Reclaiming Land
Decommodifying Property for Racial and Social Equity
From the Jeffersonian grid to the community land trust, the way land is platted and leveraged as property defines racial and social justice by shaping opportunities for wealth creation, sociability narratives, and environmental ethics. Ownership models typified by the single-family home have famously calcified conventions of stability and self-interest. Yet the structural logics behind property—belonging, the commons, liability, maintenance, and profit—are also a site for experimentation far beyond. In this sense, architects and planners can work with activists, policy makers, economists and ecologists to overhaul orchestrations and representations of power by reshaping property. This online symposium brings together scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplines to ask how property can be reimagined for equity and inclusiveness.
Part 1: Property in Crisis
Panel Discussion
Sep 21 Mon @ 6-7:30pm on Zoom
Free and Open to the Public.
Speakers Katharina Pistor, Columbia University; Noni Session, East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative; Jonathan Tate, Office of Jonathan Tate; Kyle Whyte, Michigan State University; moderated by Janette Kim, CCA Urban Works Agency.
This panel discussion asks how property can be reimagined to structure inclusive benefits and expanded accountability in the face of volatile climates, exploitative markets, defunded public health, and ever-widening social and racial inequity. While crisis has famously been framed as an ‘opportunity,’ it is perhaps even more transformative as an event that recasts previously ‘acceptable’ losses into something ethically intolerable. Resistance and resilience to crisis requires reconciliation with past injustices as well as contemporary volatility. In this light, property has long afforded protection from risk and protection for those with wealth. Instead, what inventive reconfigurations of property or alternatives to it—across spatial, cultural, legal and financial definitions of land ownership—can further equity in the face of crisis? How can property recognize the value of labor, ancestral rights, networks of care and kinship? Who stands to gain wealth from property, and be held responsible for its impacts? What kinds of collectives can be defined accordingly?
Part 2: Exquisite Properties
Workshop
Sep 24 Thu @ 12-3pm
Workshop, Sep 24 Thu @ 12-3pm PST
RSVP to participate as spots are limited.
Participants: Alex Acuña, Enterprise Community Partners; Billy Fleming, The McHarg Center; Adam Marcus, CCA; Eric Wycoff Rogers, Cambridge University; Colleen Sanders, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation; Noni Session, East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative; Maia Small, San Francisco Planning; with Janette Kim, Antje Steinmuller, Neeraj Bhatia and Chris Roach, CCA Urban Works Agency.
Interdisciplinary teams will be asked to invent alternate property paradigms in this hands-on workshop. Scholars, practitioners and students will work collaboratively to define strategies and create visualizations inspired by the Surrealist collaborative drawing game cadavre exquis, or exquisite corpse. Reservations are open to the public but limited. Please RSVP by emailing your name and affiliation to janettekim@cca.edu.
Part 3: Commoning Practices as Acts of Resistance
Panel Discussion
Sep 28 Mon @ 6-7:30pm on Zoom
Free and Open to the Public.
Stefan Gruber, Carnegie Mellon; Stavros Stavrides, National Technical University of Athens; Georgeen Theodore, NJIT; Robyn C. Spencer, Lehman College; moderated by Antje Steinmuller and Neeraj Bhatia, CCA Urban Works Agency. This panel explores commoning practices as an alternative form of land organization that sits outside the speculative market as well as acts of commoning.
This panel explores commoning practices as an alternative form of land organization that sits outside the speculative market. We will look at alternative financial and planning models that span from public to private space, the city to the house, the top down to the bottom-up. This session will speculate on how land can more equitably be distributed and tap into experimental approaches from around the world that reimagine the platting, organization, and governance of land. Speakers are especially invited to consider commoning as an alternative to commodification. Central to this question are the ways in which spatial resources are held, governed, and stewarded by the commoners.
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Speaker Bios:
Alex Acuña is the Democratizing Resilience and Disaster Recovery Program Fellow at Enterprise Community Partners, where he works to develop tools and resources to help infuse just recovery and trust transition principles into disaster management. Shaped by his experiences in community organizing and home defense work, Alex is interested in the risks and potential opportunities for community self-determination that arise in moments of acute shock – from economic crises, to natural hazard events, to pandemics. Alex was born and raised in the East Bay, received his BA in Urban and Environmental Policy from Occidental College, and his Masters in City Planning from MIT.
Adam Marcus is a licensed and registered architect (California #C35221, New York #034114) and educator with over fifteen years experience in the field. His work has been recognized, published, and exhibited internationally. In addition to directing Variable Projects, he is a partner in Futures North, a public art collaborative dedicated to exploring the aesthetics of data. A graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Adam previously practiced with Marble Fairbanks in New York City, where he served as project architect for a number of award-winning educational and public projects. Adam is an Associate Professor of Architecture at California College of the Arts, where he teaches design studios in computational design and digital fabrication, co-directs CCA's Architectural Ecologies Lab, and collaborates with CCA's Digital Craft Lab. From 2011 to 2013, Adam was the Cass Gilbert Assistant Professor at University of Minnesota School of Architecture, where he chaired the symposium "Digital Provocations: Emerging Computational Approaches to Pedagogy & Practice" and organized the school's annual Architecture As Catalyst graduate workshop program. He has also taught at the undergraduate Department of Architecture at Barnard College / Columbia University and the Architectural Association's Visiting School Los Angeles. He was recently selected by Design Intelligence as one of the ’30 Most Admired Educators’ and received the 2015-2016 New Faculty Teaching Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the American Institute of Architecture Students. Adam currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA).
Katharina Pistor is a leading scholar and writer on corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, and comparative law and legal institutions. Pistor is Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the author or co-author of nine books. Her most recent book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, examines how assets such as land, private debt, business organizations, or knowledge are transformed into capital through contract law, property rights, collateral law, and trust, corporate, and bankruptcy law. The Code of Capital was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Financial Times and Business Insider. Pistor publishes widely in legal and social science journals. In her recent essay “From Territorial to Monetary Sovereignty” in the Journal on Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2017), she argued that the rise of a global money system means a new definition of sovereignty: the control of money. She has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Institutional Economics, European Business Organization Law Review, American Journal of Comparative Law, and Columbia Journal for European Law. Pistor is a prominent commentator on cryptocurrency and has testified before Congress on the lack of regulatory oversight of proposed international cryptocurrencies. As the director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation, Pistor directs the center’s work to develop research projects and organize conferences to examine ways in which law shapes global relations and how they, in turn, transform the law. (Link)
Eric Wycoff Rogers is a scholar, community organizer, experimental designer and artist. Eric is currently a PhD student in American history at Cambridge, and their research primarily focuses on the intersections between social and spatial history in the early twentieth century, and the way that socio-spatial institutions (such as reformed municipal governments, urban moral reform movements, civic organizations, the military, and federal housing programs and policies) shaped everyday life, remade the definition of home and domesticity, leisure, families, cultural constructions of sexuality/desire, gender, financial infrastructures and collectively-held aspirations. Outside of academia, Eric is a member of the Embassy Network, which seeks collective and communal solutions to some of society’s pressing problems.
Colleen Sanders has been working with CTUIR First Foods Policy Program for almost three years, and has been engaged with local food systems and small scale agriculture for over a decade. She channeled her passion for wild systems into a Bachelors of Science in Wildlife Ecology from the University of British Columbia, and while working in the food industry after graduating, decided to translate her belief in food as the answer into a Masters of Science in Community Food Systems, and a graduate certificate in Sustainable Agriculture from Washington State University. Indigenous food systems are central to the tribe's climate adaptation planning, and as a non-tribal person working for a tribal government, part of Colleen's journey has been to decolonize the way we view food, land, water, and people, and to center environmental justice in her work and in her own ways of thinking. Colleen spends her non-existent free time building a closer connection with her food, land, and community in Pendleton, Oregon.
Noni Session is a third generation West Oaklander, Cultural Anthropologist and Grassroots Organizer. Noni is executive director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, a democratic, People of Color led cooperative that takes land and housing off the speculative market to create permanently affordable, community controlled land and housing. Noni’s research and organizing work spans national and global arenas. In her doctoral work under the umbrella of the UNDP in Nairobi, Kenya, Noni carried out ethnographic analysis of international humanitarian strategies and their on-the-ground consequences. After nearly gaining election to the Oakland City Council in 2016, she decided that her community’s best solution to rapid displacement and economic instability is to develop an independent cooperative economy. Noni is closely engaged with Mandela Grocery Cooperative, a Black led worker-owned cooperative in West Oakland that is not only bringing organic produce and local economics to the community, but also working to organize cooperative businesses into the upcoming developments around BART; as well, Noni is contributing her visionary energy to homeless advocacy groups across West and East Oakland who are building a movement of houseless and volunteers that are organizing for housing dignity through direct action and policy.
Maia Small is a Principal Architect and Urban Designer at the San Francisco Planning Department where she leads City Design, the Department’s urban design program. As part of both current entitlement and long-range policy work, she maintains the team’s agenda and portfolio of comprehensive urban design, design policy, public realm, and design review projects and processes. In response to the unique challenges of 2020, she is stepping into a temporary role running the Department’s Policies & Strategies team as part of the Community Equity Division, responsible for the Department’s Recovery Strategies, Housing Element update, and Cultural Districts. Prior to her leadership role, she was the co-author of the city’s Urban Design Guidelines, lead urban designer for the Central SoMa Plan, and a primary design reviewer for projects ranging from houses to high-rises. For a decade prior to her time at SF Planning, she was based in Rhode Island where she co-founded and ran Thurlow Small Architecture and taught at local universities including Harvard, MIT, and RISD. She is a licensed architect in California.
Jonathan Tate is principal of OJT (Office of Jonathan Tate), an architecture and urban design practice in New Orleans. The office engages in numerous design-related activities, including applied research, opportunistic planning, strategic development and conventional architectural practice. Notable recently completed projects include 3106 St. Thomas, the first unit under the Starter Home* development agenda, which has received wide recognition, and Wetland Urbanism, a research and publication project that was exhibited at the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice. Jonathan Tate, and the practice, have been recognized as part of the 2017 Emerging Voices by the Architectural League of New York, a Next Progressive by Architect Magazine and a 2018 finalist for the international Architecture Review Emerging Architect Award. They have received numerous awards for their work, including a 2018 National AIA Housing Award and a 2019 National AIA Honor Award. Jonathan Tate received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Auburn University. As a student at Auburn, he participated in the Rural Studio, an internationally recognized design/build program that provides innovative housing and facilities for rural Alabamians. He completed his graduate studies at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, with a Master in Design Studies degree in Housing and Urbanization.
Kyle Whyte is Professor of Environment and Sustainability and George Willis Pack Professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. Previously, Kyle was Professor and Timnick Chair in the Department of Philosophy and Department of Community Sustainability at Michigan State University. Kyle’s research addresses moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of Indigenous justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the anthropocene. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Kyle has partnered with numerous Tribes, First Nations and inter-Indigenous organizations in the Great Lakes region and beyond on climate change planning, education and policy. He is involved in projects and organizations that advance Indigenous research methodologies, including the Climate and Traditional Knowledges Workgroup, Sustainable Development Institute of the College of Menominee Nation, Tribal Climate Camp, and Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga. He has served as an author on reports by the U.S. Global Change Research Program and is former member of the U.S. Federal Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science and the Michigan Environmental Justice Work Group. Kyle's work has received the Bunyan Bryant Award for Academic Excellence from Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, MSU's Distinguished Partnership and Engaged Scholarship awards, and grants from the National Science Foundation. (Link)
For more on programming at the California College of the Arts Architecture Division lecture series, please see Scaffold. This event was the first in a series of events called Reclaiming Land: Reclaiming Land 3: Drawing Ownership and Reclaiming Land 2: From Dispossession to Reciprocity.