okay good so yes I brought what Mark calls shorts weather to uh take College here um I was he caught me on a zoom getting ready for the exhibition and I was in a turtleneck and a wool jacket and it was probably warmer than this but he said that's shorts weather so um anyway thanks for having me and nice to see you all in person and I guess I'm looking here to see those in Zoom um I actually thought uh I will be talking directly to the project uh that's up on the walls um in the gallery but I als
o thought maybe it would be interesting to sort of hear a little bit about my like sort of research Arc um because I don't know I think interesting to hear about the twists and turns that can present itself in a professional career um and I think it sort of helps you understand that life is actually long and there's lots of opportunities to take risks um but you know I I thought I would give this sort of Arc and how it has impacted how I practice today and I you know as I practice I would say yo
u know I practice as a designer as a historian and as an educator and so in those roles across sort of landscape history and Design design are always the sort of questions that I have related to performativity and you'll see that across the work um but that really is like specifically focused on sort of the embodiment of social political and cultural processes and practices as they relate to landscape um probably see that I mean I don't know I guess I saw some posters here so you saw the origina
l title of my talk and now I changed it slightly from landscape in the working country to landscape and work labor work and care so I'll be addressing ing um sort of all three of those terms um but I'll start by talking briefly about some of my early research on 1960s activist design practices and then transition to focus sort of my own activist design lens on the embodied practice of work both I would say as exploited through capitalist extraction of unfree labor I'll explain what that means an
d very much the opposite as a sort of collective vehicle of resistance and Liberation I'm actually going to present it in the opposite order which is unfortunate because but then I will I will end on Resistance as well and I think yeah so um so before moving into the into the work that you'll see on the walls I um but also remaining in the domain of of performance and design activism um I wrote a book on landscape architect Lawrence halin I'm going to assume that some of you are familiar with La
wrence halpin's work it sounds like Roxy is um also continuing to work on Lawrence Halprin who had a really interesting impact on the profession but really looking at the trans sort of transgressive aspects of his practice um most expressed probably most fully in the 1960s and and 70s and so in response to the radical ruptures and social dislocations occurring during the the decade of the 1960s predominantly into the 70s is sort of paralleling this Urban quote unquote crisis and urban renewal po
licies in cities at the same time this there was this parallel rise of civil society and the sort of artistic avangard and halin um developed his creative process at that time in collaboration with his wife Anna helprin who is a dancer and choreographer I would say is was a dancer and choreographer she actually very recently passed away at 102 um but she is pictur I guess um yeah here you're seeing her pictured I don't think oh here's Larry helper here and and up there um I'll talk very briefly
about the experiments in environment that you're seeing here but during the 1960s there was this sort of progressive liberation of The Spectator from Observer to active participant which was occurring in the Visual and Performing Arts and that was reciprocally informed by participatory forms of social protest and performance you expressed in things like marches stins uprisings and so on so Anna helin with her San Francisco dancers Workshop um was directly involved in those developments and their
experiments soon infiltrated her husband's work and so those new art forms um of sort of the quote unquote open Score became the major tool for stimulating action and involving the public in the in the performance of these events so Lawrence halin applied those performance theories to his work by designing City spaces as scores intended to stimulate open-ended kinesthetic response you might be familiar those in landscape architecture with love joy um Plaza fountain in Portland Oregon um in addi
tion he applied this idea of the of the open Score um by adopting the sort of temporal situational guidelines of these experimental performance events you might have heard of um these events called as happenings um but the intention was to structure in this case public participation workshops and and Lawrence hurn called um those Workshops the take part process so score he he used the term scores so again using the language that his wife was actively experimenting in um he used these scores and
deployed scores for the take part Workshop activities and the intention was to structure a series of environmental experiences that were deliberately organized in this Progressive Manner and they would build up a mutual foundation for the diversity of participants this is the sort of like the ideal um so I've actually you know I've written a lot about this process because I actually think you know it can be really mind for um a lot of principles in terms of um uh Interac Ive forms of um Communit
y engagement but um you know I argue for the sort of transformative potentials of the take part techniques but I also recognize the sort of fine line that Lawrence halin tread between facilitation and manipulation in a lot of these processes so he was having a um you know downtown dwellers all um whether they were residents or workers or um or tourists uh you know all undergo the same experience so that they would have this sort of common language from which to make decisions obviously you know
a lot of that is um a little bit um idealistic in terms of trying to to transcend conflict but um it was really choreographed so that people were sort of thinking along the same lines that um the Halprin firm was really hoping that that people where people would ultimately arrive and so there was a little bit of sort of like social engineering happening here but but you know to the to the um uh uh the with the goal of really um improving the environment and so you know there's limitations obviou
sly in community design practices to generate these future forward and Visionary environmental thinking but the research focus is um in this area in the take part process on working methods that inspired communities to break out of predictable models that sustain the status quo and and I think he was very successful at that um the research in um sort of of activist practices of um landscape architecture specifically provided a foundation to study more Landscape Architects that were working in th
e urban realm in the 1960s if you sort of understand sort of the the history of American Urban Development at the time in the 1960s there was like burgeoning suburbs throughout the United States and a lot of Landscape Architects were really focused on the sort of Market opportunities in those um growing suburbs but there are a small hand of Landscape Architects um I'm in this case um going to be briefly talking about two other men um but you know that we're looking at um the at what was left beh
ind in these Urban contexts and so you know people like Paul Friedberg I'll mention him briefly um his designs are actually represented here I'll talk about that um and Carl Lyn were really um deploying methodologies that um translated social Consciousness into physical propositions and built work and could actually serve as models for professionals working in urban areas undergoing rapid change so um you're seeing the parks commissioner in uh New York City in this time in the 1960s his name is
Thomas hoving um Paul Friedberg is a landscape architect he um designed a number of vest pocket parks in residential areas largely in Brooklyn um and and the Bronx but that had not experienced sort of wholesale clearance at that time in terms of urban renewal but were suffering from vacancy and abandonment disinvestment um and then you know freedberg was was hired or created this partnership with hoving to design the park in partnership with um neighborhood groups and the residents executed the
construction so that's what you're seeing in the lower image so I wanted to focus on this idea of sort of collective labor um as a form of Community Development um Carlin who you're seeing here for instance um he with his students at upen created a series of neighborhood Commons starting in 1960 in North Philadelphia so not far from here um the area was predominantly black lowincome and was to be just a couple years later a sort of early location for uprisings reacting to race relations in citie
s Across the Nation uh Lynn described those neighborhood Commons as quote ennobling places of meeting where meeting where young and old May gather to engage in spontaneous and Stage celebrations of public life and they were intended to be built with um and by residents of the area what enabled them was an ordinance that made it possible for the city to acquire tax delinquent properties and Lease them to community organizations so lind's Commons were built on these vacant lots that were tangible
reminders of Municipal neglect but with local residents he and his students transformed those lots into Gathering spaces meant for again I'm going to quote him extended family living based not on blood relationships but on Mutual Aid and intergenerational support that would generate the growth of the neighborhood community um Lynn and Halprin spent much much of their youth participa participating in the Kutz movement in Israel transforming parts of the desert into subsistence Farms um and you kn
ow uh the halperin's mother was actually president of hadasa which was a Zionist organization but the kibuts um combined Zionism with socialism so they're the kibud team um had this sort of sense of shared purpose close Reliance on the land which was inspired which inspired both of their approaches to community design I will say Lynn ultimately rejected Zionism um but you know they were both critical of industrial capitalism um especially Lynn who wrote a lot talked about um you know labor becom
ing commodified and divorced from the fruits of production um so him to him the building this idea of a neighborhood common cooperatively was inspired by his early life experience on the kots and you know again about this idea of sort of Labor and work and collectivity um there's an anthropologist writing simultaneous to a lot of the commons that were being developed melord spau and he he explains that the idea of the kibitz was based entirely on the moral value of Labor as a quote uniquely crea
tive act as well as a ultimate value um you know I think that there's a lot that can be said obviously about the kibutz movement that and actually um Lynn was ultimately an active member um of Jews with Palestine but um but you know really focus on the sort of socialist ideals of um this early development in 1980 um continuing to see work as a sort of vehicle of cooperation so Collective work um and a vehicle of resistance and Liberation uh here you're seeing for the people's convention in the S
outh Bronx um Lynn volunteered to design an over see the development of a campsite and meeting grounds for the people's convention so was the people's convention was a coalition of environmental peace and social justice organizations that were disillusioned with the sort of broken promises of the democratic party and that was intended to take place in New York in this case in the in the South Bronx um at the same time that the city was hosting the Democratic um National Convention so the group w
as the group transformed the site into of which was you can see um vacant buildings debris filled Lots into this meeting grounds that according to Lynn encourag I'm quoting him encouraged the expression of diverse views while brain Barn raising the campsite as a ritual that nurtured a sense of solidarity and tolerance um and so what you're see oops what you're seeing the ritual process is he talks a lot about ritual and the use of sort of ritual action for Community Development um and that runs
in sort of parallel to this author Victor Turner who's talking about again that idea of ACH achieving Community toas through this ritual process um but the idea of the sort of process of building those Commons as a collective ritual paralleled to Lynn uh rural Barn raising which to him was less about the physical outcome than the collective Act of communal effort sort of tangentially um I'll um you know this form of Cooperative work or sort of La labor as a form of social purpose was not new and
similar to Zionism the same Act of sort of barn raising is connected to the settlement of North America by homesteaders motivated by ideologies of Westward Expansion whose work might have seemed benign was part of a of a violent campaign to unsettle and dispossess land Dolores Hayden I recommend you look her up um she's a architectural and Landscape historian um she's written on utopian communities I think it actually came out this came out of her own doctoral work um focusing on the interplay
between ideology and physical design so veloping Collective models of of what these different groups um believed to be more perfect Societies in the 1930s inspired by the writings of John Dewey um Black Mountain College was developed uh which followed the pragmatist philosophy of learning by doing and physical work as Central to the education and cooperation self-sufficiency and creative problem solving as a kind of enactment of quote unquote American values Pro probably some of you are familiar
with a rural Studio out of Auburn University but it gives students this Hands-On educational experience in a design build program um in underresourced communities in Alabama what's interesting about that is 100 years before the the initiation of herl studio in this very same part of Alabama on an abandoned Plantation Booker T Washington committed himself to building this educational institution that would provide skills and resources to black families that would lead to self-sufficiency to achi
eve um what what Washington called as racial uplift um but built on this model of self-reliance the students were responsible for the construction what you're seeing here construction and maintenance of the buildings and Farms so those paradigms of sort of Cooperative work are essential to the histories of black agricultural collectives in the South and elsewhere um such as the Freedom Farm Cooperative founded by Fanny Lamer and her model um of of Cooperative farming which gave poor black share
croppers a chance to stay in the South where culture and working the land became the basis for resistance rather than oppression those kind of examples of Cooperative work for Collective care are essential to the to the stories um behind the black liberation struggles of the 1960s um here you're seeing the Black Panther Grocery and breakfast program being deployed in Berkeley as a form of sort of mutual Aid um I'm going to keep moving um but I'll return to this idea of um these Liberation strugg
les at the end of the talk so to to return to the performance of work particularly in the context I began with um looking at the sort of performance turns that I talked about with Anna Halprin in the 1960s and 70s there were a number of artists that were also foreground foregrounding labor Dynamics um who critiqued forms of sort of hidden labor by women and marginalized peoples uh these sort of feminist approaches to care show how the work of reproduction and maintenance of life has traditionall
y be been considered marginal to sort of quote quote unquote sort of value creating work I think that became particularly apparent during the um pandemic um and you know this there's this is I can offer all sorts of international examples this is one um one artist um which is continuing this sort of critique of the invisibility of women's work focusing on the social changes brought about by the war in Bosnia um in the 1990s where she relocates women's work to the public space reframing those dom
estic practices as a central part of historical memory um this is actually something I often use is an example in my like history and Theory classes it's a um it's a lagoon where African Brazilian um laundresses sort of come congregate to to um to wash in um Salvador Brazil and they were you know this was considered um a threat to the sort of fragile ecosystem of the Lagoon so they were actually um required to be sort of displaced based from the directly interacting in the lagoon and a landscape
architect Rosa cleos was um was hired to build a structure as a replacement um so this sort of like formalization or institutional containment of the practice led to its fullest to its full displacement apparently setting up the sort of interesting questions about designer roles in these cultural practices you can see on the on the right the the structure that um that became the sort of formalized version of um or the formalized container for these activities so in landscape architecture workin
g Landscapes and integrating maintenance into the choreography of a landscape's trans transformation has been an area of inquiry um but not as a social critique really rather as sort of a means to explore the extended time temporal calendar that landscape change requires um Urban agriculture um has been another way that Landscape Architects have considered work that goes into Landscapes production um but while there's been some sort of meaningful investments in community agriculture uh for susta
ined and economic empowerment um other projects have celebrated food production Without Really recognizing the realities of how to create a longlived project and the work it takes to sustain it I have a number of students that are from China and they often talk about this project so I I could go back to it at the end if you have questions but that you know this is a university built and designed by turns scape um and the intention was to sort of recall the rice production that once went that onc
e existed in this landscape and and it's now become urbanized but the the the sort of forced labor of student population to actually enact the Harvest um the cultivation of this rice has created some tensions in the in the University so moving out of this sort of like productionist Logics more recently in landscape architecture considerations of Land Management and maintenance are now part of common discourse um there's a number of authors that now and and designers that are talking about this i
dea of of the maintenance you know after design then what but the term management implies a sort of form form of control maintenance um you know recognizes that Landscapes are never done but it's but are sort of in constant St state of becoming um also to shape or design a landscape requires this time scales of work not typically afforded by capitalist Frameworks but um it's sort of void this idea this this notion of Maintenance void of the sort of ethical or effective Dimension necessary to add
ress histories of trauma and suffering so um not long ago at USC we hosted Karina gold who is the co-director of the sagor land trust it's a women-led organization um within the urban setting of her ancestral territory of the um Bay Area the Alon people um who are not Fally federally recognized um but she talked a lot about practices of rematriation cultural revitalization and land restoration and so the land trust calls on Native and non-native people to heal and transform legacies of colonizat
ion and genocide and to do the work that both ancestors and future Generations she said all of us to do um so again just sort of featuring this idea of of collective work as a as a sort of a liberatory um strategy so it's within that sort of ethos that I wanted to move into my current work at USC and I will talk about the exhibit um it's that I sort of ideas of care and Justice that inspired me to develop the landscape Justice initiative at USC which is really focused on applied research and pra
ctice in communities that design has not historically reached and so pedagogically part of the emphasis of um the landscape Justice initiative is Mark gave a little rundown but it's sort of fill the gap between academic inquiry and meaningful change on the ground so it provides some opportunity for students to participate in service learning and also long-term projects that depend on sustain engagement with local and Regional communities it also offers students opportunities um to learn from loc
al knowledge and expertise that's derived from lived experience um and imagine how design can be sort of enacted as a form of co-creation you know in addition it sort of allows for the initiation of projects outside of the structures of the market Market offering students opportunity to discover their own agency and sort of De develop into Future Leaders in design and environmental decision-making so the idea is that you know there these projects are largely self-initiated I guess I would say I
would I have initiated most of them but that you know that they weren't um they weren't based on the sort of you know developer designer relationship the market-based model but they were um they were seeded from a sort of visionary thinking and it provides these Avenues and opportunities to collaborate with Partners including institutional nonprofit uh private and government organizations and agencies to move um outside of the sort of professional Norms um and uh create a series of Partnerships
that are deployed in various ways and so part of those Partnerships has allowed for instance um a faculty member Jen toy uh is a adun faculty at USC to develop a series of community- based restoration opportunities they're called test plot um they're actually situated in public lands or public parks across um La in research focused on the future of land care and the design sort of design build Service Learning model has been really transformative for our students especially during Co I would say
we sort of bent the rules this is being recorded we bent the rules a little and have them meet outside um but really in for students to understand questions of Labor and maintenance but also how to develop relationships with Steward organizations to whom the students ultimately hand over the work so I've been largely focused thus far on sort of these ideas of like transgressive practices whereby Collective labor is used as a form of resistance to and Liberation from extractivist Power um for th
e remainder of the talk I'm transitioning into what is a very multifaceted project that spans the narratives of land landscape and work uh through contrasting lenses um one of which is the violence and oppression of um unfree labor um and the resistance and self and self-determination achieved through Cooperative work in what is a very unique landscape in the Central Valley of California so this topic is is what you will see in the Rouse gallery and it's um really focused on one hydrological Bas
in it's also um I I use it often interchangeably the two Larry Lake Basin with the sanen valley that more or less cor correspond the sanwen valley is really more based on political boundaries of the counties the Chi Lake Basin is the hydrological Basin um and I really sort of the the the real unit of measure that you should be thinking about the Central Valley um because water is um water is Power and Water is everything in the west um I don't know how many of you are familiar with Central Valle
y but it is one of the most agriculturally intensive landscapes in the world and I developed uh the foundation for that research with Roxy Thorin your very own um with as part of the laf fellowship that we did together in um 21 2021 22 I can't remember but not that long ago um unfortunately remotely because it was still the aftermath of covid um I guess we're still in that period as well but um so the the project started with this consideration um in a very sort of Academic Way a consideration o
f cultural theorists Raymond Williams often quoted claim that a working country is hardly ever a landscape and you know I would sort of did that through the examination of a very particular geography um I'm not the first to do it a lot of people have looked at the Central Valley I will talk about some of those previous um uh folks before me but like them I'm sort of arguing that this idea of the suppression of facts behind the production of landscape um prohibits the possibility for for sort of
um for critical reflection on exploitative labor practices resource extraction and forms of racial oppression and environmental violence that have shaped the ter territory the intention really is in the early project was really to sort of bring back of house realities including the material processes of Labor and production to the foreground um you know it was Ultimate ultimately arriving at a sort of landscape ethic for the working country um there's some of the early objectives and you know th
e idea was it it is it will be a large scale cultural study and a framework for change across scales it is operating that way um and I'll talk about some of the the project-based opportunities that this larger body of research has presented but um the the real scalar uh um Spectrum goes from the the region the hydrological Basin all the way down to the bodies at risk so the ideas that the project interprets the basin's Environmental and Cultural histories and practices and sort of imagines the l
andscape otherwise in narratives and just of justice that build from and with the seeds of resistance already active in the region today so it really traces how the hierarchy of vulnerability suffering and risk has been translated from the region to its localization in the bodies of those who work the ground very um specifically black and brown bodies um you're seeing here this whole array of environmental justice challenges that have impacted Public Health due to um industrial agriculture in th
is largely they're referring to it as the sanen valley so the body here in this body of research is really direct registration of landscape that makes corporally manifest the violence of that extractivist system sort of the idea that in particular workers bodies incorporate biologically the toxic layering of the cumulative impacts of environmental contamination which permeates the air the water and the land um you know bodies are also racialized for performing specific types of work and the thos
e same bodies are often misshapen by stoop labor this is a representation of the braso um guest worker program that was active um during World War II and then into the 1960s so the tari lake Basin I've I've referred to it a couple times it roughly corresponds what I said to the to sanen Valley it was once the location of the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi you can sort of see in the historic map here from 1850 um there's a whole number of different representations of the lake tha
t don't necessarily correlate but it was a very vast body of water um and um its Waters were completely diverted to support industrial agriculture by the 1920s um you're seeing that article there was from um 1902 I believe and you know it was just talking about the The Disappearance of this Lake and it was quickly paralized as it was diverted and drained um quickly paralized and it was sold into commodity Crop Production so I don't know like I I saw it in the New York Times I'm originally from N
ew York so um hence I'm often checking the New York Times but now I live in LA you know the LA Times was all over it but I don't I don't know where it circulated if if it circulated here but um you know this this the lake actually reemerged a year ago um and it was you know the Catalyst for a forthcoming book and some of the you know some of the thinking around the exhibition I'll talk a little bit about that but the Basin is really a Nexus of some of the most pressing environmental questions of
our day it really is like you know this coming together of climate volatility Rising temperatures exhausted Water Systems degraded air quality contaminated soils and ground water um another sort of irony of food insecurity despite it being an Agra business economy environmental and social inequity that's a manifestation of generations of discriminatory practices and high concentrations of poverty around its um Urban centers more positively um there it is there are also a number of immigrant pop
ulations that have um claimed this this area as home throughout its history who have really shaped the character and culture of the region with really agricultural practices most primary to those cultural expressions and so it's a sort of landscape of extremes but it's also has this amazing cultural resilience that provides a sense of optimism um right now for instance the mung population is um actually it's it's um Contracting unfortunately but there are a number of M farmers that are still han
ging on um but it has served as a landscape that's been really home to a lot of diasporic populations that are fleeing um political violence abroad so that resilience is opening up sort of alternative futures of land and its relation to work here you're actually seeing that the land once supported a diverse ecosystem cared for by numerous tribes of the yit people and so these sort of pre-colonial conditions and processes of landscape change as well as indigenous food ways that this once diverse
landscape provid provided began to contribute to narratives for the future um this is one of the images that is hanging in the um in the other room but just you know I I developed this drawing or this basically this catalog um just to really represent the vast diversity of plant-based foods that were part of you know the sort of nutritional um abundance of this landscape for uh the number of tribes that existed there and now sort of through monocultural cropping it's really like you know five si
x crops that you're really seeing in this you know many million um acre uh Valley but that you know over a period of colonial violence ecological eradication capitalistic extraction the Central Valley really became what it is it always remained outside of Jefferson's sort of agrarian ideal of the subsistence farmer living off the land and I took this bus ride from Pittsburgh to here and I saw these Rolling Hills and what looked like very bu callic a pastoral landscape um that is not what you see
there it's you know there's High particulate matter monotonous flatness and just like row after row of um pistachios almonds most of which are all going abroad um and and some other crops including cotton which does people don't associate with California but the entire lake bed is now um cotton production um you know upon statehood in the mid 19th century land Holdings um sorry land Holdings were concentrated by federal and state land disposal policies that set the scale for industrial agricult
ure um in the region land developers bought these really large parcels and they attempted to draw populations to buy land in California in farming they called them colonies farming colonies really they did this by guaranteeing water rights for irrigation and so I there's a weird timer on this sorry about that um many of those efforts were unsuccessful were water was scarce so allensworth is one such example I'll talk about this town but and and I will actually go revisit this town at the end bec
ause this where I end up but it's a town that was founded by and for African-Americans in 1908 um it was actually referred to as a race Colony but it was a an agricultural and sort of um AC cross uh cross industry Town it was actually right on the Pacific the Southern Pacific Railroad but irrigation was never delivered insufficient Supply as as was promised by the development company um and um that sort of idea of depriving communities of color access to water is a story that really continues So
speaking of water at the small scale I'm going to blow out for a minute and talk about the large scale I I don't know how familiar you are with the the with water in the west but I know that you know there's there's like in mainstream news there's there are references to the Colorado River um the Central Valley is its own Beast um but it was really through this complete restructuring of hydrology in the reason that the that the Central Valley became you know on the surface um it hasn't been eno
ugh to re to to meet the rising water demands of a growing industrial agricultural region so Growers have turned to um these massive agricultural um I'm sorry massive um groundwater Wells to supplement their surface water which has led to over pumping the depletion of the aquifer and ultimately land subsidence um land subsidence you know I I just saw an article um in one of the science journals about you know it's it's changing the magnetic pull of the earth um but it's it's largely due to the c
ollapsing of the aquafer and here you're seeing a a well that could very easily in the Westlands water district go down 2 200 feet just to give you a sense to get to fresh water so it's really those obviously those Farmers with these massive financial resources that can afford to send a well that deep and as I mentioned it's the small rural communities that are reliant on groundwater so it's typically those communities that are left with dry Wells because of the straw sucking from Deep um and th
ey're all that you know the water that they are able to um access are often contaminated by agrochemicals nitrates or arsenic so it was this sort of heavily subsidized um surface water that facilitated the development of large Farms of labor intensive vegetable fruit and increasingly nut crops as I mentioned pistachios I really have a theory that because pistachios are much more drought tolerant and salt tolerant um two things that the Central Valley is facing um is you know we're going to start
seeing like pistachio milk and everything pistachio like we did with almonds because almonds are are being um outnumbered now in in Central Valley but you know this this labor intensive uh series of what they called specialty crops um afforded many farmers the opportunity to operate um you know also dairy farms and cattle ranches uh and so the valley is still is sort of heavily dependent on because of its diversity on an abundance supply of seasonal workers um with this idea of sort of divers s
pecialty Diversified specialty crop farming labor became an increasing issue and what was needed to operate those Capital intensive Farms was this highly mobile wage labor force preferably to Farmers in over Supply so that they could um keep wages low some of you um if you were born and raised in the states might be familiar um with these histories and I'll I'll get to a require I had as a kid um a minute but these farmers were able to maintain that over Supply so they could keep wages low throu
gh dependence on what was easily exploitable immigrant labor in the 19th century through today so here you're actually seeing that that same program that I mentioned earlier where there's um it's a guest worker program um from from of of Mexican guest workers uh where here on you know on on one side bodies are being inspected and on the other side you're seeing um a man who is being sprayed with DDT at the end of a farming day which was a common practice so it was during the Great Depression tha
t the realities of this idea of the working country gained visibility in the US in particular because and I you know I think it's an easy um uh conclusion to draw that it was largely because it was white bodies that were the subject of suffering and you know I I don't know how many of you probably these days had this as a required reading but The Grapes of Wrath was one of my required reading texts um so really understanding the 1930s the um the sort of plight of the farm laborer largely these a
re dust bow migrants going from the on the middle of the United States because of um the over um the sort of lack of sustainable um farming practices the the overstress on soils there and the creation of these this dust bowl and the sort of migration West to California um where there's fruit that Windfield talks about um you know and the the opportunity for um a supposed living wage and we we learn quickly that that's actually not the case you might be familiar with d Lang's Migrant Mother serie
s among other Farm Security Administration um photographs that really made this visible to the common American public um today the demand for cheap labor has been filled by the most vulnerable and that includes many indigenous Mexicans from Southern regions particularly Waka that have been Crossing um the Border in number since the 1970s um those undocumented largely about 70% California estimates are undocumented workers they're e easily the most vulnerable in the hierarchy of farm operations a
nd they have limited access to information about legal rights um they often remain invisibly housed in substandard and informal Arrangements um and as this sort of result of a continued immigration and loss of what were once farmer provided labor camps by the 1980s these scores of rural towns were trans formed into Farm labor enclaves um what did facilitate that is something called the farm labor contractor um which is sort of an economic model where the where the contractor serves as the main r
ecruiter and employer of short-term and temporary crop workers and that has made it actually possible for once's migratory workers if you remember that map I showed earlier to settle really in the region and work in different capacities throughout the year so you know in a highly extended season of diverse crops as well as in the factory or in the warehouse so what was is sort of interesting despite the farm labor contractor actually being a very exploitative model um is this idea that this the
sort of The Stereotype of the migratory Farm worker has really remained in the Central Valley I'm sure that there's um relevance elsewhere but has convinced those with power throughout the decades to sort of avoid the question of permanent affordable housing for a population on which the world relies and at the same time through these forms of selective um annexation by cities and towns communities of colors have have been strategically left out of Municipal services so I'm going to return to th
is subject of water here you're actually seeing the um what's called the unincorporated um settlement of fair um unincorporated means that it isn't its own municipality so it doesn't have Municipal Services it was a historically black Town it was settled in the 30s and 40s um the city of Chowchilla you're seeing on the upper left um recently annexed land adjacent to Fair me um on which two prisons stand um but not fair me itself so the idea is that that provides an income base um for the city bu
t you know has has leapfrogged over Fair me which has denied them access to sort of the most basic features of a safe healthy and sustainable um living that includes portable water a sewer system but also more generally safe housing public transit parks and so on and so not this idea of not being included within Municipal Water Systems that sort of treat and distribute water those unincorporated Community residents depend on these fragmented Patchwork of small and underperforming systems that pr
edominantly rely on groundwater and those leges of segregation are especially clear in the many rural towns that once provided refuge for thousands of black Farm Workers who were able to buy property and homes in places no one else wanted be precisely because of the lack of water um that's created a lot of issues to today in these towns which are now predominantly latinx and they're among the first to lose water when drought comes and you know we I think we're like out of the drought emergency n
ow in California because of the two the atmospheric rivers that brought back the tary lake but we were you know prior to that in about 15 years of extreme drought when water does flow it's often painted by agrochemicals and coliform far above the legal limits and that's largely doing due to failing septic systems so that toxified landscape is really in this like sharp contrast um to the image or symbolism of fruit that you saw even in the text in The Grapes of Wrath which was really integral to
this idea of the California Dream and it was intended to like lure settlers to this landscape you might be familiar um for Cesar Chavez Dolores querta the histories of of the labor histories of the Central Valley and and it's pre sort of prehistories to the 1960s ones that are much more um widely known but different from those sort of Highly visible meta efforts of these unions that had become really become symbolic of Labor Justice since the 1970s the region has actually been sort of act um act
ivated by alternative landbased approaches to resist uneven development and uneven burdens on the rural poor um you know a lot of this is largely achieved through Collective work I I really I love the example of self-help Enterprises um they're still active but you know they provided and still provide housing assistance working on the basis of what's it's called Sweat Equity um for Collective Community Development and what that is is that 8 to 12 families are grouped together and agree to help e
ach other build their houses um while those labor hours are used as a form of down payment um it is actually really complicated in terms of um you know um the logistics and the paperwork that is involved so self-help Enterprises um facilitates that process and and provides the training for people to be building and so you know we've been on with a number of students we've been on all sorts of working sites of of really just sort of everyday people that don't know anything about building houses r
eally becoming experts um in laying tile and pouring foundations and all those other things it is really really amazing um another organization that was part of this the sort of land-based um resistance was something called the national land for people which was a movement for land reform that attempted to Homestead Farm Workers and aspiring sort of predominantly minority growers in the 1970s um by using legal measures and litigation in Washington so they they actually had a number of people tha
t were um equipped and trained to do so but they worked across scales from on the ground what they called agricultural reality tours so they actually brought this sort of interested public around to see industrial scale agriculture probably from the coastal cities largely I don't have couldn't access the list of participants but you know the idea was also they would track uh it's not easy to to do this even today with the Freedom of Information Act but um tracking corporate land Holdings and sor
t of these corrupt land and water deals that made it impossible for the small grower to really survive in this landscape um but they have these amazing sort of maps of trying to track the different um consolidations of power um and um you know I I think I could go on and on about the national land for people I think they're really interesting group they a little they basically dissipated with um Reagan's um uh Ronald Reagan was the governor of California before he was president of the United Sta
tes and he um issued the land reclamation the reform Reclamation law um which made actually the ability for Farmers to own much more land feasible and it actually sort of um worked against ultimately the uh the goals of the national land for people but they were very interesting organization that were really really trying to identify what were these consolidations and really make visible in a very graphic way um the the inequities of power in this landscape but those landbased forms of resistanc
e set a foundation for this complex network of advocacy organizations making strides in the valley today um you know I just threw a bunch of them on there this is a slide that I adapted since laf but because it's more or less a timeline what I I wanted to say here is like I I touched on this idea of sort of ethics of care and to some degree so I thought that you know it was worth stopping to talk about these extended time scales which I just talked about in roxxy's class that are really needed t
o build trust with communities that include populations that might prefer to stay invisible um and might certainly be skeptical of Outsiders so um in terms of methods the project has sort of been tackled from the ground up I'm going to talk a lot about allensworth um in a couple minutes but you know working with through Community Partnerships with um organizations with tribes with individuals um that are leading efforts at environmental labor and political reform so really thinking sort of at th
e incremental scale but at the same time the project is um considering the region down specifically through investigative mapping that attempts to synthesize the intersecting systems at play that have led to the Valley's formation so really thinking about the sort of systemic entanglements and the opportunities to impact structural change at the policy level so um you know I think another just pause for for students to be thinking about this is like you know there's overall objectives to this wo
rk but much of it has been sort of opportunistic in the sense of sort of staying open um taking time for sort of building relationships and networks of trust and seeing where the opportunities to contribute arise um I know I'm a little bit hesitant about using this word opportunistic because it sounds exploitative but really it's just sort of staying open um but it does it require I think I have an audio here let's see if I can why I work in what I work in is because when I visited or was like a
number of things but when one of the when I visited where my family was from when I was like younger I was like really confused why my parents had to leave that place like I was like why would you leave this really beautiful area and then come and then be Farm Workers here and like not have food and like a lot of times we didn't have food and like my mom was very creative with like food bank food and yeah and so I think for me like I I think growing up I just kept coming back to that like how i
s it that people have to leave and then like when they come here like they have this like reality that they have to do and then that goes to sort of who I work with I work with a lot of immigrant Farmers who've also had to face certain uh decisions where they had to leave their home country and they had to leave like their farms and then come here so this is a Guzman I should have given you I forgot that I had audio but um so lot of this early research was with you know working with the laf fell
owship and it was during Co so we were a lot the time was on Zoom but these are sort of key informants that are really Visionaries of the place and IA is one of this this amazing soil scientist that had works specifically with immigrant Farmers trying to navigate the um challenges of the Central Valley um but sort of you know this idea of sort of key informance I'm trying to go into a little into methodologies but you know there was this um collaboration between actually my USC students and an o
rganization a youth of color or leadership organization dedicated to Social and economic Justice in the sanwen Valley and we sort of began to gather visual narratives around experiences and hopes and dreams in the valley really from the those that have worked and lived and raised families there a lot there's days now when um the school actually will say the kids can't go play outside because the air quality gets bad um and when I was younger that I don't remember that actually ever happening and
now like my um my cousins when they were a little bit younger I remember they're like well we can't go play outside because they said that the air quality is bad um and you see a lot of people with respiratory um masks I've seen I've see a lot of them especially when they're like biking and you know that kind of thing they're all wearing respiratory masks because the air quality actually gets really bad yeah so I um G to mute this I'm going to play all audio but um an I don't know if you caught
it just was talking about basically the particulate matter that's created through um industrial Agriculture and in large ways like very similar to the Dust Bowl in terms of what's happening to the Sals there so this sort of process of sharing and learning from local knowledge has enabled both me and my students who I've gotten involved in this project in many ways to sort of understand those time scales and or time cycles and rhythms of everyday existence in this landscape um and also you know
and you know understand how it's a landscape of sacrifice but also of resilience and joy and Hope um and um you know that there there's there's more um optimism than maybe is is portrayed when um considering this very very troubled place but at the sort of territorial scale so I said I'm talking across scales this investigative mapping as I you know as the national land for people are doing we've been trying to figure out what are the corporate land Holdings I will say that the tary lake lake be
d the sort of historic extent of the lake is here and um this you can see um JG Boswell uh that company basically owns the entire Lake Bed and they they produce predominantly cotton cotton and tomatoes but just understanding that there are these like vast um hundreds of thousands of Acres of um Consolidated land that are used for um corporatized agriculture so this idea this really large scale idea leads me to how I've moved forward with um from the laf I guess year um in terms of transformative
policy so going from really on the ground perspectives to large scale thinking about policy there is this new policy that's being um uh enforced um it was it was written up in 19 in in 2014 not 19 2014 to bring uh it's called the sustainable groundwater management act and it's sort of increasing momentum in terms of its enforcement um the idea is to bring overdrafted hydrological basins into balance by 2040 so going from extraction um or finding a balance between extraction and recharge and so
as this sort of enforcement of that policy really has only just begun will ultimately mean land transitions of at least 500,000 to 1 million Acres coming out of agricultural production um and that impacts not just Growers but especially Farm Workers in their communities so as the valley is really on the cusp of this dramatic change um that really is the the sort of primary opportunity to realize a more just and Equitable to Larry Lake Basin Central Valley more generally so um some of these uh li
ke just basic GIS mappings and suitability analyses is really what they are was to see how um was was working in in um partnership with the environmental defense fund to to understand how um their pilot program called the multi-benefit land repurposing program can really provide the funding necess NE AR to see through this cross agency collaboration and realizing a more coordinated and multi-beneficial transition transition to a more diverse set of economies um you know the idea is that if if th
ere's uncoordinated land transition that could lead to much more dust it could lead to pests and weeds The increased use of agrochemicals um to control those pests um and all sorts of Public Health impacts so the idea of the of this of the um multi benefit land transition program was actually to even incentivized Farm Workers excuse me Farmers land owners to transition their land into a whole set of different um and beneficial land uses whether it's Habitat restoration um Alternative Energy ther
e's a lot of questions about massive basically monocultural monoculture solar Farms so there's a lot of issues with that too but um but things like um recharge basins that also serve as recreational opportunities and um and habitat opportunities so you know the is uh you know a lot of different sort of overlaps and overlays that can be um achieved through this we started with a you know we approached EDF really to to focus on visualizing um this program as it might impact rural communities so re
ally they wanted to see like okay well if this is um a TP sort of prototypical um rural community it's it actually is a place that's popular but they wanted it to be more prototypical of one on the east side of the valley where you know right at the base of the sieras more or less but um you know what would happen if they we if it was uncoordinated land fallowing just taking water and just taking land out of production massive loss of jobs um in you know increase of of um dust and and Wells goin
g dry what would that actually sort of look like um the idea is to really get Buy in into the program by land by um by land owners but also other organizations that are really investing in land transition so you know this idea of you know Alternatives of this very multi-beneficial um diff different approaches to um thinking about um land use in the Central Valley and we looked more specifically at Partnerships and programs in place to imagine how they could be best optimized for Community well-b
eing and health so here you're actually seeing this town of hiron um it's in the Westlands water district it's a really like Infamous water district for being incredibly exploitative of land and political power based on the amount of of of um of money basically but water and money are are interchangeable in this landscape um I guess water power and money um as a trifecta but the the park buffers around communities um protect the water supply uh that became this idea of like the um a land transit
ion immediately around rural communities as well as Alternative Energy options and smaller scale agricultural production which is focused on soil Care and More Progressive farming techniques and that visioning process has you know it's been a number of different small towns but it actually brought us brings us back to allensworth um where I'm going to ultimately end but um you know this idea is um this sort of renewed vision for to see through the intentions of um of Allen R founding which I'll
talk about in a minute but this sort of multi- um industry Town situated in a landscape where there is more than just extractive industrial agriculture that is really depleting their um water security and um and creating all sorts of of public health hazards um and really understanding you know what is the what is the possibility of seeing through the original vision of this town as I already mentioned it was founded financed and governed by black Americans in California in 1908 it was intended
to fulfill a vision for black agrarian self-determination it actually really I I I don't the town um representatives and I don't like to dwell on its struggles but it did Thrive for a couple decades and then it started to struggle mostly because of the lack of water um Colonel allensworth founded the town with four partners and it was to serve as a center for black economic Innovation so it wasn't intended to only be farming um but also as a place of refuge and prosperity for black families to t
hrive um really in the face of Jim Crow um dmco laws that were active at the time and um it was built largely on the principles of Booker T Washington who I talked about earlier as one as the founder of the Tuskegee Institute um and here you actually see allensworth Vision it's interesting because Colonel allensworth is formerly enslaved he was a Buffalo Soldier he's a chaplain in the Army um but he a he was an urban an urban dweller prior to this and you know you sort of see this like the urban
ized um deployment of um sort of high high density um town here but um the idea was actually this this Horticultural college that you're seeing here was to actually be modeled after Tusk ige and you know he had these visions of the Tuskegee of the West being situated there and so the town as I mentioned thrived for a few decades but it it did experience these setbacks created by racist land policies um I could go on and on about those but uh you know after a long period of decline in 1974 a Cali
fornia state parks actually purchased 240 acres in allensworth as um the core Town site and it operates it as the um Allen R State Historic Park I will say uh eventually that'll turn um you know a lot of the buildings have been restored um and reconstructed but the can probably tell the historic landscape is actually I mean there's there's no there's no reference to um the historic farming land largely farming landscape but um and it's a really and this will change in the next few years and it's
related to the work I'm doing but you know it's has been a very disinvesting part of the um State Park system um but today in in comparison to the state Historic Park which is basically like um a sort of dehumanized Colonial Williamsburg in some ways um meaning that there aren't enactments and things except on special occasions actually there's um there are like Buffalo Soldier events and they actually um use a lot of the buildings like the blacksmith and so on to do reenactments but um you kno
w it is like a preserved town without people living there um but there is currently today about 600 people still living in Allen and you know people think of allensworth they think of the park um but it's actually you know a predominantly latinx mostly farmw workking um series of of predominantly families living with high levels of economic health and immigration status vulnerabilities this is um more typical of the of the Town book um although right now it's much more green because we have had
some water this is Elementary School it's the community center I'm going to show in a second but um it it became sort of emblematic of the stress on Rural communities in terms of water um scarcity and arsenic contamination also failing septic systems lack of infrastructural investment High particulate matter which has made something called valley fever really persistent but they recently got 4 $40 million from the legislative Black Caucus to um realize uh Colonel allensworth fullest dream of cre
ating this thriving multi-industry Town centered around the vision for the development of the Tuskegee of the West and um it's being implemented through an organization called the allensworth progressive Association some of those individuals are very much embedded in that in that organization um I I work very closely with Sherry Hunter who is actually wonderful but you know that's really where I've entered the real work in the community and it's and what you're seeing here is actually work with
students um partnered with the allensworth progressive Association and we were sort of packed um in in this amazing partnership to help them realize in um basically in a a large scale planning document the the realization of Allen Worth's aspired future through the development of something called the community plan um and that's really intended to create this sort of Avenue or road map for them to become an incorporated Town um so that they would have more Municipal services but we were working
with the APA the state parks the local native tribes and other agencies to contribute to the community plan and again it's it's a road map for the future but it's also modeled on you know it's also intended to be a real model for climate resilient rural communities um that are really built on sort of specific cultural assets of that unique place and so um we developed a document ultimately with them and the community and and um and we looked at historic and sort of thriving black and indous land
practices in communities um throughout the United States um and and really that became integrated into um the community plan and it's its hopes for the it's aspirations for the future um I'm not going to go I realize I'm I don't even know I've been talking for now an hour I think so I want to talk too much longer so you know the the state park as I said isn't disinvested that money will go into um increased amenities what's interesting is there's a state Historic Park but there's literally no n
o um economic uh or amenities I guess commercial amenities at all like no um place to get a sandwich um or to fill up on gas or or EV station or those kind of basic things that you would assume sort of formal Commerce in the town at all there are a lot of informal forms of Commerce um and I really some of them are amazing like salons being operated out of people's houses and so on but um land access and sort of best use has been really primary to Community Development considerations um and so th
e APA has been organizing these cafesito every W third Wednesday of the month so the APA is really trying to build trust and soliciting input that is sustained and intended to create this community amongst very diverse residents um and the idea is actually starting largely with the um the school um and and ultimately seeing through this uh this Evolution into a k through 14 curriculum um is that they would actually you know by starting at that with the school where as I mentioned this predominan
tly the population is families that they're hoping to get sort of Buy in to be actually also looking forward to um a future of other um aspects of the community the community plan being um implemented so Community infrastructure is intended to be extended into this um well what you just saw into the community center Greenways um are actually in intended to create you know not just sort of climate infrastructure but also food potentially food production and so on um and one sort of key component
of this going back to this idea of sort of collective labor as a form of resistance is they do have um plans to develop a Cooperative Farm in allensworth based on some of the early principles of the founders and so this regenerative Cooperative Farm has already gotten um the credentials to serve as a training farm for minority um grow for minority um Farmers to transition from Farm worker to farm owner and so we've been working a lot with them on um you know the well land access for that but als
o um plans for the future um I won't go into this although I Always Love featuring Sher because we um work really well together but you know part of this is also the historic Cemetery of um of allensworth and its protection from threats of desecration are plentiful in that area she also wants to develop a um an active Community Cemetery as well um but just to go sort of Full Circle and I am going to finish in the next minute or so is that um there's one aspect of the allensworth project that's s
ignificant to the sort of care of work necessary for all forms of community design and really what I thought would be useful for again for students is that this idea of any Community work you do you you do you have to stay adaptable it's not profound but there you know I I think it's really worth sort of reminding yourself that there may be a plan in mind but the ability to sort of adjust to the messiness of community work is really essential to sustained Community to to to sort of sustained rel
ationships and so a good example of this was our Focus From the Start in allensworth was really on climate resilience in the face of long periods of drought but with those Ral of those atmospheric Rivers like one after the other and this imminent sort of Sierra Mountain snow melt um as the most re recent sort of climate crisis impacting the community um this idea of climate resilience for acute and chronic weather events became the sort of real number one priority for the town and its community
plan so you know I the the the exhibition is largely about this Phantom Lake um which was featured all over the place um but understanding that allensworth is basically on its Southwest um Lake Southwest Shore and um those large scale land owners that I already mentioned Boswell is one name that I used actually rerouted a lot of the floodwaters from the lake bed into the community itself and they had an emergency evacuation but what it did is it activated the community to work together on climat
e response really from the ground up um because they had no really no help um from the county state or corporate entities that exacerbated the vulnerabilities through sort of broken levies poor land planning and so it brought residents of allensworth who were from vastly different um experiences together and that sort of converging of community members has been a has really sustained itself and has channeled itself into new projects that create the care NE care infrastructure necessary to thrive
in what is a very harsh landscape and so we've been working with them on land and water management to assist in stabilizing their vulnerability um but you know this is what's interesting as I talked just very briefly about tribes um the Resurgence of the lake had a had really tremendous meaning for the yal tribes that I mentioned in the beginning they lived along its Waters it was the reason that they were there um and um you know these quotes are actually really meaningful but um you know all
my life I wanted I want all my life I want back our good old home onto Lake but I guess I can never have it cotton cotton that is all that is left Indians cannot live on Cotton they cannot sing their songs until their old stories where there is nothing but cotton um it is a a entirely um cotton landscape so the lake you know was pasi means the big water the name for the lake it was welcomed as a sort of sacred reemergence as a symbol of resilience and the assertion of the will of the ancestors f
or um the Tachi yat in particular um but Allen's Earth was also Gravely impacted by the flood um as it was situated and developed within more or less within the lake bed so it creates a lot of nuance for the argument for restored Lake which is what you know the tribe is advocating for what a lot of um ecologists are advocating for but together with the tribe they Allen the the community of allensworth um has been um forming sort of alliances and and forms of solidarity built on this idea Mutual
care um to ensure a future where the sort of marginalized collectively marginalized colonized displaced that were you know that one that have ultimately found themselves in this once abundant land can Thrive into a collective future of reciprocal care and with that I'll end but um well I'll just say one thing with together with the tribe um so a lot of these are representatives of the APA this is the Tachi Tachi yoka tribe um they've form this sort of solidarity again um and are working together
to U um see forward the the perpetuation of the of the tary lake um that really has um that really respects the the the sort of landscape of marginalization that was created in this place to to seek a better future and that's [Applause] all um first part of talk talked about working 6s in urban environments and part that was performance and doing art things and and at a at a scale and um and I wonder how you could talk more about how that like is there a place for that kind of like that seemed
like whether it was artists or Landscape Architects part of the role was creation of beauty and eing out meaning by like making almost art objects that were also Landscapes um and obviously this is totally different like the Central Valley stuff different scale different economics everything like that but this there you see a role for like that like playfulness or just beauty or yeah that's a really good question I mean the tie that I was drawing was really through this idea of like work and lab
or um and performativity because a lot of what help um I mean know this sort of this Collective task the execution of tasks became part of the performance scores um but actually in allensworth um I'm involved with this uh sort of what they're calling um cultural planning um but you know doing a lot of like cultural asset mapping and so on but the idea is actually to serve as a basis for artists to come and do interpretive interventions in the in the landscape that is in um largely within the sta
te Historic Park but you know playfully um and not so playfully um you know responding to the to the legacy of of of the the founding of Ensworth so I think it sort of comes full circle in some ways but um but also you know just the idea of like the the this was a a form of political action and a lot of what those in allensworth working to do are really you know resisting sort of industrial scale Agriculture and protecting their very local economies and um you know creating a sort of community i
nfrastructure that is enables people to thrive yeah so I'm strong that that even though this is very geographically specific that the translations to even Northwestern communities is really helpable I think and um so and especially this last image I love this and so it brings up a question one is is the community feeling a sense of resilience and hope picture suggests but and I know you've been studying this area but how how well known is this particular town and the lake Etc in the rest of Cali
fornia say did a big and if it's well known how did it get to be that way yeah it's um you know I it's interesting because I am originally from New York and I moved to California um in 2013 and I was I was very interested in Fresno which is a town in Central Valley my mother's arm there's a huge diasporic population there and you know I'd always read about that um that migration um but I also was very curious about this this California that like I heard of but I can't couldn't see because I was
I'm in La coastal cities or like you know how you sort of picture California but there is like a behind the curtain and it's literally behind it's like behind the coastal mountain range um and it is you know this this working landscape um with like vast inequality obviously um but I think it's very easy to live in the coastal cities and really ignore the rest of California but it is like it's really conservative it's um it's red and purple um it's a really really distinct not just in terms of th
e E economy and the sort of public imagery but but politically um and so you know I think that there's a lot of people that like deliberately ignore it but it exists and there's actually a lot um and it like Bears a lot of power in terms of um of decisions being made about specifically about water and these coastal cities are all reliant on the same Water Systems I mean ultimately all that water um you know gets some of the these U sort of land Barons have bought up water to reroute their water
rights ultimately to sell water to to Southern California cities it's it's very complicated and I don't totally understand it even having researched it for a very long time but um but really like the it's all sort of in intertwined and um and yeah I don't I don't you know people are aware that it exists cuz californ is a huge state but it's um in terms of like the the nuance and the complications and the complexities of the place I don't think they're so aware but there was a real sort of celebr
ation around tary Lake a lot of people from La Bay Area all wanted to see the lake because it I think the last time it flooded was in the N late 1990s but it wasn't anything like we saw in 2023 so we've had this year has been on environmental justice we've got speakers who work with incarcerated women um we also have a community Design Studio that works with communities and I'm curious when you work with these um neighborhoods and towns and schools are there practic that you engage in that feel
that help you build trust that help you be this without saying words you do things where people yeah um I would say and I you know I tried to say this a little bit it's just like I almost feel like I'm I'm a resident at this point um I stay over in worth um I I you know I show up constantly and um I think especially through the teaching work which has been really interesting um there's been a lot of Youth interaction um and you know this is emblematic but um with my students from USC and some of
the youth in allensworth and the surrounding towns um because there there is no um there's only an elementary school currently in Ensworth but um you know that there's there's been a lot of opportunity for exchange between the younger populations and I think that's also set a really good foundation to understand that this was not the intention is not anything other than sort of like like I have this set of skills my students have this set of skills but they're always learning and you know is th
ere any place we can Implement them and help out in terms of this larger vision and I think that approach has been successful um I mean I will say I feel like allensworth like the APA now is like literally like like family um so but you know it took took three or four years of just being there but I again I think largely through the teaching and sort of the youth work it's been I think like that relationship really was established yeah other [Music] questions than you mark thank you remind you a
ll of the exhibition be sure to stop in thank you for your time your evening have a [Applause] pleas
Comments