Keller Easterling

Transcription

Good evening. My name is Pierre Belanger. I'm co-director of the MDes program with Kiel Moe. We'd like to welcome you to the spring annual event of the MDes program. And we really appreciate you taking time out of your schedules. We're always trying to figure out what is the sweet spot that you can have a lecture in the spring, where people don't start falling off and start getting exhausted. So we really appreciate you taking time out of your schedules to be with us, also for a special lecture with Keller Easterling. We'd like to provide a brief introduction to Keller's lecture, and also in the context of the MDes program that Kiel and I, as well as a group of coordinators have been really working with Mohsen over the past few years, developing a postgraduate research vision. We've been trying to ask a few questions over the past couple of years with a number of different speakers. The central one is this idea of what does support urban life. And I'm going to try to capture your attention against the background of these really repugnant images. You don't have to look at me. You can just listen. What's been particularly important also is to be able to answer this question in really practical, and also at the same time, undisciplined ways. Pedagogically, we've also been exploring the role of representation as part of the role of research as a way to advance the postgraduate environment conducive to advance research studies dealing with what we could consider the design arts and the design sciences. In that light, we're also looking to try to understand how do we extend and also stretch knowledge from the platform of the core disciplines themselves. Towards this effort, last year, we received blogger Jeff Menaw, as well as designer Christien Meindertsma, who spoke about her book PIG 05049. And they both captured our imagination, as well as our attention, asking fundamental questions about the mediation of our environments and the measures of our research methods-- how do we do research in design? This year, we also advanced these pursuits with films and filmmakers, including the work of Jennifer Baichwal and Ed Burtynsky. Almost the same time last year, their film Watermark that was screened for the first time in Boston. They explored the scales, technologies, infrastructures of urbanization. And earlier this fall, with filmmaker Raoul Peck with this film Fatal Assistance, which profiled the failure of international humanitarian aid following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. So through these creators, innovators, Kiel and I, along with the coordinators of the MDes program, have been trying to explore also how video, film, time-based representation factors a pivotal role in the communication of research and dissemination of design across the world, this possibility of being able to make design and the communication of it searchable and scalable. Launching our 30th anniversary year since the creation of the MDes program in 1985 and 1986, we were fortunate to receive Keller Easterling this evening, who will be in conversation with Charles Waldheim, chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture; John Irving, professor of Landscape Architecture, as well as founding coordinator the urbanism landscape and ecology concentration of the MDes program in 2009, 2010. I'd like to say a few words about the context of Keller Easterling's work over, really, the past two decades. There was a long list of reasons to invite you. So Shantel asked me to contain this to five minutes. So I'm going to try. I think it's important to understand the work of Keller Easterling over the past two decades as emerging out of an extremely turbulent era of the early 1990s and the late 1980s, where the shock of digitalism and deconstructivism that mark a kind of a [speaking french] transition was nothing short of both structurally turbulent and also at the same time, surprisingly, has been overlooked as an era of tremendous exhaustive and exhausting transformation. As one of its most reflexive as well as preemptive thinkers, Keller Easterling's work transcends this groundbreaking change that was occurring in the early 1990s. Not only did she live in or did she pass through this major period of transformation, but in hindsight, she can be seen as the soft heroine of a spatial avant garde that we're now just beginning to understand two decades later. As writer, urbanist, and architect at Yale, we can argue that her work belongs not only in the fields and forms of professional disciplines as we know them, but we could also propose that her work belongs in an entirely different time zone. Influenced by early collaboration with film archivist Rick Prelinger in New York, her collaboration on the laser disc on suburbia, Call it Home. Keller Easterling's preemptive work on the landscape of interconnectivity was later compiled in a book, Organization Space, published by MIT Press in 1999. It profiled researchers Patrick Geddes, Benton MacKaye, which remarkably, yet not unsurprisingly, comes out of the shadows of the school of deconstructivist though of the early 1990s that essentially marginalized and overlooked environments, overlooked ecologies and infrastructures, scales at which can be recognized in her contemporary adoption of landscape as support and system for contemporary urban life. Today, Easterling's observational empiricism is not only accelerated algorithmically over the past two decades; it's grown in significance and kind with two follow-up books, Enduring Innocence, which chronicles the rise of new spatial products, as well as the rise of infrastructural effects in the book that she'll speak about tonight, Extrastatecraft. Retroactively-- and I realize-- I turned the page-- I only have a half a page left-- retroactively, the importance of Keller's work can also be seen on two levels. She's attempted to overtly and indirectly correct the course set in motion more than 40 years go by so-called revolutionary architecture of the 20th century, a course that, according to postmodern theorist Charles Jencks proposed, and I quote, "has not been healthy or good for the environment." I'm quoting out of an article from Architectural Review that Charles Jencks did on the evolution of architecture. Reporting on the sexist and dogmatic arrogance of the 20th century architect, according to Jencks in 1999-- and I quote again-- "the revolutionary century has been dominated by men, and there are very few women among the 400 protean creators gathered from other writers." He's specifically referencing the diagram that has been so famously recycled and been reiterated in four or five different occasions as part of his work. Moving forward-- and this is a rare moment of self-reflection as part of Jenck's work on his own work-- Jencks proposes-- and I quote again, from 1999-- "an urbanism both more feminine and coherent would have been far superior to the over-rationalized and badly related boxes that have formed our cities." That's the end of the quote. So between the bank art traditions of geography, once considered, early beginning of the 20th century, as girl science, and American cultural geographers, such as Denis Cosgrove, JB Jackson, Keller's work can be seen as injecting the field of urbanism and the system of landscape as geographic subject of critical importance by making a transitive, transdisciplinary leap into the fields of design. This leap is extremely important to understand as part of her work over the past two decades. And if her work seems to fall in between certain cracks, it's only because of the distance that certain divides have between disciplines of architecture, economy, ecology, anthropology, and engineering. Easterling's eye crystallizes as what preeminent human geographer Carl O'Sauer saw in 1963 in his book Land and Life as the value of, what he quotes, "being unspecialized," where her synthetic and telescopic optic has enabled us to see urbanization as both the stratification or the strata and synthesis of power relations expressed through different skills and spaces of information. And we can see that as a transition from her work dealing with organization space to infrastructure space. In some total, her work elucidates urbanism's chaos and complexity, translating it for us-- and again, quoting Sauer-- into a vocabulary of wider and clearer intelligibility and where power forms its foundations. So I guess we can say, as the dean of infrastructural thought, Keller's work reveals the very nature and essence of infrastructure that's realized as part of the process of infrastructural products and effects in her latest book Extrastatecraft-- The Power of Infrastructure Space. I'd just like to finish off with a quote from her book, which I think captures both the work that she's done over the past two decades, but also at the same time, if you listen carefully, one can begin to understand how to be able to predict the next two decades. I'm quoting directly from her book Extrastatecraft. "Infrastructure space is a form, but not like a building is a form. It's an updating platform unfolding in time to handle new circumstances, encoding the relationships between buildings or dictating logistics. There are object forms, like buildings, and active forms, like bits of code and the software that organizes building. Information resides in the often undeclared activities of this software-- the protocols, the routines, the schedules, choices it manifests in space. Marshall McLuhan's meme, transposed to infrastructure, might be "the action is the form." Please join us in welcoming Keller Easterling. [applause] Thank you, Pierre, for that introduction. It's a pleasure to be here at this excellent place with these exceptional faculty and exceptional students. I'm showing you a bit of urban porn here. And I'm sorry that was so distracting. And in many ways, the book that I just finished is meant to be a book in dialogue with people like you. Some of my books and writings have really been reportage. But Extrastatecraft is hoping to be an adventure in thinking, and one that rehearses a habit of mind about design. So you all probably know that I have long been working on unfocusing eyes to see not only buildings with shapes and outlines, but also the almost infrastructural matrix space in which buildings are suspended. That's not an infrastructure of pipes and wires into the ground, but something like an operating system for shaping the city. And it's coded with laws and econometrics and informatics and global standards and formulas for making spatial products. You know it. You know it. It's the cartoon of skyscrapers and turning radii and malls and resorts and franchises and parking lots and golf courses and airports and airport lounges and free zones. Again, not an infrastructure that's hidden, far from it-- Something that's pressing into view and looking the same, whether it's in Texas or Taiwan, and telling emotional stories about Arnold Palmer golf and Beard Papa cream puffs. And this is, as you know, inner Mongolia. And some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world have been written in the language of this matrix space, so much so that it's become a de facto medium of polity. And you know this space is currently coded by org men and World Bank yes men and 28-year-old McKinsey consultants and quality management specialists. It's the secret weapon of some of the most powerful people on Earth. And sometimes, it seems like it's a secret that's best kept from those of us who are trained to make space. No one's leading, really, with spatial variables. So however unlikely it may seem, I'm arguing that this space brings to our art another relevance, as well as another set of aesthetic pleasures and political capacities. Also, for many of the most interesting thinkers in the arts and sciences who are looking for a more complex context in which to test some of the assumptions of their supposed science or their master narratives or methodologies, this book offers infrastructure space as a kind of test bed, a fresh test bed of evidence. So not to make the mistake of seeing interdisciplinarity as a diluting of our discipline, but rather to see spatial studies as a crossroads of other disciples, that what we know is something that those disciplines are now quite curious about. So the book is asking, with all those other thinkers looking on, what if the world could use from us for making in another register or gear? We're largely trained to make object forms, like buildings, and to assess them for their outline and shape. And so we should. And so we always will be doing that. And it's a perfectly reasonable choice to just only make object form, to choose that. But what if there is also an artistic curiosity about the active forms that are, as Pierre was saying, like little bits of code in a software that actually work with and empower object form to determine how those objects will be organized and multiplied and circulated. And precisely because it's a moment where we are focused on the ubiquity, even the political treachery, of digital information systems, I'm looking at space itself as an information system, in the same way that Gregory Bateson would say a man, a tree, and an ax is an information system. So what if we actually do know how to hack the operating system with the equivalent of a spatial software, an active form of interplay that's manifest in the head of the bulk of urban space? And what if the more formulaic this matrix space, the more difficult it is to design meaningful object form? And maybe it may even be easier to design active forms, to exploit the existing multipliers in that matrix with amplifying effects. And does this matrix space even tutor an expanded repertoire, not only an expanded repertoire of form making, but an expanded unorthodox approach to political activism that's finding political capacities latent in organization and underexploited in governance? So I want to return to those questions. But I just want to put some evidence on the table first. Of all the spatial softwares that are currently circulating around the globe in the spatial operating system, a dominant software is the free zone. It's the infrastructural technology that the world now uses to make cities, the promotional videos that are always the same. They just zoom from outer space, that drop down through clouds and locate a position on the Earth, which is now the new center of the Earth. And a deep movie trailer voice comes on to list all the requisite features. And stirring music accompanies a swoop through cartoon skylines and resorts and suburbs and sun flares. This zone, what is it? It's a relatively dumb enclave form. And nobody really knows why we use it, except that the world has become addicted to its special form of incentivized urbanism. It is the world's most popular contagious form, world city paradigm. But as a software, it's more primitive than MS-DOS. But the wild mutations of this form over the last 30 years I find strangely inspiring because they make a world look insanely impenetrable. But of course, it has ancient roots and pirate enclaves and free ports. But the zone mutated in the early 20th century, as a US term, from an early 20th century warehousing compound for storing custom free trade to a UN-promoted formula for jump-starting the economies of developing countries. This export processing zone, as it was called, set up authorities independent from the domestic laws of the host country. So it provided incentives like tax exemptions and foreign ownership of property and streamlined customs, cheap labor, deregulation of labor and environmental law. And those are the same mantras that you hear the deep movie trailer voice repeat, the neoliberal mantras that are describing sort of someone else's freedom. And while it remained in the backstage, zone growth accelerated exponentially after China adopted it as a market experiment. And now China is kind of its own zone category, employing the largest number of zone workers in the world, making the zone a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. UNIDO thought that the zone would just dissolve back into the economy of the host country. But the opposite happened. Everything wanted to locate in the zone-- why wouldn't it-- to enjoy this kind of lubricated economic condition and the kind of political quarantine. The zone is kind of the perfect island of corporate externalizing. So then, having sort of swallowed selected programs and ejected others, it's become a germ of an urban epidemic that reproduces glittering mimics of Dubai and Singapore and Hong Kong all over the world. So the zone that used to look like this or this-- this is a maquiladora in Tijuana-- or this now looks like this or this or this. And while in the '60s there were a handful of zones in the world today, there are thousands, some measured in hectares, some measured in square kilometers. It's still treated by the global consultancies as the Shibboleth, the essential signal of entry into the global marketplace. It's the nexus of every global technology, the place of headquartering for every global player, always described as a sort of clean slate, one-stop entry into the economy of a foreign country. Meanwhile, in its sweatshops and dormitories-- and this is a particularly cleaned up one-- they are still hidden, legally stabilized sites of often quite grisly labor abuse. And it still fails to deliver on its economic promises. And yet, the zone now more and more longs to call itself, or does call itself, a city. Now, perhaps even more than China, you all know-- you've studied it-- Dubai has used the zone to distinct advantages, as you know. It's an aggregate of zone enclaves for almost every imaginable program, and many of them calling themselves a city. You know this-- Dubai Maritime City, Dubai Knowledge Village, Dubai Media City, Dubai Health Care City. And each has a raft of different exemptions and laws. In Dubai Media City, there's something like free speech for some people. Dubai international city-- but it's the same right around the world. I've been collecting urban porn, like I showed you at the beginning. And I've collected hours of it as these forms travel around to 130 countries in the world. This is HITEC city outside of Hyderabad. And now, surpassing irony, even major cities and national capitals want to have their own zone doppelgangers that allow state and non-state actors to use each other as brand or proxy or camouflage-- you probably know there's this new Songdo city, a kind of double of Seoul in the Incheon free trade zone, based on Venice, New York, Sydney, Central Park, Canal Street, World Trade Center. Or really surpassing irony, Astana, the newly minted capital of Kazakhstan, as supposedly the center of law now in a zone. This is President Nazarbayev, sort of paleoGenghis competition with Dubai. So the zone is a very vivid vessel of extrastatecraft, the title of this book, where the "extra" means outside of and in addition to the state. Extrastatecraft doesn't describe a post-national world, but a world where the nation has a new set of sneakier partners and multiple nested forms of sovereignty. So the zone emerges from this as a kind of-- I was just in dialogue with Saskia Sassen-- you can see it almost as a kind of gear of the expulsions that she describes. And it kind of emerges from that, what she calls, economic cleansing, as a kind of strange form of intentional community with colored fountains and faith in golf. And it's a place where everyone speaks the esperanto of standards of quality management ease. And it has fantasy resorts and palaces where petrodollars can get away to relax. And the videos get more and more delirious as the imagery becomes more and more contagious around the world. [video playback] -Nothing is as rare and desirable as diamonds. Diamond Palace attracts magically, fascinates inside and out with its scintillating architecture. The inner design of the palace transforms the image and emotion of the diamond onto the visitor, letting them become a part of the myth of the diamond. [helicopter] [end playback] And the organizational and political constitution of the zone is always portrayed in this kind of, if not extreme luxury, openness, relaxation, freedom. But maintaining an autonomous control over a closed loop of circumstances, the zone embodies an inherently violent, isomorphic disposition. It's in an information paradox. An enormous amount of information is pulled down in these trade centers, but an enormous amount of information to remain information poor, a kind of special stupidity that is the common tool of power. And while it's extolled as an instrument of economic liberalism, the zone often trades a kind of state bureaucracy for even more complex layers of extrastate governance and market manipulation. And for all its efforts to be apolitical, it's in the crosshairs of global conflict. And this supposed tool of economic and logistical rationalization is really a perfect crucible of irrationality. And the next poorest country wants its mirror tiled skyline at any cost. We could look at another huge shift in global infrastructure space by dropping down into East Africa, specifically Kenya. It was one of the last places on Earth to receive international fiber optic cable and one of the places that's now poised to experience some of the most explosive telecommunications growth. So in 2009, it looked like this. And now it looks like this. And now there are three international submarine cables. The country's flush with broadband. It's serving a dense population of cellphones. And their cellphone ads, the telecom ads, look like this. And as you know, but just to say it again, in 2000, there were 750 million cell phone subscriptions in the world. Now there's 6.8 billion. And 3/4 of them are in the developing world. Mobile telephony is the world's largest shared platform. Broadband infrastructure is a resource that's treated like water. And in Kenya, there's plenty of those 28-year-old McKinsey consultants and bankers on the ground. And the development expertise is spoken in the languages of business and technology and informatics and econometrics, all kinds of metrics to link broadband to GDP to predict the impacts of broadband on what they called development 2.0. It's filled with jargon that you would expect. And there's plenty of new entrepreneurs writing software for billions of cellphones. And those entrepreneurs, now that's where the business models are coming from. And there are entrepreneurs who know how to use the cellphone as a multiplier and carrier of all kinds of relationships that have enormous spacial impact. But the spacial consequences are somehow treated as a kind of accidental byproduct of these networks. Probably any urbanist worth their salt would know about the relationship of a highway and a railroad to the city. They would know how those infrastructures territorialize. But we're under-rehearsed in understanding the spatial consequences of broadband and mobile telephony, the fixed fiber that territorializes not unlike a highway or a railroad, the atomized cloud of cellphones and microwaves, and then all of the switches in between, any one of which can become a choke point or monopoly. So digital technologies have spatial consequences, but spatial technologies also have consequences on digital networks. And yet, no one's deliberately writing the protocols that start with space in the broadband technoscape. And all you find is a kind of generic, outmoded zone on offer. So Kenya's getting that, the same-- Konza Techno City or LAPSSET is treated like a good idea. It's a transportation corridor between Lamu and Juba, the capital of South Sudan, as will be studded with zones and resorts and deliver oil for refining to the coast. So in a country that's poised to change the terms of urban around infrastructure, they are adopting an old, potentially dangerous development formula around heavy resource extraction. And there's more of it, more plan, like Machakos New City or new Kenya-China Economic Zone or somewhere else in Africa-- you can maybe turn the volume up a little bit-- [video playback] -Lean forward to the Golden Coast. KELLER EASTERLING: --Nigeria. -Lekki Free Trade Zone is receiving every day the warm breeze from the Atlantic. The German philosopher Hegel once said, the breeze from the ocean is a call for trading. Similarly, the breeze blowing over Lekki Free Trade Zone is sending you a warm and a faithful invitation for investment and trade. Please accept this warm invitation and call. Go to Lekki for investment. Go to Lekki for development. KELLER EASTERLING: Anyway-- -Let us join hands in cooperation to create a beautiful tomorrow. [end playback] KELLER EASTERLING: Yes, yes. Wipe the tears from your eyes. So that used to be the end of my talk. But in Enduring Innocence, I was largely reporting on what was out there. But in Extrastatecraft, I'm trying to mix-- and you'll see if you think this works-- but I'm trying to mix evidentiary segments with contemplative segments in a book that's rehearsing a habit of mind, rehearsing for an encounter with the space. So again, we know that we can contribute object form to this matrix space, and that would be an exceptional experiment. There have been exceptional experiments in object form in these environments. But if there is an artistic curiosity about designing not only object form, but active form, the active form that's like the little bits of code in the software that would allow us to kind of hack into some of the world's most powerful spatial softwares, how do you do it? How does one begin to design a spatial interplay that's like software, that's like a little machine for producing space? Well, if I've done my job in this book, there should be the sense that we already know how to do it, that it's only a skill or a talent that's been under-rehearsed or, I would say, under-indulged, because in this field of nearly identical suburban houses, we see object forms, but we also know that there's a simple software or operating system there that is doing something and that that agency is decoupled from stories about home ownership and patriotism. In other words, it's saying something different from what it's doing. And we know what it's doing. It's doing something that makes some things possible and some things impossible, just like an operating system. There's a bit of simple code here. And it's the simplest of active forms that's at work here. It's a multiplier. It's generating multiple slabs and frames and roofs in this almost agricultural matrix space. And we can design the single house, the single object form. We can rush up to one of those and fix it with all our skills. But it would extend our power to be able to also design it as an active form, another multiplier or contagion that uses the organization as a carrier, a multiplier that potentially changes this landscape, like the elevator changed urban morphology. And we were just talking about the cellphone, which is, in some ways, an elevator, will have that much impact. We're less accustomed to the idea that space can be an actor and that it can be a carrier of information, that's it's an information system even if it's not coded with sensors and information technologies. Space, however static, possesses agency. And that information resides in what we can only call disposition, the character or propensity of an organization that resides in the activity or the potentials latent in the organization. And there's nothing mysterious about that word "disposition," word in common parlance. A ball on an inclined plane, through its geometry and relative position, it possesses disposition. And we already know something about the topology or wiring of an organization as a marker of its disposition. Network topology begins with an urban question, like the Koenigsburg bridge problem, which, I'm sure you know, began with a sort of bet in a bar, that you couldn't get back to that bar without crossing one of the bridges of Koenigsburg more than once. We know about that disposition, the latent potential in typology, in sequence, relationship linkage. And these relationships in space that are almost so patently obvious to us are not obvious to some 28-year-old McKinsey consultants and bankers and org men who are currently manipulating this space. We know the disposition of these organizations. We even know something about their political temperament, which adds yet another power, skill to what we know. Where they concentrate power or authority or violence, we know how to adjust that. We know which one is a smuggling ring. We know which one is mainframe computing. We know which one is like a railroad. We know which one is like buried fiber, which one's like clouds of microwaves. We know which one's like the zone in disposition, which one was like FireChat, the little protocol that the protesters in Hong Kong used to avoid the central kill switch. And one simple example of a spatial software that I always use-- and forgive me if you've heard me say this before-- but one simple software is Savannah. It's an 18th century American city that Oglethorp designed. He didn't design the plat as an object form, but rather as a software, as a kind of growth protocol. The town would grow by wards. And those wards provided explicit instructions for relationships about quotients between public or private or green space, as well as agricultural space beyond. So when you had a ward, you also would reserve a quotient of agricultural space beyond. He didn't design a thing, but an instruction for relationships between things. And you didn't know the shape of the town's outline, even though you had an explicit measured spatial instruction. I would say it's like a governor, like a thermostat as a governor, an interplay between counterbalancing variables or a time-released instruction for the ongoing activities of urban space. So it's pretty simple. We can design a multiplier. We could design a delta. We could design a valve, a governor, a switch. We can tune a topology. And all these things are like-- they're not the only one, but they're like little markers or bits of code or active forms that are kind of like the spatial equivalent of software. So they're shaping not a single object form, but a stream of objects. And I just hasten to say-- I guess I've said it already-- but I just hasten to say again, this is a non-modern proposition. Active form does not replace. Object form works with it, propels it, hopefully into a kind of redoubled territory of operation, again, with different aesthetic pleasures and political capacities. But the aesthetic pleasures of active form and interplay, if they're dispositional, if they're time-released, they're often less about knowing that and more about knowing how, which I'm borrowing from Gilbert Ryle. So in some ways, the aesthetic pleasures, if they involve knowing-- I'll slow way down-- if they involve knowing how, they're about exceeding intellection. It's a habit of mind that's capable of working with changing unfinished process for which there can only be dynamic markers. So it's a mind like a chess master, so I could see many moves ahead, except that this game can't be rationalized. I would say, in this world, confidence games trump game theory, or cybernetics of behaviorism or any of the other kind of determinant frameworks that our discipline has gotten stuck on at various moments, snagged on. The markers are indeterminate-- sounds contradictory-- but the markers are indeterminate to be practical. Like one can only know how to navigate a river by observing the ripples and dimples that are changing on the surface. You can only know how to kind of correlate card combinations in poker against the changing faces of the players. You can only know how to feel for the potentials in bread and dough or land a plane in high wind or sling plaster or hustle or kiss or tell a joke. There's things you can only know how to do. And active forms and the dispositions they generate are markers or diagnostics in the fluid politics of Extrastatecraft. So that used to be maybe another place where the talk could end. And this book talks less about what to do and more about how to do it. But maybe it's useful to sort of back to the zone or go through a few examples. If we return to the zone, in addition to designing the skyscraper, we can take advantage of the fact that the zone is itself a contagious platform, as it's obvious. We could design something to multiply within the zone and potentially change it as radically as it's changed over the last 30 years. And you see things like those coloredy fountains that race through a population of zones. Many things become contagious within it. So a hack might release a germ. And the aesthetic pleasures there are not about I finished the master plan. The aesthetic pleasures are about exploiting a contagion, about population effects. Or a hack might establish a kind of time-released interplay. For instance, given a zone's ambition to be a city, it may already even carry the genetics of its own reversal, its own antidote. One way to hack the zone-- and if there is a one-liner in the book, it might be this-- but one way to hack the zone is to map selected zone incentives back onto existing cities rather than ex urban enclaves, return the zone to the rule of law when it comes to the oversight of labor, and more directly, return financial benefits to the domestic economy. It's what UNIDO thought would actually happen. And just as there is an interdependence between something like public and private space in Savannah, a zone incentive can become part of a time-released counterbalancing interplay. In Nairobi, for instance, if zone centers were located in Nairobi instead of a new Kenya-China Economic Zone or something, zone incentives could be linked to any number of things-- for instance, transit. And that machine for generating space develops infrastructure while also delivering workers to business. So what the work would be-- again, not the master plan, not the thing, but the identifying of counterbalancing linkage. Digital variables, as we said before, influence space. But the spatial variables also influence digital networks. So if the constant desired outcome in Nairobi, the outcome of broadband urbanism, is to access information, then crucial is access to the information of the digital systems, but it's also crucial to access the information of the city. Even outside Nairobi, an active form might place broadband and roads in an interdependence. Seems unlikely. But dialing up broadband for the fixed service that attracts university and tourism might result in dialing down roads, roads that would disrupt the wilderness and indigenous culture, the information carried in space that's important to universities and tourism. Dialing up broadband also makes roads less essential. And roads can interrupt the spatial information of the city by inflating spaces and distances for vehicles, information, again, embedded in the city that's made more immediate by walking or transit or bicycle. So an architect who can make active form as well as object form-- into another example-- can think about even not only making the development lurch forward, but making it go into reverse. If object form usually results in the addition of more stuff, does an active form let you do even the opposite, put the building machine into reverse? Can we use the interplay of counterbalancing forces to target or contract or even delete development in the floodplains of New Orleans or Bangkok, in the Amazon rainforest or in McMansion suburbia? And I won't go into detail, but one software, like Savannah in reverse, or if you play Go-- I don't know if you play Go-- but like a reverse game of Go, is a subtraction protocol-- I'll just race through here-- but something that is about making not walls, but clearings, making an interplay between properties that may even be remote to each other. And less important than the details of this little software-- that's another lecture-- but it's just the idea, the habit of mind about designing interplay itself. This is another one, which is about retreating from floodplain by using a set of levers to do with insurance and mortgage. So I won't go into detail about it. There are not only different aesthetic pleasures, but also different political capacities of active form and infrastructure space. And they're different from the familiar scripts of political activism, where you usually find strongly held, forthright beliefs that galvanize around declaration, a fight for solidarity, decency, justice. And an activist may fight and die for these principles using techniques that at many junctures in history have required enormous courage to enact. David must kill Goliath. That's the sort of classic script that we are equipped with. And yet, many powerful players in infrastructure space survive on fluid, undeclared intentions. And it's pretty easy for them to toy with and trick descent if declaration is considered to be the only thing that registers as information. So when targeted, they wander away from the bullseye. Or Goliath finds a way to come dressed as David. Or they're saying something different from what they're doing. The story is discrepant from the real disposition of the organization, which I keep arguing we would be very good at detecting. But it's in these situations that dissent is often left shaking its fists at an effigy. It showed up to the proper barricade or border crossing. But the real violence is happening over your shoulder. The real violence is happening somewhere else and can only cure the problem with another purification ritual. And there's surely moments when dissent must stand up and name an opponent and assume as kind of binary stance of resistance. But I'm trying to think about a kind of auxiliary, some way of supporting this dissent with the dispositional capacities of infrastructure space that are more performative than prescriptive. So they offer a dissensus that's harder to target, less interested in binaries, and less interested in being right, a shrewder, cagier counter to the stealthy global players, an alternative extrastatecraft, where the declared intention may be less important than the undeclared disposition and where righteousness may be less consequential than the discrepant or the fictional or the sly. So I'm sort of describing a sneakier David, who would never bother to kill Goliath, but a David who could be a secret partner to the righteous activist, maybe even soften up ground to increase their chances of success, maybe an unwelcome, unwitting partner to that righteous activist. And that auxiliary activist works, again, less on knowing that or knowing what, knowing what to righteously oppose, and works more on knowing how to oppose it. So consider what are the political capacities of something like a switch or a remote that benefits from remaining not only indirect, but maybe also undetected or at a distance, reconditioning at a remove in space and time. For activists here, we often long to directly confront and cure a problem, just as the designer often longs to address urban issues with object form, get our hands dirty, go to the actual place. But often, the real toggles of urbanity may be elsewhere. And active form maybe allows you to adjust the capacities of entire network by altering the repertoire of one's switch within it. Also, infrastructure spaces is not a duel. And in this dispositional register, one doesn't square off against every weed in the field when you can remotely change the chemistry of the soil. The multipliers that make up infrastructure space can be accelerated by all the irrationality that I've been showing you, by narrative active forums, like a rumor. Rumor is one of the most successful political techniques, rumor and gossip. And maybe only a design that combines organizational active forms with narrative active forms has any chance of successfully engaging the world's spacial products. A couple of years ago, I was invited to a conference of zone developers. And I gave them fair warning that I was a critic of the zone. And they were-- oh, Professor Easterling. They were so nice about it. But I sort of realized it was the perfect place to spread a rumor, to tell a little lie, to tell a rumor that the next smart report, that the next smartest zone operators were doing what we were just talking about, locating zone incentives in existing cities to avoid all kinds of costs and to find-- and I went through the whole thing. And there were plenty of people, almost everyone who bit on that hook. And in some ways, it doesn't matter. It's like an anecdotal thing. What does become the new contagious symbolic capital? It's what is obviously fueling this. It can't be more unlikely than buildings that are shaped like diamonds or dolphins. Or in addition to kind of binary resistance, the tense resistance of the binary, consider the power of non-oppositional inflections of active forms, like the gift or the panda or forms of exaggerated compliance. The panda, as you know, is a sweet, sort of arm-twisting gift, like China's gift to Taiwan of two pandas, their names, when translated, meant "reunion" or "unity." And we have running through our fingers pandas. The zone incentives or broadband capacity might be just such a leveraging gift. But they're often not used to leverage anything. They're not part of an active interplay. Or in Domination and the Arts of Resistance, James C. Scott provides this great example of exaggerated compliance that he finds in a portion of Milan Kundera's The Joke. In that novel, you remember, the prisoners in the story are challenged to a foot race against the guards. And so they know they have to lose. And the prisoners decide to run very slowly against the sprinting guards. So their compliance disarms and delivers independence from authority. And in Extrastatecraft, it's the same thing. Picking one's submissions rather than one's battles is an almost invisible, noncontroversial means of gaining advantage in a field. Sometimes it allows you to do it without drawing attention to your larger strategy. The binary dispositions of head-to-head conflict are often marked by competition, by symmetrical mimicry, that leads to escalating violence. But another kind of mimicry, the double, can be a source of confusion or disguise or trickery, the doubles to shill or the proxy, like the twin siblings that fool the world. The double can hijack the existence of its counterpart. And you see that already in the doubles that I showed you. Rather than engaging in a fight with the risk of escalating it or being drawn into its vortex, all of the active forms might be politically enhanced by distracting from the fight. Meaninglessness that is considered by the forthright activist to be a complete evacuation of principles can be the opposite. It can be incredibly politically powerful. Misdirections and distractions can lull and redirect the most intractable political situations. Obfuscations, irrational desire, circuitous stories are lubricants with enormous political instrumentality. It's all I see. And like the comedian who learned to tell jokes to keep his parents from fighting, that's part of not knowing that, but knowing how. An architect might even know how to deploy a spatial variable to reduce the violence of binaries or dissipate monistic concentrations of authority as they are embedded in space. So in infrastructure space, it's routine to deal with the irrational, the discrepant, and the indeterminate, because it's not only more practical, but more vigilant, than righteousness. With active forms of interplay, a snaking chain of moves can worm into matrix space and gradually generate leverage against intractable politics. So maybe when we pan back over this matrix space, we see nothing but artistic opportunities, an additional kind of pleasure, artistic pleasure, and excess and power in the art of infrastructure space. Infrastructure space may be the secret weapon of the most powerful, but two can play at this game. Thank you. [applause] So if you'd like to hold on for a few minutes, Charles Waldheim is joining us in conversation with Keller Easterling. We have 15, 20 minutes for conversation, a few questions. We thought that it'd be appropriate to kind of transition to questions, that we could in many respects invite Charles to share a few reflections. And also, at the same time, I was thinking maybe Kiel and I-- I'm not sure whether or not, after the lecture, we should invite Richard Branson to lecture or not next year. But we can consult with the dean afterwards. But thank you very much, Keller. I'll leave you with the floor, Charles. Thanks, Pierre. I'm sure that Beth Kramer in developmental would welcome Richard Branson. I'm sure we can see him on a poster soon. Pierre has given me the enviable but impossible task of following Keller's prose. So I just want to begin by just taking a moment and pausing and just saying, I don't know about you, because I could sit there and listen to that all night. It's kind of you to be here. And I know that we want to spend the bulk of our time continuing to her Keller elaborate her thoughts and hearing from you with your questions. It's striking to me that, among other things, one could begin by saying, Keller, your work has been so impactful for so long, for so many of us. And at the same moment, I think it's timely to reflect on it in the context of the MDes specifically. We have this luxury of these round-numbered anniversaries. And I'm thinking of the MDes 40-year anniversary, but also the 50th anniversary his year of the founding of the laboratory for computer graphics, which we'll be commemorating in a couple of weeks, as well. So with those kind of legacies in mind, for me, I think one of the most interesting questions to begin with would be the shift that you signal over the two most recent books, which really work as a set of paired complementary between Enduring Innocence and Extrastatecraft. From what you described as reportage to something that's, on the one hand, meant to be more directly political, but also a bit more of a disciplinary formation, it's been a bit more challenge for us in these buildings. And I just want to hear you say something a little bit more off script about that and the evolution of your thinking. What caused you to think that moving beyond reportage was timely and important to do? Well, I found it always so strange that the questions after Enduring Innocence that I would be asked, but what are your politics? And I didn't understand the question. How could you say what your politics are? I mean, obviously, we are all opposed to the abuses of other human beings and the environment. That's the easy part. But how to do those things, how to approach them, seem to be the-- [phone ringing] --question. That's not my phone. Might be. Sorry. It's calling. Branson. It's Branson. So sorry. Sorry about that. And I'm a designer. I'm a designer. And I work with students on design. And so it also seemed to me that many of these things which we have long regarded in our discipline as something that's outside of the discipline, that has nothing to do with our art, it becomes so clear that it's possible that it amplifies our powers, that the very pervasiveness of this space is this something that potentially amplifies our powers. So it seemed that then design studios and so on could be rehearsals for that. So it's maybe just starting to reflect the ongoing work with these spaces. In that context, I think many of us here have been, over the last several years, and I suspect maybe in other schools or architecture, as well, still struggling with the question of, on the one hand, the desire for autonomy, cultural autonomy of the architect, the role of the architect and their purview, their agency, the space of their activities, relative to the petered externalities that you and I and others are so interested in, in a kind of debate around, on the one hand, rehearsing a kind of Gesellschaft, Gemeinschaft debate interminably. But at the same moment, if these externalities are within the purview of the agency of design, then a whole host of questions appear immediately that you begin to address, I think, in both books, and certainly in the most recent one most forthrightly. So on the one hand, I think you make a very clear argument for how this epistemology, this way of seeing the world, this way of understanding the world, producing knowledge in it, might position the architect on campus with a renewed sense of centrality, or at least a renewed relevance for audience. And that seems fairly clear in what you said this evening, but also in the book itself. I remember just recently, in the last couple of years, when a variety of people at the Kennedy School realized that our students know how to map things really well. All of a sudden, we started getting a lot more invitations to things. And with a great deal of enthusiasm, of course, we all accepted them. And then, after a year or so, we began to realize, well, we're just illustrating what's going on in the Jordan Valley and these other forces and flows that you describe. And so could you say something more about that, the introduction of these topics for the architect or those in the design sphere and their centrality within the play of disciplines on campus? And beyond simple illustration, beyond reportage, what role does the education of the architect play in kind of recentering the design disciplines on campus? That's such a good question. Well, I have been trying in a small at Yale to elevate spatial studies among the other disciplines from global affairs to health to environment to forestry and art and so on. I think Yale probably is the place which is training the 28-year-old McKinsey consultant or CIA agent. I don't know. And their global affairs are still about nation state and very mid-century sort of training. So it's become very clear to me that for them to be able to have a chance to think about the power of spatial variables is important. I don't know how successful I've been in making it more central. But it is a way to sort of trip the lock on that conundrum or the ongoing perennial argument that we often have in our disciple, some kind of fear of losing disciplinarity, some kind of fear of diluting. But that is not the problem. But it's more that there are other disciplines outside of ours that could use our knowledge and could use our special skills and our correlative thinking and on and on. It's a persuasive argument. I think, in some ways, your intellectual project more broadly, by reclaiming space, all of space and the production of space, as the [inaudible] of our fields, I think your longer term intellectual project speaks to that even beyond just these two books. So staying with the disciplinary relationships, I have a moment where I was thinking it would have been interesting if Neil Brenner had been here this evening. And I won't be able to do his precise intonation. But I want to suggest if Neil were with us, he might say something like, OK, so extrastatecraft-- your formulation of extrastatecraft implies, at least, among other things, that what goes on within the FTC, within Free Trade Zone, is really outside the state's monopoly on a certain set of jurisdictional and operational protocols. But I have a sense that if Neil were with us, he would ask something like, is it in fact precisely through the power to deliver the Free Trade Zone that the state is inscribing its power? Isn't this just a re-inscription of state powerfulness? And in what ways is it external to that? It is another power of the state. But it's the state, as I was saying, with a new set of sneakier partners. It's a longstanding oscillation, a historical oscillation. The state gets pirates. The state gets another set of more powerful pirates. It was interesting in dialogue with Saskia last week, because she talks about a kind of de-nationalizing process that is about empowering some selected players and disempowering others in that process. It doesn't erase the power of the nation. It makes the nation powerful in another way and delivers that power to, usually, a select few who are in partnership with the state. So yeah, outside of and in addition to the state. And so in that regard, your call for habit of mind, a propensity for and ability to respond to, to not simply describe, to be prepared to hack, to intervene upon, to throw some sand in the years, if not a spanner. All of that are really about the audiences in this building and about how we might be able to get beyond the simple empirical after a couple of decades of empirical work. It strikes me that it would be fair also to situate your work in this regard in a lineage of the last couple of decades. I'm thinking of work that Pierre was referencing from the 1990s of people like Alejandro Zaera-Polo or Alex Wall, in which logistics, operating protocols, infrastructure were seen as a kind of other. And in that work, there was an appropriation into our field that had a sense of diversification, of expanding the realm, the agency of the architect. But I think, having participated in that myself a little bit, I think, overwhelmingly, that economy has been in one direction. That is, we in architectural culture have been learning from these forces and flows and processes and changing the terms of reference for our own work, changing the context for our own cultural production. At the same moment, it's challenging enough to come upon examples of that economy working in both directions. And so I think it would be fair in this context to draw you out a little bit more on, are there cases, examples, we could point to from your work for this audience in which it's not simply we fetishizing the operational performance and condition and political economy of infrastructure, but in fact, where the architect was kind of upstream far enough to hack the system? Yeah. It's tricky to know where to place yourself in that. And it is something that has to be rehearsed. Almost one wants to rehearse your reactivity to different situations rather than to say, this is the way to do it, that there is only one way to do it. But there would be many ways to do it. And I agree with you that it concerns me when architects seem less powerful than they are, than they should be. So you might think, oh, well, the way to do that is to learn to work with an NGO or something like that-- and that's absolutely not what I'm saying-- or that there's some proper way to enter politics, to learn about policy. That's not what I'm saying. And in fact, in the book, there's a story about ISO and other kinds of proper parliaments of the NG-ocracy. And so I'm sort of suggesting that one doesn't go get that second degree in global affairs, necessarily. That's not what I'm saying, but that we have ways of-- well, I don't know how to do this, because you need sort of like 20 examples or none. But there are many ways in which we can hack that system. And I don't know if you want me to give examples. So here's an analogy that comes to mind. I wonder if this would fit the bill for you. So in the last several years, within the MDes, there's been quite a lot of enthusiasm for what we generically refer to as border studies, the role of the architect and returning to mapmaking, cartography, in revealing the spaciality of a certain political economy or a certain set of political choices. And so that's one set of examples that would be available. In that regard, I do think that there is something recurring about the architect's ability to organize and manage information with a certain professional identity. But I think a part of what's really so impactful for me in the last two books has been the notion that the spatial metier is itself always inherently political. And it seems to be consistently, throughout both books, the idea that the material that we're working with, the media itself, is itself political. It inscribes a set of political relationships. And that in some ways-- I'm inferring, and correctly me that I get this wrong-- in some ways, I take your position to be that by reaching out and getting the third degree in political science or joining the NGO or externalizing all of its social agency neglects the inherent politics of space itself. Is that a fair reading? Well, it's just that you all are-- and the work that you do here, is exceptional. And the work of architects at this level is so information rich. I could tell you, in studios that we work on at Yale, where we were actually-- so we're actually rehearsing these things, and rehearsing both object form and active form. Why would you give up? Again, it's a non-modern proposition. It's adding skills to the repertoire, but heavily reliant on object form. But we do studios which are not kind of masterpiece studios, where you design your finished masterpiece, but studios where you are allowed to test your reactivity to different conditions. So there are studios that are more like an improv class in a drama school. And the students design more and more and more. I mean, I'm at Yale, so the dean has to look sort of with half-closed eyes from six feet away and see lots of object form. And it answers all of those things. But there is throughout the test a series of forks in the road and decisions where students are allowed to test their political savvy, make forms on all different kinds of level, from irrational desires to technical details, highly technical details. If you don't have that technical skill, it's not going to work. And some of those students have been successful. They're actually doing it. Parenthetically, still set in every mid review, I recall this about-- it's, to my mind, quite remarkable. So one of the things I want to press on a little bit has to do with our context here in the reception or in the wake of Ferguson. We've had a number of conversations in this space, in this building, about the implications of the conversations that are taking place about race and space and social justice and social agency. And among other things that came out of those discussions was that for many of our colleagues, many of our cohort, a sense that what was really immediately most pressing and available wasn't spatial, necessarily, a sense that, well, there are courses on campus, maybe at the Kennedy School, maybe at the law school, and a sense that the real traction, the real street credibility, the real issues had to do with the nexus of media, popular opinion, law, governance. And I, for one, at least, have participated in many of those conversations. I think it's been a very important set of conversations for us. And at the same moment, I feel as though we are only just now beginning to come to terms with, well, what are the special implications? What do we have by way of knowledge in these areas that don't fall directly into immediately social justice post '68 in planning as opposed to the autonomy of design culture? And that's pretty far afield from your talk tonight. And so don't hesitate to wave me off. But any thoughts about that as it pertains to your interests? Well, the obvious social justice issues in infrastructure space have to do with labor and how labor is treated-- environment, as well. But I'm always amazed that, again, in the NG-ocracy that speaks in informatics and standards. Even the activist NGOs speak in terms of standards, like kind of mimicking the ISO 9000 quality management, because it's a habit within the corporate world. But I see that there are often things like standards, there's a currency of something like that. And often, there are new standards to do with environment. That's an easy one because it comes with-- I'm sure you talk about this all the time-- because it comes with another kind of asset for a corporate culture. But there is nothing about labor. There's one standard that I've found in ISO about how long a man can stay in a refrigerator. But there is nothing, there is nothing, to-- and as you know, most of the global superpowers have signed no compact about how labor will be treated. And this goes on for decades. There's no hope that somehow-- or there may be hope when one works on the legal side and on the standard side. But in the meantime, part of the idea about infrastructure space and what we know about a city, we know that a factory that's in the middle of Nairobi or a factory that's way out where no one can see it, we know the power of a city. And it's an undeclared power. But again, what you know about urbanity is incredibly powerful and can be a kind of undeclared power. It doesn't seem dangerous to anybody. Or at least there's that potential. There's that potential in space to-- if we were doing as I was suggesting, locating factories back in cities instead of ex urban enclaves, we know the power of a city to bring some more surveillance or potentially to return the oversight of that labor to the rule of law. So those are the kin of issues that are out there in infrastructure space. And again, space could be a powerful, undeclared point of leverage in it. I know that there are questions in the audience. As you're getting your questions teed up-- I think we have a couple of microphones-- I can't help but take the self-indulgent opportunity just to talk to you just about writing. Apart from what the subject matter or the content is, the implication for these fields and what we've been discussing, this is an observation-- and I'm happy to be dissuaded-- but my perception has been, as a reader of your work, that there has been a longstanding interest in the writing for its own sake. That may be overstating it, but the idea of writing as such. But with these two most recent books in particular, my sense of it is, well, you've always been in command of the material. You've also in these two books been in control of a sense of the craft, if I could put it that way, and not only the symmetry between the spoken word here and what's in print, but equally, moments when the language, the Barthian sense of the rustle of language pushes back. And if you could say a little-- I know that many of us in the building spend our days and nights writing or thinking about writing or reading about writing. And given that that's a sizable proportion certainly of the MDes activity, advice to writers? It seems always like a complete struggle. And Enduring Innocence was-- the world was making it very easy for me in Enduring Innocence in some ways because I had decided to write a kind of footnoted fiction. And it was easy, since there was so many irrational tales to be told. This book was a lot harder because I was supposed to write for a general audience. And it's what I wanted, without writing in that kind of Malcolm Gladwellian teaser language-- Where you gloss very quickly over a dozen academics sort of toiling away. Yeah. Yeah. Or any of the other TED Talk locutions or something. How could you develop a kind of quiet voice that would be talking about something for which you need a book, for which you need something that lasts as long as a book, to be with a reader for awhile or to be with a reader and make a short segment that one might need to read. You might have to have a different relationship with the reader to go quiet, to slow down. But there was quite a lot of resistance with having a book that was experimenting with evidentiary segments and contemplative segments. And it did get kind of flattened into something like chapters that are just parallel. So I don't know about-- I don't have any advice because I feel like such a novice myself. But the-- So for any of my doctoral students that are here, first of all, it's really hard, and it takes two decades to be a novice. So maybe you have questions. Yeah. Keller, thanks for a beautiful talk-- very beautiful, but suspiciously beautiful. And I want to talk about maybe aesthetics. I was struck by the comment you made at the beginning about describing the images as porn. And I wasn't quite sure why you meant porn. But I assume because it was a rather tacky, glitzy, postmodern architecture. And I'm wondering what would happen if it was, say, Peter Zumthor or Herzog and de Meuron whose buildings were there. But it strikes me that there's a danger that we as designers focus too much on the visual, on the formal. On my understanding, the future of the city is going to be governed less by form and more by informational systems. I think the way that we think Uber or Lyft are operating today or some other kind of-- Nest or those kind of control systems that are controlling our homes and things, that's the kind of intelligence that's going to be part of the thing. And it strikes me that, really, the problem that we have as designers is we have marginalized ourselves by focusing precisely on the design as such. You talk about hacking into the zones, this new system. Well, I don't think we need to hack into it. The system's been there in its different guises for many years. And we simply left ourselves out of the equation because we come in at the very end, and we just put the icing on the cake. And I would want to just draw the distinction between, say, urban planners and urban designers. Urban planners are there at the very beginning. They're involved in all the strategic decision making by policymakers, by politicians. If there is any designer at all, it's probably some civil engineer who's going to design the roads and so on. And we've left ourselves completely out of the equation because we just wait till the very end and do the final bit. It strikes me that really what we should be doing as designers is redesigning what we do as designers and really focusing ourselves on those strategic aspects and locking into that. We've simply marginalized ourselves. There's no reason why we can't be part of that process. Is that fair? I agree. And showing you this porn is just cheap. But I want to show it to you. Some of it is so odd. And I end up wanting to show it. And at least it makes it clear that the world is not somehow run off of cast iron economic logics or law or something. It's clear that those supposedly serious things are being buffeted about by the most ridiculous desires. And that I find empowering. So that's a little bit why I show it. But I agree completely with what you're saying. I'm trying to say that the object of our design might be slightly different, that what we might be designing, instead of as that urban designer, not be delivering the master plan to Nairobi or Kitow or Guadalajara and congratulating ourselves on what a genius work it was. And if they don't adopt it, then it's just because they just weren't clever enough to see the purity of the design and how perfect it was. That happens over and over and over again. It's so incredibly tedious that it seems like the very thing that we are designing is the wrong thing. So what would it be like if, in addition to that, what we were designing was something like an interplay, something like an interdependence that was time-released, that could be changed, that required incredible vigilance, that wasn't over, that wasn't finished, that was more about tools for steering a process, identifying toggles and levers and linkages. Thank you for the talk. You show us the porn twice. And at the end, it was on a slightly more optimistic note. But given the inscrutability of this extrastatecraft, I wonder what sort of criteria do you think it can be used to distinguish, to put it naively, good from bad, right from wrong, extrastatecraft and to actually enact it in a sort of optimistic way? I don't really talk that much about what would be good or bad. But I think that the criteria is whether it releases more information or not. I think it is about somehow assessing the disposition of an organization. Is it an isomorphic disposition that locks down on information, which I find inherently violent, or is a system that releases information? I know that sounds incredibly abstract. But it was also what I was trying to talk about as the theory of productive or criminal piracy. When does piracy release information, like breaks a blockade, and when is it just kind of a criminal theft or something that increases violence? So reducing violence, increasing information, reducing abuse, increasing information, what are the acts that do that? What are the organizational dispositions that do that? Hi. I'm up here. Hi. I'd like to push you a little bit more and following on the first question, a lot of the discussion you had about how we hack and how we get from where we are and how designers get there into what's going on, maybe in terms of the zone, because what I see right now and what occurred to me while you were talking is maybe one step or one end point is that the 28-year-old McKinsey consultant is replaced by the 27-year-old MMARC or something like that. And maybe that's totally wrong. But from what we've seen so far, maybe we as designers aren't doing a very good job of that right now. I think of the opportunity that, say, Zaha Hadid had to say something about the labor practices of building a World Cup stadium in Qatar, which maybe is a ridiculous thing for her to be doing anyway. But when it came to it, she said, I have nothing to do with the labor practices. And I think that wasn't very good. But for us, I'm not maybe asking a career question. I'm asking maybe a political question because you have to get into the power, and you have to participate. But then you have to switch at some point and maybe show your true colors, or else you just won't be invited back to participate or you won't be able to participate in the first place. So I guess that's my question is, how do you do that? Well, the protagonist that you're describing or the sort of character that's moving through this world, as I'm understanding you, might be somebody who is already a little bit more downstream in the system, in which case, it becomes quite difficult to do anything. But the kinds of work I'm talking about are not necessarily deploying spatial studies or spatial variables in a kind of fee-for-service practice situation. But we've been kind of rehearsing alternative modes of practice, other kinds of entrepreneurial modes of practice, social, political, but also commercially entrepreneurial forms of practice. I don't think that what's implied here is that one has to work from within or be a kind of double agent in these situations, but really that what you might be doing is really manipulating it from the outside, which looks a little bit like from within, but in the sense that it's not just standing with a placard saying, I am against this. It's starting to work with it, manipulate it, con it. There was something else I was going to say. This is what I was going to say. This is not for everybody. There's no reason why you should be artistically interested in is. There's no "ought to," like, oh, you ought to be. It just is this something that is exciting to you artistically or not. It's not as if this is wagging a finger at the profession to be more interested in this or that. It occurs to me, in relationship to this question, the dean of the business school at the University of Toronto, a fellow called Roger Martin, has been saying for many years-- and it's a part of what he's done at the school there-- is he wants to train his MBAs, his brand managers, to think and act and work more like architects. And when I was driving, listening to the CBC, I almost drove off the road. On the one hand, of course, what have we been waiting for all these years with that kind of traction and centrality and oxygen. And at the same moment, inherent in that formulation is a kind of ambivalence. On the one hand, I immediately imagine, well, you mean less well capitalized, without health insurance, small, flexible. We're all free agents at 27. And so yeah, I think there's a version where the way in which we are organized as a professional body or as a set of disciplines certainly can be found attractive for a whole variety of reasons. At the same moment, there are so many other interesting examples. I was just thinking of one of Pierre's students from Toronto who then came and taught for us here, Kelly Doran. So he's had a practice for many years working in West Africa in and around sites of extraction. And what his practice is doing is dealing with the relocation and settlement and accommodation of existing populations. And you can say, on the one hand, because he's embedded in a process of infrastructure, extraction, all the things we've been talking about this evening, then he's complicit on the one hand of enabling that activity. But what you see in the work is not so much that. What you see, really, is dealing with the reality that there are populations and cultural heritage questions and issues of community directly in the crosshairs of that flow of capital and infrastructure. And so projects like that, practices like that, that don't necessarily project an enormous moral implication for the entirety of the field, but rather ways of constructing one's body of work through. So maybe we have time for-- what do you think, Pierre, one more? Two more? One more? Please. Keller, thanks for your talk. It was wonderful. I really appreciate this word "how" in the discourse that we're talking about. And I especially appreciate it as you're talking about it as we think about forms of practice and modes of practice. But I'd also like to relate it back to what I was very intrigued when you said, at the academic level, you're trying to teach this in a studio or how that's sort of rehearsed at the level of academy where we start to pick up these sort of biases, I guess, in how we do things. And I'm wondering if maybe you could just more specifically give some concrete examples or describe further how you run your studio, how that impacts the pedagogy, and perhaps a project in which a student was successful in marrying the formal to the social political, in a more concrete example. Sure. Well, some of the studios that I've been playing around with are-- it's nothing new-- but where the students start out and they identify the place where they want to work, sometimes in a collective site. One of the last collective sites we did was in Las Vegas. And we did a book about it. I could show you. So each student developed what they wanted to work on. But after they started working into their course of work, they would get messages. And they were messages from me. But they would get envelopes delivered to them. And those envelopes had in them any number of things. Sometimes it was very bad news. Sometimes the envelope was, like, burned or something. Or sometimes it was just that they were-- there were all kinds of things in the envelope, all kinds of forks in the road. There was no directive within it. They were collaborators that were passing through, they were people who were angry, they were laws that changed, they were people who were protesting. You had to somehow wriggle through or accept some advantage that had come to you. Some of the worst news was, you've been wildly successful. Now what do you do? And so there would be sort of three of those in the course of a semester. And it was unbelievable how great they did. I couldn't believe how smart they were and how they redoubled their efforts throughout and invented things. So one of those that was successful in the Las Vegas project, it just won the Holson prize this past fall, which is a lot of money. And it was a project that was a construction detail in concrete that would deal with flash floods in Las Vegas. But then it was also a system. So it went from a detail, a kind of porous detail that was based on biomimicry, to something that was a giant tank about the size of the turbine hall. So it was about infrastructure also as a kind of new civic space. So it was construction detail, persuasion, civic space. And they're prototyping it now. They're meeting with people in Las Vegas and things like that. One more if we have it? Hi. Thank you, Keller. This was absolutely amazing. You showed us a lot of zones that were crafted with economic logics behind them. I'm wondering if you also looked at territories that were crafted with a political agenda, like the settlements in the West Bank or temple towns in India. And I'm wondering what are the kind of frameworks and codes that govern these? I have not worked on things like settlements in the West Bank. I think maybe something that's kind of close to what you're talking about are the work on subtraction, on how to kind of subtract buildings. And this maybe answers a little bit to the social justice question that Charles was talking about before. Some of the work on subtraction has been dealing with the possible impacts for informal settlement, informal settlement that's always at the other end of the bulldozer, in a subtraction that's about tabula rasa. So the subtraction work that we've been working on is about not a tabula rasa, but again, an interplay between properties, a way to develop an interplay between some formal and informal areas so that no property's ever worth zero, no property can ever be completely devalued, or that there's a certain kind of interdependency between properties. And that can be applied to kind of a McMansian suburbia area. But the idea is that it could also be applied to places where people are disenfranchised. Some of the zone work naturally drifts into those geographies. There's work about qualifying industrial zones in Jordan, which have become embroiled in Middle Eastern politics with issues of labor. So those might be two examples. So thank you so much, Keller. It was just occurring to me-- and I was wondering if you could give me some sense of if you would agree with this sentiment-- I was just thinking about the lab for computer graphics, 50 years ago founded in part by a fellow called Howard Fisher. So Howard Fisher was an architect, postwar architect, in Chicago who was deeply interested in mass production, steel housing, and was on the kind of industry side of things, and over the course of his career, found himself then moving increasingly upstream to the systematization of growth and then eventually came here to do this kind of foundational work in mapping that would completely re-characterize the system with which suburbs got cast. So that's one narrative. That's one arc of one person's storyline that begins with some of these obsessions with respect to mass seriality, but then works its way upstream, as it were, to really get at the operating system behind the thing itself and moving away from, you know. Would that kind of arc be something of interest, maybe? Is that something that we could pursue in greater detail, do you think? Absolutely. I don't know about this. I'd be curious to talk about it. I guess we always just want to be-- our discipline is a love of universals and determinants, which was maybe not necessary in the trajectories you describe. But I'd love to talk about that over drinks, maybe. 50th anniversary of labs, coming up in a couple weeks. Keller Easterling, thanks so much. [applause] I'd just like to thank everyone. I also hope that perhaps in two decades we can look back at this year in terms of a turning point, also in terms of if we were to ever engage issues of space and power, that potentially this is-- I couldn't think of a better way that we could do this. Thank you very much, Keller, Charles, Mohsen. [applause]