speaks lecture and planning series presentation. Our speaker for today is Professor Brandy Thompson Summers, assistant professor of geography and global metropolitan studies at the University of California, Berkeley. My name is Carolyn Swope and I'm a PhD student here in Columbia's urban planning program. I will be moderating this session. I'll start with just a few brief technical and logistical announcements and then turn to introducing our speaker. During the talk, I'd like to remind audience members on Zoom to please mute their microphones. We will be recording today's lecture so anyone in the audience who wishes not to be recorded should turn off their video input. Audience and everyone 14 who are also connected on Zoom, please be mindful to mute your sound as well. The chat box should be used only for discussion regarding the session. If you have any technical questions that apply only to you, please message me or my co-host for engineer Helena privately. We encourage all of you to type questions into the chat box during the presentation and after the presentation, we will have some time for Q&A. We'll start that around 2 or 2.15 so that we have time for folks questions. I'll be coordinating the Q&A with attention to diversity and inclusion, so if you have already had a chance to ask a question, please allow others to do so before asking one. To ask questions, participants can use the raise your hand function and we'll call on you to unmute and ask directly or if you prefer, you may also type your questions into the chat box. Again, feel free to do that at any point in the lecture and I can read them out. For our audience in everyone 14, you can raise your hand and I'll call on you so that you can ask your question directly. So with that, I'm delighted to introduce today's speaker. Dr. Summers, as I said, is assistant professor of geography and global metropolitan studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is co-founder and co-director of the Berkeley Lab for speculative urbanisms. Her research examines the relationship between and function of race, space, urban infrastructure and architecture. Her book Black in Place, The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City explores how aesthetics and race converge to map blackness in Washington DC and the way that competing notions of blackness structure economic relations and develop land in the gentrifying city. Her current research focuses on how uses of space and place making practices inform productions of knowledge and power in Oakland, California. She has published several articles and essays that analyze blackness, culture, aesthetics and urbanization that appear in both scholarly and popular publications. She is a member of the editorial collectives at City and Acme and is on the editorial boards of various journals. Dr. Summers' talk today is entitled Spatial Temporalities, The Future Pass of Black Dispossession, which draws on the speculative to highlight a long history of restrictive and devastating policy passed and promoted by local governments and developers in West Oakland. So Professor Summers, if you're ready, I will pass things over to you now. Thank you so much, Caroline. And thank you to this hybrid interesting space. I'm all the way in Berkeley, California. So for those of you who are in New York, hello, I miss New York. I have not been on a plane in over a year and a half. So hopefully I'll be able to get back there at some point. But I do appreciate you joining me today. So I'm actually going to share my screen. Hopefully you'll be able to see it pretty easily and present. Hopefully everyone can see this. So it's just kind of my title page. Again, thank you, Caroline, for the generous introduction as well as the invitation. So I'm going to be talking a bit today about some work that I am in the process of doing. And it's mostly a collaborative project that I'm doing with my good friend and collaborator, Ola Lacon J.F.S., who's actually on the call, so I might actually pull him out to talk. But anyway, beyond that, I wanted to first situate the work. I'm from Oakland, California. And though when I joined the faculty at UC Berkeley, coming from Virginia Commonwealth University, I had intended to have a very different focus on Oakland. But because I came back and saw how devastating and visible the unhoused crisis was in the Bay Area and specifically in Oakland, this just seemed like a really important opportunity to think through on questions of blackness, but also in terms of displacement and dispossession, given my work on gentrification. But this was something new. I wanted to try something different. So hopefully you all will have some great questions and we can chat afterwards. So I'll go ahead and begin. So I want to start with this question. How do you map no place? So as I mentioned in my little, there's a blurb about this talk, I find that there's an intimacy between blackness and placelessness that shows up today as homelessness.  The logic holds sway in urban planning and the policies that have destroyed working and middle class black neighborhoods across the United States.  Simultaneously, there's a presumption of blackness and therefore any black person belongs only in or to the city. So I want you to kind of get your imagination hats on. All right. So imagine, if you will, right, there's an arc. It's a degraded cruise ship that's propped up on blocks and languishing in an empty parking lot in West Oakland against the backdrop of the interstate 880 freeway. In the shadow of the ship, there's this in a weedy lot that's populated by a tent city or homeless encampment. That's an agglomeration of Teslas, we know Teslas, tents and campers. There's charcoal grills. There's a glass in case seating pod. There's charging stations that huddle at the ship's lee. Wires are strong with cheerful penance stretching down from reactors that are attached to the ship's hull to these vehicular generators that are primed for electric cars scattered throughout the camp. Above on the ship, on the sun deck, you can see more generators and further colorful assortment of tarp covered tents and patio umbrellas all framed by a series of penance. The ship's hull, like the facade of the adjoining bow arts train station, so this again imagining a train station next to this cruise ship in a parking lot, and this train station was built in 1912, is adorned with graffiti. One of the more prominent tags on this ship or around this ship proclaims in the red and anti-capitalist Russoian eat the rich with an accompanying sickle and fork emblem. I think we know this pretty well. So let's just take a look at what this could look like, right? So this image, the Ark, is a photo montage by my collaborator, Lake, I'm going to call him Lake, J.F.S., who's part, it's part of this collaborative series that we have called The Apocryphal Gospel of Oakland, which visually constructs the improbable ongoing story of Oakland's unhousing crisis through speculative digital collages. The scene depicted here in the Ark seems improbable, as I described it, and probably looking at it as an allegorical fantasy. However, in December of 2019, several months before COVID-19 took hold, Oakland's then city council president, Rebecca Kaplan, introduced a plan to dock a decommissioned cruise ship at the port of Oakland, adjacent to this West Oakland neighborhood. The idea was to provide emergency shelter for nearly a thousand unhoused individuals. Now, Oakland's port remains one of the busiest in the nation. It's engineered with a federally regulated infrastructure that's designed explicitly for cargo ships, making it structurally untenable for docking cruise liners. Even so, Kaplan and her colleagues argued that a floating hotel could temporarily address the 86% spike in homelessness that Oakland had witnessed between 2015 and 2019. Kaplan then noted that the cruise ships had been used as emergency housing in the aftermath of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. And homelessness, as we know, is an unnatural disaster. But Kaplan's plan was just one in a long line of attempts to ameliorate the crisis. Oakland and other Bay Area cities have been experimenting since 2015 with other emergency proposals, including legalizing tent camps and encampments in specific parking lots and on certain vacant lots. So the floating hotel for unhoused Oaklanders never became a reality. Still Kaplan's proposition had been pretty prescient. On March 9, 2020, a ship named the Grand Princess belonging to Princess Cruise Line docked at the Port of Oakland with more than 2,400 passengers aboard, 21 of whom had tested positive for the coronavirus. The Grand Princess had cut shorter crews to Hawaii and had been stranded in California waters for 10 days with no place to go. So Oakland's housing population, excuse me, homeless population consistently makes up over half the total of Alameda counties. Between 2015 and 2019, the number of those unhoused in the city jumped from over 2,100 people to over 4,000. The epidemic of homelessness across the Bay Area tends to be narrowly framed as a result of a housing crisis as opposed to a crisis in affordability. Accordingly, rather than address income inequality in a massive low-income housing gap, local policy makers often propose simply to build, betting on an additional development to solve the problem, despite the fact that most resulting projects produce luxury and or high-end residences. And this isn't just in Oakland, right? We see this all over the country. In other words, city administrators tend to see homelessness as a social problem rather than an issue that is political and economic. For example, California Senate Bill SB 50, supported in 2020 by Oakland's current Mayor Libby Schaff, advocated upzoning with the idea that this would lead to large-scale housing production, but this failed measure pushed for increased development, especially around transit centers. So this would have further compromised the fragile infrastructural balance between transportation options and the extent housing stock, which even before the near doubling of the unhoused population had threatened working-class communities throughout the region as rampant speculation and financialization exacerbated long-standing transportation issues. So Schaff had promised in 2016 to build 17,000 new housing units by 2024, setting aside 28% of that number for low-income residents. But again, by two years later, by July 2018, less than 6% of the newly constructed homes were reserved for affordable housing units. As of May of this year, Oakland had built over 22,000 new units, exceeding the original goal by more than 5,000. Nevertheless, only a small number of these units were actually priced below market rate, and the city is currently on track to build only half of the Mayor's promised affordable units. So West Oakland, where the Grand Princess was docked, is the oldest neighborhood in the city of Oakland and was once home to the largest Black community in Northern California. But as the overall Black population in the city continues to dwindle precipitously, so does West Oakland's concentration of Black residents. Across the 20th century and into the 21st, Black people throughout the United States have been targeted by spatial exclusions and dispositions that are rooted in racial capitalism. Yet racial disparities in Oakland's rates of homelessness remains particularly stark, with African Americans comprising an astonishing 70%, 70% of those experiencing homelessness, while making up just about 20% of the overall population. Black and Indigenous populations continue to be the only ones whose numbers are diminishing in Oakland, while the total number of Black residents who are homeless continues to grow. Most reports produced by the state acknowledge this disproportion, albeit typically only as a data point, rather than a focus for targeted response. So it's not an accident that the arc that we've located in this dry dock shipping yard or at least a parking lot besides a defunct train station is an ad hoc solution to the housing crisis fused into a landscape that itself is symptomatic of a decades-long ascendancy of car culture and the defunding of mass transportation. Thus, rather than the arc being docked at the point of Oakland in this kind of imaginary space, it has landed unceremoniously in a massive West Oakland parking lot that in reality, as well as in Lake's image, harbors dozens of unsanctioned camp dwellers. Nor was it a coincidence that passengers embarked from the Grand Princess in West Oakland, their medical status was triaged in an 11-acre, quote, containment area in the Port's gigantic parking lot. The parking lot, as a typology, one of the most spatially dominant landscape features of 20th century urbanism represents a planning failure. Parking lots were thought of in the mid-20th century as this temporary form of land use or a kind of land banking against the future. Ultimately, they were thought to not necessarily be inhabited, right? But they've taken on new and important meaning in the contemporary struggles over the uses of and the right to public space in America's cities. Cities don't systematically catalog their parking anchorage. However, it's estimated in the U.S. that there's more than 500 million parking spaces in off-street surface lots alone. Perhaps, not surprisingly, parking lots have become central fights that are waged by unhoused people against the state, as well as central to the state's strategy for addressing a generalized problem. Parking lots have been used since the 1940s as a spatial resource for mitigating homelessness deployed as a temporary solution that in practice remains ever present. In this doubling of eras or recurrence of things past, provisional solutions harden into legacies that extend across generations, all the while retaining their official status as impermanent, improvised, and based on reaction to emergency. We're living though in the second decade of the 21st century with unprecedented levels of income inequality, food insecurity, ostentation, precarity, and austerity. The world is organized by private property and market exchange. It's fashioned by corporatization and burdened by social repression, environmental destruction, and racial reckonings. So, the arc in this case shows us this condition by laying out a space resembling what Jaubiel calls, quote, a zone of social abandonment, a place that's neglected by the state and treated as a repository for the poor, unemployed, disabled, and or the homeless. The arc, again, is this dystopian hybrid, a landlocked vessel that's poised between the apocalypse in progress and this new post-apocalyptic normal that's replete with signs of entropy, as well as innovation, resurrection, and abjection. The scene, though, is exaggerated, as you can see, yet the best sci-fi, right, like the best sci-fi, it's also familiar in that the world emerges post-disaster, and then that's emerging right now post-disaster, though we are certainly not post, draws on memories of the pre-disastrous in order to visualize itself. To put this another way, dystopian narratives look backwards, right, serving to warn us about the impending catastrophe, but when it comes to considering black homelessness and what it tells us about the urban spatialities in which we're currently living, as well as those in the making, this speculative timeline folds into a more complicated knot. Here, we can presume a truth that's explained by the writer D. Scott Miller in the Afro-surreal Manifesto, the Black as a New Black, the future is already here. So, as he says, there's no need for tomorrow's tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afro-surrealists, the tasers are here. The four horsemen ride through too long ago to recall, what is the future? The future has been around so long that it's now the past. So, mindful of these histories, the yet to come prospects, I want to consider here, black homelessness in West Oakland as occurring in a collapsed or simultaneous parascience or Afro-surreal time, in which the complexes of events and seem mappable, really, along this kind of past, present, future access, and they're in fact all happening at once. In this folded and disjunctive temporality, events from the past are noticed or they're only received in the present, determining the experiences of the here and now as well as likelihoods for the future in this unfanceful but often denied ways. And then further, the future past of black dispossession and homelessness doesn't take place just anywhere. Because Oakland has cleared so much land but provided no adequate means for housing people, informal settlements emerge and are often contained within vacant spaces where built structures used to be. Tent camps grow under bridges and underpasses or at least beneath overpasses and in parks along with deindustrializing margins, right? More encampments are set up in parking lots than any other kind of open urban space. However, unlike a public park or the no man's land under an overpass, parking lots are officially sanctioned spaces for temporary, i.e., emergency habitability. Given Oakland's long and destructive history of both clearance and containment of black residents, the parking lot, as I see it, is this useful urban typology for thinking about black homelessness in this city. The parking lot, as the arc shows, is a node where the simultaneity of the past, present, and yet to come can be seen and felt with particular clarity. So in thinking about this, I have two major questions. First, I'm thinking about how we might consider the relationship between parking lots as the central, even redundant features of the built urban environment and the politics of black clearance and containment, right? And then secondly, what does it mean for black people in Oakland and elsewhere to continue to live the same experience again and again and again decade after decade? So since, oh, my image isn't showing up. Well, that is horrible because it was a great image. Well, we'll just have to imagine it. All right. So since World War II, the Bay Area is one of the fastest growing urban centers in the country. And more than 50,000 black migrants arrived between 1942 and 1945, mostly from Louisiana, where my family hails from, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. This influx coupled with the displacement and dispossession of Japanese Americans in their internment camps established black people as a city's largest racial minority.  This restructuring of racism in California from the targeting of Japanese immigrant populations to the assailing of black American migrants aligned with much of what had already occurred in other parts of the United States, particularly the South. So since the National Housing Act of 1934, discriminatory housing policy in the practices such as red lighting, which we're familiar with and restrictive covenants, have cordoned off certain neighborhoods from black residents across the United States. At the same time, segregation facilitated the emergence of vibrant and growing black communities in urban locales. By 1940, for example, in Oakland, nearly 60% of the black population lived in West Oakland and a robust commercial district and cultural district had grown up alongside Seventh Street in West Oakland and therefore it became known as Harlem of the West. By the end of the Second World War, Oakland was overpopulated. Black inhabitants were over represented in public housing and specifically in West Oakland, it was full of overcrowded, dilapidated housing stock. With the waning or closing of defense industries like shipbuilding and the unemployment rate climbing, even as commercial infrastructure scaled back, the population of homeless black families expanded. There was a local journalist writing in 1943 who described, quote, the tragic spectacle of black families going from door to door, begging for sleeping accommodations in sheds, garages, at any place they could have shelter, end quote. Black Oaklanders were not yet camped in parking lots at this time, but a pattern of black dispossession was calcifying in the city, laying this foundation upon which the present crisis of displacement would occur. By 1950, 80% of the black population in West Oakland or excuse me, 80% of Oakland's black population lived in West Oakland and the city council and planning commission officially considered the whole neighborhood to be blighted. This made an easy way for demolition via urban renewal policies or what James Baldwin famously called Negro removal. The urban renewal excuse me, urban renewal and its primary vehicle slum clearance accomplished the clearance and containment of black people really in two ways through the widespread demolition and limited reconstruction of residential buildings and the devastating construction of a transportation infrastructure, including major roadways and a robust public transit system, that privileged white movement over black life and left landscapes across the city lying fallow for years on end. The Federal Housing Act of 49 did though provide cities with the capital and apparatus for urban redevelopment and public housing allotting or allocating 135,000 public housing units nationwide. In Oakland, however, public housing was viewed as an issue primarily impacting black and other people of color since white working class residents by this time had largely aspired to flee the city and purchase homes in the Tony suburbs. Oakland requested only 3000 new public housing units under the 1949 program far fewer than were contained in existing but dilapidated war housing. As the city level dozens of those war housing units, only 500 public housing units were constructed to take their place. Thousands of black Oaklanders were left once again without shelter. So during the same period, federal commitments to the construction of affordable housing for all were shifting towards federal and municipal plans for the revitalization of downtown as a way to really strengthen the local tax bases. So cities began to use federal funds to deploy the powers of eminent domain to redevelop instead of revitalize blighted neighborhoods, aka those neighborhoods that were mostly inhabited by black people. In 1954, Oakland's Mayor John Hulaham formed a redevelopment advisory committee primarily comprised of real estate, banking and commercial retail elites, executive from let's say the Bank of America Kaiser Industries Sears and Roebuck as well as the Oakland real estate board, right? Oh, as well as the East Bay Homeowners Association or Home Builders Association. So the result was this Oakland citizens committee, Oakland citizens committee for urban renewal or occur in turn. And they ended up producing the general neighborhood renewal plan through which they asserted their prerogatives to strengthen the downtown business district, which ended up being of course a priority. The GNRP that renewal program was unanimously approved and planned for the destruction of a 250 block area of West Oakland, including that burgeoning or the robust seven street commercial corridor moved ahead. So they had plans to destroy it. In 1956 was the advent of the Oakland redevelopment agency. They announced a plan for the redevelopment of an area called Acorn. So it was called the Acorn area redevelopment project, which designated about 50 blocks in West Oakland for demolition as the first of five major slum clearance areas in the city. In particular, this Acorn plan focused on industrial and middle income residential development, but made no provision for public housing, despite the overwhelmingly poor population in this area. The Acorn project was celebrated by city officials and developers as an opportunity to attract white residents in the hopes of having them return to the area and have it be this elite quote elite residential neighborhood. It was honestly one of the nation's first attempts at reverse integration. So black people in Acorn attempted to stop the bulldozing of their homes by suing the city on the grounds that black homeowners were losing their properties without having anywhere else to go. Ultimately, they ended up lacking the political power to fight this destruction and the federal court sided with the city. So between the April 1962 and May 1965, crews destroyed the majority of the 610 structures. The land laid bare and had been home to 4,300 people, right? So the Oakland redevelopment agency had designated nearly half of this land about 32 acres for industrial development, right? So again, they're prioritizing commercial and industrial real estate over residential. So the remaining 34 acres were earmarked for housing. Priority was given to development of industrial sites all over the residential units. However, by 1967, no homes had been built in Acorn. Bacon lots dominated the landscape. And this image here on this map that I'm so proud of my undergraduate research assistant, but she was building really looking at this map of Oakland. And what she's done is taken a map from the 1940s and instead layered on it the kinds of movement in terms of parking and vacant lots, as well as highway construction by 1968. So you start to see the areas in the teal color where you're seeing these empty spaces proliferate. So the Acorn project never achieved the city's aims to create an integral place, that is to make the neighborhood less black, right? So the redevelopment agencies commissioner lamented, quote, West Oakland used to be an area where rich white Americans lived before it became a mostly black area. Acorn was a chance to reintegrate West Oakland, but I'm afraid that hasn't happened. Acorn was also a template for the city and addressing lingering housing crises such as this experimental management of black and low income populations. The project complemented several others orchestrated by the redevelopment agency later in the 60s, including the clearing of more than 70 blocks in West Oakland to make room for the construction of the US Postal Service Distribution Center, along with the surface and underground lines for BART, which is the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, and most notably, new highways, interstate highways. Further renewal projects were put forward as the redevelopment agency focused on development in the downtown core, immediately adjacent to West Oakland. These plans promoted transit, right? Commercial construction, and inevitably parking. So the expansion of the federally subsidized interstate highway system decimated black communities nationally throughout this era, as hopefully most of you know. Construction was often routed through black and lower income neighborhoods where it contributed to blight, installed infrastructural impediments to social and logistical circulation, and accelerated the deterioration of formerly robust communities. In California in particular, these new expressways further facilitated the clearance and containment of black people who continue to live in city cores bypassed and encircled by freeways. Three interconnected freeways completed between 1952 and 1985, first the Nimitz, which is the highway I-80 that was in the backdrop of the arc. The Cypress Freeway, which is a two-tiered portion of the Nimitz Freeway of I-80, and the Grove Shafter Freeway, the I-980, they sliced West Oakland into these smaller bits. The Cypress Freeway funded through the Federal Highway Act of 1956, and then later completed in 1958, literally cut the neighborhood in half along a north-south axis, displacing hundreds of black residents and placing a physical obstruction between the westernmost section of the neighborhood and the rest of the city, notably downtown. So it was really this barrier where you couldn't just drive into or walk into downtown. The symbolic barrier that had already existed between West Oakland and Oakland at large was made literal. It's been dubbed the Berlin Wall by local residents. The Cypress Freeway ended up collapsing in the devastating 1989. Oh my goodness, my images! The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and it was not rebuilt. As a result, there is a parkway that's there instead of the Mandela Parkway. The Nimitz and Grove Shafter freeways are, however, still there. So here's that 1946 picture I was showing you before. Intimately connected to freeway infrastructure, the parking lot emerged as a key signifier of mid-century enemy West Coast style, desolate, but functional, even futuristic, and the surface parking lot became this polyvalent sign of the modern city. Both urban and suburban municipalities began to require that new construction account for widespread dependency on cars, the stipulation that often remains in force to this day. As a major transformation of the built environment, freeways and interstate highways established in the postwar years tended to generate both fanfare as well as protests across the country. Surface parking lots in comparison were and still are built much more frequently, gaining at best minor recognition. Parking lots were parking lots. For the most part, they existed not so much from building something new and demolishing something old. Jane Jacobs even called parking lots border vacuums. They're these bleak spaces that unstitched the urban tapestry. As the 1960s dawned, the parking lot was emerging as the ultimate manifestation of spatial clearance, cleansing, and removal of permanent temporariness in cities. So let's see if this works. So I wanted to kind of show this distinction between, let's see if I go back. So here's 1946. Here's the layered 1968 where you see this proliferation of vacant spaces and parking lots as well as this move towards freeways. And then we go to 1993 where you see even more, though 880 freeway got fatter, essentially. The Cypress Freeway, however, though by 1993 had collapsed, its carcass was still there, right? You couldn't, they hadn't constructed Mandela Parkway at the time. So it wasn't something that you could move across. So West Oakland lost a total of nearly 14,000 residents between 1960 and 1966. 8,000 units were raised. Three quarter of those 8,000 demolished dwellings had been occupied by low income, mostly black people. Contributing to this reduction in housing density, Oakland Zoning required that all new, oh gosh, that all new apartments provide one off-street parking spaces per unit. As a result, the land was suddenly burdened with a new requirement to provide parking that residents didn't pay for, right? The number of units per acre fell 30% and land values fell by 33% as well as property tax revenues and construction investment declining proportionately. So as substandard housing was removed from West Oakland, still more vacant lots were left behind. A portion of these remained unbuilt, excuse me, remained unbuilt, right? And they were converted into surface parking lots for a new population of commuters from the East Bay suburbs, hopefully coming into Oakland as they thought. An area that had been notorious for human overcrowding was soon overpopulated by parking lots. So urban renewal then intensified the precarity of Black life in West Oakland in particular. Black labor had been key to Oakland's wartime emergence as an industrial powerhouse, but as state and federal governments poured funds into advancement of white suburbanization, the urban core was left to decay. A polluted pavement scape that was littered with vacant parcels, surface parking lots, and unfinished projects, these industrial parkes or scars. These dystopias of half a century ago were perpetuated across the intervening decades by the continuing neglect of Black residents in regards to education, employment, healthcare, day-to-day mobility, and of course, housing. A powerfully destructive trajectory was established for Black Oaklanders towards the end of the 20th century, and its results were visible across the city today as the looming threat of gentrification ended up becoming a reality. I love drawing on Octavia Butler because she essentially was a fortune teller. Okay. So when I moved to Oakland, as I mentioned in August of 2019 prior to the onset of the pandemic, I was astonished by the explosive growth of homelessness that was immediately recognizable in the dozens of encampments that were spread across Oakland in parts of neighboring Emeryville as well as Berkeley. Large and elaborate sites, they swelled along pedestrian parkways in public parks under freeway overpasses and in empty commercial lots and in parking lots. Some of the most glaring examples spread around the periphery of West Oakland's Bart Station, and a barren asphalt lot where dozens of tents were created, and they had made these makeshift communities of unhoused residents. If you're driving along the Interstate 880 freeway along the southbound overpass, it was impossible to miss the nearly five-acre expanse sprinkled with tents, charred in abandoned cars, stationary RVs, and cobbled together plywood and metal structures that were crammed behind a chain link fence around a lot on Wood Street in West Oakland. Even so, the East Bay's economy had grown. It was not uncommon to see Tesla's whiz by Wood Street or other encampments beneath the Interstate 80 or Interstate 580 along the edges of West Oakland. This incongruence between the vision reflected, at least for me, this frightening sense of how our new shared reality was really operating under late-stage capitalism. So people living without housing tend to really be pathologized in ways that personalize and medicalize their predicament as if private failings and health problems were responsible for conditions that are in fact driven by racial capitalism. This is what Peter Marcuse calls, quote, neutralizing homelessness. Impoverished neighborhoods and homeless people's camps in California have in recent years been compared with slums in Pakistan, Brazilian favelas and shantytowns in Mexico, conditions that in an earlier era would have been characterized again as blight. Throughout my research, I found that official responses to such extremity tend to come in three forms. One of the more popular arguments about the cause of homelessness generally is that cities lack enough affordable housing. I mentioned that earlier. This position has been readily adopted by the city of Oakland and indeed there's some truth to it. A similar argument emerged after the Second World War with the designation of shipyard ghettos. Since 2008, however, the restructuring of the East Bay's racial geography has been profoundly intertwined with the foreclosure crisis, even as skyrocketing housing costs across the Bay Area have been made national news. Black people overall pay more of their income for housing and are more susceptible to being evicted from their homes. And data show that the subprime mortgage fiasco disproportionately impacted black homeowners through West Oakland. Yet a push for more housing, even affordable housing, activates a new real estate or a new crop of real estate development. And it's not necessarily good for a low-income black people. Here again, the past ends up being prologue, right? In the post-war years, the federal government sought to expand housing stock by offering financing options to white Americans, propelling the growth of suburban communities while at the same time disenfranchising black urbanites left behind. If we fast forward to the first decades of this century and racialized disinvestment, technology booms and financializations were creating these conditions that made poor and working-class city neighborhoods exceptionally vulnerable to gentrification as well to do white folks moved in, right? So the second area where cities really think about homelessness is that the spread of encampments are explicitly managed through these policies of clearance and again containment, this theme that just keeps coming up for me. So as of April of 2021, an estimated 140 encampments could be found all across Oakland. And the High Street encampment, there was a, you'll have to take a look at it, I can send a link, but the New York Times did this intensive photo essay showing various parts of the city, but particularly in East Oakland, which was the location of the High Street encampment. But a disproportionate number of camps continue to be located in West Oakland. In October of 2020, a city of Oakland passed its encampment management policy or the EMP to establish criteria for encampment interventions, right? So this policy created the encampment management team or EMT. So both of them together emphasize management as opposed to the eradication of conditions that drive the proliferation of encamped communities. So the EMT, which went into effect in January of 2021 focuses on the designation and protection of high sensitivity areas, meaning that the city will enforce the removal of encampments from parks along waterways and on other public lands. Similar to explanations for slum clearance from the mid century, a justifiable focus on health and societal well-being is unjustifiably leveraged to further disenfranchisement of the unhoused. Excluded from public civic spaces, homeless people are de facto restricted to industrial wastelands. Of all the interventions that are advocated by the city, few are more dystopian than its contract with the organization called Operation Dignity, which was founded in 1993. Operation Dignity is a third-party contractor whose work with the city throughout the encampment removal process, right? So according to Oakland City Auditor, closures and cleaning interventions must be preceded by certain steps, including but not limited to at least 72 hours advance notice of clearance.  So despite this euphemistic language of closures and cleaning interventions, the city and Operation Dignity are doing something certainly more insidious. The city frames the removal of encampments as necessary for safety and hygiene. Again, this framing is reminiscent of rhetoric during the urban renewal period when the city allowed portions of West Oakland to fall and disrepair in order to qualify for federal aid that would then facilitate the clearance of the entire area, right? In fact, in 1961, Assistant City Manager of Oakland admitted that the city had purposely disinvested the areas comprising that Acorn neighborhood I discussed earlier for several years because they knew that their development plan would be approved, so they just let it lay fallow. To designate an area as unsafe and unsanitary might reflect true conditions, but it doesn't address the processes by which the area got that way. So the last area by which the, I think, contemporary American cities, but specifically Oakland attempt to address and manage homelessness is through design. Oakland has initiated several programs and policies to address homelessness, most of which placed responsibility on homeless individuals. The city's offered various contemporary, excuse me, temporary solutions which operate alongside community-generated projects produced by artists, activists, organizers, and unsheltered individuals themselves. These include the provision of transitional housing, shelter beds, RV parking sites, and the controversial community cabins. I wish you could see it! Okay, this program is also known as the Tough Shed program. These are really toolshed communities erected on surface parking lots and in other vacant spaces, such as beneath the Interstate 980 Freeway. The Tough Shed experimental program came about in 2017, but at the end of 2017. But it was expanded after the city received a combination, combined $11.7 million from the state of California as well as Alameda County as part of the Homeless Emergency Aid program, or it's called HEAP. Following the city council's declaration of a shelter emergency crisis in 2017, the city started buying these toolsheds and they were the Tough Sheds that are produced by this Denver-based Tough Shed Inc. company. They established not only the community cabins through Tough Sheds or toolsheds, but they also established RV parking sites and surface lights all over Oakland as part of Emergency Homeless Response. So far, Oakland has spent nearly $9 million of those funds on the actual Tough Sheds and RV parking sites. So, you know, these settlements can never really be on private property, right? The various legislative measures have prohibited the establishment of camping, or excuse me, encampments within 25 feet of homeless shelters, within 50 feet of private residents or parks, within 100 feet of high schools, 150 feet from preschools, middle schools, or child care centers. So, essentially, they can't be around anybody, right? The irony, of course, is that some of today's encampments map onto the very parking lots that were produced through urban renewal and the removal of black homes half a century ago. Consider, for example, this co-governed homeless camp at the Peralta and Third Streets location in West Oakland, which is maintained in partnership between an unhoused community of residents and a housing outreach and support service provider. This camp is literally located on the vacant lot that's owned by California's Caltrans, which is like CDOT, right? And it emphasizes the links between transportation containment, if you think about state agencies, and homelessness, right? It's this layering that's occurring again. Another encampment site is directly behind the Seventh Street Post Office Distribution Center that, again, raised a whole community of black homes as well as commercial areas, right? This is, again, the location where in 1960 more than 400 homes and businesses were demolished to make room for that very distribution center. All right, we're going to go back to our imagination and hope that my image shows up. Okay, so let's imagine again the dystopian near future, right? So we were in the past, we got the present, we're thinking about the future. So foreshadowing this ever-expanding use of parking lots, right? And the, in the reinvention of housing options in Oakland. So let's look at, I am so sad. Oh my goodness. Okay, I cannot believe this. Where are my images? Okay, we're going to pause for a moment because you have to see the images. Okay, what is going on? All right, let's try again. They're here in my presentation. We're going to try to present. Folks in the room are also saying maybe you could share the presentation with us, and then if the images are showing up for you, we can read it. Maybe you could put it in the... Oh, PDF. I see that. Okay, let's try one more time. And then, do you guys see that? We see it now, yeah. All right. So those are tough sheds, right? So we're going back to, these are the community cabins, right? This is what they produced. Okay. So now we see that. Oh, I'm sad you didn't see the other images. Look at that. These are beautiful images. I love the pictures. Okay. And then you didn't... Okay, you saw that. All right. Now we're imagining tough towers, right? So this was another incredible image or images that Lake produced. It's tough towers in 2021. So if we think about these images, we're seeing the ways that the future folds back into the present day to depict a kind of utopianism after the end of utopias, right? So in this prophetic scene, we're examining an elaborate vertical settlement that strains against the edges of an asphalt-covered parking lot on Harrison Street in downtown Oakland. And this literally is a location I went with my daughter. We took pictures of this parking lot that exists today and Lake created these incredible images and built on this existing structure, right? Or existing space. So again, in downtown Oakland, this is tough towers, right? This modular provisional encampment for the unhoused that's administered as the logos inside the images tell us by the city of Oakland and sponsored by the Home Depot, which does distribute tough sheds as well as the tough shed company, right? So in tough towers, we're visually exacerbating Oakland's multi-million dollar expansion of the community cabins program to really riff on the likely perpetual kind of temporary housing solution that tough sheds in the community cabins program uses, right, as viable residences. Each of the tough towers, the units of the tough towers is a single tough shed that's stacked 10 stories high. These building blocks are intricately configured for structural stability. They're colorful frames connected by open stairways, billboards are cantilevered off the high units, and they advertise informal businesses. And we kind of imagine eyebrow threading or vegan tacos, right? So tough towers really is equipped with, as you see, a cell phone tower that's granting its inhabitants access to next generation wireless and broadband networks. Other kinds of technology are present too, right? A squad of golden drones hover, as you see, screening and surveilling residents and their guests. So it's easy to imagine that these are transmitting, evolving demographic data to the Oakland Police Department, which I could go on forever talking about them. All right, so tough towers is contained within its lot. It's stretching the borders but not breaching them. The towers serve as a temporary housing, like most of the emergency housing solutions proposed in Oakland over the decades. But again, imagine that this image shows us a structure that appears to be permanent, even if it's precariously so. The toughness that's ascribed to tough towers invokes this rhetoric of self-determination of resilience as well as dignity. Policy jargon that most often, other than that, functions to circumvent civic accountability and to shift the burden of resolving the city's housing crisis onto individuals and grassroots organizations who receive little more than performative assistance from above. This logo studded Oakland of the near future, really near future, looks peppy and inventive, designed forward. It seems to represent a victory for the city, which has apparently partnered with multinational businesses to offer terrific optics. It looks like a win for everyone except the people who actually live there, but so on the one hand, tough towers operates as this top-down system imposed onto its residents, who we understand have no other options, right? But on the other hand, we could imagine that the marginalized residents of this dystopian towers continues to live with the urban, adapting opportunistically to the political excesses that surround and manipulate them. All of which means that the unhoused will further adapt the structure of their settlement to discover ways to make these uninhabitable spaces inhabitable. So tough towers like the Ark is a fantasy that renders visible what present-time platform capitalism actually entails. Lake's images really clarify what's going on already, right now, exposing that which gets hidden under narratives of personal responsibility and short-term solutionism. This is what we see when we acknowledge the long deray of our ever-present past. So no official explanations have been given for the staggering 86% jump in homelessness in Oakland between 2015 and 2019. In 2021, the City Auditor's Office determined that the city lacked an efficient strategy or an effective strategy to deal with the crisis that's unfolded over these years, and it hasn't properly accounted for the declining conditions in the encampments. There really isn't a clear understanding of encampment activities. There's no budget that's sufficient to address the problems that have befallen those assembled into these communities. And really, the City Auditor's audit specifically analyzed the city's encampment management services, including its crisis response and long-term housing options, but by and large, the auditor concluded that the city is failing in its attempt to address and ultimately eradicate homelessness, at least within its city limits. So these policy prescriptions by the city and also by the county of Alameda, which in which Oakland is in, are quick fixes at best. None of them really address the long-standing political and economic issues that face marginalized groups, specifically Black Oaklanders. We can imagine that in the yet to come in which we are already living, which is also a long ago out of which we've never emerged, the most intensely marginalized residents of dystopian cities will continue to improvise, to generate opportunities, render unlivable places livable again. In doing so, they will continue to cope with the conditions generated by decisions many decades old and circumstances that are no longer clearly visible. Black migration for wartime jobs and the city's inability to house shipyard workers, the urban renewal area of demolition, the rapid construction of interstates and freeways that decimated neighborhoods of West Oakland, and the pre-pandemic jump in the unsheltered population, these histories collectively extend their temporal tendrils into the encampments across Oakland today. Through those encampments, the past of the 1940s and the 1960s and the 1990s and the 2000s continue to plot what's likely to happen in two or five or 20 or 50 years. So in looking at what's happening today, how then are we able to think about a future, right, that's already here, when it's the past that's never gone away? Honestly, clearance and containment, moving populations into particular locations and containing them there are central to urban policymaking. In the economy at large, time might have moved linearly from the post-war era to the present, but urban dynamics keep us as Black people in a cyclical routine, clear and contain. That's what's happened when the two temporalities of the way back then and the pretty soon and the two spatialities of get going and stay here collide and fuse. We are always already living out a future that was set in motion by past choices, yet this fact is constantly denied in political discourse and represented in policy decisions. Solutions end up being fetishized, yet positives as separable from still active legacies. What could seem like dry details of urban planning and economic history or like sci-fi scenarios dependent on time travel and seer-like predictions or like satirical takedowns of exaggerated corporate good citizenship. There are also mundane facts of what we see when we drive through parts of Oakland now, today. These pasts persist in the present as traces, as ghosts, as spores, half denied or invisibilized and half accepted as normal conditions of the 21st century East Bay housing economy. Once it was beat up old Victorian homes in West Oakland that were being destroyed to make room for freeways, industrial districts and surface parking lots, now the unhoused are being corralled into the same locations where those Victorians once stood. Those who were dispossessed then couldn't afford the houses now. If those buildings were still here, they wouldn't have been able to renovate them into these multimillion dollar assets. Parking lots themselves are contentious aspects of this feedback loop. They don't cause or resolve the housing crisis, but they're a tool constantly being deployed as a short-term fix for constantly presumed dearth of housing. The parking lot as an interim solution has operated in the past is operating in the present and in the future will continue to operate as a battleground where cities oscillate between clearing the unhoused away and containing them within the makeshift but impermeable borders of the lot. It's hard to conceive of the current cataclysmic conditions facing the growing unsheltered population in this wealthiest nation in the world. It's anything. I mean, we can't really think of it as anything but surreal. But the surreal is usually understood as a departure from reality as we know it. A concerted move away from the observable world. The surreal shows up as alternate or a non-reality, right? There's a narrow space between the aggressive objection of the contemporary encampment, which might seem surreal if it wasn't so normalized and the bright and unnerving Afro-surrealist exaggerations of Lake's arc or tough towers, right? One could also say that the contemporary encampment with its battered vacation campers and blue tarps and repurposed woodshipping pallets represents a grubby hypertrophy of the streamlined urban renewal vision of the 1960s and 1970s or the can-do efforts of the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps it's time to imagine not a future divorce from the past but a layered present in which our awareness and acknowledgement can help make room for a truly radical reimagination of interior and exterior life alone. As geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, what the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. And I want to leave with this image that I saw on Twitter last week, which I think represents kind of our understanding of what's going on, right? So here we have someone who's critiquing, I guess, communism by showing an image from today, saying this is an example of housing plans under communism. And the reply, as you see, is actually pretty correct. This is the literal current housing plan under capitalism, right? This is existing today. So if you're going to take a look at anything, take a look at Big C Capitalism, probably a little C as well. But anyway, thank you so much. I don't know how much time is left because I was just chatting, chatting, chatting, but I do appreciate you all listening. So thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Summers, for your talk. I think that's given all of us a lot of food for thought and created some new horizons and possibilities for how we think about a lot of issues in urban planning. So I'd like to open up the session for questions at this point. And I see the first question coming in from Stefan. So Stefan, do you want to read your question out loud or I can read it? Yeah, sure. Either one. You can read it, Carolyn, if you want. Okay. So Stefan says, alongside these future passive zones of social abandonment, and he loves the Jalbiel reference, I'm curious as to whether your research also engages more optimistic future paths for foregrounding black alternative imaginings. For example, could Black Panther histories with major roots in Oakland connect with bright aphorocerealist aesthetics of political power building with contemporary activism like in the Moms for Housing? In short, might there be experiments and possibilities of an optimistic sort from below too? Interesting. So thank you for that question, Stefan. I saw you during my presentation nodding and stuff, so I really appreciated that. So I think part of it is recognizing that we might have to upend a positive negative binary that in dealing with the aphorocereal, it's not necessarily about what's a hopeful future. It's really examining what exists currently. So in a way, having Lake produce these images was more so taking something to its extreme. Our intention for this work is, you know, what I was referencing before. We're not coming up with solutions. We are not going to be the ones fetishizing solutions as so many others do. Instead, we're calling attention to how absurd the current policy prescriptions and past policy prescriptions have been. So part of it is recognizing that the condition and crisis of the unhoused and really thinking specifically about the over population of black homeless residents in Oakland and elsewhere is a symptom, right? It is not the disease itself. It's a symptom of the disease. So if anything, we want to be able to highlight the fact that the folks who are supposed to be focused on creating a solution aren't necessarily looking at the true problem. So certainly we could look at alternative imaginings. And I think it's really important to imagine a different kind of future, but again, not to necessarily couch it and thinking about positive or negative, which I don't think you're necessarily falling back on, but I do think that acknowledging what's currently happening can allow us to say, okay, either we're going to start over, right? Which is actually what I would like, start over and not necessarily fix what's existed in the past, or it's going to be the cycle that's happening constantly. Last thing though, I do think that various histories and thinking about the Black Panther Party, thinking about moms for housing and other activities that have very much these roots in the past are important to understanding how folks are today combating various forms of racial capitalism that have put black people in particular in these precarious conditions and positions. So in a lot of ways, I do think that that kind of political activism is invaluable at the same time as critiquing a past, a long past of policy that has just not helped the people that it supposedly is looking out for. But I appreciate that question. I have a question, actually. So I read and really enjoyed your book, Black in Place, about DC. And I'm curious, well, this is actually sort of a selfish question because my favorite topic, I'll frame it in a way that makes it relevant for others too, hopefully. So I'm curious how you think some of the concepts and ideas that you talked about here might apply in DC and what about the Oakland case study you think is particular versus what might perhaps be more universal across, you know, a shared history of dispossession that most if not probably all cities in the US share with one another. I'm curious how you might apply some of these ideas in DC and how they might be different in that context. Well, thank you for reading the book. I appreciate that. So, you know, in terms of Black in Place, one of the main analytics I really work with is thinking about blackness as an aesthetic. So I talk about black aesthetic and placement and the ways that cities attempt to ultimately gentrify and push out black people by using the blackness that their bodies or culture generate to kind of create places that are exclusionary and essentially make them unwelcome. And so as it relates to Oakland and thinking more about time and temporality, you know, Oakland was another chocolate city and me growing up in Oakland really, I mean, that was my experience. Oakland was a black city. Everywhere I went, it's like I carried Oakland with me, especially around the Bay Area in terms of visiting other areas. So thinking about the emplacement of blackness in Oakland is still incredibly prevalent. You see this in the public art, you see this when people rely on the legacy of the Black Panther Party as a way to generate conversations around diversity. The Bay Area, you know, there were a former, Gene Kwan, the former mayor of Oakland, a few mayors back, was on record speaking about the fact that Oakland wasn't black, but it was diverse, right? There was this push against understanding it as a black city and instead wanting to welcome this form of diversity. And you certainly see that in DC as I discussed in the book, but in other locations, diversity is supposed to make us feel good. Black is supposed to make us in a lot of ways feel bad, but you have to have a little bit of black in order to show that you're progressive enough to invite other people into the city. Oakland is very complicated in that sense because it does have this legacy of not only kind of black pride, black culture, but also if you think about black politics and organizing and organizing outside of the state, it was really important to be disruptive. And so the state can't contain that disruption if you rely on that kind of political infrastructure that exists again outside. So with imagining the importance of community-based work, honestly, black feminism in terms of creating spaces for black people to still reside, I do think that in relationship to the book, Oakland unfortunately is further along. It's kind of, I mean, going back to actually Steffen in terms of the negative and optimistic, it's like it's really further along. The fact that the last census had the black population at 24% and that it's now at 20%, just kind of like, it just, it stuck me because I didn't expect that the numbers had dwindled so much. And why I do believe that the population is important because I do think that black people are actually remaining and making space in the city is really important to the place being open to encouraging other people. So yeah, thinking about, you know, Carolyn, I appreciate you bringing up black in place because I think honestly, like the next book was for me supposed to be more positive and focusing on the ways that black people are making space in Oakland. And then when I moved here, I was just completely depressed. It was like I need to figure out what's going on here before I could look at the ways that there's resistance and that resistance is being really adopted by the folks who live here. The last thing I'll say with my lab, the Berkeley lab for speculative urbanisms, the focus that we're really trying to draw on here is the speculative, not speculation in the sense that we have, you know, developers coming in and essentially targeting and tarnishing communities, but speculative in the ways that methods are drawn on that don't necessarily require the way planners, sorry, y'all who are trying to be planners, but the way planners have truly destroyed communities. It's creating a different language, a new way of thinking forward that enables the kind of quotidian and mundane living to emerge. Oh, an audience member. Hello, audience member. Hi, my name is Taisha and I'm a first year PhD student. And I like a way to use the imagining of the future in your research. And I think now in the sustainability research, we kind of use this approach. And I'm not sure whether you used corrective envisioning by the cities in your research. Do you think about bringing some value in the context of urban planning to use this, like a corrective and creative power of the people in this process to think of what they could imagine on the alternative instead of what planners are putting to them? Well, thank you for that question. So I mean, I think it's a good one in the sense that there is this attention to fixing what has occurred in the past, right? So that corrective component I think is important. But my concern is that going back to this concept of the symptom versus the disease. If you, I think in a lot of ways planners, like the kind of legacy of Robert Moses can't completely just be erased, you have to understand how it was able to happen. So me being in geography, it's helpful to understand the conditions that undergird what's happening, right? And I think drawing on understanding how something was able to happen can enable you to correct, right? And so there needs, in terms of imagining, you still kind of do have to go back to the past. You don't reinscribe the same thing. So it's not that you create exclusivity or exclusive conditions or that you necessarily privilege a certain group. You need to see, well, there are policies, there were structures, there were theories, there were epistemologies that were enacted in order to get us to this point. So we need to further understand what happened in order to not reinscribe those same theories, epistemologies methods, etc. So the corrective component still requires an acknowledgement as well. And I've talked to different planning groups about this and planners, the fact that we have to also let go of the concept of being an expert, especially when you're going into someone else's community. And so it's the actual living that we should care about. So it's more important, I think, to ask the people who are doing the living what is needed and then figuring out through skill what can be done versus determining what should be for a particular future, right? Correcting the past can be an important concept, but honestly learning how to work with communities I think is a much more effective strategy around that. Thank you. Thank you. Any further questions from the audience online or folks in the room? So I think we will wrap up there. But on behalf of GSTAP and the Urban Planning Program in particular, I'd like to thank you again, Dr. Summers, for your great presentation today. And we really appreciate you taking the time to share your work with us. Thank you for having me. Thanks also to everyone who attended and make sure to join us next week at the same time for our next Lips Talk by Professor Willow Langamom, whose talk will be on. She's fantastic. Good talk will be on the Fight for Fair redevelopment along Mary Lynn's purple line. So thank you again, Dr. Summers, and if the Ph.D. folks want to... Oh yeah, I'm sticking around. ...get set up there. And folks on Zoom, see you next week.


Hi, everyone. Thank you for being here today. And let's just get the talk started. First, a little bit about myself. My name is CeCe Huang, and I'm currently working at Google as a software engineer. And I have been contributing directly to Kubernetes upstream for a couple of years and across multiple SIGs. For those who are not familiar with Kubernetes upstream community, SIG is short for Special Interest Group. And I started at the C-Club Rider and won the Contributor Award there. And then I released Kubernetes 127 as the release manager, which is the previous release. And I'm also a contributor in SIG APM machinery with the focus on the extensible features. And recently, I'm leading the self-related work there and which we are going to talk about a little bit in our next slides, maybe. So the topic is declarative everything and what's going to be covered today. So we'll first begin with the declarative nature of Kubernetes and then talk about the notable missing pieces inside declarative APIs and talk about all the improvements we did and plan to do, and then the future plan at the end. So let's start with the declarative nature of Kubernetes. But first, let's begin with the very basic concept of declarative versus imperative. I know most of you might already familiar with the concept, but in short words, declarative is when you see what you want, while on imperative is when you see how to get what you want. So let's take a look at an example of a Costco sampling station. I just assume everyone loves their free food there. So see if you'd love to make sure there are always six samples on the tree. And for doing it imperatively, we maybe periodically check the number of the samples on the tree. And if the number doesn't match what we want, we make adjustments. For example, if it's empty, we just make six samples and put them on the tree. If it's more, we just take off the extra. While the declarative way would be to state the desired state, which is having six random samples on the tree. And you can rely on the system to do the right things for you. And you don't need to worry about how the system ensures the desired state to maintain throughout time. So how it can achieve in Kubernetes. You just specify a desired state with a configuration file like this. Everyone familiar with the arm. And after submitted to Kubernetes, Kubernetes would perform all the sample monitoring and adjustment for you in a control loop, which we also call it a reconciliation loop. So what's the benefit of this? The biggest thing is that Kubernetes declarative API enforced the separation of responsibilities. So you don't need to spend effort to develop and maintain the implementation. And it's much more intuitive to understand what the end goal is. And it's much easier to change the end goal if you really want. And as everyone know, all the Kubernetes magic is done through declarative APIs. So from things like resource allocation to the basic stuff like resource object creation and the authorization. And we even have a declarative API, which is to define new declarative APIs, the customer resource definition. Before we go any further, I'd love to set the stage. So first, I will not get into the backstory of why we went declarative, like the decision made roughly 10 years ago. There is a fantastic resource I've linked here from the Kubernetes early stage and authored by Brian Grant for those curious about the history. And second, we won't be going deep into the inner workings of control loop or all the details about how we do the declarative management. And last, I'm not here to argue about the way over the other. So either imperative or declarative Kubernetes offers ability for both and for different use cases. And they always continue to do so. So what are we going to talk about today? So over time, there has been a lot of effort to make declarative APIs more powerful, not to mention that the versionings, the resources, the structure schemas, the defaulting, the server-side apply, the open API history, and all those stuff. But there are still a bunch of things which we are not able to do them well in declarative API just yet. And today, we're going to talk about one of the notable missing pieces, the data validation. So everyone know data validation is critical and you just need data validation when there are constraints on your data and it almost do constraints everywhere. So however today, from the declarative APIs, you may easily get information like, say for example, your resource might have to have a name and the name is supposed to be a string. But that's it. It's less obviously to find the constraints behind the fields. So for example, here, even for the constraints, constraints name itself, Kubernetes have so many different constraints applied for different names. And if you are defining your own customer resources, there might be further. And also, type string was widely used for all the other fields and each of them may have like different constraints associated. And it will get even more complicated when you define your own customer resource. And we all know that validating is critical. If we don't do validating or don't do it properly, things will break in a hard to reason way. And future debugging would be much more difficult. So here is an example of the current OP API specification which gives you exactly what I mentioned like you're supposed to have a name and the name is supposed to be a string and that's it. People may argue that, okay, I can write like a very detailed description there and the user is supposed to like read all three of them and follow them. But everyone knows it's not what's happening in the real world. So let's begin with, let's talk about how the improvement we did in this area and how this gonna benefit for all the users. And let's begin with the one people cares the most, customer resource definition. And there was quite some time that we only have like a very limited support for specify constraints declaratively. So for example, we have seridistructural schemas, we have OP API V3 validations, so on so forth as an example here. So we are declaring the type and value here for the IP addresses and we can use some of the, we can put some of the constraints in a very declaratively, but that's it. So what if you have like more advanced constraints? Like what if involves check of another field? What if you want to only apply certain constraints when the see the type is set to a specific value? So for quite some time, all the things which are not covered here, we have to use a thing called admission webhook. Any of my here have ever developed their own webhook? Wow, not many, any of them are familiar with the concept of the webhook? Cool, so the webhook is basically another very powerful extension point, a Kubernetes upstream offering. So it will happen like after the data being authorized and authenticated and before the data was saved in the specific storage. But it's a separate like a binary and component added into your system. So introducing a production grade webhook is not only a substantial development work but also increase the operational complexity dramatically. I'll explain why, but I'll explain it briefly today but you can get the idea as a separate component added into your system. You just have to wherever you were trying to introduce a webhook, you just have to think carefully on things like how to package it, how to release it, how to integrate with your existing monitoring or learning system and how to upgrade it or roll it back if needed. What about the latency added, how to scale it and to make it even worse, webhook is very easy to be misconfigured. So an example I always like to give is the failure policy you have to set in your webhook. So basically webhook allow you to set either fill open or fill close mode by setting the policies inside your configuration. So, sorry, if you go with fill open, so this basically means if the webhook fills either the binary stop serving or there is an error happened and you're just gonna let the request through anyway. And if your webhook is doing some kind of security check that clearly will be a problem. But on the other hand, if you choose to fill close which means if the webhook has a problem, all the requests that are routed to the webhook will be rejected. So if your webhook matches to all the polls or all the deployments, so you basically lose your controlling availability for that. So that's why still now webhook is still remain the leading cause of the controlling outage. Even people learned over time like to be more cautious to configure it but it's still having a lot of issues. And for a while, webhook is the only solution to the functionalities we want.  So you have to be the one who responsible to validate it. And webhook is widely used for that purpose but it's causing all the trouble we just mentioned. And we began to as a community maintainer, we began to think about how we could do here to help things better. So after research, we found that the vast majority of the use cases people want to do with validation are really simple. So they want to make sure the field is immutable or they want to do some basic crossfield check or they want to apply a specific format to a field. So then the question becomes can we use something simpler? And I'm really happy and excited to announce that all of that happened through a very magic extension field we added into CRD called x-communities-validations. The feature called CRD validation use and I linked the documentation here. And I'm happy to announce that like we just graduated to stable in the current community 129 release. Of course, if nobody reverted before the former release date, roughly a month, yeah. So what they did is they'll leverage a power of a common expression language, which allowed you to write a very powerful expressions in your CRD to do your data validation. You don't need to know much about cell, it's just a tool we used and after you see the examples following you can easily guess what they are doing and you might not even need to look at the documentations like for the basic validations you're trying to write. But for cell, all you need to know is it's an open source project and we work really close with the maintenance there. It's designed to be simple and efficient and it's a type language. So we will do proper type checking for you and we have already successfully embedded cell into Kubernetes. So that's great. And the cell got pretty solid adoption in the community ecosystem and other cloud provider offerings. So I will not spend much time there, but just the basic stuff. All the magic was done through one single extension field called x-community validations and it can put anywhere under open PIV3 schema if you're familiar with CRD. That gives you a lot of flexibility and you can just start writing expressions there. In this example, we want to make sure that the replica we said is always smaller than the max replica being said. So you can use self, which is a cell variable to provide you access to the values scoped to current schema. And as I mentioned earlier, we have a really nice type checking which caught the error way ahead of time. So if you have like mistyped a field or anything like that and it will be caught while you are creating or updating your CRD. And of course, we have another cell variable called old self which allowed it to be used for, so we call it a transition rule, but it's mainly just to force the immutability. So in this example, we just try to enforce that the field called full is immutable through a very simple cell expression. And my colleague, Alexander Zaleski, wrote a very nice blog on the use cases on the immutability, so please feel free to take a look if you're interested. And here is a real world example I just borrowed from Gateway API. So as it's showing here previously, we have all those basic kind of validation done through OpenPI schema for type and values. But as an example, I just explained earlier what if we want to apply a specific format for a specific like a value if it's been set. Now for those kind of advanced validation, it's all possible with the CRD validation rules I just mentioned earlier. So in this case, we want to apply a specific format when the type is set to host name. And I will stop here, but I do have another talk earlier this year in another cube count to talk about all the details and all some features offered here. So please feel free to take a look if you're interested. And they have great documentation on that. And first to mention that, thanks to Mathos Maurice who went ahead and built something called Cell Playground which comes with a lot of examples and allow you to play with the cell. So it's easy to just play with it, make sure all the expressions you wrote is right and valid before you actually put it into production. And another exciting thing, news I wanted to share is about the adoption. So it's from the Gateway API team which just released the GA version. And by using the feature we offered here, they successfully replaced more than 99% of the validation webhook they were used before which like a really big relief for them. And thanks to Nick Young and Rob Scott who shared the slides with us. And thanks for everyone who worked on Gateway API to make the adoption working. So now, wait a second. If we take a step back and look at the CRDs, then that means CRD now is even more declarative than native types because as many of you may already know that native types doesn't offer those many formations. So what is validation done in native types? It's mostly the hard-coded validation logic. You have no idea how many lines of validations just for API sitting inside the Kubernetes upstream repo. It's like tens of thousands lines of code only for API field validation. It's a lot of maintenance effort and also it makes it very expensive to add validation later because we're humans and we make mistakes. But as a maintainer who like maintain the project like Kubernetes, which is such a fundamental project has a whole ecosystem like built on top of it. It's we really don't want to break anything like. So the first principle would be like we hope that things which previous work will keep working. So which makes it very expensive to add any missing validations later. And also it might cause inconsistent error message in different ways because it's all human writing code. So it might have like a different error message. And also because servers use a ghost drug and the kubectl uses open API schema. So there might be inconsistency there as well. So what are we going to do here? There is a enhancement recently called Declare Validation Rules for Declarative Validation for Native Types. Thanks to my colleague Joe Bass who initiated the effort. And thanks for Alexander Noleski who is leading this effort now. So the main idea behind this is catch the native type with what we did, what I just mentioned in CRD. And so later like you will be able to use IDR tags to declare validation rules for native types. So an example would be here. There is some IDR tags people might already familiar with like a minimum maximum. But the field we just mentioned earlier for CRD will also be adopted for native types which allowed us to write more complicated rules, validation constraints like here like the cross field check or something. And I have linked the cap link here. So if you're interested to play take a look. This enhancement is going to alpha in the current community 129 release but there is no notable changes for users yet. So we're looking forward for the future work. But the end goal is we plan to support all those IDR tags for native types as well. And all those information will be published to OpenATL together. And you can see X-community, stash validation. We're using the exactly same OpenATL validation field for all the complicated and advanced constraints. So what those will bring us? It will benefit for both community maintainers and community users. As an API reviewer who recently trying to help with API review, you have no idea how complicated or how many code sitting there only for the API validation. And after this, it will be easy to develop, maintain and review APIs for sure. And it will also will enable the improvements to the API machinery. For example, if we have future enhancement for the validation parts instead of writing code across maybe 15K lines of handwriting validation logic, you can just embed it, implement it into the declarative validation subsystem. And people may ask why I should care if I don't contribute to community upstream? Here is the reason. It will allow the direct access to extra API validation rules instead of only checking for descriptions. The end user can now very visibly to see that all the constraints behind the API. And also this effort will make OpenAPI more valuable for sure. It will for sure tell us more about what's expected. And this effort is also gonna allow the shift left validation, slice command line to validation to be possible rely on the information provided by OpenAPI. And in the link, there is already a initiative effort done by Alex who is proposing to have like a command line validation tools for that. And also it will great help the API deposition. So for example, there is a very common use case that people would want to embed native types into your CRD. And earlier you just have to like basically take responsibility for all the validations and in a separate part. But now after all the constraints are banded together within the unpublished in OpenAPI, it becomes very easier to like have like the embedded native types inside CRD. And it's also will gain the validation of native types automatically. So now we have talked about specifying constraints for CRDs in a declarative way. We have talked about specifying the constraints for native types in a declarative way. But you may wonder, like if I declare the constraints within the type definition, then the constraints will be forced to like wherever I use that type. But what if it's not what I need? So what if I have some kind of constraints which is only specified for my own cluster? And for example, for like a security reasons, I only want to say allow image being pulled from my cooperation like registry, or I only allow authorized user to perform a 13 operation. So in another word, policy enforcement as people is more familiar with. It's used generically on security, compliance, governance or configuration management. And previously like to be able to do it, we only have very limited support together with the community core upstream and people have to use some third party like policy engine. For example, OPA gatekeeper or Kavanaugh to achieve their goals. Or you just have to write your own webhook for that. So what we did there is we offered a feature called the validating animation policy. I'm happy to share that we just graduated this feature to beta in Kubernetes 128, which is the last release. And we are working on promoting it to stable in very soon. So what they did is I will not explain everything is maybe too much information, but we introduced some new Kubernetes resources called validating animation policy and validating animation policy binding. And the main reason behind having two resources here is that we would love to offer the possibility to properly separate the responsibilities of writing policies and the policy enforcement work here. So in this case, the policy would be reusable and sufficient configurable to be able to support more than just one company or one clusters. And also like cluster and main who probably will be the one who enforce all those policies. Sorry. So we'd have enough flexibility to configure the policy based on the end goal of their own organization. So here is the new resource called validating animation policy and it's very, if you are familiar with webhook, it might be easy to pick it up. We have like the match conference which defined which resources this policy applied to and the way it works is very similar as the way current webhook works, but we have some more fantastic features here as well. And we have like a field called validations which you can just start write cell rules to explain what the policy does. So in this example, we just do very simple validations. We want the policy applied to all the creation and update deployment requests and we want to make sure that the replica number set is always smaller than a number which were referred to a parameter resource. You can use basically anything for your parameter resource which gives flexibility to cloud and main to like configure the policy. So then cloudster and main can go ahead and create something called that information policy binding which bind the policy to your own cluster. And in this case, the policy will start to be enforced and the parameterization will allow the cluster mainly to bind like multiple policies in different ways. So for example here, we might want to enforce the replica to be smaller than three in a test namespace but for your production namespace that might be a different number. And there are so many awesome stuff going on in this feature but unfortunately I don't have enough time to talk about it. I talked it a little bit together with the best practice in my earlier talk and hopefully the documentation we provided will like sufficient answer like all the possible questions. And yeah, so also another thing worse to mention that if you only want to enforce something very simple which you don't need parameterization at all you can just remove the parameter resource and only use those two like new resources to achieve your goal. And another thing worse to mention is that the whole ecosystem has been aware of the effort we did and the main policy engine such as Opaket Keeper or Kavana already adopted the feature and yeah, so that's it. Feel free to talk about more details like afterwards I'm happy to share. And then let's talk about the future plan and the key takeaways. So the way I view this is like we have like a bunch of use cases we pretty familiar with like deployments, jobs, Arbex and stuff which are supported by declarative APIs. And we have some other like emerging use cases like we talk about today the data validation both for native types, facilities for advanced policy purpose which are not supported by declarative APIs earlier. And we have some further for example the mutating cases in policy enforcement area. What about the CRD version conversion and some other use cases which are not covered by declarative APIs. And now cell will give us a power to expand the power of declarative APIs so that a lot of use cases which were not covered before will be covered now. And we are as I mentioned earlier the mutating case and the CRD conversion is also critical since CRD remains one of the most important extension point in Kubernetes offerings. So our next step will be expand the declarative API power to include those cases as well. And there is our cell all those work I mentioned has been done under the CKPM machinery. Here is the contact information and they also have a specific working group called cell working group and have like the separate select check on the mailing list. So please feel free to talk to us if you feel that's usable. Thank you so much. And I'm open for questions. And I guess we have Mac on each side. So if whoever have questions feel free to speak up. Thanks for nice work. After validation to accomplish your declarative goal are you gonna do remediation? I saw your drawing board as a future work. Oh yeah. So mutating would be our next target for sure because there are a lot of use cases especially among the policy enforcement area where people just wanted to make sure they apply or like see the labels in their resources or whatsoever. So that will be our next step. So can I say to make declarative API a reality there are still gaps, right? Mutation is one of them. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Can you elaborate any other gaps? For example, like a controller. So even though you like we allowed the power to declare your like new declarative APIs through customer resource definition but you still have probably to write your own, I don't know, imperative controllers which told them how to do. So I will keep the door open to future possibilities to also say supported use cases like that in a more declarative way. Yeah. Thanks. You're welcome. I got a question on sort of validating the cell that you've written. Like in the replicas field that you had that typo. Like what are sort of tools that you can use for catching errors like that? I mean like you said that it would've gotten caught and it seems like there are tools like that but how can we validate that actually we're writing, you're adding code essentially to the game files. Like how do you validate that code? Oh, that's a great question. So as I mentioned, cell is a typed language. So we probably do the type checking for you in all of the features I mentioned. So for example, in the CRD if the good thing about the type checking is that we do it in a really early stage of the life cycle. So whenever you have like a C type checking error there so you misspiled a field name for example, it will be caught immediately when you try to apply your customer resource definition. So and also you can use either like the cell playground I shared to pre-verify or you can make your own like cell like tools to pre-verify before you really apply your CRD. And we do have some cell linker tools available but currently it's lack of maintenance. So feel free to make your own or come to contribute. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, hi. The current validating admissions webhook ecosystem is pretty large. Basically every project has one multiple tons. Do you see this less like significantly lessening the amount of charge that are shipping with full validating webhooks or is it more of a different? Yeah, we agree that's a huge area out there. And as I mentioned, like we do see a lot of troubles like webhook was bring to us like not only the things I mentioned but also like it's a lot more complicated configuration and it's a separated component. It's a separate binary. So it involves a lot of extra effort there. So what we did here is we were trying to really focus on the Kubernetes upstream offerings try to think what they should do to make this extension point better. So after the validating admission policy were widely used it can also be used by among the men like policy like engines like I mentioned earlier or like among other kind of third party policy engine tools so that they could leverage the power of this to kind of reduce the trouble previously made by webhook. I hope that answered. Yeah, that does. I have one more if no one else has one. And I might have missed this earlier. Are there any plans to extend this to mutating policies? Oh, yes. Our next plan would be like expand the power to mutating use cases for sure. And hopefully we could get something like wrapped up for the next release. Yeah, they're working on the design and because mutating obviously are more way more complicated than validating cases. And we discussed earlier inside the CIG APM machinery. So all the key maintainers there agree that we should wait until we finalized the validation cases before we move too soon to mutating cases. Yeah. That seems like a pretty huge deal for versioning primarily. If you have minor bumps within your versions you no longer need any webhook at all. That's pretty cool. Yeah, hopefully that's our end goal. Thank you. To save people from the webhook nightmare. Oh, sorry. Thank you so much for being here.