It is an exciting day for all of us. We have Javier Vergara Petrescu from Ciudad Interjante joining us from Santiago de Chile. And this is the last in this series of global lectures that are intended to probe and discover and celebrate the diversity of urban design practice in the globe and sort of generate a substantive discussion among students, faculty around the world. And we have students and faculty joining us from many institutions this morning to talk about urban design and to understand new methods, practices, places for its further advancement and discovery. So Ciudad Interjante engages tactical interventions across Latin America and Europe. His statement, collaborate, try and share which is a beautifully welcome and opening statement that somehow defies the sort of urban design of late capitalism and the sort of master plan if you will as a frame really conveys the significance of public participation beyond being a sort of a check mark in a box or a green light animating and just a step in a linear design process but he really foregrounds and centers public participation as the project itself. So this is just a thrilling and closing lecture for us because it's really pulling people in communities back to the center and really giving us a kind of a global lens and our lecturers have been describing interventions and strategies and tactics from places as diverse as Mumbai to Amir's Fort to Spain to Barcelona and points around the globe. And so we're truly excited to hear from you Javier and welcome to the lecture series and thank you for joining us. And by way of just a reminder, this lecture is being recorded and so by for academic purposes only and I see tall on the screen and so on behalf of the entire faculty, welcome and you see David Smiley as well who will moderate your question and answers toward the end of the lecture. So welcome all, thank you again, David and Tal for your partnership and to all the Columbia faculty for joining and Javier over to you, bienvenidos. Thank you so much, Kate. Muchas gracias. I hope you can hear me well. Great. So I'm very excited of participating on this online lecture series. Thank you so much for the invitation. I hope we can have an interesting conversation. I will share with you some thoughts today from Santiago de Chile. I'm connected very south at this point. So I will start. If you please let me know someone with the open mic if the screen is shared in the right way. No, can you try to share it again? Yeah, actually I'm gonna do it right now. So I'm gonna start sharing and I'm gonna put in full screen to present you. That's working great, thanks. Super and I'm gonna, okay, so I'm gonna start and again, thank you, Kate. Thank you, Tal, for all the organization. Thank you, David, everybody. So I will be very, very happy. I'm just gonna put like some kind of like timer here so I can have a little idea of the timing. So well, first I would like to introduce myself. So for you guys that haven't heard about us, I'm, first of all, I'm Javier Vergara Petrescu. The first thing I want to tell you is a little bit about the context of what I do, who I am. So you would say like, who is this guy talking today from Chile? Well, maybe some of you have been here in South America for you that you guys haven't been here. I'm from the capital city of Santiago de Chile and I'm an architect. I study architecture at the school of the Catolica University. Maybe some of you guys know the work of some of our, like architects from the school as the Britzker Prize Alejandra Ravena, who was one of the mentors of my formation as an architect. And I was very, very much interested from the very beginning when I started studying architecture on the topic of cities. And that's why when I was actually very early in the career, I decided to have an experience of like exchanging my classes.  And I was very much like taking on the life and the excitement of this like streetscapes and this like urban life that the city's had. So very early in my career, I decided to go back to Santiago and started with some of my colleagues. Our first startup, I will say, with one of my classmates, David Asael. So we started very early in 2005, 2006, a small startup that was called Art Daily that then start growing and it became like a very big, like online side of architecture that is in multiple languages. But as I said early, I was very much interested in cities. So back in 2008, I decided to go and do some expertise on cities. So I moved to London. So I did my masters in London School of Economics on city design and social sciences, trying to understand why cities were so much challenged by multiple issues that were more regarded into social challenges like climate challenges. And that was a way for me to understand beyond the issue of form. And this was more like an approach to like the social issues that shapes the city and the political decisions that are behind the cities that we have or we shape. So after that experience in London, learning those approaches, I moved to New York, actually where eventually most of you are at this point. I was living in New York after my masters and this was around, maybe you will remember like this, this was like nearly 10 years ago, but it was like the kind of like the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. So imagine that I was like a young student that was like starting this like different ideas, like entrepreneurship, like approaches to cities, but also wanting to create something new. And well, it was very difficult actually after my masters and then moving to New York to start something in the middle of this crisis. So I decided to start something from scratch again and I founded Ciudad Emergente in the city of New York, actually when I was like based in the city and I tried to connect like networks that I had in Santiago, in London, in the US. So we started like this idea very back in 2011, like connecting the dots in different cities where they had some like networks. So what was happening back in 2011? Well, maybe many of you eventually were like, well, much younger, right? In my case, like I was very like taken by all the social unrest that was like being seen, you know, in the Northern Africa, also in the New York, like all the movement of Occupy Wall Street was very active at that point. And also in Chile, we were seeing a series of like protests like driven by students that were demanding a change in the education system and in the political system that led actually not for nothing to the time magazine that year to name the protester as the person of the year. So that was very fundamental, I will say in the approach that we took at Ciudad Emergente. So why all these things were happening at that point in 2011 and that I would say kind of very similar to what we are seeing 10 years after. And of course we don't know all the reasons but we can see certain trends that are very much important to be considered, for example, more than half of the people of this planet live in cities but these cities only use like a very little amount of surface, like because we are living in a dense area like only 3% of the surface of the yard is used by cities but these cities are like responsible for multiple issues like for instance like the levels of CO2 emissions or more than 70% of emissions are produced in cities and these places are places of like multiple challenges more than 25% of urban settlements are informal settlements. So this like map that I show you, you might have seen it it's like the genie index that measures like inequality and income and the darker the countries are the more unequal they are. So for example, South America ranks very much similar to like countries in South Africa or in the Northern Africa and they are clear the color is like it's more equal to distribution of wealth and that the inequality in income has been also been very much aggravated by the COVID pandemic during this like last year or so. So why this social unrest is so like eventually like serious it's because it's been also affected by multiple other issues like this graphic that I'm sure that eventually you have seen it. It's like also the illustration of like the increasing temperatures that we have seen in the last like nearly like 200 years and the closest we are like today like the most like complex this issue has been for cities. So having said that, what do we do at Ciudad Emerjente? What is our approach to this context? So first I want to say that Ciudad Emerjente is a city lab that we want to like actually seek how we can build more livable cities through collective actions. That's our main purpose, how we can seek, how we can collectively build more livable cities. And this idea of building cities collectively we have been applying it in different countries in the last 10 years. I mentioned before that we started in New York but most of our work has been in Chile and other countries of South, Central and also North America. We have done other things in other continents but mostly in the Americas. And what we are driven is like how we can build cities collectively by bridging like trying to bridge the time of people and the time of cities. This is like an exercise that I love to do when I do like online or lectures in general. And it's like to ask you a question, maybe you can respond on the chat by the side here about like how much time do you think that a human project takes to happen? For example, if you want to create a human being, how much time does it take? Maybe you can respond here on the chat, we can discuss it later. So again, I'm gonna ask the question, how much time do you think that it take us to create a human project? Some people will say like what is this guy talking about? But I want to compare it to cities like time. So for example, if we think about humans, we know that it takes us like nine months to create a human being, right? It's like nine months that we have like this like baby coming in this belly and then after nine months we have a human living in this planet. But when we talk about cities, how much time do you guys think that it takes to create an urban project? Like if a human takes nine months, how much it takes an urban project like a city project? And of course that's very relative. It depends on the project that we're talking about. It depends if it's, we're talking about a park, if we're talking about like a big infrastructure, but I'm just putting like an example of like an urban park here in the city of Santiago and just the design of the project and the coordination of all the technical aspects of the project, at least take this project in Santiago more than nine years, 10 years to be finally built on its first phase. This is a project, it's a floating park in the south side of the city. So the fact that the time of people and the time of cities are so different was something that triggered our interest into the American to do something that can bring back people to be more protagonist of the city making process. So at least from our perspective, there is a way to start like reaching the gap between the time of people and the time of cities through actions that can be understood as like prototypes that can be seen as like actions too or a way or a path to start talking about people oriented cities, like cities that put on the center the capabilities of people, not just like at the last stage of the urban design process, but at the very beginning of the urban design process. If I would have more time in this lecture today, I would love to talk to you about theories of justice that connects very much to this approach of like putting people first and this is very much based on theories of capabilities approach. When we see, for example, what this Nobel Prize in economics like Amartya Sen talks regarding like how to understand development, he actually states that development is not just the achievement of like wealth in terms of capital wealth or like economic resources, but it's also about the human development that we can achieve. Like the more developed a society or the more developed a city is also connected to how able are people to achieve the life that they have reasons to value. This is something very much connected to theories of justice and the thinking behind like for example, United Nations development human development approach or the agenda 2030. So this is just a context for you to understand that this concept that might be kind of like super theoretical has a very, I will say like practical understanding. If you see these people doing this action taking like some paints and like painting a crosswalk it's a very illustrative example of how people can have the tools to live their life that they have reason to value. In this example, like these people had a reason to paint a crosswalk in the middle of this neighborhood because they felt unsafe, okay? But they also felt that they have the tools and the capabilities to change that reality. And that's very much connected to the idea of human development. Like if you have the capabilities and you have the tools to tackle the barriers or the idea, the barriers that blocks you to live the life that you have reason to value then we're talking about human development, okay? So this idea is very much grounded on the base of the method that I'm gonna talk to you today which is about like prototyping and tactical urbanism, okay? This idea is about like building actions collectively from the very beginning of the urban design process and this methodology is about not only building collectively but also measuring what we do in order to learn about these methods in order to learn about these prototypes so we can influence decision-making processes, okay? In order to share the learning lessons so we can inspire more people to change our reality. So what is tactical urbanism? That is very much connected to this methodology. Tactical urbanism as we understand is a way of prototyping the city through short-term actions that can influence or can it help to advance on long-term changes, okay? This concept I'm gonna be repeating all over the rest of the presentation through some examples. So this idea of tactical urbanism started years like decades ago actually in Europe or the Netherlands we can see some examples of like how these communities and people were doing short-term actions to try to shape their city. This is like Amsterdam around 1970s doing actions of like tactical bike lanes demanding a change collectively through a protest eventually but trying to like create and raise awareness on the need of changing their city. This was in the middle of the oil crisis of the 70s. So when you go today to this like cities and you see the type of infrastructure that they have the type of cityscape that they have, it was not free. I mean, someone needed to wake up and start like demanding a change, okay? So this is something that happened years and decades ago in the Netherlands, but also has happened in US cities too.  You know, nearly 10 years ago with the transformation of the streets of the city, you know with the administration of Bloomberg mayor and the Janet Sadiq Khan commissioner of transportation, right? Where using these methods of tactical urbanism they start changing the city. And also that methodology has been applied in Chile and Latin American cities and we have been very active on that line. These are examples of urban prototypes trying to transform pavement into plazas. These are like examples that we did like years ago but it's just to show you that this method is not only applied in Europe or Northern America but also like in different cities of South America. This is a pilot that we call the Ocuplazas. It's like an occupation of a pavement to be transformed into a plaza for people. And the interesting thing about these pilots is that decision makers have been supported the continuity of these pilots into more permanent projects and has been inspiring local authorities to create long-term lasting projects. This example that this graphic that I'm showing you in the screen was designed by like Mike Liedon from Street Plans Collaborative. I maybe some of you have seen this but it's a very simple graphic that shows you that the type of tactical urbanism that we can see it's very, I would say like diverse. In the vertical axis of the graphic you can see the type of tacticians that can apply these methods. And on the horizontal axis, you can see like how sanction or unsanction this like methods can be. So there's a wide range of different like actions. So it can be done by artists, by like nonprofits, by city agencies, but it can also be done in a very like unsanctioned way or hybrid or also very legal. So if you wanna know more about these cases there's a lot of information in the internet. But we published together with Street Plans Collaborative like nearly like eight years ago like an online book that it's available in the internet of course with Latin American case studies if you want to take a look at it I will be happy to show you more examples. But in a nutshell the approach that these actions have it's about implementing short-term actions in public spaces that can be light, quick and cheap. And for example, like I don't know tactical bike lanes expansion of like sidewalks creating like pavement to blast as pilots but the important thing about this short-term action is that they need to be measured with tools that can help you to understand the impact of this action. So tools that can help you to measure the situation of a project before an intervention during an intervention and of course after the implementation. This is very important because this at least from our perspective it's the only way that you can leverage the evidence that can show you how good or bad the performance of this action was, okay? So this simple graphic is very relevant for the methodology that we're talking about. And the second thing that I want to do now from the rest of the presentation is to show you some examples of how these methods can be applied to tackle urban challenges, okay? So I will share you some experiences from Ciudad Emerjente on how tactical urbanism can be applied on different issues. For instance, I will start giving you some examples of how through community building we can achieve climate goals. And I will show you a few examples in Latin American context in order to give you an idea of the relevance of the topic I just want to show you this like quote from Gus Spiff from the World Resource Institute and he said this very interesting thing. He says like we scientists don't know how to do that and I'm gonna read this, but he said like I used to think that the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse or climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems, but I was wrong. The top environmental problem are selfishness, greed and apathy. And to deal with those, we need like sort of a spiritual or cultural transformation. And scientists like environmental scientists don't know how to do that. Like how we can like tackle those like issues of lack of trust, lack of like collaboration in a context, at least in Latin America where very little people trust each other. So this is very relevant. I don't know in the case of the US. Well, maybe actually we can see here in the graphic but this is the level of like interpersonal trust that countries have. Sorry that the slide is in Spanish but it's a very simple graphic to read. This is like, for example, the levels of interpersonal trust in Chile where only 12% of people trust someone that is not from their close circle of friends or family. In Brazil it's even lower but it's just for you to have an idea that the levels of trust in this society is that we are based, are very little. So how do we tackle like the problems of climate change or sustainable cities if we don't interact with other people? So I'm gonna give you an example of a case of a city called Antofagasta. This is in the north of Chile. It's a city that is like very close to Bolivia and Peru, north of Chile. And one of the main problems that we were faced when we went to the city of Antofagasta was the problem of landfill, like illegal landfills and dumpsters all around the outskirts of the city and also in the city center. This is a big landfill, just for you to know. Antofagasta is, maybe you will not believe this but it's the wealthiest city of Chile with a GDP similar to London or Melbourne like around like $40,000 per capita, the GDP per capita. So how come like a city that is so wealthy from a, let's say economic point of view can look like this, right? So this is just for you to start like, or thinking about how we measure development again, right? Are we measuring with the right indicators or not? So these are images of the city of Antofagasta and the landscapes of the city and the tactical method that we applied to try to like face this problem of this environmental problem was through selecting multiple sites of the city where we can pilot short-term actions that can help us to shape a long-term positive change in the city. So the first thing that we start doing was like with a very simple, very light, very quick and cheap method, we start bringing people to the streets to share a meal, okay? Just as simple as that, as a potluck, okay? Like let's bring people together. We don't need much resources. We only need like a table, some chairs and let's start like discussing with the community how we can together try to solve this problem or what are the real problems of the community? So through something very simple as like eating and sharing a meal with your neighbors, I'm gonna just read this like quote, I'm gonna translate it in Spanish, but this is a person who participated on this like urban potlucks that we were doing in the city and she was saying like this encounter of the urban potluck has made me feel something that this country that has been shaped it through individualism and competitiveness like challenging each other has made us forget which is the fact that we live in a neighborhood and we are able to say hello to each other. This quote, which is like super simple but it gives you an idea of how important the issue of getting to know each other is so relevant in this action. So after this first ideas of gathering people through this potlucks, we start measuring that people trust each other more. Actually more than 70% of people trusted more than neighbors after sharing a simple meal. So that was very key to go a step further. Once we know each other, it's much like likely that you will engage on a process of environmental alleviation or an environmental strategy. This is a group of neighbors with students from the city of Antofalasta that were participating on a cleaning of a site that was a big landfill. So together with the community, together with the municipality, together with companies of the city of Antofalasta, we started cleaning and making people feel relevant actors and protagonists of the process. Not just like passive receivers of a benefit but instead of that active agents of change, okay? So these are like just for you to have an idea of some photographs of like the neighbors that were participating on the process of recovery and after this like first cleaning actions, there were celebrations about like the achievement of the cleaning site, but that was not the end of the story. Like after you had like the site clean, there was something to do about it because if you don't activate those spaces, they quickly become again landfills and illegal dumpsters. So there was a process of activating the area through tactical urbanism, giving different uses to this former landfill. So because these methods are so like, like we can chip to implement, you can try different things. So the interesting thing about this Oculplasa, again, it's an occupation of abandoned area into like an active plaza. We tried multiple uses, for example, games for kids like food markets. We tried like different activities for leisure, for the community. All of these were like prototypes that were measured in order to know how much the community value these uses. So we didn't know what this landfill would become. We were just trying different options, okay? So when you measure this, then you start like having a better idea, a better sense of what could be the next step in investment. So after we pilot all these like multiple uses on the landfill, we were able to invest much more resources in a more accurate use of the public space. And this became like, this became sorry, a plaza, an active plaza that collect all the data that was leveraged through the pilot, the tactical urbanism project. So that's at least how we understand how a short-term action can shape a long-term change, in this case, in the cityscape of the neighborhood, okay? It's just like one simple example, but how do we sustain these ideas, not only through urban design but through like, for example, decision-making, okay? I'm gonna show you another example. This in a city, it's a different city, it's called Valparaiso. It's a city that has a very like attractive postcard of like in 1800 South American city that was shaped through like, you know, the development of like the port of the city of Valparaiso. But Valparaiso has also a similar postcard of Antohogasta in terms of pollution, in terms of like illegal landfills and like illegal dumpsters. So this example was actually shaped in 2013 and what we did was like, try to tackle the problem of like trash and dumpsters through a tactical campaign on recycling in a city that didn't have any institutional strategy for waste management. So the method was very actually simple. We started like prototyping some like simple, like, you know, points for recycling, even though in the city there were no, as I said, institutional framework for doing this. But the interesting thing is that we tried out a campaign that for 30 days, allow us to collect more than 12,000 plastic bottles. So this was interesting because it was not that the city couldn't do it because there were a lot of interest in people to recycle, even though there were no this method. So with this first amount of like bottles that we collect, we designed an urban intervention that was aimed to raise awareness in the community about the waste that was produced in the city. So, oh, I don't know what happened with this photo. So this was like a project called the Ocuplasa, like the recycling of Ocuplasa. This was actually a prey that was, as I said, with the aim of raising awareness in the community. This photograph actually, we didn't take it. It was something that someone that sent us a photo like a month after of the project and we found it super cool. We said, oh, cool. We will post it on our website. A few months after that, the Museum of Modern Art, the MoMA, contacted us and told us, hey, to emergent, we will like to publish you on this exhibition that we'll have in the museum. So it was kind of like from a very superficial point of view that sometimes architect we have. It was kind of like exciting for us, like, oh, we're gonna be published at the MoMA, but moreover, the important thing of this project was not that, was that the pilot of this plaza allowed us to connect the dots between like emerging recyclers in the city with community leaders. So this guy that is in the photograph is called Don Pedro. So this guy, Don Pedro was a community-based recycler and he got to know Benjamin, who is this guy who was a community leader that helped us to put this like recycling points in his neighborhood. So these people got to know each other through the tactical project. They didn't know each other and after the intervention, even though intervention was like dismantle, these guys started to have a relationship and they kept on recycling after the project. So this is more like an intangible effect of a project. It's not related to like a physical change as in the example of Antofagasta where the short-term change is like an actual urban design change on the neighborhood, but this is another kind of impact. It's more intangible. It's like community bonds, community connections and on top of that, what is interesting of this case is that during the activity that we were having, we invited people to sign up a petition to legislate on the use of plastic on this city. This break was done in 2013. So we collect a lot of signatures, a lot of like support from people that wanted to reduce the use of plastic in Chile. So with all this like support from communities and people who were participating on the pilot, we sent all that evidence to the parliament so there were evidences for the legislation of the Recycling Law of Chile that was passed in 2016, three years after the project, okay? So I will not say, I would like to you if I will tell you that the Recycling Law in Chile was approved because of our project support. No, not at all. But it was just like one effort on top of many other efforts that helped to create a political change like a legislation change in the country that it's called the, today it's called like the law that extend the responsibility to the producer of this like waste. So again, this is actually another way of understanding tactical urbanism, short-term actions that can help to change long-term changes in this case, like through policy-making, okay? So these two examples are using the same idea. Urban prototyping, it's like understand as like short-term actions that can help us to advance some long-term changes and just to like go on with examples and then this is gonna be like part of the last part of the presentation, it's about sharing some experiences on how tactical urbanism can be applied to tackle sustainable mobility challenges. This is again, the city of Santiago where I'm calling you, where I'm actually presenting now. And just for you to have an idea, Santiago is a very car-oriented city, like unfortunately like most of the priorities on mobility has been like put on making very easy people to drive by cars. And sadly, the city has been declared as saturated zone because of the high levels of particulated material, the number like the 2.5, which is the most dangerous one. So this project that I'm gonna show you, it's about climate change, but through an approach of changing habits of people, okay? It's like how we can tackle climate change by creating changes of habits in people and what kind of changes it's about like the mobility habits that we have. Sadly, like of course, there's a big inequality in the use of streetscapes. Even in the pandemic times, like we have seen how much space sometimes cars use and like how little space there is for people to use the city scape, the streetscape. So this example of urban prototyping was done in a very specific neighborhood in the city of Santiago. And what we did was trying to change the streetscape of a very, I would say a very like a common street in the city. The photograph that you're seeing on your screen is an avenue that it could be any other avenue of the city of Santiago. See for example, seven lanes and the seven lanes are for cars, okay? So what we did is was try to create a shared street project through the implementation of a method that was creating a city, sorry, a street that was invited, inviting everyone to use it, not only cars but also bikers, pedestrians, like any other like transportation mode, okay? So we deleted all the boundaries between like cars and bicycles. So we tried to calm the traffic through this shared street pilot that was applied for a few days actually. And the interesting thing about this method is that of course it was not an anti-car approach. It was more like a pro people approach, okay? So people could walk, there were actually like different uses and also different tools to measure what was the impact of sharing the street. So these graphs that I'm showing you are sensors that can measure the quality of air in the pilot area. And during the pilot project, we saw a reduction on nine times on CO2 emissions on that specific point, nine times reductions of CO2 emissions. Of course, like it was because there were less cars but sometimes when you have the data, it's much more clear for everybody what is the next step to do. So the municipality of Santiago with this information with the reduction of CO2 emissions and the number of cyclists that were circulating on the street, they decided to create a one kilometer bike lane connector on this neighborhood. Someone would say, well, one kilometer is not very much. Yeah, it's true. But when you use that kilometer to connect other existing bike lanes, that's very relevant because we saw that the project before the project, there were around 800 cyclists riding their bicycles in the area before the project, okay? With the construction of this one kilometer of bike lane connectors, the demand of cyclists increased in more than 500%. Today, actually there are more than 4,500 cyclists riding their bicycles in the same area because there is an infrastructure that invites them to use this area. So again, a short term action that with the data that is collected help you to pave or to advance on a long-term change. In this case, a change of habit in how we move in the city. And just to finish the examples on this case, I will show you this case in the city of Panama. This is Panama City and it's a project that we did with the IEDB with the Danish, well, international firm, GEL and the University of Panama and a collective art group called Via Plural in the city center of the Panama City. And it was about trying to balance again the space for cars and the space for people in a city that had a lot of opportunities to create more human center cities. So the pilot project in Panama City was very much similar to the one that I showed you in Santiago. We used different collaborators from the local neighborhood that we were working at with the municipality, with the university. And this was the city, the area in Panama City center before the project. This is after or during the project. As you can see, like again, it's not like anti-cars approach but it's more like pro people. So we expand the space for people to invite everybody to use the streetscape. Like kids invited to use the city like elder people invited to use the city. And again, we measure the impact of this activity is super relevant to apply methods to collect opinions, to collect quantitative and qualitative data. For example, we knew that more than 70% of the people considered that the pilot project was good for the city and more than 45% considered that the tactical action brought more security to the area because they were, as you have heard, like the concept of eyes on the street, you know? Like this Jane Jacobs idea of like the more people are on the streets, the safer it feels. So it was also a measure on that point. And we know at this point that the municipality of Panama has kept the transformation of the city because they saw the benefit of it. So that's again, the same idea, short-term actions for long-term changes. Just to sum up and rub up some final thoughts on urban prototyping and tactical urbanism. I would like to just like underscore some ideas. I would love to show you more examples and trigger more conversation, but the good news is that there's a lot of information online. Just recently, a few weeks ago, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs included Ciudad Emergenti among best practices on how to localize SDGs. So if you go to this link that I'm sharing you on screen, you can find a lot of these examples on the website of the United Nations, but also on our website, there's a lot of more info. And just on a concept note, this idea of urban prototyping and tactical urbanism, it's a way to understand cities as an incremental process. So you can start thinking that you can trigger a temporary intervention through tactical urbanism, building it collectively, collecting the data and learning from the pilots in order to pass to a second state that can be a broader investment with less uncertainty for a permanent or semi-permanent design and the information or the impact that you can achieve through that second stage can help you to go towards another stage of ambitious which could be like influencing urban policy, like scaling up and adapting your learning lessons through, as I said, like an incremental process. So this is the first insight that I would like to share you. These methods can be incremental gains, okay? On another note, well, these images are more or less the same. And on another note, it's important to underscore what is tactical urbanism about and what is not, okay? So what it is, I already repeated a lot, it's this like short-term actions that can help you to shape a long-term process. It also is very important to say that this is complementary to other forms of city making. It's not replacing and it's not instead of urban planning or urban design. It's part of a complementary toolkit that you guys can think about, okay? So it's not replacing, it's complementing these other approaches, okay? Urban planning, the city planning and territory planning are super relevant and they're very powerful when you complement it with this method. And also tactical urbanism is a very interesting way to put people first because you can invite them to do very simple and fun things. Like, you know, getting together on a public space to have a meal, it's cool. It's actually, it's very like yummy. And I think it's a very creative way of, you know, start thinking about cities and urban planning in a more engaging way. So that is very important. What is not tactical urbanism? What is not, it's not a magic wand to solve all problems in the city. Sometimes like mayors or decision makers see this as a very attractive tool but it's not gonna solve all the problems of a neighborhood or a city. They are not just temporary interventions. Their impacts need to be measured in order to generate change. And there's not a right way to do tactical urbanism. As I show you in the graph of street plans collaborative, there are multiple ways to do this method, okay? You have to find what works for you in your context. So some tips for you guys, if you are interested in doing this kind of actions, it's very important to understand what you're trying to impact and measure it. So what is the issue? How, what is the questions that you want to respond? How can you measure it? Okay, that's very important. Also measure your success on what you learn, not what you achieve. It's very important to see this as a learning process. You have to look for partners who can share your vision. I mentioned some projects and most of them were never done only by student emergenti. We collaborate with multiple stakeholders. So these actions are very powerful to do them with like different partners. You have also to communicate what you're going to do and what you are not going to do because there's a lot of expectations sometimes with this method. So it's very relevant to be clear on that. Also, it's very key to develop a narrative, like mix your data with a story or the opinions that you gather, like create a story behind this processes, okay? And make it attractive, but don't make it about how it looks. It's important to use the power of data combined with the power of this physical changes, okay? And also think ahead how long is intervention going to last? It's gonna be a few days, it's gonna be a few months, a few years and who is responsible afterwards, okay? Just to like a final conclusion, at least this is something that we shared a lot in student emergenti team members is that what history has demonstrated us is that you need a small group of people who can do things differently. Like let's think about like urban innovators or sometimes we are like called as crazy people, but this like group of people that can demonstrate that things can done differently and when their ideas become the mainstream, this is like when changes start to happen really fast. So wherever you are like eventually working next year or engage on even it is academia or public sector or private sector or a startup, like let's give us the permission to do changes. Like that's like a very relevant thing to do. So that's what I had to share with you today. I'm gonna start sharing. I hope you heard what I said because sometimes the internet is not like the best. So I'm just gonna handle now to David. I think David's gonna do some questions. Okay, questions and answers. Hello and thank you so much. That was amazing. And really I deeply appreciate your kind of enthusiasm and your kind of groundedness that is rare among in our field. I'll leave it there. And I think that the students, we have quite a few questions coming in which is a great indicator of kind of trying to figure it out along with you. So I'm gonna start off by coming clean which is I do a lot of teaching where we discuss kind of short-term projects, public space projects. And we have a lot of last year when we taught the class, we had a lot of debate about tactical urbanism. And you raise most of the issues. And I think essentially I come to it from an overarching kind of critique of society. So I admit I lean in the direction of looking for structural change even as I know that small scale and incremental changes need to be are essential to any real change. So I really appreciate that you've gone along the way to convince me that stuff that this is truly an important way to do work in cities and to have an attitude about cities that would welcome this kind of work. So I just, that's my little thank you very much in my admission that, you know as much as I read the tactical urbanism books I'm always a little like, but what about structure? What about society? So as I say, you've kind of pulled me back the other way. And I really appreciate one thing you said and that comes, that joins with some of the questions coming up. And you just concluded a little bit with who is responsible afterwards? And I think that's a key question, you know, maintenance and stakeholders that stick around. Because if, you know, you walk away from one street action and the next year it's kind of bulldozed or left to rot, then that raises a lot of troubles and questions. So I really appreciate you're asking the question of who is responsible afterwards because it makes us realize that you don't just walk away from a project. You've got to make sure that there's a constituency and a community that sees the long-term need which is the kind of flip side. You know, you say short-term action for long-term change. And I think post-project commitments are vital. So several students have asked about that and they once asked, how much of the long-term change do you actually get to be involved with? And another student wants to know about, oh, I'm trying to find it again. And how, and to what degree do you have long-term changes in mind as you're working? So both of those students are kind of wondering about this long-term question. You know, I'll leave it there. Yes. Okay. Well, thank you, David, for your comments. And I think that you're not the only who has feel skeptical about this method because there are a lot of noise behind these actions that are very visible sometimes and they are regarded as more like, I don't know, like hot air. And then what happened afterwards? Like what happened with the real changes? Like, so I think there's a lot of like, in any discipline, like you can, for example, in architecture, you can have good architecture and bad architecture. Or you can have like good urban design or bad urban design, eventually how you say it. So you can have like good tactical urbanism or bad tactical urbanism. So I guess that the ones that, at least from our perspective are the ones that can be more impactful are the ones that can actually like, one, like have this like ideas of, for example, how do you measure and what do you want to impact and what happened after this kind of interventions, right? So in order to respond like the questions, like how much of the long-term change are you involved? So, well, I will have to say that it depends on every project. Like there's something that for us is super important and I mentioned it at the very beginning of the presentation that was about the idea of like human development. When we understand these actions as a way of creating capabilities, then there is a big opportunity to think that the continuation of these processes is not just on one organization or one municipality, but it's about like different actors and stakeholders that have capabilities to continue the process. So for example, in our experiences, it's very important to try to install a simple capability on people so they can feel more responsible either on the maintenance of the project or the replication of the tactic or the, I don't know, the replicating it on other places. So thinking this method as a way to like install a capacity and a way of people to feel more protagonist of a process is very relevant for us, okay? For example, the idea of the botlack, the simple idea that I show you as a tactical idea of like building like bouncing people is such a simple action, but when you frame it as a toolkit where people can actually replicate it over time, this help us people to do it without us. So we are not there on the action afterwards. They are just doing it by theirself. They are self-organized. So in order to create long-term like impact, it's very important to create the capability on people so they can be self, as I said, like self-organized activities or maybe like be more interested on maintaining the place or keeping track with authorities. So again, like how much of the long-term changes are we involved? We are very like cautious on trying to create this capabilities for example on the municipality. So the municipality or the local stakeholders in the public sector can learn how to do this on their own and they don't need us eventually on the second stages, okay? Of course, not all of our projects have been successful. Some of them are like, they haven't worked or we have like seen a lot of challenges to keep on like the long-term impact. Sometimes we've seen that there's no willingness to do like a second phase and some stakeholders like even like mayors or like municipalities, they just want to like see like quick results but then it's very relevant for us to like try to partner with people that first are willing to do changes and I'm trying to like, I don't know say persuade but give a lot of like evidence on the benefits of this action so people can really believe that it's like for the benefit of everybody. So yeah, so yeah, I don't know if I respond like the two questions but maybe we can have a conversation about it. I think you really are inspiring in the sense that you recognize the variety of actors and your commitment to kind of trust and collaboration is infectious and I think as you stated just a second ago that the municipalities are key actors and they're very, they have different goals and different masters and different protocols and I'm sure that in every city in every country where this kind of work is tried, it's always different, it's always a negotiation. I mean, it's some degree there's gotta be some connection to planning authorities, municipal authorities, there's no escaping that if it's to extend into a longer term proposition I think that's really good to see. A couple of questions have to deal with stakeholders and that's an extremely vague term in many ways because it could be a person having tea on the street versus the guy who owns the property on the street to the state regulation, et cetera. So stakeholders is a tough term but I think we tend to think of it in some ways as a kind of community-based level which I think is where it's best to think of it but some want to know about how do you deal with changing stakeholders? How do you deal with different kinds of stakeholder participation? Youth, older people, different kinds of communities or even multiple stakeholders who may not agree. I think that kind of ultimately it's a kind of question about the kind of conflict and hurdles to stakeholder activities that you somehow have to manage. How does that work? Yeah, that's a very interesting one because for example, like the changing stakeholders that happens a lot in our public counterparts. So when you do that, for example, the project and you are trying to shape changes in the city where local or like elected authorities have to change after four years or after like an election period it's very like challenging to go through these methods. For example, in our experience it has been like a big challenge when we're doing a project in the middle of an election process, right? So for example, we start with one local authority, the public stakeholder and then we ended up with another one and that's like a big challenge. The one, the example that I show you this shared street project in Santiago was just that case. So the pilot was done with one administration and the permanent project was done with another one and they were from different political parties. So how did we like bridge that? And that's the key thing of data because it was very key for not only us but also like the public workers that were also collaborating with us that were not political stakeholders but more like the second floor kind of like people. They used all the data that we collected to, I don't know if convinced but open the discussion with the new mayor about what had happened. If we wouldn't have had the data it would have been really difficult to have an argument with the new mayor about what was like the benefit of this. So we learned that in a case where changing stakeholders was the case and that's not only in the case of Santiago it's like in any city that we have that kind of problem. The data component and the creation of a storyline that can help the new authority to see the benefit of this to see what happened with their quality circumstances what happened with the safety of the bikers that was relevant for us to like go in the next step the permanent investment. So that was for us a very big learning lesson. In another cases, we have had the problem that for example, I don't know people don't want to participate on this. I'm not telling you like that this is like the ultimate method of doing participatory process at all because in our experience when we do this kind of projects let's say if a neighborhood has like 100% of like people like neighbors in at the very beginning only 20% of the neighbors of a neighborhood engage on this idea. Only it's a limited number of people that really like want to go to the preparing meetings the only 20% of them want to listen what we are trying to like bring to the neighborhood as a new idea. And when the things are happening when you have like for example, the street transform when you have the pot like happening there then we bring the attention of more people than in our experience like we can achieve like maybe 50 or 60 or almost 70% of like people of a neighborhood participating during the action. So we start with very little that say 20% we can achieve around 70% more during the action and there's a 10% of people that will never join this they will actually criticize it they will be like the haters that we say sometimes that I know this was a terrible idea. So but at least if we add up like the 20 from the very beginning and the 70 during the action we can start talking about like a 90% of people trying to engage on something different and that's very important to like I think that this is a method that if it's done well can bring them like a good number of people back into the idea of like being part of the city planning process. But as I said, David, it's not like a magic wand like we know that we cannot engage everybody but it's a gradual like a step by step process. It seems also related to that that in terms of getting people or engaging people for participation it has to do with trust as you've said several times and building enthusiasm and students are very curious. I think they're trying to do this in their own work because not all people have the time or the resources to actually participate. And so lowering the bar to participation is something that we talk about a lot and it seems like the kind of potluck although when you first said it I thought you said potlatch the anthropological term for a gift giving ceremony but it's potluck and it's kind of similar and it's funny how they resonate but I think that idea of small events to actually that are about trust more than anything about specific project guidelines or to-dos. So I think that's very helpful. One person asks, have you ever encountered in this kind of tactical mode the sense that perhaps government or institutional planners worry that you're taking their place that it undermines the role of government. I'm just passing that along. I think it's a really fascinating question because you are in some ways, I'll be generous and say you are complimenting government but do you come across resistance because of officials et cetera feeling threatened? Yeah, it has been the case many times. I can give you some examples and then maybe a little insight about it but in the Antofagasta project that I showed you guys of this landfills it happened that the mayor of the city they really saw the work that we were doing as a competitor. They were like, no, this is our role. What are you guys doing here? I am responsible to connect with these communities. We have to show the results. It's not like an NGO working with them. So it was a very challenging thing I have to say. I remember that this mayor, when we did the potluck that I showed you in the photographs they arrived with hundreds of teddy bears that they want to give to the kids of the neighborhood because they wanted to be seen as the implementers or whatever. We had a fight with the mayor on the same photograph that I showed you trying to make the mayor see that it was not about seeing people as a passive receiver of benefits but more as people as able to organize, self-organize things and sometimes authorities at least in South America I don't know if it's in the case in other cities but there's a lot of paternalism kind of like a sense of like people are like kids so we have to treat them like that so there's like a big challenge on changing habits on like decision makers and trying to like create, as I said before the idea of human development the idea of like trying to like install capabilities on people so they can feel more agents of change and not just like observers of the process so we had a conversation with the mayor we took the teddy bears out of the conversation she had like an activity like two weeks after we had a conversation with the people and then she gave this teddy bears in another context not on the potluck that was like totally different it was a totally different spirit so in that sense the lesson in that prayer was like trying to be bold on what you believe and be also ready to face the authorities with your arguments and say well it's the mayor so we cannot say anything no you have to actually like put arguments in a very respectful way trying to convince with arguments and like then also be you know open to have like a negative reaction in the case of Antofagasta we had a good reaction and that mayor didn't do that show but in other cases for example I didn't show you some examples that we did in Guatemala the authorities were investigated by the United Nations because of corruption so the prayer that we were doing was sponsored by the United Nations and the authorities thought that we were like doing some kind of like inquiry or research for corruption cases so they mixed things and they didn't allow us to do anything so in that case we couldn't actually do the project we didn't have any permits so we have to change the strategy we ended up doing something totally different from what it was originally planned so in that case the learning lesson was like okay if you cannot have your way we'll try to have a plan B or a plan C and try to do other things because sometimes authorities in context where the state is that sometimes happens like in some countries that we have work at then you have to have other methods there's a tip that I will suggest if anyone is wanting to work on challenging context there's like a permit that we try to collect that it's not emitted by the authority but it's emitted by hundreds of neighbors and we call it like a social permit but it's not valid from a legal point of view but it's like very powerful in terms of like the I would say the support of the community if you have like 200 signatures of the community wanting to do something it's like a very powerful method to talk with the mayor even though they don't want eventually to allow you to do things so again you have to be bold you have to be open to frustration you have to be open to these kind of things has a lot of like a lot of things that don't work but it's also very I don't know exciting you feel alive when you do this kind of phrase because you are constantly challenged to create solutions so I can tell you more I can tell you more but I want to ask more questions I think it sounds like you have lots of war stories I'm going to interpret a couple of questions and ask essentially that do you have any larger scale urban projects what we might call getting a long-term project built yes yes larger scale in terms of planning and also in terms of infrastructure so I show you more the piloting side of our work but we have an area of Ciudad emergente that works on long-term planning strategies for example in Central America we were invited by the Spanish cooperation agency to create a sustainable mobility plan for 2030 for a city that it's called we're currently working there but in order to create the plan we use these methods these tactical methods to collect like the first data and to socialize and to like how do you say, outreach the community about this long-term planning process because sometimes like plans are very difficult for people to be like you know excited about or understand them so we use the tactical methods to outreach with the people and try to like let them see the benefits as a sustainable mobility I wish I would have selected that example but it's on our website I can maybe you know maybe later show you guys like the links but we do long-term planning strategies and we combine them with these methods we also work a lot in like permanent infrastructure processes but we use again the same very first steps doing this like like quick and cheap methods to create a sustainable mobility plan for a city that it's very difficult for people to communicate with the community if we want to co-create an infrastructure it's very powerful when you start the co-creation with simple actions that can like you know identify which in the community is more against the project who is like more like in favor of a project so these are like projects that will work at all by itself no it's like the more tools we have I think the better the practice that we can put in practice Another question which you mentioned somewhat along the way and some students are asking about financial questions municipal funding state funding or you know how slippery is the funding and does that cause at especially at the the tactical level Sorry David said about financing how we finance ourselves and how the pandemic has affected I'm thinking more about how to build something even if it's temporary there's still a funding source and how stable are your funding sources and I'm guessing the pandemic has also changed that landscape but I think students we push them to be somewhat responsible we're acknowledging the role of hard and soft costs so I'm just curious if that has been something you deal with So in general terms the way we finance this kind of methods are very different depending on the context and the years for example at the very beginning it was 100% private funding because why the public would put money on something they didn't understand so it was a lot of capital from entrepreneurial agencies so we started with more private funding and then during the years we started increasing like financing this initiative through public sector actually in 2014 it was the first time that the Chilean State Commission a tactical urbanism project and that was very exciting for us because we were for maybe five years trying to coin the concept and trying to validate the idea until the state start like it's been like this bit for tactical projects so I would say that it has been very fluctuating we have been mixing private funding public funding and in the last years we have seen that it's very useful to combine the sources of funding for the very first stages we try to operate with private funding which is easier and faster to be allocated and with those first insight it's much easier than the public sector can invest long term funding with less uncertainty so it's a kind of a complement like the way of understanding cities actually we have been doing some donation campaigns also for doing tactical projects and we invite people so they can also like donate for this kind of actions so it's been like a very hybrid method and during the pandemic of course it has been very affected because like first of all because of the pandemic the work that we do was super challenge we couldn't go out to public space but we praise so even though that today 70% of our resources are coming from private sources and the rest is from international cooperation and public sector that's a concern of ours or at least mine I should say you know the kind of public-private connections and relationships are again I tend to be skeptical only because private sector has certain goals and which Bloomberg and his administration here in New York cultivated very well but did not really follow through and so the public sector is less able to participate as you say but also I worry that people tend to view the public sector as ineffective or unhelpful but I think that's a much larger problem than just even tactical urbanism I mean in many places public sectors have been kind of delegitimized in terrifying ways and the private sector given this kind of you know a kind of sense that the private sector can do things better and I think that's a huge political question that we all need to face but I think in your case the kind of navigation is the key point the kind of the agility to maneuver and find that but and it leads me a little bit and I know this may seem odd but you mentioned a lot of the use of sensors and you talk a lot about measurement and it seems fairly sensible but I'm just going to take the flip side which is the city that Google wanted to build in Toronto I think it was called Keyside which was a completely censored not censorship but an environment full of sensors and well I trust you personally I wonder you know what that kind of use of sensors and use of data gathering techniques how it affects our kind of intervention into the private sphere does that cause I mean I think I'm guessing that a kind of low level use of sensors and spotlights or cameras etc has a clear function but when you ramp it up to the level of what Google worked on in Keyside and you know there's a lot of debates about that I'll just take the kind of general point is how do you think that the question of sensors but also of measurement how does that play out forward in kind of political and social terms I don't even know myself really but many alarms go off when I hear when I think about massive measurement of public life that's a big one big question well I really don't know on the details the the Google one but eventually the scale that we're talking about is very different from the piloting that I show you because the kind of examples that I show you and the work that we do it's not at the scale of the state I mean we're not like a city we're not like a regional government we're like a sort of a lab okay so eventually it will be like much bigger and you know it will be a totally different conversation but the sensor that we applied are always using data that it's not personal it's like environmental information that it collects like the I don't know if you guys have heard about like smart citizen kids which is some kind of you know Arduino sensors that are very easy to use but they are not about personal data but more about environmental conditions so we actually provide people to use those sensors so they can actually it's called like citizen science so you give like people different kind of like gadgets that they can operate easily they are fun to work with but also sometimes because of the level of trust that I told you they're challenging because we have had the case that we for example in order to install those sensors we have to ask a permit for someone to you know put the sensor on his house on her house and we have had like conversation with people like what are you asking me like why do you want to put a sensor in my house and you're asking me my Wi-Fi password to make this work so sometimes like these like smart cities like tools are not taking into account a topic about like trust again like why someone would you put a sensor on their house if you're asking like this kind of like basic stuff so we have learned that it's very important at least for censoring the the intermediator like the person that it's the human that can explain to someone why are we doing this that eventually I don't know again what how the Vancouver project with Google worked but in the case of we combine like social workers with architects and engineers so it's very important to you know approach people and explain them what are we doing why are we doing it what will be the benefit so then it's not a data that was collected through any position but it was something that was talk with someone so just just to tell you about that case of course again the scale that we work it's not the same as a city we're not censoring the whole city we're censoring this pilot okay so the other thing that I have to say that the data that we collect is not just through sensor but it's a lot of like analog information a lot of like like you know face-to-face data so we for example we start gadgets that are like for example we call them trees of ideas that are like simple like structures that we hang out in public spaces and people felt invited feel invited to interact with the with the sensor like it which is actually a person collecting data so the face-to-face thing we realize that it was very very much important to understand I mean to make people understand what the data collection is for to like engage in a conversation and try to like have opinions and and not just think this method as a way of like doing a short-term action for a long-term change but also an excuse to talk with someone and through conversation you can actually understand the value of people or what is the value that people puts on a project so there's a lot of qualitative information that we collect through face-to-face things so the more advanced technology has been like you know seen in the last years with all this like advance on like data or like the fact of privacy I think it's much more relevant to also combine the analog way of collecting data the the human side of the information we as 10 years ago we're seeing how powerful the idea of like using Twitter or using like smartphones was like the you know the cookie cutter approach for collecting data but the more advanced it is the more important we think it's like to combine it with like the old-fashioned way of doing things so yeah Thank you so much just kind of wrap up here but I really appreciate the idea of trust playing out in a technologized you know electronic world that humans are data surveyors of their own sort or increasingly a kind of cyborg which you know using our eyes and our tools kind of meshed anyway that's a great long-term question and I think that's role we have time for I really appreciate your work and I think you've shared with some great stuff and I think the students know to be able to go to your website and look up some work I also shared the link for the tactical urbanism book with the students and I think you've given us some real food for thought especially this question of scale I reminded that there's smart city and then there's smart citizen and that may be a superficial binary but it's a useful one in so far as cities are abstractions there's a little bit more kind of tangible reality there that may be my own fantasy but yes I think that's a key thing for the tactical is that kind of citizen local scale so anyway it's been great thank you so much thank you Javier really enjoyed your talk and this vibrant Q&A session it's been a great summer I feel like I've learned so much so inspired by what we've heard thanks again everybody I just want to add one thing by the way some students and some of the facilitators and the discussion groups were plotting maybe to have another session maybe next week to join join some groups together and share some findings and some questions I think I forgot to tell you that anyway thank you again thank you so much Javier thank you David, Kate, Tal and everybody thank you and I see a friend there Adriana Chavez yes she says hi ok guys, thank you so much bye bye


The human body runs on food. Once, food shortage was the major concern. After the Second World War, technological advances in food production led to a new era that was characterized by an overabundance of inexpensive food and relatively little physical activity. In the decades that followed, other sociocultural shifts continued to contribute to the changing way we ate. Women who had previously controlled most of the average family's food preparation now entered the workforce in significant numbers, and the processed food industry began to capitalize on our need for fast, convenient food. This meant that fewer meals were being cooked at home, and since convenience foods were generally higher in calories than home-cooked meals, the average person's caloric intake increased dramatically. Academics studying the intersection of food and health, like Michael Pollan, have written extensively about the implications of this cultural shift on the way we eat today. To the extent we outsource our food, first we eat less healthy food, more salt, fat and sugar, but we also eat more food because processed food is often designed as snack food and marketed to us as a way to eat continually through the day. The changes in the way we as a society ate led to the emergence of obesity as a recognized chronic disease with well-defined health consequences, and medical recommendations were made to try and address this growing health crisis. In the second half of the 20th century, a lot of attention was focused on reducing saturated fat and total fat in our diets, and the processed food industry responded by giving us what we wanted, but they still had a vested interest in selling their products, so they found other ways to make the reduced-fat products taste good. One way they did this was by adding significantly more sugar and other forms of sugar like corn syrup to almost everything we ate. This not only made the reduced-fat foods more appealing, but it also increased their shelf life, so the food industry had a huge incentive to add corn syrup and other sweeteners to packaged foods. The resulting increase in our intake of simple sugars fueled our modern epidemics of obesity and diabetes. These shifts in our food consumption patterns have led us to a point in history where a physiological adaptation, our ability to store energy as fat, has become maladaptive. The balance between food availability and energy expenditure has been disrupted, and it's left us with an exponential increase in the incidence of obesity over the past 60 years. An epidemic that the World Health Organization has labeled a worldwide public health crisis.


El Gordo is a cluster of hundreds of galaxies that existed when the universe was 6.2 billion years old. It's the most massive cluster known to exist at that time. This image was produced by a combination of Hubble and web data. It contains 60 lensed arcs, from galaxies billions of light years further away than El Gordo. Here's a sample of the numbering system used to identify each object studied. There are over 180 points of interest. Note the long, pencil-thin line below and left of center. Known as laflaca, the thin one, it is extremely thin and one of the longest arcs known. One of the most striking features is the bright red arc at the upper right. It's called the fish hook. The light from this galaxy took 10.8 billion years to reach Earth. Its distinctive red color is due to a combination of reddening from dust within the galaxy itself and cosmological redshift due to space expansion. In our gravitational lensing segment of the How Fast is it video book, we covered how knowledge of the lens properties and critical curves of the foreground cluster enables astronomers to reconstruct the source galaxy's size and shape. Using these techniques, astronomers were able to determine that the background galaxy is disc-shaped and 26,000 light years in diameter. That's about one-fourth the size of the Milky Way. Another fascinating find in El Gordo is the first individual red supergiant star beyond one billion light years from Earth. Until now, all previous stars discovered at high redshifts have been hot blue stars. Blue juice and antaries are the brightest and best known red supergiants in our Milky Way galaxy. This star is named Quiller. Such stars at high redshift are only detectable using the infrared filters and sensitivity of the web telescope. The outer yellow circles mark the positions of two counter-images of a source that brackets the position of the critical curve. The white central circle marks Quiller.


If you need the ball to get to a teammate quickly, you can use this top-techer, the Driven Pass. Place your foot next to the ball, with your toes pointing at your target, head over the ball, strike through the center of the ball with your laces, toes pointing to the floor. Follow through with your striking leg. Now go and practice until you're ready for the challenge.