 Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us here, however remotely, however at whatever distance you are. I hope everyone is doing well. Before going into the talk on the relationship potential and otherwise between the New Deal and the Green New Deal, I wanted to just show you and make available to you some resources that we've been developing at the Buell Center that may help get oriented in the midst of the crisis as it relates to what we're going to discuss. So this is the Power website at the Buell Center. This is the homepage of that website, power.buellcenter.columbia.edu, in which you say right here at the top it's also listed under initiatives over here, a project called Green Stimulus and Beyond, a resource. And this is a essentially live resource that we've been updating daily of material that has been published mostly online. You see there are some videos here on the side related to this intersection, the climate crisis, mostly, but not all of these deal with that but also the economic crisis related to the current health crisis. So it's an attempt to, for all of you, to offer a kind of map, you could say a kind of cognitive map of useful material that goes all the way back to early March. And as I said, it's being updated every day that is being published. There are also some podcasts here published by various journalists and academics and others who are thinking about these matters, including some of the protagonists in the Green New Deal discussion. Also, on the GSAP website, accessible also through the Buell website, now is this page, which documents the work done under Public Works for a Green New Deal, the nine courses that were supported by the Buell Center in the fall of 2019, it seems like a previous century, to test, to experiment with, to critique even the premises of the Green New Deal as expressed in the House resolution that I'll be discussing. So here are some videos of faculty and students and others talking about the work and then some samples of the work itself. So you can scroll down and also circulate this, please, to any of your friends and colleagues who might be interested, whether here or elsewhere, on about what we've been doing here to think about about the Green New Deal more broadly. And then here, some links to other activities, including the big discussion at the University of Pennsylvania and and a big meeting that the Public Assembly, the Buell Center co-hosted with the Queens Museum in Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's district and with her participation and that of others on the Green New Deal to try to model a kind of critical grassroots conversation, a democratic conversation and debate about about priorities and possibilities. So now we'll now to the lecture. So from New Deal to Green New Deal. And and I did want to say that this is in memory of Michael Sorkin, our colleague at City College who passed away quite recently from this awful disease. Today, in a tragic era of fast moving pandemic and slow moving climate change, what is the use of thinking historically? Why still insist, in other words, on teaching history to students of architecture? Well, as recent events remind us, there's one certainty that remains within the historian's purview, the simple, difficult truth that things change and the simple, equally difficult truth that within certain limitations, things can be made to change. How? That as I'll explain is the point of the Green New Deal, which proposes democratic decarbonization for all rather than green gated communities that is green lifeboats for a few. It's also the point of recent calls for a green stimulus. These are very recent that propose massive federal support for care work, such as the work that is being done by nurses and other medical professionals, doctors and nurses, caring for the patients who have been afflicted by this and many other diseases. And other green jobs, as they're sometimes called, along with these are low-carbon jobs, along with so-called shovel ready green infrastructure projects. Such calls are inspired in part by New Deal fiscal stimulus measures. Federal jobs programs, that is, as a sustainable form of economic relief and recovery and simultaneously a crucial step towards confronting the climate catastrophe in a decisive equitable manner. So to reflect on what we might call the uses and disadvantages of history for the present, I'm going to first show you some architectural infrastructural excerpts from the New Deal, the historical New Deal. Then I'll say a few words about the current Green New Deal, the proposal for that, and then we'll return briefly to the New Deal historically in order to translate its contradictions into strategies for our collective future. So first the New Deal, what was the New Deal? The New Deal was actually many things at once. A heterogeneous suite of legislation and executive actions put in place in the United States under the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, principally from 1933 to 1936 during the Great Depression, that is, so quite relevant for many reasons for us today. From the start critics denounced the initiative as an undemocratic form of centralized planning that presumptuously interfered in so-called free markets or from a different perspective subordinated the needs and voices of affected communities to the ideological priorities of governing elites and technocrats. The New Deal has been was criticized from the beginning and still is from these and many other perspectives. Nonetheless, here we're here to recognize its contributions as well as its limitations. Now the centerpiece of the New Deal's first phase from 1933 to 1935 was the National Industrial Recovery Act which protected labor unions, established a body to oversee public works, a great deal of public works, and set price controls and production quotas for industry. More radically, the New Deal's second phase, 1935 to 1936 roughly, saw passage of the National Labor Relations Act, the Public Utility Holding Company Act and the Social Security Act, among many others, all of which were designed to regulate capital and redistribute material and social goods. Today, as we speak, literally as we speak, under emergency conditions, these and other New Deal programs are being cited by many as evidence of government's ability to address societal crisis and provide economic support in the form of jobs and social programs. Now among this alphabet soup, as it's sometimes called, of New Deal agency acronyms, the Public Works Administration, or PWA, and later the Works Progress Administration, the WPA, funded and oversaw the construction of public infrastructure and buildings on a scale never before seen in the United States. The PWA did so indirectly through grants and loans, while the WPA did so through direct employment. Typical PWA and WPA projects were designed by architects and engineers, typically, working anonymously for public agencies, not in in our own offices. So in other words, working anonymously for public agencies rather than by celebrities in private practice. This is a big difference from the way that we typically see architectural practice today. Thus, at the time already, replacing the modernist cult of genius with a more democratic form of collaborative work, while providing much needed employment for design professionals, as well as for construction workers and many others. So here are just a few examples of New Deal projects from New York City. One right in our neighborhood here, near Columbia, Riverside Park, which was originally designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in the late 19th century, the sort of first phase by Riverside Drive, but was built out over the rail line, this is the promenade area in the park, by 4,000 workers from the WPA, to designs by Gilmore Clark, Michael Rappuano, and Clinton Lloyd, under New York City, then New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses from 1934 to 1937. The Harlem River Houses, completed in 1937, was among the very first federally funded public housing projects in New York City or anywhere in the country, designed by a team of eight architects, led by Archibald Manning Brown, working with the New York City Housing Authority, again pertinent for our times, the Rose Bank Quarantine Center on Staten Island, which had been used as a quarantine hospital for immigrants since 1873 and was expanded in 1935 by a K construction company with New Deal funding overseen by the U.S. Treasury. And here, in tribute to medical workers now fighting the pandemic in this building, there's also Bellevue Hospital, New York City's first public hospital. Through the 1930s, the PWA designed and built or sponsored and built several public buildings, several new buildings for the Bellevue complex and native additions to several others. And school buildings like the Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn, New York, which was among roughly 2000 schools built or renovated during the New Deal and was designed by a team led by Walter C. Martin and completed for the PWA in 1938. Now alongside civic buildings and spaces like these, the WPA employed 8.5 million workers to build thousands of other less visible projects, basically infrastructure projects including hundreds of local bridges and airports, thousands of water supply systems and sewer lines. Here's one in Buffalo, the reservoir in Buffalo, hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, and so on. The PWA added loans and grants to state and local and city governments to build infrastructure like again here in New York, the tri-barrow bridge, now the RFK bridge, the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, and the Washington National or now Reagan Airport in DC. All while the Civilian Conservation Corps or the CCC planted 3 billion trees all across the country. Lots of trees. Okay. But now I want to consider a little more detail in other New Deal initiative, maybe something that many of you heard of, the Tennessee Valley Authority or TVA. Established in 1933, the TVA created thousands of construction jobs and provided publicly subsidized electricity to hundreds of thousands of households via a comprehensive infrastructural transformation of the 40,000 square mile Tennessee River Valley that was overseen by a new federal body, the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority, but like kind of the Port Authority or something like that, the TVA. It also, however, this project program also reproduced injustices from which any effort to revive New Deal-era policies must learn. So we're going to recognize the potential to learn from this project in two ways. One, in terms of its many achievements in supporting jobs and providing electricity and also in reproducing injustice. Now initially proposed as a means to improve navigation, to control flooding and repair deforestation in an area the size of England while providing well-paid construction jobs to an impoverished rural population. By 1940, the TVA included 11 dams with a generating capacity of about 1.4 million kilowatts. When completed in 1954, the TVA system, because you can see here even from the map, it's a system, it's a regional system, total 32 dams of both the high-head storage type like the Norris Dam and the low-head navigational types, 26 of which were built or owned by the Authority itself. The high-head types were usually built on tributaries. The low-head types, which yielded the greatest electrical output, were built on the main river. Like this one, the first low-head installation built by the Authority was Wheeler Dam, about midway between Florence and Decatur, Alabama. Conceived as civic monuments by a design team led by Harry B. Tour, Roland Vank and Mario Benculli, the TVA dams invited a voting public to witness firsthand a spectacle, they could go and see these these places, these rooms, a spectacle of raw concrete rushing water and spinning turbines. Visitors to Wheeler were welcomed in an elegant reception room, this is the reception room for Wheeler Dam, which introduced them to the TVA's grandeur with gridded displays of maps, photographs, and streamlined slogans describing the sort of overall TVA program. Just beyond behind the exhibition, through that door that you see there, however, separate restrooms of matter-of-factly divided black citizens from white. The conflict to which these restrooms testified, and here you see them in plan, you can count four restrooms here rather than two, was memorialized even more grimly in a detail of quote-unquote typical drinking fountains used throughout the TVA, as reproduced here for architects in a 1939 issue of pencil-pencil points. An unadorned marble bowl sits discreetly in a gridded niche lined with glazed tile and illuminated with a recessed fixture. Above, sans serif chrome letters, you see them here, serenely admonished, white. So this is in a sense the silent, not the tragedy of the TVA. As the political scientist, and now I should say acting Columbia Provost, Ira Katz-Nelson has shown progressive new dealers, including Roosevelt, repeatedly made concessions to southern Democrats that preserve racial discrimination in order to secure their votes in Congress. These are there because of the politics of getting the legislation through. Referring to coal mining, here is a map for example of the Kentucky coal fields, which you see here in dark green. Roosevelt insisted in 1934 that quote, it is not the purpose of the administration by sudden or explosive change to impair southern industry by refusing to recognize what he called traditional differentials. Now these traditional differentials were of course racial and economic. They were also cross-hatched with gender. Just as the NRA did little to the earlier New Deal legislation did little to protect African-American agricultural workers in the south, it built in lower wages for predominantly white coal miners south of the Ohio River, than for those further north. So there are various degrees of discrimination. Some along racial lines, some along regional lines. This again is an important context in which we should understand the Green New Deal, which raises a strong and uncompromising emphasis on racial and economic justice as inseparable from environmental justice. Okay, but what exactly is the Green New Deal? It is as you may know a proposal rather than a piece of legislation or a program. Introduced on February 7th 2019 and co-authored by New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez along with as you see here many others, US House of Representatives resolution 109 or HR 109 quote recognizing the duty of the federal government to create a Green New Deal and its Senate companion S-59 have become an important focus for the nationwide and now indeed international campaign for climate justice. The resolution centerpiece is a call to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers. That's a quote from the text. It's 14 page text which is available online. You can download it if you want. It defines the climate crisis as a social crisis. In high legislative pros, the whereas and the results and so on, in the resolution observation leads to action as the text moves from whereas to resolved. For example, quote whereas. I'll just give you some quotes and you'll see how it moves from observation to resolution. Whereas the United States is currently experiencing several related crises with the greatest income inequality since the 1920s and now of course this has been exacerbated by the current crisis. A large racial wealth divide amounting to a difference of 20 times more wealth between the average white family and the average black family and a gender earnings gap that results in women earning approximately 80% as much as men at the medium. This is all from the Green New Deal resolution. Whereas climate change, pollution and environmental destruction have exacerbated systemic racial, regional and social, environmental and economic injustices referred to in this preamble as systemic injustices. By disproportionately affecting indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, de-industrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities and youth referred to in this preamble as frontline and vulnerable communities. This is language that you'll hear regularly in climate justice discussions. And then resolved that it is the sense of the House of Representatives, they're proposing that this be adopted, that one it's the duty of the federal government to create a Green New Deal. To, among other things, to, you see here, achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions and also to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future and repairing historic oppression to indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, de-industrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities and youth, again frontline and vulnerable communities. So in its very name then, in a sense echoing that the term the name New Deal, the Green New Deal, or sometimes the GND, points to what historians sometimes call a usable past, parts of which I've just shown you from the climate change, but not all of this obviously is usable. This is the point is how to think and to develop on, build on the positive and affirmative dimensions of examples like the New Deal while critically refusing their, the oppressions that, as I showed you, they nonetheless reproduce. So, okay, so all of this, so the Green New Deal sort of citing or quoting from the New Deal points backwards. It sort of pulls something from the past into the present and asks us to build upon it. Climate change on the other hand looks forward into the future. Now, given the contribution, the contradictions, sorry, that plagued the original New Deal, as I pointed out, systematic racial discrimination, as well as indiscriminate erasure in the TVA of impoverished impoverished rural communities, even as in other areas, similar communities were being supported, it's notable that the Green New Deal resolution calls unambiguously for quote, the use of democratic and participatory processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and vulnerable communities and workers to implement the required social, economic, and technological changes. But beyond the meaningful participation of disenfranchised groups and decision-making, so you know, what might a properly democratic Green New Deal look like? All right, well, to explore this question we can return again quickly to the social and spatial paradigm on which the TVA was based, that is, regionalism. The TVA rearranged the technical, so I'm again returning to the TVA as a sort of example of an infrastructural, large-scale infrastructural, and potentially green jobs program basically, that offers some lessons to us in the present to think through both the contradictions, as I said, and the potential for this kind of policy and this kind of incentive program. So the TVA rearranged the technological, natural, and political geography of the Tennessee Valley through regional planning. Influentially advocated by the Regional Planning Association of America, the RPA, this approach was exemplified by a 1926 study you see here at the top by Henry Wright and Benton Mackay for the reorganization of New York State around a proposed hydroelectric corridor. This scheme, this project, wasn't realized, but this kind of thinking informed the TVA. And despite its other purposes, flood control, reforestation, agricultural development, it was the TVA's ability to generate large quantities of hydropower and distribute electricity at rates that undercut local monopolies that gave it unprecedented scope in reorganizing the political economy of the Tennessee Valley. Originating near Knoxville, with tributaries you see, okay Knoxville is over here, here, with tributaries reaching into Virginia and North Carolina, the Tennessee River follows a southwestern course into Alabama, glances along along Mississippi's northeastern corner and returns north into western Tennessee and through Kentucky, where it meets the Ohio River at Paducah. So you can see the tributaries coming in here, they're all this is now the Tennessee River and it's going up here and it meets the Ohio River up here. The Ohio discharges in turn into the Mississippi River at Cairo, Illinois and from there the Mississippi flows south. So about halfway along the Tennessee River's 1200 mile length at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, we uh is the Wilson, the Wilson Dam. So you see the Wilson Dam. Begone at the close of the First World War in 1918, the Wilson Dam was intended as a source of hydroelectric electric power for the manufacture of ammonium nitrate used in munitions. After its completion in 1924 Henry Ford sought but failed, Henry Ford of Ford Motor Company, sought but failed to acquire the dam and two adjacent nitrate plants from the federal government to manufacture fertilizer for southern cotton. In the early 1930s following in Ford's footsteps the TVA's managers converted the two Muscle Shoals nitrate plants into facilities for the energy intensive production of phosphate-based fertilizers to be distributed at no cost to local farmers. Historically, geographically and technologically then Muscle Shoals was the epicenter of the whole sort of TVA system. So this dam was sort of at the center of it. Technically, the Tennessee Valley is not exactly a region. Howard W. Odom, the south's most prominent academic regionalist, here's his book, referred to it as a subregion. Odom defined the Tennessee Valley by a circle radiating 400 miles from Muscle Shoals. So if you go 400 miles around Muscle Shoals you get the Tennessee Valley, which contained in microcosm what he called, quote, all the elemental factors of the new American regionalism and a fair epitome of the range and complexity of the southern regions. This is a very specific idea about regionalism. I know the term is used in many different ways in architecture and urbanism. There's a particular idea about regionalism that is used technologically, geographically, but also politically. So here you see, for example, Odom showing the subregion of the Tennessee Valley right here, over here on the right, overlaid with a network of interstate highways. Working at the University of North Carolina, Odom studied the particularities of what he called regional folkways, the life ways of the people who live in this region, as an alternative. So we basically did sociological work and quasi ethnographic work as an alternative to the paradigm to try to develop understandings of ways of life in these different areas as an alternative to the then dominant paradigm of competing geographic areas, competing cultures, and competing economies, predominantly the north and the south, that was known as sectionalism. So Odom's larger project, the larger project of this kind of regionalism, was to redraw the nation's internal boundaries in a manner that replaced a formerly monolithic idea of the south with what he called a composite picture based on hundreds of tabulated indexes measuring distinct geographic, cultural, natural, and technological characteristics. It was basically a big data project that's basically what this kind of regionalism was, hundreds of tables and charts and so on. Differentiating the colonial southeast from the newly developing southwest, this is 1930s, Odom divided the country into six loosely bounded regions that were integrated into what amounted from his point of view to a national ecosystem. So here you see the regions, the northeast, southeast, middle states, northwest, southwest, and then far west. And then here's the sort of sense of the ecosystem into which these were integrated. So the basic idea is that where sectionalism, the kind of north-south antagonism that dates from, of course, prior to the Civil War, where sectionalism divided regionalism united. It linked distinct regions and social worlds and ecological worlds together. Nevertheless, so it's conciliatory, right? It's a way of binding the country together in socially and geographically. Nevertheless, a thread of conflict runs through this regionalism, a kind of separatism we could say, which paints a picture of a southern people divided by race. The geographical center of the southeast, the region here, the southeast down here, in which the Tennessee Valley was located, was the geographical center of this was what was known as the Black Belt, which ran through the heart of what was long known as the Cotton Kingdom. You see this here, the Cotton Southeast, which had been since the 18th century really and throughout the 19th century a key supplier to the global textile industry and a site for the reproduction of global capital. Recognizing the injustice of white supremacy but deferring to regionalism's conciliatory evolutionist view, Odom, our regionalist, appealed to the long term. So this is a quote from Odom from this kind of discourse on regionalism from the time. Manifestly, he says, quote, it's asking too much of a region to change overnight the powerful folkways of long generations. What did he mean by folkways? What does a term like folkways mean here? Well basically, folkways stands here as a euphemism for racial discrimination. So basically he's saying, don't ask the southern people, the inhabitants of this region, or any other region to change their folkways too quickly. So this functions, this kind of euphemistic language functions as an apology that enables the culturally and kind of in the background the cultural kind of narrative that accompanies the separate but equal, so-called separately equal, restrooms and border fountains that were ultimately built in the TVA installations. Now of the three TVAs, three directors, David Lillianthal, Arthur Morgan, and Harcourt Morgan, not related to Arthur, Arthur Morgan was most committed to regional planning. Like Roosevelt, Morgan, who favored more extensive government involvement in electricity distribution, saw the Tennessee Valley, which you see here again shown by Odom with Harry Moore, with other river valley regions. Morgan in particular, but many of these TVA planners, saw this area as a laboratory, quote unquote laboratory, in which infrastructural development could lead to social transformation. Following what Lillianthal disingenuously called a grassroots strategy, it wasn't really a grassroots strategy, but they called it that, the TVA's technocrats sought to incorporate local folkways, quote unquote, folkways into developments such as Norris, Tennessee, a model suburb in the wilderness as they called it, built for workers on the TVA's first project in the Norris Dam. So this this is the dam and Norris Village was built for for the people working on this dam, this village. The folkways in question, as I were overwhelmingly those of rural whites, and despite massive displacement caused by flooding the river valley, the folk tradition that proved most durable was the racial divide. Built as a permanent village rather than a temporary construction camp, Norris consisted of 294 single family houses, 10 duplexes, and five 30 unit apartment buildings, all for white workers and their families. Lily white reconstruction, quote unquote, as John P. Davis, a prominent African-American journalist, called it. Incorporating features like screen porches, the modern modest houses of Norris Village were based on the rural vernacular, except that chimneys as you can see here were moved into the from the flanking walls where they typically were in the older buildings, to a utility core at the center of the house to accommodate the new electrical service used for heating and low-cost appliances being supplied by the TVA system. In marked contrast then to the so-called separate but equal restrooms at visitor centers at the TVA dams, the utilitarian community center at Norris included only one restroom for men and one for women, White's only, because it was a White's only village. The water thus flowed mightily through the TVA system. Its current slowed for navigation and channeled for irrigation, its energies harnessed to electrify the rural landscape, its intimacies divided in public restaurants, public drinking fountains, fountains, and segregated housing. Today we might be tempted to consider this coexistence of enlightened modernity, these public works of enlightened modernity, the coexistence of enlightened modernity, and genteel barbers, the racial discrimination that was built into them as anachronistic. We might be tempted to say okay that that was all back then in the past and we're beyond all of this and and and the such mistakes will not be repeated. Now of course as I've said the Green New Deal's congressional authors evoke such precedents as the New Deal to blunt capital's sharpest edges like the racial wage discrimination and other so-called traditional different differentials that were built even into Roosevelt's origin and they seek to blunt these edges with renewables remediation and green jobs. But revisiting precedents in this way takes I think a little bit more historical care and that's what we're here to do. That's what we're here to do in the university and that's what we're here to do thinking critically with history. So finally I just want to go back to the TVA for just a few more minutes before we speak about the potential strategies for the future. So I'm going to focus now on the energy provision aspect of the TVA system. Now among the early controversies surrounding the TVA was the question of who would distribute and sell the electricity its turbines generate. For utility companies looking to profit from this new source it was one thing for the federal government to supply them with power at wholesale rates and quite another for the TVA to cut them out entirely by supplying electricity directly to consumers. Beginning in 1934 the TVA transmitted electricity from the Wilson Dam to households and businesses in Tupelo, Tupelo, Mississippi. So this whole process of distributing electricity began already in 1934 from the dams to local households and businesses in this case in Mississippi. Reporting in 1935 Davis noted that for the over John Davis writing in The Crisis which is the the principal magazine of the NAACP reported that for the over 11,000 African Americans living there quote largely in grotesque rented slum dwellings that landlords found unprofitable to wire cheap electricity meant in his words meant nothing. So it didn't matter that there was cheap electricity for the African American families living in Tupelo, Mississippi because their houses weren't wired because it wasn't profitable for the landlords to wire those houses. So this is one of the ways in which electricity connects with social relations in this case real estate and ways of life and the inequities built in or shall we say hardwired into quote unquote folkway. Now despite public subsidy then as Davis put it John Davis put it, millions of kilowatt hours will be generated as he said at a price so high quote that for Negroes it might just as well be lightning from the sky might just as well be lightning from the sky. Access to this lightning and the modern mechanized life that it promised was therefore among the more measurable wages or privileges of whiteness. Nevertheless so basically access to electricity divided along racial lines. Nevertheless Davis argued that in addition to organizing black labor his readers quote should demand a program of socialized i.e public or state-owned electrification which will enable Negro workers to have some benefit from the power program. In other words Davis is not rejecting the power program the TVA program entirely. He's saying basically that his readers should demand a properly socialized public state-owned program that would begin the process of democratizing access to electricity. In some municipalities serviced by the TVA electricity was distributed in another way but through a relatively small local collectively owned energy cooperatives that were established also under the New Deal under the rural electrification administration or REA. This model actually has survived and remains viable in many parts of the country including in the Tennessee Valley Public Power Association which is a non-profit group of what they call consumer owned power companies basically local cooperatives. Still from the turbines to the family house TVA electricity was from the start only partly public. Its generation price and availability were matters of partially and as I've just explained dramatically variable access and democratic governance. Yet as Davis and other critics noted despite its contradictions the TVA remains a potential model for subsidized subsidized democratically accountable provision of public electricity. So in other words I'll say it again the TVA remains a potential model for the subsidized democratically accountable provision of public electricity that is public power as in the logo here but public power at a regional or perhaps national scale or transnational we could even say at scale. This then is one history lesson for the for the Green New Deal. If the pattern of economic devastation that is unfolding as we speak initiated by the COVID 19 pandemic if this continues recovery programs much larger than those of the New Deal will be required in the US to say nothing of elsewhere in the world. Meanwhile the climate clock ticks on. Prior to the pandemic the authors of the Green New Deal pointed out that racial discrimination and other forms of structural inequality affecting frontline and vulnerable communities are the very definition of the climate crisis right they're not not separate from it right they're the very definition of the climate crisis rather than some kind of unfortunate side effect. Now as we see such inequalities playing out before our eyes through unequal access to healthcare paid sick leave and many other necessities we must learn to see these two crises together. Pandemic in the short term and climate change in the longer term. Architecture can help provide solutions in the form of housing hospitals schools and other public institutions as I showed you earlier but only if if linked up with the kinds of democratic power and the sense of both energy and political voice that truly and unapologetically public works can provide. In other words it's time to rethink with the help of architecture and urbanism and many other fields and areas of work the institutions and infrastructures that govern our common world and the technical political and social means by which they do so. Learning from the American New Deal and but also from many other more radical examples while acknowledging their contradictions architecture and urbanism can help restore meaning to the word public as in public works as a social economic term as well as a spatial term. So not just public space but social a kind of way of being together a social contract an economic relation public ownership for example of of public goods to the point where an expression like public power as you see in the logo here I mean not just municipal ownership so not just public ownership not just municipal ownership but clean renewable electricity generated and distributed democratically as a collective good a common good like water and clean air for free just can you imagine electricity for free to support all lives equally rather than a few unequally. To do so the meaning of public power must be expanded to include organized collective action all right it's not just about about technical processes public power power must be expanded to incorporate include organized collective action at the ballot box in the streets or for the for the time being and hopefully not for for too long online but also online beginning with a green new deal for all in place of lifeboats designed by very stable geniuses for the survival of just a few thank you so I think now we can I'll stop the share and we have a few minutes for any questions so I you know I know some of you have to go at at you know two o'clock but the chat the chats now open for questions so if anybody has questions I'm happy to answer answer them and I'll read the questions out as they have they come up questions some of you might have made use of anybody who traveled from one of the airports for example to New York City to come to Columbia made use of at least one new deal project that I showed you the the tri-barrow bridge but of course there are many many others probably in parts of the country for those of you who live in the US where you might have seen similar and benefited from similar public works so from Dylan what do you consider we can leverage these lessons around public providing public internet yeah as utility during this period that's an excellent question I mean you know okay sorry public providing public internet as utility during this period when it has become a necessity it's a great point that that of all times now would be the time for you know in stimulus package let's say number four we're on number three you may realize already the two trillion dollar package that was approved last week was the really technically the third major legislation related pandemic pandemic but on but it didn't as far as I know I don't think it at all really addressed public access to the internet which as Dylan is pointing out is critical for students and for workers of many kinds of many many types especially at this time so that would be an excellent kind of parallel to to the the the kinds of basically the thinking about what what what necessities of life you know so internet access has become a necessity collective action which is to say in in our current system government action there are other models for this but but public in the sense of a federal or it could be state or low or other municipal action could assist with so yes we could imagine in a future green stimulus a kind of net neutral public access kind of like public television maybe provision that would subsidize internet service for those who don't have it I know this was a big big issue for for in here in New York when in closing the New York City schools many felt that that many many of the kids would not be able to learn learn online and because they didn't have internet at home and that would that would reinforce the kind of these these inequities that are that are already present I have Kadeva Tarver has raised their hand see um I don't know uh Kadeva maybe you want to type your question is that okay since we're doing it by typing rather than by you know sort of hand raised yes sorry didn't mean to and can you do that if you want yeah I mean you can ask your question then we have another question from Jackie okay wait I've got more question Kadeva why don't you ask your question and then I have a couple more coming up can I I could think I can sounds like she might have accidentally clicked the hand raised right okay okay sorry okay there we go okay fine okay Jackie Jackie in terms of the unhoused as the GNE calls them how possible or viable would it be to repurpose larger buildings like armories as affordable housing options versus building no yeah I mean this is like a architects question you know of course but you know the basic challenge in repurposing for example any existing building you know a building that's not very well used or underutilized for purposes of housing unhoused persons or or people whose housing is it's just unaffordable existing housing it's unaffordable has to do with ownership I mean basically has to do with with the financial pressures put on such properties by real estate speculation and and on the one side in other words that that these buildings have certain kind of market values and so on and then on the other side the the very very weak political will if at all to do such work I mean in other words the budgets that the unwillingness of congress or other bodies to to fund such efforts to you know because it would let's say if it's in New York the city would have to buy up an armory probably or if it's if they already own it they'd have to find the money somewhere to to to to build that to do that renovation now there are two ways to get that money one is to raise taxes and and you don't want to raise taxes and the people whose housing is already basically unaffordable so it would be to raise taxes on on the upper echelons of the society you know sometimes this this discussion goes is conducted around 1% 99% and where that is absolutely true the disproportionate wealth is is is is is upwardly distributed towards 1% of the population you know there are many other ways in which we could think about taxing the wealthy or or the the upper middle classes the but there's also as we've just seen because nobody actually asked where does this two trillion come from that's now being spent to relieve the the certain aspects of the pandemic pandemic the government has other mechanisms to by which to spend it's basically deficit spending and there are many many debates and and disputes about the the value and the potential for that if you want to read about it the resource on the Buell Center the Green Stimulus resource that I showed you at the beginning has collected a number of articles in which economists and and political scientists and others make arguments for this kind of spending especially in the time of crisis so you can look at at that there okay i'm going to move to but thank you thank you for that question i wish we could have more of a discussion but i guess we're just going to do it this way from alan alan vaughn a lot of democratic participation that that is highlighted in the Green New Deal is currently used by the powerful and the wealthy as a weapon for stopping serious action and climate change yes this is familiar examples include wealthy car owners kind of nimbyism basically blocking the 14th street busway vacation homeowners delaying the installation of offshore wind farms that i believe you're referring to nantucket and martha's vineyard wealthy homeowners in california delaying the electrification of cal train and so on yes how should we look to stop illegitimate uses of democratic power and who gets to decide what counts well we should you know is again a great question but yeah it's i mean the short answer is democratically in other words that you know these wealthy homeowners or the others who are blocking these initiatives from positions of privilege are exercising their privilege either through their political their influence in in local or or national politics through you know either could be through direct campaign contributions or many many other channels by which elites exercise political influence and and and therefore block actual democratic decision-making you know around these kinds of questions so so more democracy not less in order to counter the the kind of manipulation of you know town hall meetings and other also various plebiscites and and and votes that are sometimes taken around particular initiatives in different parts of of the country the so so you know what that means is that the Green New Deal isn't just a kind of legislative proposal the Green New Deal is is the tip of a very very large iceberg that is made principally of social movements of movements that that have been active for many many years the various forms of environmental justice movements social justice movements economic justice movements racial justice movements and and so on that that have been making these cases and making these arguments and often participating in some of the same disputes that you are you're talking about here these meetings that get interrupted by or get shut down by by wealthy landowners that and this movement this is public power basically it's the movements it's the capacity of large numbers of people to to literally to vote in favor of proposals that that democratize rather than de-democratize but also to act in what is sometimes called extra extra parliamentary way to sometimes take to the streets sometimes to lobby very aggressively their their their local and national politicians and otherwise to speak politically so so this is a it's clearly a political question as much as it is a technical or or simply sort of socio-economic okay so to keep to continue with what looks to be the last question at the moment from Milo Milo McBride as the New Deal era helped solidify a style of American architecture okay we have American architecture art deco mid-century modernism and so on how do you see the role of design in working to create something analogous for the GND how can we build a sustainable resilient architecture in a way that creates cultural and aesthetic value are there specific projects that you can suggest looking towards well first of all yes I mean again it's a great question and first of all they you can go back to the g-side website and look at I don't know maybe you were a participant in this but some of you probably were look at the student work that was done under the public works for Green New Deal teaching initiative from the Buell Center this past year and in the fall and and you'll see some proposals from some of your own colleagues for architectural languages we could say or forms and aesthetic values that accompany the technical and and more policy-based aspects of basically excuse me green thinking now but another part of your question implies something else I think that that you asked how can we build sustainable resilient architecture in a way that creates cultural and aesthetic value okay the value here can can take other forms it's there's you know okay it's something that we might appreciate as an artwork but the value here might also imply the capacity to tell different stories now i'm putting in that way not because i think architecture necessarily tells stories but because architecture does represent value it it's it circulates value in the form of of symbolic language of experience and of any other kind of poetic techniques and dimensions that that you you know those of you who design buildings talk about all the time in your studios and reviews and so on if you it is in the in that kind of milieu broadly the kind of cultural aesthetic domain that that we that the imagination the collective as well as individual imagination is shaped and really what i'm i'm asking and so this could be a test for any project so i'm not going to you know offer this or that specific project as an answer because we don't have any silver bullets to offer here unfortunately but but there are many many projects historical and contemporary that in various ways extend the imagination and allow us by showing us by demonstrating it's sort of object lessons uh how we might do this kind of this kind of thing sometimes these are public projects sometimes they're they're not but they they they they stretch the envelope of of the constraints under which architects tend to work you know the sort of uh uh under the thumb basically of real estate investment and so on in very imaginative ways uh they try to work outside various boxes economic ones and political ones so uh you know i'll give you one example from the political world that i mean you may not know but in relation to the gnd uh there were two actually two public housing initiatives so so i just say basically public housing would be one answer um but um two public housing one proposed by alexandra cosiocortes and others and ed markey to uh to um uh adapt the existing public housing stock it's called the green new deal for public housing you can look at it look for it online to adapt the the and kind of you know it's sort of the adaptive reuse of of existing housing stock to upgrade to uh to low-carbon performance levels um and then another one uh introduced by ilhan omar from minnesota um for that proposes that the construction of 10 million new units of public housing real public housing not affordable housing that is still built by non-profit developers but public housing built in a manner comparable to the way those dams and the public schools and the other buildings that i showed you the hospitals uh were uh were built so so that's uh that those are exact the policy proposals that you can look towards and just think okay ask what would be the architecture of those that would that would in a sense follow from these kinds of proposals uh and and you can you can come up with your own uh so do there are many other uh you know political uh sort of initiatives and proposals from um formal uh political actors but also from uh from uh more uh locally-based groups that that one way or another um you could simply ask okay what would be the architecture uh that accompanies this or that shall we say sort of progressive initiative uh to think and work to decarbonize uh in an in an equitable manner um okay um i think uh well i still have uh there's still other questions um uh well a practical question jackie's asking the links within the page to power okay i think i fixed the links reinhold if you want to just take kadia's question i will okay that's the let's take that as the last question okay so kadia's question is going to be the last one um but the links are fixed and they they now link to some of the things i'm referring to i should only at the bill center you just look go through the power of sight we've tried to since portray the dramas of mostly american life but this is an international drama uh related to especially frontline life uh in the climate crisis um in order to pose these kinds of questions that the same kind of questions that you're asking um to uh in a in a more focused and specific way so you can go to those links for that okay quickly uh uh kadia the green new deal requires regional solutions as they say as part of the overall plan to slow the negative effects of climate change however as you as i just explained regions have different definitions of what justice justice and equity look like what are some examples of how radical public works projects have been successfully implemented in regions that don't support them uh or support their prerequisites well that's a that's a good question um you know um i don't want to i appreciate you know what are basically saying and as you picked up on that you see actually this regionalist language even in the green new deal resolution it's it's already it's there as you as you picked up um and so it we might be tempted you know whether we are urban planners or or urban designers or architects or uh or policymakers um or simply citizens to to opt for an advocate for like as the g&d says regional solutions a new kind of regionalism the reason i call this dialectical regionalism is is that that you know that may not be the the worst idea i mean if you think about how to democratize the u.s energy grid uh to to move the whole the national grid in off of uh oil and coal and on to clean energy uh regional strategies may may work best because the grid is basically a patchwork however um as you point out uh then as i also explained uh you're likely to encounter certain conflicts and and and even contradictions in such processes um and so you're asking whether there are examples of radical public works progress that have successfully overcome these kinds of things and i you know i must say i don't think the projects even have to be so radical i mean it's interesting to think about what from the new deal is uncontroversial versus what's controversial even the tva is not so controversial you know at this point we should all be embarrassed by those restrooms we should also we should be ashamed that architects design those restaurants uh and and so but we you know we should also know that that the um that that that that our society the the sort of enlightened um critical discourse to which we at least theoretically aspire in in the university and well beyond uh would not tolerate uh uh the this this kind of segregated uh kind of space so okay so so that means that you know if you were to build the dam like those today that you're not going to have separate but equal quote unquote you know restrooms but there are going to be other kinds of inequities and so that's what we need to train ourselves to do these things don't go away because we're living in and working in a society that is built around them and that's kind of the really the point of progressive initiatives especially uh more ambitious ones like the gnd in its most you could say radical forms as infuse your language but you know decidedly less radical programs like social security are also very successfully um still with us uh uh from the new deal era as are the many public schools now the public schools were not the the initiated or kind of you know did not do not originate with the with the new deal but as i showed you many were built public hospitals right i mean these these should not be controversial projects to to propose a new public hospital imagine today wouldn't be what what an idea you you saw the tragic scenes of elmhurst hospital uh in queens it was i'll tell you a personal story was the first project that i worked on as an architect working in an office here in new york in in 1980s i date myself um the renovations of elmhurst hospital uh so i know it uh quite well um and it was a real so it's a real tragedy to see this this this system this hospital and many others overwhelmed uh well why many reasons but but one has to do with basically the neoliberalization of the health system and and the the the sort of for the the sort of defunding of public institutions like public hospitals public schools and so on were forced to to uh to operate on on on very very razors in budgets uh and the encouragement the the the basically the subsidizing of for-profit health care and for-profit education uh so and many other of course in many other areas it's the same for housing right with the with with uh you know tax credits for for mortgages uh even at the same time that public housing is defunded so so these are you know there are there are typically positive examples on either side of these equations but they're always going to have as public housing does in its own way uh contradictions and conflicts built into them so I encourage you all of you and thank you all for for your patience and for listening if you're you're you're amazing questions uh to continue thinking about about these matters just ask yourself the same kinds of questions about in the in the work that you do in school and beyond about what could be public uh about your work uh and so I also want to thank Laila and the whole team at GSAP events uh for uh for making all of this possible and and I hope that uh that that all of you have have found our discussion uh stimulating and as we say uh and uh and perhaps even uh energizing thank you