Columbia GSAPP LiPS: Miriam Greenberg

So, hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today for the last LIPS lecture of the spring semester. Uh my name is Andrea. I'm a PhD student here at Columbia's Urban Planning Program, and will be moderating the session along with my co-organizer, Rosella Ferro. Uh with these sessions, we aim to have the safest space for the learning community here at GSAPP, a space where we can also learn and engage in meaningful discussions about urban issues, and we can come together to recompose different perspectives with others today in our society. So, about this series, we feature urban scholars working and theorizing at the intersection of various disciplines, including history, sociology, geography, architecture, and more. And thanks so much to everyone for coming to this last session. Uh we hope you enjoy the conversations, and that this continues to be a space where we can collectively learn from each other. Speaking today is Miriam Greenberg, professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and co-director of the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies. After the presentation, we will have time for a Q&A. Uh we will start the Q&A around 1:00 to 1:15 p.m., so that we have enough time for everyone's questions. Uh I will be coordinating Q&A with attention to diversity and inclusion. So, if you have already had a chance to ask a question, please allow others to so before asking another one. So, we return to introduce our speaker today. Ms. Greenberg holds a PhD in sociology from the City University of New York Graduate Center, and is the author of In New York, How City in Crisis Was Sold to the World, and co-author of Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans, and co-editor of The City Is the Factory: Solidarities and Spatial Tactics in the New Urban Age. Ms. Greenberg has undertaken a series of engaged, collaborative, public-facing research projects exploring urban and environmental justice issues in California, including most recently as PI on WUI research for resilience exploring the relationship between urban housing crisis and the growth of the wildland urban interface. In today's talk, Miriam will focus on how two especially distinct phenomena, like the worsening household crisis in cities and climate disasters in urban hinterlands, increasingly and are dialectically related. We just welcoming Miriam. >> Thank you so much. It's really an honor to be here with you all. Thank you Daniela and to Rosalia and to Kean for organizing this event. Um yeah, I'm amazed that uh this has been, you know, an ongoing series that you all get to have lunch and hear speakers from all over the country and the world and I'm very um fortunate to get to be one of them. Um and look forward to your questions and thinking with you about your work and as it may relate to what I'm going to be talking about in California, which I think is also uh relevant in in various ways uh in New York um and elsewhere. So, without further ado, uh let's see if my Oh, there we go. Okay. I think that I'm going to organize things pretty basically between how I arrived at this project, what I found, my framework and findings uh from the project, you know, what I found sort of on the ground that required the project, and then the project itself, and then next steps. Uh and as uh Daniela mentioned, um I have two previous projects, the first of which book projects, that this kind of grows out of thinking about urban crises and analytic um the first of which was my dissertation at CUNY Graduate Center, um Branding New York: How City in Crisis Was Sold to the World, um that really looked at the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and the role that the crisis itself played in both dividing the city, fracturing it along multiple political and cultural lines, but also bringing together new forms of political and cultural coalition to on the one hand create, uh, a brand for the city that we might recognize in a lot of the ways in which the city was marketed through I love New York campaigns and other campaigns at the time, as well as to restructure the city under kind of new forms of neoliberal governance. While at the same time new forms of symbolically oriented resistance were arising at that time, um, and there was this kind of reaction going on between the two forms of coalition, um, including those who were involved a lot in hip hop and graffiti, for instance, and those involved in the branding. Um, and then, uh, I was interested in broadening out my approach to thinking about urban crisis by doing a comparative project with my colleague Kevin Fox Gotham after the events of 9/11 in New York and with the events of Katrina, Hurricane Katrina, in New Orleans. And this comparative project kind of required me to think a little more broadly and theoretically about crisis uh, as an analytic and, um, in doing so to draw on different kinds of crisis theory. I was very much influenced by, for instance the work of Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall and others who are cultural theorists who think a lot about how crisis creates a potential rupture in a larger historical conjuncture. Um, and how we might use these moments, uh, in a very open-ended fashion to intervene in what is going on on the ground and how many people rush in to do so. And there's a lot of indeterminacy in those moments. They could end up driving people in a variety of directions. Um and what happens when we think about that not only kind of politically in the abstract, but also spatially? And so, I kind of developed this idea with Kevin of crisis-driven urbanization. Um and this notion that a series of events can um land upon already existing landscapes of uh of un- uneven landscapes of risk and resilience. Some people facing more risk, some people more resilient, and having more vulnerabilities. There's all kinds of impacts of the way in which the crisis itself, the you know, the events are framed, whether that's 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. And I should note that when we were working on this project, a lot of people thought it was crazy that we would compare these two events since one was a man-made disaster and the other was a quote natural disaster, but this was part of our kind of approach to think more broadly about an event and an an event-based analysis. Uh so, that event, whatever its origins, lands on that landscape. And then, as a result, different groups politically enter, and there are short- and long-term processes of recovery and redevelopment. And depending on what happens in that space, uh over the course of this redevelopment, you might find yourself either replicating or intervening and mitigating the already existing inequalities that existed in that space. And what we found in the case of both New New York and New Orleans is that while there had been uneven development prior to the events, in the aftermath, based on the interventions that occurred, there was uneven redevelopment, um which led to an exacerbation of the conditions and the potential for greater crisis in the future. So, that I just raised that because um that kind of framework of this kind of process and the notion of crisis as an analytic has stayed with me even after I moved to Northern California. When I left New York and returned actually to my homeland where I'm from Northern California. I'm from the Bay Area and returned I was teaching actually at Pratt Institute and took a job in sociology at UC Santa Cruz. And I was an urban sociologist entering a space where a lot of people thought there was no need for urban sociology. A lot of people were like why would you study cities here? We don't really have cities here. And this notion that this was a space unlike perhaps you know the LA school in Los Angeles in California in general. There hasn't been a long tradition like there has been in New York, in Chicago, to some degree in in Southern cities in the US of these kind of city schools that you know people really have used the space to analyze and to develop theory from similarly to the you know to to approaches to postcolonial urban theory and and looking at others other urban spaces beyond you know the the United States. Northern California has not kind of used the city as a as an analytic in the same kind of a way. On the other hand being someone who's kind of obsessed with wherever I am and also being from this place I really kind of dove deep very quickly in trying to understand what some of the ways of understanding urbanization were and recognize that in some ways it was helpful for me to get out of New York City to think about not so much discrete and bounded metropolises but processes of urbanization which was already an ongoing framework that was emerging in urban studies to think about urbanization as a process much more so and this draws from the work of people like Henri Lefebvre and others, but to think of urbanization as a process much more so than a kind of bounded container of a place. And certainly when you thought of it that way, um Northern California, uh like most places, lent itself to this. And particularly the housing crisis that California in general was facing, uh especially Santa Cruz, where I was going, uh which has uh by many measures the worst housing crisis in the United States. Uh the you know, the greatest disparity in average income and housing costs. And a lot of other issues surrounding housing, which have been driving people into outlying areas, processes of displacement. And there were a number of projects that were going on at Berkeley, uh in Oakland and San Francisco, uh in the North Bay of the Bay Area. And then, you know, we started at at Santa Cruz thinking about the dynamics of this displacement. Okay. Um and this expanding urban area throughout the broader greater Bay Area region. And in doing that, um created an urban studies focus that really integrated urban and environmental studies um from the beginning because while urban studies was not a focus in Northern California, environmental studies was very developed and focus on sustainability and urban sustainability was was was was quite um sophisticated in the region. And actually the region had been since the 1960s and 70s a kind of destination for people wanting to study urban sustainability. However, without thinking about housing particularly or at least the cost of housing. You know, thinking about the design of housing uh and the integration of housing within an urban plan, but far and from a planning perspective, but far less in terms of actual issues of housing crisis or equity or affordability. And so, CUES, um the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies, um in its earlier formation was very much interested in bringing these things together and thinking about organization as a process and the housing crisis kind of as a as a central force in that. Um one of the first projects we did and this is something that was a uh a project that um used a method that we call community initiated student engaged research and that means partnering with community-based organizations in our region and also working with large cohorts of students to do the research and usually students who have a lot of experience themselves with the issues that we're studying. So the students draw on their own knowledge, their own backgrounds and experiences in partnership with the community organizations with whom we um co-construct the research questions. Um and really the housing crisis is uh something front and center of all of our partners and these were partners in community services, in labor, um the Monterey Bay Central Labor Council and um you know, groups that were focused, whatever their focus might be and often it was not housing, housing was affecting their reality in all kinds of ways and so students um you know, partnered and participated in a lot of things on the ground also because they were facing a housing crisis um in a profound way as many of you may be familiar with in New York City and how that affects your studies and how that affects your life on on every level and so and many of them came from families and situations of housing crisis in California, you know, 90% of our of our students are from California and California has the top five cities um up and down the coast. Santa Cruz is the most extreme but the greater Bay Area, Los Angeles has housing crises on par with with Santa Cruz and of course much larger populations. So they had brought with them a lot of experience and this is this is one of the reports that we did from it. The project was called No Place Like Home and it looked at a number of impacts of the housing crisis, um um you know, rent burden, uh overcrowding, first moves and displacement, and uh major problems with housing. Um and I'm just showing a slide here from our from our map from our survey. We did a large-scale survey of renters, 2,000 renters in our region. Um and this one was about forced moves. Um and we don't have rent control or rent board, and so we can't actually track to the same degree people's evictions and displacement in a formal way, but we are able to interview and survey people, and renters are often undercounted in in standard census um document, you know, documentation. Um so we did an intensive purposive sampling of renters to find out, you know, how many people were were being forced to move, um and and also living under these other conditions, and found 50% in our region experienced forced moves. And this is a map that shows the central coast of California, and you see Santa Cruz and the uh this is the county of Santa Cruz with the mid part of the county and the south part of the county in in Watsonville, and and differences of experience across all of the different metrics um of impacts of the housing crisis. And then we also looked at it demographically in terms of impacts um along lines of income and race and age. Uh so the point here really is that, you know, we were um using this I'm going to call it scissor, community initiated student engaged research, scissor uh approach to understand something that was affecting all of us in all kinds of ways. And the image on the cover of our report is one of our students um who was, you know, and it was we, you know, she offered to use this image of herself in transitional housing situation living in the woods outside of our campus. Um and you can see with all of her belongings not really there for camping purposes. Um and many many of our students living in garages, living in uh cars and and other kinds of things while they're transitioning and trying to find other forms of housing. Um and at the time, and this is a kind of also a uh interesting indication of like what happens over the course of one's research, we weren't really thinking about the physical material environment in which the student was living in an environmental sense. And the impact of her presence in that environment. We were just thinking about the fact, oh my god, so many of the people that we were both surveying and interviewing, you were interviewing a number of people and in some cases following up with people over a period of time in those interviews um were being displaced to this wider region, even beyond this little map. And you can see in this little map, it's just the county, you know. And you can see we had other studies that looked at, you know, within the county people being pushed, you know, it from North County to South County, and that was going on. But we weren't really looking so much at the kinds of mountains. Sure about these mountains, where a lot of people were also being pushed, or beyond Watsonville into the kind of hills and little lying valleys, river valleys, um of neighboring counties. Okay. And I point that out um just to say that yes, we were looking nonetheless at how housing crisis and displacement were affecting exurbanization generally, with exurbanization not thought about in environmental terms. Okay. So then, what happens in 2020? So that report came out in 2021, and in the midst of editing that report one of the the largest fires in our region's history occurs. Um and this is called the CZU Lightning Complex fire. Uh and this fire was was not a singular event. It was part of a year in which the largest fires on his in on record sent with and with these records having been kept since the 1930s and there's evidence that there might have been other kinds of evidence for earlier kinds of fires that we might compare it to but in any case um since the 1930s since records have been kept on fires uh in the state of California this year broke every record on on the books um and there were fires up and down the coast and into the interior um and I could say a number of things and I don't know you know the degree to which folks are studying um fire ecology or have any any experience of that in urban planning um but it is to say that fire is an endemic part of this landscape it's a Mediterranean landscape it's a naturally occurring event all kinds of historical conditions have contributed to the fact that fire um is more extreme in this moment connect with climate change but do not only include climate change so uh native Californians historically used fire as a means of agriculture uh as a means of habitat restoration of particularly significant um culturally significant plants um propagating a space for animals to hunt as well as to mitigate catastrophic wildfire and with colonialism uh in the 18th and 19th centuries uh by the Spanish uh the Mexicans and ultimately the Americans native traditions and means of land stewardship were uh largely not entirely and it depends on where in the state eradicated uh as native Californians particularly in the mid and southern part of the state were were put on to um into uh missions and ultimately off of their lands and their lands were stolen and used for ranching and farming and other things, which itself has an effect on on ecology of fire. But what it what I will say there was, you know, a shift in what's called a fire regime. However, climate change clearly played a role and something else was playing a role that was very significant, which was the increasing amount of housing that was entering these areas. Uh and I wrote an article at the time after having learned, and I think I'm going to actually I'm going to turn here. Well, I want to just point to this image on the right. This image on the right from an article that I wrote Seeking Shelter: How Housing and Urban Exclusion Shape Exurban Disaster was really thinking in a special issue on disaster that was about climate disaster as well as COVID, the COVID pandemic, which of course was also happening on April. So, we were going out when this massive fire was happening. And some of you may be familiar with the fires that happen in Canada and you had to experience the the air the conditions of the air. With multiple masks. We had masks for COVID. We had particulate matter masks for the fires. And it was crazy. And we could hardly breathe. And the air was this color. And you can see, and this is actually an image taken from a windshield. It's kind of a dramatization, but it's like particulate matter that's falling from on top of a housing crisis. This idea of the concatenation, the convergence of crisis, some people refer to as a kind of a polycrisis, uh of, you know, an epidemic, pandemic, uh a climate-related crisis, and of a housing crisis. And this question of whether there was any connection between these things. You know, what is going on with the housing crisis? What is going on with the climate crisis? Knowing that so many of our former students, our own students, so many of our neighbors were being pushed into these areas where they had lost homes, belongings, faced incredible risk as a result of this fire. And that is when we learned about the idea of the wildlands urban interface. Has anyone ever heard of the wildlands urban interface? Great. Okay, two people. I was just presenting at the AG and the whole room had heard about the wildlands urban interface, but mostly that's a that's a record for urban studies folks. Um, and certainly urban not urban planners I should say on the West Coast. If you were to be doing a planning program in California, you would be learning about the wildlands urban interface. Um, how did you learn about the wildlands urban interface? In Southern California. Mhm. Yes, okay. It's remarkable how site how siloed our studies of this are and I'll talk about that more in a moment. But it's a fascinating concept. It is I think of a very dialectical concept. I note here that it's the idea that housing is both a cause and casualty of fire. And unlike other climate hazards like flooding and sea level rise where housing plays a huge role and don't get me wrong and we can study the the dialectical interaction of housing development and other kinds of climate hazards. However, when it comes to the fire regime which depends upon this kind of material presence of different forms of fuel uh in order to kick into action, the presence of different kinds of housing plays a direct role in altering this this fire regime. And you can see that occurring across different levels of density of housing into undeveloped areas. Okay, so this is the continuum of wild land to urban density. And there's different terms used for different types of of Louie. And now in California, we all talk about the Louie. It's just like standard language. And particularly people living in in the Louie as I do, we talk about this all the time. And there's interface Louie and intermix Louie. In particular, interface Louie is alongside of wildlands areas and intermix Louie is when it's intertwined, intermixed inside of woodlands and other kinds of undeveloped vegetation otherwise undeveloped vegetation. Okay. So, I put here discovering the Louie because clearly there had been a massive amount of literature and research on this. And for urbanists, we were discovering it. None of my colleagues had ever heard of this. On the other hand, the folks studying the Louie had never heard of any of the work we were doing on exurbanization, urban displacement, peri-urbanization, and all of the other frameworks that were coming um from, you know, the urban social sciences. And that was actually one of the the foci of my article in Sociologica was the the the num- the proliferation of different literatures on the idea of an interface that were coming at it from a variety of angles. You might think of it as the blind men and the interface. Everyone is describing the same kind of geography from different fields and angles as a result, different kind of epistemological perspectives as a result of their field. Meanwhile, we're dealing with a similar kind of a material geography. Um and political ecology. And I'll talk more about that. So, I wanted to now get into this problem and uh of of siloing. We tried to figure out, you know, is there a relationship then, since there was no literature on this, between these phenomena that we'd been studying? We've been studying the housing crisis. Now we're looking at this issue of the Louie. And in particular, I should say the scholars on the WUI are really interested in the fact that the WUI not only exists, but as I'm sure you study in in Southern California and others would would see if you start looking at these literatures, the main focus is on its growth. The growth of the WUI is the fastest form of housing development in this country right now. Uh and in California, we lead the United States in this development. Okay? And this has been going on since at least according to the literature on this, and a lot of this comes out of labs um in different universities in the country, in particular the University of Wisconsin and the Silvis Lab has done really important uh research on this. Uh a number of a number of uh fire ecologists, including um someone named Radloff, and one of my colleagues, um Alexandra Syphard. It's been growing since the 1990s at a at a very large rate around the country, particularly in the West. Uh and it's been growing in in both interface and intermix areas, particularly interface areas. And this is coincident with, on the one hand, the rise of these megafires. Okay? So, the period that I talked about with 2020 was, you know, uh you know, 20 to 30 years in, some of the megafires started a bit earlier, to the growth of the WUI, and so people started to theorize within, you know, fire ecology and planning, the role of housing in driving megafires in California. That this was really independent of climate change, the growth of the WUI, again, absent these these, you know, conditions of longer summers and hotter summers, was really the main major cause of these fires. But this is not only coincident with climate change and mega fires, this period of WUI growth is also coincident with the exponential increase in the housing crisis. And there was nothing that was really linking these frameworks. And so this is just an early map that I did with a graduate student um looking at a certain measure of the housing crisis using data from the out of reach reports from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. I don't know if anyone's ever seen these reports and New York is often in the top 10 generally in the top 10 as well of you know how much it would how many jobs you need to work in order to afford um a two-bedroom apartment in New York City and what that's called the housing wage. And unfortunately, you know, again, our metro areas on the coast of California are have since the late 90s, since these reports have been done, been in the top 10 of these housing wage um rankings. And Santa Cruz actually is the number one least affordable according to this report. So we kind of mapped these um out of reach areas with growth of the WUI and saw that there was certainly an overlap going on. Yeah, as I mentioned, there is a gap in the literature, massive gap in the literature, um and there's a common sense unfortunately that has prevailed and the WUI has become it's all over the media. It's, you know, reporters are talking about it, the public is talking about it, it's common it's a kind of common knowledge and common sense. But often when you see images of it, you see the Kardashians. You see very affluent people in the Malibu and you know, we can think about the Palisades fire. We um this is an image here um from the you know, the the aftermath of Malibu and indeed it is very true that some of the most expensive real estate in the United States is affected is in the WUI, right? Is in these beautiful pristine you know, a mountainous and coastal areas and is in fact is impacted massively by fire and has been repeatedly over the last decades and a very famous essay was written by Mike Davis. I don't know if folks are familiar with Mike Davis here. The case for letting Malibu burn that was actually an argument for letting this traditional indigenous ecosystem return to Malibu. Ending massive you know, wealth disparity in housing that was also associated with urban fires in Los Angeles that weren't getting addressed while all of the resources were going to fighting fires for the wealthy in the Malibu Hills. And that is a real thing. It's it's a it's a real thing that that occurs and one of and is hugely endangering firefighters in California. The fire front is constantly expanding. Another of my colleagues is an epidemiologist who looks at the impact of this on firefighters who are now confronting not only wildland toxins but all of these housing toxins. So it's a massive issue to have to defend these homes but those homes we think are not only wealthy homes. And so we had to confront a common sense that people are moving to these areas to live close to nature. People are amenity migrants. They're primarily affluent moving into those kinds of areas. We also had to confront a methodological challenge which is true for not only wooie research but rural research in general and I'm sure this is relevant for you all as you think about urban planning and how you kind of use metrics and analytics that transcend just an urban space into a into a peri-urban and rural space. And you know, census data for instance is designed much more effectively at the urban scale when we think about blocks and block groups and tracks and the kind of density that you need to do all kinds of analyses, right, of demographics, for instance, much harder at the urban scale at the rural scale, excuse me. As a result of which there's generally understood within rural sociol- rural sociology and other kinds of rural social sciences to be a kind of invisibility of rural communities. Um and as a result, there's also a prevalence of case studies like of Malibu, like of the Oakland Hills in California, which led to a hypothesis of um rather than a WUI and affluence interface, an urban affluence interface in that was based on a very affluent community in the Oakland Hills, again, absent all kinds of other things happening throughout the state of California on that map I just showed earlier. Um and then, of course, there's the siloing of literatures that we are already um clear about in this room, um critical urban geography of displacement, theories of racial banishment, the asset economy, which creates all kinds of asset divides, um is very distinct and not used and referenced by fire ecologists on land use and WUI growth, and even within this burgeoning political ecology of wildfire, um some of like like by Mike Davis, um and those who are looking at this affluence interface. So, the goal of the project has really been to bridge literatures um in order to think about housing and climate in a com- in a combined way with in the context of WUI growth. And in doing that, needing to contend also with urban nature binaries, that is often kind of undergirding a lot of our a lot of our field. Um and there are there's a long history of work and continuing to this day that tries to transcend those urban nature binaries theoretically and and analytically so that we can do this kind of empirical work. We can't do this applied empirical work without frameworks that allow us to understand these relationships. Uh and that includes within planning approaches. Um I would say urban and regional planning and the work of Patrick Geddes was an early an early um argument for this and maybe some of you are familiar with that that kind of work that thinks about the city within a continuum of urbanization and within a rural context. Um but interestingly a lot of planners didn't pick that up later, you know, they kind of segmented and segregated themselves into kind of urban planners and sometimes urban and regional planners. I would say um there was a a real move in the 1990s and 2000s with the work for instance of Karen Chapple um to think about housing and transit-oriented development and to recognize that a lot of the, you know, in the critical sustainability work that we were doing that a lot of these sustainable urban interventions were driving up housing costs. I think you heard um from uh folks who study environmental gentrification um here um and uh that, you know, as a result of that gentrification and the lack of housing present in transit-oriented development, it actually worsened the carbon footprint of larger regions by driving people out to areas that don't have transit, necessitating car travel, um and so on and so forth. So, that kind of work was really interesting to us, the kind of contradictions um of equity-deficient urban sustainability [snorts] planning. Um and then critical urban approaches like urban political ecology, hugely important that really thinks about political ecology and the politics of of the ecology that we and and the environment and the ways in which humans shape that environment and vice versa, and urbanization within that. Um also urban environmental cultural studies going back to people like Raymond Williams, um urban environmental anthropology and landscape studies, historical approaches, um environmental history, uh urban ecological conjunctural analysis, and finally nature-based um nature natural science-based approaches. And this was something that we discovered in the midst of doing this work because we are also siloed in our own work. Um the NSF has a program in the dynamics of integrated socio-environmental systems, for instance. Um And um excuse me, and woo-wee research itself. And I just wanted to highlight that actually the stuff that I'm working on right now. And sorry to give this litany, but just to say that there's all of these ways in which these fields interact with one another. I'm currently really thinking a lot around urban ecological conjunctural analysis. Um and the talk today is is really drawing more on that. And the work of Farhana Sultana actually is a is a contemporary uh version of this trying to think about how do we bring conjunctural analysis and this question of rupture and crisis into dialogue with um urban ecology. Which is often not done. So, along these lines, we created this project. Okay. So, um and I um will talk about this, and uh I realize we're starting a little late, so I'll go a little quickly. Um but this is called the Wildland Urban Interface Research for Resilience, Addressing California's Climate, Conservation, and Housing Crises. Um it was a is a 3-year-long project that has been interdisciplinary, mixed methods, using scissor approaches. Um it has support from the state of California. We did not get NSF funding um despite trying a couple of times, but we did get um support from the state of California, and from the UC, and and and a number of other foundations. Um we have a multiple uh we have multiple community research partners in recovery and resilience, labor, conservation, and indigenous land stewardship and housing. Um and we have um a focus on what we call the three D's, drivers, demographics, and dynamics of the WUI growth. And I'm just going to quickly say I'm not going to go through all of this. Um this is just a slide that shows a few of the projects we're actually doing in within this larger what we call WUI Equity Atlas. Um and uh new methods for an urban political ecology of wildfire. So, you know, um I'm happy to go into detail later about a number of the different things that students and community partners are are taking this project in the direction of. But it is to say to highlight in yellow there the drivers, demographics, and socio-environmental dynamics have really been the focus. What is driving the growth of the WUI? Who is there? And what happens when they're there? What are the socio-environmental dynamics of of the presence there? And given the fact that we have this assumption about this, you know, high-income growth, um and based on our hypothesis that actually it's much more complicated because of the housing crisis, and that there's a combination of both affordability and amenity migration to these areas, this led to a second hypothesis that there's increasing inequality in the WUI, and that that inequality itself has ecological as well as social effects. Creates all kinds of socio-environmental dynamics, this increasing inequality in the WUI. So, um one example of this is, you know, and we we focus on this I mentioned in this previous slide at multiple scales. We've done stuff very local in Santa Cruz. This is a four-county scale of analysis. We've done California-wide research. We also have a study that's looking at California in comparison to the United States. Um but this is an example I think that best um conveys some of the possibilities of the scissor research because it's where you can physically go. Um and again, scissor research depends on students' own experiences and many of our students are from this region. Um and we also partnered with a lot of organizations from this region uh and then constructed a project to try to do purposive sampling of people living in these areas because not only were many of them renters, which are hard to reach as I mentioned before, but they're living in areas that are very hard to reach. And so one of our one of our metrics was via the survey, large-scale survey of Louie residents, um as well as interviews um uh and other kind of engaged research projects in different sites throughout the region that also try to sample from different types of Louie, which are kind of color-coded here. Um and this led to a new Louie growth hypothesis. Uh so this is kind of the amalgamation of all the stuff I've been talking about in a sense. Um and I'm showing this image. I'm going to go into depth into these little pieces of it, but just to say that it was the kind of result of a lot of our um convenings in community feedback sessions and kind of reflections based on preliminary findings from our survey and other studies about what these dynamics involved, um how you could have a housing crisis that could lead to displacement that could lead to socio-environmental impacts that could exacerbate climate uh climate hazards as well as disasters in the aftermath of which, based on pre-existing uh inequalities and the inequalities um that were generated by the disaster, leading to potentially uneven redevelopment and displacement, which could potentially exacerbate the housing crisis itself. And this um this was um first articulated in this article here as a kind of hypothesis. From PNAS um a couple years ago. And I thought I would after giving the overview of this kind of go through step by step because I think this gets at that question of conjunctural analysis and really the moments. Like what does it mean to focus in a conjuncture on what leads to a rupture and potential crisis and what follows and succeeds from it. And how can you kind of do research as [snorts] well as intervention that is attentive to those moments? The space as well as time and that takes seriously these different these different uh potential moments of shift and change and these events that are occurring within them. And so for instance, the housing crisis itself could be thought of as a kind of a moment um in which we're seeing and I realize that it's and by the way, I should mention that we take a lot of these materials to our we we create them with community partners and we take them to community meetings and kind of have people reflect on these experiences. Um and this includes, you know, people living um often informally, people have having um a lack of access to adequate housing. Drawing on the um assets economy literature, really thinking not only about increasing displacement and unaffordability, but also increasing housing wealth that's being generated at the same time. And so one of the things we're suspecting that we're seeing and we're finding in our region is that some of the most affluent people are moving to these areas and some of the least affluent, right? And a lot of groups in between, but certainly we're seeing both you know, both of those things occurring um as a result of the housing prices. And we can think about that as a crisis. It's a crisis for most people. For some people it's actually a a boon if they already own housing and the value of their housing is skyrocketing, right? As an asset is growing. So, for some people the the crisis is not experienced as a crisis, right? But we're calling it a crisis cuz I think for the majority of people that's what it is. Um and then this leads to displacement to and growth of the WUI along these different lines, different forms of wealth and inequality to moving into these areas. Um and this in turn has an impact on uh increasing housing costs in the WUI itself. Um so, there's a kind of rural gentrification that's occurring as well as through this. Um and a potential loss of rural land, land that's getting converted into housing, which we're seeing massively in our region. Um and this in turn as you know, as I noted because of the inequality that's moving into these areas has a huge impact on people's ability to steward the land. So, native peoples and and uh native tribes in our in our region, it's the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and Land Trust have had much more difficulty accessing and stewarding their lands as well as rural communities and long-standing um communities that really know what to do in these spaces because they've been doing it for for generations and generations having sometimes more challenge and sometimes more access to resources. Like it can it can actually be complicated in order to do the kinds of mitigations that are required to prevent catastrophic wildfire and other kinds of hazards. On the other hand, as a result of the WUIs interacting in these spaces with the fire regime, the scale and scope of the hazards and the disasters have increased to such a degree that even people with massive amounts of knowledge and experience do not have the capacity to contend with these fires on these mega fires. Um so that is is kind of addressing some of the socio-environmental impacts. Of course, it's also increasing the commute shed, which was a previous kind of piece of research in California. There's been a lot of stuff on um increasing extreme commuting and commute sheds. That's also associated with um regrowth. A colleague of mine runs what's called the Puma project at Santa Cruz studies mountain lions in the Santa Cruz mountains. Um it's it's fragmenting habitat from for wildlife um and having impacts on their ability to reproduce um and creating bottleneck uh populations and potential um endangerment and extinct extinction of certain animals in our region as well. Um anyway, in the context of uh climate crisis, this, as we can imagine, can lead to disaster. Um we call these WUI and climate-related disasters. Sometimes we refer to them as interface disasters. Um these are disasters that are overdetermined, you know, as uh as Stuart Hall and others would say, by this confluence of events. Um so it's not just a rupture, but it's it's really creating this kind of a crisis. Um and we in our region, because of the location, are dealing with not only fire, but also um extreme storms, um bomb cyclones, which I understand were um experienced here um a little while ago, and uh landslides, um and flooding um in different in different parts of our region. So I didn't want to only talk about fire. And some places have all of those things kind of on top of one another and related to one another. So when you have a fire followed by a bomb cyclone, followed it can precipitate a landslide and flooding, and they can be related to one another. And then again, in the context of pre-existing uneven landscapes of risk and resilience, we see uneven redevelopment and recovery depending also on the intervention that occurs and how equitable that intervention is and how wide-ranging and the communities that are not even accessed and and recognized, many of whom are living uh or renters in the area, now increasing numbers of renters, increasing numbers of unhoused people, you know, who's getting access to to these resources and the potential for uh this to return to the urban housing crisis itself. Um and so just thinking about this in terms of these critical moments for intervention, pre-disaster landscape, the moment of rupture and potential crisis, and the post-disaster possibilities that emerge. Um and, you know, again, we have brought this to we have brought this to a lot of our meetings, this framework, and thinking about, you know, people kind of engaging with what what is going on for you based on where you're living in this region and what could happen if a lot of these you know, these pressures identified in this diagram were relieved, you know, and imagining a kind of a blank slate of our region, um what would it mean if if we were able to build affordable dense and safe housing in urban areas, if those who would have been living and desire to live and to maintain uh and steward lands in the hinterlands, as we call them from the urban perspective, in rural areas, um in ancestral lands for native tribes, were able to to remain in those spaces as well and to train those who want to live and and know how to steward those lands. What if we were able to maintain this kind of a balance? And those are a lot of the kinds of conversations and that has led a lot to new kinds of coalitions and alliance building across the urban-rural divide. Um and that relates to really the final slide, which is um what does this mean for uh urban studies, uh planning, and politics? And we're thinking of this in terms of urban interface studies. You know, we can think about urban and regional studies, urban and regional planning. I think the interface helps us think about where these places uh come together and interact, and what happens when we focus on those spaces opens up all kinds of possibilities. Um one is recognizing what we call the relational geographies between the urban and the rural. They are co-constituting and co-creating one another and have to be thought of together. And the entanglement as well of housing and climate crisis. These things are also um interacting, specifically the role of housing prices in both the origins and outcomes of climate disaster. Um and secondly, holding open the fundamentally political questions of rupture and redevelopment. You know, that moment in the uh of crisis in in that previous slide is an is a place that in which many things get are possible. Many things you know, can can enter, many things can exit, uh many coalitions can form, uh and how are we dealing, especially as we're as we're facing this concatenation and compounding of crisis, uh much more in much more complex ways and much more rapidly following one up uh after the other. How are we dealing in these kinds of moments and thinking analytically and coalitionally and collectively and politically about um questions of redevelopment? Um and finally, this involves building partnerships around uh housing. I would you know, in our region, but I think it it's relevant elsewhere, housing and land justice in the face of climate change, bridging uh what we think about as the right to the city and who has a right to safe and affordable housing in urban areas, uh equitable recovery in the aftermath of all kinds of different disaster, and uh indigenous and rural land stewardship. How can we think these things together and build coalitions across these kinds of divides? So, I'm going to leave it there. I'm going to leave it there. Thank you very much for your participation. I'm coming ahead, you guys. Uh big question. Um so, uh it definitely I mean, so, and are you are you working on things the way that you did in New Orleans or Yeah. But yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, um and I actually just um was thinking about this in New Orleans, um the there was a um a wonderful conference that happened um a couple of months ago called multiplied displacements that was looking at the question of climate migration and housing displacement and how do we think together? Um and often when we think about climate migration we think about I I'm literature and you know, did a big literature and it's very um segmented between global north and south um and a lot of the climate migration literature is in the global south and a lot of the stuff that I'm talking about here could be thought of as um Um agree uh particularly in the aftermath after but there's often more of a urban focus, um right? And I think something Uh placement from home. What happens when we So, that that's one quick thought that I have, but in terms of the previous uh that I am New York in New Orleans, um definitely kind of qualities feel me that was the fact that as with Laura and I have After this earth condition maybe I could have another colleague of mine our place that I didn't have another point I wait a lot of this week sorry I mean I don't the non-existent I don't know but you do the work I don't know sorry I can that get it I get actually the baby qualities people really thinking of this interaction about the during post disaster mode that happens in mitigate I get I think >> Control burns? Mhm. Um so, it's a great question and many of our partners are involved in prescribed burning. We partner with the Prescribed Burn Association of the Central Coast and I've gone on a lot of burns and I've learned a lot about burning um and I have a few different things to say. I think one um I don't know if folks are familiar with the idea of prescribed burning, um also known as cultural burning, um which involves um you know, a form of fire mitigation by keeping the fuel load down, particularly if for vegetation. We're not talking about prescribed burning of homes, for instance, um but prescribed burning of of wildlands. Um and wildland is a problematic concept, which I could talk more about, [laughter] but um natural vegetation. Um one of my, you know, dear colleagues on this project, his name is Alexandra Syphard, who's a fire ecologist and was really, um, very much at the forefront of thinking about land use independent of climate change as a driver of, uh, megafire. Um, she has a background in in in, you know, on the ecological side and she and her colleague have done a really important map and project on, uh, what's called, um, fire return intervals and one of the ways in which fire is really significant for ecosystems in terms of the fire regime has to do with its intensity, its scale, and its return. How long between fires. I've learned all of this in the last few years. And when you have too frequent fire, it's a big problem for ecosystems. You can have what's called type conversion where the ecosystem can transform from one to the next cuz this is constantly getting burned and the seed stock doesn't have a chance to re-germinate re-re-develop and germinate. And if it's too long, you can have a situation I think that you're suggesting where things the fuel load builds up and builds up uh, and you can have such a massive fire that can wipe out species as well. Um, and they created this amazing map that looks at and color codes according to the fire return interval pre-colonization and post-colonization and allows you to see um, where fire has returned too frequently and where fire has returned not frequently enough and where it's the sweet spot and it's perfect. Um, and you can look at that across the different fire regimes of California and you and they've done this around the world. Um, and one of their arguments, um, has been as a kind of response to a massive and really welcome movement that's called good fire, the good fire movement, trying to bring fire back to the land. But fire isn't actually effective everywhere. And in some cases, and they're doing this in Southern California, they they're doing outside of San Diego, outside of LA, where there's been so much new development, and in the context of climate change and the Santa Ana winds and all the rest of it, this massive type conversion of ecosystem and the loss of what's called chaparral, which is a really important ecosystem that was incredibly important also for native, is continues to be important for native tribes and others in our in in in terms of biodiversity. So, they were interested, and Alexandra was interested in coming to our region because we've actually had such little massive fire, and she saw similar kinds of development and saw us becoming the next Southern California. And in fact, that is the that is the worry. We had a a big fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains that I showed you, the CZU, and the next in the southern part of our region where a lot of development's going is where we're really concerned that it could burn. And so, we're using these maps to figure out where are the ideal spots to burn. We created a model that combines those maps with where do you actually have access to do burns, and what is the situation in terms of, you know, income vulnerability, housing vulnerability. And often what we find is that big homeowners, let's say, these big homes, like the Kardashians or whatever you can imagine, just just a just a visual, can afford to hire their own burn bosses and have their own fires in their own backyards. Um, and these low-income communities that are moving into these areas, and I could have shown you a whole bunch of pictures with San Diego third of land, um, about the kind of morphology and typology of the housing in these areas, and we're talking about mobile home parks. We're talking about people living in older in kind of housing in forested lands that were developed for um for you know summer rentals and are these kind of very thin little houses and and kind of lean-tos and and shocks. We're talking about people living in new sprawling kind of developments often that do not have you know kind of commuter suburbs that are that are low income suburbs. In the area with that is most endangered for the next fire and those folks don't necessarily have access to prescribed burning and so there has been a measure passed to try to raise funds in the county and we're trying to use this model to direct prescribed burning to the places that need it have access and where it won't actually devastating environmental impacts. Um in terms of national and state lands in California actually the state lands are quite well governed and I think there is this issue now at the federal level which we could have a longer conversation about you know because of the cuts to funding in general for the for managing of of federal lands um some argue in with the interest of ultimately privatizing. Um all kinds of arguments about why this is important. Um so really I think state lands and these lands where local communities are able to do what we're describing are places where prescribed fire could happen. Um federal lands are question right now. Yeah. Due to this current administration. That was a long answer. Yeah. >> And you know, uh You know, I think that um that a colleague of mine um collaborated on on some of a lot of this work um Hillary Angelo is doing work on the land. The land. You know, um and there is question of the Okay, question of And And region, I should say, did all of those things well, um and it's the uh Sure. Uh that's right. Um I I uh those fires were caused by Uh it's happening. I did Here. Thank you. It's fine. oil extraction, but other form tion mining. So, what that means for I guess Folks have thoughts on that. I mean That's a great question, too. Um Well, there's different scales of government governance. And you know, when you talk about growth boundaries. So, one of the projects that we're doing is a kind of county by county comparison. Um and we're interested in I mean, on the Uh if I were to go back here um on the question of woolly growth itself I think one of the Oh, it's not working anymore. That's good. Um that first the slice as the woolly is growing, one of the points there is what are the kind of supply side, not only demand driven obviously, what are the conditions under which varies by by county And we happen to be in a in a region where Monterey County, our the county that's my campus is in Monterey County, San San Benito town. So, the kind of sprawling development kind of the form of the cities with that form though people have gotten around those boundaries ways particularly the very high income and the very low income. People are living in poverty. And people are buying mountain tops and doing the same often without insurance. Like other things that happen beyond income. Um so, some of this is governed at the county level and there's all these questions about thinking about that more regionally. So, that's beginning to be a conversation I think um very much so and there are these governments. Um and that's been going on since the '90s and there's a lot of work in the field about kind of regional governance and that's being really catalyzed I think now in this megafire and and so you're seeing you know, we have this office of response, recovery, and resilience that's created this network and they're trying and they're using this to try to be in the way animals. They are the squirrels. But even so, there's the question of state and unlike and maybe you all have read books like planning in the USA and or sorry, zoned in the USA zoned they um they um but um it's a great book by a planner who I believe from India. Um in any case who came to the United States as a planner and was like, what is going on with zoning? This idea of single Um and the idea of segregation is um where you have areas for commerce and you have residence uh and you have massive sprawling suburbs and everything else, but you know, so and it is to say that zoning varies state by state. And zoning law has often been used uh for all kinds of other political purposes, social purposes, including exclusionary zoning and racial exclusion in this country. Um and so it has its history and roots, a history of of segregation and socio-spatial inequality and maintaining equality. So, that is a larger conversation about how, you know, the the who we develop that is so hard to densify in urban areas. Turns out low density um explains a lot about why it's been even in areas that have growth boundaries. being out into these areas. Um and so now, at least in the state of California, there's an effort to kind of function more and develop this. I uh in other parts of the country, varies based on who has control over where housing goes, you know. Yeah. >> Well, I mean, our campus has this long history of environmental work. They're really excited about the project and we were one of the projects that got state funding than any other campus long history. And um the other project one farm workers, which is a really important one. Also near this really good one. So, they uh another has to do with ground water. You know, there's all kinds of issues. But, um so, they have been very supportive. Um and I should say by the way that the office of president was the oversees that our opening this governor spoke and California as like this bullwark against what's going on. It's elevate our green economy and environmental for balance see obviously to what's going on. Get in the state funding. Um but uh from this dynamics of the creative social Um but but the state of California was very interested in it and actually interested in it, you know, given that they're uh they want to fund things. So, the project Um so, that was great. I think you're point about the previous project um which was not so much about the environment um as it was about the crisis itself particularly including students. Our campus was very supportive. I think the community was not there with created a lot of I wrote a little piece about this idea in community engaged research and what do you know community engaged research in in very broad times and very just times when communities put in quotes are pitted against one another. So that the land board had home owners at the time was and it's something that I've referred to another work as asset class politics. There's a kind of class politics based on or lack thereof and So home owner and not all home owners not all home owners not all landlords but many organized in opposition to what happened in between. And many of the students in our project and and other students on our campus formed an organization called students uniting. And recognized that they were basically in the same situation as area rent. And they supported rent control which had been tried and failed in Santa Cruz in the teens. And it is a huge source of income for people in our community rents and a group formed called Santa Cruz United that was supported by over a dollar. The rent control campaign raised around close to $70,000. The anti-rent control campaign raised over a million dollars. Um very short amount of time. The California Apartment Association California Apartment Association attorney the National Apartment Association and other big um uh housing and developers and uh to ultimately overwhelm us. And in the midst of that very massive battle that happened in our um which the town was blanketed with signs for and against this rent control measure. Um and this also is occurring in the context statewide effort uh overturn a law that is a redemption law that makes local rent control more powerful. There was a statewide measure for a Costa-Hawkins for the Costa-Hawkins and then there was a The one is about 10 minutes. I'm going to take advantage of the But we got the most funding for the opposition. Anyways, um that led to some of the people trying to uh writing and trying to criminalize against them. Trying to get students which who had won scholarships and they're amazing. Who had done incredible uh you know kinds of projects for their senior who had you know presented in town. Trying to get the fellowship Trying to that they could write to colleges to prevent I mean it's mean stuff. I don't know. This case I mentioned to you was divisive. Um so I wrote about that in that piece um and it and it also meant that I as a tenant probably you know or less this and some at least my I do think that's it. Yes. Is it not anything Um, yeah. >> [clears throat] >> and careful. I think like wildfire What's wildfire