I'm Jacob Moore. I'm the assistant director of the Temple Horned Beowulf Center for the study of American architecture here at GSEP, which is right over at Beowulf, next to the chapel. So, together with, first I need to thank Lila and Lucy and Stefan from the events office, but also the urban planning program, urban design, historic preservation, central spatial research, and all of their various team members. It was a real group effort to get this thing pulled together. In particular, as a Beowulf team member, I need to thank Ronald Martin, Jordan Stangard, Eddie Alente, Alicia Fringe, Judging Lynn, and Ria Linares, who are, that's the Beowulf team. And so, just really quickly, to set up, GSEP does multi-year thematic research projects, and our current project is called Power of Infrastructure in America. And it has provided some of the institutional context for the event today, so I thought I would just describe a little bit about that project before handing it off to the moderators and the presenters. So, extending and further developing 10 years of work on the interrelated materials, systems, and discourses of housing and real estate development. With Power of Infrastructure in America, as you might gather from this name, the Beowulf Center is thinking critically about many of those same houses. But rather than walking in through the door, we're flowing in through the pipes, wires, and ducts that crisscross their thresholds, and going back out again to the treatment facilities, excel sheets, and sloganeering that both define and stress those buildings' capacities. In particular, we've been interested in the ways in which emergencies, which is a hard to define category that we'll leave it loose for now, in which emergencies expose infrastructures that work. Most spectacularly, sometimes during emergencies, infrastructures break down, and as they're not working, that demands attention. More often, however, and usually much less spectacularly, emergencies tend to intensify and accelerate processes already long underway, literally through the infrastructures at hand. In Flint, Michigan, the executive definition and declaration of emergency financial management led to the disenfranchisement of the town's majority black population by a majority white state government, and subsequently, through, among other things, the municipality's water pipes, to at least 12 deaths, and the left poisoning of thousands of more Flint residents. In New Orleans, Louisiana, concentrated poverty and constrained ecological imagination, among other things, allowed, through the city's levies, for at least 1,800 deaths, and a more pernicious transformation of the region's demographics and landscape than was otherwise guaranteed. And here in New York, real estate interests, public authorities, and architects, responded to nearly 3,000 deaths, and the imperatives of the so-called global war on terror, through, among other things, the sites Slurry Wall and subway channels, with the making and monetizing of sacred ground. As of the spring and summer of 2017, the Beale Center planned to study these infrastructures and others, with special attention paid not only to their similarities, but also, importantly, to their differences, and this plan persists. However, in late September of 2017, in its bracing exposure of infrastructure at the convergence of neoliberalism, colonialism, and relentlessly warming oceans, the unnatural disaster known as Hurricane Maria has made the urgency of working across categories, and across disciplines, ever more clear. So in this year, here at this most interdisciplinary school, I'm going to introduce Hiba Buakar, who is going to moderate together with one fellow best discussion at the end, and she'll introduce everyone else. So Hiba Buakar is assistant professor here at the Department of Planning at GESAP, her recent book for the War Yet to Come Planning Beirut Frontiers, which released this year at Stanford University Press, examines how Beirut's post-civil war reveries have been transformed through multiple planning exercises into contested frontiers that are mired in new forms of conflict. Buakar received her PhD from University of California Berkeley, and she holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut, and a Master in City Planning from the Master's in Scientific Technology. So I'll hand it to Hiba and to her best friend, Hiba. Thank you for the viewing answer. I'm so glad that we're having this conversation here today, because we at GESAP, with our architecture, planning, design, and historic reservation programs, start to be at the forefront of these particular conversations and actually need to be at the forefront of these conversations of our time, especially that these natural crises are in fact very much human-made. Crises like Hurricane Maria highlight not only the detrimental effects of climate change, but also the long histories of how our fields, such as planning, architecture, development, and policy, played a primary role in the colonization, dispossession, and disinvestment and exclusion of places like Puerto Rico, rendering them unable to recover from disasters, and leading to worsening living conditions and new forms of displacement. Yet at the same time, while acknowledging these histories, we are called upon to participate in improving the living conditions before and when and after such crises happen, and to help conceive of a different future that is more inclusive, equitable, and resilient. So we have an amazing panel today here to discuss these issues, and I will go ahead and introduce our speakers. Muncho Lopez is a researcher, a professor, cartographer, and self-prompt based environmental and urban justice activist. He teaches Latino and ethnic politics at Country College, and is a mapping fellow at the Design Trust for Public Spaces. Muncho also is a founding member of South Bronx Unite, a local, urban, and environmental justice organization, and founding member and board member of the Mothebe and Pothmore's community land stewards, the local community land trust. He holds a PhD in political science from CUNY's Graduate Center and an MA from the University of Iowa in Quebec, Canada. His academic research revolves around spatiality, mapping, social justice, political theory, and Latino communities. Lopez's political writings on spatial and social justice have been published in Sanon, the CUNY Rebellion, and Aklok, among other media outlets, and his adverse work has been profiled in New York Times, Urban Office, and Corridor de la Serra. He was born and grew up in Puerto Rico and currently lives in Monterrey, in the South Bronx. Next, we move to... Yves Garcia Zambrana is an assistant professor in city and metropolitan planning at the University of Utah. He has spent time as a professional planning in Albuquerque, New Mexico, San Francisco, California, Springfield, Missouri, Washington DC, and Chicago, where she was the co-chair of the city's larger Puerto Rican organization, the Puerto Rican agenda. She's currently writing a book on Puerto Ricans in Chicago, which is under contract with Central Press. Dr. Garcia also chairs planning for Puerto Rico, a group of academic and practitioners. Practitioned planners from ECSP, APA, the famous Central UPR, and Society for Puerto Rican Planner, among others, that are collaborating in recovered recovery efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. She was recently elected a board member of the National Puerto Rican Agenda, which is a non-partisan alliance to address Puerto Rico's humanitarian crisis and promote Puerto Rican political and civic participation in the United States. She earned her PhD in urban and civic participation. She entered in urban planning and policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She holds U of D degrees from the University of New Mexico in community and region planning, and Latin American studies and bachelor in environmental sciences from Inter-American University of Puerto Rico. Marcelo La Paz Dinardi is a immigrant, researcher, and educator interested in the various tales of design in the practice of architecture as research and the intersection of architecture and political economy. He's an assistant professor of architecture at Texas A&M University as partner of an A office, well, as partner of an A office, was elected to represent the United States Pavilion in the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, and later selected as a fellow for IDS Cities Athens as an audience and event organized by the New York City New Museum. He has written for every review the organized newspaper, Domo's planning perspective, art form in China, and lectured at Cooper Union Princeton University's RISC, among others. He completed a Bachelor in architecture from the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico and NMS in critical greater and conceptual practice of architecture here at Columbia GISA. Martin Brass is the director of commenting relations and research at the VKAS Conservation and Historical Trust and the co-founder of VKAS Love, both are non-profits. His research focuses on biome... I'm not going to be able to say it. Biomemestic. Okay, you're on Facebook. And C-tertors with the wide number activity. After Mario Martin took a leadership role on the emergent response and recovery by connecting outside resources and local entities to provide solutions. He became a facilitator and coordinator for the complex response system, providing logistics, resources, translation and coordination for government and private entities. He is an EPA environmental champion recipient, a member of the board of SCENTIS and the president of the board of Rieko Silva and Educational Foundation. Andreas Magnucci is a Puerto Rican architect, urbanist and educator. He is the recipient of the National Architecture Prize and Architecture, a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and the Henry Club Award Literate. His recent publications include Conversations with Forms, Supports Housing and City and Bruno Stegno and Architecture for the Properties. Magnucci has been selected as the Robert Farrow Foundation Arts and Literary Arts Fellow and 2019 Scholar and Resident at the Bellagio Center, developing a research project entitled Common Ground, Public Space and the Resident City. Magnucci teaches at the School of Architecture at the University of Puerto Rico and is the principal of Andreas Magnucci's architecture. Frances Magnucci is a filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar and professor at Columbia University where she is also a founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive. Among her books and publications are Quercopap, Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture, the Latino Media Cap and Sovereign Acts, Contest and Colonialism in Native Nations and Latinx America. Her most recent films include Small City Big Change, War from One and Life Outside. For her work as a scholar and filmmaker, Nefla Malan Taner has received four Truman Rocker Fellowships. In 2008, the United Nations Rapid Response Media Mechanism recognized her as an global expert in the areas of mass media and Latino American studies. She is also the recipient of the Lancet Award, one of Columbia's most prestigious recognition for excellence in teaching and scholarship. She has also served as the director for the study of ethnicity and race in 2019-2016. And lastly, Angred Olivio is an urban planner and architect with over 20 years' experience combining policy and advisory work, research and teaching. She was recently an associate researcher for Columbia Center for Urban Disaster Risk, Reduction and Resilience and an Urban Studies Foundation post-doctoral fellow. And is currently a coordinator with Ecuador Sustainable Secondary Cities Program. She has worked with NGOs, private firms, universities, multinational and public institutions receiving support from institutions such as the British Council, Fulbright, UNESCO, Organization of American States. She has received her doctorate from Urban Planning from Columbia Chissat. So, amazing panel. Welcome to this journey. Hi everybody. Yes. So, I'm going to start a strange place. For the French-Algerian writer and philosopher Albert Camus, the only important philosophical question was suicide. Was life worth living given the injustices, the cruelty, the pain and the pattern of certainty surrounding all of us? For Camus, the response was always yes. Stroke was always the only option but is that the case with the situation in Puerto Rico? I'm going to be a little bit dramatic but this is what I think the situation in Puerto Rico boils down to. Is Puerto Rico worth saving and fighting for? I'm not talking about Puerto Ricans because obviously we are human beings and Puerto Ricans like everybody in the planet have rights and we are supposed to possess human rights but are Puerto Ricans worth saving in Puerto Rico? Is Puerto Rico worth saving for Puerto Ricans? Is saving and fighting for Puerto Rico and saving for Puerto Ricans the same thing? These are uncomfortable questions, existential questions and I think that some of the possible answers to those questions are already out there and many of us do not like what we hear. The massive exodus pray and post Maria signals precisely at the recovery of Puerto Rico and Puerto Rico. There is one more time that you can save one and let the other go down on it. That we can save Puerto Ricans meaning have massive numbers of refugees while saving the island apparently for non Puerto Ricans. Why does this feel possible? It feels so lightly it is the plant that doesn't include us but it also feels so wrong. I think that the answer is because we automatically people and places for the simple reason that people usually build the places they advocate. In most colonial cases however this equation of people and places is not as straight forward. And Puerto Rico is a colonial case. Infrastructure the built infrastructure and the institutional infrastructure of colonies does not work in normal ways. In colonies infrastructure is hard to produce colonial subjects and reproduce colonial dynamics. And again given that Puerto Rico and its infrastructure is in general of a colonial nature the question is again is this infrastructure worth saving and fighting for? Can we really delete the colonial aspect from our infrastructure? Can we build truly the colonial things from within a thoroughly colonial environment? The answer to this might be complicated but I believe it must be yes. Today we need to sketch potential ways to transmute the colonial into the decolonial to transmute dependency into independence and to try to answer the question of why and how Puerto Rico must be saved for Puerto Ricans and for other of our brothers and sisters from the Caribbean. It means that we must begin our conversation fully aware of the colonial stew as I called it in which we find ourselves. The key operative work here is work because most folks I know or most activists I know can recite the colonial land release of what's running for Puerto Rico by heart. What we need to have a conversation is the real crisis for me. It's not a crisis of information we know in general what's going on in Puerto Rico. The crisis revolves around how and why we are built or we are going to unbuild whatever needs to be built or unbuilt in Puerto Rico. This is why a talk about infrastructure is important because I feel it frames our discussion around a trope of action rather than around a trope of information and data. Information and data are important and more we have the better. Yet I think that we know most of what we need to know to get our outrage and organizing going. I am known as a kind of internal joke by some people as much of watts. Right after the hurricane I got called by my sister asking me she told me that she was going through an asthma attack and she told me that all generators are going to kill me. So I need you to find out how solar works I need you to build a prototype an inexpensive one I want you to gather all the information so we can share information in Puerto Rico. When I started doing this I didn't know anything about solar about amperage about volts nothing of the sort but this last week with the knowledge the know-how that I acquired I was installing like a rather large solar system in the South Bronx based on the knowledge that I acquired while working in Puerto Rico while I worked on that prototype I thought about what I was doing from an overly political perspective I tried to think about my efforts within a decolonial frame I wrote about it I polished and talked about it but my main emphasis was and we remained organizing action to change the material conditions that the paraphrase here lists determine how dependence takes place meaning I want to investigate and add on how the built environment reproduces dependence the key here is that I was in Puerto Rico in August and the natural infrastructure you know is doing just fine what is still down and not working as it should work is the built infrastructure and so we need to somehow figure out how to reproduce in a way not only the resiliency but the redundancy and the fortitude of that natural infrastructure that was in a way as it was around hurricanes we were traumatized by the hurricane but somehow our nature wasn't I think that one of our insights and living in the diaspora gives us is how planning architecture has been used here in our cities to breathe dependence and displacement from the top the planning is not to us here in the cities I am personally involved in efforts here and in Puerto Rico to organize communities around community land fields mechanisms that allow communities to develop the tools for planning and building their own infrastructure I'm sure that our partners today will give us food for thought on these matters about different strategies of planning recovery efforts etc also there is the question of preservation and the archive what do the archives of wounded places like Puerto Rico look like can we have a healthy archive in a place that is emptying out I believe I'm not the only one to feel that our recent massive exiles from Puerto Rico is the wound that subsumes all other wounds the exiles is in a sense the mental limit for the sad state of the island how bad is the situation in the island people ask me I usually reply hundreds of thousands of people have left since the hurricane it is difficult to shake off the impression that these exiles that sometimes healthy individuals and individual families survive is at the same time an open wound that figures what Francis calls the empty island the island that is a scenario Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans or paradise for developers it is for the reason that I'm convinced that our diasporas are an essential part of the conversation about Puerto Rico that our experiences here are relevant and might be helpful in dealing with the situation down in Puerto Rico and vice versa that our refugees and the conditions which they have free have lots to teach us about the potential roles of action for our diasporic communities here in the US a conversation on the legal human and built infrastructure in Puerto Rico is a necessary one both for the Bureau of Puerto Rico but also for the sake of building healthy communities here in exile I'm going to end with a personal note like and one of the things that I that I'm really concerned about is the idea that we don't let ourselves and the we define by the tragedy of the hurricane I think that it's important that we talk about what happened I think that we are all in a way in treatment and talking about it the way of walking through that trauma that being said I feel it's really really important that we don't let ourselves be defined by this and that we allow ourselves to be defined by the way that we are responding not only to the tragedy of the hurricane but also to the human-made catastrophe of the financial crisis in the US I guess today I'm going to talk about housing as an infrastructure I'm going to let you guys know that with the $100,000 that Puerto Rico will receive there's like about 30% or 31 billion dollars that are going to go to housing development general infrastructure inside twice as much that is going to go for the electric bill but in particular I'm going to be talking about how informal housing and how people were not able to prove ownership so I will leave like a little background about informal housing in Puerto Rico some stories of people that were not able to obtain assistance from FEMA and then some policy recommendations in terms of the methods I joined the disaster recovery coalition they have like weekly talks with the coalition and I worked previously with them and like through them I met Ayuda Legalia we brought a pair of them and once I went to Puerto Rico I'm going to be there for a year I went to the public workshops and have conversations with them and they have been using some case studies so there's different case studies some of them that they use for media so the question is like what kind of proof of ownership in the applications for the appeals of FEMA individuals and household grants between a barrier for thousands of Puerto Ricans who live in a title or land or homes and most importantly it's like how this barrier could be overcome so to give you some background there's 1.2 million homes in Puerto Rico and 92 of those receive like some damages so in terms of like a lot of damages they were like 300,000 and 17,000 that were like completely lost homes then of those that applied for FEMA it was like 98% and those who before also like personal property in terms of like the decisions of FEMA 40% were approved so that's like 1.39 billion in grants that means that 60% were not approved there was like 30% that were illegible and 30% that were denied and of course you can always appeal but even for people who appeal 18% were approved and 82% were not so that's like an eligibility rate of like 75% so as a scale formality in Puerto Rico so there's a lot of informal construction with no permits and no performance in land use costs that's about like 45 to 55% so there's different ranges and 20% of people do not have any deeds there could be like 41 codes where people could be denied insufficient damages or like there was some kind of resisting condition people simply could not be contacted on the phone or when they sent a letter they didn't get it there was also inconsistency like some people have electric bills in one address they have phone bills in another address and no group ownership is about so in terms of informal practices you might divide them in like building but also like occupying it could be with permission or without right so for without permission like rescue land that's how people call it and most of the times it's like see the home but it could also be that you build a home where your family has land or maybe you have permission from the government or from an NGO to be there in terms of what you probably could be taking or you can be ahead there's something else that is the good faith so that means that somebody told you that it was okay to live in this place and you believe that it could be related to you or not so a little bit more background because there's also informal housing in the United States and there was a case of Magwater Teresa of FEMA it was a lawsuit of residents of Missiana, Mississippi and Alabama and in this case FEMA denied them assistance based on them having the same address or also sharing a home and then the court decided that FEMA was right because they were just trying to prevent frondling duplication or frondling behavior and the recommendation was that they should be more inclusive in the future and ask for their documentation so these are like some people that were denied assistance we have for example Fernando and he bought this land like three years ago he took his own home but he bought it for $1,500 and there was no contract and this happens a lot in Portugal no contract at all, there could be a verbal agreement there's a Roberto that he lives in the home that his mother mother used to have, but his mother passed away there's other ways that you can also try to through ownership and maybe like through electric bills or water bills but he kept the water and electric bills then we have this it's a very common case which is the land segregation so you have multiple homes in like a single family land and in this case a lot of people bought just $500 for their damages in their homes so it would be more like treated as a renter that lost some things but you can not really fix their homes there's some cases where people are in unrelated lands so it's not that that belongs to the family but this for example is José's case that his mother built a land in the it was his grandfather's employer this was like an agreement between gentlemen 50 years ago so he could not prove that he had a home this also happens a lot in where you have two households in one family so you just build on top of like some other house and in this case there's like two brothers and because of this rule of the church house rule the brother bought assistance because he bought, he sent the application but then his brother could not get assistance because he was again trying to prevent fraudulent behavior they could not prove that they are a separate new place there's other cases like in Villes del Sol this is like 221 families living in this community that 50 years ago the government took them from informal settlements and they say you know it's okay to live in this housing for land that belongs to us and there was an NGO that was taking care of the land but again these families cannot prove that they are owners in terms of like the policies so the lawyers from the national income housing coalition what they were doing is like trying to look at what were some of the definitions of ownership in the United States in terms of like head of law and also look at where the vehicle is and in the US you would be the legal owner but also you have no title but then prove that you are maintaining a place or you are paying taxes and also you could be a head so based on this the federal law should be able to prove they are owners so there was a creation of a source statement and this was actually a creation also with people from FEMA and it was actually in August 6 and it doesn't have to be notarized so that was like a major thing because in Puerto Rico the notaries you cannot go to the FedEx right you have to have to get a lawyer to sign this for you and then you could provide several supporting documents in any way that you could to prove like maintenance inheritance or possession however this was not a FEMA document so what that meant it meant that they put a price release but they didn't attach the form it meant that they didn't train the DRC staff on the availability of this they just like presented like this is another alternative and then all the work of like passing around this and telling people it was on the profits like a legal which is mostly volunteers so this is what they are doing they're like have gone back and forward with FEMA staff to get them to notify staff to train staff on the form to notify the applicants they also have tried to see if they can get the addresses of people on the phone so they can call them and they have got them to try to extend the deadline they are looking into like a class lawsuit to see if they actually can get them to do these things in terms of other policy solutions of the 18.5 billion dollars that will come to Puerto Rico in the form of CDBGDR funds 40 million dollars are going to go to give titles to people they already received 10 proposals for this they don't know like who are those and some of you know that it's kind of kept secret and then the idea is that they will actually give titles to 48,000 people that the government knows that we don't have any titles so thank you very much good afternoon everyone thanks to GSAP Bill Center and all the organizers for the invitation I'm super happy to be back I'm going to talk about debt, tax and how they perform as infrastructure in a Puerto Rican foreign scenario with specializing debt, a visual audit and now I'm trying to understand Puerto Rico's debt in order to localize it it was inevitable to consider this within the context of the 120 years of Puerto Rico's history under the ruling of the United States I want to start with this map the first of the ones I made and will understand it today that shows an overall timeline of US President's visits to Puerto Rico to stress attention between territory legal frameworks and their impact there have been six official visits out of 21 presidents some of them lasted less than 4 hours some performed racing and some unofficial visits as layovers for vacation overall the official visits does not zoom more than 200 hours or the equivalent of 40 hours full time working however the impact they have had on who currently extends indefinitely in time shows the extent of the current debt that I will briefly recount I have also inevitably encountered things visually which has been one form of constructing cultural minorities I will suggest as infrastructural products themselves the Spanish-American War coincided with the booming of journalism which produced a great amount of imagery that in many ways has to impress ideas of these other territories and circulated media in general served as a principal partner the judge magazine cover of August of 1895 shows the map as an image, a powerful narrative building image combined with territorial coordinates and visual imagery Puerto Rico, the center of the discussion is not included in it this image is precise, the Spanish-American War Puerto Rico was first half the shadow an extra or an animated as character cartoons also circulated beyond New York this time Puerto Rico was included with the map combat these images started to acquire a great reality at every step then seated at tables in remote places formalized this reality and circulated for everyone's knowledge Puerto Rico has been seated to the United States by the Crown of Spain as part of the closing transaction of the Spanish-American War the dishing and cartoon began a class in civilization is spelled by Anton Sam to the new students who, beyond consent as clearly stated in the situation's blackboard on the right are parked in a room including a physical earth globe, colonized subjects and obedient states again the cartoon materialized stories about the new processions were being implemented in Puerto Rico and the U.S reproducing colonial histories through the site and emanation of those in power the image construction continues imagining not only a territory but a subject who is a businessman and prosperer or the early stages of commercial financial entrepreneurship your maps were created to document the sources for extraction agricultural plantation maps or military enclave and communications infrastructure among others but I would like to zoom out now to guide you through a visual timeline of some of the critical moments of this story of texts images and maps first in Paris France signed the agreement of Puerto Rico's fate in 1898 then the Forkitt Act of 1900 signed at the U.S. Congress in Washington to establish the civilian government for the island in 1917 the people of Puerto Rico were assigned U.S. citizenship with restrictions of representation but not military duties like serving in war it was also under the John Strayford Act that a triple tax exemption was created at the local state and federal level for American business interested in Puerto Rico 1920 followed with the Merchant Marine Act that conditioned in the context of an island that every ship with goods coming into and out of Puerto Rico must have, must happen in a U.S. made vessel under a U.S. company and always through a U.S. port 1952 formalized the ambivalence of Puerto Rico's status quo by the hand of the first local elected governor of the Merchant Marine Puerto Rico was allowed to profits out of the constitution giving the island an appearance already of an autonomy ruler however the class was entered in the constitution in the case of the government of Puerto Rico do not have enough money to give itself running it must pay first paying creditors before any public provision in 1976 an economic incentive was created for developing jobs to learn other tax reduction program known as the section 926 opening high school jobs in the island for locally dedicated people and great benefit for the U.S. company school decided to set up operations there particularly the pharmaceutical industry later in 1984 the low-key revision to the bankruptcy code redefined the concept of territory making is specific for the 50 states excluding Puerto Rico during the 10 year period from 1996 to 2006 the section 96 program was faced out eliminating thousands of jobs in the island and was also a period where the date grew significantly in late 2006 Puerto Rico integrated a sales tax to help highlight its deficit passing the growing burden onto its residents this tax was defined under Pofina which is the Spanish acronym for Puerto Rico urgent interest fund corporation that eventually added around 22% to the total debt this sales tax in Pofina was in part designed by the women's tax service entity two years before the 2008 crash money was taken to give the government running privatization of the infrastructure massive layoffs happened all during the last two years of administration now we're standing the US debt and it's selling in blue get pricing and it is expected to surpass $20 trillion by the end of this year Puerto Rico eventually ran out of money to keep operating and its constitution important to pay traders first there was no money for it to be defeated this takes us to 2014 when the last of those administration issued 3.5 billion in bonds immediately 275 companies from all over the world responded these bonds were explicitly noted as high risk and hedge of managers did not wait to react however global the big majority of them were transaction from companies distributed across the US with a big concentration in the east coast it is no surprise that the biggest concentration of those were the New York City citizens in Lower Manhattan both consolidated mostly in meantime years ago it was discussed in the liquidity of finance in the context of the US thin and tall skyscrapers in meantime in Manhattan and that we needed to ground that money Puerto Rico's debt might be somehow different but I have persisted to ground it first in the island's territory before framing it within the context it belongs to under the umbrella of the US financial system I will however ground that money on the island as well as this project continues but when we look at this map consider that 44% of Puerto Ricans live under the political rig established by the US and of those 28% live with $10,000 a year meantime in Manhattan's median income is a minimum of $200,000 with a large concentration much more a median cost for a house or condo is $1 million and with at least an 80% white population in 2016 the US Congress passed the PROMESA Act signed by President Obama the Puerto Rico Oversight Management and Economic Stability Act in which an oversight board takes supreme control over the island's provisions the islands on the island of colonial condition had yet again nearly the same but this construction happened also in the register of 1% images that are also a Germanic infrastructure mostly as products of the supremacist finance the impact governments and individuals alike including those were willingly subjected to the colonial mandate and had embodied the proper business map of the 1900 cartoon others haven't shown it and others have responded and resisted from every possible front yet there are key actors and players who help us understand these asymmetries for example from a realist capital holders of debt are used objectively that the oversight board imposed on Puerto Rico is unconstitutional and that he prefers to follow the mandate at his benefit of the Puerto Rico Constitution the same figure had benefitted in the path from betting against the crash of Argentina but the debt keeps moving and circulates rearranged with a big town in Lower Manhattan and 17 status of the debt transaction and its locations that will soon be mapped however these transactions and these operations at least these days are now individual actions a month ago the US Treasury Secretary Steven Boone King just announced the creation of opportunity zones in which as it broadly circulates in the Wall Street Journal the entire territory of Puerto Rico is an opportunity zone there are no formal cartoons included in this news perhaps there's no more irony needed there is however a photograph of the instrumentation of architecture as a territorial state and main signing documents in Washington among the Treasury Secretary Pascal Abernayers and a crucial figure of the 2008 housing crisis is in the New York City Union who also participated in the 2013 Puerto Rico bonds transaction made billions from the 2008 housing crisis and have increased its presence in the valley and acquiring hotels resorts and real estate development Mr. Paulson, one of the fields he'll continue working with was an economic advisor for Donald Trump's presidential campaign and worked with now Secretary Mugin as Special Manager in 2008 he owns the refurbished and expanded Vanderbilt Hotel in Condado, Puerto Rico who now appeals to its own glory of 1919 when the hotel opened to European and Hollywood royalty his San Regis Resort also in Puerto Rico like a military enclave happy to reproduce and construct a narrative in his plantation house the hallmark of early 1900 colonial extraction and exploitation for a few everything is okay as read the call for painting on the restaurant wall Puerto Rico's debt, its infrastructure is not only to be added from within by local agents scrutinizing every penny to hold their elected officials accountable, but also from without with text, images and maps perhaps strutting in Manhattan is being done my name is Mark Martin Bras I come from Vieques, Puerto Rico and I call it an island in the wind because it's kind of how it well first of all I don't know where you've been to Vieques or not but it's a municipality of Puerto Rico which is a Commonwealth and we're US citizens in a way and in the sense of the colonial aspects we would be like a colony in Puerto Rico too if you consider the way that things went down in Vieques we're about 9000 people we're isolated by water which is something that during this response was looked at as this imaginable unsurpassable way to tree or fix a place but then you consider all the islands and you consider how far Hawaii is it doesn't seem that hard weirdly our water and energy it comes from the main island of Puerto Rico on the water to our west coast until Maria we have a very complex history you probably remember more than anything the military occupation and the bombing that happened and the civil disobedience that came an international movement on a very small island we have gone through a lot of different stages in our history and we were in a real state of tourism boom right before Maria that brought us the economic development but an immense danger if you can see we have an island that still held some of the greatest things an island should have then Maria and everything became very different you can see at the development of Vieques it's 21 miles by 4.5 miles because this was military and then monoculture of sugar came before the development of the towns was in the middle and they gave some of this land back when the Navy left weird transportation systems are inconsistent at best and we have a limit one of the poorest education systems in all of Puerto Rico which is one of the poorest in all of the United States we have a very limited amount of services and when the emergency hit we were completely unprepared and we were out there for weeks without having anybody from the central government of Puerto Rico or from FIMAC and we were in shock a bunch of saying in therapy because we lived a really hard shock that took a lot of people including the local government out and so you have people oceanographers and you have teachers and you have technical difficulties that had to step up and do the job of people that were just simply in their homes that didn't know exactly what they could do their recovery was very slow at best and it was an exercise in inefficiency I cannot tell you how many times we had assessments people come over in helicopters with teams of 10, 20 to 5 die for the hospital generator to assess it and then they got the wrong we had a structure that was just really hard to organize and if it wasn't for the private group I don't know what would have happened to me weeks without any interaction language barriers the administrative process was a failure but the ego is something we should not ignore because it was a huge part of the problem and still is a huge part of the problem and it's part of the problem that people that also are trying to bring solutions because they don't understand that they're trying to help people that do have power and knowledge and skills they're not this bunch of idiots in a corner they don't have anything they need help they don't have the resources but the better aspect would be to empower them this did not work at all there was a total chaos at all levels and still is and we're still living some way without power today I woke up, I got all power completely, 100% out in vehicles what happened, we don't know one of the infrastructure problems we had was communication we had no power in the island we had people bringing mini inverters we had almost mob mentality we ran out of gas, we ran out of diesel we ran out of water we had limited food we ran out of medicine in the hospital and then the hospital had to be closed because it was damaged so we had the under C cable situation and that will get through back again a little bit, we had Tesla coming one of the few cases where that corporate infusion came where they did it but there's reason for that other reason they did power a lot of the essential things on the island and were offered actually went to a burger garden and said I'm sure with financial interest as well and PR interest, so I looked power at the whole island it takes 8 months in October, we'll do it, sure you'll pay me, we'll give you a discount we'll look great, I'll be yielding months powering vehicles, here's a Tesla they said no and still we're powered by generators which are running at about $22,000 a day and they just shut up completely unsustainable maybe people have asthma attacks etc and the compatibility of some of the answers has led to a lot of thinking and a lot of assistance we are in a situation now power wise where vehicles could become really fantastic in a way in terms that it could have a hybrid solar system it could have the smartest grid because one of the things that I wanted to instill that places like this could become a model if it's a model for the people there and that we're waiting on all these situations to happen but as of today none are silent the housing, we have our 350 houses completely destroyed and we had a confusion about what we could do we had people with a lot of money saying I will fix the housing if you know what we're going no, no, no, no they asked for money, that's fraud we'll take it to court but they're getting water inside their house they're getting asthma they got mold, no, no, no you have to wait for the decision and we have problems in that but there's still people living in tents on the beach not this one, but another one they're still in some of these situations and the Blue Tart program is, I don't know I was in Puerto Rico, completely in other places and I bring to you that part of the answers in solutions after hurricane is that people have to see it they're ignoring the culture and they're ignoring of how the people live in a place and the nature of which is fantastic by the way is exercise in failure I can't tell you how many solutions how much money was spent how many things were brought without getting local knowledge of people like this food wise we had incredible problems and all these solutions I came to did not consider the local people so it didn't work, money wasted so it leads us to believe that rather than to come and establish what should happen on these islands and their culture and everything like that you should empower people there to be ready and that's the thing that really wasn't done big fishing community, hey help them get the things to fish big tourism community help get them out this also transfers into what happens when you have all these things going on you do it and then you get this people don't like to see it anymore because it's kind of like oh yes, the drama and all that kind of thing but it's really what people went through and it's really what they had to deal with afterwards and in Vieques we had emergency service completely limited this is our road right in front of the coastline we worked without power for about 8 months in a way we didn't have that power today and we had people doing work basically the reality of what we saw was that nobody was ready for this we didn't know about it and so we had to go and create new systems create new solutions for it I go forward because my time is running out but what we work with is environmental and what we're thinking is what kind of what you have to do is build, transfer and train Colombia for example got involved through the studio and that's one case where they said ok we'll do a Vieques initiative we'll go there, they come and say we'll plan and we'll give you the answer we talk to the people, we spend the time seeing what everybody needed and try to develop and what happens is that we were there in a room and in the room the mayor, vice mayor, all these people are there and we're all fighting and suddenly the Colombian students came we're trying to do this thing and we want to know and everybody changed and it was a virtuous exchange because it wasn't an overlapping thing trying to go over and tell you what to do it was an interaction that they wanted to know and it helped us look at it in a different way and so we're happy that they came down and we're still working on that we are working on different models and I think that's the key of islands like Vieques in Puerto Rico the complexity of it is not allowed for an easy visual model of how we should live in terms of the infrastructure water, energy, food safety and all that so we're trying to create reliable resilient centers like this so that people can come and actually transfer that skill from all over the world without trying to overpower the island like in Vieques it's not a very preferred situation because of what you all heard about all these people everybody's saying it's beautiful you saw it, it's cheap now we can buy, we can take over we get out of this situation we have zero education Vieques has to go in Vieques so there's an exit of people who want to further along so this skilled transfer I think is something that has to go around with any infrastructure aspect I think it's a model for the world same as it's a microcosm to what's happening in Puerto Rico and all that you heard it is a microcosm to what's happening to the world in terms of climate change and environmental considerations that have to be done so what I think we should do is not forget like what you were saying when we were having the hurricane everybody was in a complete shock as soon as you plug the electricity back in there's a certain regressing back to that level this is a time where we just have to make a stop in our case with Maria but we plan to amplify that to the world to realize that if you do not go the environmental way it's just going to keep on happening all throughout and there's a series of political and there's a series of economical drivers that are changing that but there is a human factor that can help them make them all we think Vieques is visible on a rights goal that we can show the world a better way thank you I want to thank the association it's a privilege to be here it's a privilege to be here just a fantastic panel what I want to do today is really share a number of questions and observations that come about as a result of the event of the hurricane obviously this is it and there are two slides I think just to recapitulate they are important and this is the day before the hurricane and this is right now the magnitude of the implications of an event like this are absolutely extraordinary in terms of how it shapes the lives and the things that you take for granted as part of your everyday routine your everyday experience this is the town of Manatee this we've already talked about the issue is that there certainly has been an interest and a concentration on the idea of infrastructure as hard infrastructure is very important particularly when the whole country is without power but one of the things that I would like to put forward a part of this presentation is the idea of looking at public space and that component of our physical built environment as a fundamental infrastructure and it is one that certainly the government has not paid attention to because they were concentrating on issues of power and water supply and all of this now if we think of public space not necessarily as the gardens and classes and parks but really as that public realm that we share as citizens including streets and sidewalks and certainly the parks and the commons cases which are very important particularly in our Latin Caribbean culture it is something that has been dramatically changed as a result of the hurricane and what I have begun to observe is that as a result of the hurricane our appropriation of public space started changing obviously we have to manage knowing the first days after the hurricane the idea of mobility the way that we move about the city had to be reassessed and this is a dramatic I don't know if you may have stopped but this is on the way up to Calle just imagine the idea of a country that loses its trees in one day this is absolutely extraordinary so I'm going to put forward three sort of ideas to rethink the nature of public space and it partially comes from my own experience because I had dedicated a good part of my life as an architect in designing public spaces this is one of my public spaces in San Juan in Parque de Líneo very nice period in public space very well used etc and here we see it with its grove of palms and then I got this photograph on my telephone so as an architect I'm confronted with sort of my own architecture just putting it personally and what that architecture represents to the public in having myself to reassess the work that I have done and the way that I have done it and saying there has to be something different from now on we cannot keep on doing things the same way that we have so a little bit to want to question about is it worth saving Puerto Rico for Puerto Ricans the answer is no if that answer is in the same way that we have always done it but the answer is yes if we can start thinking of fundamental paradigm shifts in the way that Puerto Ricans we concentrate on the environment in the way that Puerto Rico's built environment operates so with the idea of common ground and how do we reassess the notion of public space as part of our ability to build a resilient city or a resilient country I have been observing three conditions that sort of interest me the first was the shift in the way that people use space public space as healing space the second has to do with this construction of sustainable mobility sort of a larger infrastructure of the way that we move and experience within the city and most fundamentally the idea of public space a democratic space and just to go through these very very quickly but times people started looking at public space as a way to share as a place to share as a place to get assistance so there is physical healing space but there is also emotional healing space it was the place to go and get information have you heard from the town of Alcuna and how can we get materials or supplies to this place or this place do you know about my family have you seen my cousin this broader idea of public space as healing space became very very important and the comfort that finally after some days of not having food or not being able to find the food in the supermarkets I can get it here so that sort of reappropriation of public space as healing space the second is the idea of sustainable utility and obviously there are these fundamental problems about how we move within the city in a moment of environmental crisis but when I started looking after this and seeing for example a place like the Tremulvan the urban train in San Juan public transport and if you take the urban train with a fantastic investment in stations the capacity of the train to move if you think about the way that you get from the train station out to the destination let's say the University of Puerto Rico etc you see that the public realm in normal conditions is completely inadequate it's completely unsustainable in terms of facilitating the way that people move within the city so when it collapses then these things sort of come to the surface so that second component that I think that we have to reload is the idea of sustainable mobility in whatever form it takes and finally the idea of public space as democratic space and democratic space implies that there have to be certain physical qualities embedded in the public realm that ensure accessibility that ensure inclusiveness that ensure the possibility that people of different backgrounds of different religions of different sort of economic classes are able to share this without the general stickiness of exclusion and separation so these are the the behavior of space and the ability to get together in space is sort of a lesson and obviously there's the reappropriation of creating new public spaces and how do you assimilate the idea of transforming space as sort of a collective gesture and these are events that happen in public space for example there is the symphonica giving free concerts in public spaces and community centers etc as part of that healing process and finally just to conclude Hurricane Maria happened two weeks after Harvey three days after Irma right after the banks of the same were flooding the wildfires in California so this is not alone a Puerto Rican sort of situation and I think that there are certainly lessons in Puerto Rico that have to be looked at in cities worldwide and look at certainly the capacity of public space to sort of build common ground for all of us. Thank you very much. First of all I want to thank all of you for all of this invitation I really I've been working kind of on something of sensibly a group of people and so this is great to come out and talk to other people I want to before I start I want to say that I decided not to actually talk a lot about the piece that Mucho was mentioning but I do feel compelled to say three things or three conclusions from that piece that speak to a question about Puerto Rico being saved and the first thing about emptying that I founded my piece is that the experience of growth of population growth is actually an anomaly in the last 520 years in Puerto Rico emptying has been the more dominant logic throughout that period from the genocide of the indigenous people to populations in the 20th century so in that context then I would suggest that yes I mean better times might be found the second thing I want to underscore is that Puerto Rico is not an island in at least two fundamental ways and that's why I also think empty is such a dangerous trope the first ways on an island is that Puerto Rico has a lot of archipelago vieques, coleras, monos, mitos but at another level Puerto Rico is not an island because it has relationships with multiple color locations forming what we could call in our archipelagic configuration so we think about it in that term when people leave Puerto Rico they're not entirely leaving Puerto Rico or they leave you vieca there are relationships that are pretty constituted and I'll speak a little bit about that in a minute and the third thing that I will dwell on a bit more is that the same empty infrastructure has been re-purposed for other things so the infrastructure in the empty process is not a linear process but it gets disrupted from the infrastructure itself outward so having said that so the first thing I should say is that I'm new to this conversation of infrastructure as so many scholars of Puerto Rican study granted in humanities we have paid some attention I feel to technology particularly in relation to music and media studies but not so much to the concept of infrastructure not only did it sound fairly dry in some way but I think to some extent it risked returning us to certain strands of structuralism including Marxist structuralism which so many of us have struggled for decades to come the infra now located somehow under political economic structure and cultural superstructure which is not problematic that I'm going to get in right now but I think it's something worth thinking about a little more now of course in the aftermath of Maria drastically changed all of us in all our fields regardless so it's not only urban planners or architecture or others thinking about this for some time but I think everybody this was because not only there was coast on the floor but there were more than 3,000 deaths as a result of declining infrastructure and this made infrastructure not only a new concept but also a new trove I think this is a bit of a conceptual that I'm working through which has become a trove to narrate everything you know a master trove colonialism, capitalism, political economy cultural etc but as I began working my way through the concept I saw that rather than the blackout begin this awareness I feel that it came at the right time to see it as such and that's because when things fall apart infrastructure becomes particularly exposed and there's no doubt that things are falling apart and being reconfigured sometimes still with the wires hanging everywhere and that's not really important and when I start reading across disciplines I actually have to conclude that there is in fact an infrastructure in turn not only in fields usually interested in studying infrastructure that I'm trying to work through in the work that I'm doing now one is from the work organic team who is developing the concept of infrastructure in the context of a theory of affect so in texts like the politics of affect team argues that as theories based on reason and rationality are increasingly inadequate to explain a wide range of phenomena including consumer cultural production, political behavior an ocean of effective infrastructure is necessary I just put a picture like this and I think you can see a point to that this concept would allow us to inquire to how we make sense of the world to various forms of emotional attachments rather than the prior concept based on reason and rationality and also I explain how similarly contradictory political vocabulary is binding for the same groups which is something that's been going on in our national politics for a few years now a second example that is a bit closer to our topic comes from political scientist Agargo Melendez recently on sponsor migrations the state of Puerto Rican coastal migration for the United States where he dedicates a substantial chapter to air transportation titled the anal buses from San Juan and he does an importance of his infrastructure to organize what he calls government sponsored migration interesting Melendez argues that it's not only infrastructure but it had to be a certain kind of infrastructure for instance it had to be commercial and it had to be safe a process that only changed the scale of migration but also the ways that Puerto Ricans could connect to the US and the diaspora as well as the development of industries like tourism I mean a big point that he makes in this chapter is that unlike most people think air transportation did not account to stimulate tourism but actually tourism came after that infrastructure had to be provided to move migrants from Puerto Rico to the United States ultimately to manage this migration and this movement the government also approved a number of legislation that in turn created various forms of institutional or bureaucratic infrastructure to make this happen now my third word the reason I became interested is in infrastructure migration studies is that I was wondering I actually had to answer the question of the speed of emptying after Hurricane Maria how do we account for the fact that in a very short period of time thousands hundreds of thousands of people actually were able to leave so that it started making me think about elements that are not normally thought about as infrastructure as infrastructure for instance US citizenship as a form of infrastructure because it does not provide very many rights if you live in Puerto Rico but it does allow for free movement from the island to the United States so perhaps we also have to think about some aspect of legal system in terms of infrastructure of course actual commercial air transportation whether the suggestion but also this is the other part because I was concerned with the question of how could the federal government get away with this of not investing in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and I realized that another perhaps a relevant element of infrastructure were the Puerto Ricans that were already in the United States their physical resources their emotional resources if it had not been that these 5.5 million people existed in the United States I wonder if and how this emptying could have happened so in that regard these various elements of infrastructure were completely necessary to actually propel emptying as a way to the federal government not support Puerto Ricans on the island after Hurricane Maria and not really then during the entire depressive period at the same time I was interested in how do we use that same infrastructure but that same infrastructure was used by the diaspora repurposing it to other ends and it is clear that you can make a very very long list that indeed Puerto Ricans from the United States mobilized those same resources in order to assist Puerto Ricans sometimes three weeks many more weeks months before the federal government actually got to Puerto Rico and to make a very long list for instance Puerto Ricans arrived with blue charts I had a FEMA Puerto Ricans arrived with medicine and medical care ahead of the federal government and you also have to raise the question of how is that possible but that's another conversation the second working through the empty island these were some of the questions that I became engaged in that involved the question of the vicinity of infrastructure and then the second work that I'm doing has to do with art in particular after curating an exhibit called Puerto Ricans Under Water I became interested in art infrastructure for two reasons the first reason is that I noticed that the very art that I was including in the show actually was about infrastructure in some ways money, finance physical infrastructure this is Santurcil the work was uploaded Saracen Santos's work which is a chronicle of the debt crisis and hurricane, post hurricane crisis as a thing by photographing the debris all these works I also found the question of archive was mentioned that art was also playing a big role in archiving the crisis in various ways larger inspiration for me to become interested in art as infrastructure however came from an analysis of the short story and I go into all the details but I would say that one of the things that he concludes in this short story is that illumination comes from darkness which I think is something that artists have very much taken to part and I see that I'm done so I will just show you a few ways that I think art is becoming infrastructure or reflecting on infrastructure the first is that art infrastructure was added in jeopardy in Puerto Rico this is Celia Sanchez studio after the hurricane the second way is the ways art and infrastructure projects are coming together this is the Sina Solar Initiative called Casa Pueblo so bringing new technologies of solar energy and combining them with showing of artistic work and this also itinerant movie house that moves around three is the ways that art is repurposing and taking thromboling infrastructure you can see that in the explosion of murals and public art and the ways that this very process stradded your placemaking in the face of neoliberal of empty housing there's a lot of those and then there's the ways that art collectives are also producing models of altruistic almost self-governance under markings of the state and it's the ways that was mentioned by the earlier presenter about the ways that public space has become healing space a reflection on the death of Maria the debate around how many and the condition of that pain but one of the things that's interesting here is how art is becoming also an infrastructure for monumentalizing or memorializing things that are events and processes that are being obscured by the state so lastly I guess my conclusion would be that when things fall apart the imagination needs to take over there's a lot of infrastructure work to do Barrago Hi First of all I want to say that I'm really grateful to my audience to show my work to I'm grateful to the colleagues who have preceded me who have prepared this oil program at this day and I'm also grateful to those who invited me to come to this house it was here where I decided to focus my Ph.D. for the people who were with me at the same time on the exemplary case on the experimental laboratory of the US policies that were going to be seen later on in the south of the United States but also in the south so I'm very grateful for being here and the second thing I want to say that I'm going to apologize because it's no way that I can fit in minutes what was the work of many years so I think I have a small strategy to make it fit and I will let you know about it but I have I want to start with this image which was taken 19 90 years ago and when I found it in the archives at the University of Puerto Rico I was fascinated because probably nobody in that picture is alive and I wish we could speak to them or they could speak to us of what went wrong then and what is going on now and why haven't we learned enough lessons to work it out again because in this case we see a formal house completely destroyed this is not the case of a precarious settlement it is raised to the ground and it is what we were going to do witnessing again and again and again in Puerto Rico with the different hurricanes so that's why I chose this to begin and this was my little intro I'm going to speak about the intro I'm going to just focus on the case studies I'm afraid I won't be able to get to the second table which is the relief and policy trends and I'll jump into the conclusions but the image that I'm showing to the left it's also a very telling image of the 50s in Puerto Rico a time in which the island government was trying to put forward a proposal how to understand hurricanes and make it a collective project to stop down from the state so this is the poster of a film and it's still bearing some of the ideas that this was a rural country that we had to migrate and there is something human about the hurricane blowing people's lives which is what I could read in this poster and it's also related to the way disasters are built by how we humans use space and how we allocate knowledge resources infrastructure so this is my little clip to feed myself with time this is the end of it I mean these are my conclusions so if I don't get to your conclusions I'm grateful if you put attention to this I think that after studying these three Europeans I have three lessons that I want to share with you one is that we would need critical and multidisciplinary knowledge long-term with different systems of knowledge to inform action because that's what at the end of the term at the end of the story I think planning is about action so how do we decide to act I propose that we do the we try to be critical we try to challenge assumptions and so on my second lesson would be that we have to focus on what went wrong the three existing factors that enable a storm not to be a storm anymore but to become a disaster so there's a big difference between what can happen with the same hurricane earthquake, snowstorm depending on the place depending on how information is shared knowledge, what kind of society and grounds are there for people to react to a disaster and then the last lesson I think that disaster management could be going many others it needs to go beyond the relief decisions that have shaped the island responses throughout the three cases I managed to study which meant a change of the island, a very significant change from the island being a Spanish colony to being part of an unincorporated territory of the US to becoming a commonwealth of the US so my three case studies are a few months after this case took over from Spain and you can see if we go back to my colleague at Bres how street and infrastructure mobility need to be rethought in that later image you see a man riding a horse and the water is up to the chest and this was let me see 1899 so if you just change the vehicles that's what we saw in the other pictures we see this recurring crisis of construction mobility and the second one is the 1928 a few months before the crash of the stock exchange which was going to ripple over Puerto Rico massively and it shows the hurricane San Felipe that was a source for Norah to ride the island with Archie Rod and it's a massive regional problem that was never seen as a regional problem it was studied in an isolated fashion and it was also dealt with as if the same hurricane blowing all across it's fragmented and there's this lack of understanding of region as a PC unit would stand in the history of colonialism and the third six shows the aftermath of hurricane Santa Clara in 1956 four years after the Commonwealth that being the island was set up in which the major you can see still this very rural background of poverty that my colleagues were explaining before the almost dependency debate so with this image I just want to speak about the asymmetrical relationship of Puerto Rico and this is a very brave cartoonist in 1915 speaking of Puerto Rico as a small barefoot bender who was completely independent of what the US wanted to sell food arms tools and so on so this is another fact of continuity that is going to show up and it has shown up during hurricane Maria this is more of the same I'm going to skip them so I'm going to focus now on what I thought were like good standing patterns of transformation and in this case how the growth ended during the first two hurricanes were to depend massively on one expert crop sugar which meant the complete change of the coastal landscape complete transformation of areas that were buffers to hurricanes and floods for example marshes, ponds, rivers mangroves and so on for the quest of sugar and once during hurricane Santa Clara the third one by the 40s when this expert was decaying the economy changed towards a targeted industrialization institutional reform and migration as we saw in the picture of the planes later on tourism and construction so at the end what I put this till from all this time is that for the most part the economic growth engines were always pushing for vast gains for corporations and at best mixed results for lay citizens and in the second one you can see the pattern of urbanization all along the coast this is the path of the strongest hurricanes of the 19th century and someone is disproportionately shown here it should be a huge dot impressive to the other but what this map is saying is that already by the 19th century the fate of vulnerability to floods for example to coastal floods to winds and so on must be established because most of the cities are along the coast and this makes the whole urban infrastructure mostly subject to surges also tsunamis and so on and planning and investment what I studied was when I started the time period that I started to study until the end the investment level were increasing but for the most part they were targeting commodities and often times keep you as interest very questionable once in a time by force if needed with gravel inclusion of lay citizens so for example the railroad was established not to move people across the island but to export goods out of the island and as soon as that model was not effective the railroad system and this is another way in which you can see how infrastructure was it existed because it did but it was not meant to be used for the development of citizens in the same way that it meant to be used for crops and exports goods and so on so this is another example of the same debate these pictures they are taking one year apart on the left hand side you see the refinery model to be built in southern Puerto Rico and the tax the tax exemptions that we just heard of huge environmental degradation and the vast gains that the government the US government and the Puerto Rican government were offering this firms if you look at it it's one of these mechanisms of entrenching power because at the same time that this was happening on the left hand side you see the dog workers on strike protesting because basic needs were not met the salary was not in reaching the basic level so who was this infrastructure being built for and what for is the question that these two images speak of so there was a great public investment but for the left hand side not for the right hand side or for the VKS that we just saw with my colleague this is another example of infrastructure throughout the three time period that I started to study at the beginning it was a very limited investment, mostly export investment export investment infrastructure for exportation that's what I'm trying to say such as ports, ridges, lighthouses roads and fractional railroad this increased but by the 1950s what we had was again a huge investment like this motorway which helped the gains of private owners and developers it also privileged individual car transportation then the mass transportation time is up and so it was for all and compact growth we see water infrastructure massive transformation of the island which would put people at risk of the dams if you've heard 70,000 people were relocated due to emergencies, you'll feel the dam break so in a way it's like the seat of its own destruction creating a better infrastructure but with aims of transforming it, of dominating nature of taming it which bounces back so this whole idea of transforming the coastline also precarious housing towards formal housing which later on becomes as I said, extremely vulnerable to floods it's part of a loop that needs to be critically assessed because it's not lack of investment it's what the assumptions behind where did it go who gained from it and who didn't gain from it so I would say those are the basic questions that I want to deal with but I'm sorry that I couldn't I could get to the end of it but thank you my concern is that we are speaking we'll identify the problem but I don't have a clear picture of my head as to where to go from here what has to be done some of the things that I hear is there's all kinds of negotiations going on in Puerto Rico the finances have to be rearranged that's part of the problem and as long as this question remains who could have the most brilliant people in the world are planning for Puerto Rico but these questions have to be resolved in order for us to go forward that's my comment and I was wondering if you could help me with that okay well the short answer to your question is what should we do, everything everything the work that I've done a bit of work documenting starting to do the work of documenting and understanding the ways that the vacuum of government created an environment where Altamus Pion and sub-garden organizations have flourished so one of the things that I find interesting and important to understand is how these initiatives are proposing new ways of thinking the very questions of how we go forward or how we resolve things which is a very different vocabulary in a different scale and raises other questions to what let's say the governing elites of Puerto Rico and the United States might do or not do so in that regard I would say that anybody that actually wants to become involved in addressing any number of issues that are the totality of things can't find a way into that because it is involving every aspect of life from the west fundamental housing, education food, energy, etc now you're talking about the larger dynamics at play I think those are a lot more complicated and potentially a lot more frustrating which raises to me a question that I haven't resolved yet that I'm working on which is what is the relationship between these initiatives of self governance that's defined so many different ways and the mainstream political structures that is one of the I think a lucid question for me that I don't know if anyone else here wants to comment on that but I just think you would like to hear what you have to say about that because I think it's one of the most vexing questions related to your question yeah I would comment about that can't keep us used to say I extended time I think that an sort of opinion on your question and also on the part of your answer is that certainly in Puerto Rico we have seen sort of two systems of governance sort of emerge there is the official governance usually top-down structured by government etc and then there is the flourishing of bottom up initiatives about the self-governance occurring simultaneously and sort of riffing a little bit on Montrose initial statement one thing that has happened is that we have all at one point or another deemed the government and that top-down structure sort of incompetent and unable to sort of really manage and certainly that was my initially as to how things were operating but sadly I think that there is a lot of elements going on and it is that what apparently seems like an incompetence in fact is a very Machiavellian plan of invisibility in terms of decision-making the inability to have any sort of sense of transparency decisions that are being made on behalf of Puerto Rico lack of transparency as to any sort of clear policy or political drive with politics on behalf of the people so in fact what is happening is that there is a very very very fast distribution distribution of Puerto Rico in sort of a complicit sort of structure between the government of Puerto Rico and investors of the United States now what happens with that alternative strategy with the myriad of initiatives of autohestión is that they are lacking a unified sort of policy that is able to structure them as part of a sort of a larger vision of a future for Puerto Rico and I think that that idea of how we how are we able to articulate a vision as to that transformation that you were calling on about when Puerto Rico is so obviously certainly worth saving and Puerto Ricans are worth saving Puerto Rico what form does it take as an alternative paradigm to the one that we've been living and certainly all of the buttons of initiatives are very important but we are operating in the absence of that sort of logic we sort of feel it and sort of have a certain understanding and a certain set of values but it should be that there is still not an articulated vision where we can say we are building this piece of sort of this larger puzzle in terms of the face of the future and I think that that's something that's certainly desperately needed and I come to your question and I think part of their answer is this to put it simply you have to change policy this doesn't work you have to eliminate the German side tomorrow like there's something to have no real reason of existing and whether this is a political climate for or not to do it and I have my opinions that you have to change that you're going to find out that you're going to be walking into the same things no matter there's loopholes of ways to get out you have to consider changing the Stafford Act even if you have to fund the agency better you have to consider allowing the channel for all these private people from the diaspora and from all other ways that have been the right agenda to be a part of this recovery process of irrigating out of the debt and not choose the existing policy which is like well you know what we have our disposal just selling the entire quarry which is going to leave you in the same place that's what they're doing let's sell everything we have like it was a bankruptcy when there's really people that are moving out the same way that my colleague over here explained the the economical monster that would Puerto Rico or help Puerto Rico by doing it legally into this crisis there are a lot of people that would help and in the sense of the hurricane we saw you know my organization raised a million dollars in less than a month and we couldn't get into that we have to go around it is I won't be foolish and tell you that there's people bringing 72 billion dollars to pay the debt just to help Puerto Rico like they want to help Puerto Rico but there are ways and policies that definitely go to that and the one that we just cannot get into the brain of people is that no matter how economics or politics drive it, it's environmental the food, the hurricane the life situation it's all environmental I'm not saying that because our environment goes only but you have to quantify how much damage or how much we're putting people in peril by being non-environmental in our planning in Australia and we have to change policies there I know it's a frustrating effort because we're maybe not in the right time for those where they go to changes but you can't ignore that it just has to be I think it was mentioned a couple of times that there is a strong asymmetry between the relations of the US and Puerto Rico and I think that in changing those relations which are understood as also mentioned here the idea of a pre-existent condition which I think is a known truth that we heard about before the idea that it's a pre-existent that doesn't apply because it's far back and the reason that I started in the idea is to say there's a pre-existent condition that is still operating so it's not something that we can easily overwrite and I think it has to do with the question of history and education of both that body precisely about thought to mostly subject itself to the common demand so I think it's in a way to break the asymmetry that has to do with rebuild if there was a stronger body-positivity that will take up on the challenges more concrete and real which are our infrastructure and the sort of legal frameworks that are operating in the island and I think that is for me sort of the pretty good turning point for how that can emerge into different models that will take over coming from sort of governance or bottom up and so on until perhaps the larger superstructure technology then changes I wanted to add that there's going to be like amounts of money and dollars coming to Puerto Rico but there's like a report actually that is recent from the Center for Human Economy that shows that 90% of all the contracts have actually gone to firms in the United States so I think that we need as for instance be able to get some of those federal funds and the conversation right now is that there's not enough CDC's in Puerto Rico there might be not enough CDFIs that can apply to the scale that might be needed so there's a lot of organizations that are like smart organizations that have not applied perhaps for CDBG funds that need to learn about matching funds and so on so I think that capacity building is like a big thing and also like how we can get more nonprofits and people putting proposals together and I think that planners have a huge role there in community planning so I think that that's definitely a solution and I think that it was Andres that mentioned that with the Autohistion groups so the idea of maybe creating a cooperative so there's some of the conversations that are going now because Puerto Rico has a lot of cooperatives their system is huge so what about with like a cooperative all these smaller groups that they can access the funds so there's a lot of work organizing happening and there's also a lot of conversation about intermediaries how organizations here in the next day like Liz, like Rasa like Enterprise can actually like help to be able to put like this bigger in scale grants that will be inclusive of things like smaller groups maybe we can get micro grants and so on so those are some of the conversations that are happening right now so now we get the funding and capacity building I will I think that to answer your question straightforward I think that what we need to do we have already done it before and I think that in Puerto Rico and all over the Caribbean maybe yes you know because there are a lot of Puerto Rico like we we believe that the ocean ends at the beach okay that's the end of the ocean we are we see the ocean that's disconnecting us from other places and I think that has to change and I say that we don't this before because since the arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean one of the ways and obviously before that was the case one of the ways that we were able and people were able to survive was through smuggling and through communication with other islands in the Caribbean okay and so when Francis spoke about emotional infrastructure that really you know enlightened my day because what we've seen here is how infrastructure that are supposed to be dynamics in different grounds of life that bring people together that facilitate life that enhance production and so on and so forth what happens when infrastructure becomes an obstacle what happens when infrastructure instead of promoting a sense of belonging promotes a sense of solitude and so one of the things when Francis spoke about emotional infrastructure is this idea for example that the diaspora was able because of its emotional connection and the existing infrastructure that she referred to like the airplanes and what not like how we were able to connect and to help in Puerto Rico before the third war and so we need to connect with the Caribbean we need to look beyond shores in ways that you know what other people do like people smoke drugs and the drugs business is super successful in Puerto Rico because they ignore all that infrastructure that promotes solitude I'm not promoting like you know whatever but something that is done right now and if drug conglomerates and cartels are able to do it I think that if we put our political will into it it's something that can be done there are forces against it like we have 500 years of a systematic effort to separate the others of the Caribbean but we've always survived in part thanks to the infrastructural disobedience of our people I think that we need to accept who we are we are in a way smaller and people that refuse to be in long distance relationships you know what so Puerto Ricans and all people in the Caribbean have those emotional relationships be exclusively long distance so we need to connect in more concrete ways with the other people around us I feel that the diasporas here the big urban centers in the United States play a fundamental role because it's easier for me to connect with someone from Mar Buda from the Caribbean islands from Trinidad's label Brooklyn or in the Bronx that in Puerto Rico so I think that part of the solution and part of the smuggling goes through our neighborhoods and our organizing efforts here in the United States you mentioned the word refusal so I just want to say that my argument in the Indian island is that there's three modalities of refusal that are playing out one is I'm not going anywhere the second one is but so I think practices of memory are very important in sustaining any kind of future that Puerto Rico has not as an isolated island but an interconnected island not only to the Caribbean but also to make your locations in the United States and elsewhere the Puerto Ricans also outside of the United States I have also mobilized in support so but I have to say that there's another big problem we have to go into it now but there's another issue which has to do with the crisis of many narratives of coming together which is that a lot of our categories of coming together are in crisis and that's I think one part of it and the other part of it has to do with what you were mentioning about capacity building and drain in our working group on payable debt we've done some with Wancho and we've done some listening tours with activists and one of the things number one things that they told us that we're exhausted we cannot organize in our community and organize the nation and organize in a broader or a rarer scale so although this is a monster problem but it has many heads, power is not concentrated in one place so that's why I completely wanted underscore that anybody that wants to work on this can find a way to work on this there's multiple ways, from small scale medium scale, larger scale from the arts to building for this there is a very broad gamma so there's we shouldn't be overwhelmed by the complexity or the asymmetries and so forth but rather look at it that this is a complex problem with multiple points of entry that any everyone can participate I think that you said that because I was going to say the cards are stuck against in this game the federal government at this moment and the either government are not going to be the ones pushing forward the progressive agenda by a bit of pieces that we spoke about here so at the moment one of the things I see clearly is the need to build even more resistance at whatever scale one can find there or one cannot find but adding to what my colleagues have said I would play I would put a great emphasis on building the fusion of knowledge and that's one of the things my research pointed me to because there's so much knowledge to be built on the entire Korean region which is experiencing similar processes different similar dissimilar but if we go beyond this narrative of that colonialism left us we came to countries Dutch speaking, English speaking so on we can find a lot of information ways of dealing with problems at different scales that would be extremely useful so when I was doing my archival research it was completely hard for me to find all the information in one place and here it is our recurrent Brahma and the Korean one of the recurring Brahma so I would also focus on storing the knowledge making it knowledge known to us through different means printed names, the internet and whatever and it would be one of the things I would push forward knowing history more and be it small scale oral history or be it the meta narratives of history that we need to contest or endorse but this would be also for me a cultural project behind that needs to be started on different scales and there is such an amount of knowledge and know how that I am very optimistic that there is a lot of gain from there it's just that we need to also focus no matter what the federal administration is doing or what the island government is doing as practitioners, as scholars, our students as whatever our quest for knowledge, for sharing it for challenging it is central for building a different world to make all one step at a time I have no illusions on this being a huge transform transformation I would like to see but I do have trust in that by looking at this knowledge, by dividing it by sharing it we have the possibility of seeing all the spaces of hope which are vulnerable you know they're always going to be perfectable, we can always criticize that but I would bring knowledge and culture and history as one of our big allies it is a cultural battle also, it's a political battle an economic battle, an environmental battle but it's also dealing with history and culture and there's a lot there to fight for and it just needs us and others to be aware of it I'll take a couple I'm aware that you're saying that because as some we've been preparing our seminar, we've been trying to find just the ordinary maps to find the ordinary maps to describe what happened in Puerto Rico and they're really, really hard to find so just for example when Katrina hit we knew the levee failed the lower land board was the most damaged and the five other neighbors were more damaged we knew which buildings were most affected so I'm just curious, is there a narrative like that that you think is useful about Puerto Rico? Was there one population that was most affected? Was there one city that was most affected? Was it part of the north because of the direction? I'm just curious, because even today and your talks were all really fantastic and I really I really learned a lot about sort of what happened and what we've done but I'm just curious if there's some major narratives that you think would be useful in starting in starting that debate in comparing Puerto Rico to Houston, New Orleans etc because I don't think that's been I don't think that's been done especially in terms of there's some thoughts there if I didn't use my description as an argument I would call myself a map maker but I was too busy filling diesel tanks to make any maps I think that one of the things that and Puerto Rico's been in crisis it's been a year and some months but I would say that we are still in a crisis mode to address but it is important to be able to start 2019 sort of being able to put down some documentation some reflections on the documentation there is certainly something that is important to look at cost crisis and and Harvey and but I think that for us it is more important to look at Puerto Rico against Puerto Rico so there is sort of a mapping back a layering of those inherent the existing conditions and sort of where it was and there is certainly to look at the effect of Maria and sort of what happened to that but I think that the other one is establishing parameters and standards as to what it should be and maybe there is sort of a weird thing about about projective mapping the idea of if we had for example using some of the terms that I brought if we had a condition of sustainable mobility what would that map look like and be able to sort of have a shifting vision of a place as it was and certainly looking at history and mapping for our history and what happened to Ray before was the result of Maria but then projecting it towards the future maybe that's part of the link as to how we are able to start formulating a vision about that future that is needed just one last comment I think that with Maria we had a certain complacency with that sort that we had gone through hurricanes before and then there was Hugo and there was Georges and all this and all of us thought that somehow or another we were going to be able to manage since this is being recorded I won't use the term that I came right into my mind but no way this was something that was completely off the charts and the morning after we could not even imagine any sort of sense of planning that we could have done so yes we had some training how we did it and what it meant to be one month without electricity at that time or without water but certainly not enough so this is to a certain extent sort of new knowledge that we have to be able to construct through this experience I just wanted to say that I actually find comparisons within and across useful but Puerto Rico is not a city although it's a small place relatively speedy it's not a city and it also is although small, very diverse physically so you have mountains and you have coasts and you have islands that are not other islands in the archipelago therefore it would be difficult I mean it's possible because it's done by journalists in the sense of a journalist like the treaty of Puerto Rico almost like it was just a city it's one unit in fact it's an archipelago with seven, eight municipalities the condition of the rural area is completely different from the metropolitan area you also have coastal and mountain you have island and other islands therefore producing that type of narrative might be much harder although it can be done for certain strategic purposes or it needs to take that diversity into account but in more nuanced work it would have to do that it would have to take that fact that it's not a single city that although a relatively small place it is extremely diverse geographically and economically and racially and I think she was giving you a little you're going to dry your goose are you hearing yeah I think you should well I think what I'm telling you is a big key it's very different however one thing that happened two things here one one thing that happened was we weren't prepared but let me tell you we're not prepared now when the tropical storm came by and it was trending became hurricane it was coming I tell you we were setting up a makeshift shelter this is eight months after Maria you know like nobody's ready really and we have FEMA in there and part of the reason is we're a whole population rich people poor people I think rich people are a lot more ready because they have a lot more resources but I think in the mapping exercise that you want to do one thing that was ignored was because we were struck with that complacency of people were going to save us and we have all this life one thing that changed from Hugo to now is technology so we did have a lot of tools that did work and the fact that we're not prepared and that mapping will require an extensive digital system that it's not going to work but it has to be powered one of the first problems we had was like communication nobody knew where to bring things nobody knew how to map things you have to preload it in terms of our response and you have to set the parameters that will let you identify the particularities of the rural areas the mountains like that certainly it's going to have to have a deep digital indicator that is resilient with redundancy in communications there is a there is a group that is I don't know which media because I get emails on communication too but it's a group I think it's called open but it's just after they started to produce maps because it worked and the first one of the problems was that there was no base map and it was in part generated called searcher and so on so I think after they have been continued because they didn't receive any notifications so they are filling gaps at least as base map for things to be worked out they kind of think that can be of course there are so many others that have to do with the emotional whole map but there are so many things that they have documented since then which I think will be the whole map or conceptual maps I think the unifying team may be denied because when I was doing my research there what they were saying was clear to me I felt I was preaching in the desert it was like this cannot happen to us this is Haiti we are the member republic this is not for the people I looked for a drop of left, right and center and I never got one I think because Jordan was scared people believe in officials that's what reality showed us we are unprepared we thought this was not going to happen so this mapping of denial versus reality and also the denial for example of how the federal government treat what we were immediately that's a denial of a humanitarian emergency from throwing paper towels that's denial of a profound human crisis same with the government so I would map this act of denial versus reality and I would also map differences because they were rightly pointing at the differences so how different municipalities or entities or communities respond to the same problem that would be interesting for me it's hard to do but I think these two things diverse responses to the same problem in denial those could be leading lines to have a demographic in terms of housing I would say that where the worker can enter and also in the new region that's where more homes were affected so about 76% of homes and also in the coastal regions as well and I would also go into the poorest towns not necessarily in terms of population but those towns that already were hurting because they already had informal housing so for example the town of Comedie where the river La Plata is, all that area was flooded so there's already maps that have been done about some of these and in terms of comparisons I would say that at least in the case that we were looking at with about FEMA and I think that for advocacy that could be helpful as well to look into other areas in the United States because then you can see where the inequity exists and you can make the advocacy points of what happened in other circumstances so I find and comprises very useful Thank you for the presentation because being in your midst and hearing all that you went through brings it so closer to my reality than it would watching it on CDNN or just hearing about your meeting in the newspaper I'm doing research on infrastructural analysis looking at African-American one room school facilities and one of the things that brought me here to this conference today was that the topic of course a natural disaster and just sitting here and you say repeatedly the concepts of you know pre-existing conditions and the electrical company and not being prepared and it's the same in the past the future and you can project for the future my question is in terms of infrastructure how would you explain a cat pie in Houston same cat pie in Puerto Mica and the devastation is just absolutely phenomenal indifference in everything that you see or speak about and today I heard you say something about pre-existing conditions so going to Houston I was telling people I'm a Texan, you know I live in New York but I'm a Texan and when they were all upset about what was going on in Houston I immediately said you know Houston is going to be okay because we have three presidents from that state to living now seeing Bush and Bush they're living there I mean I already I knew that Houston was going to be okay even with that cat pie but when I heard that same cat pie in Puerto Rico I really shuttered because of the infrastructure now what is being done to look at we can be specific this lady over here said we can do a lot and a little but in terms of infrastructure my research looks at schools roofs windows and floors how would we begin to make sure that schools operate with the infrastructure that you have then and that you have now and how do you project it changing in the future that against the backdrop of disaster are we just having a day to keep the school or could we come up with something so let me see if there are other questions in the room for the last day of the panel yeah whatever we have our attendance yeah there was a lack of planning actually the plan that was done for emergency response it was about and it was a plan that was outdated so FEMA wasn't prepared so it didn't have the things that needed to respond even though he approved this plan so I think that planning in terms of emergency it wasn't there so that's something that you mentioned in terms of infrastructure that existed we had for example in terms of just electric compact so everything was outdated like 50 years ago when investments were made 80% of the cables just fell down so again it was having the lack of investments for a very long time in terms of the schools that's an interesting piece because the governor just closed 300 schools and the majority in rural areas so in terms of the whole educational system it being restructured is now what's going to happen with these vacuum buildings other people have been doing community resilience centers because they can put like power on them they can put cisterns and being ready for another emergency other people have been thanking it for housing some people have people already have been squatting for a while in schools so we have to figure out what to do with those schools so that's like one piece of it and in terms of the education education is being completely dismantled so there's a lot of thoughts to the University of Puerto Rico and to schools themselves so that seems like another man named disaster I don't know what is the solution in terms of education what the governor already seen is like and just like the privatization of the educational system so it has been kind of like a movement that we have seen in many many older cities so I don't have an answer, not anybody does I just wanted to mention that piece of education I think that the government what has been the real here again in terms of education of schools in Puerto Rico like what the hurricane didn't take with it the government has done it so I think that in terms of infrastructure the real problem there is evidently the policies and the closing of schools and so on and so forth who are now the hurricane I think that the government has decided that they were going to do a new grid over vehicles that could handle cat 4's maybe cat 5's and then put some on the ground and put rural utility standards that would hold and it would be like a piece from 1960 another from 1970 most rural places in Puerto Rico that haven't somewhat changed it it was just really crappy grid but when they presented these options the electric company wants to have to do it themselves not an outside company from the United States or even another Puerto Rico but they're not trusted by anybody who's funding because they're not known for their money management but in the schools in Mieca's for example we see what is transferable to all that you would think you would think they would go to the schools and smoke them up and make them resilient and all that that's just not the case like Puerto Rico has to revisit the entire grid and make it sustainable to categories and the federal government should pay for it if they're smart because if not they're going to be rebuilding it all the time and that's why I mean the staff for them has to bend a little bit so you don't have to find these weird sources of money to face a problem that you know you're going to have and then you have to apply it to the schools in Mieca's in when Pearl came we were outfitting the school as a secondary shelter because they weren't ready and the school wasn't ready going back to the U.S. citizens as an infrastructure of travel and mobility what about Puerto Rico is all being one of the places that most of the population votes like 80% I think but then with the new diaspora that's been happening in Florida and the election has just happened because that's a really prosaic but very evident way of going about some of the policy problems so what is the voting rate of the new diasporas getting to Florida and some places like that and taking advantage of that U.S. citizenship infrastructure to move to places and change those policies through the systems that already exist I was before it actually I scratched all that part of my paper but I think someone used to say I just want to say that a brief answer to your prior question is that there's not going to be what you're asking is there going to be a systemic rebuilding of Puerto Rico according to what we have learned no what there's going to be is a good old Marxist concept that's Iwali called Minal there's going to be an unequal process of rebuilding depending on the resources networks and other capabilities of different parts I think that's what's been under current conditions if there was other kinds of political developments other things might happen to leave a desk question one or the other actually I've been following the Florida situation there's a lot of hope I think the Florida situation is also the Iwali calling Minal you don't have the same levels of voting anywhere Puerto Ricans in the U.S. and you have Puerto Rico because in Puerto Rico your job may depend on your vote it's a whole different reality nothing to do with citizenship or any of that so the other thing though is that particularly Florida I think that's a big question Mark I see reasons to be optimistic and pessimistic about the future of Florida, Puerto Ricans, politically on the optimistic side we've seen things in Florida happen as a result of Hurricane Maria settlement that we hadn't seen before there was a protest people protested in Rosario when you went to Cassini and called them Bende Patria, people are suffering that kind of stuff you did not normally see in Florida but on the other hand Florida is a place and I lived there for 7 years it's a place where neoliberalism is the legal framework is dominant ideology internalized you have to pull yourself up from the bootstrap the government is not responsible for you in that regard I think that in the long term Puerto Ricans will diversify politically the majority may still be practically progressive it's not going to be a block the way that some people would like it to be or behave as I think the opportunity that you're identifying is the only thing that's going to get some policy change here in Villegas we didn't get power so all these people got together voices were asked in Villegas and called 32 people in Congress and Senate every day and the Army Corps engineer showed up that's not the way it should work but in terms of the policies why should we get benefit that we have people calling over Hurricane Maria I mean I'm glad we got it and we were being abandoned so it's timely and I cannot feel that it's okay because everybody looks kind of being offended to but in terms of what you're saying there is a strong not only the Puerto Ricans or the people who care about Puerto Rico still have Maria in their minds to the elections and to the that are going to be coming up and to the decision making so I would make a major push to change some of these policies to get some of these resources because it's going to affect the elections if we keep clear into what's needed we could keep on infrastructure and improvement and education and all these things very clearly very single trick pony there I think you do have the power with the people who moved to Puerto Rico from to the states and with the people in the states that remembered Puerto Rico but you need a massive organizational I mean think about Villegas as an example massive investment you would need a massive political investment or a great movie many levels in order to I'll just say thanks I don't want to just do that but first of all thank you everybody for the amazing conversation but I just want to very quickly you don't have nobody any sense of this but maybe you have some thoughts you attempted some of the thoughts that Jacob made at the beginning you all just gave us the name of the little script in one way or the other including the Q&A and to my mind you showed us what is not so much exceptional about this particular case but what's typical about it and not just those hurricanes but for example Detroit we mentioned Flint sites of dispossession they usually map onto some kind of either colonial or other sort of cartography indocolonial indocolonial and what seems to be new maybe is this moment of emergency the sort of declaration that all bets are off and most particularly the way that this works on suspending exactly the processes you just described it is heartening to hear more about the sort of self governing processes and so on but particularly the way the democratic institutions are suspended in order for this other restructuring to happen seems to be a plan so in a way I guess one of the things that you've confirmed for me and maybe you do some closing thoughts is that not only is the plan not to have a plan but the point of that is to attack directly those institutions and those popular democracy even formal democracy that may get in the way of the bankers and so on so at one level yes it may be about who's running the show that this is maybe a more infrastructural element that they're operating system learning in the background that in a sense drive the whole project anticipate climate change anticipate the economic restructuring and plan accordingly so I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that you don't have to I'll add another sort of lesson circle your role title and perhaps the expectations of the conversation certainly there's the issue of the urgency that you mentioned and the other one which is not to abuse of Rosalind Krauss but it's the idea of infrastructure as an expanded field that the common thought of infrastructure as the hard very very very technical underpinnings of the built environment to hear the idea of emotional infrastructure to to hear about history as infrastructure that sort of supports economic systems that sort of underpin the trajectory of how certain things how we can understand how certain things happen over time I think that all of those are maybe my own public spaces infrastructure are all sort of enriching the conversation making it certainly much more complex than how you how you fix grids and how you establish capacities for the future but something that is much more much richer much more complex much more wicked as a guardian not in terms of a problem that we have to confront and certainly I think it's something it's a benefit of having been here and being able to hear all of those sort of added complexities to our own sort of making it a complex home yeah but we'd like to thank you for bringing us I think part of it is what you said this movement that takes the opportunity that Maria brought to highlight these typical situations and to push for change the more we all do it in all the different ways we have a short window very short window