Deb Chachra – Olin College – Transforming our Built Environment

good evening everybody Welcome to Media Evolution and welcome everybody following us online I'm glad to have you have you

here some of you were here two weeks ago or maybe watch the recording that is by the way available when Nick Dunn came over from Lancaster University and

talked about envisioning the futures of the built environment and Nick he talked about the way we've envisioned um the built environment

futures um in the past how we do that in the present and what we can learn from this going into the future and one thing that he called for

were Visions for these kind of boring things the systems and the structures and ways our value chains work and how what type of communication networks and

value systems we have another thing um he acknowledged something that we've seen over and over

again is that when we create Visions or we create shape the future of the built environment that we're never really starting from scratch or very seldomly

do so that we're very much building on the visions of past of the past of that are very much in the very

concrete um the buildings that we are in this roads that we're in the Telecommunications Network that are our digital systems are built on and so on and so

on and some of these old systems they may no longer serve the purpose that they have or unfortunately very often

they have very detrimental impacts that cannot be justified when we move into into the future we are very much as Daniel

Christian wo puts it in a situation where we need to redesign the plane we're on in in mid-flight you know

really change the core of the assistance while we're in them as well and that's no easy

task that's why this evening we've asked um de Shakra to return to malma after one and a half years since she spoke at

the at the conference to come and talk about this issue and very much tune in and provide us with some keys into to

rebuilding redesigning the plane we're in in mid-flight um by turning our focus on energy and on matter and on the ethics of

care my name is tetta Hafner I lead our foresight work here at media Evolution a nonprofit Community Based and and um community-owned organization based here

in malma in southern Sweden um and I also have the honor to to lead a project together with my colleague Freda here tonight um called the Futures we built

that is bringing us together here this evening this is a strategic project by a strategic Innovation program called smart built

environment that seeks to answer this question here how will the built environment and the sector shaping it look like function and be organized in a future Sweden where shared

sustainability goals have been achieved we do not have an answer um to this instead we've invited four interdisciplinary teams that are working

throughout this this fall to create visions that that will then made available for for each and every one of us um and these Visions are there to to

support the built environment sector to transform together very much and this is something to this evening's lecture is

both a inspiration and knowledge to the teams but also to The Wider Community here here today and also following online on on how can we start

Transforming Our built environment toward sustainable and inclusive Futures the agenda of the program um of this evening looks like the following

we're in the intro soon we'll hear from Depp um for about 45 minutes 50 minutes um after which we'll open open up for

Q&A and and then invite you all in this room to continue the conversation outside over over maybe another another beer good to know for those of you

physical physically present there are toilets um in the main space um fire exit is there's one over here and then outside over here and we are recording

this conversation so you will have access to the recording if you want to share it um afterwards or go back into into some of the things that we learned

here I also want to bring up that one way of continuing hearing and reading about de you can find a copy and this is also available on the media Evolution

website of our most latest book from the collaborative foresight cycle and futures of infrastructure where Deb has written a beautiful and insightful

chapter as well and with this I have the honor and the BR privilege to welcome our speaker

this evening um she is Professor of engineering at alling College in Massachusetts she's also author of this wonderful book that I can highly

recommend called how infrastructure Works inside the systems that shape our world and when not visiting us in malma as you are for the second time Deb

writes things builds and speaks widely on themes of technology and Society she's very much an educated with strong technical background in

engineering physics and Material Science with a focus on biological systems and prior to joining The Faculty of Allin college she was a post-doctoral

associate at MIT please welcome Deb Shakra thank you so much um thanks for that great introduction and now I wish I was here for or at least um had the opportunity

to watch Nick Dunn's talk um it sounds great and and deeply relevant um one and certainly we will I will be thinking we'll be thinking through some of the same ideas this idea that um where the

infrastructure that we have came from before we start thinking about what the future might be and in fact I realized that one way to think about this talk and the book chapter um in the mesh we in is that this is kind of a prequel

that's kind of like the okay now that we've thought about this this is how to move forward and this is a little bit more of the sort of big picture where stuff came from so um let's see where do

I want to start so this is me this is in 2016 I think um uh with some friends walking the length of the LA River which is 51 miles so about 80 kilometers um

from its start to its finish um and uh so when I say that I'm interested in infrastructure where I'm thinking about the built environment um I people are often kind of like what kind of infrastructure and I realize that I'm my

focus is like you can tell I'm an engineering Professor um because my focus is very much on it's not you know sort of on infrastructure broadly if you think about it as like health or education or the legal system or for the

financial system I really do focus on um the physical systems right the technological systems of infrastructure um so what we often think of his utilities so and I I like this photo

because you can see a whole bunch of them in it so you can't see the cell phone in my pocket but you can see the sort of water um management you can see the bridges you can see the electricity

so those are the system that I really focus on so um so that's really the focus of what I do oops I'll go the other direction um I love this quote by Kaya

gwin about what technology is that it's how a society copes with physical reality that it's how people get and keep and cook food how they clothe themselves and what their power sources

are what they build with and what they build and so on and she says that technology is the active human interface with the material world and part of the reason why I really love this quote

particularly the longer quote is that it's not about how we do this as individuals it really is how we do it as a society um and the second thing I really love about this is that actually

there's many I just realize that every word in that sentence I feel carries meaning for me but I'm going to focus on that the sort of Technology isn't just the sort of high-tech what's the next thing coming down the pike right it's

the really basic things and a lot of what I'm going to talk about in the context of infrastructure is is a century or more old so um speaking of which so this one is

not quite that old this is um uh the you know the main things I focus on include things like water this is actually Lake Bulman which is where mmer gets its water from um but the water tunnel my

understanding is was built in the 60s and 70s to bring water um to bring water here um so I care about Water Systems I care about sewage this is my sewage treatment plant which is also built

around the same time um you can I took this photo I took this photo um CU you can see it from the from leaving the

airport um in Boston um this is um so I mentioned in transportation particularly rail um the newest thing that we recognize kind of recognizably infrastructure which is the internet and

the Telecommunications that really came up in the last couple of decades this is a map of the undersea cables um and I already mentioned electricity um so I want to actually

stop and go back and say a little bit about what all these things have in common in terms of how they work so this is the reservoir um north of New York City this is actually the first one that

was built it's it's actually it's called the new codin dam because it was built on top of the first codin Dam um but that site is the first Reservoir that was built for New York City and the way

you can sort of imagine if you're living in New York City in the 19th century um if you have a whole bunch of people who live in close proximity everyone needs water every day everyone needs clean water every day which is a little hard

to get when you're living in close proximity to a lot of other humans um so it becomes a little bit more acute where you're going to get your water from and um but water flows

downhill um water can be easily divided and subdivided right that's how you go from like rivers to Creeks through riverlet that that can deliver water um and so what this means is that if you

can get together with the people around you you can build out a system that is a reservoir and an aqueduct that delivers water to your city and and that subdivides it and divides it to where it

needs to go in the city and there's a few kind of important things that fall out of this right one is and this is why you could do it in the 19th century once you build the system you don't need any

additional energy to keep it functioning in fact to this day more like 97% or something of New York City water is delivered by gravity alone right it's just you build a reservoir and you and the ACU and you do it right and you

maintain it but you don't have to put energy in to keep it running so it does mean you need to get together to make that math of initial investment right so you cooperate with the people around you

to build this thing that everyone will then benefit from for you know I'm sure there're definitely thinking decades in the future but it's now been about a century and a half and and sort of

carrying on that these systems were built um the second thing is you clearly would benefit from like we have clean water in our household but the other thing is because of waterborne diseases

which we don't really think about very much anymore but of course we're emic um we're all over in the the 19th century um if the people around you were getting sick because they didn't have clean

water your family would also get sick so it is that very much in your like even if you can you know you can pay to build the system for your family you would benefit not only because you have clean

water but you benefit because the people RAR and you have clean water so um this is kind of so one of the reasons why I started talk about this in a little bit more detail is because the physical

characteristics of water that you can build it as a network that it flows downhill and then the sort of the physical characteristics of our bodies we need water every day and we get sick

if people around us get sick means that that sort of sets the stage for a really strong incentive to cooperate with your neighbors to do this thing to make this

investment into the future as a group and there's a reason why of course water I mean so I think of the two earliest types of infrastructure are are roads and water but water as long as there's

been sort of human groups people have figured out how to manage water together because the sort of social piece of it falls out so convincingly from the

physical characteristics um of the system and um so that's why like broadly as soon as people get together they're like yeah we should do this thing right it will work out and make sense from a social point of view an energy point of

view and it's why we absolutely consider water to be a public good in both the economic sense that you want you don't want to sort of keep people from getting it you you want everyone to have access

to it um but also in the moral sense right that is a thing that benefits the public and so water is one of the oldest versions of this and but this type of

logic broadly holds for a lot of things that we recognize as as infrastructures as networked infrastructures so it's true of transportation that it benefits that when more people have access to a transportation Network because you're

interacting with each other and you have Commerce um we I know of this um meta's law is how mcraft talks about um ethernet right and like this is like you

know now a full centuy and change later right that if you have access to a network the more people who have access to it the number of connections between them grows much faster than the number of people attached so if there's if you

have like for those of you who remember fax machines but if you have like a phone line and there's two people who are on that phone line and then you have there there's one connection if you have three people there's now three connections and it goes up with very

rapidly you have more and more people connected and of course we are living in that world today right we're living in this world of connection so so um the idea is that these physical

networks um end up being built out and they have sort of characteristics that come from being networks and as I said water is kind of the canonical example so um amarus sen is a development um a

developmental Economist and he wrote um that we have an excellent reason for whing more income for wealth he says it's not because income or wealth are desirable

for their own sake but because they are typically admirable general purpose means for having more freedom to live the kind of lives that we have reason to Value right it's the thing it lets the

things it lets us do and and this is you know I said I'm an engineering professor and I think about matter and energy so he's an economist so he frames it US

money but I'm but I think about what we do with it and one of the important things that we do is we use it to buy energy so that we can do things in the world and the single most important

example is the one that is in evidence in this room today which is is that as soon as people get money resources that go beyond basic survival needs the thing they do with it is get artificial light

right an artificial light is not a survival need right um but this you know this this actually this correlation is so reliable that that you can use it as a proxy for the development of a region right by taking aerial photographs and

seeing you know how it gets brighter over time as a proxy for economic development and of course the converse is also true right if if an area gets dimer over time because the the idea

that like what we want to you know the idea I might to send frames that as freedoms right in the world to do to live the kind of life that we want to have and just the ability and I really appreciate it in a place that's as far

north as malmer to um to be able to turn on the lights and start doing what you want to do right as opposed to um being constrained by the um our lack of

ability to see in the dark or to see in inside spaces so um I think it really illustrates this idea that for most of us and in particular because we are like

physical beings in a in a material world right per urwin um the thing that we do with money is we use it to buy ourselves the ability to do things in the world which

means broadly buying energy and artificial light is just the most important example of that so so I grew up I live in Boston but I actually grew

up in Toronto um and so my hometown is kind of up here um in Toronto and um I often say that my my my infrastructural birth right of being born in Toronto is

that I actually grew up halfway between Niagara Falls um and there's actually a nuclear power plant like right here which is the other place where I grew up and in fact actually um I just for a

sense of scale this is about um 200 kilometers so it's about like twice the width of Sweden at this point is it kic that's on the far the other side of the

peninsula right yeah so um um so that's you know just this is this is like two-thirds of Lake Ontario um and of course because you know my favorite joke about being European or American is that

in um in America we think 100 years is a long time and in Europe people think 100 miles is a long way um because of course I think this is really close um and uh

but what it meant was so my parents immigrated from India so I grew up in Canada and so what it meant was that I grew up with access to this the energy that was provided by a reliable

electricity grid um access to Transportation access to clean water and sewage all of these ways in which my Society collectively invested in um

these networks that basically supported my life so not just clean water not just the one that you could kind of get with no energy but the one that you build out when you actually have access to much larger amounts of energy and that was

provided by in this case as in Sweden predominantly hydroelectricity and nuclear power um which is still the sort of the bulk of the energy mix in Ontario as it is here so so um and so I think of

that as kind of my infrastructural birth right this is actually there's um this is actually the hydrop plants at Nago Falls um this is our standing this is

the one in New York state um that's the nioga river um so on the right hand side is is the New York Power Authority in Upstate New York and on the leftand side

is the Canadian one um so I grew up on the the left hand side but both of these are Downstream of Niagara Falls so they actually take power from niaga Falls and it's this you know this incredible example of in this case one of the

reasons why I like this as an example because it's not just the society and either side of the border that is cooperating it's actually that both um both Pro or both New York and Ontario

cooperate across the border for kind of the most fun reason which is that they have an agreement that um no matter how much water they take to produce energy that there has to be a curtain at least

a curtain of water falling over naago Falls at all times because tourists come to see Niagara Falls you are not allowed to turn off niaga Falls so so there is like a very serious agreement between um

the can the Ontario and the New York power authorities right so getting at this idea of this is how we kind of cooperate together this is how we invest our wealth together to produce energy

that gives people agency to do what they want to do and the level of cooperation that's involved so one way of thinking about the story of the

last um I'm going to say a 100 years I'm going to count from about like 1950 or so is that these systems which which you know which started building them with the Industrial Revolution so started

building them in the 19th century is that these networks really went Global I mean they basically grew in size and scale and extent right they got bigger

um physically bigger and they got their um they had more Geographic extent um and they serve more people and so that's certainly true of things like El um

that's oops I keep going in the wrong direction um this is actually um the building of the Hoover Dam in uh the 1930s in the US but this idea of of

building it out these sort of gigantic systems um and that everything is just kind of bigger um we saw this for things like Transportation um so this is um looking

at civil aviation um which is the the second thing that's really changed since really again after World War III so the 1960s and 1970s sort of the growth of civil aviation into something that is

now global right that sort of every place in the world is now reachable um and then the other really important one is the rise of containerization and you know walk even

just walking around Malmo I can sort of see right the the um the change in a city that happens when the cost so container shipping containers

essentially um get rid of the friction between moving things in the ocean across the ocean and then moving things by land right so instead of having to like unload having to unload a boat and having a whole bunch of people and

putting it in warehouses and eventually putting putting that into Vehicles you know we've all sort of seen shipping um cranes lifting containers up right and then moving them into um straight into

trucks or straight onto trains so there's very there's essentially so little friction that it meant that the cost of shipping fell through the floor to the point where it's essentially a

negligible amount of the cost of objects which is why 150 years ago most of what you use would have been made close to where you live and now that's not true anymore right even over the course of my

lifetime that's that's really radically changed right the idea of everything coming from someplace else is a relatively new thing um these are actually the three newest um shipping container um shipping crens in Boston

which does not have I mean it was a big Warehouse town when it was built um but it's not really a major port anymore it just has a handful um of containers because the the containerization also led to

centralization so all of these things right all of these Global networks for how we talk to each other and how we move around and

how we get goods and how we um we get our our water and all these things means that the sort of the true thing that we do together the true thing that really

differentiates places is not even so much like rich countries and poor countries right it really has to do with our Collective wealth and how we spend it so this is um this is not a map of

GDP per cap capita this is actually a map of of energy footprint um per capita and you can see which places stand out so um I often say um so you can very

clearly see sort of the global South and the developing north um you can see that Canada has a slightly darker oh I realized my my Legend got cut off but it's what you would expect that the

darker um uh places the more energy it uses per capita um so there's um you can see Canada is a little bit darker than the US and I often say it's because Canada is both bigger and colder than the us and it has a very similar

standard of living but it means you're going to use more energy um and you can see Sweden up here which is kind of in

the same sort of ballpark um and the the but the differentiation is not that we use this energy as individuals is that largely we use this energy through these

Collective systems so um the energy then so our energy footprint is not about our individual wealth it's the fact that our our individual agency the things we do

in the world is underpinned by these Collective systems and we use our Collective wealth to invest in these systems to provide us with that agency so it's actually one of the reasons why it's really hard to make individual

decisions to reduce your carbon footprint right because by and large most of our energy consumption is is channeled through these Collective systems it's also why when you like I you know I flew into Copenhagen and I

took the train across and I looked at the wind farms and I arrived here in Malmo and um the thing that you really notice in different places is it's less of the differentiation is we really we

really notice the infrastructural systems and even when we're thinking about like oh it like my family's from India so I spent time there as a kid and you know India feels really different

from Canada right and the thing that you think you're noticing Is wealth but in fact one of the things you're really noticing is that different in Collective infrastructure and Collective infrastructural provision and certainly

like as a 9-year-old living in India the thing that was really Germain was Bo only had clean water coming out the TOs for an hour a day or we only we had

could expect brown outs in the afternoon so um the you know this this is a way a way of kind of framing how we think

about um our lives we're I think we're really kind of conditioned to think about it in terms of money but the you know money you know I one it's thinking about it as it's money is how we measure

it right but like energy is the actual currency of the material world right energy is the thing we need to move through the world um and to communicate to um to get things to get Goods to

manufacture Goods so um the other piece and this is a piece that I think we're all sort of familiar with even if you haven't seen it this way is this kind of framing that

energy has to come from somewhere and historically you know since I mean basically roughly all of human humans basically all of the energy we had came from basically

burning biological things AKA traditional biomass until about 1850 when um actually the first newom the

first um uh coal engine in the UK the thing that's often considered to be the first um commercial coal engine was in the UK and the idea was that you took a

small amount of coal out of the mine and you used it to power the water pump that the engine that powered the water pump that actually enabled you to take water out of the m just meant you could get more coal out right so you take a small

amount of coal and me to get a larger amount of coal out and it is like literally kind of the definition of exponential growth right and you can sort of think of that as the pattern that we've sort of followed is that

we've taken the energy that we've had and remember I said everything's gotten bigger right we grew out the scale of things because we took the energy that we had and we used it to build things that gave us more energy like hydroelectricity dams like nuclear power

plants and of course like building out massive amounts of fossil fuel infrastructure right so using using this energy to get more energy is has been the pattern and that has led to the sort

of exponential growth in the amount of energy that we have and that we use and you can see you know it was originally coal and oil and then gas came online and then the newer things right nuclear

hydropower Etc um I realized that I went looking for this um because I have 2019 data and this as you might imagine figuring out the world's entire energy consumption is takes a a little bit of

time um but I think the next bit of data is out so it's it's actually fascinating to see the sort of top part here you know starting to sort of visibly grow on this but it is still of course most of

our energy comes from setting things on fire still and and that's the world that we're looking to change um the other thing I want to say though is um for those of you who pay attention in the UK

they actually just shut down their last Coal Fired electricity plant a few weeks ago so it's a really kind of bookending right this first part of um of this

growth right of coal that sort of kicked this whole thing off and in the UK and then the last one just just shut down really is sort of a harbinger of the world that we're trying to build so as I

said um you know most of this still comes from fossil fuels most of our energy is still drived that way um and we kind we really know the consequences of this so I'm not sure

this is are folks familiar with this particular graphic some of you so it's called the climate Stripes visualization so each stripe is a year and the

intensity of the color is it is it um cooler than the historical average or is it warmer than the historical average and I probably do not need to tell you

which way the axis runs right so um this is going to the present right and seeing more and more years that are warmer than the historical average and so we're sort of living in the consequences of that

that of the graph I just showed you about burning fossil fuels to put CO2 in the atmosphere so that's and then the other thing though about this so one is you know we think a lot about decarbonizing our

infrastructural systems from the point of view of not accelerating climate change right of not contributing to climate change but the other thing that is worth pointing out that I said all of

these networks these are all networks that bring resources to um where we use them and so one of the consequences of the growth of these networks is that it means that we bring things from farther

and farther way and I talked about that in the context of goods but it's also true for for things like telecommunications it's true for things like energy right electricity um bringing them from further and F farther

away and and even if it's from relatively close right like they are all of these systems are embedded in the landscape because we are in the landscape right our bodies exist somewhere on the planet these are all

sort of physical systems that are about us and the people around us and the nature of these networks being passing through the landscape Apes is that they're sort of built assuming that these Landscapes are pretty stable which

they have been but that is no longer true and so even if you did an excellent job of building out your your your infrastructural system you designed it really well if the landscape that you

build it in is changing then it's not going to be fit for purpose anymore and one of the examples I use of this is um the City of Austin in Texas has an extremely well-built water supply they're like really serious about Austin

in particular is really serious about public utilities um but they had rains that flooded um the hills and it kind of washed so much silt into the reservoir

that it overwhelmed their their um their water treatment system so like they built it out perfectly well you know the engineers did the job it's just that the thing that was perfectly fine 50 years

ago which they thought would be fine for 50 years to come is no longer acceptable and that's I mean you know I mean that's kind of a tame version of the story of

things like California wildfires um in terms and we're sort of seeing the impact of actually I'm going to go back and want say one thing we're we're seeing this impact of climate change and

infrastructure every day we don't always call it that right but the um every time you know literally every time you look at the sort of homepage of a newspaper

and you see um I mean fundamentally like a natural disaster right the way we sort of Define a natural disaster is its impact on infrastructure right so so there's a certain you know there's a

certain number there's a certain thing that happens kind of in the moment but broadly what we think about is as a disaster is that infrastructural systems go down and the severity is how hard

they go down and for how long right like you lost power for a week the roads were impassible right you didn't you know you didn't have um you know fuel deliveries or food deliveries so the N what

basically constitutes a national disaster is often mediated through it's often almost defined by the effect that has an infr Ral networks the flip side of that of course is that you can turn that around you can

basically say if you can build infrastructural systems that are resilient to these kinds of shocks then that will deeply mitigate the impact of natural disasters

so this is kind of this is all of this I feel like this is kind of like getting us to the present right so thinking about infrastructure as collective systems thinking about them as ways we work together thinking about them as things that have been built out over the

last 150 or so years um and actually you know further to sort of Nick Dunn's point that they were built out in a way that I mean really kind of embodies the values of the people who built them right they

were built to do things like we think that everyone should have clean water we're going to build this together and we are now in the world where they're built assuming that we can use build

them on fossil fuels they're built um assuming that the landscape is stable which is no longer true they're built and this is especially true in places like the US they're built with um social

norms or social benefit that embody values that are not the ones um that we want today um and so we find ourselves in this present where we're like okay

this is where we are and you know one way of saying is like we built out all this stuff and it kind of works but we also know it really sucks and we're not sure it's going to work into the future um so I'm now now that we've sort of got

us to that point in the present I'm actually going to step back and um offer us the million mile view um and this is literally the million mile view of Earth this is actually an image of Earth that

Tak taken from lrange point1 which is the sort of stable point between the Earth and the Sun there's an observatory there that faces the Earth so it could actually watch the Earth all the time um

so in this image you can just see it in the middle um the sun is kind of behind you and you're looking at the at the Earth and I think of it as kind of the Modern Blue Marble it's kind of about this wonderful image but there's kind of

two things I want to highlight from this image so the first one is that the Earth is positively drenched in solar radiation right that it is getting every

moment every instant um it's getting solar energy from the Sun um that powers kind of every biological and and um all meteorological processes pretty much on

our planet and the amount of energy that arrives that way is actually stunning um it's if you know if all if everyone on

Earth used energy at the same per capita footprint as kadaa or Sweden it's still only a fraction of a percent of the incident solar energy right so we're kind of used to thinking of renewable

energy as like scarce and it's like no no the actual energy is abundant kind of beyond belief what's what we haven't been able to do is we haven't actually been able to figure it how to access it

but it's all there the second thing that that you notice from this image um is that the earth the earth is surrounded by the void of space so um so like you know barrowing the odd meteorite or the

odd spacecraft nothing really comes in or out right it's really sort of a closed system and when people started burning carbon dioxide they're like whatever the atmosphere is huge we can

just keep dumping CO2 right we're not going to run out of space it's not a problem um there's a now black humor the solution to pollution is dilution um thing like joke I it wasn't

a joke originally that was like your strategy right as a as a civil engineer in 1850 or I guess probably up until 1950 and um and we don't really buy that anymore more because we're kind of

running out of space to dilate things so um so everything that gets everything that we use has to be mind from somewhere and then whatever it tuned

into has to go somewhere right and so that's essentially what's been happening with carbon dioxide but it's also what happens with all of the sort of things that we use all of the materials we use all of the all of the um all of the ores

that are mined for use um stuff right just like it has to there's nowhere else for it to go right it has to go somewhere um and where it just goes is somewhere else um in the planet and we are hitting the limits of this right

this is what we talk about when we talk about like the problem with the environment right it's this issue of pollution so in the present and the thing that has really changed in the last you know 20

or so years is the lovely Danish windmill Design This is actually in Palm Springs California and um so one pie people have been trying to actually build windmills actually at this site um

there is like what I definitely think of as a graveyard windmill designs um because people have been trying to build like windmills for electricity um for a solid like definitely since the beginning of the 19th century and sorry

the beginning of the the beginning of the 20th century so like 100 years in change and the reason why you see this one everywhere right why it's like you

know off the the the bridge here and then 3,000 miles away actually 6,000 miles away 10 almost 10,000 kilometers away in California is because they cracked it right this is the design that

works in amazingly well um due you know to concerted effort not by accident um and then similarly the other thing that sort of happened in the last 20 25 years

is um the development of economically feasible um solar panels right and that too was due to a significant investment um a sort of the decision to be made to

like be like we we want to get these out of the lab we want to make good enough solar panels um this is actually a solar firm in hydrabad near hydrabad in India

um so this is sort of the change and so what this means is that for the first time in human history we have a pathway

to meeting people's energy needs using only renewable energy and for my purposes the reason why that's relevant I know you know this the reason why that's relevant is because it means that

we can actually go we can get energy without having to pass through matter right to pass through matter sort of in like an incremental way without transforming matters maybe a better way way of saying that so instead of going

from like you take fossil fuels and you burn them and you get Co2 it's like you have a solar panel Sunshine comes in electricity goes out nothing else

changes and um so we're basically can use that energy as energy and there's a bunch of things that falls out of that

um I'm just going I'm going to talk about this first so the first like it's it's actually I it's genuinely kind of hard to wrap your brain around and the

thing I I want to live in a world where like everybody has all the energy that they need to do everything that they want to do that's available to them and I know that world is now possible Right it has never been possible before it is

now possible the pro the problem is the thing the thing is the last time the practice that we've had the thing that

we've done is we are not good at thinking about energy like this what we good at doing is we're good at building out systems where we think about um some people are going to be harmed and some

people going to be are going to benefit from it and um and then we build out sort of systems accordingly so the thing that I'm kind of concerned

about is that if we go into this world with the mindset that we had the first time we had access to a huge amount of energy through fossil fuels we're going to be digging ourselves a much much

deeper hole and so one of the pieces of that mindset is this idea of you can make someone else deal with the costs um and so I use this as an example this is the same power plant I showed you

earlier at niaga Falls this is the New York power plant um this is actually a Google map of the area behind the power plant so this is the power plant right here this is the New York one this is

the um just across the river is the Canadian one behind this Reservoir this Reservoir here was half of half or more

of this piece right here which is um belongs to the indigenous peoples who live in that area so this was the Tuscarora people had a treaty with the federal government in the United States

to have this land this patch of land in nioga Falls um and Robert Moses who some of you um may be familiar with um went to the US Supreme Court to ask

for um them basically the US to break this treaty obligation to get this land to build this Reservoir and

I'm like I know that the logic of this was there are people who live in New York City and if we can give them a reliable electricity Supply there's a very small number of people who live

here so we are going to um build the system where the the benefits um will outweigh the harms right like the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the

few um and he not surprisingly got it um and it's a little bit the one thing I kind of want to say that's a little bit um like not kind of cut and dried is this idea it's not so much that this

group of people benefits and this group of people is harmed everyone who lives in this region benefits from having access to clean renewable abundant inexpensive

electricity but only one group of people who have access to it were harmed right who had to like deal with the consequences of it happening and that pattern we've sort of seen over and over

again in the development of infrastructure over the 20th century right it's like the you make decisions about who's going to benefit from it and you make decisions about well someone's going to be harmed um or you don't even

necessarily think of it as harms like I think about um uh like a lot of things were kind of built being like Oh like we'll just put it there especially in North America like no one's using that

land um but this is of a piece with stories of sort of colonization I mentioned my family was from India right so India was was basically has railroads

and you know uh the sewers canal and telegrams right because it was all about uh consolidating control by the UK in order to take resources from India to

the UK um or to Britain during the 19th century um until 1947 or so um it's interesting actually thinking I think it's really interesting thinking about places like Scandinavia because the

other thing you can do is you can actually instead of saying well this is the group that'll benefit and this group that'll be harmed is that you can say well we are going to mitigate the harms we're going to try to build these things

in a way that no one is harmed and the places where that happens is where instead of having this sort of distribution of well there's a distribution of harms and a distribution of benefits and they're not evenly

distributed right some people get the benefits but they also get the Harms in places like Scandinavia that have like a long historic tradition of sort of equality and that sort of everyone is

there together those patterns don't hold as strongly because it's like okay well there is no other group that we and you know it's not physically big enough necessarily put it elsewhere it's not there's no other group right it's like

where're it's for all of us and therefore we need to figure out how to sort of mitigate the harms and um I actually think of it there's an example there's a power plant in Wales in the UK

that's a really beautiful example of this of like recognizing that the people you're building it for who live on um in Great Britain and the people who were benefiting from it or or be harmed of the same people and they went to

extraordinary length to limit the sort of damage to the environment so that it's basically hidden it's next to a natural park you wouldn't know who was there right whereas I live in the world where you build giant like dams somewhere where you think well no one's

going to go there it's like huge it has this impact um because of this mindset of well there's the people who benefit and then there's these other people and there's much less of that sort of world in

Scandinavia um and in Sweden and I think it actually gets you you're in a very different position to think about this idea of using energy to mitigate harm

instead of displeasing them um so so that's the first thing right to think about the fact that when we built these infrastructural systems we sort of had it for the benefit of a group and

potentially with other people being damaged and to be fair you know the canonical example of that is in fact fossil fuels right it's like you the whoever burned them in whatever like in their vehicles or

whatever is the person who benefits from them but the CO2 molecules of course affect lots of different people in lots of different ways right it's diffused through the atmosphere and different

places deal with that in different consequences so even if you're like okay while locally we do a good job of mitigating harms we're all still living in this world that's buil been built on fossil fuels and what that means is that

we're all still diffusing those harms to elsewhere in the world might not be as direct as we're displacing these people right but it is definitely as direct as if you live in a place like Bangladesh which has a per capita energy footprint

that's a tenth of what it is um here here or in Canada or North America um you've never benefited from access to these fossil fuels and you are almost certainly going to be dealing with the

consequences in terms of like your climate in terms of you know increased intensity of um of typhoons and the like right so we're all this is sort of a common thing it's just the the actually

illustrates another really good point the way it manifests in different places is really different right but the sort of patterns are still in still holding so the other thing

that um I want to talk about is the other thing we did when we got access to huge amounts of energy is we used it to do things that just take a lot of large amount of energy to do this is an

aluminum smelter so um no matter how you slice it for basically chemical reasons it takes a huge amount of electricity to get aluminum out of its ore um aluminum isn't rare but it's why we didn't use it

until the 20th century really because it just took so much energy to separate out um and turn into aluminum metal and so so when we got access to these sort of

large amount of energy aluminum went from being literally a precious metal to being pretty much literally disposable and um to be fair aluminum is actually

recycled fairly well it depends a lot on where you live but because it takes so much energy to get aluminum away from its ore that it's almost always economically viable to recycle aluminum

because you know money is how we measure it right but energy is what actually matters and and so if you say something is economically viable often what you mean is it's energetically feasible and it's like it's it makes sense

energy-wise to recycle energy but the last time so I'm looking at saying well we have all this abundant renewable energy the last time we had all this abundant energy what we did was we sort of supercharged the idea that we can

extract stuff and turn into something else and then dump it right and it's like that is the thing that we cannot do again um but what we can do and of course the you know the worst scenario

of this because aluminum gets recycled but plastic does not right and if you I know that um melmo gets um has an incinerator for Waste right and so if

you can burn it and get heat out of it it means that it take you can get energy out of it and that means that if you want to do anything else if you want to reconstitute it you need to put energy into it so one of the reasons why

plastic doesn't get recycled is because it of necessity of physical necessity requires energy which means until recently you get that from fossil fuels it seems really dumb to like be like okay I'm going to use fossil fuels to

make plastic and I'm going to burn more fossil fuels to make this plastic into something else right you can sort of understand the Twisted but real economic logic of we're just going to use fossil

fuels to make more plastic but of course we're again we're sort of hitting the limits of that but so one of the things about renewable energy of course is that it it actually opens up new possibilities so

just like access to large amounts of energy in the form of things like Hydro made aluminum extraction possible and in fact commonplace um we're starting to see the possibility of what we can do with renewable energy

so I I use this as an example because itasha this lovely person here um now Dr katasha cave did her PhD in Stanford looking at a catalyst to turn carbon

dioxide molecules in the air back mix them with with with with water um it takes an enormous amount of energy to do this but to turn them into long chains like Plastics like

biofuels but the key the catch is that now using renewable en energy to do that so in order to do this you need you need two things you need to know how to do it that's where the Catalyst comes in and

you need to have huge amounts of energy that is relatively inexpensive and that's where renewable energy comes in so um she was actually in the very first Material Science course I taught as a

professor um and she's now the CSO of this company that is actually doing this so there are many companies like this this is an illustration right is that people are starting to figure out that

if we have access to energy that's renewable that doesn't involve going through fossil fuels it really can change what we do with matter right so it's like all of this time we've

basically been like we live in a world we're like energy is really scarce you have to burn things to get it but matter like whatever you just pick it up somewhere you dump it somewhere else no problem um and we are now in the world

where we can actually sort of engage with the actual planetary reality which is the opposite of that right energy is abundant and matter is scarce and and so people are sort of starting to put this

together um because that's sort of the possibility for the world that we can live in so um I mentioned I really love this Windmill and V smill who's a famous

energy scholar sort of famously said words to the effect of the the you know windmills are basically made of fossil fuels right and it's what I said at the beginning about we use this energy to

build things to give us more energy so um is it Lil little what's the name of the Wind Farm say little dumb oh no I'm the only person so this wind farm was built in I

think 2011 and so like I pretty much guarantee you that like all of these windmills were built using energy from fossil fuels right that were built using sort of extracted materials and the way I kind of think of it is like I want

like the first windmill to have been made entirely from fossil fuels and entirely from extracted materials but like someday hopefully someday soon we'll have a windmill that's entirely

made with renewable energy that's entirely made from repurpose materials that was made possible with renewable energy right so like the first one is all made of fossil fuels but like one day there will be one that is not made

from fossil fuels at all right that we've sort of gone through this transition and that's the thing that we're sort of looking at as the possibility for our future so this is our built this is my built environment

today I know there's probably parts around here that looks like this um you know we didn't we didn't get here overnight right like we built out these systems with these kind of mindsets of

of um like how we use matter and how we use energy and like what's cheap and what's not and which humans matter and which humans don't matter and like how do we want to do this and it took a lot of took a lot of time and energy and

work to get here right so this is not a thing um that happened overnight this phys these physical infrastructures embody the values of the people who

built them which are not our values right and we are now in a position where we have to but also in a position where we can like choose to transform these systems in a way that means that they

will be sustainable that they will be resilient that they will be functional that they will be Equitable they kind of have to be all of those things really and um because if we want to build systems that are going to last they need

to be decarbonized they need to be resilient to climate change um they are of their nature going to be able to address some of these problems but what we really kind of want is to have the

kind of mindset shift to say like okay if we live in a world where we have abundant energy and a world where we have finite materials which we do right that's the plantary reality how do we

kind of apply one to the other right how do we think about the future where we use renewable energy to close materials loops and how does that change what we do today and a huge piece of that is this mindset shift right is thinking

about how we use things so I'm actually going to wrap things up there this is Ursula frin who was a material scientist she was an alma at my alma M of Toronto and she said that Central to any new order that can shape and direct

technology and human Destiny will be a renewed emphasis on the concept of justice and I think that what we are talking about is exactly this right is a

a new um order to shape and direct technology um so what we need to think about is how do we do it in ways that are just okay thank

you thank you so much thank you Depp for your lecture um we have now time for some questions um so please get your questions ready and raise your hand and I'm going to

start off with asking the first one and I just wanted to comment on on what you said I think it was really interesting to what you said about how this only one group being

harmed and who who benefits and I think that's a really relevant topic also for Sweden where we have a lot of um um disputes and and difficult issues

up north that we don't necessarily always think about when it comes to wind farms and and renewable energies um and and the Sami people in in Sweden so that's a that's a really good point for

for us to also to think think in terms of uh of um what happens um in this country um but my question was um around our roles and skills and competencies

you're also teaching a class here today um tomorrow morning um about about this similar things and so on and we also have one of the teams um in the the

Futures we build who are creating a vision around like what are the future roles and skills and competences um that are needed in the built environment sector as we transform into into

renewable energy um more sustainable practices and and so on um so would love to hear you're you're also an educator So you you're you're basically teaching

uh skills of of um of the future so what's your take on what well I mean you know the first thing I want to say is I think it's actually it's really clear how much of the specifics of this is now

really situated in place right and you can sort of see it in me sort of thinking and talking about um the sort of Swedish context versus where I'm from and thinking about the Sami people here

um and this the sort of question so one piece of it is is is kind of getting away from the idea of like we can just parachute in and build a dam it'll be great and into the like I do not know

your local context and so one piece of it for sure is is actually having that deep situated knowledge of the places where you're building and so I know one of the ways in which folks have sort of

dealt with this is this idea of finding ways to interface with communities right and so one of the roles is that sort of community um the that sort of liaison

that sort of ability to sort of talk between groups is absolutely a key piece um because of the situatedness of of these sort of new of these sort of new ways of thinking about infrastructure um

we I I we were talking earlier I have friends um at a designed company called spherical and they're actually building out um systems that are it's it's actually it's kind of weirdly like Sim

City if any of you have played that game except that it's for Los Angeles and so it's basically the ability to sort of see what types of infrastructures are present there and it makes it really

easy to be like oh if you make this the the concrete permeable what does that change like it's like oh this is my school if the the parking lot because schools in La have parking lots if the

parking lot was made of impermeable of permeable concrete instead of impermeable concrete what would the benefit of that be how much would it cost so it's sort of a tool that it's I think it's going live this month and it

it is intended to be actually um freely available but it's La focused so but the idea is to make it larger and so getting these kind of tools that are necessary if you're going to ask people to think

about what makes sense for their Community right have tools to think with about that and tools to communic with so those types of understandings like shared developing the shared

understanding of what is in your locally situated environment seems like a place guess as soon as they were like we're doing this thing I was like I want that right it's like that's such a hard thing for people to wrap their brain around so those are the two that sort of come to

mind and they're they're in fact working with Community facilitators um so those are the two things that immediately come to mind and it's the real how do you get that deep knowledge um of the place you

are um as opposed to just being like oh well we'll just treat you like any other place right thank you so much well all right turning I'm going to put my C over

here fra has a mic so please just um we have a question here in the the front so thank you um my name is Yan p uh I have a question so um when we talk

about sustainability we we usually kind of focus on the individual responsibility uh but so from your talk it's more about kind of solutions are more

Collective uh probably not individual do you have like a way to speak about the collective Solutions without kind of taking away the individual

responsibility so I I mean I am definitely a um like a maximalist right and and kind of in all things um not that there's no kind of one right way to

do things I don't I think that it is both both an individual responsibility and a collective responsibility um and I think it's often really important to think about in a given context what is

the thing that can be done by individuals or what is the thing that should be done collectively um and again you know I think this is extremely context specific in terms of who has the

capacity to do what kinds of work um or to do what kinds of things so um I don't think I think that expecting someone else to solve the problem takes away

from Individual responsibility but I think that there are many aspects of this that cannot be dealt with as individuals and a big I mean you know good example of that is like where does your electricity come from and if you're like okay well I'm just getting this is

a very USI in response it's like well I'm going to be individually responsible and put solar panels on my house and it's like lots of people do not have that as an option in fact I live I live in a mixed use building I don't own my

house right I cannot put solar panels on my roof as an individual it's just not an option that's open to me um my City basically essentially did a did a thing where they said if you would like all of

your electricity to come from renewable sources just tell us and we will tell your electricity provider and and then they will basically know that there's a whole bunch of people who live here who

are willing to have who want to pay the cost like the very small increment to have renewable energy instead of whatever the mick they would provide it basically provides a pull for the for

the um electricity provider to make a shift right so that's that's kind of thing that I think about as like a balance between the individual like I certainly know people with solar panels

and the like finding Collective ways for for so that everyone has a pathway to be able to do this um that includes what they can do as individuals but also gives you a pathway to do things collectively because there are some

things that you just can't do as an individual and I think that balance is going to be really different depending on where you live right it's going to be really different depending on what's available to you um it's going to be

really devel different depending on sort of your socio economic status or your sort of um your economic precarity it's going to be really different depending on what sort of in your environment um so I don't think it's I do not think it

is an either or they're an opposition thing I think it's a finding ways that you can both um make these changes as individuals and make these changes collectively in a way that makes the

most sense for the context that you're in you question over here and then then there hi thanks for the wonderful lecture I have the question about the at crossb Dam project it's really

fascinating that the two countries can agree on such a big project and um how what is the context that they um they

made agreement because I heard also in the recent years um like the inter state uh collaboration for electricity Network Construction in the US is very difficult

I I read a book about someone who tried to build one an hbdc line across several states in the US he spent nine years and Fa and a journalist heard about his

story even wrote a book for him right yeah so I'm trying to think what you know remember the name of the book I was send to you uh right after I I I have a strong suspicion that that's in my

backyard and um because uh people have been trying to build power lines from uh Canada from Hydro Quebec to Mass Massachusetts for a while and um and

it's it's faced all sorts of challenges um yeah I mean the I mean it really sort of illustrates I mean I I always say that the

thing um I think it is underappreciated outside of the country how much the US is just 50 different countries in a trench coat it's like everyone thinks it's like it's America and it's like no it's really it's like it's actually more

than 50 because there's like every state is its own like has its own thing and um but on top of that like depending on where you live your different parts of your state might have very different

cultural things um so it is hard and the thing you know the reason why that they spent nine years of their life doing this was not because they were trying to solve the technological problem of how you build a grid right because it was an

entirely social right it's entirely the way it's structured economically and politically and socially and um and that that really sort of illustrates the

point beautifully which is that a lot of what we're facing now is is you know the thing I said is like we have we kind of know it's possible to build these systems out we kind of know what we have

to do we are we are very much in the world of figuring out how to do it together and that's partly why it's the collective not the individual problem right because because some of these

things can only be done collectively um I do not think there's a one size fit to all answer to that I think that one thing that is changing it is um people sort of UND beginning to sort of wrap

their brain around around the utility of having um basically living in in that in the world where we have like larger scale energy I mean the specifics of the problem can be variable right but like

things like having like a grid like having a larger grid and the the reliability or the ability to use energy generated in other places is the kind of thing that's going to change that it is as you might imagine incredibly

frustrating right to hear things to hear about that it's like we could just do this as long as like why can't people just get their act together and the the way in which they're getting their act together is different in different

places um the other thing though is that the I spent nine years doing this thing across multiple States and I couldn't make it work is is makes for a good book

right um the thing that is so one of the things I talk a lot about is like this the world that we're building like these systems are much more locally situated right like locally specific it's not

just these sort of big one-size fits all solutions and what that means is that when it happens it's not very obvious to people outside that it's happening and

so um there's a huge number of smallscale like locally specific projects that are happening that are having significant impacts in the communities that they live in that are like just not visible outside that

community and which is great in the sense of um it makes sense for that Community one two it's happening right and but it does mean that it's really easy to feel like nothing is everen

happening and nothing is ever changing um instead of being like no no it's actually happening everywhere I just can't see it very well and the nature of the problem is that it doesn't all have

to happen all at once if it happens in a thousand different places right it's it's that works just as well as like one thousand siiz thing right so um so it's

it's really easy to focus on the large scale stuff that isn't happening and it's really easy then to overlook the equally important small scale stuff that happening everywhere um and again I think this is I mean I'm most familiar

with the American and the Canadian context and like you know in the US I recently learned that there are there's there's a significant funding bill to support change and so if you ask I think if you ask people they're like yeah I

don't know what's happening with climate change everything is terrible and it's like they funded 55,000 different projects that are like intended to be like climate change

infrastructure projects in across the US and I was paying attention and that was still 10 times more than I thought and but like every one of them is like locally specific so it's like you don't

really it's hard to wrap your brain around them so that's the other side is like I would like the big stuff to work right but I also am really happy to see all of the small local stuff getting

happening but I understand it's much harder for us to see and I think that's true globally all the things that are happening everywhere that are just hard to see if you're not right there yeah thank you Deb we had a question over

over here first and then there um hey uh you kind of uh answered part of my question already I'm super

curious about this um the state of things which is more objective and not uh not perceived by individuals we obviously have a very narrow perspective especially in time we we are we are

biased in the sense so I acknowledge this bias and I'm curious to hear from you do you see uh any tendencies in terms of our governments and you know public institutions more or less interested in investing in

infrastructure because when we look back we we see how the rails exploded 150 years ago yeah we don't really see similar explosions right now but it doesn't mean they're not happening so do

you see um you know big infrastructural projects accelerating or decelerating it seems that some projects are very hard to build right now but maybe it's just

an impression so um I there's actually a new book out by I would I say Brett Brett fleeber on like building big projects um CU that I mean the question that we hear I get

all the time is like it's like why can't we just build another like Subway or like another giant thing and it was like um so there's sort of two two pieces to that right one is I mean the US has and

actually this is the very situated thing right like I feel like every place has their own answers for why they can't do it and they're all different um it's a what is it is it Dusty like happy families are all alike and unhappy

families are all unhappy in different ways right and um what why it doesn't work is different in lots of different places the so I think I agree that like

in lots of places it's it's the the idea of like we're just going to build this big thing is um hard to wrap hard to get people's brains wrapped around and this that is like an active topic of

conversation among everyone I know who cares about this right which is like how can we do that how can we do that better but the flip side is the thing that I just described is these two Federal in the US these sort two federal grants

that have funded all of the small projects and it's like that is also the the government getting behind making this change it's just doing it in a way that's not building a giant dam in the

desert it's like doing it in a way that makes sense for the communities and so I think in that sense like I think that and you know I was talking to someone who was like you know building renewable

mic like energy um systems in developing countries she was working in India right where it's like you know instead of like we're not going to build a giant coal plant it's like we're going to go straight into a community and build out

like a local solar thing and similar things are happening in places like Puerto Rico right building out Community micro grids so I don't think that there

isn't um and again this really depends on your government right I don't think that's like governments don't care about doing this stuff anymore I think it's manifesting in different ways but also I agree with you I think that there is

this like really hard to build up the thing and and I I've lived in the UK so I tend to follow it and like watching things like the cancellation of the the high-speed rail line in the UK is just like right but and

then you know I live in in the US which is not a place that people really think about as being Cutting Edge infrastructure and like there's just a bunch of money that just went into um Interurban rail right and like I definitely know that you can now take

the train from Chicago to the Twin Cities to Minneapolis which you did not used to be able to do and people are like I can go to Chicago by train it's so exciting right and and again like I don't I think that people I mean I doubt

anyone in this room knew that there was like this major because we don't notice the things that are small but important to the people there when we're not there so I think it's really hard to see but I

don't think there isn't a commitment on the part of a government but also like if you live in a democracy we are a government right like we you know we're you all of you showed up on a Monday night to listen to like a professor talk about energy and matter and

infrastructure because you think it's important right and because you want to be able to like push the people who are making decisions around you to make decisions um and you want to learn more so you can do that

right so I think that's a piece of it too right is is um you know the idea that that that you know Le we don't we don't follow our leaders our leaders follow us right like people make

decisions about how what values they want to have and what kinds of things they want to do and then they they they use that to push um their leaders into going in that direction that's actually the other role of individual

responsibility right is that you make you live according to your values and then that gets manifested in things like policy thank you we take one more brief

question brief answer before we wrap up yeah over there thanks Deb I'm Theodore transportation in built

environments personal transportation in densely built Urban environments I'll build on your words

that energy is abundant and matter is scarce and I'll say see if you agree with

me best infrastructure is no infrastructure here comes my question with minimal

infrastructure how do you see transportation of people in densely built yeah City

environments happening so it's just for everybody so um people are there's uh I'm trying to think of who's the person I associate with this people talk about building things like

the five minute or the 10-minute or the 15minute city so the idea would be that you would live in a place and everything you need kind of on a daily or whatever basis is pretty close to you like your

school where you work your you know your grocery store if you uh your church all of those sort of immediate needs are within 10 or 15 minutes so walking is dist

and um and so that is the world right where it's like you need you don't need infrastructure right it's like it's like you're walking you're biking you're you're you're getting around in that sort of 15minute city and then I think

of those as kind of nodes on a network right that are then connected to other parts of the city using things like public transit right but the idea is that in that dense in the dense place you need sort of minimal infrastructure

I think of like Barcelona's super blocks which sort of fall into that category um of of taking everything out other than sort of pedestrianized blocks so that is

certainly I mean there are different versions of it um complete streets is a version that um folks talk about um in the US in particular this idea of of

having um cores particularly places where you would normally Drive some place to be the idea that you you drive to the sort of neighborhood and then you park your car and then you're just in

foot um in that neighborhood so this that the no infrastructure is is good infrastructure is manifesting in lots of different ways and lots of different ideas around urban

planning thank you I am going to change the slide and while I do that I'm going to take final question and you'll get to think about this for a little while and we are here in the context of the

Futures we built which is about Visions for desirable futures of our built environment and so I would love to hear your desirable future and you've talked about how it's very contextual and

locally based so maybe maybe a place that's very dear to you um in let's say I know 30 years is very short when it comes to infrastructure but if you get to dream and vision what would you hope

that the place where you'll be you'll be in um where you are today looking into 30 years what would the infrastructure and the built environment be like yeah you know there's a trism that we overestimate what we can do in a year

and we underestimate what happens in 10 years and so 30 years is you know it's a short time in the context of like when were the roads built and it's a longest

time in terms of this kind of change um so I actually I live well I guess I have two answers to I have the sort of the hypercal answer and I have the sort of large scale answer right so the large

scale answer is that I really want to live in a world where um everyone has access to energy that enable them to have freedom to live the way they want

to live and I mentioned my family from India um most women who are look like me like middle-aged Brown women do not get to do things like I get to do right like I get to do this solely because of where

I was born and the access to energy I had but at the sort of hyper local so I live in Cambridge I live um I live halfway between MIT and Harvard I'm not a professor at either institution um so I live in a really dense Urban

neighborhood and I still have a car because I drive out to the Suburban College where I work um a few days a week and I get to riverse community I also have a bike I literally live on a subway station um I don't I would like

to live in the world where like I never have to drive my car right like where basically it's like there's good enough public transit for me to get out to the suburbs um I would love it if the main

street that I live on was fully pedestrianized except for the odd like delivery vehicle um and transport for people who are Mobility impaired right so it's like there's a Subway

underground and then there's like Transport service for people who can't necess walk or bike to where they're going um I would love it if the building that I live on that I don't not owned

that my landlord owned had solar panels on the roof um Australia has such penetration of solar power they just hit um for the first time 50% of their power came from solar from rooftop solar

mostly right so like I don't understand why like the the extremely flat roof of my building isn't covered with solar panels but I don't get to decide um there's um so yeah so it's like it's

easy you know I can definitely think about like in my neighborhood right like what are the things um that I would see that I could see potentially that can

see potentially change mostly it's um no cars like I would love to live love for there to be no cars and like the the my street is lined there's cars parked on both sides of the street right like

imagine having that back for a cyclist and pedestrians right imagine I have a car I I like my car yeah in D over neighborhoods they don't

scale is what's wrong with them sorry so um you know it's interesting okay so actually you know what why don't we why don't we wrap things up here so that the nice people on the live stream and those of you who would like to go get a drink or ask me other questions can go and

then I if you can hang around for a bit we'll talk about cars and and urban environment unless you have a few more things of your vision so don't but yeah

thank you so much Deb um we'll thank you so much um and I will just close off here and those of you in the room please do stay for for another

beer and and have a chat with Deb as well so thank you so much thank you so much thank you for having me I'm going to say a few words you can you can have a seat um what's coming next if you're

interested in joining any of the other kind of educational seminars conversations that we have I have a few tips one on AI um and creativity coming

up um early November um not here but at con Museum um you can sign up for the waiting list there's also a a a live stream of that and then 30th of January

next year we will have those four teams that will um we will exhibit the visions that they have created and have an opening um of that Exhibition at form

and Design Center here in malma and also on live stream that you can follow follow up so meeting up for beerus outside thank you all for watching and and thank you so much for this evening

and thank you Deb for coming to malma thank