 Welcome to ASU Ked Talks, the podcast. I'm your host, Diane Boudreau, and I'm here today with Duke Rider, Senior Advisor to the President at ASU, Executive Director of the University City Exchange, and Founder of the Ten Across Project. Thanks for joining us. Glad to be here. So first of all, tell me what this University City Exchange is. The University City Exchange is pretty much as it sounds in the title. What's the relationship between the University and the metropolitan area? How can we find mutually beneficial relationships, downtown Phoenix campus being a perfect example? What was the city looking for in terms of urban vitality? What were we looking for in terms of positioning some of our best professional programs in the environments where those things take place, like journalism, like government? And we established an extraordinary relationship with Phoenix in that regard. We've done the same with Mesa, with Scottsdale, other communities in the valley, obviously Tempe. And so the University Exchange makes sure that we never lose sight of the fact that our futures are inextricably linked. And then tell me a little bit about the Ten Across Project that you found it, correct? So if the University City Exchange is somewhat local or regional, although we are thinking about where we are in the rest of the country, the Ten Across Project is expansive for sure. There's a 2,400-mile-long stretch of highway, obviously, on the I-10 that goes from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic and all the major cities in between. Looking at those cities, Phoenix included, of course, the Phoenix metro area, we think we see a laboratory for the future in those places. When you say a laboratory for the future, what kinds of issues and topics of the future are we talking about? I think the most pressing issues of the day are shown in their highest relief in these places. Take, for example, obviously, what's in the news right here in Phoenix, water, or lack thereof, probably couldn't have a more existential issue. On the other hand, if you're in the Gulf region, water is equally important, but for another reason, they've got simply too much of it and cities are being inundated and water supplies are being threatened. Just water alone is one of those topics as being emblematic of where we're going and how we're going to have to handle things and well represented in this quarter. The same is true for energy, with the energy of the capital of Houston, obviously being in this transect, global trade. Think about all the discussion now about tariffs and other things. That certainly affects the port of Los Angeles as well as the other major ports in this area, immigration and migration, probably again right in the news. Where could you go to understand this better than El Paso, Ciudad Juarez? We just think all the major topics of the day seem to be, again, demonstrated in extraordinary ways on this transect, so along the I-10, which is why we're calling it Tentacross. How is this idea born? The idea was born in the fact that I spent 10 years of my life in New Orleans. Grew up in Ohio, wanted to go a place that was as different as that, as I could find. New Orleans was certainly all that, a singular city, but it was clear that the city while it was aware that was in a hurricane zone and that waters were rising all the time, its infrastructure was inadequate to meet those conditions. And so you could see the future in the infrastructure and one always wondered why we didn't do more knowing what was going to happen there. And sure enough, in 2005 Katrina came, hurricanes came in New Orleans almost every year, and this one really demonstrated the inadequacies of that infrastructure. Now that I live in Phoenix, I see some similarities, even though the circumstances are different, again around water, but are we fully prepared? And as I mentioned earlier, that topic is in the news to address the future. So the project was born of looking at places that can see their future and maybe don't quite grapple with it the way that they should. And that's probably true of all of us in a lot of different places as well. When we spoke earlier, you mentioned that New Orleans actually now has a resiliency plan. That's true. So Katrina clearly caused people to think about what's important about cities, and that one in particular. It's irreplaceable. It's a very special place. So following that, there was much more attention paid to preparation and what that city means to not only the residents who live there, but the country as a whole. And the Rockefeller Foundation has a program called 100 Resilient Cities. And New Orleans is one of those cities. Rockefeller was down in the city, as were many other foundations and other organizations trying to help rebuild it. And so they provided a resilience officer, as they did with other cities on the I-10 quarter. El Paso would be one. Los Angeles is another. In fact, post-Harvey, Houston was just designated as the 101st Resilient City in that program. So that affirms that the stretch that we're looking at is the place where you can understand resiliency, sustainability, adaptability. And so New Orleans is probably built because they were highly motivated. One of the most comprehensive and well-organized resiliency plans in the country was done, especially under Mayor Landers' administration, with a gentleman named Jeff A. Bear, who's one of our best partners in the Tundra Cross Project. What does a resiliency plan include? What kinds of things? It can range. And we've studied resiliency plans on all the cities in the 10x area. We've looked at all their documentation. We've got about 400 pages of notes. It goes from the most immediate. How do you address a disaster? And what people need in the here and now? And then these plans begin to look a little further and further and further into the future. What do we need to be doing to manage water systems, energy systems, food security, well-being in all aspects of life, health and wellness? And the cities that have gotten the furthest out there are really thinking now generationally. What should we be doing now to prepare a place for our children and our families and others to really be able to be in this place, at the very least, but also thrive in that? And that can include economic resiliency as well. What happens if there's an economic downturn? How quickly does your city recover? So is Phoenix thinking about doing a resiliency plan? Or do we have one? Phoenix is not one of the 100 resilient cities in the Rockefeller program. But that doesn't keep you from doing the work. And Phoenix has been very focused on this issue. It has a chief sustainability officer. You can't think about Phoenix and not think about the availability of water. I know Catherine Sorenson, who's the head of the Water District Department for the city of Phoenix, is very focused on this, of course, as you would expect. And Phoenix has been looking at itself and what it needs to do around a variety of issues. Take one, for example, that would be very much Phoenix, which would be heat. And so they're looking at heat island effects and how the construction of our cities and the materials that hold heat impact temperatures, especially the reduction of nighttime temperatures, also what it means for water and evaporation, what it means for health, what it means for security for people. So Phoenix is very much focused on sustainability and heat would be but one example. Well, it's good to know we're thinking about it. Yes. So your background is in architecture, right? How did you come to study resilient cities? How did you get into this area of work? I think by being an architect, you take cues from the built environment. So whether you're looking at New Orleans or Phoenix or even places like Detroit that have suffered downturns, you can see the beginnings of what's going on in a community by the built environment, what it's telling you. So if you're an architect who's both designed buildings but also attuned to look at them for cues about what's happening in communities, I think that's been a really helpful experience and expertise to understand what the built environment is telling us that we need to attend to. So for me, it was a natural transition and going from, let's say, individual buildings to whole communities, that was very much the transition I made when I came here as dean of the College of Design from maybe designing buildings to thinking about, let's say, the downtown Phoenix campus. How do you knit a whole area together? They're all design projects, if you think about it. And then when we met to discuss your Ked Talk, you also mentioned doing your thesis work on monuments to the future. And that phrase really intrigued me. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Sometimes it's easier to think about a place once you've left it. Because when you're in it every day, it's just part of your being. So when I left New Orleans after 10 years, I not only went to school there, but I worked on the last World's Fair ever held in the United States. And after that, I was fortunate enough to go to Harvard and graduate school. And my thesis project there looked back to New Orleans and talked about how maybe instead of building monuments to the past, New Orleans is very much a place that thinks about its past. It's an extraordinary one involving many cultures. Could you build or conceive of monuments that would remind you every day you should be thinking about the future as well? And so as you move through the city on your way to work or wherever it was, you would see something. And they wouldn't be conventional, let's say, statues on pedestals, but some indicator that the future was right around the corner and you would do well to attend to it. So while I think we know what monuments to the past are, we build them all the time, how would you build an indicator that suggests that the future is equally, if not more important, and would require you to do something differently? Maybe to your individual lives and your community or maybe at the city, state, or regional scale. What should we be doing? And I think we need those reminders. So what would that look like? Do you have ideas about that? So when I looked at the New Orleans circumstance, I actually designed, again, I'm an architect, also heavily involved in the visual arts, a series of elements that as people moved into the city as they got closer and closer to the city, they saw indicators that reminded them that this is a water place. It's a place born of water. New Orleans had to happen. There was always going to be a great city at the mouth of the Mississippi River. So it was absolutely the place where a city had to be. And it's one of the worst places to build a city. It's a swamp. And now, much of it below sea level. So that dichotomy sort of drove what the design of these things were, reminding us that we made a decision to be here. And presumably for a long time, what do we need to be doing? And these structures were in various ways, shapes, and forms, as you can imagine. And then they sort of reached a crescendo when you got to the city and said, here we are. This is the place that we were destined to create. What are we going to do about it? It's also quite interesting that Mary Landrieu got involved heavily in the issue of monuments, as all of you know, having taken down a number of monuments in the city, four in particular, that were reminders of the past sort of kind of. They were maybe not quite accurate depictions of the past, but he realized the importance of monuments as well, and what they meant to various people. So Norlitz has a history of thinking about this. Going back to Tenacross, Tenacross held its first summit this year in Baton Rouge. Is that right? That's right, that's right. Can you tell us why Baton Rouge? Sure. So again, think about this transect, coast to coast, 11 or more major cities, all the issues I described that are of real importance, and what could be more so than water. And so as we thought about our water circumstance here in Phoenix, which is clearly one of access to it in the future, which is to some degree uncertain. We're going to have to work really hard to make sure that that's the case. Having spent time in the Gulf area, I was well aware of what was happening with regard to water in that area, in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. And it's about inundation. Waters are rising, and every time there's a major storm, the water's coming even further inland than they ever did before. They've lost 2,000 square miles recently of land. And people are actually retreating. People are actually having to be moved. And in the case of Baton Rouge, their aquifers, where they get their water, is being infiltrated with saltwater, which could really threaten that city to some extent. So they had built a wonderful facility called the Water Institute of the Gulf, perched right on the Mississippi River looking at the bridge that is the I-10. You could not find a better place to bring this all together. So thinking that water was something that everybody understands, everybody needs, obviously, to sustain life, we would use that as our first topic. And we would hold our event not here in Phoenix, but in a place that was already thinking about it, had built a facility dedicated to it, including a scale model of the Mississippi River Delta that shows the future of what that is going to be. So we thought that they were like-minded. We approached them. They were all over this topic. They have embraced 10X like no other area. I really want to credit John Davies and the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. He has taken 10X into his own, into his organization, and they continue to help us to this day. And they will be involved in every 10X water project that we hold because they believe in it. It turns out that the exchange of information amongst people interested in a topic like water is facilitative, not accelerated, when the topics are a little different, meaning drought or flooding. And the flow of information at this conference was unlike anything I've ever seen. Who was there? We invited what was opened up in a wonderful way by the governor, Governor Bill Edwards. The mayor of Baton Rouge was there. Senator Landrieu was there. Henry Cisneros was there. Four-time mayor of San Antonio, obviously one of the major cities in the I-10 study area. So you had city officials from across the land from LA to Jacksonville. You had experts in water. You had experts in city development. You had citizens who understand the urgency of these issues. You had chief sustainability and resilience officers from these cities, appropriately so. And so everybody was there showing what they knew about their circumstance and why it might have some relevance to your circumstance if you weren't from that place. So what's next for TenaCross? So we think of TenaCross as an awareness-building project. There are other people who are more expert in the science or engineering or other things than we may be, but we are, my team, is particularly good at, I think, understanding the whole and building a communications platform of some sort, like the events we just talked about, the TenaCross event in Baton Rouge, as well as other media forms that could further the dialogues that I think we started there and elsewhere. So we're thinking about a number of things. How do we do that in all the kinds of media you would imagine? We are extending that into the potential to turn this into a course that could be consumed by high school students in all these cities along the TEN. And again, foster exchange between them. I could be in El Paso and I get a call from somebody in Jacksonville to understand the issues of migration and what a border means. And I'm now in a dialogue with people who are, if you will, we've used this quote before, on the same street. You're all on the I-10. So you already have something in common. And so there could be an educational platform. I'm sure there will be. We're also talking about how these cities can band together to form a risk pool that might help them in times of need so they're not exclusively dependent on the federal government. And we've talked about the potential for podcasts, not unlike this one, with people who live on the TEN and even a broadcast in a television format, if you will, that could move from west to east, from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, describing the future of this country as seen through the lens of those cities. So as somebody who lives on this transect in the Phoenix area, if I'm interested in getting involved with the TEN and CROSS project, how would I do that? So you can go to the website and you will find TENacross.com and I think we have a .org as well. We're building all these things as we speak, as you and I are talking. And so you could let us know why you're interested and we'll create a better forum on a website, which is being constructed right now to take in information from people across the TEN. We're even imagining that we at some point would have a mobile studio to go out and get those voices and record them much as we're doing here now and turn them into things that could make their way into that educational product for those high school students or for others. But if you have expertise in areas that are represented by the project, we would love to hear from you and involve you in our events or help with content development or whatever it might be. This project is very much about multiple ways of knowing. And some of that comes from people who live in these areas, their lived experience on the ground and what they know about what they're seeing. In other cases, it's from people who have more technical expertise. We have at universities, of course, great earth observing technologies. And that's another kind of truth. We're taking all of those ways of knowing, if you will, combining them into what we think is a pretty compelling understanding of what we're going to have to attend to with regard to the future. Great. Was there anything else that I didn't ask about, but you would really like to talk about? I might think of two things. One of the things that I think we saw, let's say in the recent elections is we are encountering a further rural urban divide. And our first pass across the 10 is hitting the major cities. Those are the 11 largest urban areas on the 10. There are others, but we're not unaware that in between these major cities in the, especially in the three largest states in the union that are implicated here, California, Texas and Florida, there are a lot of people who don't hear their voices registered. They may not understand the issues that we're talking about or they may understand them better than we do. So we want to make sure that in this transect, we're gathering all voices, both those who are generated from cities and urban conditions to suburban, which there's a lot in this transect. This is the new America, if you will. There's many of these cities were facilitated by the automobile. So the suburbs are enormous, but also the rural areas, a lot of agriculture, a lot of other ecosystems. We want to make sure we capture all that. So I think this project could be part of a larger understanding. The nation as a whole and bringing diverse points of view together. I hope that's the case. The other thing that's interesting about this project, I think it's crucial that it's, if you will, latitudinal in nature. In other words, east to west. If it weren't for geographic circumstances, these cities would be somewhat similar. Sun angles are hitting these cities in the same way all the time, all year round. So they have a lot in common. What makes them different is their proximity to water or elevation or other things. But that means you can compare and contrast them. If this project was north to south, where one area was obviously colder all the time and another was hotter, they are already separated in a certain way. So the fact that these cities are organized east to west, and this is one of the largest transects in one country where you could do this, the ability to cause these peoples and cities to be in dialogue with one another, is really made much more available and easy because of the latitudinal organization here. Not to mention they're literally on the same street and people can move easily between them. Well, thank you for joining us here today. It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me. If you're interested in more from Duke Rider, watch the ASU Ked Talks video at research.asu.edu slash Ked Talks. 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