like we are coming full circle in many ways here um but uh I uh so I think like as a a qualitative researcher a social scientist um we are often you know if we're doing a case study we are trying to explain the case fully and there's different philosophies about how much you bring existing theory with you to your site um and I do bring theory with me I think most of us do in practice but I think um then you're also like always pushing on where is it not enough and um one thing that Danielle and I have talked about and hope to write about more is how um we learn a lot from how people in the places we go to themselves describe what's happening to them and then we take that seriously as theory um and they're often talking metaphorically and visually about dynamics or they talk about processes or say you know they're talking often in not abstracted terms but more like a like almost theatrical terms like they're you know they they take you on this journey through a metaphor um like I I didn't really understand what was happening in Benton Harbor until somebody was like Benton Harbor is on the table with fine diners ready um uh we're on the menu and there's fine diners sitting at this table ready to spend and and that sent me down a track of really understanding how these extraction processes were working but he was talking metaphorically and there were a lot of metaphors going around that same meeting and so I have um kind of begun and ended with taking ideas like that seriously we found similar ones in Tamina um that we could maybe get into but but that I think um you know rather than starting from can we find racial capitalism here or can we find gentrification here or can we find environmental racism here we're trying to understand the storyline and the dynamics and then that ended up um becoming the framework um so that you can explain gentrification and all these other processes through the larger framework when sometimes we're limited when we are looking for the thing and yes you'll find it I think it can lead to some errors like um like in my work on Flint some of the work showing how Flint's water crisis was tied to structural racism is kind of lit on Flint was redlined and I'm like if redlining caused a water crisis we would have we would have a you know an abject water crisis in every single city major city in the country so it's not causal so but if you're looking for something you will find it because we've had all of these processes repeat so many places so instead of looking for the thing trying to understand the story I think is is more where what got us to creative extraction and then drawing on again like all of these existing and frameworks and some of which are in the past five years now being discussed much more commonly like racial capitalism is now a thing that you're allowed to talk about where frankly when I was writing my dissertation was not an option available to to be used openly so there's been a large shift in the past few years about what we can talk about and I think there is a good confluence of these ideas coming together and there's more I could say but I but I will turn it over to Danielle instead of trying to think of more sure I mean I think you pretty much covered it I think you know one way that I think about this is that I think is is useful is is scale I think you know there's a way that we understand racial capitalism colonialism right like through like in an international context right we have some sense of what that looks like but you know it feels in some way that when we talk about a at the smaller scale right we we tend to think that each of these sorts of processes has to be proved separately right as though the United States as an example right wasn't wasn't constructed via colonial colonization and theft and all these sorts of things and so you get to a place where you know where you know I guess there's a there's a progress narrative there right about what a modern city or town looks like that couldn't possibly be doing the exact same things that you know the predecessors centuries earlier were doing right you have to kind of prove the concept right again that it's replicable right at multiple scales so I think that's that's yeah you know there's what is it Walter Rodney's right like how Europe underdeveloped Africa and people again like people have we have a long history of decolonial histories and literatures that help us understand extraction at that scale and you know to a certain extent right we have some sense right we have like some sense of inequities in cities right but there's a lot of still discussion of these things as as if as inequities as somehow kind of independent of one another in a way that can still lend itself to these narratives about dysfunctional black places right and highly competent prepared right like white places that are just positioned well right to to go after the resources in some sort of fair competition so that's yeah so I think it's it's important to that's you know part of the reason why it's so important to keep in mind right these other frameworks and I think you know creative extraction um you know there's there are parallels and similarities right there at at every scale but creative extraction is yes specifically interested right in in the local specifically interested in those mechanisms that happen in cities and towns in ways that they don't necessarily happen right at the at the national international level that can produce reliably similar outcomes at this smaller scale um this is really exciting you know uh you know an anthropologist loves to talk about the metaphorical or people talking in metaphorical registers and so I I appreciate this big push to think relationally right and to think about these codependent relationships that are very hard to grasp when the object is often presented as pathologies right so a black neighborhood the black ghetto right all these ways that social scientists have uh reifying these spaces as necessarily already problematic that cuts out this discussion of how they came to even be conceived of those problems in the household that also are the resources of enormous value production right that make the good life possible somewhere else and so I was actually um a little I wondered if the um creative extraction was even the little sanitize because I hear my collaborators and research collaborators interlocutors use much stronger language and I wondered if you um if you could talk about those more intense chains of like metaphorical association through which people grasp these this codependent relationship that is very corrosive right it may be creative they extracted the extremely corrosive end of pleading right yeah I'm just curious yeah um I think that that those like those other uh terms are really important too so like there yes there's creative extraction which may sound kind of nice but we definitely don't mean it that way um and I think that uh like when I was in the past few years um some of the work saying we talk about blight when we should talk about ruination for instance that we have a hard time finding the active verbs to describe what's happening um in uh you know euphemism like distressed cities uh which itself is like not conveying this either um but to this you know we talk about neighborhoods becoming blighted as if it's a natural process that's kind of biological rather than the policies that you can actually directly trace back that created um the neighborhoods looking the way they do and then justified um you know the legal designation of blighted which that in turn justifies things like mass demolitions um and so which which are also violent and so um we are kind of keeping at our disposal the whole range of of ways in which this plays out including the you know pretty directly violent um dynamics um so like within within that arsenal of creative extraction I think to some degree I don't know we've been like a lot of where I have gone in my research over the past few years has kind of gone into the realm of of horror genres and I think Danielle and I do talk about this a lot um that's the horror film I mean there's a reason why it comes together so it's such a trope right yeah um and and and because it's sometimes like you know in a horror movie you think about what makes things scarier is like the mundanity of like and then things went back to normal but what you realize is like there is like what the normal is is based on this foundation of blood basically and and so I think um to the degree we're talking about like the creativity of creative extraction is that it's kind of grasping at whatever it can to like build you know opportunistically use laws policies space people taxes um geography all of that grasping to itself and then at a given time something may come up as being more useful or um and so it will kind of be incorporated um and and so I don't think we mean create creativity like in a good way we mean it like like like wow they really they really come up with so many ways to to do these um uh to do that to reenact the same processes with new means um and that and and to kind of be like that means you can't just defeat the monster once you have to keep you have to keep seeing what new formats taken and then defeat it again but you know at its foundation I think we want to put all the characters in the room so you can see who's doing what to whom and insist on that um rather than it being like oh wow why is this you know the equivalent of like a kid like why are you hitting yourself in the face which is kind of the story we tell about black cities and neighborhoods most of the time um of course so creative I actually Danielle I was thinking about this with respect to uh the generative dimension of the representational work here right the two diagrams that usually two illustrations let's call them illustrations right and you are someone as I understand it who has come uh you think that academia can also have many platforms right if you're working scale alive like storytelling all sorts of stuff so I wondered if you could thinking about this framework of creative extraction right and thinking about this being a zoom I assume full of people who uh are creative more creative than me as professionalist with that very visual design oriented right I'm wondering if you could talk about why first of all what you think an architect or a planner or a preservationist could how they could be involved in the kind of creative representational work necessary not just to visualize these structures but also to think about them differently right to change them and I'm wondering also how you think about it in your own work working across these different platforms well that's a great question um you know I I feel like I always I often get this question about um how people can intervene and I I often feel like stumped by it because it feels like so massive right um so many um of our like interventions are like um are complicated by the fact that we're part of right like structures that have specific rules that like are intended right to like replicate right these um uh these same kind of structures but one of the things that has been I think really useful for me and I'm in this process right now I live in um I live in Durham North Carolina and I'm from um I'm actually from here um and um I feel like there's a lot of really deep like listening and learning and study um that has to happen um in order for me to kind of understand like how like in the sense like how creative extraction is working in my city in my place and so one of like you know if I had any kind of advice because I again I feel like sometimes it's hard to know like a thing to do or what to do um I you know I always I always think it's really important to start where you are um and maybe start even where um in places where you're familiar um you know maybe where you're from um you know as you know architects and planners right um you know you're you're given a set of skills and a way of seeing right um that um has really long histories in that we know right we have some sense right like that can um you know lend itself to practices that replicate these outcomes even if you have no intentions and so one way um to think about even shifting it in your mind right is this kind of um I think deep observation um which is kind of one of our methods um I think in this process has been like okay here's a place that we don't know right but we you know we started if I look back at our timeline we started um looking at Tamina back in 2016 um and you know it has taken us um you know that these articles were published in 2020 and it took us a really like a long like deliberate time to really start to understand these dynamics how they shifted right it took a while for the community members there to trust us enough to like let us like in so that we could actually interview them um and so but it was really um generative in the end and helping us to to understand that um so in terms of like so I think deep listening learning and maybe preferably you know where the place that you have some familiarity with and feel comfortable asking questions right like about um uh and then to see how it works in in in your place right um and then I think you know to answer your question about um different platforms um I think it's massively important right to and you know we're working on this now right to to talk about these things publicly um it's really um you know it is not as nearly as rewarded in academia for speaking publicly about things that you're doing research on even though public scholarship as it were is becoming a bit more acceptable um but the impact of it is huge um you know I in my own individual work um you know in um historic black places in north carolina and alabama um you know I wrote um pretty extensively in public through scallowag about these places and these patterns right that I was observing um you know across the south in terms of infrastructure and access right and particularly around wastewater sanitation and it's really amazing to see um um the kind of responsiveness that um that takes place right it turns out that a lot of these white places really do not like to be put on blast right publicly right they they do not you know in particularly I'm dealing with places that are quite small right um but even the bigger ones don't like it but especially the small ones the word gets around and people have a reputation to uphold and you know sometimes what that means is um people decide right to go back to the drawing board or to um maybe hold off on a particular decision and to do something different because now they know people are watching right and that's important it's just massively important so um you know I you know I don't pretend to be a planner or an architect I think there's like some really brilliant creative work that can come out of thinking doing this sort of deep observation um and um writing about it illustrating it publicly um helping us to understand how this you know these processes work in um in other places right um and so you know it's something that we're we're hoping to do some of ourselves but this is definitely an open invitation for other folks to yeah take a look um you know be in touch we'd love to to see um how people see it or our kid you know if it rings a bell with you in the places where you are excellent okay there is a question where is this question Brian holds a secret question oh the Q&A let me see here uh it's in the Q&A from Prem Sylvester is that right Prem um I hope you guys said your name right thank you for such an insightful talk I was wondering if you could speak to the importance of emphasizing the quote creative aspect of creative extraction rather than merely referring to extraction we talked a bit about this but yes I mean I think there's more to say thanks Prem do you want to add to this I think that Louis it was at Louise you said or both of you said that there is a kind of um lay flexibility of these different mechanisms and it really comes out in the articles I'll say that you know your main example is on a water infrastructure but we're also talking about disposal right the disposal of bodies right the disposal of building debris um the the question of obviously relevant for Benton Harbor and Whirlpool toxicity right like legacy chemicals talk about a euphemism um the question of also climate I don't know how to talk about holding areas right you mentioned this too in a kind of question of the climate emergency so these all seem to be potential fodder to to open up Prem's question oh I yeah I think I mean just to start with we were um thinking a lot about Joseph Schumpeter's creative destruction concept from the 50s so he was a economist who was writing about this positively and even if this isn't something that's familiar to you I mean you my son now is very well acquainted with the song video killed the radio star like we're we're familiar with the idea of like one technology has to murder off the previous technologies blockbuster is dead along with Netflix is is the is like the framework of creative destruction and and so like Schumpeter was positively describing capitalism as having to erase whatever came before it in order to like make an advance um and we've kind of taken that on its head and like looked at how that works with um extraction um so that it's it I think it's to some degree I'll let Danielle take a step out of this too but like I think it's trying to show the positive the positive side of like white development and its cost at the same time and and always going back and forth across those two ways of seeing um I think this also relates to why I write about debt a lot not because I like finance but because you can you can kind of similarly think in terms of like positive and negative space and you have to switch modes of thinking all the time so like some you know someone's benefit is my cost and um and so I think the the the creativity of it is like you don't have like I think this is also again what Daniel was saying about scale is it's often the same people who at one point are doing land grabs and at another point get into the water business and like you know and then they become the mayor and so they often are like moving across these domains themselves or if not that like whirlpool is in Benton Harbor that they you know they started out as an industrialist and now they have this golf course and how do we get from one thing to the next so that they can move across domains easily and be thinking across all of these different ways of being in the city and like different points of engagement with policy and officials and the state and like spaces and water environment like that they are thinking across all these places and so we have to as well and we are really not set up to do this as scholars we're supposed to focus you know be a water specialist or you know just do one area I just study pollution um but like just like pollution does not stay in one place but it enters into um you know like we have to be thinking about the ground the water and the air when we're thinking about contamination and how things move from one place to another I feel similarly about how I'm kind of just following the story as it takes me different places and and I think that is like another aspect of that creativity that I was mentioning earlier yeah and just quickly I mean I think I mean Louise it's a spot on I think the you know as we're talking through this concept Louise and I talked a lot about value um like valuation processes um and how like we think of um we don't actually think very much I mean in some ways I guess you think of like all valuation is relative right like there is you know you value one house at a hundred thousand dollars and another at thirty thousand and you have a sensibly a set of criteria right for how to do that um uh how you get to that difference right um but you know when we think about um how valuation works in terms of development um there is you know the again the narrative that we get all the time about development is sort of just this kind of like unidirectional like sense of like creating wealth upon itself right like the valuation just sort of springs out of the air right people come together and then then wealth just builds and accumulates um and the way that we that we're observing it is that actually right like that valuation comes from somewhere right like it is it is created from something right and it is literally created um from the from the land from the physical resources from the labor right of these black places in my own like my my own research a lot of these places that um um you know are on the site of former plantations um and they have these black places and they have you know the white planter class right those um there's descendants who live in the city um so much of why those black places are there were was a kind of bribe with land right to ensure that like um this white place would forever have a black labor pool right that was helping to develop it right and when you think about it that way like the the creation of wealth right in the extraction is very clear right it seems very um very clear but what but you have to understand like the history like of how those places came to be in order to start to understand what the relationship is so that's that but that's one iteration right not every black place came off of a plantation and is adjacent to a place where the white planter class that had previously enslaved them live right but you can see very similar right like kinds of patterns of extraction you know what happened to how did black places create them like how are black places created and where were they created um you know during the great migration for instance right um how do we understand um something like a sundown town right like legit like it's not it's not no black people allowed ever at all right in this white place it's like you are allowed here to work and to contribute your labor and to like build our wealth right but you cannot reside here you cannot actually enjoy the the literal fruits of your labor you have to leave right so those sundown towns are actually mostly outside of the south right and so having um yeah so there's a lot of like it's it's all there right um it's just about how um we think about uh what it means to be what it means for wealth right um to be created right like what is that process we are really I think at this point kind of obsessed right with like how is this the process of like wealth and valuation happen um and like you know in the sundown towns just as in the plantation towns right um what we see is that like like the white places like sense of itself and value is directly predicated right on um on what it can extract right and land labor resources from the from the black places and they don't even have to be adjacent right like um you know a really great example is where I live now I live in Durham um North Carolina I you know teach at UNC Chapel Hill both of these places um don't dump their waste in town right both of these places dump their waste in a um a black place in a county in eastern North Carolina over 100 miles away right and so that extraction happens um in all sorts of um in all sorts of ways and it devalues right and it forecloses um all sorts of possibilities for what that black place can become when that happens thanks for that we have a couple more questions from David Crockett apologies to be joining late so if you've already answered this please please forgive me I have wondered how work on so-called underdevelopment so many marbles work how informs your work yeah so thank you this is a great question so we had talked a little bit earlier about um oh my god the how Europe underdeveloped Africa right um and and how colonialism we kind of have some sense of um how extraction um in this sense operates on the international scale um and you're talking about many marbles work um yeah I think it's I I think that um it relates directly right like Manny Marable's work is in conversation with um Cedric Robinson's work on racial capitalism is in conversation with um Charles Mills's work on the racial contract I think um you know what these folks are describing are sort of um like the view from like you know uh 3000 feet of like how um how these processes work to um like of development and underdevelopment and um what we're doing is basically like like like doing a um zoom sorry zooming in right sorry we're on zoom we're zooming into um at the scale of the locality right and seeing how like you know even without thinking about thinking very much about the federal government right like each government at each level right um has this has this ability right to to operate in this particularly um in this particular way that replicate something that we think of again at a much larger level and so you know rather than dealing with things like the GI bill right and like sort of those broad redlining processes as we think of sort of big federal like you know programs that created these development outcomes we're looking at like municipal utility districts right like that's and so it's really just again um a matter of um the scale and mechanism of it I would say if I can emphasize this I think this is a really important point that you said several times in this question of scale I think that what your work is bringing to the table and I think as an example for um you know people who are going out in the world and engaging with community economic development interfaces and this kind of stuff is precisely you know you can talk about these broad mechanisms called colonization decolonization whatever you know fill in the blank or whatever it is these kinds of paradigms that become kind of roll off the tongue these days but the work of actually tackling them would require you to ask about extreme tax regression and property taxes right which seniors get tax breaks and why um what I really appreciate about the articles this question of air property right these really nitty gritty uh things that I think that planners and architects are in a position to open the books on right because they're there for the taking right so what is air property right what is the tax regression where which which part of the county can negotiate different tax rates right these are really critical questions that of course can fall under these big branches of uh racial capitalism but in order to actually find a place to move things around and create a different kind of illustration that's where the pressure is put right so I really appreciate that Danielle keeps on coming back to this question of scale nuance the local as not incidental here but where the work is done to reimagine this kind of structure so that's yeah if I could say one thing about that I think that I completely agree and I think we often think about big picture like the wealth must be made you know out in the realms of trillions of dollars but it's you know like the bank's wealth is generated from like mortgage interest and and water bills and people paying two dollar fees and so just in the same way like what we're seeing you know we we have a hard time thinking about like big picture like structural racism but you can actually show the person doing making the decision that did the thing at these scales you can often actually see it take place in front of your eyes at a meeting and so um you you both have like it's the picture is clear and also it's really important to study this and to reiterate that a bunch of many planners and designers and architects are in a position to see this play out in front of their eyes like a lot of times um I started I came into this studying I will not get into what they are but tax increment financing arrangements in Benton Harbor and and in causing me to realize like this is where like in this case the the financing for this very big half billion dollar development was being reimbursed partially through um through uh city taxes and schools uh taxes that should have gone to schools for the next 20 plus years and then the school district was virtually going bankrupt and we weren't supposed to think of these two things as connected and and so part of this is just um trusting your instinct that when you see uh something happen and then something come you can come afterwards that maybe he actually are connected but that a lot of the times the financing that we'll talk about like Hudson Yards bajillion dollar projects but that it comes from similar types of um financing schemes that ultimately kind of hinge on similarly extractive policies um to understand why that's relevant to Flint you'll have to read my book in several years but but but that we this my first plug ever um but we you know we um it can be easy to kind of exist in this like abstracted realm but a lot of times when you trace back where that money came from that is financing the thing that you are affiliated with it it does it's not coming from the ether it's coming from like people's pocketbooks and um and when you are at that smaller scale you can watch the money kind of travel from place to place in ways that you can then kind of scale up in your analysis um but but that is easier to see I would just add a plug for Clyde Woods's book Arrested Development which was really formational for me um when Xandria Robinson told me to read it like 2013 and and and he said like in the first chapter like the Delta looks away does not from uh too little but too much capitalism and I was like whoa I gotta do something with this like like that that we see places that have been suffering from too much capitalism as being underdeveloped in that they are both like under and overdeveloped at the same time or what underdevelopment really means in this case so thanks for your question David. What is amazing okay um so we are a little over eight week you know there's more to be said um if there are no questions from the group but I also want to um um where I am it's quite warm so I wonder if these folks are in a hot seat as well um so uh are there more questions from from our audience whose faces I can't see but I'm hoping are having all sorts of ideas my silent friend Reinhold is there something that you would like to say? Well uh I've come back well first of all in you know it does seem like this this conversation first of all has continued from the many and it's been a real pleasure you know listening in again and and uh and it can continue I think uh in many of the directions that that you uh Cassie have have already laid out and that that Louise and Danielle have in in their own work um in the spirit of kind of ongoing uh work uh Jacob I think it was posted earlier and just able to post again the link to um to the Buell Center Power Infrastructure in America site uh in which um there you'll find further information on on Danielle's and Louise's project and its links to other work that we've been doing at the Buell Center and in again an extension including a collaboration with Skallowaga mentioned earlier so you know kind of proliferating uh connections and and so I I you know just really want to say again how how honored I think we've been to to be able to at least um in these ways host such uh amazing work and and such a great conversation and I did want to give Danielle and Louise just a chance if they wanted to say any a concluding a beginning concluding offer concluding thoughts or anything or or or whatever as we all enter into the summer evening are you there here um I thank you Reinhardt I um I don't know that I have any um anything else to contribute at this point but um I think I will say that it's been really amazing to have this time um you know this uh to do this project and to dig in in the ways that we have um it's you know academic time is as so many of you know um really precious and it's um to have the support um of um of the Buell Center through this process was really um foundational right and essential for us to um to get this work done um we have more work to come um and um so I would just encourage you you know I guess we're both on Twitter and that kind of thing we we tweet at each other and we tweet um about our work pretty frequently um and um yeah we're just looking forward to um more public discourse about creative extraction about um the particular case of Tamina as it continues to unfold um and um yeah looking forward to any of the kind of feedback um that y'all might have um on other places you might you know on occasion people um message us and say like oh have you looked into this in that other place and we we really like that um so we um yeah we we certainly encourage that if um if if this um kind of thing interests you um but yeah but thank you yeah I want to I want to uh reiterate all of that and I think in particular it's been great that like since we're coming to this from different disciplines I mean we're both English majors and sometimes we trot out this fact at random times that like we both didn't start where we are now and that um it's been oh apparently Catherine as well no wonder we're talking about metaphor um but uh you know to be able to like work with a center for architecture and planning has been really helpful I think to get outside like sociologists have a certain way they want me to talk about what I do and I'm sure the experience is the same thing um environmental policy you know and geography and that without having that same restriction to just think about like what's important what's translating across audiences how might professional people be thinking about what we want to do um that that it helps you know it it it takes all of those restraints off so that we can just be like what is our case study saying rather than like what what would sociology want me to do to translate this into legibility for them and that actually I feel like our work got a lot better because we could think about how to translate it for different audiences um rather than our own and and so thank you for that for for being willing to to like think about how your work works with social science um and how how this like design like how this concrete and abstract processes work together it's been really interesting well likewise for us and in fact to come even more full circle I you as you've been speaking our architectural colleague Anna Maria Leon with whom we have also had the opportunity to collaborate around the the question of emergency powers in in uh Detroit um has posted uh some reflections really I'm just you know speaking so you have a chance to read them everybody uh on Du Bois's thoughts observations about white planters looking even further south um to uh Latin America um uh and uh kind of as a reminder that that we hear at the Buell center for the study of American architecture whatever that could possibly uh are are inherently responsible for this question of the the relation and or distinction between America IE US and America's IE um the north south axis that Anna Maria is referring to uh but that's for another time for sure uh in the meantime I just wanted to thank everybody again and thanks so much Cassie for uh for your you know wonderful interlocution uh and and commentary also I'd say on on the work uh so to be continued in in in many many ways okay okay well good evening good night we're everywhere