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Watch the video of From City to Sink: Urban Carbon Removal as Promise and Practice with Duncan McLaren

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Transcript for From City to Sink: Urban Carbon Removal as Promise and Practice with Duncan McLaren

0:00:07.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Sharable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website shareable.net just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:40.2 Professor Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and together with my research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry, and our partners Shareable and the Barr foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross disciplinary academic initiative which recognises Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today, we’re delighted to host Dr. Duncan McLaren. Apart from being a good old friend of mine, Duncan is currently a Research Fellow with the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University. His research examines the politics and implications for justice of novel technologies, particularly using public engagement methods. Prior to his PhD studies completed in 2017, Duncan worked as an environmental researcher and campaigner, most recently as Chief Executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland from 2003 to 2011. He’s advised and consulted for research and financial institutions, government departments, philanthropic donors and non governmental bodies on energy, climate, urban and sustainable development issues. Duncan’s talk today is From City to Sink: Urban Carbon Removal as Promise and Practice. Duncan, a zoomtastic. Welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:02:16.4 Dr. Duncan McLaren: It’s a real pleasure to be with you, Julian, and to renew our association in the city space. Shall I just get kicked off? 

0:02:28.1 Professor Julian Agyeman: Okay, go straight away, thanks. Yep, yep.

0:02:31.9 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Great. So, thanks for the invitation and as Julian says, I’m talking about urban carbon removal. There’s a lot to get through. So here we go. So, first I’m going to introduce carbon dioxide removal and its purposes and limits. I’ll then outline some past CDR promises before exploring some urban CDR prospects with a library of examples offering an estimate of practical urban CDR potential in the light of the politics around it, highlighting particularly questions of justice, before ending with some policy recommendations and conclusions. So first, what is CDR and what is it not? Well, CDR techniques are human interventions that remove CO2 from the environment, place it into long term stable storage. They are both anthropogenic and intentional, not incidental. The CO2 must come from the atmosphere or the wider environment, not from flue gases or other point sources, and be stored for centuries to millennia and not re-released. CDR does not include the natural operation of biological or geological sinks on land or water. There are some blurry boundaries however. So looking a bit deeper into the terminology, carbon dioxide removal is often shortened to carbon removal, sometimes broadened to include other greenhouse gases may also be described as negative emissions techniques or technologies.

0:04:08.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: It’s often mixed up with other things. By contrast, carbon capture and storage is typically an adjunct to fossil fuel use, capturing perhaps 90% of the emissions at a point source and shipping them for storage or utilization. Carbon utilization can be in durable materials, but is more often in chemicals, short lived plastic products or even synthetic fuels. So typically therefore it is at best a form of emissions abatement, not carbon removal. Sequestration Carbon sequestration refers to locking away carbon dioxide but with no concern about what source it’s come from. And while EOR or enhanced oil recovery might sequester some carbon dioxide, it does so by using it to force more oil or gas from old wells. One of the big issues here is that deliberate conflation of these different techniques under the rubric of carbon management allows the fossil industry and petrostates, to justify continued fossil fuel extraction. Such discursive tricks exacerbate the big policy challenges facing CDR. These are additionality ensuring that CDR would not that that CDR would not have happened anyway durability ensuring that the storage is long term and without significant leakage and avoiding mitigation deterrence where promises of future removal enable delay in cutting emissions.

0:05:50.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So getting into what these methods look like this schematic indicates the main techniques involved in CDR proposals. It’s not a comprehensive set, but hopefully enough to note the principal routes of capture and storage in CDR techniques. The options in the orange shaded box have clear urban applications and I’ll say a little more about how these might work as I run through the examples later. Here I’ve added one potentially important urban option for CO2 storage in building materials using carbon sourced from biomass, Biochar or direct CO2 capture.

0:06:32.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Before discussing particular techniques though, a reminder of why we’re talking about carbon dioxide removal. Typically, it’s seen as having three functions in climate policy. First, accelerating progress towards net zero, then counterbalancing recalcitrant residuals at net zero, and finally reversing overshoot through net negativity after net zero. To deliver any of these functions, CDR must be additional to emissions cuts not a substitute. But so far in practice, most CDR, primarily from forestry and a little from soils and biochar, is traded in offset markets, so does nothing to accelerate progress. And all those forms of biological CDR are vulnerable to reversal by wildfire or drought, for example. So such traded substitution could ultimately make things worse.

0:07:35.2 Dr. Duncan McLaren: And in exchanging emissions reductions now for future CDR, adding to overshoot in the hope of reparation, we’re gambling on the effective delivery of that future CDR. Here, of course, by we I mean humanity in general. Though of course such a simplification is unfair to those not involved in these choices. Nonetheless, modeling suggests that limiting global temperature rises to 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius seems impossible unless CDR is deployed. Scenarios from the IPCC project CDR being used at rates of 6 to 11 gigatons a year in and after 2050. That’s in comparison to current emissions of around 40 to 45 gigatons a year. So about big big share and a vast increase from current levels of CDR, which are around 1.3 million tonnes, four orders of magnitude smaller. Analysis of nationally determined contributions and low emission development strategy pledges suggests countries are currently anticipating that CDR will reach 8 to 10 gigatons by 2050 to deliver net zero with around 20% of current emissions remaining. Much of the anticipated CDR is land based, with pledges accounting for over a billion hectares of land dedicated to CDR. That’s equivalent to 2/3 of all arable land. Delivery of such projected increased levels of CDR would likely transgress sustainability limits, harm human rights and exacerbate injustice.

0:09:27.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Experience so far suggests such modeled promises are exaggerated and dangerous. Inherent model features such as discounting future costs mean that CDR displaces early mitigation action. But the models then only square carbon budgets through huge future projected CDR capacity. That is likely impractical and almost inevitably socially and environmentally harmful. Early modeling presumed use of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage until it was shown that the levels projected would require three times the land area of India to provide biomass, creating real threats to food security. Now modeling often assumes direct air capture, which would involve energy demand nine times India’s primary energy use or around 2/3 of current world primary energy use, suggesting similar threats to energy security. Some advocates have suggested that marine CDR might prove more fruitful, but the implications there are as yet little understood and some companies in the space have already failed. So could urban CDR help fill the gap? Some research and advocacy reports suggest potentials for urban CDR of between 5 and 20 gigatons per year. However, I’m going to pour cold water on this and argue that it’s too good to be true and risks fuelling further climate procrastination. Exaggerated promises of CDR contribution don’t come out of nowhere.

0:11:06.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So noted already models discount future costs of CDR. They also overlook sustainability limits and tend to exaggerate the costs of near term mitigation. But there are other sources too. In the neoliberal model of venture capital funded innovation, such technologies need to promise both scale and profits if they are to obtain investment. Developers therefore project lower than realistic costs and where these businesses get funded, VC works by shunting aside the scientific founders and installing business managers to find the earliest profitable exit. The prospect of inclusion of removal credits in carbon markets risks undermining climate purposes too. Carbon traders want more products and more credits to trade, and for them, higher continued emissions means more opportunities to profit from trading, a perverse incentive for them to big up CDR’s potential. CDR also acts as a promissory technology for the oil and gas industry to legitimate its operations and protect otherwise stranded assets.

0:12:28.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Here there may be some hope of delivery. The oil and gas companies think they can get paid by the public for transmission storage of CO2, even if they then use it for enhanced oil recovery. But overall, this means that even if CDR could be massively scaled and net zero achieved by balancing two carbon elephants rather than two mice, huge harms would remain from continued fossil extraction and combustion. This all leaves us facing something of a dilemma. Exaggerated promises of CDR undermine essential immediate action to mitigate and phase out fossil fuels. But without removals, we’ll likely exceed carbon budgets and impose substantial additional harms on future generations.

0:13:11.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Delivering large scale CDR could have serious implications for justice right now, not least for other species, but also through competition for agricultural land and clean energy. We can’t afford to have a carbon tunnel vision and disregard human rights, food security and biodiversity. But nor can we reject CDR out of hand. We need policy mechanisms that can support it in just and sustainable forms and scales while weeding out the false and exaggerated promises. In the next section of the talk, I’ll sketch out existing practice on urban CDR and explore the realistic prospects, highlighting some of the misleading promises about specific techniques and possible scales which CDR methods show particular promise for cities well thinking about urban functions in procuring, managing and regulating buildings, cities have opportunities to promote carbon storage and building materials, incorporate direct air capture in buildings as operators and regulators of energy systems and buyers of energy for buildings and transport systems. Cities offer opportunities for bioenergy with CCS, perhaps including biogas and biofuel production.

0:14:30.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Cities also operate and regulate solid and wastewater management with more opportunities for BECCS, biochar and capture of biogenic carbon from wastewater, possibly even incorporation of enhanced weathering or alkalinity enhancement into water treatment. And of course, cities own and manage land with opportunities for biochar, both biomass supply and biochar use in parks, urban forestry and so forth. Maybe enhanced weathering through rock dust use or carbon storage in trees and soil. There are also some niche CDR opportunities that I won’t talk more about that some cities might share, like desalination, sea defences and beach replenishment. I’m going to run through this library of cases quickly and maybe skip some if we run short of time. So timber construction is generally positive in climate terms.

0:15:37.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Timber buildings are better in earthquake zones that don’t increase fire risks. They’re lighter, requiring less deep foundations. Using timber in construction means that carbon accumulated by the trees prior to felling is kept out of the atmosphere for at least the lifespan of the building. Recent advances in mass or composite timber mean even large buildings up to 18 storeys high can be constructed entirely from timber. On average, mass timber construction stores about 380 kilograms of carbon dioxide per meter square of floor area, but costs less up to $150 per meter squared less to construct than concrete and steel.

0:16:16.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So Boston’s Mass Timber Accelerator provided development teams with technical assistance and funding grants to assess and integrate low carbon mass timber building practices into their projects. It supported 10 projects over three years involving buildings up to nine storeys high. If they all come to completion, there’ll be 48 buildings over 10 million square feet of total floor area and around 350,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide stored.

0:16:51.6 Dr. Duncan McLaren: However, net gains in carbon storage in the building and built environment from timber may be at least partly offset by net losses in forest carbon. One estimate suggests mass timber use could average 2 gigatons per year of carbon dioxide, but notes that the forest pool is already declining at 0.7 gigatons a year. Highlights that potential increase in demand for timber for building materials threatens to intensify deforestation and illegal logging. Given that current timber supply would only cover about a third of estimated 2050 demand for construction if it was all shifted to timber, that means pressures on forests would grow dramatically. For this technique, lifespan and end of life issues are critical. Will these buildings remain in use for centuries or just decades? If construction waste can then be reused or become feedstock for BECCS or biochar, then storage might be meaningfully prolonged to really climatically meaningful timescales.

0:18:00.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: There are also several methods been explored for storing carbon in concrete buildings. These include enriching concrete with carbon dioxide in the curing process, using alternative minerals such as magnesium carbonate that absorb more CO2 in the curing, and directly incorporating carbon rich aggregate to biochar in concrete up to 15% by waste wait. The Four Corners Carbon Coalition partnership of several US cities provides grants to accelerate CO2 removal projects and in 2023 it awarded nearly $400 million to 4 billion businesses incorporating carbon removal in concrete, cement, synthetic limestone and insulation materials. However, claims in this field are likely exaggerated, perhaps in defense of the interests of a major energy intensive industry. Most alleged removal of storage in this sector is not enough to even offset the emissions involved in the production of cement and concrete. Accelerating carbon uptake in concrete curing is of questionable additionality as it largely merely replaces carbon dioxide that would be absorbed over some years from the atmosphere. Accelerating curing using CO2 from fossil sources as is happening in New York is therefore likely counterproductive in CDR terms.

0:19:29.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: CDR promises here seem likely to help lock in the use of energy intensive concrete and steel where alternatives timber or building refurbishment would be environmentally preferable. Adding biochar or carbonaceous aggregate in residual concrete uses, however, would remain sensible. Direct air capture delivers carbon removal by the selective chemical capture of carbon dioxide from air passing over a contactor. Once saturated with CO2, the contactor is moved into an enclosed space and regenerated by temperature, pressure or humidity swing techniques. The collected CO2 would be pressurized and shipped to geological storage or utilization. Direct air capture uses a lot of energy for moving large volumes of air and regenerating the sorbent. Integrating DAC into building HVAC systems, as Solitaire Power are doing in pilot projects, should increase its capture efficiency by using air enriched with CO2 from respiration as the source, and it should reduce energy demand by utilizing the HVAC airflow.

0:20:46.9 Dr. Duncan McLaren: The pilot in Aarhus promises 15 tonnes a year of removals for this one office building with no confirmed destination for the CO2 as yet. The costs are also unspecified, but described as adding 5 to 14% to rental and operational costs. At the lowest end. This implies over $1,000 a ton of carbon dioxide despite the efficiency savings. Whereas centralized DAC currently costs perhaps 400 to $600 a tonne in urban settings, collection transport costs will likely be higher too.

0:21:23.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: However, there are potentially significant health benefits from reducing CO2 concentrations indoors. Perhaps the poster child for urban CDR is Stockholm BECCS project. BECCS Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage works in theory by capturing up to 90% of the carbon dioxide from flue gas from biomass combustion, it counts as CDR because the biomass is considered carbon neutral. BECCS typically uses a chemical amine capture agent through which the flue gas is filtered. The amine is then regenerated to separate the captured CO2 which is then purified and compressed for storage, typically in a geological reservoir. Overall, this takes carbon dioxide that’s originally captured in photosynthesis into long term geological storage. But in practice most existing BECC’s plants do not result in net removals because they capture CO2 from biofuel fermentation with an overall capture rate only around 50% as the remainder of the carbon ends up in the fuel and they sell the captured carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery, which can lead to 150% or higher rebound in emissions.

0:22:45.9 Dr. Duncan McLaren: At least the Stockholm Beck’s proposal is better than those. It’s a form of biomass combustion generates heat and or electricity. Some 20% or so of the energy generated has to be used to run the capture system, which means that overall biomass use in a retrofit like this is increased. So Stockholm Exergy is retrofitting its Vertan biomass cogeneration district heating plant and the retrofit is scheduled to begin operations in 2028. The plant relies on importing biomass about 60% from elsewhere in Sweden and will export compressed CO2 by ship for storage. EXIGEE has won EU innovation funding of $180 million and Swedish government support of around $160 a ton for 800,000 tonnes of capture per year for 15 years. It’s also selling removal credits 3.3 million tonnes already sold in advance to Microsoft and around $50 million worth via Frontier to various buyers.

0:24:04.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: This means much of the CDR benefit will be offset by emissions legitimated elsewhere. And intriguingly, EXIGEE has lobbied the EU in efforts to ensure that the Green Claims Directive doesn’t undermine the business logic of such credit sales. I’m going to skip this, as methanol production is a form of biofuel BECCS, which is at best a highly inefficient form of CDR. More biogenic emissions remain than are captured and a full life cycle analysis might not demonstrate net negativity. However, it was highlighted as a significant source of potential in the Amsterdam Region report commissioned by Carbon Traders South Pole, which I’ll mention later.

0:24:49.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Even for cities using biofuel or biogas for buses, electrifying the transit and directing biomass to more efficient CDR techniques would seem a better approach. In Trondheim we have another form of BECCs here, rather than using virgin biomass, it’s being put on a waste incinerator which incinerates mixed waste. Treating the biogenic component of mixed waste as carbon neutral by definition and thus capturing the emissions from its combustion cancer CDR. The potential here is around 300,000 tonnes per year capture from mixed waste in synergy of which about a third is fossil. The big downside here is that it creates incentives to increase or maintain waste production rather than avoid reuse or recycle or, as has already happened in Sweden, end up importing waste from other countries to feed the incinerators. Health risks from emissions make incineration unpopular in many countries, so tying CDR to such technologies might make it harder to promote.

0:26:04.4 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Turning to biochar. Biochar is the pyrolysis of biogenic materials, often waste such as forestry residues at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. This generates a carbon rich solid character, the biochar and combustible gases and or oils. Burying the char in soil can result in stable storage of carbon for centuries.

0:26:32.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Nova Carbon’s biochar park, the third I think of four they’ve developed so far at Grevesmühlen, captures around 3,200 tons of carbon dioxide per year. The cost per ton are unclear, but biochar in general is estimated to cost a little under $200 per ton. The biochar may then be used in agriculture or urban landscaping. Char is believed to benefit soil stability, water retention and fertility in most settings.

0:27:13.7 Dr. Duncan McLaren: But concerns have been raised about contamination arising from waste feedstocks, especially if there’s things like heavy metals that survive the high temperatures involved. That might limit the use of such char to landscaping in relatively undisturbed areas. There are other possible biochar synergies in dry and wildfire risk areas. Incorporation of biochar might usefully enhance soil moisture retention, thus helping restrain fire spread. And there is a need to collect biomass. Harvest biomass for fire suppression purposes, which can then be supplied to the biochar facility like BECCS Biochar as CDR rests on the assumption that biomass is carbon neutral. Collection, transport and processing emissions are typically accounted for, as are emissions from any gaseous or oil fraction produced in the pyrolysis process. In this case, Nova Carbon claimed that the carb capture in char fully offsets process, energy use and the gaseous fraction.

0:28:12.7 Dr. Duncan McLaren: But they’re also selling carbon credits and it’s not clear whether the net result would be some double counting once the emissions legitimated by the credits are included. Moving to Wastewater treatment this is the first of two different approaches in wastewater treatment. At Wood Huxley Sewage Treatment plant in Zurich, CCS is being installed on a sewage sludge incineration facility aiming to abate 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year at a cost of over $1,000 per ton. So this is another form of BECCS here, though the process is unlikely to generate surplus energy given the energy costs of drying sludge, so several questions are generated there. I’m going to skip on more innovative approach in New Haven, Crude carbon, a spinoff from Yale, is adding alkalinity to microbial wastewater treatment. This captures carbon dioxide as bicarbonate for export to the ocean via the plant outflow. Crew Carbon claims its pilot operations have demonstrated 4,000 tons a year removals and on this basis they have made advanced sales of carbon credits for 72,000 tonnes over the period 2025 to 2030 at a cost of around 450 tonnes at $450 per ton. Unlike BECCS, DAC or even Biochar, the total quantity of carbon captured here is difficult to measure directly and monitoring reporting verification standards become critical, especially if removals are to be marketed as credits.

0:30:02.2 Dr. Duncan McLaren: A more conventional form of carbon removal has been practiced in Yokohama. Seagrass meadows and salt marshes are amongst the most effective biological carbon sinks with per hectare rates several times greater than forests. Since 2011 Yokohama has supported projects planting and protecting eel grass and seaweed beds which are generally being lost and degraded faster. But since 2015 they’ve been turning the carbon gains into tradable credits and as of 2019 total removals were just 80 tons.

0:30:45.7 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Such projects have valuable co benefits for fisheries, but the carbon removals are marginal at best and may even be double counting as these would be previously unmanaged spaces. Perhaps a bit of a niche as the this depends on a coastal location, but the Captura process uses electrodialysis, an energy consuming process to separate seawater into acid and alkali streams. The acid stream is first added to contain seawater, forcing out dissolved inorganic CO2 and the alkali stream is returned and mixed and the now CO2 depleted water returned to the ocean where it re equilibrates by drawing down atmospheric CO2. Captura have a 100 ton per annum pilot plant at the port of LA and are developing 1000 ton per annum plant In Hawaii, costs are currently estimated at perhaps $2,000 a ton and need to be cut significantly to make it competitive.

0:31:46.4 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Finally, Freetown in Sierra Leone is using reforestation tree planting to accumulate and store carbon in living biomass. Following the loss of over 500,000 trees each year from 2011 to 2018 and devastating mudslides killing over a thousand people in 2017, the city is aiming to plant 20 to 25 million trees by 2050. Motivated primarily by climate resilience benefits, stabilizing slopes and providing shade, citizens have been mobilized to plant and maintain trees through a digital app and micropayments. Funding has been raised in part through the sale of digitized tokens for corporate social responsibility purposes and plans to sell carbon credits. The project is deliberately targeted informal settlement areas for equity reasons. However, the long term durability of these carbon stores must be questioned as the land involved is in a growing urban area and policies on land use can change quickly.

0:32:58.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So the bottom line, how much carbon could cities remove? All these projects have generated only small numbers, none of them more than a million tons a year, some of them down in the level of tens of tonnes. Putting it together, there are a few reports that have made estimates, but there’s huge variation in the estimates and the amounts and even in the techniques considered.

0:33:28.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: This quick survey of the literature suggests a range from less than half a gigaton to 5 or even perhaps 13 gigatons. Those upper figures appear to me hugely over optimistic in terms of the credibility of the techniques that we’ve just looked at, the sustainability of supplies for them and the uptake levels that would be likely achieved in practice. So amongst the reports, the Mercator Institute’s estimates of 0.3 to 1.2 gigatons seem perhaps most responsible in this respect. But these exclude waste management routes. So my best guess, adding some potential for waste management to the Mercator estimates is a maximum of around 2 gigatons. That builds an estimate for waste treatment based on BECCS and 3.8 gigatons of municipal solid waste in 2050, around 70% of it urban and around 20% biogenic carbon. Even this, allowing an ambitious coverage of 50% of waste treated that way, would give the figure of 0.9 gigatons. So we’ve got an overall aggregate figure that’s certainly well worth pursuing in the light of the IPCC’s estimates of a need for 6 to 11 gigatons, but not something that’s a silver bullet. There’s lots of positives being raised in the cases that I’ve suggested and lots of questions outstanding.

0:35:15.2 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So we need much more rigorous assessment of the promises of such proposals. It’s not to say such pilot projects are bad, but we should free them from the pressures and distortions of venture capital and carbon trading, providing instead public funding and public accountability based on radical transparency and public intellectual property. Rejecting offsetting for CDR is a first step towards addressing these problems, but also critical in moving away from continued magical thinking and the promises that go on contributing to mitigation, deterrence and climate procrastination CDR advocacy is riddled with magical thinking, notably expectations of technological fixes, a belief in technological wizardry to evade material and environmental limits, often coupled with financial wizardry, a belief that venture capital and novel financial instruments in constructed markets will somehow make these technologies effective and affordable.

0:36:20.9 Dr. Duncan McLaren: These combine to generate exaggerated expectations and facilitate delay and mitigation. Taking CDR into the public realm as a vital future shared utility might also seem magical thinking, especially at the current moment in US politics. But if any group of actors in the CDR space could lead such a move, then it might be cities focusing development of CDR on techniques with co-benefits for their existing services and facilities.

0:36:57.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Doing that will need careful navigation of a host of political currents and interests that want to turn CDR into a marketable commodity, deliberately substituting for mitigation efforts including finance, oil and gas, airlines and others. But there may be potential to win support from other sectors like the development sector as well as from the broader public. Key to public support is likely to be the question of justice and fairness, and taking account of all such issues is likely to further reduce practical potential for urban CDR.

0:37:45.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: I think leaving an impression of perhaps half to 1 gigaton per annum by 2050 as the possible practical contribution would be responsible and realistic. David Morrow and his friends and his colleagues have suggested these guiding principles for climate justice with respect to CDR. Play the long game, support CDR as reparation, avoid carbon tunnel vision, account for all impacts, split, don’t lump measure and manage different techniques separately, and don’t bet the house on the models. Those are all useful guidance, I think for cities. More specifically, urban CDR could exacerbate injustice through several routes, notably via the location and impacts of pollution, odour, truck movements and so forth of energy and waste facilities.

0:38:37.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: CDR doesn’t make energy generation or waste management magically clean, also via the effects of CDR in construction materials on relative housing costs and availability. Thirdly, through competition for land elsewhere for any additional BioMass to supply BECCS or biochar and finally through the many injustices in offsetting and carbon trading, such as intermediaries extracting the value, the wealthy purchasing offsets and the poor suffering project impacts. So with urban CDR cities must beware exporting impacts. BECCS and Biochar may still rely on land outside the city.

0:39:23.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: CDR is not exempt from the risks of green colonialism. Overall as well, we should remember that environmental justice is not necessarily served by every entity individually reaching net zero. Net zero is a global goal. Cities may well do more to cut emissions and less CDR, while rural areas might have more sustained emissions from agriculture and transport, but do much more in absolute terms to generate removals. Delivering environmental justice in CDR requires careful attention to historical and continuing inequalities, failures of recognition and uneven capabilities and vulnerabilities. Coming to conclusions. Some preliminary recommendations for urban CDR policy. Keep CDR subsidiary to mitigation and adaptation. Look for the co benefits for example in waste management, district heating, air quality and health, wildfire suppression, urban greening, shade and resilience.

0:40:35.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Focus any BECCS or biochar on genuine residual waste generated by the city and not on imported biomass. Integrate CDR in municipal functions, states management, waste management, building regulations and planning rules, for example, and avoid buying CDR offsets. Minimize selling removals that are generated by public utilities. For brief conclusions so urban CDR has lots of potential worth exploiting even at the total half to 1 gigaton level. But cities have far greater prospects to cut emissions and eliminate fossil fuel use. Those must be the priority. In climate policy terms, urban CDR can be part of a CDR portfolio. But neither urban CDR nor CDR as a whole is a silver bullet for the climate and cities exploring in this space must beware misleading and illusory promises from CDR promoters, especially those who are seeking to sell credits. And in working with CDR, cities must attend to justice Implications CDR is not a magic wand that will erase social and environmental side effects. Thanks so much for your attention and let’s move over to the question and discussion section. I’ll be making the slides available and there’s some extra slides with links.

0:42:21.7 Professor Julian Agyeman: Well, thank you so much Duncan for that. Fascinating. And you did cover some serious ground there. It’s a lot to take in and if you just stop the screen share then we can get a picture of everybody. There we go. Well, we’ve got a lot of questions and let me just go through them. So Venkata asks, what are the challenges and support systems for alkalinity enhancement in coastal cities that also provide some level of resiliency support for local corals against ocean acidification.

0:43:06.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: If I caught that correctly, the question is would these sort of alkalinity measures be good for protecting coral reefs and so forth? That’s one of the functions that I think researchers in the space are exploring. What’s not clear at the moment is whether a process like the Captura one would provide alkalinity in the right places and in weight in forms that reef organisms could make use of. I think there is… It’s an area that’s definitely worth thinking about, a very clear possible co-benefit here. And as I said, most of these things need co-benefits to become affordable for a start because they’re otherwise very expensive. And focusing on the co-benefits is a good way of deciding which techniques are most appropriate in the relevant location.

0:44:12.9 Professor Julian Agyeman: Great, thanks, Duncan. A very practical question from Michael. What are the super accessible interventions that cities and cities and groups can pursue in their cities? What’s the equivalent of eat less beef for citizens and city dwellers? 

0:44:32.7 Dr. Duncan McLaren: I don’t think there’s anything quite as simple as that. There’s nothing… There was a study that I looked at during preparing for this that looked at biochar incorporation in residential yards and the average result was 10kg of carbon a year. You do better than that by taking the train once instead of driving. So really personal carbon removal is probably not in the big picture. But at the city level, the shift to shifting at the margin of new build into timber buildings and using biochar in city parks and urban public spaces, those would seem to be probably the early win wins and there are probably some other no regrets in terms of the management of land, whether that be urban forests or urban coastal lands.

0:45:41.3 Professor Julian Agyeman: Is Edith in the room? Because she has a quite a long question, very detailed question, and I’d rather she ask Duncan directly. Edith, are you in the room? 

0:45:54.4 Edith Kutz: Yes, I am. Can you hear me? Hi. Hi. Hi. This was a great presentation. I went to one yesterday that was… Doesn’t even compare because you really hit. You really made it practical. You were critical and you also included policies. So anyhow, I just wanted to let you know, I mean, to ask you if you’re aware of. I’ve been following carbon collect. They are a direct air capture machine, let’s say, and it uses ambient air and it doesn’t use fans. So it doesn’t require huge sources of energy. And it has a proprietary transfer mechanism to absorb and release the carbon dioxide. And the carbon dioxide can be reused in carbon Manufacture concrete, like through the carbon cure method. So it’s like this win, win for a city. I mean, because you could get a circular economy going. And it’s a modular and a really attractive, the most attractive DAC mechanism that I have come across thus far. It’s not like Climeworks or some of the others. So I just wanted to suggest that because as a landscape architect, I’ve been trying to find out ways to bring DAC right into the city in parks and in places. I mean, I work with natural bay solutions also, but I’ve been really trying to find the application for mechanical ones within a city, which is why I found your presentations really very interesting and really good.

0:47:20.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Well, thanks, Edith. I was at the same webinar as you yesterday. Appreciated your contributions in the chat. I haven’t heard of Karma Collect specifically as you describe them. They’re not dissimilar to solitaire that I did include in the, in the talk.

0:47:39.7 Edith Kutz: No, no, no, no. Solitaire is connected to buildings, right? Yeah, no, this is a freestanding.

0:47:47.6 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Right.

0:47:48.6 Professor Julian Agyeman: Just Google Carbon Collect. You’ll see it as Mechanical Tree.

0:47:53.2 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Immediately, I would worry a little about the embodied capital cost of doing something that uses ambient air, at least in, in places that aren’t very windy. If you’ve got wind generating a good airflow, then then in theory you can get the efficiency high enough. And in general, I think DAC does have a lot of limitations because we look at photovoltaics and we think that’s brilliant. We have this dispersed, decentralized system which does away with or limits the amount of infrastructure we need because it supplants having such an intensive energy grid. DAC’s the opposite. If you make it modular and dispersed, then you have to have more infrastructure or more costly, less efficient ways of collecting up the CO2 to get it to permanent storage. And that’s partly because I’m more skeptical of the concrete reuse. So in concrete, I think incorporation of biochar is a better route than accelerated curing with DAC CO2 and more broadly, reuse of buildings. And timber buildings are better than concrete buildings.

0:49:22.5 Edith Kutz: Well, I think you ought to take a look at Carbon Collect’s site, because I’ll bring that question up to them. I’ve been in contact with them regarding their technology, but I think that the ambient air thing is not inefficient. So anyhow, I think you ought to check it out.

0:49:39.6 Dr. Duncan McLaren: And it’s a long standing debate in the in the DAC field about the potential for use of ambient air. It will probably have a niche. It will probably not be the only way to do DAC or necessarily the best way to do CDR in cities.

0:49:57.6 Edith Kutz: Okay, Well, a few… I agree. There’s going to be a mosaic of all kinds of different application technologies.

0:50:04.8 Professor Julian Agyeman: Yeah, great. Thanks for your question, Edith. Patricia Lacacia, what are smart technologies and policies that can enhance urban resilience in the face of climate disasters such as the increased frequency of hurricanes? 

0:50:20.6 Dr. Duncan McLaren: That’s a huge question, Patricia. And there are. What I’ll try and do is think if there are any contributions from CDR practices specifically. There are of course, many, many other ways in which cities should be building resilience. Starting from probably the biggest and most sweeping, increasing social equity as a way to build resilience amongst the population. That always seems to me the biggest and most overlooked way of preparing for these sort of disasters. In the CDR space, there may be possibilities for coastal cities in the way that coastal defenses and beach replenishment are done. I mentioned that as niches there are carbon removal techniques that involve putting pebbles or rocks on beaches where the wave action helps accelerate the carbon uptake, using particular basaltic rocks.

0:51:32.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: And if cities need those for to improve the defense of the city against storm surges or whatever, one could see a synergy there. That’s a very marginal thing, I think, or a niche thing in the overall resilience. Hurricanes obviously also tend to bring excess water. So anything that’s improving the permeability of urban areas is good. And here again at the margin, use of biochar in public parks and lands could be improving the ability of those parks to absorb and retain water. CDR wouldn’t be my go to technique or set of technologies for building disaster resilience in cities. I think I’d start from the other end.

0:52:24.7 Professor Julian Agyeman: Thanks, Duncan. Roger? Roger Hickman, are you still in here? For those of you who don’t know, Roger actually worked at Friends of the Earth in the in London around the same time as Duncan was there. Roger, are you in the room? 

0:52:47.8 Roger Hickman: Yeah, I am in the room. Nice to see you both and it’s great to see you both working together, which is why I came really more than anything else. But excellent presentation, Duncan. You just thoroughly exhaustively researched and great and albeit a bit depressing. I just in New England, but you know, a lot of British cities, we’re right next to Dartmoor territory and I’m wondering about sort of what potential is there and what the sort of carbon abatement is there.

0:53:17.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Thanks Roger, you broke up a bit. It’s a real pleasure to hear from you, but I got the gist that you were asking about peatland enhancement as a climate tool. Really? And yes, I didn’t mention it in the list of techniques because there’s rarely peatland managed by the city within the city boundaries. This would fall into the category of the rural areas doing more CDR and cities doing more emissions cuts in that cities should stop using peat in their gardens and urban public spaces because the extraction of peat from peatlands is a big carbon emitter because it ends up drying out the carbon comes out of it and protecting peatlands re wetting them is indeed a potentially valuable carbon removal tool.

0:54:25.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Peatlands can be more rapid and more dense sinks than forests. However, rewetting peatlands also does tend to increase methane emissions from and getting a net balance that is Capturing more carbon or in greenhouse gas terms is carbon negative rather than carbon positive will depend on the particularities of the location and the age of the peatland in particular. But broadly, yes, intervene to re-wet and restore growth in peatlands and stop digging them up and turning them into gardens.

0:55:08.6 Professor Julian Agyeman: Great. Thanks Duncan. I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got time for. Can we give a warm Cities@Tufts round of applause for Dr. Duncan McLaren? Our next Cities@Tufts colloquium is on March 12th, when we have Hessann Farooqi, who is the ED of Boston climate Action Network talking about local leadership for climate change. Thank you for coming and see you on March 12th. Thanks again, Duncan.

0:55:37.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: It’s been a pleasure.

0:55:39.2 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the Show Notes to access the video, transcript and graphic recording or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University in shareable with support from the Barr foundation, shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Jess Milner. Paige Kelly is our co producer, audio Editor and Communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Allison Huff and Bobby Jones, and the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

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Watch the video of Solidarity Cities: Examining solidarity economies at the urban level

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Transcript for Solidarity Cities: Examining Solidarity Economies at the Urban Level

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0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:41.3 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and together with my research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry, and our partners Shareable and the Barr foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross disciplinary academic initiative which recognises Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts territory. Today we’re delighted to host Maliha Safri. Maliha is professor of Economics at Drew University. Her academic research focuses on collective economic practices, including worker food and housing cooperatives amidst other organizations. By teaching popular education seminars and courses with activists since 2000 and specifically with migrant workers at a variety of worker centers in the process of forming collectives, her research was based in concrete issues faced by participants of what some movement activists call solidarity economies, which are economies prioritizing cooperation and inclusion.

0:01:54.8 Julian Agyeman: She’s published articles in Signs, Antipode, Environmental Policy and Governance, the Economist’s Voice, Organization, among other journals and edited book collections. She has a new co-authored book, Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism and Mapping Transformation, and her talk today is Solidarity Examining Solidarity Economies at the Urban level. Maliha, a zoomtastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:02:26.7 Maliha Safri: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks. I’m gonna get started right away. Tom, thank you so much for helping with the tech today. And Julian, thank you so much for this invitation. I wanted to begin with this first slide. This is a painting done by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an indigenous artist. This is a painting called State Names. She quickly draws our eyes to all the state names that have directly taken their names from indigenous peoples that lived there. I offer that as a very brief land acknowledgement. If this was a city level map, then the island on which I live, Manhattan, comes from the word Manahatta, the Lenape word for this land. I just wanna talk a little bit about my background, popular education, because it is so important for the kind of work and the research that we’ve done. Popular education, let’s define it. It is not the banking model diagnosed by Paulo Freire, one of depositing knowledge into the passive vessel of the student. And I understood this in a much better way when I began to be teacher for the center for Popular Economics, devoted to a popular approach to economics, running six-week Train the Trainer summer institutes with labor organizers activists in different areas. We were always intentional to work with communities of activists on a particular issue.

0:03:49.9 Maliha Safri: I also became a member of the Community Economies collective and began to be involved with participatory action research. I’d been doing popular Econ classes with anybody that wanted to do it and one group in particular of ex-prisoners. We did a participatory action research project where they interviewed all the collectives, cooperatives, social enterprises, non-profits in their town in Asbury Park. The young men, they were all young men, talked to an ex-prisoner collective run by women who had said, after facing a great deal of discrimination in the labor market, they said to themselves, “Fuck it, they won’t give us jobs, we’ll make our own jobs”. So we did a community mapping of the solidarity economy of Asbury park. And when we got to talking about different ways of organizing work, they wanted to start a cooperative after this project and the young guys started a construction worker cooperative joined by undocumented immigrant workers who were very familiar with cooperatives already and joined this project. And the mapping exercise helped them see their own town differently, see their own role in that town differently.

0:04:58.5 Maliha Safri: And of course, I think there’s just a joy in sometimes showing up and doing the work. I saw that a little bit in Occupy. Right. And these are just some simple takeaways that I wanna stress. But that, of course, is also familiar to some of the people on this call. But I need to be explicit about why we did the research the way we did. Participatory action research is community-led in structure. It can be transformative. And I think that popular education plus participatory action research plus collaborative writing really colored everything in me towards collaboration. And in 2015, I started working with a group of people and that collaboration has now spanned over a decade. We’ve written multiple articles together and now a book. And this project had a lot of pieces. So let me start with one research component that I was a key organizer for in 2015. We surveyed all of the worker cooperatives in New York City, and this was the year before a city council funding initiative for worker cooperatives began. So in a way, this is a very good baseline of pre-city support.

0:06:15.8 Maliha Safri: Overwhelmingly Latinx people dominate as worker owners. And this is both including and excluding the major outlier. The major outlier in New York City being Cooperative Home Healthcare Associates, the largest in home health care cooperative in the country. It has since been superseded by a new cooperative that started after we’ve finished even gathering data in 2019. But let’s stick to this snapshot for just a moment and I’m happy to talk about where things have gone in questions too. In terms of industrial sector and gender composition breakdown of the cooperatives, we see some patterns. 98% are women, 70%… Sorry, two-thirds are in care work occupations, cleaning, child care, elder care, tutoring, in home health care doulas. These are some of the main categories. We spoke to dozens of workers directly for this project and probably hundreds over the years. Two who had started a cleaning cooperative described to me what they experienced in terms of trying to create a model for how to help others start cooperatives. We can see subjective transformation in what they told me, micro leading to meso level transformations. It’s a mode of politicization that has an expansive politics. Many others have written rich ethnographic work about this. Daphne Berry and Myrtle Bell leap to mind, as does Caroline Shenaz Hossein.

0:08:00.8 Maliha Safri: There are many in this field of looking at the qualitative experiences. We wanted to actually add a different piece to this conversation. We wanted to look at one piece. What is the economic impact of all of the worker cooperatives together? Here I used input-output modeling to try to trace out the multiplier impact. Planners are more familiar with this method than economists. So when I was trying to teach myself this, the economists were like, “No, you should go to the planners”. And I learned the most common software program, IMPLAN, that’s like the Excel of input-output modeling, a package program software. So bear with me while we walk through this row by row. Let’s concentrate on the first line. We examined worker cooperatives, actual output, what they made in revenues. We had that information. We gathered that information. We also had what they pay in payroll, labor income. We also had the total number of workers employed. And here part-time and full-time are included and mixed. We, plus the coalition and a wider movement was always interested and remained so in this idea of what they call value chains and an academic literature might call supply chain effects.

0:09:25.8 Maliha Safri: That’s this second row. How much do they spend on supplies? Indirectly effect. How many jobs got supported. And inside the movement there is a particular emphasis. Can we be intentional about sourcing? And can we be intentional about building different kinds of supply chains which Support a further 101 jobs. Induced effects are what is the spending power of all these workers and jobs supported? Right. When the workers go out and spend their payroll, when they buy food, when they pay for their rent, the total that adds all this together and the total impact is 125 million. Now here is where I think there’s some harsh critique of worker cooperatives, that they only benefit those workers. And that’s actually not true. Right? They benefit local economies as well. But here’s where some interesting class analysis falls out of the way social accounting matrices are organized. Regional input-output models assume all firms are conventional employer owned capitalist firms. So we are using a technique that was never designed for cooperatives in the first place. So how do cooperatives compare using the same tool to conventional capitalist employer owned firms? Left side, you’ve already seen and now understood and are pros.

0:10:49.9 Maliha Safri: The right side, this is us comparing cooperatives real data with how conventional employer owned firms in the same industries with the same exact revenues, the same sized firms, basically. Right. What would their output be? Now let’s just look at that first row for a second for conventional capitalist firms. These firms have about the same revenues, right? The same prices as cooperatives. In fact, they’re probably the price setters in the market. A cooperative cannot realistically come in and charge double the price, that is actually set by the market. So the output across capitalist firms and cooperatives is roughly the same. What they do with it is different. Conventional firms of course have a payroll and importantly they hire less workers, almost half the workers. They probably have a different distribution across management and base workers in terms of pay, a more unequal payroll. But conventional firms importantly also cut a percentage of the revenues, the output to the proprietor. The gap between labor income and output is the return to the entrepreneur. Indirect effects. What do conventional firms spend on supplies? That’s about the same in materials. There’s some evidence to say that maybe cooperative firms do spend a little bit more.

0:12:25.2 Maliha Safri: I’ve talked to, for instance, cleaning firms that buy insist upon non-toxic cleaning products for workers. But the induced effect is where the picture gets very different. Because of the decisions made about how to distribute output across payroll, the money being spent by the workers is much higher in the cooperative model. Why? Because their payroll is higher, they do not have a return to the entrepreneur. What does this mean? That the final comparison between conventional firms and cooperatives is that conventional employer owned firms produce less total output than equivalent cooperatives in the city economy. The cooperatives have a bigger total economic impact than conventional firms of the same sizes in the same industries in the same city. Do you have to be a radical as a city councilor or a mayor to say you want job stability and more local growth? Not really. However, I do think this is an example of counter visioning the urban space. We have two options for urban economic planning, equity versus inequality. And surprise, equity turns out to be better for more local people.

0:13:47.8 Maliha Safri: At one level, this is so simple and intuitive. I am not sure we needed this proof. But it’s nice to have that proof, right, that cities are designed to be unequal. They can be made in other ways. They are already being made in other ways by people on the ground. Now, this was one piece of a much larger project that had many more people, more cities, more methods, more and more. And we had always wanted to concentrate on cities where we were working closely. But we were also working with solidarity economy activists. And at the national level there was a conversation about how far behind the US was in some ways in terms of organizing around another world, another economy, as possible politics. It is not shocking that the US would be behind other countries in many ways. And this is just one. The concept of a solidarity economy is not one we invent. It has instead been developed and theorized in context specific ways by scholars and practitioners spanning the globe of what has become a transnational solidarity economy movement. Although, practices of solidarity are foundational to all human societies, the term solidarity economies came up in at the same time, but separately in Chile and France in the 1980s to elevate economic initiatives that actively prioritize egalitarian and cooperative norms.

0:15:20.4 Maliha Safri: Much of the energy of the movement has come from post colonial contexts. The network is global, but the work of defining solidarity economies has largely fallen to practitioners organizing at national, regional or local scales, which has led to considerable terminological and conceptual diversity. My co-author Craig Borowiak has written about this very lucidly. I already mentioned I was engaged in worker center kinds of education, right? Remember that Jersey Shore map that I was talking about created by ex-prisoners? And in that case, practically speaking, a lot of the social organizations and collectives they visited signed up to be their first customers, creating a different kind of solidarity-based supply chain. Even that one example shows how community mapping can be transformative. Maps don’t just represent the world. Once they are produced as part of our shared reality, they can help make new worlds. But before you can map, you have to make decisions about what to map. And we worked closely with activists over two years in the US Solidarity Economy Network and City Level Networks to produce this typology. Now, in determining what to include, many considerations were paramount. We aim to identify organizational forms that are substantially aligned with key solidarity economy values, including social equity, environmental sustainability, solidarity, pluralism and democracy.

0:16:58.0 Maliha Safri: No initiative is perfect on all counts, but we also did not want to include initiatives that are structured in ways that inherently violate particular solidarity economy norms. For this, the commitment to self management and democratic decision-making were non negotiable for most of the activists. For example, even though social enterprises seek to combine environmental and social concerns with their financial bottom lines, they are not part of the typology because most are structured in undemocratic ways, excluding workers from key economic decision making processes. Extremely important, the typology is by no means a rigid classification nor an exhaustive list, not at all, of informal economic practices of solidarity in families, neighborhoods, cities. It is not a blueprint, but an invitation to add to this, to take this, an invitation to thinking about how solidarity economy initiatives differ from conventional capitalist firms. One of the problems I mentioned was that US activists had no comparable map in the US at the national level. So we helped develop that as an openly accessible, interactive and searchable map and research database over, I think 26,000 entries, searchable by organizational type or function.

0:18:25.3 Maliha Safri: So, for instance, looking for credit unions in your city. This is a pragmatic tool for anybody who wants to know more about solidarity economies near them. Now there are other maps. The black socialists in America have produced one called the Black Dual Power Map. New Economy Coalition has also produced a national level directory. However, we turned most of our analytical attention to cities. We were working closely with networks in our own cities, so we dug in deeper there. We mapped all of the categories in the bottom right hand corner in all three cities in Philadelphia, New York City and Worcester, medium, the largest and small. But in all the cities, there are sizable footprints. And this simple mapping exercise transforms the common understanding of US cities as entirely shaped by capitalism and profit centered logics. The maps show that the same cities contain a large array of economic practices that follow ethics of solidarity and cooperation.

0:19:31.1 Tom Llewellyn: We see hundreds of community gardens, affordable housing cooperatives, cooperative enterprises, scores of credit unions, dozens of community supported agriculture programs, amongst many other initiatives. The maps provide a glimpse to the extent to which solidarity is woven into urban economies and invite us to consider more fully what role solidarity economy initiatives play in our cities, what they can offer to urban residents, especially in the disinvested neighborhoods where capitalism falls short to support life needs.

0:20:05.7 Maliha Safri: Our maps are partial. All of the maps represent formal initiatives with a defined location rather than informal or spatially diffused practices. One implication is that these maps actually under-represent solidarity economies because a wide range cannot be mapped. Some evade cartographic representation because they are informal, while others have a spatially diffuse character, no crisp boundaries. In other words, if it were possible to visualize the Solidarity City as composed of all forms of the solidarity economy and those who work to support it, its spatial contours would be even more expansive and diverse and extend beyond our maps. Even though we made this map, we technically don’t own it. Since it came out in our book on this just this month, we looked at three cities. As I’ve mentioned, we came from different disciplines. And we were also convinced that this project needed all of us and our expertise to work. So we use multiple methods, qualitative and quantitative prioritizing community formed questions in research, using geospatial analysis and input-output modeling. From the beginning, we wanted to look at race and racial segregation and deep poverty. We are in these circles and we understand the buzz of the believer who wants to convince others of the great potential right under our noses.

0:21:48.2 Maliha Safri: But sometimes that can lead to being so busy, trying to convince people of the value of the project that we do not face internal divisions of race and deep poverty. And that’s what we wanted to do, have this internal examination. Reminding you quickly from the footprint map, the distribution across these three cities is marked by patterns. And we were pattern investigators. The problem with dot maps is that they actually don’t give us an accurate measure of density, right, because dots can be on top of each other. So using kernel density estimation techniques, we wanted to look at what geographers call hotspots. And here I’m gonna stick to New York City for the sake of time as well, because the patterns are actually different across all three cities, and we cannot make easy generalizations about all these patterns. Now, there are important clusters across New York. The dense, what geographers call hotspots, you can call them clusters. And if you know these neighborhoods, you will also not be surprised by the next step where we examine who lives in these neighborhoods. So, on the left hand side we have income and poverty, and on the right hand side, we are examining the location of these clusters vis-à-vis race, the racial composition of the neighborhoods.

0:23:18.4 Maliha Safri: Let’s look at income first. Here we are using multiples of the official poverty line, because already so many activists, people, institutional bodies, have convinced us of the inadequacy of official poverty measures in the US as sufficient to measuring the problem. So we use guidelines of twice the poverty line for a lot of our work. And race, we wanted to see how these initiatives are distributed vis-à-vis the racial composition. Now New York city is a deeply hyper segregated city. Our city is about 31% white, 29% Latinx, 21% black and 14% Asian. For a neighborhood to be 100% white means it is significantly diverging from the normal population of New York. We are a hyper segregated city and that will affect solidarity economies. How could it not? So what does the data show? Significant clustering of solidarity economies in neighborhoods of color, which also have a significant overlap with high levels of poverty. Now I wanna connect this to this idea of racial capitalism. The term racial capitalism refers to a body of scholarship that emerged as an important corrective to earlier theorizations of class and capitalism.

0:24:39.8 Maliha Safri: Many liberal and Marxist accounts of capitalist economies tended to treat racial relations as peripheral to market logics and class antagonisms. Theorists of racial capitalism reveal how capitalist development in the US and elsewhere is fundamentally intertwined with processes of racialization. Racial capitalism is not one variation of capitalism, as if there could be processes of capitalism separate from race. Rather, capitalism has always operated through racial differentiation from its very beginnings. In Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s memorable phrasing, capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it. In this respect, capitalism is racial capitalism, particularly in the US context. At the end, we see many examples of that for instance in redlining, which I’ll get back to in just a second. At the same time, black indigenous Latinx cartographies and scholarship teach us a lot. And one way is their critique of space is categorized as poor and assumed to be devoid of life. Racial capitalism literatures offer us rich historiographic accounts of the resistance and cooperation that weaken those absence narratives. You can see it inside the influential scholarship of Cedric Robinson, alongside his attention to the racialized processes of slavery, feudalism and capitalism.

0:26:12.4 Maliha Safri: He equally emphasized a long history and theory and practice where people unsettle exploitative economies, building up cooperative alternatives in peasant communes that rejected feudal hierarchies long before the emergence of Marxism and through maroon societies created by formerly enslaved peoples that both he and Du Bois examined in depth. Later RDG Kelly will look at freedom dreams as existing in reality, not only our imagination. So let’s focus something something concrete here, redlining. This is a crowd that knows this very well. The set of urban practices that shapes cities in powerful ways to this day. I’m not gonna go into depth because I assuming a lot of familiarity with this process. I am simply bringing this up because these maps represented one powerful way of coding the city by race from best to hazardous and dangerous. And for us, redlining is especially important because it exemplifies how maps have been deployed to sustain and consolidate hegemonic social orders. We wanted to see how the clusters of solidarity economies relate to this historical process. And our maps show the striking manner in which practically all contemporary solidarity economy hotspots coincide with formerly redlined areas, many of whom remain home to communities of color living at or below twice the poverty line.

0:27:49.1 Maliha Safri: Today, for example, we see clusters of solidarity economies in impoverished black and Latinx communities, informally redlined areas in New York’s Lower east side, northern Manhattan, Harlem, Washington Heights, North Brooklyn, and also the South Bronx. The cartographies of the solidarity economy that we overlay against the borders of redline neighborhoods make it clear that in the past, like today, urban space has been powerfully created through solidarity as well as through racist policies of capital. Now I know one critique I have heard people is that people are doing this out of deprivation. One woman asked me even, “Are you for redlining?” And “No, I’m not”. [laughter] But I want to look at how people have also created resistance based practices. So, for example, when you look at credit unions, in the majority of the US, most people like myself belong to professional credit unions. That’s not the case in New York City, where faith-based credit unions, and even more specifically black faith-based credit unions began operations at the very height of redlining in the 1930s. In the resistance to redlining itself, we see the seeds of not only what we want to build, but how we want to build in direct opposition to exclusion, predations of racial capitalism.

0:29:24.7 Maliha Safri: If we just look at those clusters in 3D format across New York City in Philadelphia, we have heard some people describe this as producing a kind of uncanny effect. Looking anew at our cities to see mountains and valleys, and many of those neighborhoods that were characterized as best on the redlining maps representing areas full of opportunities are actually valleys here. Places where solidarity economy initiatives are conspicuously scarce. By contrast, the neighborhoods categorized as hazardous and lacking in opportunity are mountains of urban economic solidarity. Counter mapping, I think if we think about mapping and counter mapping as a resistance practice, counter mapping can change the political horizon. Counter visioning. I chose this word because of the ways that emphasizes that the vision is rooted in real material ways people are disempowered, excluded, exploited. A lot of times people want to talk about empowerment without talking about all the ways that people have been made disempowered, and not dealing with that is not gonna get us anywhere. So we’re against something in the process of envisioning the future. And what are we against? And organizers always stress, it’s important to name what you’re against. Right? Because then it’s not just about making sure people survive racism, but constructing alternatives that oppose and build in ways that liberate communities and on their own terms.

0:31:00.6 Maliha Safri: We need vision, but one that is rooted and clear about what we’re against, but also not having that define what we are for. Very quickly, I just wanna talk and stress that when you look at how these initiatives are providing, what are they providing, what kinds of goods and services? These are not luxuries, which is actually sometimes what we hear from critics who don’t know necessarily so much about this, that this is just for people with privilege. But actually this shows the core industrial breakdown of what solidarity economies are providing. Housing, food, fair finance, and work. Now, we’re interested in the overall footprint because we wanted to challenge the representation of economic alternative… I promise I’m wrapping up. We want to challenge the representation of economic alternatives as marginal. One of our intentions in writing the book was to counteract these limiting habits of thought by exploring the geographies that emerge when diverse initiatives are brought out of their silos and conceived together as facets of a shared solidarity economy. What if we could learn to see the examples all around us, not as scattered exceptions, but as constitutive elements of the vital networks of human solidarity that support urban life? 

0:32:26.9 Maliha Safri: What if, amidst the towering trees of capitalist structures that dominate our horizons like urban skyscrapers, we could sense an expanding solidarity ecosystem growing in the understory? Using the metaphor of the forest, we could see a robust life. Many other trees, bushes, ferns, mushrooms that might be considered economic entities nurtured by underground root systems and the fungi that symbiotically connect trees. Visible above ground are the more formally organized parts of the Solidarity City. Housing and worker cooperatives, credit unions, community gardens, and more. And by the way, Solidarity City I think of as an imaginary right, as a way of thinking about the city below ground, the undercurrents of solidarity spread through the soil, nurturing informal economies and social practices, sustaining what lies above through the continual extension of goodwill, reciprocity, and care. Learning to see solidarity already operating within economies is a crucial step towards envisioning that solidarity cities have always been here. They are here. And what might they become? 

0:33:49.6 Maliha Safri: Second, we argued that many of the race and income divisions that underlie modern urban life are manifest within the geographies of the solidarity economy. This can be seen in the way solidarity economies concentrate in particular neighborhoods and the spatial patterns actually among the different sectors. In the book, we actually look at different sectors one by one, two as well as together. Some initiatives, for instance, tend to cluster in lower income neighborhoods of color, whereas others tend to map onto spaces of white middle class privilege. And in our field work, we frequently heard community partners use the term fault line to describe how divisions in the larger society also run through the movement spaces. We join them in adopting this fault line metaphor to characterize divided geographies of the city and use it carefully, acknowledging that the term fault line may evoke rigid or naturally occurring phenomena. And we do not suggest that at all, only that not that race or poverty are natural or inevitable, only that they are evident in spatial patterns we analyze and part of the truth that solidarity economy movements must bear.

0:35:03.3 Maliha Safri: Third, we contend that solidarity economy initiatives and the movement and large, while being affected by racial and economic divisions, possess many of the normative and practical resources for confronting and transforming these fractured landscapes. Here other metaphors emerged through our engagement with movement practitioners that helped us make sense of how solidarity economies produce urban space. Ecotones refers to the ecosystem needed to nurture these initiatives, and we do a deep dive in Philadelphia to examine the variety of ways neighborhoods come to be ecosystems. Another, and one that I’ve already seeded with a little bit of my work on the worker cooperatives is what we call bulwarks that successfully form patterns of defense and resistance to racialized forms of disinvestment or exploitation. Bulwarks are echoes of what Cooperation Jackson calls the build and fight strategy.

0:36:11.5 Maliha Safri: For Cooperation Jackson fight refers to a long history of resistance in Mississippi against the disposability of black life, which Cooperation Jackson seeks to confront and defeat as part of any urban human rights agenda. Build refers to a multi part expansive regional plan and Corporation Jackson offers one instantiation of a theme that has shown up in multiple social struggles places. Build and fight, oppose and propose, resist and build. Similar expressions have become mottos for campaigns that combine anti capitalist politics with post capitalist world building. And there are shades of meaning separating these expressions. There are many ways to resist, not all of which involve fighting. And all of these mottos and campaigns are rooted in opposition and defined by visions of solidarity as a generative power. To these we add the reframed expression build and defend, to draw greater attention to the needs and creative forces of communities to emphasize and the imperative to not only build for the future, but recognize that which has already been built. Like the worker cooperatives or some of our work on housing cooperatives and faith-based credit unions in need of support and protection. I’ll end with this. I know we’re in a fight for our lives mode and I very much understand that. But there is something very powerful about the resist and build axiomatic politics because it focuses attention on the means and the ends. I’ll stop there, and thank you very much.

0:37:58.6 Julian Agyeman: Wow. I’m still processing. Maliha, that was fantastic. And I note your book is open access and I’m just thinking, how could it be otherwise [laughter] given the nature of what you’re talking about? I’d also like…

0:38:11.3 Maliha Safri: That’s what we aimed for. We thought that that should not be the reason that anybody should not be able to read this. We can arrange for that. Right.

0:38:18.8 Julian Agyeman: I’d just like to acknowledge that my colleague and friend Penlo has just joined us after having been at a rather essential faculty meeting. So I wanna give space to Penn if he wants to say something. But we’ve got a whole welter of questions here. First is from Nancy in Quebec. Is there a reason for not including mutuals in Europe? And here in Quebec, they are included.

0:38:44.8 Maliha Safri: Mutual insurance and mutual… Is that what you… Mutual insurance associations or in other…

0:38:56.5 Nancy: Yeah, that’s one form but it’s being renewed now. So they, historically, it’s the big mutuals but there’s now new forms of mutualization that are emerging, and actually this one is coming back but in new forms.

0:39:12.3 Maliha Safri: Yes, we mutual aid networks. I understand your question to also but I will say that to a certain extent we had very small team, how can we also deal with the universe of what exists in our cities? 

0:39:35.6 Nancy: No, it was just around the tableau that I was reacting. But for the rest, obviously you’ve got to look at what’s going on in your own community and it’s very interesting by the way. Thank you.

0:39:43.5 Maliha Safri: And I think that’s something to be considered. I do think of the topology that the US Solidarity Economy Network that we helped develop has already actually transformed and changed and now different people are adding different terms to it and I think of it as not a set thing, but is something for everyone to take, to use, to modify and especially in ways that make sense in their location.

0:40:08.9 Nancy: Yeah, no, and this is not the time and the subject of the… But there’s a whole evolution and hybridization in terms of public and collective and the commons and so on. So even the definitions and the forms are rapidly evolving as well. But anyhow, so sorry. Thank you. And this is very interesting.

0:40:26.7 Julian Agyeman: Thank you, Nancy. Renee asks I’d love to hear more about how the indirect effects whats measured in this project.

0:40:34.9 Maliha Safri: For cooperatives that is actually information that we had in terms of what cooperatives spent on means of production supplies. We asked them that question.

0:40:53.6 Julian Agyeman: Michelle asks will there be a continuum of what a community can do to help grow a solidarity economy at the urban level? So a continuum idea.

0:41:05.8 Maliha Safri: Continuum about what are the possibilities if I’m reading that correctly.

0:41:10.6 Julian Agyeman: Oh are you in the house still? 

0:41:16.9 Maliha Safri: I can only… So I’m gonna guess a little bit at what continuum or possible of what concrete communities can do to grow solidarity economies. Right. And I think of that as a very expansive range, perhaps one that I can’t even imagine the ends to it. One of the things that we really stress and this kind of comes back maybe to Nancy’s question is that this, we have to have an open ontological approach to understanding solidarity. We cannot think about this as, “This is it. These are the only people I will have solidarity with”. It is an ever porous boundary that actually requires us to be thinking about the exclusions that we have made and how can they also be brought into a project of thinking about or thinking about urban planning but with community well-being at the center and forefront, that is going to ever evolve because even our understandings of community well-being will shift as new demands are made, for instance for the peoplehood and rights of our trans kind of brothers and sisters. So, that is absolutely I think an open process.

0:42:51.8 Julian Agyeman: Tom Llewellyn asks what advice do you have for organizers or researchers interested in doing similar mapping work in their communities? 

0:43:00.7 Maliha Safri: Thanks. And I get asked that a lot. My first thing is gonna be please look to actually make sure that someone has already… So for instance, someone from San Francisco was like, “How can I do this?” And I said, “At first you should… ” I’m very certain there’s already an existing solidarity economy map in San Francisco. So you don’t need to duplicate work. Look for already existing networks, city level networks in your city and in all the major cities. I wanna say there’s this bubbling happening in this this area for sure. And so one is all hook into already existing efforts. Second, there are many organizers that are very skilled in terms of leading mapping workshops for people who are trying to get efforts off the ground in their cities. In case you don’t have one already, you can contact me. There are other people inside the Solidarity Economy activist movement that are very skilled in leading some of these workshops. And it can be done… So I would say that there’s a variety of ways that people can do this. And we really considered the entire book itself as a little bit of a how to do this, as a set of techniques and tools that can be used in many places.

0:44:33.5 Maliha Safri: I know we wrote this about the… Primarily about these cities, but this is actually not just about these cities. And this is about seeing anew inside the cities in which you live to look for these things. Because I almost guarantee you that these things already exist, a good number of them. Right.

0:44:58.7 Julian Agyeman: John asks how has the Solidarity economy evolved since the 1980s, especially since the rise of neoliberalism? I think you’ve… With this in a non-explicit way, but if you can give us a quick.

0:45:10.7 Maliha Safri: Yeah, it’s a big question a little bit. Right. And I’m sure you already, you can please also help in this as well, because I know you. Penn has worked on this for sure. So I wanna say that I think in some ways the rise of the Solidarity Economy movement was in opposition to the neoliberal sort of discourse of power. If the neoliberal discourse of power could be contained in the phrasing of Margaret Thatcher, there is no alternative. Then the very first World Social Forum that designed itself in opposition to the World Economic Forum, their slogan was another world is possible and then the sub-slogan was Another economy is possible and then it proliferated another knowledge is possible. And that that opposition is there from the beginning. How has it evolved? It’s also, we’re talking about a set of social movements. We have Nancy Neemtan from Quebec here as well. I think it’s going to be different in different countries, to be honest. And I think there are different relations to the state in different countries.

0:46:30.7 Maliha Safri: If you’re in Canada, then and/or in Brazil, we could think about official state support in the form of agencies, in the form of procurement contracts which designate Solidarity Economy institutions as privileged sources for contracting for the government. You know, that is… So that’s one possibility there and then that’s much… That is likely but on a much more local city level scale inside the US. So I suppose I’m a little wary of talking about the Solidarity economy movement as a unified movement because I don’t think that is the case. It is a decentralized social movement. But it at its core, many of the constituents do have an oppositional relationship and continue to have an oppositional relationship to neoliberal processes. Absolutely. Do you wanna add anything to that, Julian? 

0:47:42.7 Julian Agyeman: Sorry? 

0:47:43.8 Maliha Safri: I said if you wanted to add anything to that, Julian.

0:47:45.6 Julian Agyeman: Oh, I’m good. We’ve got… Questions are coming in thick and fast now and we’ve got about seven minutes. So really quick answers. And this one, how can solidarity economies counteract the financialization of our land economy? There are two responses to it. This is from Zvi. But do you have a quick answer to that? How can solidarity economies counteract the financialization of our land? 

0:48:09.6 Maliha Safri: If we think about the financialization of the economy as moving increasingly the center of the entire economy towards the financial sector and the health of the financial sector, then I think everything about, first of all, even the financial sector inside the solidarity economy, if we think about credit unions, community development credit unions and public banks and rotating savings and credit associations that are zero interest, that is a very different model of the entire financial sector by design. And that the financial sector should be organized by either nonprofit or zero interest principles. Already inside that financial sector we see a financial sector that sees itself in direct opposition to the capitalist financial sector. And then, if you step outside just the financial sector of the solidarity economy itself, definitely I would say that the center of gravity for solidarity economies is towards production, towards the primacy of labor over capital. And it is about shifting towards satisfying core human needs, housing, food. So it’s not just the financial sector that is counteracting, let’s say, the financialization. I would say the entirety, the entire spectrum is counteracting that kind of drive.

0:49:52.6 Julian Agyeman: Crystal asks, can you talk a little bit more about your positionality within the participatory action research and how you navigated challenges that came up? 

0:50:04.4 Maliha Safri: You should contact me, please. I attached my msafri@drew.edu. If you’re interested in doing some of this work yourself, I think you have to think… And it’s a continual process. You have to think about your positionality and you have to be willing to let that research be community-led and relinquish the position of the masterful expert. There was this one great check a little bit for me because I’d been so integral in helping one worker cooperative get off the ground. And we do a whole workshop with organizers that are really trained in how… In decision-making in collectives, especially navigating conflict and how to decide on how to make decisions itself. And anyway, there was this moment where I’d been part of the group, but I am not part of the worker cooperative. I was there for the participatory action research part, but I wasn’t going to be a construction worker in the worker cooperative. And so, there was this moment where the consultant is asking us, “So who’s gonna vote?” And I rose, I raised my hand and it was a check because I don’t have a vote in that cooperative.

0:51:31.0 Maliha Safri: That would be a separate entity and the workers will have a vote, not me. So all this to say that I think you have to be thinking about that. But it is extremely important to also bring in experienced community organizers and experienced people who will also be able to help you see things that you could not see.

0:51:57.8 Julian Agyeman: Final question goes to Neil Garenflo. What’s next for your research? 

0:52:03.2 Maliha Safri: Thank you. So I’ve been thinking about, I’ve been attending many community defense trainings, especially around ICEWatch. Some of you are familiar with, with CopWatch, and CopWatch was… And I remember participating in that too, although that strangely was not as active in Harlem when I moved here. But now, ICEWatch kinds of community defense trainings. And I am going to all these trainings and at the end of them, they’re always ending. By the third meeting, the organizers were ending with, “Do your mapping. And here I am doing all this mapping stuff”. And I felt confused in the first. I said there hasn’t been a single map. What, there’s no maps in there to do your mapping. But I understood do your mapping is also in a different way. How do community organizers do mapping? How do you suggest undocumented people do mapping for safety and security? And this is one thing that we were not able to get into too much. But Solidarity Cities actually has many valences. In this country, we use the terminology sanctuary city, but actually in Europe, sanctuary cities are called solidarity cities. And so how do we think about community organizations mapping for community defense of undocumented immigrants and mapping not to make visible, but mapping for internal organizing purposes.

0:53:37.3 Maliha Safri: So a lot of this work was about visibility, but that is not gonna be the tack in this next four years. So how do we think about mapping for strength? Not visibility. Mapping that is going on inside communities. So that is really making, drawing me in terms of my labor, in terms of my time and my thinking now as well. And I really wanna push on that. And in addition, I would say there have been all these questions raised about the relationship between racial capitalism and post capitalism. And I know this conversation is one piece of that, but there is more to say about that. And so, I definitely see my future research being pulled there as well.

0:54:27.8 Julian Agyeman: Maliha, we’re gonna have to leave it there. What a fantastic presentation. I’m sorry I couldn’t get to all the questions. You have started a conversation and you can expect the server with your book on it to be over downloaded. It’ll break down I am sure. Can we give…

0:54:45.7 Maliha Safri: You can go to the Manifold edition of University of Minnesota to get to the open access version.

0:54:51.6 Julian Agyeman: Sure. Can we give Maliha a warm Cities@Tufts thank you. Thank you so much Maliha. Our next Cities@Tufts Colloquium is on February 19th where Duncan McLaren will talk about From City to Sink, Urban Carbon Removal as Promise and Practice. Thank you so much again, Maliha.

0:55:11.2 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video, transcript and graphic recording or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable with support from the Bar foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Jess Milner. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and Communications Manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones, Candice Spivey. And the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

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Watch the video of Environmental Justice, Political-Economic Inequalities, and Pathways to Justice

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Transcript for Environmental Justice, Political-Economic Inequalities, and Pathways to Justice

0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Sharable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website Shareable.net just click the link in the show notes and now here’s the host of Cities@Tufts Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:41.3 Julian Agyeman: Welcome everybody to our first Cities@Tufts virtual colloquium of 2025. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and together with my research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partners Shareable and the Barr foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross disciplinary academic initiative which recognises Tufts as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we are delighted to host Dr. Prakash Kashwan, who’s an Associate professor of Environmental Studies at Brandeis University, not far away from Tufts. He’s also the Chair of the Environmental Justice Concentration in the Master of Public Policy Program at Brandeis Heller School of Social Policy and Management.

0:01:38.1 Julian Agyeman: I can’t even begin to encapsulate all his research in the one paragraph that I have here, but he is a scholar who focuses on the intersections of environment development and socioeconomic and political dimensions of global environmental and climate change. His research and writings are shaped profoundly by his over two decades long engagements with global and international environmental governance, including a pre academic career in international development from 1999 to 2005. He’s the author of Democracy in the Woods, Environmental Conservation and Social justice in India, Tanzania and Mexico, Oxford University Press, 2017, the editor of Climate justice in India, Cambridge University Press, 2022 and one of the editors of the excellent journal Environmental Politics.

0:02:31.3 Julian Agyeman: He’s also co founder of the Climate Justice Network. Prakash’s talk today is Political Economic Inequalities, Policy Narratives and Pathways to Environmental and Climate Justice. I think it’s the longest title we’ve ever had Prakash. Prakash a zoomtastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:02:51.9 Prakash Kashwan: Thank you Professor Agyeman and everyone else who’s involved with the organization of this fantastic series. I’ve listened to several of the videos and I’ve learned so much, so I really appreciate all of your work on this series. Without taking too long, I do want to take a moment to think about the moment we are in the context, the heaviness in the air. And I just want to say that challenging as the times are, we have learned so much from fellow scholars and activists. And Julian is one of those founding leading lights of the field of environmental justice, urban sustainability, just sustainability. And. And so I really want to thank you for your leadership. Of you and many others. I won’t name all the names, but just recognizing the general community of scholars and activists in the fields of environmental justice, climate justice, and social justice more broadly. And I think it’s drawing on the wisdom of all that work that you and others have done that hopefully will stand us on solid grounds as we prepare for the next four years, 10 years, next decade or so. So with that, I want to dive right into my PowerPoint presentation.

0:04:20.5 Prakash Kashwan: And I did change the title a little bit because it threatened to become even longer. So I cut out the policy narratives part, which I wasn’t really focusing so much on as the talk took shape. So now I’m talking about environmental justice, political economic inequalities, and pathways to justice. This audience probably does not need a long introduction to environmental justice, but just highlighting the definition of environmental justice that EPA and the federal agencies use means the just treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of income, race, color, national origin, tribal affiliation, or disability. This phrase, all people has its own history.

0:05:12.3 Prakash Kashwan: As many of you might know, the environmental justice movement started with a very pointed focus on environmental racism. And one could argue that it got sanitized a little bit as it went through the process of institutionalization in federal policy making and state level policymaking. But this definition has been adopted very widely also within the EJ movement. And so that’s another point of discussion that sort of shows up in some of the literature review that I’ll share with you. So the contributions of environmental justice movement. We can’t spend enough time celebrate the contributions here in this limited format, but just to recognize that environmental justice movement has almost single handedly change the conversation and the policy and political debates on not just environment, but climate change and many other areas of policymaking and politics.

0:06:13.5 Prakash Kashwan: Having recognized those contributions, I think there’s also a very rich scholarship on environmental justice that talks about multiple histories, regional political economies, the EJ paradigm. There are methodological debates and policy engagements that have come about. And all of these scholars and scholar activists, they have shed light on different dimensions and aspects. So it’s a very rich body of literature. It has expanded starting from the toxic waste disposal to going on to conservation, food justice, carbon pollution, climate change, global climate governance, national and international case studies. So it has expanded tremendously in its scope and reach as it has gone. We will talk quite a bit about the whole paradigm of just sustainability. But there’s another sort of very active debate within the EJ scholarship that has focused on this idea of what is the role of the state and are the EJ agents, groups and movements, by working with the state, are they able to leverage this state for advancing emancipatory EJ outcomes or are they being co opted? And there’s a very vigorous some of these scholars, David Pellow, Laura Pulido and Jill Harrison and many others who have made tremendous contributions. You will hear glimpses of this debate, even though I don’t directly address their critique and the way they are framing this debate.

0:07:47.1 Prakash Kashwan: And finally, there’s been a lot of work on EJ policy, especially from the school that is, I went for my graduate studies at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Evan Rehnquist did some early work on grappling with the empirical questions, methodological questions, and David Konisky, now at the same school. But also folks like Mendy’s have done quite a bit of work sort of connecting the EJ debate to do specific sort of policy debates. And there’s also a more nascent kind of debate about globalization of EJ movement. And if you think about nationalization in the same sense that we think of globalization, the diffusion of EJ movements and scholarship from one region within the US to another region, and there are different origin stories. So the California EJ movement traces its trajectory back to the farm workers labor unions and farm workers unions, which is a different trajectory. And Tracy Perkins recent book is fantastic in just tracing these trajectories, but also showing what it means for us to take those alternative histories and trajectories seriously. And what does it tell us about where the EJ movement and the EJ policy engagements need to go? I’ve done some work engaging with this idea that now there’s a globalization of EJ movement.

0:09:11.2 Prakash Kashwan: John Martinez Elliott has written about this and I provided an initial critique of that kind of argument. So the main anchor that I want to use for this talk is in the just sustainability paradigm. And one reason I wanted to give you that kind of broad overview of the EJ scholarship and movement is to say that there are so many rich debates that one it’s impossible to do justice to all of those debates in the same talk, but also to push the debates and discussion beyond the sort of the basic argument that often get repeated within the context of say climate change, where some of the climate policy scholars are discovering EJ now and they’re bringing it in. And I’m afraid some of them are rediscovering the wheel because they haven’t actually engaged with the whole suite of EJ debates as they’ve unfolded over the years. So just sustainability again, I think this audience knows a lot about just sustainability, so I’ll jump through this. But the idea was to integrate questions of EJ into the debates on sustainability and sustainable development. And this definition of sustainability, which was an expanded definition of sustainability from the popular definition that we often see in the literature is by Kulin and co-authors, the need to ensure a better quality of life for all.

0:10:38.1 Prakash Kashwan: So you see the phrase all showing for all showing up here again now and into the future in a just and equitable manner. This last part is really important and I haven’t actually seen a lot of advancement of this particular part of the debate which is that all of this has to be done whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems. So both sustainable and… One could argue that actually sustainable development community has not taken these limits very seriously, but also to then think about what it means for the program of an agenda of EJ as such. And again, just sustainability has blossomed into this multifaceted dense literature talking about alternative economic models, the approaches to co production of knowledge and policy agendas and policy models, intragenerational and intergenerational questions, and then reimagining needs. Thinking about good old man Gandhi who said there’s plenty to meet everybody’s needs, but not everybody’s wants. And so the just sustainability paradigm has sought to expand the the EJ debate beyond critiquing and fending off the bad effect of environmental toxic and waste disposal and hasn’t brought in this idea that a functioning thriving environment is also a prerequisite for the advancement of environmental justice and social justice. So this particular statement, a poor environment is not only a symptom of existing injustices, rather a functioning environment provides the necessary conditions to achieve social justice.

0:12:23.3 Prakash Kashwan: Now, all of this has brought us a long way from where we started in we as in the EJ movement started in the ’70s and some would argue even before then. And there’s a lot of scope to do a lot more meaningful work. The way I have understood this advancement of EJ literature, coming from a slightly different trajectory from the political economy and policy side, is that there are these main pillars of this argument rest on a couple of different kinds of arguments. One, that environmental bads also contribute to social injustices. Again, this argument is very familiar to this audience. Then there’s a second bit of argument which has been highlighted quite a bit and developed quite a bit by the just sustainability paradigm, which is that environmental goods, which is that good environment, protected environment, conservation, clean air, and along with alternative economic paradigms, et cetera, is a prerequisite for social and environmental justice. And this, I would argue that this also aligns with a body of work in economics, ecological economics, and some of the policy work that some of us have done, which talks about this inequality hypothesis, that environmental inequality, because it also hampers industrial regulation, inequalities are bad for the environment, and at the same time, they’re also bad for society.

0:13:56.9 Prakash Kashwan: So all in all, if you look at this literature, it clubs all the bad outcomes together. Bad environment, bad social justice outcome, bad EJ outcomes, and then all the good arguments that good environmental outcomes will reinforce the justice agenda as well as the pursuit of justice. And in all of this, I would argue that this literature still has three gaps, by and large, right? There’s been some work, but by and large, in the general sort of understanding of the field, I think there are three major gaps. One is that because of this good and bad sort of pooling of environmental and social outcomes, the literature is yet to get into a lot of critical scrutiny of the contested nature of the agenda of environment, because environmental protection is not one thing. There are many different ways and different ideologies of environmental protection that need to be scrutinized, and that has been done in other literatures, but it hasn’t somehow been fully integrated into the literature on EJ and just sustainability. And that’s really important because different ideological foundations of environmental protection are entangled with the dominant economic paradigm that the just sustainability argument has rightly criticized.

0:15:17.8 Prakash Kashwan: There’s an innate coherence to the argument that I’m making here. It’s coherent with just sustainability. And in that sense, one could argue that I’m trying to add to those arguments. This literature also has yet to take political and economic inequalities seriously in the sense that it has yet to deeply ask this question, what do political economic inequalities do to the kind of environmental policies, paradigms, and programs that come up in different societies? So not just on the environmental bad side, but also on the environmental good side. And then there’s this role of the state debate from the EJ literature. But there’s a different side to this kind of argument in the policy and institution literature. So that’s my, the lay of the landscape and how I’ve seen the gaps. But as I said, we look, really look forward to the discussions onto the extent to which we all are on the same page about this particular characterization of the literature and the gaps. So with this I want to first provide you some evidence about what do when I say critical scrutiny of the environmental protection paradigms, policies and programs. And one argument I want to make is that environmental protection, please put that in scare quotes.

0:16:41.5 Prakash Kashwan: “Environmental protection can produce both good and bad social justice outcomes, good and bad environmental justice outcomes.” So that’s first I want to show you quite a bit of evidence to make that argument and then use that argument to bring us to the current moment and what it means to think about this in the context, particularly in the context of renewable energy transition here in the US So my main focus here is on looking at the percentage of national territory that countries have set aside the agenda of nature protection. Now I know it’s a bit of a jump from talking about mostly about domestic environmental justice, but I’ll come back to it. Please stay with me for a while. It’ll all fit together. Hopefully it will. This graph shows you that if we go back to 1990 and please look at the green line, which is what we are concerned about, we’re not thinking so much about the marina area national jurisdiction right now. So green line shows you the global percentage of protected land globally, which has gone up from about 8% in 1990 to about 17% in 2022, 2023.

0:18:10.0 Prakash Kashwan: So it’s really almost gone up like 2.5 times in an era that has been full of neoliberal economic extractive development. And that context is really important because of the argument that is sometimes made about the fundamental contradictions between economic development and environmental protection. Here I’m showing you that one form of environmental protection has kept pace with the extractive development that we have seen over past quarter of a century, 35, 40 years. You could take this, expand this graph and you’ll see the same sort of trajectory which some of you who are in economics and public policy, this sort of contradicts some of the very popular economic arguments about nature conservation, poverty, development and so forth. But anyway, to come back to this progression of nature conservation, with the progression of nature conservation, we have seen a lot of conflicts around these conservation projects.

0:19:17.0 Prakash Kashwan: There’s another paradox here. The first paradox was the co evolution of extractive economic development and this nature conservation protected area based nature conservation. The second paradox is that all the countries that has big, large protected areas also have lots of conflicts around it. Which again calls into question ideas about how if you don’t do environmental protection in a way that takes the people along, then you won’t be able to do environmental protection.

0:19:48.0 Prakash Kashwan: It sort of questions that popular narrative which sometimes also shows up in the conservation, justice and EJ kind of literatures and debates to grapple with these two paradoxes. What I did was to look at the variation in the percentage of national territory that is set aside as protected area within countries. Greenland was not so popular. I did not actually include Greenland, even though it shows in the red color. I want you to be thinking about all of the other areas in red, particularly those in Africa. Red color, if you can see the legend at the bottom, is the countries that have more than 25% of their national territory set aside for nature protected areas. I want us to think about Africa in particular, because these are some of the poorest countries with some of the poorest people in the world, and they have more than a quarter of their national territories set aside as nature protected areas.

0:21:02.2 Prakash Kashwan: Tanzania, a country that I’ve studied, has 40% of its national territory under declared as set aside exclusively for protection of nature under these protected areas. This begs the question, how is it that first, why is it that these poor countries are deciding to set aside these large tracts of land for nature protection when they can clearly use that land, as economists would have us believe, that they would first like to use that land to do extractive economic development and poverty alleviation? Of course, there’s this popular argument about the conflict between poverty and environment again in the literature on environmental economics and so forth.

0:21:48.3 Prakash Kashwan: And so I run some very simple multivariate regression analysis and looked at the way in which political and economic inequalities mediate the designation or allocation of land for nature protection. The argument would be that inequality plays some role in this. As you can suspect that if you have unequal societies, those societies political decision making will not reflect the popular will. Right? Political inequalities, economic inequalities. If you have economic inequalities, very rich people can use poverty as a form of poverty alleviation and some kind of income programs as a form of incentives to promote the kind of nature protection programs that they want to promote. So there are many different ways in which economic inequality obviously plays a role. And similarly, poor leaders in poor, economically less advanced economies would have incentives to sign on to these programs if they come with some kind of economic support for park development or agency development and so forth. I Look at how political and economic inequality plays into this agenda of nature protection. And I’ll skip through the models and robustness tests and all of that. I went through a very torturous and painful review process, but in the end it all worked out.

0:23:24.0 Prakash Kashwan: And so the highlight results from this analysis are that democracy itself has positive effect on the percentage of national territory under protected area. If you control for everything else, democracy itself is actually associated positively with the larger area of national territory under protected areas. Now, there’s some dynamics going on here between European protected areas, which are different from African protected areas. But please stay with me and we can talk about rest of this stuff later. But this democratic dividend is undermined by increasing inequality within democracies. So if you take the sample of all the strong democracies and then see how, if you vary inequality within democracies, what happens to protected areas. What we see in this data set of 137 countries is that as economic inequality increases within democracies, the percentage of national territory set aside as protected area goes down. So democracy kicks in. And if you have inequality but strong democratic institutions, people who are subjected to unjust policies, they can protest and they can put some brakes on protected areas. That’s the basic argument, but this is the main finding here. Countries with poor democratic institutions and high economic inequalities, especially in Africa, have the largest percentage of national territories declared as protected areas.

0:25:09.1 Prakash Kashwan: In a nutshell, this global movement on conservation has ridden on poverty and lack of democracy, poverty and authoritarianism, if you will, to expand into global south territories. That’s the sort of the story here in the book Democracy in the woods that Julian mentioned in his very kind introduction. I unpack that whole thing. I’m not throwing you some crass empirical findings without sort of contextual understanding of those topics, but empirical analysis has its own sort of importance. Now these kinds of issues have traveled into or permeated into the ongoing debates on nature based solutions and nature based climate restoration and ecosystem restoration. So many of you may have heard there was this famous map, global map, prepared by Strasberg and colleagues. What they did was they, they said that if we wanted to look for three kinds of outcomes, so they created a global model and used remotely sensed imagery as well as geospatial analysis and spatial statistics to then say if we wanted to maximize the benefits of climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation, and we wanted to do it at. At the minimum cost, globally speaking. So minimum cost requires cheap land and cheap labor. Right? The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things is the kind of reference here.

0:26:46.1 Prakash Kashwan: And so cheap land, cheap labor takes you to all the places that you see on this map highlighted in dark red. So these are the lands that if you, again, if you take a look at the legend on the top right hand corner, These are top 5% and top 10% global priority areas for restoring back to nature. I want to repeat this again. This is a proposal that these lands in the red color should be restored lock, stock and barrel. These lands should be restored back to pre human restoration status. That’s the argument here. And of course you ask what happens to the most densely populated region in the world, which is South Asia and Southeast Asia, because it’s all red. Essentially, cheap land and cheap labor needs to give way to the agenda of nature restoration. Now what we did, we took this map, a group of us, we took this map and we said, okay, what if we insert some basic social and economic variables into this map? So we brought in economic inequality, political inequality, food insecurity, those kinds of variables that you think would be obviously related to this agenda of restoration because you’re restoring lands back to nature so all the farmland goes away and so forth.

0:28:18.0 Prakash Kashwan: What we found was that if you follow that top 15% restoration priority areas, almost all of agricultural land in Equatorial Guinea, Philippines, Nicaragua, Nepal, Indonesia, more than 80%, close to about 90% of agricultural land in some of these largest countries is supposed to be restored back to nature. What we found was that the map not remember, these scholars did not decide to prioritize. So I’m reading through the second bullet on the left side of the screen here. This map ends up prioritizing, right? Prioritizes in the sense that this is how things work out in the real world. When you’re looking for cheap land and cheap labor. It prioritizes restoration in countries that are poorer, more populated, more economically unequal, less food insecure, and that employed more people in agriculture. So all the wrong kinds of variables on the wrong side of the restoration priority areas. These equity effects hold, not just internationally. So it’s not just looking at countries as a whole, but you can also go sub nationally and look at which areas are being set aside for nature conservation within countries. Then we also see the same effect at the subnational level. So we started by looking at this rather simplistic sort of cross national international analysis.

0:29:49.3 Prakash Kashwan: But this analysis tells us that these outcomes actually percolate down all the way to the subnational level and they are applicable throughout the global landscape within these new programs of climate restoration and climate justice and so forth. Now I won’t. We don’t have. I haven’t seen analysis that test some of the same arguments within the US But I’m sure you’re familiar with the debates on public land in the US west and in different parts, and of course the debates around the histories of protected areas within us, the dispossession and displacement of indigenous people and the whole settler colonial project and how directly implicated protected areas were in that project of settler colonialism. So there’s a research agenda here that could be picked up if there are some interested graduate students listening to this talk right now. I have a framework to try and put together all of this, but I won’t talk about that for now. But the argument is to bring the literature from the policy and political economy with the literature on just sustainability to provide an integrated framework to look at these social ecological outcomes and thinking of environment, which is denoted in green here, both as a context to political policy, social outcomes as well as an outcome, right. So environment…

0:31:16.5 Prakash Kashwan: And this comes from the just sustainability idea. With that, let me move to the concluding part of this talk. I want to come back to this notion of staying within the limits of supporting ecosystems. This would have implications for the renewable energy agenda that is important and on the top of the political and policy debates and also debates within EJ movements and to some extent. Green New Deal, Inflation Reduction Act has this kind of electrify everything wipe to it, which is that with a maximalist argument about building so much renewable energy everywhere that we will have tons of jobs and prosperity and we’ll have money for care economy, supporting the care economy and all of that, remember that bipolar pooling of bad environmental, bad social outcomes, good environmental, good social outcomes, that pooling continues into the Green New Deal and IRA kind of policies and programs. And to the extent that just sustainability relies on this argument about good quality jobs that will contribute to social and economic justice, but will also contribute to a better environment. There’s a problem here in the sense that this idea of electrifying everything, maximizing everything, does not speak so well to this notion of staying within supporting ecosystems.

0:33:05.0 Prakash Kashwan: For those of you who are studying renewable energy transition here in the US the arguments that some of the indigenous nations and indigenous leaders are making, as well as some of the fishing communities and other communities who are dependent on the landscapes that are being reshaped by renewable energy projects, they are asking questions about how much renewable energy we need. And if there’s some debate on trying to minimize the need for renewable energy by reducing consumption, and if we do that, that then has implication for how we negotiate this tension between a speedy transition to renewable energy, while also thinking about social justice and environmental justice within this process. My argument is not that we should forego one or the other. We should continue to talk about limiting consumption. We should continue to talk about synergies between renewable energy transition and environmental justice. But this will become a contested process. And so I think there’s a need to muddy those two pools that we talked about. Good and bad environmental outcomes and social outcomes will not always go together. And that will then help us pierce through this almost omnipresent rhetoric that we see about community participation in scripts, stakeholderism within the federal policies and federal agencies.

0:34:40.7 Prakash Kashwan: If you look at offshore wind development or other kinds of renewable energy policies, it’s overflowing with this rhetoric of community participation. But those in practice, the community participation is not happening. And it is not happening with seriousness. And I argue that lack of seriousness is a symptom of avoiding the contestation that cannot be avoided and that should not be avoided. The other important part now I want to come back to, in the last couple of points, I want to come back to this kind of entanglement between the economic paradigms and this sort of renewable energy climate mitigation transition paradigm of maximalist outcomes. That the maximalist outcome has allowed a the corporate industry around renewable energy to take hold of the ongoing transition process. It has overpowered. And this is particularly evident in the offshore wind program that I’ve been studying for past few years. In a nutshell, the corporations are riding on this maximalist green energy transition program to maximize their profits. And as many of these corporations are the fossil fuel companies not just here in the US but also some of the largest European offshore wind companies are also the largest fossil fuel corporations of the yesterday, both the state owned corporations in Europe as well as the private corporations based here in the US.

0:36:20.0 Prakash Kashwan: This corporate agenda is the tension between EJ groups and labor unions. Labor unions do well under that paradigm of maximalist electrify everything paradigm because the more we build, the more jobs there are for unionized workers. And unions want that. And that should also happen. Of course unionization should expand. But still we cannot brush aside the tension that is showing up in New York and California. In many other states where EJ groups are strong, labor unions are struggling to deal with this idea of environmental justice and climate mitigation. The intersection of these two agendas is quite a bit. There has been an exception in Maine where labor unions have succeeded in building a broader coalition. And I’ve written about this, but that is Maine, right? So Maine does not have an EJ movement. And so that’s an exceptionalism. My concluding thought is this idea of the entanglement of the maximalist environmental agenda and the dominant economic paradigm, which is capitalism writ large. How do we rethink the environmental paradigm in a way so that it is effectively able to confront the economic paradigm as the Just Sustainability Program directs us to do, to makes us think to do broad based coalitions.

0:37:48.0 Prakash Kashwan: And obviously this audience again doesn’t need this reiteration that we need broad based coalitions struggling and shaping and negotiating and bargaining policies, laws, institutions that we need. And going back to that debate within the EJ movement, we cannot avoid engaging with this state. There’s no way, because anything at scale has to be done at speed, will require us to use the power of the state one way or another. Right now the corporations have been effectively able to use that power to that advantage. EJ movements have also succeeded, particularly in California and New York. But the larger story, that paradigm shift that Just Sustainability Program asks us to do that is still a long way off. And my hope is that in this current moment we can debate about and come out with some nuggets of wisdom collectively to think about both our scholarship as well as the social and environmental justice agenda that is even more important in the current context. So I’ll stop here.

0:38:56.9 Julian Agyeman: Thank you, Prakash. So last semester I taught my food justice class and I always use the quote that from Sen. That famine doesn’t happen because of an absence of food, it happens because of an absence of democracy. And I kept thinking of that as you were going through and challenging us to rethink our ideas about democracy. And my obvious thought here is we are, as you’ve intimated, we’re going to go through some very great challenges to democracy, not just here, but around the world. We are going to go through a period where states and regulation are changing greatly. What’s the agenda? Yes, we have to get back and look at these broad based coalitions, Prakash. But what is your prescription, Dr. Kashwan? 

0:39:51.8 Prakash Kashwan: As I said, I think this is an audience, especially in your presence, and I don’t know who else is around, but I wasn’t really. I was trying to avoid, to be prescriptive, but I’ll take the bait. Those of us who dabble a little bit in the positivist social science, sometimes you remove certain variables to get a clear picture on one of the many variables. And I think for me, and I haven’t because I Want to be very disciplined. In my 40 minutes that you gave me, I didn’t mention that I’ve been actually researching a comparative research on Maine, New York and California looking at how these three states are dealing with this agenda of renewable energy transition. So what we have seen in Maine, and remember it’s a state where we don’t have EJ. So we are taking out one of the variables. But what the labor unions have done in Maine is to engage with the environmental groups, the climate activist groups, as well as some of the indigenous nations and leaders to create a broad based coalition. And not just as a paper coalition. Right. This is a phrase that is often used that you sign on to some statements and make some paper coalitions.

0:41:05.8 Prakash Kashwan: But labor unions in Maine have actually taken that coalition building seriously and have put their own interest at stake, sometimes for the sake of advocating for indigenous people or advocating for the environmental protection agenda and so forth. And what we see in that particular case study, and I have a new paper in Environmental Energy and Social Science Journal which shows that the labor unions have confronted the corporate profit maximization tendency within the offshore wind industry in the Gulf of Maine. And that has not happened in many other places. And so that would be the first step, I would argue that labor unions, and this again, as many of you, there’s long standing debates about this wage bargaining model of labor union versus a larger societal political agenda that labor unions took on in Europe and sometimes also in the US in the New Deal era and so forth. And so the labor unions really have to think about working more closely with EJ groups in big states like California and New York. And similarly groups have to find ways of working more strongly with this politically powerful constituency of labor unions. And to me that, and again, I’m reducing it to a simplistic one sort of bullet point purposely to point out the ways in which we can connect the agenda of environmental and climate justice with the agenda of democracy, largely broadly speaking.

0:42:41.8 Julian Agyeman: We’ve got a question from Alejandro Manga, WPI. Alejandro, it’s an amazingly long one. Can you, are you on the line at the moment? Can you give it to Prakash in a couple of sentences? 

0:43:01.0 Prakash Kashwan: Oh, there’s. I’m scrolling. Okay.

0:43:03.3 Alejandro Manga: Allright. Yeah, now I can ask the question. Yes.

0:43:06.0 Prakash Kashwan: Well, please do. Please do.

0:43:10.1 Alejandro Manga: So this question is basically like you’re using, you’re doing regressions and you have a top down approach and a large approach of what is happening globally with this issue. And my question is framed from a perspective. I teach at WPI and I had this project where my students had this. They had to go and work on education, on community based natural resource management awareness. And so they had to go to communities that live in contact with the wildlife of Africa, say lions and elephants. And there were a couple of issues that they found. First, the communities care about this only insofar it does not. If it doesn’t impinge on the livelihoods, it works. So if the lion kills livestock and they get it back, it works. If the elephant tramples their cultures and they get it back, it works. But usually these programs to find out these kinds of research, they’re done with Western money and they’re framed by educated, mostly black people in Windhoek who are upper middle class people that have no experience and are trying to break away from their, like this whole thing, we are modern, we’re not peasants kind of framework. And I was looking at this and I was thinking this is the kind of stuff that irked the communities that we were working with. And yeah, so that’s. And it’s something that you cannot do if you stick to the methodologies that we’re using. And so I wanted to know whether you have something to say about that.

0:44:27.5 Prakash Kashwan: Right, absolutely. And along with this, I’ll also respond to the other comment that I saw about the confusion around the relationship between protected areas and democracy. The argument there is that it is contingent. So it’s the relationship between inequality and democracy. And protected areas is dependent on the level of inequalities, which means that in countries with lack of democracy and high level of inequality, more protected areas, because these elites and Alejandro talks about this, there are these people who are explicitly trying to sort of portray themselves as modern, as not peasants, as not being. And if I read the subtext, not being ignorant, but enlightened about the need for global conservation and so forth. And remember, these need not be the actual citrus. This might just be discourses. Right. So we think a lot about the power of the narrative to shape leaders and their actions. But yes, absolutely. And again, to think about this, it’s helpful to do a little bit of comparison between Latin America and, say, Africa. Protected areas in Latin America have benefited local surrounding communities more than they have benefited the communities in Africa. And that’s because the communities in peasants in Latin America have been very well organized and have been connected to national political parties and regional political parties.

0:46:00.2 Prakash Kashwan: And they are able to pull the strings so that whatever income the agencies earn from protected areas, that income is channeled back, effectively, relatively speaking, into local communities while in Africa, because the leaders are not accountable to local communities in the same way there Is this feudalism? Cheat tenancy hierarchies? And this also holds true for South Africa and large parts of Southeast Asia in those contexts, because there’s no accountability. These modern enlightened leaders impose protected areas on local communities. There’s another article that I would like to draw your attention which came out in the journal Environment, the Environment magazine. It’s called From Racist Conservation to Environmentalism, something like that, where we take you through the whole history of protected areas and bring you up to the speed on community based conservation and regional differences and infiltration of markets and financialism, financialization of conservation and all of that. So all of these forces are entangled and depending on what methodological tools you’re using, you look at different parts of it, Right? So you’re very right that it, it cannot show up in all of the empirical analysis. But one needs to do like qualitative case studies to show some of these effects.

0:47:24.3 Julian Agyeman: We’ve got a question from Barth wants to know. You talk about it, but you don’t mention degrowth. He wants to know, have you incorporated degrowth into your thinking? 

0:47:38.5 Prakash Kashwan: Degrowth, Absolutely. To the extent that it reminds us of the limits part. There are some naughty questions around the type of growth and degrowth. Scholars have been remarkably nuanced about what they mean by degrowth in terms of. It’s not a crass sort of argument about stopping all kinds of economic development, but de developing the global north, especially the extractive economies and all of that. But I would argue that de growth has been framed by and has been developed within the Western liberal framework. And so it has to deal with many kinds of issues that are quite complicated, but in a broader spirit of reducing consumption. I think that goes very well with the just sustainability idea of living within the surrounding ecosystems and the limits to that.

0:48:33.5 Julian Agyeman: Lorenzo asks, how do you define democracy? This sounds like a whole nother cities of Tufts. But how do you define democracy as a variable in your research? Is it just holding elections? Is it just a binary variable or are there degrees of democracy? 

0:48:50.6 Prakash Kashwan: So the Freedom House index that I used in that 2017 Ecological Economics article has a, has a scale with a variety of different indicators. And then in some of the subsequent projects we have also used Polity Score, which is a more. It’s a more politicized but a somewhat simpler measure. Remarkably, these two main indicators of democracy have a very high correlation of about 85, 90%. So even though they measure democracy very differently, they come to the same sort of conclusions about which countries are strong democracies. And which are weaker. In my qualitative work, of which I’ve done a lot actually I take a more nuanced approach of democracy with a smaller D where it is about grappling with the ongoing political and policy processes and holding leaders accountable and making them do the things that they wouldn’t normally do under corporate oligarchy, kind of democratic setup that have become very common in many countries. There I actually look at the actual struggle for democracy and how they develop. My argument is that we have already actually seen quite a bit of that. I don’t want to preview another argument here, but I think there’s quite a bit of that benefit gains to be had by looking at the small D democracy at the state level, energy transition processes.

0:50:19.8 Julian Agyeman: Great, thanks Prakash. Lucia, do you want to talk about your question? It looks like a good one, but it’s again very long.

0:50:32.4 Lucia Cristea: Hi, yes, I’m Lucia. I’m from Italy at this moment and thank you very much for this. Yeah. In Europe we haven’t probably, you know very well we have an imposed process or imposed stage of co creation or involvement on the stakeholders in the process of implementing anything, anything, any project that we are doing we have to or strategy or even policy we have to discuss with stakeholders and end users and unfortunately how nice democratic this process is. It’s so long and sometimes over seen by the politicians or by the decision makers. And my major concern is to what extent all these nice stages in the process of implementing a project or a strategy or a policy allows us to reach quickly the targets that are imposed by different policies such as Green Dealer or I don’t know, achieving fit for 55 in in 2013 in Europe or something like this. So it is a gap in my opinion between how we engage or how we discuss with everybody and even how we can create or address the conflict resolutions between different, like you correctly said, between different stakeholders. So I’m interesting if you have some insights on this or mechanism I will be very grateful if you can have your insights. Thank you very much and very nice talk.

0:52:03.6 Prakash Kashwan: Thank you, thank you. I really appreciate that question. It’s a big one. So I’ll say briefly that the state of affairs that we have now, they are a product of at least a century long, if not more of extractive development and then rigging of the policies, institutions, democracies by the extractives, the industries and actors who are benefiting. This includes both market actors as well as political actors who have benefited from that extractivist project. I think in all fairness, I think it’s a bit too much to ask the environmentalist to grapple with all of that in brief period of time. I think the dilemma that you point out is very real, but we have to live with dilemma and we have to tackle these questions in ways that justice to both the environmental agenda as well as the ecological and social justice and environmental justice agenda. I will say this, that this respecting the social justice and environmental protection agenda has been very difficult because we haven’t been able to tackle the original extractivist project. We are patching on these all of the other processes that you’re talking about on the top of an ongoing extractivist project, and this is why that’s so hard. So if we attack that more strongly, I think we’ll have a much better handle around these kinds of challenges.

0:53:33.5 Julian Agyeman: Prakash, thank you so much for getting us off to a fantastic Cities@Tufts colloquium start for spring 2025. Can we give a warm round of applause to Prakash Kashwan of Brandeis University? 

0:53:46.6 Prakash Kashwan: Thank you everyone. Please email me if we would like to continue some of these discussions.

0:53:52.5 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video transcript and graphic recording or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable, with support from the Barr Foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Jess Milner. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and Communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Allison Huff, Bobby Jones, and Candice Spivey, and the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

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Watch the video of Decolonizing Climate and Energy Policy

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Transcript for Decolonizing Climate and Energy Policy

0:00:06.9 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities @ Tufts lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Bar Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities @ Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:39.9 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities @ Tufts Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and with my research assistants, Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partner, Shareable and the Bar Foundation, we organize Cities @ Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative, which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues.

0:01:04.5 Julian Agyeman: We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we are delighted to host Dr. Noel Healy, who’s actually in Medellín Colombia. Noel is a professor in the Geography and Sustainability Department at Salem State University and is the director of the Climate Justice and Just Transitions Lab. His research explores the sociopolitical dimensions of rapid climate change, climate mitigation, climate justice, fossil fuel politics, and climate obstructionism with a focus on economic and racial justice in climate and energy policy.

0:01:47.9 Julian Agyeman: Noel was contributing author to the UN IPCC’s AR6/WG3 report, and Noel, I’m sure you know what that means. And he serves on the Advisory Board of Cell Reports sustainability and on the editorial board of Energy Research and Social Sciences. His work has been published in leading journals such as One Earth, Wire, Climate Change, Energy Policy, and Climate Change, as well as in popular outlets such as The Guardian, The Hill, Scientific American. His research has also garnered attention from major media outlets like the Boston Globe, W Radio, Colombia, the Times, and Forbes. Noel’s talk today is decolonizing Climate and energy policy, forging a just global green transition. Noel, a zoomtastic welcome to Cities @ Tufts.

0:02:42.4 Noel Healy: Thank you, Julian. It’s great to be here. And hello to everyone. I’m gonna start off by sharing my screen. We’ll just do that logistic first. And Julian, can you see my slides now? Okay. I presume you can.

0:03:01.4 Julian Agyeman: Yes.

0:03:02.6 Noel Healy: Okay, excellent. Okay, great. Welcome everyone. I’m delighted to be here. Today I’m gonna talk about decolonizing climate and energy policy. Julian gave a nice introduction there. Basically, I work on three buckets of research, environmental climate justice, fossil fuel obstructionism, and climate and energy policymaking. For instance, one of my studies investigated the interconnected injustices along fossil fuel supply chains between Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Colombia South America and currently in Medellín Colombia. My study documented the injustices enforceable displacement of indigenous YU and Afro Colombians from coal mining at the Sarah Horne open pit coal mine. In the US, I’ve worked with folks like Greenpeace and others to document public health hazards from air and water pollution and the risks associated with climate change.

0:03:55.1 Noel Healy: And also I’ve worked on a range of issues connected to the Green New Deal. Okay, so what is the current state of the climate crisis? I’m gonna go over this quite quickly ’cause I think my audience is well versed on this, but the IPCC has outlined a magnitude of ongoing and future threats, extreme weather events, sea level rise, increased frequency and severity of droughts, floods, wildfires, and the breakdown of food systems, mass human migration, something that I’m really worried about. Over 220 people died in flooding in Valencia, Spain just within the last two weeks and the Philippines have now been hit by four typhoons in the span of just 10 days or five major storms in three weeks.

0:04:41.2 Noel Healy: Sadly, those least responsible for historical emissions will get hit hardest and fastest. Okay, so in terms of what types of cuts that are needed, and this graph here on the left is from the IPCC’s 1.5 report, and I give a lot of climate and energy folk nightmares when it first come out because effectively we have to cut global net CO2 emissions by 45% as of 2030.

0:05:10.2 Noel Healy: So achieving such a steep decarbonization would involve reconstituting not only our electrical grid, our cultural system, our transportation system, financial system, trade, manufacturing, land use, political system, military, the entire economy. So within a decade, we must cut emissions almost by half, and that’s around 7.8% of pollution cut every year. Put this in context, despite global efforts, emissions have risen every year over the last five years. And while there was approximately 8.8% decrease in global emissions during the first six months of COVID, the emissions have rebounded. So global emissions continue to reach record highs with greenhouse gases 1.3% higher in 2023.

0:05:56.9 Noel Healy: Kevin Anderson is one of my favorite climate scientists because I don’t think that he really sugarcoats the level of transformation that is needed. So we had the opportunity to do an easy, moderate change, maybe 30 to 40 years ago the same time period when fossil fuel companies knew the impact of their products.

0:06:16.5 Noel Healy: But we are now at the point where we can either do a radical transformative shift or face climate chaos. There’s really no scenario in which we won’t be experiencing massive oil and change. So as we face into Trump 2.0, it’s important to first acknowledge that the United States is producing more oil and natural gas today than ever before, and far more than any other country. So the Biden administration might argue that increased oil and gas production during its administration is to some extent a result of issues of leases issued during the Trump administration. Trump auctioned off the leases and the Biden administration signed the permits.

0:06:57.7 Noel Healy: However, the Biden-Harris administration also gave the go ahead for the nation’s largest oil drilling operation, the ConocoPhillips Vast Willow Project in Alaska, known as the climate bomb. And this had nothing got to do with Trump. Okay, so that’s the kind of quick background to where we’re at. So what do I mean by international climate policy? 

0:07:20.1 Noel Healy: International climate policy refers to collective actions and treaties such as the UN’s Paris Agreement aimed at mitigating and adapting climate change on the local scale. So the COP29 is taking place right now, and in the next few slides, and I’ll illustrate how in the fine print of international climate policies, we can still witness the continuing entrenchment and the dominance of the global North over the global south, a region already burdened by historical extraction of trillions of dollars worth of resources and labor by its colonizers.

0:07:53.0 Noel Healy: So the US and the EU are not only accountable for almost half of all historical emissions, but as architects of global Empire, leverage their colonial wealth to steer climate negotiations, obscure historical emissions, overshadowing the severe consequences they have inflicted over the global south. This is a graphic from one of Jason Hickel’s research papers, I’m a big fan of Jason Hickel’s work and Julian Steinberg and others who work on this critical, climate justice stuff.

0:08:28.6 Noel Healy: So there’s a whole body of literature which outlines that decisions on how to count emissions are political ones, with social justice implications. And I think Professor Avi Chomsky, who also teaches at Salem State, does a good job of breaking this down. Almost all emissions are calculated in terms of countries. So most statistics required by the Paris Agreement use territorial or production based accounting, which means counting emissions at the point of production.

0:08:57.5 Noel Healy: On the other hand, calculating emissions per capita or per person highlights a country’s consumption levels. Alternatively, cumulative or historical emissions measure how much a country has emitted over time. So from this perspective, the US and the EU owe a huge climate debt to the world. And many scholars argued that because of the importance of global trade and the way rich countries have outsourced their production to poorer countries, it makes more sense to measure emissions by what is consumed in the country.

0:09:29.3 Noel Healy: We then have the historical perspective. The inequality of the responsibility appears even starker than a annual total or even per capita emissions. So the US accounts for twice the amount of historical emissions as China, even though China emits more every year. So international climate policy conveniently overlooks the historical emissions of the global North, an evasion of responsibility that is a modern extension of imperial dominance.

0:09:56.8 Noel Healy: The Global North represents a mere 14% of the population, yet has emitted 80% of CO2 since 1850. And this historical debt contributes to what can be turned to atmospheric colonization. And now the entire world, especially the global South, is forced to pay the climate price for the colonial industrialization of a few countries. My second point, the Global North’s continued domination within climate policy. UN climate agreements offer non-committal ambitious sounding goals that are not backed by concrete measures to curb fossil fuel production. Meanwhile, the global south endures the most severe ecological and economic impacts of this inaction.

0:10:40.3 Noel Healy: International climate policies entrenched inequality by permitting the global north to continue emitting at levels that dwarfed per capita emissions of the global south. And this non-committal nature of the UN climate agreements allows the global north to set broad unenforceable targets without real accountability. This dynamic enables the global North to dictate terms and priorities, sidelining the urgent needs and voices of the global south as we’re seeing now in COP29.

0:11:07.5 Noel Healy: Take carbon offsets for example, this climate policy allows polluters of the global north to buy their way out of climate impact by funding projects that reduce CO2 elsewhere, often in the global south. However, this can lead to land grabs or environmental projects that displace local communities, disrupting economies and ecosystems without reducing overall emissions. My next point is that it’s not just about emissions within national borders, it’s also about the ecological footprints that span globally.

0:11:37.3 Noel Healy: The Global North exports carbon emissions and pollution by shifting production to the global south. This carbon outsourcing allows the global north to appear greener, maintain higher consumption levels while offshoring environmental damage. International climate policy also has inadvertently triggered a neo imperial rush as nation’s vie for crucial minerals like lithium in the global south.

0:12:01.9 Noel Healy: This green tech race not only threatens to displace local communities, but also murs the historical patterns of exploitation, all in the name of advancing climate progress. My next point, the co-opting of the UNFCCC process by major fossil fuel companies like BP, fossil fuel producer nations like the US has led to non-inclusive policymaking and outcomes that are non-binding and ineffective.

0:12:30.6 Noel Healy: This partnership of public authority and private profit undermines the autonomy of the global south. A staggering 70% of CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution can be traced back to a mere of 78 entities. So these corporate giants are dictating the planet’s fate. So rather than heeding the urgent calls from the global south for fossil fuel production cuts, the UNFCCC process bows to the interest of a few corporations and Petro states effectively silencing the voices of billions.

0:13:06.1 Noel Healy: For instance, the graphic on the left-hand side shows that there were over 1,700 fossil fuel lobbyists at the COP29, which is currently taking place. And this is more than delegates from the top 10 most climate vulnerable nations. Only three countries brought larger delegations. Additionally, 480 carbon capture lobbyists infiltrated, COP29 more than the US, UK, and Canada and the EU combined, even though 78% of large scale carbon capture projects have failed. And of course, it’s important to note that most negotiation red lines are drawn way before the COP takes place and fossil fuel interests have got access to all these people.

0:13:50.8 Noel Healy: My next point is that at the heart of international climate policy lies broken promises. The Global North has not fulfilled their 2009 UNFCCC pledge to provide a hundred billion annually in climate finance to the global south. Meanwhile, G20 nations blatantly contradict their old commitments, climate commitments by pouring over 1.4 trillion into fossil fuel subsidies in 2022 alone. So when the global South is asking for the global north to pay its climate debt, the global north is already pumping close to 1.4 trillion of fossil fuel subsidies. So this shows you the contradiction of the system and how it perpetuates the cycle of neglect, where the economic interest of the powerful trump the needs of the formerly colonized.

0:14:39.2 Noel Healy: My second last point in this first half of the presentation. International climate policy, and the second half I’m gonna talk about solutions, binds nations not with chains of debt, but instead with chains of direct rule, but instead with shackles of debt. Approximately two thirds of climate finance is offered as loans. So rather than addressing historical injustices, the Global North provides loans under the pretense of climate finance, while imposing high interest rates that perpetuate debt dependency in the global south.

0:15:10.5 Noel Healy: Astonishingly in 2018, a staggering 90% of climate aid in Latin America and the Caribbean came in the forms of loans, not grants, strapping nations with debt instead of providing much needed aid. And this places formerly colonized countries in a position of financial subsidy, compelling the global south to spend fivefold on debt repayments over climate action. Meanwhile, wealth is funneled back to northern creditors, perpetuating a cycle of dependency and exploitation where the global north retains economic and political control at the expense of the global south’s sovereignty.

0:15:50.3 Noel Healy: My last point before we get on to the solutions, some pretty interesting graphics here on the left hand side. If you look at the loss and damage fund, which is established to address the irreversible impacts of climate change on the global south, the global north, historically most culpable for the climate crisis have pledged a mere 700 million. This sum is a drop in the ocean, less than 0.2 of the annual losses of the global South will incur due to global warming. A staggering shortfall anywhere or estimated between 300 billion and 1 trillion or even there’s some studies that go even further that a 30 year delay in establishing the loss and damage fund highlights the global north’s apathy, especially in the US, the leading historical emitter, which has no problem allocating 800 billion annually to its defense budget.

0:16:40.9 Noel Healy: So you can see the priorities there. What is more, the global north countries have funneled investments into fossil fuel projects at a rate 58 times higher than their contributions to the loss and damage fund from 2020 to 2022. So that was just seven big points that are condensed into why we need to transform the International Climate Policy system and how these systematic inequities are baked into the system.

0:17:12.3 Noel Healy: So what about solutions? These aren’t easy, but there are solutions out there and there are movements and peoples who are working on this, the first as a organizing framework is climate justice. So what is climate justice? And I use a definition here from Professor Avi Chomsky’s new book on Climate Justice. So climate justice recognizes the disproportionate impacts of climate change on low income communities and communities of color around the world. The people least responsible for the problem. It seeks solutions that address the root causes of climate change. And in doing so, simultaneously address a broad range of social, racial and environmental justice.

0:17:55.8 Noel Healy: So this is an economic issue requiring a fundamental reorganizing of our society and economy, not just manipulating incentives and enhancing technologies. I like this quote here from Chico Mendez, “Climate Justice also centers people, marginalized communities and issues of labor, race, gender and class.” Mendez, who was a Brazilian rubber tapper, trade union leader and environmentalist famously, he said, “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.” And you could apply that to a lot of conservationist organizations historically and even present day within the US in terms of their focus.

0:18:39.0 Noel Healy: This is a new book which has just came out edited by Farhana Sultana. I’ve just read the first chapter ’cause I’m still waiting for my copy to arrive here in Columbia. The first chapter is available online, and I plucked out this nice quote from the book when I was reading it yesterday. “Decolonizing climate is largely meaningless if it doesn’t accompany measurable shifts and law, policies and institutional frameworks are material distributions.”

0:19:08.7 Noel Healy: So I’m gonna talk about what some of these might actually look like in practice. A second book, which I would strongly recommend and arguably to me, maybe one of the most important books written on climate after Naomi Kleins. This changes everything and reconsidering reparations by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. So this brings us to more complex questions around climate justice. So authors such as Táíwò, Jason Hickel, Julian Steinberg, and others, have outlined how European countries in the industrial offspring, US Canada, and Australia were built on the wealth of extractive colonialism.

0:19:41.2 Noel Healy: They used this to industrialize and build a fossil fuel economy. And I’m gonna read out this quote here from Olúfẹ́mi, “Figuring out who should pay for the loss and damage of climate change brings up familiar problems in distributive justice.” Should rich countries pay because they’re richer, because they’re more responsible? We can add another because they’ve inherited more liabilities from the global racial empire. What does he mean by this? So in his book, he outlines how the global social structure that resulted from transatlantic slavery and colonialism resulted in advantages accumulating to the Global North racially dominant communities. He and others outline that colonized countries, particularly the African continent, often inherited weak legislators, deeply autocratic political structures. And these initial conditions affected the trajectory of legislative power development even after formal dependences weren’t what was one.

0:20:41.8 Noel Healy: And he uses this study here in the top left. This form of accumulation could then directly affect a number of measures that Brooks Setall have found to be key detriments of climate vulnerability, including government effectiveness, political rights, voice and accountability, and civil liberties. I’m conducting more research in Columbia at the moment, and Columbia arguably has one of the world’s strongest climate focused president, certainly from a country that has vast resources of fossil fuels.

0:21:12.9 Noel Healy: Gustavo Petro has pledged no new hydrocarbon exploration licenses, a halt on fracking pilots, and has stopped the offshore fossil fuel development. And this is significant ’cause Columbia produces around 1% of the world’s coal, oil and gas. As you can imagine, he’s facing huge opposition here for various reasons. And if you think US politics is complicated, I think Columbia is arguably even more complicated. One question that has been raised in discussions in Columbia is, will the international community compensate Columbia for leaving fossil fuels in the ground? 

0:21:49.4 Noel Healy: And as you can imagine, questions like this draw a lot of eyebrows from Global North officials, but it raises real questions of distributive justice on a global scale at the COP26 which happened in Glasgow, Costa Rica and Denmark launch an alliance of countries committed to phasing out oil and gas production known as the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. And initiatives like this are critical in addressing the COP’s historical failure to tackle fossil fuel production directly.

0:22:17.4 Noel Healy: So the next solution framework is the National Fair Shares Approach. So climate justice groups argued that a system of climate reparations could require historical emitters to compensate poor countries for damages up to today by facilitating their rise to a common globally sustainable level of consumption by underwriting low carbon development there. And this kind of global climate justice that many grassroots organizations and the US Climate Fair Share Coalition are demanding. So what exactly is the Fair Share approach? 

0:22:51.4 Noel Healy: So the US is the largest historical contributor to climate change. It has a responsibility and capacity to commit to a Fair Share target, which was introduced by these groups. Within this framework, it calls for 195% reduction, which is 70% domestic reduction and 125 through international support. So this international support can address the Global South emission. So you might think that this, certainly in the next administration, this is not gonna happen that’s for sure. And you might think that something like this would never get implemented into any policy, but in fact, it actually did in some proposals for candidates for the 2020 election and specifically Bernie Sanders Green New Deal proposal. The graph on the right is a graphic from myself and Ray Galvin’s study, which appeared in energy research and social science.

0:23:41.0 Noel Healy: So Bernie Sanders’ Green New Deal arguably represented the most transformative proposal of all 2020 climate plans. And it did in fact incorporate the fair shares approach. His Green New Deal proposed to reduce domestic emissions by at least 71% by 2030 and reduce emissions among lease industrialized nations by 36% by 2030. The total equivalent of reducing our domestic emission is by 161%. And this will be accomplished by providing 200 billion for the Green Climate Fund.

0:24:13.0 Noel Healy: So this is important because rich countries never met their stated yet insufficient goal of dispersing a hundred billion per year in climate violence. However, climate justice scholars and labor groups and EJ groups from the Global South argue that solutions should go way beyond the terms of transfer to mechanisms like the Green Climate Fund. And I’m gonna name a few different types of mechanisms that we could explore. This is from a study from myself and Fergus Green.

0:24:42.7 Noel Healy: As a political scientist at University… At College London, we conducted a desk review of around 30 Green New Deal policies that were proposed between 2019 and 2021, mainly from the US and Europe. And we then categorized the different planks or components of Green New Deals. So if you look at the top, you have reconfiguring power, so pro-union reforms, racial and indigenous justice. You have then financial security policies, so proposals like job guarantees, minimum living wage. Then if we go back, one, we have supportive macroeconomic institutions. So Green Investment Banks, complementary carbon centric policies.

0:25:28.4 Noel Healy: So carbon centric policies are traditional climate policies like carbon taxes, regulation of upstream fossil fuel supply, and then foreign policy, which I’m gonna talk a lot about in the next two slides because those were something that Green New Deals were missing certainly from the mainstream US Green New Deals.

0:25:46.6 Noel Healy: And then the last bucket is, sustainable social provisioning policies. There was more radical Green New Deal proposals such as a Red New Deal, which was a number of indigenous groups proposed various counter proposals to a Green New deal which centralized even more so environmental justice, anti-capitalist principles, and decolonization. The Red Deal is a great example of this. It’s an indigenous action to save our earth. Is a political program for liberation and climate justice that emerged from one of the oldest class struggles in Americas. The fight by native people to win sovereignty, autonomy, and dignity. And the central components include indigenous treaty rights, land restoration, self-determination, decolonization, and liberation, these rights-based approaches.

0:26:44.5 Noel Healy: So when we did this analysis of the Green New Deal, the one gap that was really missing was foreign policy. And of course, foreign policy is the one that would really challenge all or would be part of this decolonization process. So the Green New Deal is meant to be about redistribution and justice, and it shouldn’t stop at US or European borders. A recent study pointed to a real foreign policy justice gap.

0:27:10.5 Noel Healy: So among the few Green New Deals in our sample that mentioned foreign policy, some focused on border adjustments to penalize other countries taking inadequate action to reduce emissions, while others focus on rules about trade, capital flows. For example, a Green New Deal foreign policy might seek to facilitate sharing green technologies, intellectual property with poorer countries, liberalize trade and green technologies, and restrict trade in carbon-intensive goods and services.

0:27:38.0 Noel Healy: However, while the functioning of the global economy might seem obscure and beyond the reach for those who study climate, climate justice scholars and Global South groups contend this is essential for climate justice. So Global South debt, trade agreements, tax havens are big factors contributing to emissions, and how global corporate powers slow international climate action just as they do at the international level. Global Green New Deals need to name and challenge these usually invisible rules of the global economy. Our nation state-based thinking visibilizes inequality domestically, but it naturalizes it internationally.

0:28:18.2 Noel Healy: And it’s also critical to note the global inequality is racialized. So many climate justice groups and academics frame foreign policy in terms of climate reparations. Poor people in Global South are asking for foreign policy that dismantles the unjust global economic system that keeps poor countries poor and rich countries over-consuming. And climate reparations are important for both climate justice and for climate. Third world debts, global tax havens function to keep resources flowing from South to North and from poor to rich.

0:28:49.0 Noel Healy: So we shouldn’t just conceive reparations as the distant past. And this is a point made eloquently by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò. It’s reparations for current extraction, not just past extraction, but it’s also how we understand the present and the future. So the Pacto Ecosocial del Sol was a Green New Deal proposal from the Global South, and they proposed plans like cancelling sovereign debt of countries, and that would allow them to reshape their political world and build platforms for countries to achieve low carbon development.

0:29:24.6 Noel Healy: This report got so little attention, and it’s just so important because Indigenous resistance stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one quarter of annual US and Canadian emissions. And when we’re talking about climate actions, this report highlights the various Indigenous-led campaigns against fossil fuel projects like pipelines, coal mines, LNG terminals, showcasing the diverse tactics used to resist development and it led to a huge amount of emissions and fossil fuels staying in the ground.

0:29:58.0 Noel Healy: So beyond direct emissions reduction, the report also argues that Indigenous resistance has also shifted public discourse around fossil fuels and Indigenous rights, and I think that that is quite accurate. If I’m to summarize all the different planks of international climate policy that could change, first one, if we look at decolonizing climate governance, so international financial institutions will have to change, establishing new global climate institutions, global trade agreements, climate refugee programmes.

0:30:32.7 Noel Healy: The second one, I’ve talked a little bit about that paying for climate debt. So climate reparations, debt cancellations, global wealth taxes, loss and damage fund, fair shares approach, Indigenous rights. So this would be Indigenous rights and climate agreements, Red New Deals, traditional ecological knowledge, legal pathways, that field is quite exciting and developing really fast at the moment in terms of climate lawsuits, global trade agreements, IP for climate tech sharing, etcetra. Fossil fuel phase-outs, so supply side climate policies which have been largely ignored. New initiatives like the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. And then rethinking economies or eco-socialist, economic policies, degrowth policies, universal basic services, planetary boundaries policies, international Green New Deals.

0:31:23.8 Noel Healy: There’s also a number of different proposals on the table that climate justice groups are proposing some of the… If you’re able to zoom into the screen, you’ll see some of them there. There are also some other ones, there’s tax on dirty ship fuels, island nations are advocating a 2% tax on ships burning, polluting fuel oil, a tax on shipping and aviation which is supported by the IMF to address emissions from sectors contributing 3.5% to global emissions. I really like this one, it’s a windfall tax on fossil fuel profits that is proposed by the UN Secretary General. I think that would be politically actually attractive from the masses, maybe not from fossil fuel interests.

0:32:07.0 Noel Healy: Another one which would be really nice in this day and age with massive global inequality is wealth tax on billionaires. Politically challenging, yes, but a 2% tax to ensure a minimum contribution could be akin to a global corporate tax reform. This has been backed by Brazil who is hosting the next COP and they believe it could generate around $250 billion annually. There’s also loan deferral for climate disasters. So mechanisms like the World Bank’s debt pause, clause allows countries to delay repayments and debt for nature swaps as well. When we’re also looking at other systems, I just read this article from Jessica Green, who’s a political scientist at Toronto, and she called for the shifting focus to international trade and financial institutions. And this is actually a better focus.

0:33:00.0 Noel Healy: So the COPs have largely failed for the last 30 years. I’m not saying that we need to abolish them, but we need to change tact. If something is not working, we need to try new strategies. And a lot of her work, she argues that tax policy as climate policy. So she highlights the impact of corporate tax practices, particularly offshoring, which deprives countries of crucial revenue for climate initiatives. So a global minimum on corporate tax could redirect funds towards sustainable projects.

0:33:28.2 Noel Healy: Another proposal is reforming investment laws. So fossil and fuel companies have exploited foreign investment laws to sue governments for climate policies that impact our profits. And this creates a regulatory chill. So reforming our withdrawing from treaties with investors state dispute settlements provisions could help countries implement stronger climate policies without fear of lawsuits. There’s also trade policy adjustments such as the World Trade Organization, which restricts domestic support for Green industries and reforming trade policies to allow local Green initiatives adopt carbon border tariffs, which could create a more supportive environment for decarbonization.

0:34:09.5 Noel Healy: And then finally, and this is linked to some domestic points that I’m going to make in terms of the current election. We need to build political support through material benefits. So effective climate policies must prioritize material benefits for working class citizens such as secure jobs and clean energy. And while Biden’s IRA had a lot of good things within it, it was mainly focused on tax breaks for industries and manufacturing. And people on the street could not really see these benefits and we probably won’t see a lot of these benefits for many years to come.

0:34:46.2 Noel Healy: So these initiatives could gain wider political backing, moving climate action from austerity to more tangible economic growth and stability. And if I end with just one or two slides on the recent election, inflation was a major issue in this election with many voters feeling that the Biden administration failed to address it effectively leading them to support Trump. Voters experienced severe or moderate voters who experienced severe or moderate hardship due to inflation favored Trump by significant margins. While those unaffected by inflation leaned towards Harris.

0:35:24.2 Noel Healy: Prices included gas and housing rose more under Biden and Trump leading to declining real incomes, which influence voters perceptions of economic management. Of course, you can argue that the Trump administration is selling snake oil in terms of how they might address this, but the message that the economy was doing great fell flat with voters.

0:35:46.5 Noel Healy: This is a pretty interesting graphic, which shows how Biden ditched his progressive domestic agenda around March, 2020. And he embraced austerity in March, 2020 onwards. And the Harris campaign effectively just carried on with this unappealing platform in terms of that it wasn’t economic populous platform. And so they gave up on economic popularism and pivoted towards austerity and a historic Pentagon budgets and that did not sit well with the electorate.

0:36:18.5 Noel Healy: And then this is my final slide, and I think one of the best climate think tanks in the US is the Climate and Community Institute, has some of the top green New Deal scholars and others. And I think that they’re really politically savvy in how they lay out, how we need to tackle the climate crisis and inequality at the same time. Essentially the Green New Deal argument and the majority of voters chose change and disruption over stability and the continuation of business as usual.

0:36:48.6 Noel Healy: So if we were to win power again to make people believe, again Democrats will have to be the party of change, which means the party itself will have to change. And I’m not sure everyone is really confident that is gonna happen soon, but the focus has to be on the material impacts not abstraction. So we need powerful, persuasive alternatives, visions of a different future to counteract Trump’s sledgehammer approach to the status quo. And many of the climate and economic conditions are devastating for working class communities, and they’re only set to deteriorate.

0:37:25.7 Noel Healy: So we need a political vision that links everyday concerns with the urgent issues facing our planet. And as the Community and Climate Project says, we need a political vision that connects kitchen table issues to the fate of the planet. Naomi Klein and others have said similar things that we all need to become Eco populous. That means championing policies that significantly lower costs while lowering emissions. So like heat pumps for all, robust tenant rights, rent caps, free and better public transportation, make polluters pay for the transition, tackling the cost of living, good jobs and infrastructure, strong unions, lower household costs by investing in public services, investing in social safety nets. All these planks within the Green New Deal actually have proven to be really popular across the political divide. Maybe when you term it green New Deal, there’s some bipartisan and cues within that. But even the Green New Deal itself, when you look at some of the polling over the last few years, it actually is very popular.

0:38:28.5 Noel Healy: And I think as we’re going into era, we have to rethink how we are framing and introducing climate policy within the US. We have to move away from this carbon centric approaches about carbon taxes that doesn’t sell. We have to tackle inequality, which is at its highest phase in many decades. So if we have a new vision for climate politics, and we have to start building that now as we’re coming up to Trump 2.0. Okay. All right. I think we’ll leave it at that. So I’ll stop sharing my screen. I think I’m within time, more or less.

0:39:08.1 Julian Agyeman: You are spot on, Noel.

0:39:08.3 Noel Healy: Here we go. How about that? 

0:39:10.7 Julian Agyeman: 12:45, we said, and it is 12:44. Noel, what a tour de force. I thought I knew something about this. You’ve opened my eyes to a whole range of new thoughts. One thing I just, one big omission, and the reason I’m gonna mention it is because next semester in Cities@Tufts, we’ve got Dr. Duncan McLaren who’s gonna talk about geoengineering as potential solutions. Now, you didn’t mention geoengineering, as I understand it, there’s two aspects to it. One is solar radiation management, the other one is carbon capture and removal. What’s your take on techno’s fixes, techno solutions? Noel.

0:39:52.9 Noel Healy: I guess the short answer would be false solutions. I think if a good rule of thumb is when you’re looking at climate solutions, what are the fossil fuel industry doing? What types of solutions are the fossil fuel industries promoting and funding within universities. And fossil fuel industry are funding geoengineering, again, like carbon capture and storage, carbon… These technologies haven’t worked at the scale we needed within the timeframe we needed right now.

0:40:26.1 Noel Healy: And even within Biden’s IRA, much of funding is going towards arguably false solutions like carbon capture and storage. Yes, they are within the IPCC but how do they get in there in the first place? Fossil fuel industries funds lots of monies into universities across the world to look at these techno fixes and these techno fixes won’t work within the timeframe.

0:40:50.9 Noel Healy: So I would argue that these geoengineering solutions are just another delay tactic by the fossil fuel industry to continue business as usual and continue burning coal, oil and gas. On the flip side, if you talk about like supply side climate policies, bans, moratoriums, ending LNG exports, these are solutions that are real, that work, but they challenge the political… They challenge the profit margins of the fossil fuel industry. So when you’re thinking about solutions, it’s always good to see, to think about which solutions are the fossil fuel industry backing or not.

0:41:27.0 Julian Agyeman: Yeah. Exactly. And I’m excited for his talk though, because he’s gonna talk specifically on the justice implications of geoengineering which has received a scanned attention. Great. Thanks for that Noel. Could humanitarian issues such as the impacts of cobalt mining in Congo be included in climate finance packages going to the global south? What interventions have resulted in effective ways for shifting power dynamics between donor countries and receiving ones, if any? 

0:42:00.0 Noel Healy: Climate finance package? Yeah, the best of my knowledge, I’m not sure if that has been included in any formal COP talk. So unfortunately, the Green Tech rush is replicating a lot of the harms that fossil fuel extraction has created over the last, since Industrial Revolution. And I think there’s now a greater awareness that issues like mining for cobalt and the Congo is something to be addressed.

0:42:30.1 Noel Healy: So I’m unaware of any finance packages linked to that, but I think it’s a great idea. That’s certainly something that needs to happen. And for the most part, when we turn on our light switch, there’s a certain level of consumer blindness. We don’t know where our electricity comes from. So in the case of Boston and Salem, when we turned on our light switch, the Salem coal power plant used coal from Salem Home Mine in Colombia, and that’s why I did the lifecycle analysis. So there’s all these supply chain issues within fossil fuels, but also within Green Tech as we try and get more critical minerals for the energy transition.

0:43:09.6 Julian Agyeman: Right. Thanks Noel. Chris asks, given national and international policy makers have, as you said, failed to bring about the types of policy approaches we need for a climate justice perspective. In states and localities that have more progressive politics, what have you seen or what can you suggest could build a movement towards power and eventual international success? 

0:43:34.8 Noel Healy: Yeah, I guess over the next 40 years, everything’s gonna be decentralized in terms of the climate movement. And so that means that I’ve done a lot of research on the Green New Deal at the federal level, but the Green New Deal can be proposed and implemented at a local level. So we saw Michelle Wu, she had a fantastic Green New Deal and proposal that was central to her election campaign in Boston. And they’re now going through the sticky politics process of trying to get different components of a past. So I think that over the next four years, everything is going to be decentralized. We’re gonna go back to local climate policy planning, state level Green New deals, even within the UNFCCC process. So it looks like Trump is gonna pull the US out of the Paris agreement. Technically, that isn’t the worst thing in the world.

0:44:26.1 Noel Healy: Okay. Yes, it is terrible. Climate change is an existential crisis, but the UNFCCC is non-binding, so that doesn’t change the bread and butter of what the US does state by state level. And if you think about within the US states, there’s 10 states that make up most of the emissions. And if those 10 states continue with their strong climate policies, states like California, even Texas is now one of the biggest wind turbine producers within the US.

0:44:56.9 Noel Healy: There’s still a lot of hope in terms of decentralized climate action. But of course the real challenge with climate change in a global level is that we need everyone on board. We need massive federal funds and certainly in the US, we’re gonna have to pivot a little bit, but it does also open up an opportunity for the EU to take more leadership, for China to take more leadership and others. And I think that the climate movement can come out stronger in terms of after four years. The problem is the climate clock is going the opposite direction.

0:45:32.4 Julian Agyeman: Denise says, hydrogen, nuclear and geo technologies are false solutions, but are there instrumental bandaids to keep the climate crisis at bay? 

0:45:43.5 Noel Healy: Yeah, so I guess when nuclear… People are really passionate about nuclear as either pronuclear or anti-nuclear. And if we are thinking about even within the climate movement, I think there’s been a slight adjustment to people’s feelings on nuclear and that people are now weighing up the sheer level of transformation that must happen in such a short space of time. And even like slight changes to some of the, we’ll say, the 2020 Green New Deal proposal. Some had proposed to leave existing nuclear power plants in existence. And I think that seems to be a fairly reasonable plan at the moment.

0:46:21.6 Noel Healy: There is a lot of hustle and bustle around green hydrogen and other technologies at the moment. And I would add a little asterisk to those in terms of the fossil fuel industry are promoting them. Nuclear, I think is something that is… The debate has certainly changed over the last number of years. Yeah.

0:46:43.6 Julian Agyeman: Where do you stand on nuclear these days and has that changed, Noel, since you were a young radical, you’re an older radical now, but since you were a really young radical, has your position changed on nuclear power? I’m not gonna say whether I’m wavering, but…

0:46:56.3 Noel Healy: Yeah. I think it has changed a little bit in that we’ll say that Bernie signed a New Deal and to the best of my recollection, he called for the decommissioning of his existing nuclear power plants. I would probably, at this day and age of the climate crisis, be okay with nuclear plants not being decommissioned and letting them to continue. So I would say my thoughts on nuclear would’ve changed a little bit, but in terms of depending on nuclear for to solve the climate crisis, it’s not gonna happen within the timeframe needed. It’s too costly as well in terms of comparing to how cheap renewable energy is at the moment. And we have the solutions right now in terms of wind, solar, and wave energy. But the problem is the political will. The problem is we’re still subsidizing fossil fuels. So until we stop subsidizing fossil fuels, until we get political leaders who treat the climate like the emergency it is, yeah, we’re gonna be in a rough space.

0:48:06.2 Julian Agyeman: Going back to your points about Mayor Wu in Boston, I remember the night she was elected in her victory speech as soon as she mentioned, yes, Boston will become a Green New Deal city. It was the biggest cheer, and I suspect it was a lot of her younger supporters. And this is something my students and I are talking about in the coming four years, refocusing on the locality, refocusing on communities on working with progressive cities and things like that. Can you say a bit more about where you see Boston’s Green New Deal? Because politically, it seemed to have been a bit hampered when the Green New Deal SAR wasn’t given a chief role, but was given the role of director and I could never work out what was the difference and was this new Green New Deal SAR hampered by not being a chief, therefore not being able to have maybe the leverage that he could have had? 

0:49:05.5 Noel Healy: Yeah, I’m a little bit out of the loop in terms of what has happened since I’ve been down in Columbia for the last half a year or so, but just in general in terms of the Green New Deal as a new climate paradigm. So the basic principles of a Green New Deal is that we engage in deep decarbonization across all sectors. So it’s not just the traditional environmental sectors, it’s energy, it’s housing, it’s essentially all policy is climate policy. And at the same time, we’re tackling inequality. And because we are at a point in history where there’s just extreme inequality, it’s just politically wise to merge these two goals together. And that’s the kind of basic principle of what the Green New Deal is. And arguably, Michelle Wu’s Green New Deal proposal was one of the top state level or city level Green New Deal proposals within the US and hopefully over the next four years, you’ll have other cities who are mirroring this.

0:50:15.0 Noel Healy: And that movement will push people towards recognizing that we need to tackle inequality and climate at the same time. It’s no longer carbon tax. If you are getting your students and who’s gonna go out and march for carbon taxes in this day and age, like nobody, except for maybe a lot of climate wonks or climate scientists who think that carbon, in theory, carbon taxes are the most efficient method. But in this day and age, it’s not gonna cut it.

0:50:41.2 Noel Healy: We have to tackle inequality and climate at the same time talking about housing, public transportation, rent caps, and making the fossil fuel companies pay. Vermont just, I think in the start of this year, introduced a new… I can’t remember the name of the bill, but it’s polluters pay bill whereby the fossil fuel companies are on the hook for X% of damages that happens within Vermont and New York are also looking at similar proposals like this. So we have to push like economic populism works. Trump was smart to enough to realize this granted he’s selling snake oil, but the Democratic party and state level, we have to go back to old school economic populism akin to the FDR era, which jumpstart the US economy after a severe number of years.

0:51:41.1 Julian Agyeman: Right. Last question and just a 30 second, one minute answer. If there was a kind of silver bullet that could cascade other changes, catalyze them, what would it be? Of all of that raft of ideas of great solutions, what would be the one that would’ve maximum bang for the buck? 

0:52:05.7 Noel Healy: At the global level and from a justice perspective, canceling global south debt is an easy win in terms of your canceling debt. Instead of countries being forced to pay a high percentage of GDP back into repaying debt, they can instead use that for climate resilience, for expanding their low carbon economy. So debt cancellation. And it’s not charity, it’s actually, it’s repaying a climate debt, repaying economic debt for plundering, and also it’s preventing continued economic or climate damage, which is gonna impact the global north anyways.

0:52:46.7 Julian Agyeman: Noel, thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your time in Medellín. Can we give Noel a great round of applause from Cities@Tufts from our last Cities@Tufts this semester? 

0:53:00.3 Noel Healy: Okay. Thanks for having me. And hopefully that was of some news.

0:53:01.1 Julian Agyeman: Absolutely. Thank you very much and happy holidays.

0:53:04.4 Noel Healy: Okay, thanks Julian. Bye everyone.

0:53:08.5 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video, transcript and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable with support from the Bar Foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graph recording was created by Ronna Alexander. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and communications manager.

0:53:45.2 Tom Llewellyn: Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones, and Candace Spivey. And the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others, so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

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Watch the video of Mobilizing Food Vending

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Transcript for Mobilizing Food Vending

0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net, just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:40.2 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tuft’s Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman, and together with my research assistants, Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partners Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative, which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on Colonized, Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we are delighted to host Dr. Ginette Wessel, who is associate Professor of Architecture at Roger Williams University.

0:01:19.0 Julian Agyeman: She teaches courses in urban design, urban planning, and environmental design research. As an urbanist designer and scholar, Ginette has published articles in the Journal of the American Planning Association, as well as chapters in my book, Food Trucks, Cultural Identity and Social Justice, and a chapter in participatory urbanisms. Her forthcoming book, which I’m sure she’s gonna tell us all about, is called Mobilizing Food Vending, Gourmet Food Trucks in the American City. And that’s coming out apparently next month through Routledge. It investigates food trucks rights and resiliency in the urban food scape using ethnography, policy analysis and spatial interpretation. Ginette’s research interests include current social and cultural transformations that are underway in city making with an emphasis on public space, social equity, and communication technology. Ginette’s talk today is mobilizing food vending, planning and policy for gourmet food trucks in the American city. Ginette, a fantastic welcome to Cities@Tufts. Over to you.

0:02:31.0 Ginette Wessel: Thank you, Julian. I’m very excited and delighted to be here, and thank you for everyone to come and listen to the talk today. My title of my talk, as Julian mentioned, is Mobilizing Food Vending, Planning and Policy for Gourmet Food Trucks in the American City. And I first really became interested in food trucks back in 2008 when I was doing my doctorate work and I found myself really intrigued by their growing presence around the San Francisco Bay Area. And their ability to mobilize, using social media and activate urban space was really something quite novel to me and unfamiliar. And little did I know I would spend about 16 years following the industry, but here we are and I have a new book to share with you, that talks about that. So let me get my slide moving here.

0:03:27.1 Ginette Wessel: So in my book, I use a spatial lens to question how food trucks navigate social structures of power in cities and contribute to the evolution of urban space. I look at Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Charlotte, and I examine how agency among usually disproportionately powerful actors unfold spatially in the act of claiming rights to urban space. I also examine how social life is generated in urban spaces with the help of communication technology and mobility. And further, I incorporate a firsthand study of space to understand how food truck locations play a role in the public realm of the capitalist city. I confront as well problems facing food trucks, due to rising property values and shifts in the real estate market. So in this book, I question if food truck’s spontaneous ability to overcome time and space is an indicator of a wider bottom-up transformation of how urban space and social life are generated. How will cities adapt and react to food trucks and how should they plan and accommodate them? Who is the gourmet food truck phenomenon, including who’s it excluding? And what about food trucks helps to diversify the city and support a more equitable city?

0:04:49.9 Ginette Wessel: So in this book, I argue that mobile food vending offers a window into a wider urban transformation, in which urban space has become part of a social and economic system reliant on mobility and technology for success. And that’s a new urban process that has become really fundamental to society’s social landscape and neoliberal economy. So the talk today is gonna follow this sequence. I first wanna talk a little bit about the origins, then I wanna shift into some theory that supports the framework for my work. I wanna look at a series of vignettes, about displacement, bottom-up policymaking, pandemic resiliency, and then we’ll look at some of the benefits and drawbacks and then a planner’s toolkit.

0:05:39.2 Ginette Wessel: So Roy Choi, Korean-American, professionally trained chef had just left his job at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and had a sleepless night. He began experimenting with Mexican and Korean flavors and created a short rib taco made with warm corn tortillas, the Korean barbecue beef or bulgogi, salsa Roja, cilantro, onion, lime, relish, slaw, and chili soy vinaigrette. Without enough money to open a storefront, Choi decided to sell his $2 tacos out of a food truck. His friend Mark Manguera quickly brokered a deal with a local commissary owner for a used catering truck. And he called his sister Alice Shin, who was a writer in New York City to manage the customer relations. Manguera, his wife Caroline, her brother Eric and Choi, bought $250 worth of food and trained for one week and began serving Korean barbecue tacos on Sunset Boulevard. Together the team of friends and family established the Kogi barbecue food truck, which made stops in South Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Koreatown and their initial vending locations had really predictable foot traffic, but were surprisingly unsuccessful.

0:06:55.3 Ginette Wessel: And then in December of that year, the team tweeted and parked outside a co-op housing unit at UCLA during final exams week, and 1000 students lined up for tacos. Choi’s recalls that was the turning point for their business. And the truck grew steadily with crowds up to 500 people within the first three months grossing nearly $2 million in that first year. And the food trucks customer base grew rapidly, both through word of mouth, but also Twitter really launching Choi into a leader of culinary experimentation. The team soon added Roja, Verde and Aranka, which served different areas of Los Angeles County, and Rosita was used for special events. And following the success of Kogi food truck imitators emerged almost immediately, each one trying to recapture Choi’s mix of fusion street food and street smarts. In 2008, a variety of unique converging factors led to the perfect moment to start a food truck business.

0:08:00.4 Ginette Wessel: For one, the economic downturn in 2008 and the subsequent decrease in consumer spending, diminished sit-down restaurant sales and made the purchase or the maintenance of a brick-and-mortar restaurant impossible for many. Chefs found food trucks to be more financially feasible option for supporting existing restaurants or starting a new business. And food truck ownership and leases grew among the under and unemployed populations across US cities. While clever food entrepreneurs sustained their livelihoods with food trucks, they also introduced a new competitive dining model to the American public. At the same time in 2008, the social media website, Twitter, which is now called X, was just 2-years-old, and it was growing in popularity among young adults. And by alerting customers to the day’s plans with a simple tweet, chefs could visit different locations with the assurance that their customers could find them. This new mode of finding food was also a fun engaging activity for food truck fans who really enjoyed seeking out new foods at impromptu locations.

0:09:12.1 Ginette Wessel: And so also another critical factor in 2008 is also thinking about food trucks and mobility, which was certainly helpful for the industry’s success. The mobility that a food truck has, really affords vendors the flexibility to change locations if business is slow or if demand is picking up in a specific location. Mobility is characteristically an American phenomenon, one that has been deeply embedded in the country’s economy and American everyday life for over a century. And more recently, mobility has been leveraged to create new economic sectors, such as on demand shopping and food delivery businesses that really cater to where people live and work. Food trucks mobility challenges also established planning ideologies, which generally address economic growth and consumer dining through very fixed and predictable business locations.

0:10:15.4 Ginette Wessel: So this calculable process of development usually allows governments to easily regulate and monitor business activity within the formal market system. In order for food trucks to align with those existing regulatory processes, governments actually require food truck owners to submit a very detailed vending schedule or operate a GPS device for surveillance. Fundamentally, mobility afforded by the food trucks temporarily activates urban space with social life, providing more opportunities for the public to socialize or take a break from work. Aside from organized special events, food trucks frequently appear in underused marginal spaces of cities of which many are privately owned. As opposed to the celebrated downtown centers, these spaces are typically a distance from restaurants or have fewer regulations. And these unfamiliar spaces also reveal the unbalanced priorities of cities, which typically focus on economically productive space, new development, or automobile circulation. Food trucks informally provide opportunities to strengthen the public realm by converting the once auto dominated spaces into more active pedestrian hubs. And food trucks also blur clear social and political boundaries of urban space, by carving out spaces for the public on private land.

0:11:49.4 Ginette Wessel: Food trucks are also attractive to customers because each visit includes a culturally charged experience. The marriage of Korean and Mexican flavors created a specific consumer connection for the Kogi food truck. Whereas over the 20th century when we were talking about cooking French or Mexican or Chinese or Italian food, that really meant providing Americans with a very well-known and easily recognizable dish reminiscent of a particular culture.

0:12:19.5 Ginette Wessel: Kogi’s Korean barbecue tacos are inventive, they’re original, and they’re cooked with ingredients that showcase Choi’s ethnic background in culinary expertise. Chefs also bring with them global influences to urban spaces through vibrant food truck branding as well as the music, all of which play and have a powerful effect on how we recognize other cultures, whether they’re real or constructed identities. And many food trucks chefs have trained in culinary kitchens across the globe, experienced transnational mobility throughout their lives, and created popular dishes that incorporate those indigenous ingredients sometimes combining them to create new fusion foods. And as food truck customers seek out or outdoor food experiences, they’re also immersing themselves in the flavors and the ambiance of distant cultures.

0:13:15.5 Ginette Wessel: Kogi food trucks are unique, in that they intentionally seek out diverse social classes in both affluent business centers and low income communities in LA. Their menu is priced affordably at $3 a taco, making the food attainable for many Angelenos. And these lower price points help attract loyal customers whose regular presence allows that truck to keep the prices low. However, very few food trucks can maintain lower prices, given the complexity of the menu or the operational costs in their region. It’s not uncommon for food trucks to exclude low income groups with prices ranging from 15 to $30 a person. The great recession of 2008, the convenience and rising popularity of social media, and the renewed desire to engage in the public realm of cities led to the birth of the US gourmet food truck movement. Over time, the food truck industry has steadily grown with the exception of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and expanded to mid-size cities and small towns.

0:14:20.0 Ginette Wessel: And as of 2023, there are more than 47,000 food truck businesses nationwide, and that industry is now worth approximately about $2.2 billion. Mobile food trucks are an important topic to study because their presence can be an indication of a changing urban landscape that reconfigures the social, the cultural, the economic, and the physical contours of cities. Moreover, as communication technology is part of our everyday life, and proximity is less of a factor in customers’ decision making shifts in how urban space is consumed and produced really should be carefully considered.

0:15:03.6 Ginette Wessel: So, let’s keep moving here. All right. So historically government officials have resisted street food vending on the grounds that it supports unsanitary food practices, it congests streets, it weakens business for brick-and-mortar establishments, contributes to crime, and is part of a low income sector. Unfavorable views of vendors have reinforced the mid 20th century modernist planning and design ideals that were about creating clear order, automobile-centered city streets and doing away with activities perceived as inefficient or unproductive.

0:15:44.9 Ginette Wessel: In the 1970s, concerns over the oversaturation of vendors in New York City prompted a 3000 vendor permit cap, which in turn tripled the cost of the permits and produced a black market. The treatment of vendors historically is rooted in a belief that their presence is an informal practice with little contribution to the formal economy. In 2009, municipalities were taken by surprise, really with the rapid growth of food trucks, which forced them to revisit the outdated and often irrelevant vending regulations.

0:16:21.6 Ginette Wessel: The lack of effective regulations allowed food trucks a bit more freedom in finding locations, enabling a faster expansion of the industry. But however, food trucks soon learned that regardless of whether they’re conducting business in a public right of way or on private land, they’re gonna draw a debate from a variety of social groups that are economically or socially motivated. And food trucks relationships with cities and municipal government, and other food sectors has fluctuated over time in terms of its acceptance or resistance, but I would say overall increasingly favorable as the customer demand continues to this day.

0:17:04.7 Ginette Wessel: So let’s talk a little bit of theory. I’m gonna look at Philosopher Michel de Certeau’s concept of strategic and tactical spatial practices, which are particularly relevant to understanding the spectrum of power or lack thereof in the mobile food vending industry. Regarding the tactical spatial practices, Certeau states, “Tactics are a clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents, and also to the play it introduces in the foundations of power.” He emphasizes that participants in the city who live in transverse adapt, alter in appropriate space, make it their own. And food trucks perform tactical spatial practices, finding opportunities within the urban landscape and adapting to new changes. Similarly, Philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the oeuvre perfectly frames food, trucks, social production of urban space. And oeuvre is an urban milieu in that is participatory in nature within which urban citizens have a right to appropriate and modify their environment.

0:18:21.7 Ginette Wessel: And oeuvre is a realm of everyday life, an opportunity for play and social exchange in the city, rather than a space with the functional purpose of making profit. To the benefit of residents, food trucks offer opportunities to remake the city as an accessible and livable social space. They are nimble, flexible, and self-organizing. And however, they’re often subject to regulatory controls or strategic spatial practices which observe, measure, and control vendors determining their inclusion or exclusions from government’s total vision of urban space.

0:19:03.7 Ginette Wessel: So I would like to review a few of them. Notably proximity bans, which are advocated by restaurant owners, proximity bans are among the most common examples of strategic spatial practices limiting their opportunity. Supporters of the bands argue the presence of vendors creates direct competition, and therefore vendors should be distanced from restaurants to protect their profits. The protectionist views often align with the interest of local politicians and council members, who leverage their decision making power to promote or to protect or improve economic development in the area, which is often defined by property taxpayers.

0:19:47.0 Ginette Wessel: Some municipalities, such as Chicago, Boston, and even Cranston, Rhode Island, have begun monitoring food locations by requiring them to place GPS locator in their vehicles. Restrictions that contain vendors to districts or ban them from public property or limit the amount of time they can stop and wait in one location also serve as examples of powerful interests really seeking to gain from regulating food trucks. The complexity, the type, and the degree of regulation enforcement in the US depends on the local municipality and its residents.

0:20:30.3 Ginette Wessel: Strategies that are used to regulate food vendors can be categorized, as I’ve done here, as acts of spatial exclusions, things like proximity bans or bans on public and private property, acts of regulating and monitoring behavior, such as putting GPS devices in the trucks, or spatial distancing between vendors, or regulating alcohol consumption and recycling, or acts of enforcing public health standards, such as requiring a commissary or letter grades for the trucks. So, however, food trucks become more powerful and gain more rights when they work collectively as an association or they seek out representation from a supporting advocacy organization, and these groups argue for more equitable regulatory frameworks and fight for vendors’ rights and share best practices. The Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association is the most legally active group in the US, having sued 13 municipalities for not abiding by the California Vehicle Code, which states that vending regulations for the public right-of-way must address a specific public safety issue.

0:21:48.7 Ginette Wessel: So, for example, in Monterova, California, the city’s ban on food trucks in the Old Town District for reasons of business competition was quickly reversed by a lawsuit. In 2013, as these food truck associations began to grow across the nation, the President Matt Geller, co-founded the National Food Truck Association, along with six other association leaders to support existing food truck associations and build new ones. And the organization represents now about 18 regional associations across the US, and I’d also mention, likewise, the Institute for Justice in Washington DC, which was founded in 1991, and that’s a non-profit public interest law firm. They litigate for food truck vendors, and they’ve organized and filed over a dozen food truck cases across the country, winning most of them and publishing many research reports on how to promote food trucks as small businesses in growing.

0:22:55.4 Ginette Wessel: So, tensions between how we think of tactical and strategic spatial practices are inevitable when public space is at stake and when new food industries emerge in landscapes with established restaurants. The strength of the food truck industry in each city is really determined by that interplay between the bottom-up efforts of food truck vendors, the associations and the advocacy firms, and the top-down regulations that are typically installed by local, county, and state government. So, now I’d like to share a series of vignettes that I think best capture the central debates at play surrounding the gourmet food truck industry.

0:23:37.1 Ginette Wessel: In 2010, the rise of gourmet food trucks on Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile led to a dispute with local restaurant owners at the Museum Square and LA County Art Museum, who argued vendors were encroaching on their business at a time when sales were in decline following the 2008 recession. One restaurant owner stated, the economy’s been so bad I had to cut employees and these trucks show up and I have to cut more. We all average $16,000 in rent and I have to pay employee taxes and alcohol licenses.

0:24:11.4 Ginette Wessel: Supporting the restaurants, District 4 Councilman Tom LaBonge claimed the trucks monopolized parking spaces and he said these trucks parked for multiple hours in a commercially zoned area, contrary to the intent of those metered spaces. Parking meters were designed to encourage turnover of vehicles in high-demand areas. Soon, junk cars began appearing to occupy the available spaces for trucks and LaBonge proposed two alternatives to City Council, either restrict trucks from commercial zones or create designated zones for them.

0:24:50.4 Ginette Wessel: The food truck vendors saw LaBonge’s proposal as short-sighted and in violation of the same code that upheld the earlier People versus Garcia-Lonchera court case, which found that local regulations can only be enacted for matters of public safety. Accordingly, LaBonge expanded his argument and claimed that the trucks blocked visibility of drivers on Wilshire Boulevard. A local food truck advocate turned to Twitter, spread the news about the debate on a Friday in 2010, asking the community to contact LaBonge with concerns. A Facebook page titled Los Angelinos Against LaBonge described him as a friend of the celebrity and a foe of a small businessman. And by the next Monday, LaBonge’s phone and inbox were flooded and the backlash postponed the measure for two years, allowing the trucks to continue business if they located an empty parking space.

0:25:44.3 Ginette Wessel: In December 2012, Los Angeles City Council approved two restrictions for the area. Food trucks larger than 22 feet long and 7 feet high were prohibited from parking with oversized vehicle restrictions along 15 blocks of Wilshire Boulevard. And second, oversized vehicle parking was prohibited from bisecting streets entirely. These restrictions, still in place as of today, reduced the number of potential parking spaces by half, from 40 to 20. And food truck advocates claim that the lack of visibility has not been proven and argue that the new regulations were a way of balancing competing interests and not having to take sides. The vendors feel the real losers are the customers who have more limited lunchtime options. So the restaurants argue that by selling food in the vicinity of their locations, food trucks are unfairly luring customers away from their establishments.

0:26:52.7 Ginette Wessel: However, the several court cases really have no evidence to support that. And much of the case law has been established by longer running Loncheras. 1978, another case where there was the banning of sale of viticules on public streets with within 100 feet of a brick and mortar establishment. And after Loncheras fought this ordinance, it was ruled that the regulation discriminated economically against catering truck operations. So that’s important to realize that the Loncheras had such an incredible role in laying a foundation. Some restaurant owners have been more inclined to embrace, actually, the food truck activity and found ways to reinvent or boost their business.

0:27:37.1 Ginette Wessel: So for instance, the owners of the Lennon ru restaurant in the HBO Hulu campus in Santa Monica realized that they could not stop food trucks from parking near the campus and instead lowered their prices and changed their menu with a different offering each day. Their new business model responded to the consumer demand and have more to go options. So from the perspective of mobile food vendors, restaurants constitute an entirely different market that offers dining space and restrooms in a climate controlled environment.

0:28:11.9 Ginette Wessel: The person who’s going to the food truck isn’t going to it over a restaurant, they’re making an active choice to go. Even so, many vendors are aware of restaurant complaints and make an effort to really avoid areas with the established restaurant scene. And in the end, consumers are driving the market and today they want more options and more access to foods that are inexpensive, inventive, and healthy.

0:28:36.9 Ginette Wessel: So my second vignette illustrates the vulnerability of food trucks at bottom-up food truck rallies in Charlotte, North Carolina. Two years after Kogi had been serving the streets of West Hollywood and they were really popular in major cities across the US, they just started emerging in Charlotte at office parks and breweries on the outskirts of the city. When Kelly Kierson arrived in Charlotte in 2010, she was eager for her own business and found that the startup cost of a truck were too high and the city’s regulations were not friendly.

0:29:13.6 Ginette Wessel: In May of 2011, Kierson started her roaming for food business in a refurbished equipment trailer and began contacting property owners at major office parks in Ballantyne and South Park. Two months into her search, she began building a relationship with Gaines Brown, a local property owner with a passion for growing the arts culture in the South End. Brown owned a vacant lot sparsely covered in grass at the intersection of Camden Road and Park Avenue. He purchased the lot in the 1980s as part of a larger initiative to create Live Work Hub art studios in this dilapidated area. In the 2000s, the lot hosted a popular weekend tailgate and Brown agreed to let Kierson operate on his lot on Wednesdays for lunch and on the first Friday art gallery crawl.

0:30:08.7 Ginette Wessel: In February 2012, Gaines Brown, Brian Seely, owner of the rising food truck Urban Legend, and Ted Boyd of the Charlotte City Center City Partners began collaborating to host food truck rallies on Brown’s lot every Friday night. City Center Partners helped them build a relationship with the city officials since the event violated current ordinances. Next door, a local grocery provided restrooms and sold beverages that could be brought to the rally. The trucks were scheduled and managed by the Tronner family, who operated the Sticks and Cones ice cream truck, and the rally started with just three trucks and rapidly grew from there, reaching 14 by 2015. These family and dog-friendly rallies also supported the neighboring Fat Burrito restaurant, whose manager reported that the weekly gathering had doubled their sales. After three years of popularity, in October 2015, Brown announced on Facebook that the last food truck rally at the lot would be that November. The lot, along with parcels of land on the 2.3 acre block, was being sold to make way for the Dimensional Fund Advisors investment firm headquarters.

0:31:27.2 Ginette Wessel: Brown saw this nine-story, 292 square-foot commercial office space development as crucial to supporting the amount of housing in the city and he was nearing retirement and wanted to pursue other things. And while the closing of the Food Truck Friday rallies at the lot was upsetting for many, it was not unexpected given the area’s rising property values and the walkable access to light rail and the strong housing growth in the surrounding area. Luckily, Brown, whose impact on the arts community was lasting, took steps to accommodate the rally at a local brewery.

0:32:04.2 Ginette Wessel: Sycamore Brewing, one of Charlotte’s rising brewery establishments, had a 1.6-acre property with an unused gravel area that could accommodate 12 trucks just a few blocks south of the original site. At the brewery, the trucks were successful but eventually seen as an amenity, not a focal point, for customers who primarily visited the location for the quality craft beer. Eventually, in 2021, as the South End neighborhood continued to appeal to real estate investors, the owners of Sycamore Brewing sold their property for $9 million to developer Hortman Holdings.

0:32:41.1 Ginette Wessel: The two-phase, 16-story development called The Line includes 285,000 residential square feet, 28,000 retail square feet, and the retail component of the development is anchored by a new 7,000-square-foot Sycamore Brewery and Taproom. And while the brewery moved into the new development, no plans were made to relocate the food trucks. And as South End became more vulnerable to development pressure in the neighborhood, food truck rallies were phased out. The food truck rallies had played a vital role in introducing the area to outsiders and to facilitating the community’s revitalization for 10 years and were a true public space, fostered from the bottom up by the public and local food entrepreneurs.

0:33:26.0 Ginette Wessel: So for my third vignette, I wanna step back a little bit to 2008 to explain the challenges that hindered the growth of them in Charlotte. In 2008, just before gourmet food trucks had arrived on the scene, the city revamped its food vending ordinances by enacting strict controls after residents complained about crime and noise from them along South Boulevard.

0:33:50.1 Ginette Wessel: And among the many regulations implemented, the most impactful limited them to vending only 90 days a year, limited the hours of their operation, required 400 feet of separations from residential communities or another vendor, and prohibited them entirely on the streets within the Central Business District. At the time, Loncheras, the Latino vendors that were the dominant population, saw the new regulations as a direct attack on their 50 vendor community. In an attempt to change what felt like a discriminatory act, the Loncheras launched the Carne Asada Is Not a Crime campaign and petitioned for the ordinance to be amended. Residents and city council members, on the other hand, argued the regulations were not about ethnicity and were meant to eliminate noise, garbage, and loitering. Unfortunately, the Loncheras’ advocacy efforts were too late to prevent the passage of the regulations, which had a detrimental impact on their businesses, decreasing from 50 to 7 by 2019.

0:34:52.3 Ginette Wessel: In 2014, Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Planning Department proposed the first major set of revisions since 2008. This was in response to the gourmet food truck scene, which had found the mobile food vending regulations way overly constraining. And these amendments established more zones which food trucks could operate in and were overall viewed as a step in the right direction. But vendors still felt they didn’t go far enough and were concerned that they were limited to operating one day a week, they had to remain 100 feet away from restaurants or residential districts, and they could not provide tables and chairs outside of their truck. So in response to this, vendors formed the Charlotte Food Truck Association in 2014, launched charlottefoodtrucks.org, and collected 3,000 signatures in three days. These advocacy efforts materialized in the Charlotte Mobile Food Truck Citizen Advisory Group, which were meetings held by the Planning Department.

0:35:54.5 Ginette Wessel: In March 2017, after three years of meetings, a set of amendments were approved by Charlotte City Council. Of them, some of the significant ones were allowing vendors to operate in residential districts at schools and churches, but still maintaining 100 feet from a property line, residential property line, down from that previous 400 feet, allowing them to operate near a restaurant if they had permission from the owner, written permission, otherwise they needed to stay 50 feet away. Vendors were no longer constrained to certain hours of operation, and although the regulations still required expensive special event permits, this was largely seen as a collaboration between city officials and vendors and resulted in much less severe restrictions. And vendors felt the new regulations were really an improvement and were pleased that their voices were heard.

0:36:52.1 Ginette Wessel: So though Loncheras were unable to change policy in 2008, and food truck vendors were able to achieve this middle-of-the-road agreement in the subsequent decade, it highlights the kind of ensuing challenges ethnic vendors face in the US. And for my final vignette, which I’m gonna kind of shorten ’cause I see time’s getting a little tight here, I do wanna mention that Charlotte’s residential communities were really unanticipated lifelines for sustaining profitable food truck businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, something that many vendors hadn’t predicted. Charlotte’s residents, like residents of many cities and towns in the US, were ordered to stay at home. And at that moment, food trucks across the city really started to appear in housing complexes.

0:37:47.2 Ginette Wessel: And in addition to the thrill and the novelty of ordering a meal from a truck, vendors were providing an enjoyable break from the monotony of daily life and the opportunity to connect with other people, things that were really taken for granted before the pandemic. One food truck expert had noted that neighborhood associations and apartment management companies quickly started scheduling food truck visits as a perk for their residents, and real estate businesses benefited from happy residents and residents enjoyed food options close to home. So this was a big shift for vendors who were very familiar with very predictable commercial and office areas. Now shifting into this new set of residential communities.

0:38:34.4 Ginette Wessel: And this eventually, now with the new unified development ordinance in Charlotte, is now a long-term opportunity for vendors to be vending in these large multi-unit residential complexes. There’s even data to show that the county had noted in 2021 about 250 food trucks and 70 of those had opened within the year of the pandemic. So very resilient despite that.

0:39:03.3 Ginette Wessel: I do want to pause here for another little snippet on thinking about rights. So the right to the city, as Henry Losev reminds us, always requires mobilization and struggle. Food trucks’ rights are never fixed. In this past January, I spoke with a reporter about a food truck dispute in which two Haitian Food Truck owners filed a lawsuit against their Virginia town of Park Slee after a vulgar city council member cut the truck’s water line because the owners did not have an active conditional use permit and were allegedly disposing of grease in the city’s sewer system. The lawsuit states that if the owners had not been of Haitian descent, the town government would not have engaged in abusive contact, effectively putting them out of business.

0:39:50.9 Ginette Wessel: I wanna mention that food truck vendors claiming rights to urban space is a very high risk activity that can collapse their business entirely and add to the many, many challenges of being successful. And so for this reason, actually, catering companies and brick and mortar locations become preferred by chefs and food truck owners after just a few years of operating. And while it’s unclear what the outcome will be for the Haitian food truck owners, this case is certainly a reminder that food trucks’ rights to urban space are deeply entwined with issues of cultural prejudice and protectionism of property.

0:40:29.4 Ginette Wessel: Food truck locations are also vulnerable due to the rising property values, as I’ve mentioned, and that was amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. And as vacant land in the growing capitalist city becomes sparser and more valuable, food trucks are at risk of displacement. Additionally, and paradoxically, while food trucks are displaced, they are also part of the gentrifying process in a neighborhood. They can participate in changing a neighborhood economically by fostering food business competition or catering to populations with middle or upper incomes. And food trucks could also be promoted as amenities for new housing developments, even as they simultaneously displace homeless who occupy marginal and unseen spaces of the city. Therefore, food trucks can be gentrifiers, but not unilaterally. They are part of a wider set of relationships that force neighborhood change, and they sometimes experience the brunt of that change themselves.

0:41:32.5 Ginette Wessel: So I know we’re getting tight. So I’m gonna skip a few parts here as we get down to thinking about… I’m gonna jump down to the toolkit as I start to think about how we might approach planning for them in the future. So let me get to my slide on that one. Okay.

0:41:57.5 Ginette Wessel: So I’d like to conclude with a planner’s toolkit. Food trucks, they can support planners’ strategies to diversify and grow small businesses. And they can introduce food options to areas with very few food businesses, and they can diversify food options for customers and others. In areas with an older restaurant scene, food trucks can elevate food quality, they can provide friendly competition at lower price points. And in general, food trucks strengthen the local economy rather than weaken existing revenue streams. Food trucks can also serve as a catalyst for diversifying that economic landscape by increasing the growth of other small businesses in mobile enterprises like beauty salons, pet shops, and health services. And planning for the growth of small businesses and recognizing them as critical economic contributors within cities helps grow entrepreneurship among that middle and low income population.

0:43:00.8 Ginette Wessel: Food trucks should be considered as part of short-term and long-term urban planning strategies to activate urban space with pedestrians. They can attract patrons by social media or by proximity. They are versatile in their environment and should be considered when we think about how to distribute them with high and low income neighborhoods.

0:43:22.0 Ginette Wessel: Food truck markets create large social gatherings and more economic revenue and facilitate streamlining permits and simplifying seating and trash and other amenities. So food truck businesses also can do well independently, but both models of having independent or collective vending can be used in combination with urban activation plans. And whenever possible, they should also be supported with mobile and permanent seating shade and weather protection.

0:43:56.4 Ginette Wessel: Zoning ordinances that deregulate rather than creates constraints leave room for interpretation and flexibility when it comes to the particularities of locations. Each site’s unique and so therefore thinking about each challenge should also be unique. And so the ability to kind of think about ordinances that incorporate access to easy transportation, thinking about how public safety and fire prevention codes apply to land use zoning is also an important element that needs to be simplified. Managing these issues on a case-by-case basis appears to be the best policy that will mitigate issues and conflict. But there’s many, many other things that they can do by simplifying their permit application. They can build better communication between enforcement and the decision makers that reduces unneeded ticketing and unneeded fines. They should also think about delegating the parking enforcement to be kind of the guardians of the industry opposed to police force who are too busy to kind of manage them.

0:45:14.5 Ginette Wessel: I’d also add that data, in some of my past work, helps to support kind of an efficient form of urban planning. When you can start to see where the food trucks move over the city over time, you can pair that with land uses and food deserts and public infrastructure and property values. So thinking about how the data of social media posts can be incorporated as a planning tool is also very powerful.

0:45:42.0 Ginette Wessel: Almost done. So almost last slide here. In the end, as I recall my visits to food trucks since 2008, I realized that the industry is a microcosm of a larger set of dynamics that define everyday urban life in the 21st century. The public realm may forever be digitally mediated and amplified by our social connections. And at the time of writing, mobile enterprises are growing in value in American society. And as real estate prices continue to skyrocket. And as formal urban centers in the public realm grow fewer, the demand for informal public spaces becomes ever more obvious. So food trucks are pop-up reminders of the tremendous value in public social life in cities. Thank you, and I look forward to chatting if we have time.

0:46:34.8 Julian Agyeman: Thank you so much, Ginette. That was fascinating. And as I mentioned in my introduction, Ginette contributes to the great chapter to my book on food trucks, which is now seven years old. Go back to some of the research that we did, and we found, for instance, you know, Portland Go figure is the gastro-polis, the great food truck center, and they only have three permit requirements, whereas Boston in 2015-16 had 17 or something requirements. So of those forms of regulating trucks, I think spatial exclusion, there was behavior. And then public health. And public health. We found in Boston, the public health restrictions were huge. I mean, is this still the case? Is… Well, which of those forms of exclusion do you think is most prominent?

0:47:41.6 Ginette Wessel: It’s a good question. You know, gosh, Portland is such the anomaly in the food cart democracy because they do not require this commissary use. And I think that commissary use is a very powerful regulation coming from the county’s public health regulatory body. And so I think that is the biggest shaper of what the food trucks can or can’t do, meaning that they would have to park their trucks overnight. And in all states except Portland require that. It’s quite amazing to see this. But you see what it looks like at the end of the day if we didn’t have that particular regulation on there.

0:48:24.3 Ginette Wessel: So I think that’s one of the most powerful shapers. But I would also say the immediate reaction to them was proximity bans, as that is now over time, I think, lessened. And we’ve gotten to really look at, again, site-specific requirements opposed to blanketing the whole city with a ban to restaurants or schools, which was a very holistic approach to thinking about it. So I think we’ve backed off from that immediate reaction. And like I said, over time, the headlines to me just keep improving in terms of their acceptance. Yes, it may mean more layers of regulations in some places, but there is generally a partnership and relationship forming between cities and food trucks to what I call in San Francisco, a top up form of urbanism really where there is a strong, strong, tight-knit relationship. And that can lead to drawbacks and benefits too, certainly thinking about vendors’ autonomy is at jeopardy there. So I think I’m always fascinated. Every place has a different story that emerges from it. And it’s really a wonderful topic to explore and study.

0:49:45.9 Julian Agyeman: So we’ve got a question from our own page, Kelly, from Shareable. She says, “Any thoughts on the growth of mobile food trucks in rust belt cities and the economic benefits they could bring?” She says, “I’m in Syracuse, New York, and it feels like we’ve had a food truck boom. Local businesses like beer gardens and even our art museum have really embraced them with permanent or regular food truck days.”

0:50:11.1 Ginette Wessel: Yeah, no, I think that is absolutely the case. It is… And again, I think this is reinforcing what I just mentioned as the kind of top-up urbanism where you find city officials and event organizers really tapping into and actually looking to I would say the industry for help in understanding it better. Some of the more famous food truck advocates have become really stars for helping cities understand what to do. And that might be the case there, that they’re starting to kind of really latch into and seeing the value and the benefit that these trucks are providing in terms of economic development. There’s wonderful spillover effects that can be heard. But it comes back to kind of Julian and your work and always thinking local, right? This is another amazing illustration of how the local sustains and is resilient and continues. The COVID didn’t kill the food trucks, you know, they found a way. And so there’s just a beautiful, local approach to thinking about how we can continue to fight for rights and agency over urban space, as long as we kind of stay true to the fight.

0:51:29.5 Julian Agyeman: Right. Okay. We have another question here from Tom, Tom Llewellyn. “Are there examples of food trucks increasing access to food in neighborhoods without grocery stores and brick and mortar restaurants.” That’s a great question, Tom. I’ve never actually thought about it. So are there food trucks that are really helping out in food desert, so-called food desert areas?

0:51:56.2 Ginette Wessel: There are. And that was one of the slides I had to quickly go through. But World Central Kitchen has actually more recently been famous because they are starting to work with food trucks during disaster relief efforts, predominantly in Florida, where there’s been a lot of destruction happening. So that is becoming, more recently, the newest kind of resilience, where they’re really helping support communities in times of need after devastating natural disasters. Roy Choi, believe it or not, started a restaurant called Local, which was meant to serve low-income communities in Watts neighborhood in LA. And so he, believe it or not, the first person has really put that message forward of trying to think about how do we serve vulnerable communities in food scarcity.

0:52:50.3 Ginette Wessel: There are also education programs with schools that will take a truck for free of lunch programs in the summer for children in neighborhoods. So there is an incredible amount of efforts and it… I’m thinking too, actually. Yeah. The wildfires in California, food trucks were able to kind of go and mobilize to help collectively get a lot of food that they could distribute quickly. I know Off the Grid was very well part of that effort there in San Francisco. So there’s so many great ways I think that they are helping in filling in the void in so many dire situations of dire need or everyday stresses of communities too.

0:53:29.6 Julian Agyeman: Thanks, Ginette. So final question. You know, you’re talking here to a lot of urban planning students. If there’s one thing you can say about food trucks going into the future, that they need to be aware of as budding urban planners, what would that be?

0:53:49.0 Ginette Wessel: That’s a great question. It’s a hard one. I would say, don’t ever assume, always talk to the chefs, talk to the owner. Ethnography is an incredible tool and powerful tool for urban planning, and I think we don’t put enough attention to it. And so that would be my last piece of wisdom to leave you is, look closely and get to know your subjects that you’re looking at.

0:54:14.8 Julian Agyeman: Great. Well, Ginette, thanks so much. And you’re in Providence, I’m in Boston. Next time, let’s get a coffee in the tent.

0:54:24.3 Ginette Wessel: That’s right.

0:54:29.2 Tom Llewellyn: I hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video, transcript, and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable, with support from the Barr Foundation, Shareable donors, and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Ronna Alexander. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Allison Huff, Bobby Jones and Candice Spivey. And the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share it with others. So this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

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Transcript

0:00:08.9 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities, and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:39.5 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman, and together with my research assistants, Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partner, Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on Colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory.

0:01:12.1 Julian Agyeman: Today, we are delighted to host Jose Richard Aviles. Richard is a transportation analyst for the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. As part of the community Power and Policy Partnership team, they support government agencies and partners with community organizations by providing trainings, technical assistance and evaluation support, centering lived experience, vision, and self-determination of the communities most impacted by transit inequities. Richard draws inspiration from their involvement with the Bus Riders Union in LA, and participation in other social justice movements like marriage equality. Richard’s talk today is provocatively named Re-imagining Urban Planning. And in a Break with tradition, Richard is going to speak rather than present slides and welcomes our participation. So please put any questions or points in the chat. Richard, a Zoomtastic welcome to Cities@Tufts. Over to you.

0:02:22.0 Jose Richard Aviles: Thank you so much for having me. And just so you all know, and thank you for everyone who’s joining us online. Just wanted to say before we started, this is also a fun reunion. I met Julian six years ago, have been a fan of Julian’s work, and so it’s now exciting in a full circle moment to come back. I was still a student, I think when I first met Julian, and now, well, now, I’m just getting older. Again, thank you all so much for coming today. The talk is called Re-imagining Urban Planning, and it’s based on a webinar series that we’ve been hosting at the Othering and Belonging Institute as part of what’s going to happen in the next couple of months. To give you some context, I am transitioning out of transportation equity work, and now am the lead for arts and cultural strategy at the institute, and we are doing and launching research around the concept of radical imagination for belonging.

0:03:11.3 Jose Richard Aviles: We are framing that work in the context of the design lab. So we’re not interested so much in just producing resources, but rather is producing resources in addition to testing some of these ideas out. And the testing of the ideas is really thinking about activities and prompts and different ways that can exercise the muscle of imagination particularly in a time where it feels like what we’re getting most is hopelessness. There is an urgency not only in our cities, in our regions, in the country, in the world for us to really rethink about how we’re approaching the work that we’re doing, particularly as urban planners.

0:03:53.5 Jose Richard Aviles: And so the Reimagining Urban Planning series was really born out of that, and we’ve been launching, now we’ve have seven to eight seminars. We are taking a break in November, giving the elections, and we’ll come back for our final seminar in December 12th, and I’d be more than happy to share that information so you all have it. And that seminar is called Planning for Dystopic Futures. Though I’ve been sitting with changing the title of that seminar ’cause the dystopic futures are here. And so the series basically intends to really and openly critique the way that we as urban planners have been trained, and propose a new way of thinking, a new way of approaching the work. The seminar has covered topics around belonging, arts and culture, our relationship to land, our relationship to economics, and then our last one is on dystopic futures. And again, just really thinking about what that relationship is.

0:04:53.6 Jose Richard Aviles: So what I’ll do today is I’ll go over through our first introductory descent that we wrote, what’s called State of the Practice, and it’s supposed to ground the intention of the series, and then I’ll begin to share some of the concepts and some of the reframes that have been born out of the speakers who have been a part of the series. And then I’ll share with you some of the new imagination that we’re having, or the things that we’re imagining as the work is picking up. So it is… I strongly believe that there are two types of planners. There are planners that romanticize the cities, and then there are those planners who go into school to try to defend their hoods. And then while we get into the schools, identify as one of the latter planners. I’m from south central Los Angeles. I am based in Mexico City at the moment, but I’m joining you all in Portland, Maine. So there’s a lot of transient movement here.

0:05:45.3 Jose Richard Aviles: And while there is a lot plenty of room within the field to advocate on behalf of communities, we as planners are not trained to be advocates on behalf of communities. Again, reimagining urban planning intends to interrogate the current way that we as planners are being trained, operate, and more importantly, the way that we perceive our relationship with the built environment. At the institute, we’ve been working hard to think about belonging, and to foster belonging as a global norm in the next 15 years. And so we hope that the series has been able to incite conversations that generate strategies and tactics that can foster belonging in an urban planning process.

0:06:23.0 Jose Richard Aviles: First, we talk about planning imagination. There’s… In the essay towards a planning imagination, author Leonie Sandercock states that planning is a project, is a social project whose purpose is to manage the way in which people coexist in a way that celebrates and acknowledges the pluralities that are now true for cities in the 21st century. She argues that planning education has not prepared planners for this new form of coexistence, and this calls for a new planning imagination. Sandercock calls for a planning imagination that is political, audacious, creative, and therapeutic. We as planners have been taught that we are the observers of the built environment, a so-called neutrality they say, yet we as planners are participants in this ecology. We operate from a place where objectivity no longer works. Planning has always been political. Now, we as planners have to ask ourselves, who are we committed to, and where do we stand in this political spectrum? 

0:07:25.5 Jose Richard Aviles: We are trained as planners. When we are trained as planners, we are asked to seek a specialization, whether it is housing, transportation, land use, etcetera. Yet community members don’t experience the built environment in silos. It’s important to understand that so much of what we do as planners are all based on social constructions. The world we live in was someone’s imagination. So we as planners have the ability to imagine, and like I asked before, who are we imagining for? It is important to also remember that planning is powerful from the distribution of capital and resources, to deciding over the use of land, something that inherently does not belong to us. I say all that to say that while planning is a field, planning also operates within systems of power. And if there’s anything that Kimberlé Crenshaw has taught us is that power never works alone, and it never operates in the benefit of those that it depresses.

0:08:22.8 Jose Richard Aviles: Lastly, in the essay planning as a heterosexist project, Dr. Frisch argues that planning is a social project that only seeks to promote heterosexuality while discriminating against queer identity. Now, Frisch makes it clear that planning doesn’t explicitly discriminate against queerness, but rather planning as a project, the work of linking systemic structures and representation, rather than specifically writing policies that openly discriminate against queer folks, urban planning as a heterosexist project focuses on the discourse of sexual difference as it formulates what is order versus disorder, public versus private, and family versus household.

0:09:06.5 Jose Richard Aviles: It’s important to note that this project, this social project, is not limited just to heterosexism, it is true for White supremacy, capitalism, settler colonialism, patriarchy. Let it be known that there are entire wars happening in parts of the world in the name of settler colonialism. And what we’re witnessing in the Middle East and in Gaza is an extreme violence of gentrification. Planning is informed by the discourse that surrounds each of these systems of powers and oppression. Power dynamics are not neutral. They must be challenged and transformed, and as planners, we have that capacity. That was the opening introductory descent for the state of the practice and how we started talking about reimagining urban planning, the series.

0:09:51.6 Jose Richard Aviles: In our arts and culture webinar, we really focused on this notion that what arts and culture has done within the planning field has only been limited to institutional thinking. What do I mean by that? Usually, what happens is that they’re still nonprofits that are seeking for policy funding of who has access to art versus what art we’re putting out there, but what we’re forgetting is the power of culture. Culture teaches us what are the motivations, aspirations, fears, and joys of communities. The thing, one of the things that Julian and I pondered over was that I’m also trained as a social worker and we talk a lot about cultural competency, and it’s something that is missing in the planning field. We don’t talk enough about cultural competency. And it’s important to understand that there is so much room in how we’re able to understand culture. In the arts and cultural seminar, we talked about the importance of looking at arts and culture as a process to planning, and not a product, in the same way that we talk about equity as a process and not a product.

0:10:55.3 Jose Richard Aviles: I became an urban planner ’cause I love my hometown Los Angeles. More importantly, I love the people who grew up in that city. I first became a planner before I knew that the field of urban planning existed. I organized with the Bus Riders Union at the age of 15, and was talking about the consent decree of 1996 in transit racism at the age of 17, and little did I know that was a field called transportation planning. And well, now we’re here. As a student bus rider, I had access to the entire city. Through each bus ride, I had the opportunity to witness a different shade of Los Angeles. I grew up along the line, the 105, which travels northwest across the city from Huntington Park to West Hollywood, two very different cities, racially, economically, ethnically, and linguistically. While in the beginning, I was very excited about the fact that I had both access to both quinceaneras, and the queer clubs, quinceaneras being the place. In Huntington Park, there’s a street named Pacific Avenue that is known for being the place where everyone go gets their tuxes and their dresses and all of the necessities for producing quinceaneras, and West Hollywood is our queer district in Los Angeles.

0:12:10.6 Jose Richard Aviles: I soon started realizing that the built environment also changed while South Central was overwhelmingly full of check cashing places, hotels and motels, liquor stores, and fast food restaurants. West Hollywood was the complete opposite. It was a home to grocery stores, hospitals, planned Parenthoods, coffee shops. Growing up, I was conditioned to believe that only white people deserve the nice things. I share these stories just to highlight the importance of the built environment in its relationship to human development and identity formation. The places that we come from highly inform the people that we are, the way that we behave, our values and our priorities. As planners, we have been trained to position the benefit of the state as the focus of our work, but where has that led us? We need to refocus our practice with a more critical lens.

0:12:57.4 Jose Richard Aviles: Again, I ask, whom are we planning for? And of course, before we can achieve a full paradigm shift within the field which feels closer than we think, we must advocate for this new way of thinking, a new way of planning. This notion that we as planners must be neutral and objective no longer works. If we’re being honest, this field was never neutral and objective. It has always benefited those with the most power and resources, and we need to politicize planning. A poor people planning, if you will. Now, the question become, how do we become advocates? The advocate represents an individual group or organization. They affirm their position in language understandable to their client and to the decision makers they seek to convince.

0:13:44.0 Jose Richard Aviles: And again, like I mentioned before, I believe that there are two types of planners that romanticize the city and planners that wanna defend their hoods. I do believe that the field has shifted greatly over the several years. And as more planners like myself step into the field planners with lived experience, we are planners that work at the intersection of technical expertise and lived experience. I joined the field ’cause I don’t only know gentrification, I myself, and those around me have been displaced. One of the main differentiations between the two planners I just mentioned is positionality. Well, the first type of planner, we will speak about marginalized communities from a position of other. The second type of planner is part of the other. And again, while planning theory will tell us that we must operate as planners from a positionality of objectivity, we simply can’t do that.

0:14:33.1 Jose Richard Aviles: The first step to truly being an advocate within urban planning is to have an understanding of social theories, critical race theory, gender theory, and other normative theoretical frameworks that inform our identity, power and privilege, especially now. Having a sensibility to these different positionalities makes it clear that we as urban planners understand that space is political. So with that, I’ll end some more of the formal talk and I’ll let you know a little bit of what the series has been able to do. The series now has about 8,500 members in a network. I was sharing earlier that when we first planned the series, we were hoping we were gonna have 20 people. And in our first seminar, we had over 1200 folks join us from all over the world. We’ve had people join us from Nigeria, from Kenya, from India, from Vietnam. We’ve had people in the all over Europe. We’ve had people all over south and Latin America, and we’ve had people all over the US, and we did not know and still don’t know what to do with this network.

0:15:35.9 Jose Richard Aviles: But if there’s something that we’ve learned is that there is a hunger for a new way of thinking and a new discourse to be introduced in urban planning. When we talked about our… On our seminar on land, we talked about this notion that now more than ever do we really need to understand that this relationship to land is not neutral, that it’s also constructed. The idea of land ownership sits at the heart of the extraction based global operating system. And because private property is a fundamental pillar of capitalism and othering, changing our relationship to land is essential to transitioning away from these systems and moving toward equity and belonging.

0:16:17.7 Jose Richard Aviles: Now, the work of shifting away from transactional systems that commodify land is both in every day and in a generational project. In the present day, people are already creating alternative legal forms of community ownership, rematriating and stewarding land, rethinking their individual responsibility as title holders, and building an ecosystem of practitioners centered around a broad vision of community stewardship that spans multiple sectors, private, public and nonprofit movements, housing, labor, climate justice, and racial justice, and geographic scales from local to global. These experiments must fit within the currently frameworks for private property while also trying to transform them.

0:17:02.3 Jose Richard Aviles: As we think about some of the next steps for reimagining urban planning, and I’ll begin to wrap up so we can have a conversation, one of the things that we have been doing… If folks know me, you all know that I like to talk shit and I am very informal about the way I do the work that I do. That’s the way that my community taught me to do the work, and I do believe that the best planners are the senoras who sell the tamales or the folks who are out on the streets, folks who are walking in the streets, that’s where real planning happens for me and I try to relate. That’s where I come from, and I try to be as close to that even as planning has taken me to different places and different opportunities, but I don’t never forget where I come from, and that’s where I’ll always talk about South Central.

0:17:47.5 Jose Richard Aviles: And because of this informality and the way that I talk shit in the first couple of seminars, I talk shit about APA. I was like, we need to do something like who’s listening, and this is even being a member of the APA Foresight committee and thinking a lot about forecasting within the field. We then found out that the current president, Angela Brooks, who is now a really good friend, we just met up not too long ago, was attending all of our seminars and yes, appreciated the APA shit talking. And now one of the things that we are imagining and working on is for the next national conference in May or April. In fact, check me on that, which will be happening in Denver. Reimagining urban planning will be a track within the conference. So not only will we be presenting some of the content and frameworks that have come out from the series, but we will be co-creating a couple of a new discourse to the field. Right now, the dream is to be in partnership with other organizations who are doing similar work to do a systemic analysis of planning curriculums across the US, identify the competencies in which planners are being trained in now, do a gaps analysis and propose new competencies that are needed for urban planning in the world that we live in today, not only geopolitically, but also in the climate that we’re living in literally.

0:19:06.0 Jose Richard Aviles: And so one of the things that’s coming out from those conversations, the one thing that we noticed, all planners, we need to be trained in basics of human behavior. What do I mean by that? I’m, again, being a social worker, of course, my mind always goes there. We have a course that’s called Human Behavior In the social environment. We’re proposing something of a course called Human Behavior in the Built Environment. And usually what that means, it’s how do you mitigate change and conflict? A lot of times community members may be in opposition to your projects, and it’s not because of you, it’s not because of your design. It might just be that there is some attachment that we need to work through. It might be that folks just don’t know how to mitigate conflict and need more support doing conflict resolution. The point is we need to know the basics of human behavior because at the end of the day, we need to centralize people and not justify their existence in the built environment.

0:20:00.4 Jose Richard Aviles: We also talked a little bit about that the urban planner needs to become an archivist. Thinking about the ways in which urban planning is currently being done. Y’all know that there is a thing called engagement burden. Communities are tired of being asked to fill out surveys, to participate in focus groups, in charettes, when there’s nothing that’s being accomplished. And so one of the things that we’ve discussed as a framework, would be what would it look like if the urban planner operated from a sense of an archivist? Unpack all of those plans and all of those false promises that have been already talked to community and identify what is implementable in the current timeline, in the current scope. So we’re not recreating the wheel. We talked about, the last thing I’ll share is that we mentioned a little bit about what would it look like to reframe our relationship to time as urban planners. A 2025 year master plan no longer works, particularly in a climate that is constantly changing.

0:20:57.2 Jose Richard Aviles: And we’re feeling the impacts not only be greater, but they’re coming more quickly. And so what would it look like if we planned for five years, for seven years, for years under which administrations can actually accomplish something and not in these 20, 35 years as the climate is rapidly changing. And the last thing I’ll share is that some of the dreams that we have for the series right now, in the same way that we’ve talked about re-imagining planning, we’re thinking about re-imagining the construction of the environment. So that is engaging engineers, that is engaging construction workers, construction managers, and engaging architects because we know that’s when the community feels the most impact when we begin to break ground. But the urban planner has no relationship in that moment of the work, and we should. The other series we’re re-imagining is a series on long bridging and doing bridging work between planners and engineers and architects so that there’s common ground for the way that we’re centralizing equity and people in the work.

0:21:55.3 Jose Richard Aviles: Again, from design to procurement to construction to evaluation. That’s always been my big question of what is the role of the planner during construction. A lot of the times that means in the relationships that I’ve been able to build with community members, when you do engagement in a way that’s more relationship built, community members will say things along the lines of like, girl, why are you starting to break ground at 7:30 in the morning? We have elders here. Can you start at 9:00? Who’s managing that relationship? Who’s telling the construction folks to go out at 9:00 versus 7:30. There’s the little things that can still happen. And again, inequities are constantly happening throughout the entire process.

0:22:31.0 Jose Richard Aviles: And there is an opportunity and a way to also continue to think about equity as a product, as a process. No. Not my own fatty and slip, oh my God. I’m like cancelled in those five seconds. But equity as a process and a process that is continuously happening. And there is an opportunity for we as planners to be stewards of land as opposed to facilitators of land transactions. With that being said, that is a little bit about reimagining urban planning. So I welcome questions and thoughts, particularly from you, Julian, I don’t even know… I wonder what you must be thinking about this series. But yeah, that’s pretty much the talk.

0:23:09.4 Julian Agyeman: Thank you so much, Richard. I’m just having a little bit of trouble getting back on screen, so while I’m doing that, I don’t wanna waste a moment. That was fantastic. I love the radicalness of this, Richard, and I was thinking… Oh, excuse me.

0:23:29.0 Whitney: Points for the dog though.

0:23:33.1 Julian Agyeman: Yes. Yeah. Much more handsome than me. One thing I was thinking, Richard, both what do you see as the main opportunities within the sort of planning system as it is, and what’s the pushbacks that you’re getting? But let’s do opportunities first.

0:23:49.6 Jose Richard Aviles: 100%. Again, like I mentioned, I think we’re at the precipice in the field where there’s a lot more planners that are being louder than before, that are bringing in all of these lived experiences into the work. So they think now as we’re seeing concepts like CLTs and circular economies and land stewardship be part of the conversation, I do believe that there is that perfect opportunity to begin to push more and more radically. Again, one of the things that I’ve been sitting with right now as an opportunity really is what would it look like if planners were also trained to be emergency responders? I’m just thinking about Tampa and Asheville. We have a stake in that conversation as well. As built environments were destroyed, we know we have seen before that developers use that opportunity to come in and take land. And so what is the role of the planner in that moment? 

0:24:43.3 Jose Richard Aviles: Do we sit back and just allow a developer to take lands and redevelop in a way we saw it with Katrina and we’re continue… We’re gonna continue to see that. We know that our facilities are not up to code and are not… We’re not constructed to withstand the conditions that we’re living in now. So there’s an opportunity, I think, along those lines, especially now as leading the work and following after the work of environmental justice activists. We all need to be that now. It’s no longer an exceptional thing. And I think that the work is really how do we make these exceptional frameworks into the norm practice and that we do. Some of the pushbacks, oh, I think are the old school planners. There are still some people who operate from a place of redlining, or let me not even go that far.

0:25:33.6 Jose Richard Aviles: Los Angeles, not too far, not too long ago, our deputy planning director got charged and indicted for bribery. Let me be hella honest about that. So I think that, again, the interest still lies in those who can… Who have the most resource and capital, whether it is developers, whether it is political feasibility, again, is also a pushback. And the fact that we continue to think under those lines, particularly in terms of planning is frustrating. And I think another pushback also is that we don’t… We haven’t taken the opportunity to look at planning as a cultural shift, as a cultural strategy. Really planning can allow us to really shape in the ways that we’re approaching relationships to the built environment. We all have it.

0:26:19.7 Jose Richard Aviles: And so planning the fact that it just lives in a too technical way, but it could also function as a cultural strategy to help shift paradigms, I’m thinking about nimbyism, I’m thinking about the housing crisis. I’m thinking about transportation. We still continue to look at transportation and public transit as a nuisance. And who’s writing it and all those things that come into play. So I think that there is an opportunity and some of that pushback is that we’re still too caught up in the technical. Again, I think that we’re just at that cusp of there being a transition. Again, it’s why we have so many folks who are interested in the conversation.

0:26:53.7 Julian Agyeman: Right. Thanks. I’ve got so many more questions, but there’s a load of questions coming up now. And the first one is from one of our great alums, Whitney. Hey Whitney. I absolutely agree that we need to move away from the white male, European nuclear style of urban planning. The whole concept of zoning is so removed from the way people live.

0:27:21.6 Whitney: So my thought is, and by the way, this has just been fantastic. And while some of us were at UEP freaking ages ago, I just wanna reassure you that it’s… We were talking about similar things, not quite as thoroughly as you are, and I’m just so thrilled. And I’m in Seattle, so we have these, and I’m doing affordable housing. So we have some of these conversations over here too. So please come up. So my question is, zoning seems to me like a failing idea of an academic way of looking at the city. It feels like a bunch of white guys were sitting in a room, modernists. Thinking like, how can we oversimplify this and just squish it onto people and force our ideas in a very simplistic manner? 

0:28:06.8 Whitney: But it was largely academic. My concern is, and I hear you doing both, not I don’t hear you doing that, but I think that sometimes when you use words like decolonization, it’s another academic argument. It’s an important one, but I think we should be having it in circles like this. But when you go out into the real world, when you talk to our grandmothers and our family members and people just trying to have a small business that’s not top of mind, top of mind, often as things we probably as planners don’t wanna admit, like they’re worried about parking.

0:28:43.7 Whitney: I am a get rid of parking minimums person, 110% and more transit. But we need more transit. But I just… I worry that sometimes we replace one academic argument with a different one. And I’m not hearing you advocate that completely. In fact, I’m hearing you say, I am using these words and I… These… I just heard you say you’re using regular words and you’re talking to regular people. So I just wanna say thank you for that. That’s really great. And then how do we push back against people who get super lofty and academic? How do we bring them back down to the real world, make real world changes like you suggest? 

0:29:17.8 Jose Richard Aviles: And I think that’s why the concept that at least in the radical imagination work that we’re doing, we’re so interested in this design lab and studio. ‘Cause we get to go out and test and pilot. It’s not just about writing an article. It’s not about publishing it. The dream right now for the radical imagination work is that we’re gonna do a toolkit that’s co-authored by different artists and cultural strategists who are doing the work. And we’re identifying now different partners that can become then the pilots to test them. But I agree with you 100%. This is why I say that to me, the true urban planners are the senoras who are out on the streets. It’s the gossip, it’s the chisme. We know that there’s a current… There was an iteration of urban planning being a flaneur. Like literally your job was to just go walk around and get the gossip of the city. And I do believe in gossip, I think it’s strategic information. I listen, I don’t report the gossip though. You’d never report the chisme.

0:30:11.6 Jose Richard Aviles: It just teaches you comportment. But if it’s institutional chisme, oh, you spill that. You spill that. I come from an organizing background that taught me to organize contra dentro y fuera del estado which translates to against within and without the state. And so I may work within the state, that’s where the decolonization and the academic argument comes in. But know that my spirit will always be against it. And so when community members were like, girl, you’re not being accessible right now, it’s okay. Dope. I’m gonna be very honest with you. I had a workshop this morning where I might have triggered someone, a survivor of a crash. And in that moment, I had to really step back and reassess the way I was framing that argument because yes, I’m talking about transit and transit equity and whatever, and I have experience. I still am an abled bodied when I still haven’t lived that in my body.

0:31:06.4 Jose Richard Aviles: Luckily, this is where the benefit of also being a social worker comes in. I get to be trauma informed and to have that conversation and to apologize and to know when I’ve made the mistake and to take the L. So I agree with you. I think there is a way to definitely present academic language and to shift the discourse because at the end of the day, also, there are a lot of planners who are gonna come through academia and are gonna be trained in ways. And so we need to use that language to get buy-in, to push out the discourse in a way that we have to within these institutions. But the real planning happens on the street. So I like to live in the… Julian and I have talked about this. I was like, I’m not gonna go get a PhD. I’m just gonna be a practitioner. And if I get to be a professor somewhere, then I’ll just be as a lecturer. And that’s cute and that’s fine. And again, the multimodal approach to the work, I think it’s important as well.

0:31:53.0 Julian Agyeman: Right.

0:31:55.1 Whitney: Thank you.

0:31:57.1 Julian Agyeman: Thanks Whitney. Judith, I see you’ve got a question or is it a statement? Do you want to speak to Richard? 

0:32:03.3 Judith: Thank you all. This is great. Great work. But I am although didactic and so I come from the streets, but I’m a real estate broker and we have our ears to the ground and… But we’re not in the conversation very much. I’m the other person in the room. But here in Philadelphia, we changed our zoning code and we have the RCO registered community organization process, which is a fraud, okay? But I’m keeping it like you, Richard. So how can you get more people who are interested? They know me because I attend all the meetings. So can you all look at the list of the average citizen who attends the meetings, who are interested in this process, and let us in. But a lot of talk is academia, ivory tower, I go there too. Go to all the forums, all of that. But then when it comes down to the where the rubber meets the road, like they’re trying to put a police facility on our historic card or Diamond Street, Google that you all, demolition by neglect, et cetera. We have no voice. Politics takes over. So let’s talk a little bit about politics and how politics usurps all of us. Thank you.

0:33:19.7 Jose Richard Aviles: No, 100% Judith. And I think I agree with you. We need to be more expansive in who we’re bringing into the conversation. One of the things when I taught at UCLA a couple years ago, and I taught a class called Community Organizing for Urban Planners. But what they didn’t realize was that the acronym of the class was coup. So basically I used to say I got hired to stage a coup. And we got to read a wonderful Text of Violence. It’s a chapter in the book, Wretched Of The Earth by Frantz Fanon. And the whole argument, right, is that the language of colonization is violence. So if the language of that is the… What we’ve only known is in the language of decolonization violence as well. Again, also a very academic argument. But what’s interesting about that is what I told my students was what would it look like if we as urban planners, and we as city staff went on a strike and we shut down the city because they are not doing their job.

0:34:10.1 Jose Richard Aviles: They being elected officials. Again, we as urban planners and a lot of times, as folks who work in helping operate the city, we live in what I call the place of… The purgatory of power. It’s a weird limbo state where we do have power because of our technical expertise, but we also don’t have power ’cause these projects have to go through some governing body. But what happens if we held them accountable through that position of power. If our community members cannot come to a 3:00 PM meeting because they’re working, why is the urban planner stuck behind, say, a desk and not out on the streets where people are there? You know what I mean? I believe I always say that I’m gonna look cute. I’m gonna have business casual. I’m gonna have a cute outfit, but I’m gonna have tennis shoes on.

0:34:52.0 Jose Richard Aviles: ‘Cause if I need to go out to the streets and talk to people, then that’s what we do. I think there’s nothing wrong and should be the practice that we’re really writing about 60% of our time out on the streets, not behind plans and not behind desks, but really getting to know community members and really being in conversation because that’s the real, that’s the richness of this field that I, again, I make the joke. I was like, I love community engagement work because I get paid to gossip and all of a sudden you’re spending time in a corridor enough and then the senoras come out and bring you coffee and say, mijo, did you eat already? There’s just this beautiful relationship that we have an opportunity for, that I think, again, if we’re not shifting who we’re committed to, whether it is being committed to a politician or it’s committed to a city or it’s committed to the state versus being committed to people, even that paradigm shift changes our approach.

0:35:45.7 Julian Agyeman: So Richard, when I was a kid, we had Bobbies on the beat. Are you saying planners on the beats? We need planners on the beats.

0:35:50.9 Jose Richard Aviles: We need planners on the beats. Yes.

0:35:52.5 Julian Agyeman: Planners on the beat. That’s right. You heard it first here folks. Crystal, you’ve got 20 questions in your one posting here. Crystal, can you distill it down and ask one question to Richard? 

0:36:07.3 Crystal: So yeah. Hey, Crystal, they/them, first semester of UEP. I’ve just been in the middle of trying to figure out, like coming to the program as someone who’s a community organizer and works in food insecurity and like accessibility. Like I’m having the experience of being a member of the community for over a decade, but there not being accessibility within the community as like part of our sense of self. And I’m like, but we’re here. But also Somerville is so inaccessible that the chair of the commission for persons with disability could not find housing that was wheelchair accessible and had to leave the city. Like it’s dire. So how do we shift that to include like definitions of our community, people who exist but are not being prioritized in our plans for the city, I guess is the like… Like It is part of our community. It’s just not the part that’s prioritized.

0:37:06.0 Jose Richard Aviles: 100%. That’s a very hard question only because as I’m learning more about New England, I’m like, Ooh, new England is a hot mess. I’m like walking around cobblestone streets and I get it historic, but history for who, again, it’s all like social constructs. I’m like, take that shit off. Ain’t nobody need this no more, let alone Boston. I got to live a summer in Boston and I was like, what are these places? Oh my gosh. When there was… Literally, Boston was planned when there was still no right away in the field. And ’cause there is no right away in Boston. So it’s a hard question given that infrastructure and context and just thinking the rate at which we need to change the infrastructure to meet those needs. One thing I really love about working in pedestrian safety, and that’s what my background is in, in Vision Zero work, the opportunity to do quick build solutions. Quick build solutions, usually either meaning temporary project… With temporary materials is always interesting.

0:38:06.8 Jose Richard Aviles: Just to begin to shift the paradigm a bit, you know what I mean? And… ’cause it’s gonna, ugh, now I’m sounding like an incrementalist. Oh lord. But just thinking about the rate at which the infrastructure needs to change, because some of this infrastructure, again, in Los Angeles, at least in the context of the US, it’s a newer city. Los Angeles is a very old city, but it’s never been part of the… It has been not part of the US for longer. But just New England is such an interesting place for that reason because it has such a weird history. But to your point, I think that again, there is that reshift of understanding. One thing I’m very inspired with.

0:38:43.0 Jose Richard Aviles: And I’m leaving with, after being in Maine. The group did an amazing job at bringing in folks with diverse abilities and in so many ways and so many different abled bodied people and understanding and, hearing those stories in real time. And then becoming that problem solver and that thinker of like, “How do I really create a place where everyone belongs? What are the ways in which like someone who has the ability to see versus someone who doesn’t, how are they talking to one another and is there an interdependence as opposed to codependence?” Right? And so, there’s some framing and some reshifting, again, as the way that we also perceive people with different abled bodies and accessibility as a whole. One thing that right now Los Angeles is doing, just as an example, the Olympics are coming to Los Angeles in 2028.

0:39:30.1 Jose Richard Aviles: The way that Los Angeles pitched the bid was that they didn’t have to construct anything new. ’cause all of the facilities are there, they’re just making it more regional to connect. And so that kind of gave space for other types of projects to come through. But we also know that the app Paralympics are coming, alongside with the Olympics. And so what that became, it’s, I know of a lot of folks who are advocating in LA to really reassess ADA compliance across the entire city. Because if you’re saving money over here, well, boo, let me tell you y’all, some of these ramps, some intersections don’t even have ramps. And then some of your pedestrian ramps are so bad. And so there that became an opportunity. So I say that to say it really poking maybe in some places how we can bring that into the conversation. I go back to what I mentioned earlier. We’re just so caught up in the silo of what this field or what this scope of work looks like. And I think what’s important to understand, it’s like the scope of work should always be flexible because we know it’s gonna constantly shift on the ground. That was a very long-winded and maybe vague answer for a very hard question.

0:40:37.2 Julian Agyeman: Thanks, Crystal. We have a question from AB who says, in what ways could we empower communities to do planning? How do you see fugitive planning in practice? 

0:40:50.3 Jose Richard Aviles: I don’t know if I understand what fugitive planning is, but it sounds fun.

0:40:53.4 Julian Agyeman: It does sound fun, doesn’t it? Can you tell us, give us a one sentence what fugitive planning is? 

0:41:00.5 Asha: Yeah, sure. And I think you, oh, my name is Asha by the way. I think you’ve been speaking to this quite a bit, but it’s taking this sort of information and practice that we have and disseminating that to the community so that they become planners themselves. And so I think just, I guess in background, I was born and raised in Chicago. I grew up on the South side. I became a planner because I noticed the sort of what ways in which the city was super segregated and like experiencing that violence firsthand that occurs spatially. And so as I’ve moved more into the practice of planning, I’ve, okay, excuse my language, but I’ve just seen like how we’re so wrapped up in the kind of bullshit of it all, but we’re not actually implementing anything. And so while people continue to suffer in these spaces, how do we move towards putting ourselves outta business, so to speak, and empowering the community to implement solutions themselves? 

0:41:52.6 Jose Richard Aviles: Yeah, I think, okay, now I like fugitive planning. Okay, I see. Okay. It’s more like this anarchist planning. I love it. I think a lot of it… A lot of things need to shift within the field as well. For example, some and just some practical things. This is very much a long-term strategy for sure. But some practical things that I think come to mind are really reframing engagement as a phase. Engagement is not a phase. Engagement is constantly happening. You’re in community and in relationship with people all the time, and you’re not an engagement just to collect data. But one of the things that we do at the institute, we have a toolkit, and I’d be more than happy to share this resource later on, transformative research. We use participatory action research. And this is a process where we work with community members to not be the subjects of the research, but rather to be the research designers, the data collectors, the data analyst.

0:42:43.7 Jose Richard Aviles: And it becomes a whole research process. And the way that we’re interested in, the way we frame research at the institute is really research is just generating knowledge. And we know that our communities have generated knowledge in many different ways or through oral histories in some practices and in some, the diaspora through braiding through song and dance. There’s knowledge being generated all the time. And I think restrain, reframing even the way that we do engagement as a way of collecting knowledge is very important. Working hand in hand with your organizers. I think if you’re in planning, and again, I come from an organizing background, little story that I’m gonna share, right quickly. When I was at the Department of Transportation and LADOT in LA, oh, they’re gonna come from me, Julian. See, I’m telling you all the secrets. But I was friends with the administrative assistance because they knew the calendars.

0:43:35.8 Jose Richard Aviles: And in our city, LADOT is across the street from city hall. So when our general manager had a meeting across the street, girl, I’d hit up all the organizers go getter. She’s crossing the street, now she has a meeting at 10:00. It’s 9:50 go getter. There’s always an opportunity to work in conversation with agitators, not with the politician. Again, that’s who I steer from though. There is a conspiracy in LA for me to run for city council and it’s a conspiracy that I started [laughter], but could you imagine me, Julian talking about F this and F that in city hall.

0:44:09.9 Julian Agyeman: I’ll Work on your campaign [laughter], let me know buddy.

0:44:12.0 Jose Richard Aviles: I have a couple of months to think about it, but we may run for city council and again, but what the goal is to agitate, there is nothing wrong with agitation. So I think from the position of planning, I think being able to work alongside your organizers who are on the ground and doing the membership work and the capacity building, if you work alongside them to move the needle in that way, I think that’s also important. And girl put politicians business out there. They have a voting record. Put it out there. Let people know what they’re up to. ‘Cause you know, when you work in planning, you know who the commissioner is, who is an asshole. You know what the city council member’s gonna decide. We know a lot of things in the way the city operates and if we’re able to share that public information because FOIA and then you don’t want to get in trouble [laughter], but if you wanna share public information and help create strategy for organizers, I think that’s a way to really be more of a fugitive within planning.

0:45:05.1 Julian Agyeman: We have a question from Kate. Hi Kate. Kate’s another one of our brilliant alumnus. Kate, what’s your question? 

0:45:12.2 Kate: Hello everyone. Thank you, Richard. I am just, it’s such a breath of fresh air to hear what you’re saying about our field of work and it was more sort of affirming comment I think to really invite and encourage and push my fellow colleagues in this field to get radical in the work, in the occasions, in the moments we have, whether it’s with our teams, whether it’s in a community meeting to ask questions that are heart-centered, that encourage people to speak, turn toward your neighbor, look at one another, have a conversation about a memory, get people with stories. I think about bridging work and really the wave of the future is if we’re going to be able to imagine, we have to remember where we came from, our past experiences, those moments as young people, we are the most vulnerable, the scary places that we are socialized to not go. I just think we really need to ruffle up how we do our work and how we think about it. Take the seriousness away for a little bit and just, let’s get real, let’s get humble. And I just, that really informs my work. And so I just feel a lot of kinship with what you’re talking about here and likely a lot of other people on this call.

0:46:22.3 Jose Richard Aviles: Yeah. One thing I’ll share about the word radical, the reason why we use the word radical in radical imagination, but also in reimagine urban planning and be more radical twofold. One, yes. The scary, definition of radical, the scary connotation, I should say that the word radical has is appropriate because we need to be more radical one and two, the etymology of the word radical is root. It’s to go back. It’s to remember what is the root cause? What is the essence of relationship to land in bodies. I say that to me. Urban planning is not about materials. It’s about restoring the sacred relationship we have between body and earth. And now more than ever do we need it. So just wanted to add a little bit of why we use the word radical.

0:47:04.4 Julian Agyeman: Thanks Kate. Okay, so I get to ask you the last question, Richard. And I’m just wondering, I haven’t heard the R word reparation, reparative, everything you are talking about lends itself to joining the push to shift from racial planning to reparative planning. What, how does your thinking and to the push for reparation through a…

0:47:33.4 Jose Richard Aviles: 100%. That’s a hard question. I only say that’s a hard question from a place of my own racialized identity. And who I am as a non-black person of color, living in Mexico City and trying to figure out, ’cause I’m like, so does Spain give us reparations for 1521? I’m trying to figure out that conversation. I’m like the US owe me reparations from 1985. And of course I totally agree with reparations in the context in which of atoning for, right in atonement. I think it’s important to, to understand in that framing. I think what I could add to the conversation, it’s that it’s possible that atonement does not, and reparations doesn’t have to live, I think in the way that it has been marketed. I dunno, market is the right word. Framed and what it means.

0:48:22.5 Jose Richard Aviles: As a really radical extreme way that it’s, but the harms of enslavement really in the US have, we see them everywhere. It’s in the way that are, are the country. This country’s economic system was created, racial systems, everything. So atonement I think is possible at many scales and many levels and should be what we should be working towards. Atonement with resiliency more than anything because we can’t recreate these systems. It’s the conversation that we have all the time at the ins well that I have at the institute all the time. I’m down for belonging. But don’t make the shit out Kumbaya. ’cause I can’t, no conflict exists in the natural world, in the natural world is how we look at conflict as something generative, as opposed to something destructive that can shift the work in the way that we do the world, the work.

0:49:11.6 Jose Richard Aviles: So I think that when it comes to reparations with this series, and it doesn’t explicitly say it, but it should is in a complete agreement with it. And we have to not only, we owe reparations to many folks and to many societies and to many ecologies. And I think now more than ever, I wrote something quite weird the other day that kind of stuck with me, but I saw no politics involved, but I saw Beyonce’s speech at the Harris rally [laughter], and it was just such a, that was a dystopic moment to see someone of that celebrity statue being there. And I wrote something along the lines of somebody prophesied about this moment, and either a prophecy will be fulfilled or an apocalypse is about to be in. And I only say, and I say those big heavy words because again, we are at such an interesting time and at a shifting point, it feels like the chrysalis is about to be born or is about to be birthed. But it, there’s, it’s tangible. The change is so tangible. And I’ve been reading your work, Julian, for, since I’ve been in grad school and the things that we’re saying are not new. You’ve been saying this for years alongside other colleagues and I don’t know, and now I have a question to you, do you feel that we are are at some sort of turning point in time in the way that we’re having these conversations about re-imagining and radicalizing planning? 

0:50:33.7 Julian Agyeman: Oh, I think, yeah. And you mentioned my great hero, Leonie Sandercock, and I was very privileged two summers ago to go and go to Vancouver. She had a group of people and we talked about her latest book, which was published in one of my book series, and she’s the architect of therapeutic planning. And you mentioned that and social worker therapeutic planning, therapeutic planning is about reparation. Yeah. It’s not about cutting checks, but it’s about a reparative approach in our thinking such that planning becomes a therapeutic process. And so I yeah, absolutely. But I think the calls are getting louder. I’ve actually got a student, and I don’t know whether Lauren Chapman is in the room there, but we are looking at, we are looking at planning authorities and what moves they are making towards a more reparative approach. Now the dream is what would a reparative comprehensive plan look like? 

0:51:32.8 Julian Agyeman: What are the implications for transportation, open space housing, employment policy, et cetera. At the moment, we’re finding examples like housing policy in Evanston, Illinois or some of the experiments, well, restoration of the land in Huntington Beach to the African American family in California. So we’re getting little examples, little experiments in reparation, but when do we get the paradigm shift? That’s what I want to map. When is the first authority gonna come up with a comprehensive plan that is whose paradigm is reparative? And this isn’t just me or you calling for this, mayors organized for racial equity want this. Planning directors want this. Rashad Williams, a brilliant young assistant professor who wrote a classic paper who’s now at University of Pittsburgh, and I’m gonna watch his work. He has pushed this further. So it’s on the way. How do we speed it up? That’s…

0:52:33.9 Jose Richard Aviles: Yeah, ’cause there’s… I feel like there’s an urgency that we haven’t experienced before, even in my lifetime. I feel like the urgency has just gotten louder and more and more dire to be honest. And I agree with you, and I’m hoping that reimagining urban planning and the way, again, I, we did not imagine for there to be this response and now to sit with that. Because clearly there’s folks who are asking for that paradigm shift. I’m an organizer, so I’m a true believer that if we come in numbers, we can move mountains for sure. So hopefully this continues to become a movement in a way that, that I can hold it, that other people can hold it, and that we test ideas. Because I think a lot of it, what’s so hard, it’s that, and like Whitney alluded to this, is that these ideas are living in our head, in our conversations, in our circles. But how are they being tested? How are they being pushed and how are they being refined? And we’re not gonna get this shit right. It’s deconstructing centuries of traumas, so we know we’re never, never gonna get it right. That’s where the therapeutic happens… Therapy happens though.

0:53:37.0 Julian Agyeman: That’s right. Well, Jose Richard Velez, Othering and Belonging Institute, I could go on all afternoon. Yes. Put some time. We need to catch up. It’s been six years. Can we give a warm Cities@Tufts? Thank you to Jose Richard Velez.

0:53:53.1 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video transcript and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University in shareable with support from the Bar Foundation, shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry, light Without Dark By Cultivate Beats our theme song and the graph recording was created by Anke Dregnat. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones, and Candice Spivey. And the series is Co-produced and presented by me, Tom Lewellen. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share it with others. So this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.