 Even though, I mean people can keep getting their lunch and I think we should just get started. And I'm not really going to give an introduction except to say each, we'll valorize it all from Gisa planning, one of the P.A. DeShawn for you. Gisa. Brandhold is gonna be up here quizzing and answering and prodding us. And we're at day 64, but who knew at day 64 all that was going on, including yesterday. And who knows even what happened this morning because I was going to have two minutes. Paul Ryan and running to the White House? Paul Ryan and running. Running? Okay. I'm glad, okay. So this dismantling and you've read the little blur, which is our title, Texas All, all of the citizens and those who are really working or even studying in the U.S. or all citizens of the world. And so we're going to each kind of take a little piece of the dismantling and not in any particular order or any level of importance, but just to say we want to kind of attack it from different positions. So Valerie's going to first speak about housing, right? Yeah, okay, thanks. All right, hi everyone. I'm the designated planner in the room today. Well, in addition to P.A. DeShawn. And I'm a third year PhD student here in the urban planning program, Medjisa. And I do work on how U.S. housing policy, justification and zoning impacts low income urban residents with a geographic focus here in NYC. And today I'm going to be talking a bit about dismantling through the lens of housing. So we're going to look at dismantling housing in the U.S. through past, present and future. So I'm going to briefly discuss the continual dismantling of U.S. federal housing policy essentially from the 1960s to the current administration. So this is nothing new in the realm of housing, this sort of frame of dismantling. So looking at the past, I'll show a policy dismantling through a lack of maintenance of public housing. At present I'll show the literal dismantling of public housing through the HOPE 6 program, housing opportunities for people everywhere. And looking forward, I'll consider the potential regulatory and financial dismantling of a number of health policies under Ben Carson's leadership. So looking to the past, so HOPE was created under LBJ in 1965. The agency was charged with continuing urban renewal efforts implemented through past iterations of the U.S. housing act. What I'll be referring to as the policy dismantling of the EG agency began merely one administration later during the Nixon years. Ideologically, Nixon opposed project-based housing assistance both due to the financial burden of it as well as the implication that it was too quote unquote, communistic in both design and aid. By 1972, the OMB dramatically reduced HUD's budget. And that same year, the Nixon administration announced a moratorium on any new construction of subsidized housing. Though Nixon lifted that moratorium in 74, he had already shifted these policy priorities away from project-based assistance to section eight vouchers and privately developed project-based units. So here I've included a photo that I'm sure you've all seen before of the iconic Pruitt-Igoe towers in St. Louis being torn down in 1972. But I wanted to contrast that image with an earlier image of young men playing baseball on the site. So public housing was intentionally segregated in some places, but at the beginning, it often served as a melting pot of sorts for low-income and working-class families. However, at the time of Pruitt-Igoe's demolition, a number of external factors, ranging from suburban white flight to dramatic changes in the labor market contributed to shifting demographics within the projects across the country. So internally, at the same time, HUD was reducing its funding for maintaining the housing that it had put up, and that resulted in the deterioration of many units that were built just a few decades prior. Ultimately, a majority-minority group was left behind in the increasingly less desirable public housing, and a number of highly racialized narratives emerged around its purported failures. So that brings us to the present. Looking at one of the narratives of... Once that narrative that public housing had failed was deeply ingrained in both the public image and the housing policy community, there were further budgetary cuts during the Reagan and Bush years, not surprisingly. However, it was the Clinton administration that took a literal step to physically dismantle public housing through the HOPE 6 program, a $6 billion initiative to demolish and replace public housing and build mixed income and mixed finance housing communities in their place. The federal policy initiative corresponded with general trends toward generating mixed income, affordable housing across U.S. cities. So the program ultimately had 260 grantees in total and demolished about 100,000 public housing units, replacing them with roughly an equal amount of units, but only 55,000 of those were exclusively for public housing. Across the sites, only an average of 28% of original tenants returned to those developments and returning often hinged upon fulfilling work requirements or other requirements, which was HUD's way of again, assessing this sort of deserving versus non-deserving poor hierarchy within its projects. So now to look at the immediate present and the potential future of dismantling, of the dismantling of HUD and its policies. I was just saying this almost feels trivial to talk about HUD when we're literally staring down the face of the ACA, but all of these things are interrelated and matter in various ways. So as most of you know, the former presidential candidate and brain surgeon, Ben Carson, has been appointed and confirmed to lead HUD. He has traditionally espoused this bootstraps approach to merging out of poverty himself. And the latest proposed budget has shown a $6 billion cut to the agency, including the elimination of the Community Development Block Grant, the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, and a program designed to encourage low-income homeownership. New York City, for example, is anticipating to lose about $150 million in federal housing funding over the next several years, and that's not counting the threat to federal cuts to sanctuary cities. Now in terms of regulation, Carson has already expressed a disdain for Obama's Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing AFFH Initiative, which is essentially an extension of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that prompted HUD grantees to demonstrate how they were tackling long-standing forms of residential inequality with the money they received. The initiative also intended to provide technical assistance and data on existing segregation patterns in U.S. cities. Carson has already expressed again a disdain for this initiative, and has called it a mandated social engineering scheme and quote-unquote, failed socialism. Meanwhile, the AFFH is also being attacked by Republican representatives in Congress. Beyond AFFH, just this week, HUD announced that it would be reviving a Bush-era online clearinghouse to share best practices in reducing regulatory barriers to creating affordable housing, i.e. discouraging local protective zoning measures, historic preservation measures, or building code requirements. These are regulations that are often seen as cumbersome to the building process, but not necessarily proven as beneficial in the creation of affordable housing. So that's unlike the administration is currently reporting. So that's all I have for now. Feel free to reach out to me via email with questions, and I look forward to hearing your comments during the panel. Thanks. The dismantling of the government that Lori just spoke about, or the dismantling of the ecology that constitutes our border that Lori just spoke about has a larger meta-narrative, right? The meta-narrative is dismantling the idea of the public, and I tread into that territory lightly because my colleague Reinhold has spoken about and written about the idea of the public so sensibly, but I think this election that we are now in the day 64 is something that has become very clear that our founding documents, all men created in equal, are really supposed to read all straight white men and our created people. And it's our fundamental confusion about that idea of who is truly the public that is driving what's happening. It's not about big government or small government. It's about whose government is it. And so I wanted understanding that much of the content today would be somewhat depressing. I wanted to put up this slide from Christophe Peace that talks about the fact that worldwide poverty has been on the decline for some time now. And I would guess that most of us would think that that is good news, but I think there are people who don't. I think there are people who look at that and say, well, that's globalization for you. Billions of brown people who are no longer poor, no longer subjugated, no longer kind of living villages. And that is, of course, the Trump narrative and I would argue at some degree, the Sanders narrative. And because of this thing like globalization, why aren't we staying in our villages? And we are not staying in our villages and we are building across the world. And what we are largely building is the vermin's brawl and I won't go off on that particular tangent that I tend to go off on. But as we build human density, however, it becomes very clear that this word infrastructure becomes defining, becomes actually this kind of manifestation of the idea of whether we believe in a public or not, particularly in the face of the climate change. And so you see our cities, particularly our coastal cities and the kind of state they are in. You see Penn Station and the kind of state it is in because this is no longer for that public. Post the Civil Rights Act, it is no longer for straight white men. And so therefore it can completely crumble before our eyes or the water in Flint, Michigan, because that is not the public that is meant by the idea of what the government is meant to represent in the times we live in. And of course there is response. And to me what is particularly brilliant about this response is the idea that we are not going to sort of protest in the plaza given to us, but actually to stop the highway and the history of a renewal tearing apart African American communities I won't go through here, but the notion of redefining public by reappropriating the space that actually did so much damage. I think it's fundamental to that movement. So what's interesting is the true public, the real public is doing its job. It's doing its job in all sorts of interesting and fascinating ways, not just in Washington and New York, but in Boise, Idaho, and red states across America. And it's doing its job, I would argue. And you see this in examples, both large and small, but in our public space, in what is truly our public space. And thank God that we still have that space or thank him or whatever you like. But then the next question that that gets me to is then where is architecture in all of this? And there is a history of architects believing in the public and it's interesting there seems to be less and less in my mind kind of a focus on this, the history of team 10 in particular I think is somehow washed away in our world this of course is a nice fourth niche. But there are these glimmers, right? There are these glimmers. You have our Fitzgerlory out there saying something as revolutionary as saying that if it's unique and it can't be repeated, it basically has a value that's close to zero. You have my good friend Tatiana Bilbao who spends most of her time in practice thinking about questions of housing and housing for the public. But, but even with those glimmers, you have this fundamental inflection point and I think I've come to realize that part of my obsession with Penn Station isn't just about the train station, but it's about the fact that the demolition of this building which happened, the demolition actually started within weeks of the candidate's assassination, happens in a very particular moment in our history in which again, the station is no longer for the public for which it was designed and therefore is disposable. And so we see in the death of the public and the death of that idea in architecture, you see a strange new replacement take hold. A replacement where it's okay to use $4 billion of recovery money to build the Oculus of a shopping mall and say, well, who remembers how much Grand Central cost? We do actually, Grand Central costs, as Michael Kimmelman wrote in this article, about in today's dollars, 50% of what the transportation hub of downtown costs and serves about six times the ridership. And that of course is because this idea of architecture as a luxury product is the dominant narrative in architecture today, that it is not for the public. And so this from Mr. Damoli and this statement couldn't be more absurd. It simply couldn't be more absurd. It is not factual. And yet these things just sort of fly out of there. And then of course that leads into one of the most outrageous things I think any architect has ever said. But hey, as long as it's parametric, right? As long as it's parametric, then it's groovy. And that stems from a source. So we did not get here out of some accent. You know, in my book I tried to talk about what was happening that it wasn't really about blue states and red states. And in this country today, there's only one or two major cities above 100,000 people that have a Republican air. Every major city in Texas has a Democratic air. This is no longer about that. It is about cities versus a kind of exurban divide. And that exurban divide is fueled by, you know, when we saw it happening with Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin. So there were clear indications that we were gonna end up at day 64. And so what's the architectural community do? Well, one of the leaders of the industry goes out and designs their headquarters at the World Trade Center site. So these guys, the two sex offenders and the guy from the gun north the other day can have their studios overlooking the footprints of the World Trade Center site and all of the linguistic messaging that that will deliver. And when asked about it, he says, oh yeah, they're at this lot to be here completely. So, you know, it just goes on and on and on that this is the way our profession is responding to one of the worst crises in human history. And how we decide to, if we decide to reconstitute the public is up to us. And there are of course small efforts and there are largely small efforts. And you know, what we really need to do is understand that there are enormous crises that are spatial, that have housing implications, that have cultural implications in which architecture, planning, preservation, development, play and enormous roles. And that it is absolutely critical that we respond to those, including the idea of responding with voice. So one thing our office did with actually group, well, with the Americans of Liberty Union and then a group of public space advocates is we did go through a letter to the mayor and identified several spots around the city, assuming that not everyone had the time to go down to Washington or some of these larger marches that get organized and trying to reach a much more diverse swath of the city economically than say protests on Fifth Avenue can and also ethnographically. And so this isn't about government somehow controlling protests. It's about government providing infrastructure for protests. So we're actually talking to all people the Department of Transportation which controls these spaces to try to create that platform. So we have a voice that is again spatial and permanent. So I'll just conclude with the fact that I still, despite the fact that I didn't quite pessimistic, I remain quite optimistic and we'll end with this length and cues. And I think this is critical. I think this is actually the exact sentiment that sums up the moment of this time in terms of this afternoon, which is this question of what this country is. And I think it's really, really critical that if we're gonna understand this, we have to understand that this country doesn't exist in the narrative that we've been given. And what's happening now is they're just kind of dismantled kind of the Christmas tree ornaments. And so we have to kind of reconstitute in a fundamentally different way. So thank you. I'm going to, first, I'm gonna represent three different things here. I'm gonna speak for myself for a second then at a little longer length speak for the fuel center and tell you a little bit about the kind of work that we're doing in this context. And then we'll, I'll switch into moderator mode and we'll have a discussion over here. So, thanks everybody. On this, the last time I stood here, I think, or maybe not, but at least at one of these discussions, I looked into that camera, I think, and tried to say something like, we all need to do what we can to prevent historians of the future from writing the book with the title Architecture in Neo-Fascism. And I still think that that's true. And I want to explain a little bit about what that could mean. Whether or not you accept the terminology and so on, that's not the issue. The issue, and we are speaking across kind of in a certain kind of harmony or there's a kind of lining maybe that I think we can feel here. Because I'll just say quickly here, and I'm here seeking for myself, that a dimension that I think thus far is missing from the debate, the conversation, the contest, the struggle, that can be articulated from within a space like this has to do with symbolism and specifically the fetishization of the nation as a sacred category, a kind of intense nationalism that we who do the history and those of you who listen to us talk about it know very well architecture has participated in time and time again, over and over again. And here in New York and indeed I think in this country and I think it's relatively self-evident that ground zero for that today is ground zero. It's specifically that building, the Oculus, and you can read a little bit about this a little later, but in the meantime I can talk about it. So that's something I want to say because that's where architecture is in the midst of it and the thick of it since the beginning and we need to be able to understand that and sort of break it down in the century. So if there's something that needs to be dismantled here it's architecture, sorry. It's a very specific idea about what architecture does in the society as one of our many, many dimensions of the many, many domains that contribute to the production of meaning in this space, in this case a kind of sacred meaning, a kind of consecration of the nation as sacred ground, which is also a home of property. So that's, you know, I can explain a little bit. Okay, now to the music. So we've written, here we are, infrastructure. So the real center, we've been doing this project called Power, and I won't summarize all of its components now, but what we're specifically doing and convening in a sense in relation to this is it does relate to what I just said, but on the ground much more concretely, or let's say not concretely, but necessarily, but as it were, materially and technically even. Because if you ask yourself how does anti-democratic rule take root, it can come from, as we are witnessing, it can come from sort of the occupation of the throne of the executive in a particular way. But it also can and has, as it were, grown out of the ground, or to put it another way, it has grown out of a very specific connection between executive power and what's in the ground, literally. And so this is the project, this kind of sub-project of the project in which we're beginning by convening a group of people who actually work on this thing on the question of the virtue of power, by which I mean very simply something like Flint, Michigan. So you know, I'm just not gonna go through the whole story, but this is the timeline, and I think our team, we have already a small team working on this at the Hill Center for this material, it's very quick. But the kind of point, the thing that you really need to know for this purpose, I mean, this is the Detroit version when Kevin Orr appointed emergency manager of Detroit, and then, yeah, where was it? I don't know, or at least appointed emergency manager of Flint, Michigan. So this is what this is, what this actually is, is the suspension of democratically elected government and the insertion of a manager, a fiscal manager, who reports directly to the executive in this case, the governor. So this is a model, it's a kind of idea of government engagement absolutely at odds with anything like constitutional models. So we're concerned about this, and we wanna explain and understand how it works, and sort of, we're simply beginning with a kind of inventory of situations like this with the assumption this is the kind of battle team. This is, these are different versions of this. It often happens with the connection to infrastructure is usually that this sort of thing will occur at moments of infrastructural failure or crisis in one way or the other. This can be something like a natural disaster, or a Katrina, or it doesn't always result in emergency management per se, but it almost always, or very frequently, frequently not, these results in forms of governments that are entered in the democratic movement together. And they tie together with financialization. This is not just about the raw exercise of power, this is about problem as well. And we can speak about that actually in this case. These are a couple of the legislative instruments, the sort of bigger ones that have enabled potentially this kind of thing, imagine a terrorist attack. So, and then finally, this is the beginning of a kind of, what we're doing really right now is assembling a database, or really a series of databases, of different instances, in this case, infrastructure-related emergencies, municipal bankruptcies, like Flint or Detroit, in both cases, and there are a number of others in the issue. Actually, Flint didn't declare bankruptcy, but pre-backer bankruptcy managers, that's another list over there. So, with the idea that this is a kind of geography, this is like America, but it's a different America than the one that we're familiar with, because this is available, this space. For two, a form of governments and rule, and it absolutely articulates with race and class, that is at odds with the, I think, ultimately, the Constitution, but let's just say, at odds with the premises, that on which we have been led to assume our sense. So, anyway, the way that we're gonna do this is in steps. Right now, we've assembled a working group of scholars who've been studying these kind of cases, and most of whom are not involved with architecture organisms per se, and we're gonna see if we can, you know, we're gonna do a series of sort of workshops and so on. And ask essentially what is to be done with the sort of general idea that this way of thinking about infrastructure as, you know, as vulnerable, will eventually meet up with someone more classical, more sort of like, yeah, classical ideas like public works or, or, or, or, or, or, techniques for what you, the worst. So, so anyways, and then that, as we do that, we intend to go more public with it. And so on, but if anybody's interested in, in this, as ever, you can visit the Beale Center and speak with either Jacob or Jordan and they'll fill you in on how they're assembled in the team and someone to do this kind of work. So I think that's probably enough to say for now. And we can, we can gather in this different dimension that runs right through these, these discussions. And it seems a relatively strange board in place to begin. However, what I want, I'd like to try to find a way to pose it, pose the question of the public or the public's in a manner that addresses, you know, as directly as possible what's actually happening right now in this country. And not just in this country, around the world. I mean, we should also add that what we're seeing and resisting is occurring in various forms around the world. So, so on the one hand, public, in its classical associations, is associated with something like the people, you know. And so, we're going to begin with that one. And we have, it has been observed in a variety of ways that what we are witnessing around the world are iterations of publicism in which publics are summoned. They are summoned into being in certain ways and asked to speak. And so, I'm, you know, we're, so I want to ask the question about populism in relationship. I mean, I'm going to take to some of the spaces and see how some sites and institutions that you all are dealing with in the second one, the second aspect of this has to do with this other very traditional classical idea. I think it's probably what we spoke to, which as a kind of cipher or amenity to the state, that public in the form of public housing or public infrastructure or public space, you know, in these processes we can say, is somehow something that's managed or offered by a certain kind of state. I had a good one from, you know, the types of states that have types of government forms that offer something in public to the people. But, you know, sort of hence the relationship ultimately between these two ideas, that maybe we can sort of, so I don't know if that's the same. Everybody has a question? Well, I think to get at your, just to get at what you're trying to get at, I think you have to go a step further back, which is, which people? Right, but that's the point, right? And, because to me, what this entire kind of national nightmare has made very, very apparent, right, is that we've been for years, at least at a sort of the level of the general public, the news media, been operating and this idea that there's a left and a right. And the left believes in, you know, things like the NEA and HUD and so forth, and the right believes there basically shouldn't be a government except for maybe defense. And this is not true. This turns out to be wholly not true, which is why, you know, remember people were laughing, that this went like five, six years ago, where there were people with protestors who said, get your government hands off my Medicare, right? That was the sort of classic trope, right? The thing is, it's not so funny and it's actually quite logical. It's quite logical in that mindset. There was an interview in the New York Times just a few days ago of a fairly poor couple, a white couple, the woman was going to lose her health care and Obama care was taken away. And she's directly quoted, and I, yeah, let's stipulate we should have compassion for all people who are in these circumstances, but she was directly quoted as saying, look, Trump isn't thinking about the people who are caught in the middle. And goes on to say, you know, I was a productive member of society, you can Google this, you just said, I was a productive member of society, this can't happen to me. So there's all sorts of coded language in that statement. Right, if you unpack it, it's fairly simple. I'm in the middle, therefore there is a group of people who don't need government benefits and there are people who are not worthy of government benefits and I'm in the middle of those two groups of people. And also that the people who typically get government benefits are unproductive citizens, they're all the people that Ben Carson has made a mockery of, right? And so this notion of the public and what governments do in terms of serving people and populism, to me it's extremely hard to unpack unless you get down to this definition of what public do people think are trying to serve you? But I'm asking, do you think any of you, that this is worth trying to rest? Well, I just wanna add on what Bashan was saying. So in planning, we are obsessed with the public, we've been trying to define it and assert ourselves as apt to handle it for the last century basically since the discipline's inception. So I mean, part of this whole issue that we're facing now stems from what Bashan was referring to as basically the fracturing of the quote unquote public or what used to be the public, i.e. what used to be a white male straight perspective of how to plan cities, how to design cities, how to build cities. We're entering an era where other groups are asserting themselves as part of the public domain. And I think that that's, I mean, we're behind the game on that in the planning disparities, in terms of planning for these people. And just in relation to your question about the state, because obviously the public and the state are so intrinsically kind of tied together, Lori showed the images of what's going to be cut in the next budget, but she didn't show what's going to be added to, right? What stands to, what agencies stand to gain from Trump's budget? I think it's going to be what, $35 billion contribution to increase in the DOE spending or something to that measure. So it's not necessarily, again, going to Bashan's point, ideologically no government or yes government, it's how do we want to prioritize on money? What kind of government do we want to see? Do we want a defense state or do we want a state that serves these various fractured publics that have different needs and different assertions as to what is their definition of public need and assistance? Okay, so for the, do I have you? No, I was just thinking when I showed the, I'm just going to say something more, something that I insert while being at the wall, at the border of Texas, and I keep thinking about it because as you're speaking, which was, I was on peer review for the GSA, the General Service Administration, which builds a lot of these ports and they were building a port, I think it was just to the east of the Dallas and various health port and so I'm reviewing this thing. And there's, it's very, the fence is there and there's an opening about as wide between these two columns where you could see and they wouldn't let us go over. You could see the city on the other side, right? It's really one city divided in half and there's a parking lot on one side and Americans every day are pulling up there and going across, walking across and going over to buy their prescription glasses and their drugs. Marvis 30p, I think it's because they're cheaper over there. They just walk in across, but vice versa, so in reverse, there are children, which I was completely shocked at, coming across as old as four and five, coming across the border every day, walking a very long distance in the sun, like unbelievable. This is the space I'm talking about because they're coming to school every day. And so this is a port, right? So this is a port of entry where you've got, parents are sending their kids across because they were maybe born in the U.S. enough to transfer the cross and there was no shade being provided and there was no interest in providing shade and then there's a kind of walking like two miles to get to some bus stop to then go to some school and then come back. So this kind of inequality about that space was just overwhelming. So it was kind of, you know. Well, okay, well, I don't know. Yeah, that's true. When I got here, go ahead. So you said is it worth saving? Yeah, I'll tell you. Right? It's worth rescuing, okay, go for it. Because I think this gets, it kind of doubles back in itself in complicated ways that we're currently dealing with in real life. As we speak, and fascism builds publics. So the question is, would you build the auto-enforces entry? Right, it's not just the wall. The wall is, you know, you're right. That's the sort of the easy question. And, but the whole problem, you know, I don't think at this point doesn't look like, but you know, that the $1 trillion infrastructure bill is gonna come into being in May in one day, but certainly the symbolic battleships and municipal launchers seem to be prioritized at the moment. And these are all symbols. These are projects. This is the kind of, in a sense, the hardware of a certain kind of public imagination that is called the nation. And so, you know, where I'm going with this is the relationship between various ways of construing people, public, and nation to remind us that we're dealing with a verity of foreign nationals. Which is specifically, and quite systematically racist, I completely agree. And needs to be named and understood as such. And it's, you know, how does it work? It works by, as it were, conjuring sovereign bodies, the nation. And historically, I think that's a gotten mixed up in these things in kind of tricky ways, you know, because there's a work of building to be built. There's a body to be built. And so, I don't know, I mean, it's the, actually the A&A was onto this right away. And that's, I think, why we all reacted so viscerally to that. Did you get seen? Yeah. That's what they're doing. They're saying, yes. Absolutely. They're saying, sure, a little building on a body. It wasn't the building on the wall. You know, so, how do you, how would you all address that in your various spheres? You try to build the World Health Organization. Okay. But what do you, okay. No, but then, This is country at this moment. No, but that's the problem. You can't separate those two, which is why I started with the slide I did. And why, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna let, here's the problem. You can't go too far down the slippery abyss of Susan Serendip, right? Which is, you know, the Susan Serendip thing? No. Where she basically argued to Chris Hayes last year. Oh, I still have. Right? But no, no, no, the reason I say it is because there is this kind of kind of, look, you know, I heard this for the last decade. Obama was a corporate stooge. Hillary Clinton was a corporate stooge. No, they were neoliberal. They're neoliberal. No, well, well, well, well. So, you know, like, it's all the same. It doesn't matter. It's all, no, I'm not, this isn't directly you. I'm just saying, there is this general narrative about, it's all neoliberal economics. It doesn't matter because the United States is, right? The system sucks. And so therefore, what difference does it make? Vote for Jill Stoneman, right? That's what, you know, that's how the, no, I'm sorry, here's the problem. These things are real. When, you know, a few hundred people decide to vote for Ralph Langer in Florida and a hundred thousand Iraqis are dead. But as a consequence, it's real. And so, the thing is, the thing is, is that so you have to start with, so I believe, so, you know, if someone says to me, do I believe in globalization over what Bernie Sanders has to say, damn straight? Right? And so, you know, I will go much more towards this idea. But I'm asking my part, not a question. No, no, but you're asking, I do, is your opinion about this, this thing about, about, about, this, this, this, amidst the problem is, is, is a, is a virulent national. Right. And I think the only way to combat that is a virulent globalization, which you then have to deal with the problems of globalization. I'm not saying that that gets you off the hook. Right? But to me, it's the only counterbalance. Step by step, let's see. Not really, we're here to deal with this thing. Step by step, what do you do? Now, as we speak. Well, I think one thing we need to do is to the extent that there is a left that remains, and I'm not even sure that that's true. Right? But to the extent that there's a left that remains, we need to get our heads on straight about this. Right? Meaning, well, so the story that, that Lori just told, Mexico is our second largest trading partner. And we have so forced Mexico into a box that we might be seeing an extraordinarily ugly government surface in Mexico for all sorts of reasons. Right? So the thing is, is that, you know, at least to the extent, again, I'm very hesitant about the binary here, but to the extent that there's a left, we need to get our heads on straight about these issues like free trade and what it means, right, to close ourselves down into the Bernie Sanders version of the sovereignty myth, versus the Donald Trump version of the sovereignty myth. Okay, that's yours. Well, I'm just interested in... Yeah, well, let's just go down the line and then we'll go on. I mean, so I just say that if we are speaking pragmatically as to what we could do right now tomorrow, and I agree that there isn't, we shouldn't speak in these binaries. We shouldn't say that Hillary Clinton was just as fascist as Trump, and that got us into a lot of trouble, obviously. But there are tangible things we can do right now, and there are people who really need public assistance. So, you know, I worked in housing, speaking from that perspective, two thirds of eligible poor people do not receive any form of government assistance. They're eligible for the funding, there isn't enough of it. If people have read Matthew Deffman's work, some people are spending up to 90% of their income on housing. I mean, this is serious. If you're taking a paycheck that's $500 a week, and you have $50 to $100 left for everything else, I mean, this is happening in our country right now, in our cities, in New York, in Minneapolis, across the country. And this is happening at the same time, yes, as sort of we framed today as a dismantling of the welfare state. But we have to keep in mind where that money has been shifted. And I'm not just talking in terms of, you know, military, or housing to military vice versa. We have entered a period of government in which contracting culture has become the norm. As architects, you all understand this very, very well. So, for example, last, I guess, last December, the Washington Post came out with an investigative report that the Pentagon had covered up a report that showed $125 billion in bureaucratic waste. Now that is three times the amount of HUD's budget. And this report effectively said that all of that money could be recouped by the government if we tightened up our contracting processes, if we got rid of basic administrative waste, not one person either at a DOD desk or in uniform would be fired if we recouped that money. So I think that there are things we can do right now in thinking about our institutions and thinking about where this money can be, that already exists, can be reallocated for the benefit of the people who actually need it. I mean, I would agree that housing is probably the major crisis that we're dealing with and that I think that the threat to HUD and to affordable housing, which is already so small, I mean, it doesn't even begin to fulfill the needs and the thousands of people that are on the list, waiting list, not just in this city where we actually have a mayor who's trying to deal with it, but it's, in no way is it enough, but there are at least this beginning of it. But I think that across the major metropolitan cities across the US, we're just not able to confront that in any way, monetarily, and I think that that, the kind of risk to people's lives and not having a place to live is probably the most drastic of all the measures. Well, we should hear, there's no doubt we want to say it, but I'm just, I'm just pardoning my head and I don't know why I upset the apple cry. Please do, can you come up and have it around the floor? But having worked close to the mayor in Flint and with the emergency measures, I guess when we were running a fairly small public art program that was trying to use these, you know, whatever methods, including participating, ideally, in an economic development process by which they can see could be absorbed into active use, it seems to me that the sorts of things that that architects would typically use as tools in this context, it already so deprived of resources up to this point and now looking at a landscape in which the resources will be radically cut, you know, I was just listening to the mayor talking about the capital budget of public housing and the $20 billion that they would need if they were going to bring them into standards, et cetera. And looking at the extent of the crisis of public accountability, of political accountability, of corporate, I don't think that we're going to build our way out of this through any kind of public infrastructure, any kind of program, which is why I advocated for using traditional tool of labor organizing to exert the power of the profession of architecture to stop working, actually. This is a very maximalist position, obviously. And I received some support, but it's not as if the American Institute of Art thinks it's going to support cutting off the entire profession of architecture. But anyways, I wanted to throw that into the mix as an argument that actually maybe the thing to do is the opposite of thinking about good strategic ways to insert new public facilities, but actually to recognize that with the extent of crisis that there needs to be a massive stopping ability with a platform, with a specific agenda of why what's being advocated for and under what conditions we would go back to work on. You're basically advocating a kind of strike. Yeah, I have to kind of agree with that because we're talking a lot about the national level and the issues with Pentagon and all of the bigger things, but even on the state level and municipal level, New York is very blue and it's horribly competent. I mean, you talked about the college travel path station and it's basically a glorified mall. We've got east side access. All these projects are just full of money and it's just controlling all of this. These are supposed to be major infrastructure projects. So it's kind of like, in a way, how are we supposed to keep talking about building more when what we're already building is such a kind of pathetic failure when you look at the rest of the world cities that are competent. We have this idea of New York exceptionalism. Like, New York, you got to do it this way or we're so all over, so this, but I mean, it just seems kind of silly that we can't even get it right regardless of the party or who it is. I mean, we should be disbanding the Port Authority of anything, not trying to get them more projects. I just, I guess I don't understand. I know we're architects and we like to think of ourselves as being really impactful and monumental and this and that, but we as architects able to do anything when we're kind of beholden to all of these people that are, and the most part, pretty corrupt and full of cronyism and it's the thing that's our thing to do. I just, I think we should be really careful because especially, you know, accusing the government of corruption is one of the best tools in the toolkit of the rain. No, no, no, let me finish, at least. It's just, let me finish. It is extremely important to understand there's a huge difference. For instance, the PD side access and the college conversation just became a point. It's extremely important to understand that the reason infrastructure is much more expensive to build in some economies than others is things like, well, union labor, right? So, you know, when you go to purchasing power parity, right, and people can't just easily, you know, die because of a lack of safety standards when they're building a tunnel, it changes dramatically how much that tunnel costs to build. Now, that isn't say there isn't corruption in places, there isn't government waste in places, but you have to be very careful when you say, well, you know, Shanghai built 250 kilometers of subway last year and we can't build one. And- But not in Shanghai, we're about Tokyo. I mean, they don't show people when they build it. Well, so, listen, Tokyo, like, there are specific fact patterns, so, and we don't want to bore everyone with how Spain did it and kind of bankrupted themselves. How London's doing it right now, how Tokyo's done it versus other parts of the world. But I just, I just want to be very careful because I think it actually relates to the last comment also, which is we have a wildly disreportional way of spending money on infrastructure in the country, which I don't believe this administration's gonna fix at all, right, that has to do with the way our districts are gerrymandered and all of this other stuff, and that if you actually had the large urban regions just even get the tax money that they generate. So, you know, picky side access, that's like, I can't remember how many billion dollars that is, like, eight billion dollars or something like that. We, as a city, spend about 30, generate about 30 billion dollars in tax revenue that goes to the, goes to Albany, it goes to the federal government, that we do not get back the tax receipts. That proportion is largely true for most cities in the United States because most of the drawdown on the federal government is coming from the red states, not the blue states. And so, that's why we don't have the money to build the infrastructure we need. And a lot of that has to do with race, a lot of that has to do with the idea, you know, because the inner cities are incarnate, right? Like, there's a clear sort of narrative that goes with that. So, I just want to be a little careful about this. Yeah, I guess I would argue, I think we do have the money. I just think we're mis-soup-lit, it's not being spent appropriately. So, maybe to Thomas, maybe like to take another side of it to think, I mean, I'm gonna give you some examples of some actually good projects that are going on that I know about. So, in this city, because I sit on someone's commission here. So, and I was amazed actually. And I think one thing that cities could do or even states could do maybe in the situation is act like Jerry Brown, you are a country into yourself, you know, or a city is like a country into itself. So, maybe you can legislate beyond, I mean, there's of course a monetary issue, but so, you know, we have a parks commissioner who's now looking at parks, everything outside of Manhattan. So, parks without fences. I mean, these all seem like kind of minor things, but I think they're major things in communities outside of Manhattan. So, to build parks where they're actually taking the fences down and trying to think about those borders, like the border of the wall is being more permeable, right, and more accessible, but we don't need those fences. We're going to close the park again. We just turn the lights off. And the housing, the affordable housing actually to place that in the context of a more conditioned design excellence so that we care about what we're building. We're not just building folks' projects. We're not just building buildings that are anonymous, but that we're thinking about what's on the ground and it may be more complex way. So, I think there are projects like that are actually being done in the city right now that aren't built yet. So, I mean, I have to say, I have a little hope. I have a little glimmer of hope, but maybe that's very local. It's not a wall scale of ex-billions, but we're, you know, a high rise of it. So, what can we say? I wanted to ask about sanctuary cities. We could do that now, maybe we can do it later, but what do you- I actually, since you wanted me to go there, I actually wanted to ask, give me the opportunity because I really wanted to hear what you have to say about when you're saying variant of naturalism, right? Because I don't buy this false of the blitz right between Burma and Trump. It's just, it's wrong. But I do say that both of them are operas on a variant of naturalism. I don't, are those variants even absolutely not. And I think one has a stronger, in any case, I wanted to give you this opportunity. Who's you? You're the one who keeps saying variant of naturalism. I can't say national, but he said they're learning anything. Oh, well, yeah. So you said that, and in a sense, like, that's, this is the sort of, there's a false of the blitz on the one hand, but then you are saying that there is this, there is a level at which they're connecting. And well, you're saying that there's a, there's a, that they're operating on this, on this register of naturalism. No populism, I was talking about populism. Or populism. But then- I'm agreeing with you. I mean, there's no way, there's so far apart that any effort to connect Sanders and Trump seems to need, you know, ideologically overturned. So, that's my position. Well, hang on. So first of all, let's just deal with some facts on the ground. Look at the number of overlap between Trump supporters. I don't care. No, no, no, no. Come on. You think that's an accident? Right? Number two, take outsourcing, which is this huge nationalistic issue. More jobs have been lost to automation than outsourcing. Get Bernie Sanders to stand up and say that. No, the video doesn't. He does. In fact, he has. He goes out there and he tells, he feeds people the exact same bullshit that Trump does. You do watch the town hall in West Virginia. Yeah, I did. And he said, you know what? Cold jobs are not coming back. Sorry, that economy has been- Yeah, that's cold. That's cold. Is that what he says in the rest of the book? He does, he does. You know, in any case, like whether, I do believe, you know, whether he acknowledges that more jobs have been lost to automation or not, I mean that, you know, like this is, in any case, that's- Look, this isn't, I'm not saying they're exactly the same. I don't, but I just want to be clear about that. They are both playing to a particular strand of nationalism and a particular strand of people who feel that their public has been lost. No, I think, let's clarify the terminology. Where perhaps at a level of policy proposition, the opposition to trans-Pacific, for example, both opposed that, right? You have different forms of protections. And then historically, of course, protectionism can be an instrument of the right and it can be an instrument of the left and any place in between. There are different ways of deploying national borders economically in that way. But where I'm speaking, the reason I'm saying this is ideological confusion when these equivalences are made. First of all, Bernie Sanders was arrested at the Civil Rights Fund. So, you know, he's like the only one who's on, like, who's got footage of that. And Trump was on the other side, completely and absolutely and structurally on the other side. And so this thing about Sanders not figuring out, you know, how to deal with race and so on is, I think that was something that was projected on them and he didn't handle it very well publicly, but anyway, it's worth, it's worth, no, it wasn't projected on them. It was, it was, you know where it came from. War, war. We know very well where it came from. And so anyway, that's all water under the bridge. The point is that what's in play here and the best, the most telling slide, among the two historically speaking, the Brutaligo sequence, I think, is very, very relevant to you, but also to Bernie. Because what Sanders is doing is pointing to the European welfare states, for better or worse. I mean, you know, we would have to discuss it on those terms. And to the world and other than that. And saying, look, something like Canada in certain ways also. And look, there are other models out there. He's basically, he's a democratic socialist. He's really a social democrat, but in the point of view of his policies. And say, okay, you know, and then you discuss that formula. That was what was being debated in the US Congress when Brutaligo was being defunded from the beginning as very eloquently pointed out, the communists and all that. What they were talking about is like too much like you were. Yeah, but yeah. I'll just chime in and say, I think that this, you know, the sentiment behind this ideological populism and the people who were disgruntled in this election, or at least the narrative that's emerged of these people in the Rust Belt, largely white working class people who felt like their nation was being taken away from them. And I think we have to focus on, A, our history, and B, the notion that it's problematic that we care now, right? So these people who are losing their jobs in the past several decades due to automation, the TPP, et cetera, et cetera. This happened to the African American community 30, 40 years ago in our city. So as industry moved outside the city, I mean, blah, blah, blah, it's a story we all know, white flight, it's a story we all know well. We didn't care in 1972 when we tore for what I go down. We didn't care that these communities are being eviscerated. You can speak for yourself. I don't know for who it would be. I'm saying the backlash wasn't as large, right? So I think we also have to think about situating this moment in a history in which certain groups have faced these sort of problems for years and they're now just getting sort of the spot, the quote unquote spotlight that they deserve in a certain way. Yeah, we could dispute the history, but anyway. Can I just ask one thing? Just thinking about European socialism. Right? Right, I mean, so you want to, and I'm not going to go out at night, I'd stay over there now. No, no, no, no, I know about it, but you raised the comparison. The, so let's talk about Europe for a second. Why do you think they don't want immigrants to have full citizenship rights? It's precisely because they pass all these benefits for themselves that they see as themselves as the public. Depends on the day. Right, oh, come on, that's precisely what happens in Europe. That's precisely what the story is. So, and I don't think Sanders is far from that argument. It's just like, okay, let's create a social safety net, but it doesn't get away from the fact that it's about us versus them. For or against Obamacare? I'm for single paneer. Yeah, okay, there you go. So I don't, but that's not my point. The single paneer, you have to believe in single paneer for every half course. But you see, this is the thing, how long will that last? The history of what I do is a history of a housing project that was incredibly successful until it became all black. No, it was that, yeah, it was segregated. It was one, it was one, it was one. And as it became clear that it was no longer for white people, it was disassembled, right? Which is exactly what would happen to our public university system if it became free. It's like, we have a track record on this. It's very easy to understand. Right? No, no, I'm not arguing with yourself. No, no, I'm not arguing. I'm just saying that this idea that like, well, if we just have this European social system. I don't know, I'm just pointing out that we need to be specific about the political economic models that we're talking about since you invoked a certain idea of the public. Public? Yeah, okay. No, no, no, I don't know. No, I mean, so there is a difference between the American welfare state, all of which I've got public housing and so on, and the European one. That's another difference to make. And it is structured largely around ethno-racist racial imaginations and realities as well. And also an overt fear of socialism. I mean, this is also kind of imprinted in the American ideology that as soon as modernist towers were built in the instance of public housing, they were referred to as communistic. I mean, that's from the offset. I just want to say, we're not at the end of the first 10 or days yet. We're not even at the end of the 60s. No, that's true. I know. What's happened? Did they pull the bill yet? It was only 60 or 80. Yeah, two major things have been overturned by judges. So we still don't have a ban against the seven of the most remote countries. Obamacare has not yet been repealed, right? Is it still tracking their photos? Yeah, it's so far, yeah. It's not over yet, yeah. It's not over yet. So I do think that they have been very successful resistance efforts, and so I think we should be really optimistic about that. And I actually happen to listen to Charles Murray's and listen to it on Facebook, actually. Only halfway through. And does everybody know about Charles Murray? You've done student stuff. The military. That's really interesting. You guys don't have it? No, so there was an invitation to Charles Murray, what is the historian? Come on, there is a pseudo scientist. Pseudo scientist, but anyway, when he gave a talk on the Middlebury campus, the students would not live in talk, and in fact, all kinds of circles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, circles back. So he was here at Columbia yesterday and there was a lot of sort of activism amongst both students and faculty to say there's a right to free speech, and his talk went by almost unnoticed, nothing like that, but what he said was things like, New Yorkers compare themselves to people in London and Mumbai more often than they compare themselves to any person in the Midwest or that was that kind of logic. And it's too expensive for somebody to come from Detroit to New York, and it's much less expensive to go from New York to Detroit, therefore we should all be, so that was the way, and he hates Trump, that's not what I know his name is, yeah. So, I don't know, I still think we're at a moment, I so disagree about the fascism argument, and I think it's almost, and Ryan Elvin and I are veterans, but it's almost irresponsible to talk about it in such clear terms because it could be its own conclusion, rather than really watching for definitions of what fascism are, and I would say I grew up in South Africa, I know what white suprematism is, it terrifies me, that's I think the language that we're speaking now is white supremacism, it's really, and I just wanna point out one thing about the infrastructure that came out in seminars, there's a few people here at the seminar today who are doing this language, conflict journalism language, and one of the undergraduate pointed out that what's on the subway, the second avenue subway, the two words that celebrate that subway, either of a spoon in, out of the one, out of the many one, and exceptionalism. Of course, it's terrifying, it's absolutely terrifying. It's really terrifying, and so I looked it up now, so the each word that's on the one side of it, it's the United States seal, and who's on that seal, is England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Holland, and Germany, it's nothing about Africa, nothing about black people, nothing about white, so I wanna be optimistic, but I also wanna say this history is very deep. You know, I totally agree with that, on the other one, I would like to be wrong, I'm desperate to be wrong about that, but I would not be able to live with myself if I was not wrong, and this is why, the reason is that what I'm talking about is not our grandparents' fascism, it is not what you think it is, it is not what it's supposed to look like, and that's why the terminology is not really the point, it's, you could name it, many things have been, and as you know, many debates about authoritarian, et cetera, et cetera, one of the qualifying characteristics, for example, is that there is no project, you've made very little, there's very little sign for project of any kind, unlike more traditional forms of fascism, but more specifically, there's not a project for a single party state, at least at the moment, that's the traditional distinction, nor are there, it is there as it were, the kind of white supremacy that you were referring to, South Africa, South Africa, however, that is why I think situations like Flint are important, because if you say, one of the qualifying characteristics is the suspension of democratic governance, you do have that, and so, it could be that's, that's an anomaly, yeah, state of emergency, so it could be, it's an anomaly, and you know, you get by, you work it out, and so on, and only a few people have to drink that one, because that's what of course happened, that then perhaps the worst is avoided, and you know, you'd be right, but I want to point to that, and I want to say, you know, this is how it works, and the other way, or is it the two sides of this, or you know, others that we could have, but the two sides that I think most immediately or have historically impacted our spheres here is this kind of thing that's sort of under the radar reorganization of how we govern ourselves, and it's often at a municipal level, but then the symbolic of it, and this isn't, it's not really, blue or red, really, it's, you know, the nationalism has, that's why I'm pointing to ground zero, and I mean, to me, the biggest threat in the world is when everybody was saying we are all New Yorkers, so no, and that, and this is not about cities and country, I disagree a little bit with the show, that's another story, it's a nuance to argue the city-country thing, but you know, I do think it's extremely important that we find, at least you know, that we have these kinds of discussions in which, in which we allow ourselves to kind of think out loud, critically, about historical processes, and you know, I suppose I'm speaking mostly as an historian, you know, where was Mies when this happened? And we never, Philip Johnson, Philip Johnson was at the front in 1939, he was with the German Dairbaugh. Now, it's not gonna be like that, the point is that it doesn't work like that anymore, at least it hasn't, but we have to be aware of how it could work, that's all. So I just wanna say something for, because I don't know if the number of people are architects here, or urban planning, I don't know how many people are architects. I mean, so as architects we do have expertise, right? So that's the point I was trying to make is that as our expertise has to do with space, with looking at space, visualizing, we're able to visualize things in the way that other people are not able to visualize, we're able to take very diverse amounts of information and put them together sometimes in ways that other people can't, we're very embodied by that, very embodied in working in this way. And I also wanted to mention, just mention, but to say I'm very encouraged by journalism today, I'm very encouraged by journalism today, because I think, I mean, I've become a dictator and I'm in obsessed with, I think there are journalists, I saw the journalism, maybe our hope right now to take this down. So I've had this architectural question around urban planning, let's say there's a journalistic article on sanctuary cities, ICE is coming to New York, what happens? We need to really prepare ourselves. Yeah, all right, let's talk about it. Practically speaking, practically speaking, okay, what can we do here? Huh? I know, I'm just saying one of you, like a kind of full-scale assault on that. Where it becomes... So anything I would want to learn to do could be what happens if ICE, goes to my favorite restaurant. Yeah, so it's all right. I want to know what to do, I can do that right now, I don't want to do it. So, I mean, anyone? You know, I think most of us, as an architect, I don't know if you do much, but as a person, you can go put your body away. I mean, that's probably what it comes to. You know, I have to say, I got the lawyers an incredible job. They did, yeah. At the airport, at the airport. Yes, I mean, that was also where they were made out of. Where are they at the airport? Praise for lawyers. Praise for lawyers, come on, come on. Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on. Well, I mean, I think there's only so much we can do sitting around and talking about this. We exist in a city of incredible organizations, make the road in New York is doing awesome work for immigrants right now, they're located, started Bushwick and all around the city, and they need people, they need help. So, this idea of sitting around and talking about it is important, but we have to recognize we're in a great city where people have been doing this work for a long time and how can we mobilize them and help them. I love that people have been doing it for before the Trump administration let them leave the way for us. Yeah, I think that that's a great point and we're in New York City, again, there's no dearth of organizations that are doing this type of protective work and granted, yes, it matters to show up at protests and put your body on the line, but organizing is long, often mundane work, right? So, organizations like Make the Road in New York or Community Voices Heard have been doing this stuff for decades. This is nothing new to them and they need people, you know, not just to show up at protests, but to make phone calls and I mean, we all have, I think your point about expertise is great, but I also want us all to think about when our expertise isn't necessarily useful. I mean, we all have great educations and we will go out and use them in a professional capacity, but in this particular instance, sometimes we need to take a step back from our expertise and be humbled, almost, by what organizing work really looks like. Yeah, I'm sorry. I would just comment on how important what we do professionally is, because we spend 40 hours a week and we know that so much of architecture has been luxury towers or have been some of the forces pushing people out of places. I think it's also really important that we kind of generate our own oaths about where we will be working, not just extra, but we're going to be organizing who we will be working for. But that goes, because we were organizing, all right? Yeah. Is it going on? What the hell? So, yeah, we're here. Yeah, we're here. Yeah, that's the oath today. Sorry, I forgot who it is. Yeah. What's up? It's coming along. It's coming along. That's good. I just want to say it's made a lot of my life the actual, the slide that resonated with us, it was a wholesale slide. Because, you know, when we are under, say, like an administration, that's the thing that we're essentially aligned with, but then we understand it, as you view historically, as a form of dismantling, then how do we interact as professionals? I just, in any case, hope six, public housing demolition program. That's what we're looking for under the Clinton administration. Just to get back to this notion of public, which I think is the most interesting thing, and its relationship with the nation or the state and the people, and I think, for me, what is still a question is, like, who really defines the public? People define the public, or is the state or the nation define the public? Maybe it's a question of time and timelines and what kind of range you're actually looking at. And in terms of architecture, something that I think that we have to prioritize of completely, not completely, but do not think into accounting anymore is the idea of permanence, the idea that our projects last, or that they should be made to last. So the Coletrava project, the most, I think the thing that disturbs me the most about it, yes, it's part of this market mechanism and the distinction between I think we're at the central. The Grand Central had a vision to last for a long time, at least in my conception of it. And Coletrava built his thing over a mall, and he is completely looking within the scope of the market, which is about the commodification of that building. And whether the building last for 50 years is just kind of a lifestyle that we look at buildings now, we don't think about them as something that can change this idea over a long period of time. So I think like Coletrava built these buildings in Spain and the city parks and culture of any building is like, it's like a craftily built building. It's about the quality of it. Yeah, it's doing no one any good for it. Yeah, so I think it's doing no for this. So maybe this is about responsibility as architecture. We look at, is there a responsibility to the market? Are we agents of the market in the end, or are we agents of the, to? Yeah, no, all right, but on this sort of, on the ground, so to speak, this, because I wanted to return a little bit to this thing about what is our responsibility now at a moment of acclaimed emergency, right? Not everybody may feel this or agree with that, but it could be to, as you said, shed one's expertise or at least bracket it and act principally as a citizen or a participant in general terms in this. But it does seem to me that there is a space, you know, the space of the lords of the airport. There's space for both. Right, right, right, so the question in this case, that's really what I was going to ask, is which specific tools from the toolkit could be used under the sort of general umbrella of the problem of the sanctuary city, or that may not be, it may be that none of the tools are used with it, but do you think that there are any tools? Because it's evidently about cities, it's evidently about space, it's evidently about about a kind of being, a form of being, a sanctuary, safety, you know. The only thing is like, I don't know if we are best for this architects, always to be acting. I know it's like a moment of crisis now, like, but this idea, I think of like, crisis thinking and perpetual, like crisis thinking perpetuates itself, and it's a victim to this idea of the continuing acceleration and velocity of the way that our political system kind of works now, you know, in terms of, everything is, it's not about the idea of like, time or length, it's about 440 characters, you know. This is like the length of how we're acting, and it should be, as architects, be acting in this frame. If you have a passport, yes. If you have citizenship, probably, you have the luxury to do that, seems to me. But for someone who's in a precarious position, that's what we were talking about here, who's literal time in this particular space is perhaps limited or under threat, then that, you know, the sort of luxury to think outside what's being imposed right now, seems a little bit like a luxury. I mean, you know, we could sort of turn around and sort of, what is our responsibility to the situation now, you know. Which of course doesn't rule out, and I, you know, is hopefully what one does most of the time is thinking in the bigger scheme of things, you know. Do you agree with that? I actually need to go out and explain it. I really like the way you phrased your initial question. Because to me, I find hope embedded in the way you phrased the question. Having to do with this notion that it is the public that can redefine what the country is, right, and not the state. And I think there was a, like, so look, I, you know, so I share some of Laura's optimism, but I think it's also tempered by, we now know who 25 to 30% of this country is. We know that with extraordinary clarity. And that's not gonna change anytime soon, right? And I think a lot of what we just witnessed is a response to the nation's first black president, where that 25 to 30% said, you know we were kidding about this whole equality thing, right? So, but I think that in the protests, in the actions that we all sort of see on a daily basis, and this extraordinary thing that happened at the airports, you see that it's the Langston Hughes quote. It is people redefining what the country is, and I think that is the hope, to always temper it with that understanding of what about a quarter of the country is, right? And that, I think, ties to your thing about time and buildings, because when you were talking about that, I was thinking about Tempelhof, and you know, you raised fascism. No, no, but it's really, it's very interesting how the Germans have dealt with the history of fascism, the physical history of fascism in Germany. And like, that's why we're counting on Germany. I know, so, I know what they're dealing with. And to me that is, I get the market part of the questions, but I mean, the newsflash is, if you just work for Columbia University, you work for the market, so, you know, this is, like there's a lot of range and variation in there, and you don't have to make that assessment yourself, but I don't know whether that's the center where the questions are coming from. Well, I was just gonna say, I tend to disagree with the position of putting the pensions down. The strike, you have to be active with it. Yeah, exactly. I have a hard time with that, because I think if you, you're already not building luxury condominiums, or if you're working in some way that is not good for that state, then why would I put my pencil down? Because I think I actually do believe in expertise, and I think I can do both, you know, and I think that you guys see the world differently, and that you have to use those tools and bring them to bear on whatever situation that you're in, whether it's working in a building or working on some temporary little structure that might not be here for 100 years, but that could have an impact somewhere. So, I think there are scales, many scales obviously, but that I'm incredibly optimistic, actually, about a profession, that I'm incredibly optimistic about journalism, and now even the law. What about architecture? The what? Architecture. No, I said architecture. No, you didn't. I said architecture. I didn't, yeah. I didn't. Yeah, and going off what Lushan was saying, I'll just add that I think that, increasingly personally, I've been thinking less about that 25, even less than that percent of people that did, you know, that made their ideologies and views very clear in this past election, but I've been thinking about those people that didn't vote at all. Like why did they feel so left out of the system that they didn't even bother to show up, right? And how, within both the professional planning and within my own role as a citizen, how do I engage with those people using my expertise and not, I mean, thinking through the lens of my expertise. I mean, I studied public housing. I study a very small subset of the housing market. The private housing market has so many issues that affect low-income people. So maybe just a reprioritizing that in my own work could illuminate how maybe landlords protect or don't protect their tenants who might be undocumented, whether, you know, things like that. These, just a reposturing of where we put our efforts, even in our, of those of us that do academic work, even in our academic work, I think is important. I have another question for you. You can, okay, I'm gonna leave, I'll fight. Thank you. Take care. No, about, the question's about class, really, but the, and I will try to phrase it in a, as directly as possible, is that you and I are the class enemies of the people that you're studying. Structure. You're talking about personal? We presume it. Do you know a bunch of PhDs, though? Yeah, yeah. Yes, I do, I actually do. But no, literally, structurally, yes. If there's a hope to be produced, and I agree, I mean, I think we must, this is the only thing we can do is hope, but make it happen. The name for that would be some kind of solidarity, it would seem to me. So I'm not just, as we're working on behalf of but, or representing or as governments tend to do, and this is, of course, one of the classic dramas of public housing, is this is a paternalism. That, do you see anything in your work? How do you, I mean, maybe, how do you address that contradiction? Yeah, I mean, this is, again, going back to what we were speaking to at the beginning, this is like the paradigm of planning. We work in the public domain. We work for low income people, but we are experts. We are experts coming in and posing sometimes, often, a paternalistic view of what society should look like, what the world should look like. And I think increasingly, and this is true, again, going back to what I was saying about when we need to shed our expertise is really important. And sometimes, yes, we can make a pro forma and decide how many, you know, what is financially feasible for an affordable housing project, and we can do that as architects, urban designers, and planners. But, I mean, over the history of planning, what we've learned is sometimes we need to look to people for answers too, and you know, we work in space, but we work in space that is occupied by humans, right? And that's something that across our disciplines, I think we've all sort of failed at, and need to continually remind ourselves of how we can produce work that is not only, highlights, shines our expertise, but shines what any given community needs. And sometimes what they need is not a new housing project, even sometimes they say, like, look at that, for example, look at the NYCHA plan. So, this is what I'm gonna be working on for my dissertation work, where the mayor wants to build mixed income housing towers to subsidize more additional units of affordable housing on NYCHA land. But NYCHA residents are saying, we don't have heat, we don't have hot water, they're basic, we don't need something new, we need to fix what's already here. So yeah, an exercise in listening, I think, is useful across the board. Right, but that's a good example. That's the Bloomberg, the DeBlozio, and that. Has it docked, yeah, or not? Yeah, and where you have the contradictions so visibly presented, you have a kind of privatization, a semi-privatization of land, which it seems to me, I have to say, I think that's, the danger here is that Carson is a kind of trojan horse that goes to the, that takes whatever resources HUD still does have to these sites, directly or indirectly, because I know also you're not only my municipalities, and seeks to privatize them. And so, and the argument is usually, as you probably know better than I, but that this is, you're so awful, and so you can make it, I think, fix the elevators. Well of course, that's not, you're really crazy. So, so, this is why I'm asking this in this kind of very crude and direct language of class, that what the community really needs is the abolition of that distinction, the class distinction, right? And that is effectively what's been put on the table in a situation in which economic and social inequality, structured among race, gender, and a series of other axes, has become so vividly in this super wealthy country of ours, so vividly extreme, that one cannot pretend. And so, you know, it's not a rhetorical question, it's more like a practical question, that, because it seems to me that if there's going to be any kind of positive outcome of this whole trauma, there will be an element of that involved, something like a renegotiation of class relation. Yeah, this isn't new, right? So, William Julius Wilson wrote a book in 1987 called The Truly Disadvantaged, and this book basically put concentrated poverty and inner cities at the spotlight of work in the social sciences. And he's an African-American man, still alive, and he was not blind to the fact that this country didn't wanna help black and brown people, right? This was no secret to him. So in the end of the book, in the policy proposal section, what he proposes is this sort of tempered universalism in which he says, we do have to align our values based on class because those respelt workers that are showing up again in the aftermath of this election are going to be suffering just as much as those black factory workers were suffering in 1970 and 1980. And if we can truly reconfigure our system, I mean, again, we're sitting here talking about these massive shifts that have to occur, but what I will say quite practically is if this election has given us anything, it's given us the opportunity to truly reconstruct the left, right, to really talk about priorities and what that looks like, and realistically what we want to achieve, not just through a lens of sell that land and fix the elevators, like, how about let's fix the elevators? Let's start with that, right? Raise the taxes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, okay, I don't know, any, I don't know where we're going. Let me give that a little time. There's this. There's one that asks, maybe sit down to the distinction and this kind of tension between direct action and indirect action. Because I think, while we as architects have expertise, unlike lawyers who have monopoly on English-speaking, we don't have monopoly on English-speaking space. You know, no architects can bid for the wall, but an engineering department's gonna set in that place, right? And this direct and indirect action has a kind of binary that of course is not always bottom-wide, but expertise always usually falls in the size of indirect action, indirect action usually falls like bodies in space, like showing up to the airport to protest, like, what do people think of you? And so I think maybe, sort of, eliciting these differences, is like, everyone here wants to know what they can do, right? But not necessarily just because we're an architect, we can do something, it means we can, you know, we're plotters and we can make big size, that's something, that's direct action, right? That not everybody can do, not everybody has that expertise. We can make 3D sounds. Yeah. You can see it. You can see it. But politics and power, especially like the run over you were saying, is like, you know, we're basically kind of one of the most common ways to get away from the situation that allows indirect actions, the kind of our expertise to be used for indirect actions that have vast, you have to apply the repercussions. Yeah, I mean, that's why I was asking what you meant, because, you know, it makes sense, in a kind of common sense way, this distinction makes sense. But that's what I was trying to get at initially, that this project that is unfolding and is being imposed upon us, it has many different dimensions. And one of the dimensions that one could say, one could argue that those who work in culture have access, or maybe not exactly direct access, but a certain kind of access, and maybe even expertise, is the domain of representation. And in other words, you know, there is no nationalism without some kind of figment of the imagination whole formation. As is a very complicated figment, and the imagination itself is obviously a complicated thing or process. But it is something that this room is usually used for, when we're not doing this kind of thing, in rooms like this and stuff on the screen, is addressed to that question in a relatively direct fashion. And I'm just trying to, you know, I'm making a kind of claim on that, and issuing an almost a plea to do more critical work on this question in this domain. And then, and find ways also to articulate that with these other sites that you're talking about, you know, things that happen on the ground, slowly or quickly in various scales and various ways. But this is real. The point is that this thing that's called a nation is a real figment of the imagination. Why is it real? Because it kills people. And, you know, you take that away, and it's not like it's, you know, peace and happiness, but at the same time, certain things change, right? So that's, it's not a solution, it's not some kind of magic key, but it's striking to me how uncommon it is in a sense to, if I show you Albert Speer and so on, that's pretty much all we'll talk about, is how this represents the German nation, Southern Reich, that fire, et cetera, et cetera, that's, you're right, that's the example. But it's not gonna be like that, you know? It may not be like that, it may take a different form. So, we experts in representation, so to speak, at least can contemplate, you can think this through. I also think that architecture is very broad in it, and I would say there's a very wide net in which you can practice architecture, okay? So we don't just have to build. Yeah, I was in the sense of this, and I think war is an example of that, and, you know, of visualizing information. And we, I was thinking, Mike, we were in Venice to learn about, you know, rising currents and global warming and what's happening to the Venice lagoon. What was really interesting when we went to this institute, Ismar, that's studying the lagoon, like with all this new technology. So the thing they were most excited about was when in the end the director came and showed us that he actually is now able to represent and show the bottom of the lagoon, right in a very precise way, and it shows exactly where the garbage is going, so this, because we wanted to be able to convey this information to more people in a very simple way, right? So to be able to see something that's very complex in a way that is translatable. So I think, you know, I'm very optimistic about what they do, I have to say. I need to, and Laura wants to say anything to that. Yeah, I think we have not seen the end of it. Yeah, so I'm looking to you guys, because you guys have a lot more tools than I have. So, okay, everybody's looking optimistic over here, I'm not sure why, they're all with negative numbers. It's not a problem, perhaps, I don't know. What's going on? That's to me, we need to find out. Is it going to do the thought or not? I didn't check my phone. Don't worry yet. I think they're just going to not. What's the, It looks like they're going to postpone it again. They're postponing it again. It's not going to be an ultimatum. I think in real time, it's not going to be an ultimatum. You haven't done an underestimate that the functioning of the chaos. It's not going to be anything good. The chaos, the level of the chaos can rise to levels. The chaos is part of the structural, I think you're deflected by a keystone. You just thought there was a keystone. Oh, so they're just going to, yeah. So, switch. So they close phones, look at this, yeah. All right, well, we'll see. Oh, that's dope. Okay. They all win home today. They win home for the day. They all win home for the day. All right, yeah, they win home for the day. Yeah, right. They all win home for the day. They all know that you got to go to Florida at some point. Yes, right, no, no, no, no, no.