Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:15 Welcome to the failed architecture podcast, a podcast about architecture and the real world. My name is Charlie <inaudible> and today is just me hosting because this episode is actually an extended version of a breezed book. We recorded earlier this year with Kilian Riano Kilian is an architectural and urban designer, researcher, writer, educator, and founder of design agency rendered DSG, N a G N C assistant Dean of the Pratt school of architecture. And until earlier this year, associate director of Kent state university's Cleveland, urban design collaborative. He's a board member of the architectural lobby and a core member of designers, protest and dark matter university. Before we start the conversation, some background, the episode was originally timed to coincide with the year anniversary of June 8th, 2020s, blackout Tuesday a day when architecture and design organizations joined countless others to mark their alignment with the black lives matter movement by responding to the blackout Tuesday, hashtag with a black square.
Speaker 1 00:01:15 Unfortunately, although not that surprisingly for the most part, their anti-racist commitment started and ended there. Meanwhile, however, the initial meetings of designers protest and dark matter university began in their words. Designers protest is a collective of designers, mobilizing strategy to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use architecture and design as tools of oppression. Their list of demands includes cause to cease implementation of hostile design center, community leadership in the design process and create anti-racist design models in education. In the past year, the collective has initiated a series of ongoing projects, including the anti-racist design justice index, which is a tool for architects, designers, planners, policy makers, and community activists committed to taking action towards identifying and dismantling systemic racism emerging from designers protests demand to create anti-racist models of design education, Dartmouth university as an anti-racist design justice school, which has since its establishment in early July, 2020 independently expanded its network and mission to quote radically transform education and practice toward adjust future from both inside and outside of academia.
Speaker 1 00:02:30 Since last year in support of designers, protests, anti-racist design justice index felt architecture along with the British social design and urban design practice migrants bureau. I've also been gathering the responses of architecture and design institutions following blackout Tuesday in a Google sheet. The release of this conversation with Kilian was also originally timed to coincide with the official release on 6th of June, 2020, one of the anti-racism design index, which members of designers celebrated by hosting a national call for the launch, a link to which is available in the show notes, along with the websites of all the initiatives mentioned so far. Okay. Without much further ado the conversation with Kilian
Speaker 1 00:03:22 I was just going to say that it was incredible really like, I mean just the, what you've managed in the past year. Cause like I was looking at a lot of these materials night. I didn't quite connect the dots and realize that don't matter university sort of, as you mentioned in the video emerged from 0.9 of the designers protests demands. Right? Um, I'm not sure if you want to link it like that necessarily, but it certainly the time period is the same a year. Basically you've managed something that I was just thinking, okay. Dogma university is very established. You know, this is look at it. It looks very, very, uh, sorted. So I don't know. I just wanted to, with that long preamble in mind, I ask you how it's been going over the past year. We've thought Matta university and design is processed from Europe.
Speaker 2 00:04:13 Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah. I want to reset. Y it's always some folks within the dark, both the science protests and art university are collected. As I collect the dark matter. University has multiple starting points for different people. So some people would dispute that. We came out of the silence protest. I personally am not one of them. I actually really very much enjoy being part of the dishonest protest, larger kind of organizing network. And I really think that they they've done tons of work and really appreciate it all that. I also think it's good to be part of a larger organizing effort. So, so right now we're still kind of in that place where we are part of the sinus protest as well and a little bit of an independent project within it. So it's to make everyone kind of happy, you know, how to select the projects and you have to do it.
Speaker 2 00:05:00 But yeah, just to share with you a little bit. So after the murder of George Floyd, I think like everyone, I was very concerned about what was going on and also brought issues that we, a lot of us had been talking about for many years, but it brought them really to the forefront. We were trying to figure out what to do. So I began to participate in designers, protest calls, and then started chatting more with people that like me working universities or work in or teach. And, um, we decided that we needed to have a more cohesive project that really talked about some of the issues that we were seeing, both in the teaching side, the administrative side, and as a student for people of color and, and the themes and topics I can look it's right around July. And I think that we decided, I think July 1st is our official anniversary.
Speaker 2 00:05:48 So we haven't even really hit that year just yet that we began to have consistent conversations. Number one, on the agenda, besides our, which it was one of those both kind of contentious and un-fun things that come up together was how much to work within the system and outside the system. We've decided that we wanted to do both. We wanted to begin to create new systems, but also that working within institutions and universities was important. And then we started getting requests and we started putting together something that became that design justice fundamentals course. And we began to develop a few processes and systems. Number one is always partnering, having the faculty be partners, especially with, uh, in cases like that. Maybe someone with a little more established and experienced teaching studio could work with someone with less so that both the university feels good, everyone.
Speaker 2 00:06:45 And there's peer ship going on that we're going doing peer to peer work. So out of that, we ended up teaching all the courses and design justice fundamentals, multiple universities, often universities kind of coming together, two different universities and, and, and those courses were, they, one of the beautiful things about us that the syllabus was developed collectively by tons of people and anyone in theory could give that course. And then we did two studio modules and those were done through an internal call for courses, which many issues came up. For example, one of the things that I still am thinking and talking about as someone that proposed a course on slowness and being slow as a, as a radical act, not everything has to be filled and that often communities of color are affected by the, by the bias towards doing something. Now, now, now, now, now filling, filling.
Speaker 2 00:07:37 So it's not that those things don't need to happen, but rather that by slowing the process, you can bring more voices, you can do things and you can let the other people on the ground. So now we're creating a more kind of specific art queue system. I went to universities and we, and we are asking them to change some administrative systems often even trying to contract with the university itself. And then to also be allowing the two teacher thing in some universities that's difficult allowing different student bodies to come together and creating vertical. So also changing that model and also trying to change the relationship between the professor and the student often questioning you in that process itself. So it's been a process of questioning education and all its models and systems, and also being part of it and very consciously being part of it and being powered is state schools that have more rules that they have to follow and places that serve both the African-American community like HBC youth or what here they call Hispanic serving institutions like CUNY and other places.
Speaker 1 00:08:42 Wow. Yeah. Um, such a lot like, um, yeah, I, I was just thinking about this notion of like working inside and outside institutions. It seems to me that progress hasn't really happened within institutions as such, but, um, I think it would be interesting to talk a little bit more about the responsibility of architecture and design organizations considering, especially that this has been the focus of, I guess, failed architecture is very limited involvement in this over the past year. We've kind of gathering some information about responses on June 8th, in particular, black square Tuesday. Um, what your thoughts more broadly on the responsibility of architecture and design institutions to work towards, uh, anti-racist design future?
Speaker 2 00:09:32 I think it's interesting that you guys are beginning to have a black square, because I think that's the moment in which the performative nature of some of these anti-racist kind of statements began to really kind of hit everyone that yet on the, on one end, you want institutions because they're the ones that serve the majority of people. And then there's, and this is why to us has been important to talk about state schools about the schools that really are serving or could begin to serve with more cohesive structures, people of color. And it's important for them to say the words, but I think that that, that black square, I guess, Junaid I've had forgotten the date. So glad that you mentioned the Charney, it's important that in Tulsa to keep them accountable, because it's easy to say those words at that moment, the reality is that, uh, you know, backlash is going to come.
Speaker 2 00:10:20 I think a lot of us are bracing ourselves for that already. You see things like critical race theory on the chopping blocks of many places. And it becoming a real political football here in the U S because anytime there's any advancements, there's always a pack lash. So both the making sure that all institutions say something that, that something is it's meaningful, that it has some, some depth to it. So it's not just abroad, we're thinking of X, but we are going to do these steps. So for example, the GSB and other institutions, they've put out some specific steps that would take, so then to keep them accountable. And, and the point here, and I think that this has been clear and ever since Trump took power in 2016, that the role of civil society and their institutions, and it was them saying what their values are, where they want to see. And then I I'm activists and an organizing effort to keep them accountable is very important. Those issues only became the role plays there, but they became more noticeable and understandable after the murder of George Floyd. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:11:28 I was thinking as well about the fact that what comes apparent, obviously it's been quite a difficult year and we've been stuck behind our computers, a lot of us, um, for long periods of time, um, uh, you know, which is in itself somewhat of a privilege, but, you know, it has in a sense, and it really became clear in engaging with, uh, Kristin who have felt architecture and, um, their involvement with designers protests, the, the way that kind of connecting online. And also some of the things that maybe historically have been dismissed as like clicktivism do actually have some potential usefulness as a sort of, one of several tools in holding institutions accountable. But also the online activity does have this potential to bring together just like I'm in a different space, across very large boundaries. People who otherwise would have been stuck in, you know, really struggling on their own within institutions.
Speaker 1 00:12:33 Right. And I know I really, yeah, I, I, I do find it sometimes hard to be too sort of, uh, critical or miserable about the past year, because it's actually speaking for felt architecture as well, being really, um, enabling of keeping in touch, because you've just gotten used to the idea that, oh, we can just jump on a call, then I can talk to someone in America. And I dunno. Um, yeah. Uh, it's, it's, it's just, we're all you kind of used to it now and yeah. Anyway, I think, I think there's something in that, you know, the, the potential to, um, keep that pressure up has increased because of there's sort of more communication happening behind the scenes between different activists and different sort of interest groups. I don't know if you wanted to kind of speak with,
Speaker 2 00:13:21 I mean, there's a few things here to unpack them or want to say. I think that that's an interesting thing to bring here, because especially again, in the context of the black square and all of that, and to begin to think about what's what's activism, whether is bad and I'd be passing judgment. I want to post beyond to use digital and social engagement tools or social media tools for organizing. So in a way I think when you're saying, is that when some hashtag or something like that, wasn't to a point it's really creating, organizing structures online. And in a funny way, although you had a little bit of a long history of this, I was an early art editor. I created an organized people to do things there. Uh, I then did things like a folk MoMA with an Armenia I've been involved as a, I did a project for who owns space that it was kind of hashtag, but it was questioning your private decisional space somewhere in between.
Speaker 2 00:14:28 But I feel like dark matter university, maybe it was actually once closer to my experience with artificial mommy and organizing the difference in which it became very clear that we were taking it slow organizing, building up, instead of saying, this is the thing, sign on to it right now, or anything like that, those things are coming along and building, but I want to agree with you a hundred percent. I have to say that for example, dark matter university came together and they was because a lot of us had, had experienced very similar things, either in the teaching side for many years, beginning teaching side, or even some folks are scared of maintenance for incision to thinking about teaching. Have we had experienced at all? We didn't have a group yet and have honest conversations about these issues with, eh, once we did it and really, um, all of us, we had some share and we have, you know, bows and behind the scenes organizing weekly meetings that you have, where we have groups that check groups, we have tons of ways.
Speaker 2 00:15:32 And at each level we both kind of have been able to talk about a personal experience as I'm understanding, then you go back to the sessions, offset that from the body. And what we experienced is action systems systematic. And that be by sharing this way. And by using all the tools that it makes us Senator pandemic kind of forced us to use these stories began to come out and then to begin to think about, or do doing something about it. And lately also even to share agility, right? Like some folks at the mural are getting kind of more awards and more recognition or they're shipping jobs, or even just the end of this semester. I didn't know, a powerful experience, less having a final review and have like 10 people from dark matter university comment was, have one review that was alive. I think you've been a part of that really kind of was a beautiful moment. So then, so anyway, to close and share these stories, try to organize about rounds, Sheraton, sneering, since then. And some things that maybe administration has done, or even ways in which relations between professors and students, that kind of work that we wanted to look at and begin to think about new ways to look at those sets of patients to celebrations. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:16:45 I guess what I was also getting at, and I think it's a minimal thing. Just the sort of, I feel like people are in general, activists are becoming more adept to take taking the best of this kind of collectivist, I suppose, approach. Cause like, I mean, I was just thinking about the fact that, you know, okay, there, there were all these empty gestures, but what about if, you know, um, speaking about design as protest here as an outsider, but you know, what about if we actually set up a series of long disgust demands that we can kind of actually bring to the table and say, okay, you've, you've said this, you know, that you, um, support broadly the idea of anti-racism, but what, you know, like here's some demands that you can actually concretely engage with. Um, I want to change direction a little bit. I think it probably just builds on the last points, but, um, maybe just sort of speaking more on the, I guess, negative side of design and how it's been used to sort of perpetuate systems of oppression and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on like, uh, I was listening to your talk at Tuskegee and you were talking about this, um, your experience with this project L space in sunset, sunset park. And is it in Brooklyn? Is that right?
Speaker 2 00:18:11 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:18:12 Anyway, uh, you mentioned that there was a sort of instinctive hostility to just the concept of design amongst participants in the neighborhood. Right. And I think this speaks to a wider notion of the problem of design as this thing that is applied from above, from the top down. Right. Um, and something that is a tool of a wider process of, um, displacement. Um, I'd wonder if you could, yeah. Just maybe unpack that a little.
Speaker 2 00:18:44 Yeah. I would love to, I mean, this is a case study that I like to talk about often, to be honest, when we started and I was their urban design fellow and all the funnels work together and we all developed the project, it was myself, Trisha Martin from week design and Lenny Schrodinger. Who's a lighting designer. So we were supposed to move the project a little bit faster. One of the first things we decided that we needed to slow it down. And it was partly through conversations with multiple community stakeholders in which we realized that's what was happening in this community is that like you're saying any design from any site, whether it's the government, the private entity, anyone it was being seen as a suspect that it was really designing for other people. I actually even remember like one of the first kind of real engagements that we had with folks, the first of the first things people said is to not do any of the hipster stuff, to not create seating areas, to not put food trucks, to not make it a place of games.
Speaker 2 00:19:47 And again, I think I love talking about this because I think it talks about some of the issues around failed architecture, how some of the concepts that we might come up with at that week, then at one point, people think, oh, this is great as well, community needs. And then it begins to, to create a culture around itself. So one, one day, and I use games quite a bit. Uh, my, my idea of games come from theater, your press, they have a lineage. Uh, but however, when people want, they see on the ground, is that pink on tables as well. Uh, you know, tech companies have, and it begins to take on another that like basically becomes a leisure activity for folks with wealth that want to like do the placemaking and wants to take over things. And folks minds, those kinds of projects wirelessly mean that they're not for them and that is meant to displace.
Speaker 2 00:20:41 And so there's a couple of things that we did. We began by taking those issues seriously. And even folks we're talking the number one, worry wasn't it was the space itself. And I'll talk about it in one second was really the place, the place related to the jobs that were in the waterfront, those jobs have been traditionally immigrant jobs, um, sense of park that has one of the highest rates of people that live the walk to work because their, their jobs are there. The folks that have been working on those jobs in the waterfront and industrial areas have changed dramatically, but they weren't have always been filled by by immigrants. So the, one of the things around that was the real thing that people wanted to talk about is jobs. Why is a waterfront becoming a luxury item? And then the second thing was then safety that, uh, that what they really wanted was that that area does behave like a highway, that there was an identified it as an important thing.
Speaker 2 00:21:35 I mean, something as dumb, as dumb, but important to us, the downspout from the highway, one of the first highways ever built in the United States kind of anywhere of its kind, the downspouts were empty on the Austrian side. So like literally as you were walking there, you would just get like all the water from the highway dumped on you. So just as the number one thing we do, first thing was just switch that, switch into it. It goes into, away from the pedestrians. And, and then we, we done work in Tricia organized courses where, you know, infrastructure courses in the high school. So we began to do a series of things that were meant to really listen deeply to what people were talking about and repackage it. But I really think it's important and it was important to understand why people are fearful. And I'm going to share with you a couple of thoughts here very quickly, which is that this sunset park experience of fear of design, even though we're, we're broadly speaking, working on the behalf of the department of transportation, trying to create a new kind of public space, the process kind of dealing with an area that was a parking lot and a highway and where people were dying, you know, because when you cross the street, cars were hitting them, but it made me think about those larger issues about jobs, about the way that things are changing on the people.
Speaker 2 00:22:54 Uh, don't always have a handle on what it might require for the time to take, you know, a little bit more on those issues, right? So when often when people hear that you're a designer, they think that you're coming to decorate it, to make it a cool, cute, beautiful, whatever, such a word that quite honestly, I want to, like as a designer, I want to make beauty. And I, even one of my proudest moments is that I was able to design this weird downspout that was large and a little awkward, but it became as a signal of, this is a place that works. Water's moving, is coming here and doing this. But even that moment was something that I was very excited to do. And then it became kind of a signifier of the space, but we made it all about showing the way things work.
Speaker 2 00:23:37 The lighting was a way to make plants grow. Those plants would clean the water, the water would go into the water better, but that area also began to reorganize traffic slowed down cars. And so began to do all the sorts of things that the folks in the community. But we want to really, that to me is number one as a question. And then at the same time I was working in Youngstown and Warren Ohio areas that happened at the populated or since the 1950s. And I've been writing reports and I wrote a report and that for the architectural league of New York. And, um, I began to think about the de-industrialization the loss of jobs and population and places like Ohio. And then an even, um, things like speculation or Ukrainian oligarch owns this gigantic steel mill area that is kind of just left rotting and creating a toxic mess in Warren, Ohio, and then comparing that to sunset park and the two questions about how design can ask the questions about how the agency of people and making decisions as their communities changed.
Speaker 2 00:24:43 Number one, that's why my practice is called design agency. Write about that. Number two, about how we are related to these changes and questioning our role. Even if at times we have to participate with it because I don't think the role of a designers to be so critical to not participate. Do we have to somehow engage in the spatial production, urban spatial production, and urban to me is wide open to include areas that might not seem super urban. And so then I moved to Ohio often. I feel that experience began to set up a ideas around looking at the future of work. And so the work that that very project in, in sense of part began to set up some of the interest in cockpit models and looking at labor and work as something that can be placed. I know I'm quite honestly even sense apart with this history of cooperatives there, you probably have, I may have mentioned this or you have read it, but the Finnish community, when they moved to sunset park created a gigantic series of cooperatives and housing cooperatives.
Speaker 2 00:25:45 They had bakeries, they had. So there's even that history embedded within the very kind of structure and some of the buildings that not far from where we were working, had the history. So why can't then Mexican American community broadly speaking Latinos from all over Latin America and the Chinese and east Asian communities that are moving well, those folks can also begin to create those processes. So anyway, one experience getting pushed back to listening to deeply and trying to understand how that critique talked about the failed architecture of our moment has led me to ask other sets of questions and try to think about how Warren, Ohio and sunset park Brooklyn, although very different one immigrant, one, mostly African-American and white with very little immigrant populations, but how those two places have relationships that's the systems has imposed a sense of things. How does two areas can also become the enclosed phobic, et cetera, and how we can imagine futures, not me, but all of us together.
Speaker 1 00:26:49 Just a lot of things to talk about that, but I think I'll steer it to what I wanted to talk about next, which I mean, you've kind of already touched upon it, but, um, well this notion of slowing down the process, I think is very interesting to me as a sort of practice of, um, uh, radical anticapitalist practice, you know, so much of the, the, the force of, um, capitalist development, I suppose, capitalists urban development is about speed. You know, it's about creative destruction, right? And, um, ruining landscapes and, you know, or complex relationships that have developed over a long period of time slowly to use your term. Right. And, um, I've been thinking about this a little bit in relation recently to, um, the Pritzker prize winners, lack autonomy, VSL, right. Who mostly engaged with refurbishment, who also, again, start with the conversations with people in the, in the neighborhood, right.
Speaker 1 00:27:45 And that they're working with, uh, there's an interview with, uh, John Phillipe of a Sal way. He, he, he dismisses the idea of scale. There is no such thing as scale. If you break up the whole, uh, uh, project into series of conversations with everybody involved, you know, and, and you, you deal with at each of them individually. But, um, I feel like there was quite a resonance that I probably just because I was reading it and then reading about your talk of, um, the work of Walter heard in his, um, urban diaries and this idea of centering people, right. And actually people being really just asleep at the heart of the drawings that he, that he produces, you know, and not in a superficial way where, you know, you have the renderings and all that, but, you know, really genuinely weaving stories in and under sort of grasping the needs of the community.
Speaker 1 00:28:45 I, I don't know. It feels to me like, um, just to sort of be negative again, you know, that like the problem with design is that it gets caught up in this, this speed, this, this need to constantly be kind of producing new things and building big buildings and, you know, redeveloping the whole neighborhood and that kind of thing. Um, I don't know. Yeah. I, I think, I mean, I don't know, I tried to find quickly pictures of Walter Hood drawings, but I was more going by your discussion of them and I'd be interested to, yeah, it'd be nice to hear you talk a little bit about them because I feel like you you're quite attached to them. Right.
Speaker 2 00:29:23 Uh, there's a couple of things. Urban diaries came to me when I was an undergraduate, uh, university of Florida. I was being taught, I don't know, a little bit of a formalist, you know, mile house here in with a little bit of SCI-Arc and Columbia university thrown in and, you know, late nineties, early two thousands moment finding his book to me was kind of revolutionary mostly because it was also kind of, um, I, I place it on, I think it's in the early nineties, mid nineties, but it has a little bit of an eighties can also feeling discovering his practice. First of all, an African-American designer that had such broad than an interesting kind of body of work recently has been getting all the awards and getting the praise that probably he's been due for decades. I'm very excited about it. And there's something about this one, which was that it believed in design.
Speaker 2 00:30:14 It didn't say that design can be part of the conversation, but it centered people. And out of the stories of people that he talks about pills and retails, again, super distilled, the friend relationships and begins to talk about and draw it and draw it again and begin to scale it in different ways. And I completely agree about this question about lack of skill. I use the same process and system, and I have taught everything from interior design to urban design, to systems, design, service, design, whatever you want to call it. The schools have to break it up because schools have to break it up, et cetera. I see no difference. So I use the same methodology and this semester I was very proud and excited to try out. And so, uh, I I've done it before and I've done it with my friend, Charlene Parsons.
Speaker 2 00:31:04 I've taught it in other courses like that, but this idea of really putting it into practice. So I first learned about Walter Hood. I really enjoyed seeing the body and, um, quite honestly, black and brown bodies being put there, the dude with the boombox in the corner being thought of as a potential person with ideas around how to use space and not a new sentence, these sets of things, instead of kind of trying to design something and have people kind of conform to it, understanding everyday practices and designed to provide those practices. So then later on that design idea got combined for me with theater of the oppressed processes of creating scenes moments in which the everyday lived experience of people gets this still and talked about and understood as a systematic thing that is not about solving the problem per se, but that oppression is a system that, uh, as, as we change one thing, another thing is going to come back to oppress.
Speaker 2 00:32:07 And it's all about constantly about creating the tools to be able to name oppression and have constant conversations about it. And even one thing that I also love about presses that actually is a very formalist practice where like the way your body moves literally means something, the relationship with your body two hours. And that's Fred in very interesting ways. I brought that to the architecture lobby. We did a series of reworking architecture performances in Chicago, for example. And then I brought that to studio. I actually used to teach videos in which the first person that came was a theater of the oppressed performer that would give us lessons. And we would go through an entire practice of doing that. But this semester, we, we looked at an area called hub Redmine community, basically disinvested on purpose by the government, by banks, but for many decades recently, as everyone in the United States in many countries is beginning to rush back to downtown areas.
Speaker 2 00:33:06 This area right next to the Cleveland clinic, one of the biggest and most profitable health institutions in the world, yet some of the worst health outcomes, nutrition, et cetera, unemployment right around and downtown. So between downtown Cleveland and the Cleveland clinic, there's this stretch of red line communities working with a group here called Cleveland loans, and then folks on the ground doing some work, actually creating youth councils, looking at how narrative and storytelling, and they're doing urban planning through that. But you beginning by studying these things, identifying people, identifying actors, both some composites, some individuals like a, there was a gentleman named Marvin that works there in Huff and became a really important person because he was willing to share his story, what it was like for him to grow up in the neighborhood, what it was like for him to be incarcerated and then come back to his neighborhood and what it means for the future when he sees in his neighborhood for his kids.
Speaker 2 00:34:07 And to that story begin to talk about the carceral system, transportation processes, Java opportunities, mentorship, education, and begin to distill out of that thing. So the students began by designing for one body. Then they had to negotiate with other students and then create mutations and move up to design to two to three bodies. Then out of that, they had to scale up so constantly collapsing and bringing different skills forth with negotiations with other students. The results were a series of cooperatives that all kind of work together and all had thinking all the way down, how this collectivity is represented all the way down to the human scale, to the urban scale and how it linked to the existing people and services of the community.
Speaker 1 00:34:55 Um, I mean, I'm sure what if press on video with us, I would probably admit that there is such a thing as scale, but I think it's the same sort of thing, right. Where it's like you start kind of with, um, something more intimate or a unit that can, can be kind of built up from there. Right. And that you build from the individual scale is, um, yeah, it's very interesting. I, I, it's nice that you brought up, um, cause I wanted to talk a little bit about your context in, in Cleveland and, um, uh, I know a little bit about the Cleveland model and community wealth building, and it does seem like a, a promising, I guess, um, base for kind of something resembling a more liberated future, you know, that you acknowledge the importance of retaining the wealth that is produced on a more local scale.
Speaker 1 00:35:48 Um, it might also touch upon some of our, what we talked about before recording about folk politics, right. I don't know if you want to engage with that either because there is a problem with, um, you know, strictly thinking about keeping the wealth in the community, you know, that there, there is, um, a need for something more universal to kind of mediate that anyway, I'm kind of maybe splurging here, but I think it would be nice considering that the democracy collaborative kind of began in Cleveland and that this notion of community wealth building, although with many precedents before the anarchists in the Spanish, civil war and Rojava and as upper testers, you know, there is many, many precedents for kind of retaining wealth locally, but it would be interesting to know your, how you've observed this, this like experiment on the ground and how you might link it to maybe some of the things you've been doing with designers, protest and dark matter university.
Speaker 2 00:36:45 Yeah, totally. I mean, there's the diggers, right? And the UK and some of them, you have a Christian thing at first, and it's kind of fascinating to hear the histories of both communal experimentation co-operative and, and what those might mean as countries later with some of those even before kind of the more kind of systematic ways of looking at things in that by Marx and others came along. So there's multiple histories. There's first of all, I think your question is incredibly important because although I see some of these cooperatives and processes and efforts, uh, interesting, and then part of a potential liberate of a model, I think it's important to talk about number one, what they don't do and potentially the real problems, because in some ways, eh, nationalists are living in communes and cooperatives. They're not, uh, God giving good and bad. And that, uh, I think that even the way you phrase localism, because I am afraid of localism, generally, I'm an immigrant to the United States.
Speaker 2 00:37:51 If we go through a Localist structure, where do I belong? And not only that I don't often, and this is actually something that we at dark matter university have been talking about consistently. And, and it's a consistent kind of, it's like how none of us really design for the communities we're from, right. And even that can be problematic to say, because we all, even a lot of us are, our education might put us in a different place in a different way. We understand certain things. We can have a conversation that is a little bit closer. So all this to say the number one, eh, I think cooperatives are important. I'm about to talk about what you asked me, but I think that it's important for me to put on table that they're not a net good, that they can be used in multiple ways. And the question then about who belongs and the porosity of the systems becomes incredibly important to me.
Speaker 2 00:38:47 And then the second part of this is that it's about that. And then about the scaliness, right? Because if you are, and this is something I talked about often in New York city, like some of the new ways of making public in quotes space can be problematic because basically they require that people in the communities to pay for their own parks. So what that means is that people in the upper east side are going to have certain kinds of parts and the people in areas that can afford that, you know, the business improvement districts, whatever it is. So to understand the, the, even the conservative nature of some of that street, localism is important to us to understand, and to understand that how local efforts and these kind of organizational things have to be linked up, cannot keep a government off the hook and all the agencies, including for the past failures.
Speaker 2 00:39:37 I mean, again, some of these areas have been purposefully disinvested and wealth has been taken from them for many, many decades. So we can't just start from zero because that's not a fair place to start. It just straightforwardly. And it requires a systems and a larger skill thinking, okay. Having settled, the cooperatives, things that I think is interesting is that they're beginning to create more. And especially with the democracy, collaborative looking, I'm Andre, Bon looking at some of the existing models in Europe specifically because, you know, looking around once a month, I gone the one in Italy, Reggio, Emilia, and other have fair, better economically even through political upheaval, through economic upheaval than most other systems. So taking a look at that and looking at that a more democratic system of ownership is needed. Number one, uh, here, one of the conversations that a lot of the baby boomers are beginning to retire and their businesses are shutting down.
Speaker 2 00:40:38 So the model of creating employee ownership is even just a way to keep some of these jobs in the area. And perhaps this is a bad way to talk about it, but in an areas where literally people are just the whole conversations about how many jobs, how, and, you know, the Amazon thing that happened a few years ago showed how people were willing to sell out big chunks of cities for a few jobs. This is a real conversation that is happening. So the democracy collaborative began to looking at I'm underground and other people began to understand the Cleveland clinic is an incredibly big powerful institution. Why isn't it doing more in the community around it then basically began to try to understand what the community around it, what are the kinds of services that they could provide for the Cleveland clinic and begin to set up employee own businesses that could do that.
Speaker 2 00:41:26 So, so far they're doing the laundry. They have a gigantic and quite actually beautiful greenhouse where they grow beautiful little lettuces for the, for the cafeteria. And actually you will find that a little bit of a missed opportunity because that could be like the center of these communities. It could be actually part of the urban fabric of the place, but it's really kind of out of the way, but in the winter you see that purple and they've done that they, tons of money has been put into these cooperatives to work. It is bringing jobs, the question of how many jobs for how many people, how many people get all, those are important questions to ask, right, to begin to answer some of those questions. Another group called Cleveland Owens has been coming up. That's a more kind of in community driven effort. And it's similar to things that are happening in the bay area.
Speaker 2 00:42:15 They're even kind of doing away with some of what they see as the corporate structure, the evergreen cooperatives to create an even more radical community-based and horizontal systems that would allow those democratic processes and systems to move forward. We, and on me, I'm interested in thinking about how those efforts can also begin to create the more democratic public spaces. And again, all of this within the understanding that we can let government and other things off the hook and that it can just be a local effort because both this community have you owed to them. And also because you cannot create a conservative system and, you know, a local system is perfect for the rich, because then they can just say, you know, in my community. Yeah, sure. We'll, corporatize it. And we'll have, but it can't be like that either. I think that ideas of taxation, progressive notions of investing in community for having, especially those that have been disinvested on purpose and thinking from is important.
Speaker 2 00:43:12 And the final thing I'll say is that, and I'm particularly interested in this because the current Neo liberal solutions to many of the problems that we have, or that I've seen here in Northeast Ohio are a big in skill and nature, like to think about the field architecture kind of ethos and way of thinking. There are a skill that when they fail, they fail kind of strategically. So tons of money puts a lost-time monitors to GM and LG battery plans to these gigantic efforts and billions and billions of dollars put mostly as a sign that these political parties care about this region, because there's a politically important region. You know, it's a swing area in a swing state, all those kinds of sets of things. But the reality means that when these things fail, people are going to lose out. And even if they work out really in my main more jobs with people in Cleveland and Pittsburgh with engineering degrees and the folks on the ground are left without any of those jobs or efforts.
Speaker 2 00:44:11 So what I see then is that these cooperative efforts allows people to organize for better kind of more money allows you in organizations, governments, and foundations, to give them the money. And it allows a lowercase E economy to drive and continue. That is not dependent on these transnational. And at times, even quite honestly risky efforts that, you know, if they work out, who do they benefit if they don't work out, it really creates a pad situations for that entire community. On the last thing I mentioned is the health anchor network, the democracy collaborative is also beginning to think about the role of many other hospitals within communities. And I'm interested in that too, as a potential model and basically asking universities, hopefully help institutions, all the institutions that are both within the system, but also live outside of it that are often powerful and have money and have stakes. And they're in every community almost to think about how to better work within the communities that they're within. Usually, I don't know. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but here often hospitals can be campuses that don't look at this run community at all.
Speaker 1 00:45:24 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I already kind of said it, but like, I think when I first stumbled across it, it seemed like a no brainer and props to fellow editor, Rennie bore. I remember trying to write about community wealth building and he immediately problematizing, again, this, this notion of, um, holding wealth and w how do you decide what kind of people are the community, right. And that that's an incredibly fluffy term in a lot of senses, but I still hold onto the fact that fundamentally it's, it's about trying to identify untapped means of leverage, I suppose, for like a more prosperous situation locally and, um, a way of leveraging so that these big institutions that aren't doing enough do actually start putting their resources in the right place. Um, I think it would be nice to talk a little bit about another slice of the social movement repertoire in relation to architecture and design, which is the burgeoning, uh, move towards a workplace organization championed by groups like the one you were involved with architecture lobby, but in the UK as well.
Speaker 1 00:46:37 Um, you know, invoices of the world, section architectural workers, that again, you know, it's not, I mean, we can problematize and say like, this is not the be all and end all, and that, you know, you can't change architecture and design or turn it into something that isn't, you know, hugely damaging and extractive globally and behind a large proportion of carbon emissions, yada yada, yada, you know, um, extra, extremely exploitative in various places we could go on, but like it is promising nonetheless, I think as a sort of one tool or weapon in the attempt to try and turn or divert architecture and design towards something more liberated and ethical. It's not really got that far yet, I suppose. And, uh, I I'd be interested to know what you think, the importance I suppose, of a workplace organization for questions of anti-racist struggle and how that's been kind of developing over the past year since your work with dark matter university developed and designer's protest as well.
Speaker 2 00:47:47 Basically architecture finds itself in a very interesting place. And I don't know Charlie, and a little bit from your side on this, because here that you, as a white clutter professional, all of that stuff. Yeah. The reality is that the jobs are not always great takes a long time. These one reason why people of color often are even driven away by guidance. And I'm not one of those people that are like, oh, I played with, I never tried to be an architect, actually wanting to be an artist. And I came to architecture through art. I might have to teach a portrait and that's my into architecture. But I do remember clearly my middle class school counselor in Miami saying to not go into architecture, to a room full of like 99% Latin X community of many races, because a lot of next is not a race.
Speaker 2 00:48:41 So, uh, and, and I say, try to even recruit to, you know, when I was at Harvard GSD, they sent me to go to the normal conference and see who would be interested. And there's some conversations around this that are important to have as well. So, but, but anyway, so we're there. Uh, often I remember almost getting arrested with Peggy Deamer, uh, the 2010 something Chicago AIA convention. And as we were being a shirt out for our small protest reading the architecture lobby manifesto. But I remember as we being not shared out with the guys that were the big burly dudes that were sharing this, I was saying, so you guys find a union paint, aren't you architects, while we are a union, you guys should chat with us, I'll share it out and threatened with arrest. If he came back, we were being given pointers by a union members.
Speaker 2 00:49:30 I myself have been a union member. I been representative from everyone from the United auto workers to the government union. When I worked for the city, I've been represented by friends, at least three different unions. And perhaps there will be one more or two more in my future. Um, so all this to say that to me is important. The place that architects are in here in the U S salaries, awkward, number one, a lot of people see what we do as professionals. So both there's legal precedent that it's hard to United for that. And second, we are doing a bad job at creating solidarity outside of architecture, because I think that the only way that an organization is going to happen is if we create solidarity within entire building process system, with construction workers, with all the folks, all the folks, and it requires us thinking differently about ourselves. Again, this question of subjectivity, all these things are very different, even when we were beginning to talk about these things with Peggy 10 years and not feel like there's more of a consciousness of that in all of an architecture, et cetera,
Speaker 1 00:50:31 Which is important in itself, right? The consciousness raising element of a union, I would say, I mean, like you asked me what my experience is. I didn't train as an architect. Um, I am a member of the, uh, United voices of the world section architectural workers and the national union of journalists. And it's an interesting contrast because on the one hand you have a very, very young union where literally, I mean, as in, it's mostly composed, I think of architectural assistance and, you know, people who are sort of still studying and working through that and very, very energetic, you know, there's new members all the time, and you can see that there's like the, what we talked about earlier with the way that online has enabled certain, um, potential conversations to happen across outside of your local environment. Um, so that's been quite interesting, but, and I, you know, it's a, it's a really long way to go, but I do feel like the consciousness raising aspect is, um, is what what's, what it's about is about kind of like understanding that the ability for architects to, I dunno, make change doesn't necessarily recite in their exclusively, in their ability to design.
Speaker 1 00:51:49 And, you know, there's an argument to be had there because I think mostly we've actually spoken about some really, really interesting examples from you and more broadly, where does design actually does have some function and you would have, on the other hand, there has been, I've heard, like it said in various contexts that, you know, that isn't the way that architects can change things. And I, I, yeah, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about that.
Speaker 2 00:52:17 Uh, so I think it's incredibly important for architects seediness full stop. I think it's perhaps one of the most important things that, that we can do. It's important to begin to talk about that real and labor conditions is that I think even the little bit of organizing that has already happened in schools and outside of it is beginning to change some, some, some minds, et cetera. I think I'm more cohesive than I saw. I mentioned that we are going to begin eventually hitting some legal kind of limits how far that could go. It will be interesting to see how we navigate that to me, the most important part of unionization is that it puts us in relationship to other workers, both in places that we work in, if we are, have a break from whatever it is, but also that it puts us with other workers outside of architecture.
Speaker 2 00:53:06 I think it's important also because conversations around social and racial justice become more amplified to the very organization. And in our case with one of the widest professions in the United States, maybe the conversation with other fields kind of can begin to do something about it. I think, I think it's important to talk even about race as a, as we talk about those sets of issues, like it is almost an every aspect of American life and why it could be important for architecture to be in relationship to other folks where, because there are tons of people of color in the act of urban space making production yet, they're not always an architecture. We have to ask that question. I think a union will help and we need to bring more folks into the tent. I think that union will help. I think all those sorts of things, as well as no one in the United States advocates for the architect that organizations argue for architecture, and that's a completely different animal, right?
Speaker 2 00:54:08 And I'm not necessarily an architect. I mean, you know, I'm not licensed. I studied architecture and I consider myself one, but you know what? I consider myself in my house, nobody cares about, but the reality is that we need people that are advocating for the larger things. So now I'm thinking the architecture lobby when we started, when we started, especially what's to advocate before it was to create a union to advocate for the things that no one else, it's not for a bigger piece of the pie of that infrastructure bill, which, you know, might have its good or bad. I don't know, but you know, what about working hours? That makes sense. What about services that will make it easier for the workers to be able to do the things they do and take care of their family like childcare, et cetera. It's something that we've heard consistently about as well as I think what you're hinting at the potential of unions to begin to allow, to have conversations about the kind of work that's.
Speaker 2 00:55:02 One thing unions tend to work also much better at, at a larger scale. And I'm sure that they couldn't. We could even one problem with architecture that we have observed from the very beginning is that this union is buying work with a specific kind of architectural firm, not so then where we left and the word architect can mean anything from employee to employer, from professor to student, it can mean so much that the architecture lobby, when started, it tried to create those kinds of consciousnesses subjectivities and understand that some subjectivities are in conflict. And that's not a bad thing. That conflict is important in a democratic system. Uh, and that we could have both employers and employees centered because they're both architects, right. And everything between. So how do you have an organization like that? And that's one, one thing that unions are either going to have to think hard about, or a certain skill and con kind of practice can be unionized in which another way the other part of that is then the cooperative network aspect that, that works in a few ways, including kind of as a, as a network of independent kind of practitioners that allows those practitioners, the flexibilities skills.
Speaker 2 00:56:12 And so the, the cooperative network. And, and I think that in, in reality, for architecture to change for the better, all of these tools are going to be needed the union for the, the shops and the places that are needed, especially in relationship to the unions and the folks that are within the production of space. And then the cooperative networks that are also embedded within the larger networks of folks on the ground that are advocating for their own cooperatives and together to then help reimagine those sets of possibilities. And to me, the heart of it, all of this is to really advocate for the needs of the architect architecture. The architecture is going to get built are not going to get built, but at the end of the day, I don't think that's the goal. And a lot of our professional organizations end up doing that more often than not.
Speaker 2 00:57:04 I mean, they argue that, doing it for the architect, really just trying to bring, getting bigger chunks, which is fine, but also as individuals that need, we have put us in solidarity with others. And I think that that's, what's important to me that whatever these sets of tools, the unions, the cooperative network, we've even one time talks about the history of things like guilds and, uh, work, you know, like we've talked work benches, we've talked about a whole, the many of these tools might be necessary, but that the goal is create solidarity and to have these larger conversations to left behind. And I think that this comes back to, again, what I see as the beauty of failed architecture is the reminder that when we only go with one tool, we fail. I'm not sure if, if, if fingers, something to avoid. I'm not a hundred percent sure.
Speaker 2 00:57:59 That's what I mean. But rather a failure is something to Medicaid to understand, to work with and, and understand the beauty of me, of understanding your work, the liberate of even project. That actually, it liberated me from trying to win. Failure's an option and the likely option, because we all are working off of the things we know right now. And, uh, and that can be problematic because we don't know everything and we don't know exactly. And we don't, we don't even represent everyone. I mean, these democratic processes, these systems, these conversations, and using every tool, every design kind of the idea, every critically, not only critically is to me, my response to the things that you guys have been pointing out and that a humanist level, how we forced people to live in certain ways. So we've done certain things that, uh, our very own lack of pluralism, radical pluralism have cost.
Speaker 1 00:59:03 I, uh, I, it reminds me a little bit, I, I think you said it, the importance of like constant reflection, what projects clients to work with public statements, work practices, like it's probably the way to get architecture and design organizations from just empty sort gestures to something that resembles progress, I guess, towards the kind of future we want.
Speaker 2 00:59:28 I guess all I'll say is I think that I want to go back to when you said before, Charlie, about how, if one thing out of the pandemic that is coming with us, it might be this organizing. Again, the architecture lobby began to do some of these things. Even before we would have national calls, we would use all the tools I'm Ray available. It's probably gotten better with the, and even worth faster, to be honest, because it was just kind of immediate and constant conversation. But that I find this moment interesting, and that I, I would urge more people, more architects to join organizing efforts, to not see them as something that other people do it that I think having robust pluralistic democratic processes with big pens is the only way we can move forward to reimagine how we produce pays the kind of space we produce and who we produce a space for.
