fine uh maybe not quite several thousand no but once we go hybrid as you know we never quite know how many people are listening so really thank you to everyone who came in person I know this is still not you know not everyone's coming to events in person we still know that but what a difference it makes to be back together in person so we're thrilled that you all came to join us and yes there is a live uh YouTube streaming audience uh and recording to tell your friends about afterwards um welcome to Rouser College's Horace M Albright lecture in conservation in collaboration with the College of environmental designs Catherine Bauer Worster Memorial lecture series I'm David ackerly dean of browser College of Natural Resources I'm Dean I'm joined by my colleague Dean Renee Chow of the College of environmental design and it is our pleasure to welcome our esteemed guest Stuart Pickett to UC Berkeley before I welcome Dr Pickett to the stage I'd like to share a bit of background on the lectures the Horace Albright lecture series at Rouser college has been going strong for over 50 years the lectures are a tribute to the achievements of Horace Albright born in Bishop California in 1890 a graduate of UC Berkeley in 1912 and second director of the National Park Service and a recipient of the presidential medal of freedom bestowed by Jimmy Carter we're honored to have the opportunity to use the Horus Albright endowed lecture series for the public good fostering a dialogue on the critical issues facing our society the Albright lecture Series has brought to Berkeley a who's who of the world's most thought-provoking and Innovative leaders in conservation and public service and you will direct you to the website and you can see previous speakers and previous talks recorded not from 50 years ago but from the recent years this year for the first time we're partnering with the College of environmental design to co-host the election this lecture the Catherine Bauer wurster Memorial lecture series honors Catherine Bauer wurster who was one of the founders of American public housing policy as the first female faculty member of the Department of city and Regional planning she helped push to combine the Departments of architecture City and Regional planning and Landscape architecture to create the CED program a Trailblazer ahead of her time Catherine's pivotal work titled modern housing is a synthesis of social economic political technological and Architectural insights which established her as an authority in housing and a leader in New Deal housing policy the lecture you're about to hear aligns perfectly with the spirit and traditions of these two lecture series and what we hope are increased opportunities for ongoing collaborations between Bowser college and CED so Dean Shaw will host the post-lecture Q a and for those attending virtually you can add um questions in the chats at the comments section of YouTube live and we will bring those in and uh and bring them in for the Q a afterwards and as I said there'll be a full recording available after the talk so I'd like to turn and introduce our speaker Dr Stuart Pickett as an ecologist and distinguished senior scientist at the Cary Institute of ecosystem studies in Millbrook New York Steward was awarded his PhD from the University of Illinois Champaign Urbana in 1977.
he specializes in urban and Landscape ecology and was the founding director of the Baltimore ecosystem study long-term ecological research project he employs a social ecological research approach to the structure and dynamics of urban areas and complex Regional Landscapes recent Urban Ecology research focuses on the equity of green storm water infrastructure and the Ecology of segregation which as you'll see is the actual title of today's talk unlike the one you were invited to which now we all want to hear as well Stuart but that he has worked in diverse systems ranging from primary forests and post-agricultural Old Fields in the eastern United States riparian woodlands in South Africa and the changing peri-urby Zone Perry Urban Zone in China is produced books on natural disturbance ecological heterogeneity humans as components of ecosystems conservation bridging ecology and Urban Design philosophy of ecology and linking ecology and ethics Stewart is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences the American Association for the advancement of Science and the ecological Society of America in 2011 he was elected to serve as president of the ecological Society of America notably as its first black president and its first openly gay president in 2021 he was elected to the U.S National Academy of Sciences in 2022 he was the recipient of the BBVA Foundation frontiers of knowledge award in ecology and conservation and the ecological society's eminent ecologist award I want to add a personal note that Stewart and I were trained by the same PhD advisor the late fockery pizzazz and today is not the day to share more about our deeply respected mentor but what I will say is when I joined bazaza's lab and that was some time ago Steward was already a legendary figure from the early years of his career as we did not overlap in graduate school so Stewart was PhD student number nine and I am number 32 from the legacy of that lab and I've admired Stuart for many many years but mostly from afar our paths have not cross frequently and it has given me deep deep personal pleasure to both bring him to Berkeley but also we've spent some really extraordinary time together in the last two days leading up to today's lecture and with that I will turn it over to Stuart Pickett foreign thank you David for that very kind introduction thank you Renee for being a part of the by umberate that has brought me here I'm immensely proud to be I guess your first sort of joint joint uh invitee between the two colleges and that's something that that I was when when David called me and made the invitation I thought how could I say no to helping signify the the linkage between Urban Design or design in general I will use that to Encompass all of the the sorts of things that go on in the College of environmental design if I may and the ecological conservation impetus of the the College of Natural Resources I apologize for not having the Worcester name up there that's an error that I should not have made I'm going to give a little I'm going to start with giving a homage to the ancestors people have started giving landing acknowledgments and I'm I'm a little hesitant to do that because it seems a little bit um just a little too easy and so I'm I'm not doing that I'm going to use my own ancestors and you see by doing that I'm going to to also use a little bit of my family history to illustrate some of these issues of the Ecology of segregation so here are um here's the faculty of Simmons College of Kentucky the first college in Kentucky founded by African Americans it founded in 1879 and um I'm related to two people on that that picture and there they are William H Steward who was born into slavery in 1847 in Brandenburg Kentucky and his wife Mamie Elizabeth steward he was interim president of this college for one year before the the gentleman in the middle of the front row became a permanent president and Mamie Steward was a music teacher at the college and organist at at the church that they they attended my my great-grandfather who only made Steward was the publisher of the American Baptist which was the newspaper of the the black Baptist Church in the south and so you know in a lot of ways I'm I'm saying that here's a bunch of people who gave me permission three generations later to to be a scholar and told me it was okay to be a scholar I didn't know these people obviously from their dates of decease but they they they're in my head all right and let me further ancestors this is my father born in 1903 we this family sort of marries late I guess and um he was among the first black boy scout Executives in the country there was an experiment done in the late 30s and there were three or four or the sources are not clear and they brought in people to help they brought in men to help establish Church to establish troops in Black communities and he was assigned to what was called then the colored division of the Boy Scout Council in Louisville and he helped establish camps for uh Black Boy Scouts and that was uh that was new stuff the other my mother was a librarian this is the Western Branch of the Louisville free public library originally it was called a western colored branch of that library and she moved she was part of the Great Migration from Georgia came up in 19 1949 and was a librarian at this Library this this library was staffed by African-American librarians so there's my pointing to the ancestors they'll come back a little bit later with some cases from Louisville few chapters I'm going to divide this in first I'm going to talk about heterogeneity in ecology and environmental justice one of the reasons that I think it's appropriate for me to be your first experimental cross-college guy is that design is about heterogeneity ecology is about heterogeneity they are both about space very deeply fundamentally and environmental justice is definitely about space heterogeneity is a core of ecology here's some principles from Sam Shiner and and Mike willig's book in 2011.
organisms are heterogeneously distributed abiotic and biotic interactions Drive ecology organism variation generates heterogeneity distribution and interactions are contingent environmental environment is perceived as heterogeneous by organisms resources are finite and heterogeneous environmental constraints birth and death rates and organismal properties result from Evolution what do you notice about this list heterogeneity is all over it and contingency is a kind of heterogeneity in time all right so this is one of the things that that ties us together in in design and ecology now let's relate this to environmental justice it is well known it is widely accepted that degraded environments or hazardous environments are associated with Injustice or inequitable exposure and vulnerability to Hazard well that's environmental justice since Bullard right from the start and here's the question that I'm going to try to deal with here does this this also holds does the the reverse also hold does a lack of Justice does inequity is that associated with environmental um detriment so that's the question here's another way to look at that environmental justice says there's an error that goes from heterogeneous environments in which some of that heterogeneity is hazardous to the condition of Justice or Injustice in populations the Ecology of segregation which is the new thing that I'm trying to promote and there are some some people in this room who are who are um is in this struggle as well asks about the return arrow so we're thinking about this as a system of interactions and here are the questions the questions guiding concerns with environmental justice are how do spatially differentiated hazards and burdens or lack of access to amenities result in social injustice that's the top box the lower box the return arrow Ecology of segregation asks how does spatial segregation by race class or other socially determined groupings affect ecological structures functions and relationships so this is a a potential feedback loop that repeats through time now that looks like circular logic so you break it down into Dynamic heterogeneity looking at spatial patches in mosaics that may interact and change and these mosaics can interact through time in series here's another way to look at that Dynamic heterogeneity if you look at start start over on this side heterogeneity at times Sub Zero is a driver that is modified by biophysical processes jointly with human perception and interventions that generates an outcome that becomes the next generation of heterogeneity heterogeneity at time T1 and so on one of the important things about this diagram is it says that the social and perceptions and interventions the biophysical processes happen at the same time they are entangled they are entwined it's not a stepwise thing so this is what I mean when I talk about social ecological processes these are not social systems and biological systems interacting they are a system they are a thing together here's an example of that emerald ash borer fractionists it's it's a little introduced Beetle that eats uh or can kill all ash trees in North America this is 2006 in Toledo Ohio three years later this is what the emerald ash borer has done to the ash trees so I'm gonna show this as a case of dynamic heterogeneity you start out over here with patchy distribution of asheries and I say in the urban Forest but in forests in general and people are aware that it's coming so they take action in my city of Poughkeepsie New York they just basically cut all the ash trees that's one way to do it it is possible to save asheries ash trees with Herculean efforts but not very many people choose to do that because of the expense so the result of both of those kinds of choices is Apache mortality of ash trees so there's a spatial pattern there are some choices that you can make you can leave it alone if it's a forest if where if it's a place that you don't want to manage you can have un unassisted succession you can plant replacement species or you can install alternative covers that then leads to new patterns of shade and surface temperature and then you see how that can feed back into people's perceptions and what they choose to do or how they are threatened by say heat heat Extremes in different environments where ash mortality has been patchy so put that aside that's our first sort of foundation now what's what is systemic about what's this thing that so when I talk about Ecology of segregation I could have said the Ecology of of systemic racism or institutional racism and a system in the ecological senses is the series of components living and non-living components networked together interacting and of course there are outcomes of this I'm not saying it's in balance or equilibrium or anything but there are outcomes things happen as a result of these networks if you add social Dimensions if you add consideration of social Dimensions to it because I've already said you can't take them apart so you're not actually adding them but if you add consideration together with this you get a con you have to consider goals you have to consider institutions and Norms plus a lot of other things that I don't have time to go into this is what this looks like in a diagram the Top Line biota interacting with physical environment is what we've taken in ecology to be the ecosystem since 1935 with with Arthur tansley simple right there's only one Arrow if you do Urban Ecology if you do social ecological things look at what you have to add you have to add social structures which includes things like politically politics greed economics um design choices things like that then you also look at the constructed environment notice I don't say the built environment I don't want you to think I'm just talking about buildings because a lot of what we do to construct environments is moving streams around damning streams changing the the the face of the land so that's a much broader case than just building buildings which is a big enough deal in itself notice how many more arrows there are this is why I'm so tired foreign now there's tools of systemic racism or tools that support and generate Ecology of segregation and Jim Crow which of course is kind of a general term for what has happened in the United States actually since the the middle of the the 19th century redlining which we'll talk a little bit more about urban renewal is a tool of systemic racism Highway citing is a tool housing policy where you put public housing how you Zone we're a single family zoning where is multi-family zoning why do we call it families anyway and and there's all kinds of there's a whole list of things that I could I could add here but but I won't now a few years ago when I was running the Baltimore ecosystem study um Rod Barnett brought his his Studio down from St Louis and we had a field trip and while the students are out doing what design students do that is videoing everything in sight um all right I'm kind of joking here a little bit but you do have to watch out for them because they're not watching out for what they're doing because they're so busy with their phones um videoing um Ron asked me this question why does this neighborhood look like this and he wasn't he knew the answer but it it basically allowed me to detail the tools of of systemic racism that's why this neighborhood looks like this all right when I got back home to Poughkeepsie I woke up in the middle of the night the next night and said you could ask the same question about this neighborhood and the answer is precisely the same okay now we're gonna look a little bit at redlining this is one of the tools which I've mentioned to answer to explain why any given neighborhood in 239 cities in the United States look the way they do and when I say cities I mean the cities the downtown the suburbs the inner ring suburbs the excerbs it's all part of the same explanation okay redlining was an enforcement of segregation and I suspect that most people know what that means but so during the the depression the government was anxious to help people to afford and buy buy homes and so they thought that one of the things they needed to do was to say where would it be safe for financial institutions where would it be reliable on for their return to to let mortgages and where would it be less reliable less more risky to do that and the red areas are the areas the degraded areas that say don't do it don't do it yellow is you know I kind of don't do it uh blue is well probably okay and green is give these people money all right sorry I'm being a little uh glib so but this was done in in um two of 239 cities around the United States it was a federal government program but it was assisted when the when the feds came in to help with this the the adjusters or the enumerators were local people they were people in the local banks there were people in the local real estate agency they were the local Elites what that means is that they were applying their views of race and quality of people's reliable fine Financial reliability through a federal program and now I'm gonna this is this is what this looks like for a particular neighborhood in Baltimore and it's hard to read that so I'm gonna blow it up a little bit and I'm going to read it and it's going to make me mad when I do so this is an area near a really famous city park in Baltimore north of downtown a little on the edge of the Avenue Pennsylvania Avenue which was sort of the main street of black Baltimore now so UB Blake and and um and oh what's my favorite same singer for the era you know um Billy Holiday I mean these people this was the the place to be so I'm gonna stoop down here so I can read this portion of the ward lying south of druidle Park and that's how you say it in Baltimore doodle um bounded on on the east by Mount Royal Terrace South North Avenue West at Reisterstown Road description an old residential section seriously threatened with negro encroachments a small section along Reisterstown Road consists of Fairly modern two-story brick rows mixed some negroes with owners of long-standing still occupying old residences converted Apartments containing White Collar class-skilled mechanics Etc population 1930 Homeward 38 000 some 10.5 percent negro 8.7 percent foreign born which was another strike against neighborhoods population increased since 1940 was 1470 14.75 percent huh um you can go on the University of Richmond website and they have they have digitized a lot of these Maps I think they've digitized about 130 maps and you can click on each of the the areas and you'll get that little description and and don't read too many of them because you'll just lose your mind so segregation is a process of long-standing and redlining is merely a slice through this ongoing process and I think that's important to emphasize it's an index of conditions and decisions and enforcement from the mid to late 1930s and I'm going to go back to my ancestors this is the redlining map for Louisville Kentucky where I grew up you all and this is a 1937 map and the same thing red is don't give a money yellow is you'd be maybe not wisest to give money there blue yeah they're probably all right and green is no problem I'm going to show you a street map that's the Ohio River I could go in I don't get me going on Louisville history I love it too much what do you notice about this what does this street grid tell you should I let you answer that the street grid tells you where the floodplain is and where the Bluffs are the Highland is the square grid the rectilinear grid is in the flood plain where it's easy to make a rectilinear grid except the curve of the river sort of messes that up and then the highlands which is hilly and a little bit more decepted the street grid is is much more um sort of diffuse it's also a little bit the case that that grid reflects the American Suburban ideal of curviness and and and not long sight lines and things like that I'm going to slap the redlining map under this look at this look at this okay there's one Blue Area down in the West End facing on one of the Olmstead parks this is the house that I grew up in in this particular nice italianate mid 19th century thing two and a half stories this is where that house was located in the early in the mid 1960s urban renewal took this neighborhood for things like the expanding the hospitals okay that's a you know putting some interstates through there too and and so we when when we um had to get rid of that house had to sell that house to the city we said well we're going to live so my father went went looking he was the one who had kind of flexible time schedule and let's let me look over up here in the highlands some nice little house a little sort of let's let's look at something interesting so this was a you know the kind of house we looked at not exactly the house we looked this is the kind of house we looked at and my father who as you probably saw from the black and white um photo that I showed of him has had about the same complexion that I did the realtor didn't know he was dealing with a black man and so when he discovered that he was about to do business with a black family he um he he cried and said that if I had sold you this house I'd have lost my license so that's part of the system of segregation the system of institutional racism so that didn't happen all right um this was the house that we did buy it's in the Blue Area down the West End it was blockbusting it was a white neighborhood white neighborhood um when the neighbors figured out we were black they they for bad my uh their two little boys from playing with my brother I was a little too old to play with them and um so we watched the neighborhood switch from um it's from white to to all black and what oh there's another thing I should tell you that this this house no no long since not in my family but about a summer before last I looked it up on Zillow that very house that address worth one hundred and thirty thousand dollars this house or this neighborhood trying to find equivalent houses number of bedrooms and all that kind of number of stories four hundred and sixty thousand dollars that's institutional racism I'm not asking for a check from anybody but that's institutional racism so this is a system that's hiding in plain sight it's a system that's hiding in place it's still expressed in predatory lending this has been documented in Baltimore not by our group by another group think about this as the cumulative cumulative effects of compound disinterest and I don't mean disinterest in the sort of intellectual fairness view what kinds of political connections and influence are being expressed in that system and I you know growing up in the in the Jim Crow um upper South I I was taught that racism was individual bad behavior individual bad behavior and that's a lot different than being taught about a system so it took me a long time to be educated about what was really going on what does race mean I gotta I got to really point to the idea that race is not a biological thing it is not a biological thing in spite of the fact that everybody talks about it as though it was biology now it's ancestry it's in it there's ancestry and inheritability involved but it's race is not fundamentally biology as well demonstrated by genetic similarities amongst all humans it is a matter of establishing groups to enforce hierarchy and generate differential social status it emerged from settler Colonial colonialism which of course this country is an example of slavery and racism racism was invented to to justify slavery racism didn't exist before Colonial Imperial expansion and figuring ways to displace people or steal their label labor or steal their land Linnaeus the famous generator inventor of the binomial system of classification in 1735 included four he talked about subspecies for things that were not People for People he talked about varieties okay so it clearly he's thinking about one species but he describes the the quote variety is of man in terms of their Continental origin and their General complexions now by the seven by the 10th edition in 1758 he had added to this sort of description by color and geography of origin characteristics which were clearly into which established or reinforced the idea that what was the what was the uh the ranking so white Europeans on top what a surprise um I don't know it was I think Asians Americans which meant Native Americans and black folks Africans I mean and and the way that he described each of these groups in terms of intelligence reliability just I mean it's just was there any data behind that it was just assertion it was just assertion but it's the assertion that governed so much of what people did relative to racialized groups throughout the world okay examples of segregation patterns segregation is really common in the United States red is is disproportionately more black blue is just proportionately more white you see Atlanta Baltimore Chicago Detroit so on here's another way to there are many ways to categorize or to quantify segregation the y axis the vertical axis is the diversity of people in by neighborhood the x-axis is the diversity of people throughout the whole city if it's a one-to-one line that means your city isn't segregated right where do all the law where do all the points fall all of the points almost all of the points except Laredo Texas which means there aren't enough black people there to to to be discriminated against well I don't know but um everywhere else the the points are below the line and some of the cities are way far below the line just Baltimore and Detroit St Louis Chicago and so on ah what are the consequences of this here's our fifth chapter and here I'm going to use the word ecologies uh to to indicate different sorts of views of how the networks of Advantage Hazard disadvantage and vulnerability operate I'm going to show you these kinds of examples here's polluting Industries in Baltimore this is work by Chris Chris Boone the the dark purple is proportion of black population the the lighter colors are less lower percentages of black population the little circles are buffers around Toxic release inventory sites which are now called something else but these are basically the the shadow of polluting Industries in throughout Baltimore City and what you find is different than what Bullard found the white folks in especially South Baltimore are living closer to the Toxic release inventory sites than than black folks and that little graph on the on the other side of the slide shows that if you want data and what what's going on here that's not the pattern that that you expect but it is systemic racism because in the when Baltimore was a hot spot of Industry the fourth largest city in the United States white people were allowed to live near the factories where they worked and black people had to live farther away so it's a different pattern it's the same cause redlining and tree canopy cover this is um this is a few cities just showing you and the colors green blue yellow and red are sort of the standard colors and so you see that there's statistical statistically significantly fewer trees in the the red lined areas and that's true of 30 [Music] um 30 some cities except for Seattle for reasons that I we don't know so that is a shadow that's a legacy of segregation from the past it's a legacy for redlining so yeah it's the map from 1937 or the middle 1930s but the process really continues stay tuned here's what canopy cover looks like in Baltimore relative to Lifestyle this is the when you get when you buy something at X Y and Z store they they record where where that's happening and so you can really use those data this is a kind of big data but it happens to be kind of insulting because um this the classification is meant for the elites who are are making decisions about where to put big box stores and things like that and so the names of these categories are really awful um segregation and vacancy the black dots are vacant properties in in Baltimore a few years ago there are tens of thousands of vacant properties in Baltimore these are legacies and feedbacks of disamenities and amenities environmental Injustice persists there is an Adaptive cycle of resilience that explains this now I'm going to show you here a sequence of maybe about five slides if you forget everything else that's fine pay attention to these next this next handful of slides the Adaptive cycle of resilience deals with the capacity of some system someplace to experiences disturbances to experience disturbances and to retain its structure and function what that means is that resilience focuses on flexibility and adaptability it does embody mechanisms and I'll show you a little bit but resilience is not normative as a as a mechanistic structure resilience is not normative resilience is neither good nor bad in and of itself which is contrary to how people are talking about when you read a newspaper article oh we want great resilience this is I'm talking about a sort of a technical Theory here what's that theory based on it's based on sort of the the I'm going to call it the wisdom or the generalizations from succession if you look from the r to the K that's how you expect ecological communities to develop as they develop as they change through time you get Capital biomass or nutrients accumulating so that's that curve going up to to a bit of an asymptote also you get increased connectivity increased networking those are expectations from succession Theory these are the idealizations which is what theory does for you now if you put these things together the big blue arrow in the middle says that the capital starts out in the system being available it's unencumbered it's uncaptured whereas later in development it is allocated the the capital is held within the system the same thing with connectedness you start out with low connectivity or connectedness and you end with high high connectedness now if you look at the system allocated capital and high connectedness if there is a disturbance what might happen you would expect the resources to be released to become available again that would fuel the growth which would lead to the increasing internalization of capital and so on this as the little thing down in the corner says is a zero Force law that means that A system that does not lose resources after disturbance or a system that can release resources after a disturbance can keep going so zero four slots an idealization Newton was pretty successful with that strategy now if you have loss and lock in then you're not dealing with a zero Force law you have to now explain what drives the loss what drives the lock-in what ways are there to overcome that if you're dealing with a practical system that you want to maintain resilience in the sense that I've explained it all right pay particular attention this is a map of a neighborhood in West Baltimore um it's it's kind of interesting but you can you can see things like there's the church the mountain cyan Methodist Episcopal Church which they label as negro there's a public school I've outlined the little tiny houses along the small streets and alleys we call those alley houses in Baltimore and you see the houses on the main streets are are considerably grander this is a maybe a little bit of an unfair example these houses face one of the 19th century squares so these are pretty Grand so that's what uh the boss's houses would look like the servants houses the slaves houses the immigrants houses are on the inside of the block facing the alleys and this is what they look like now in case you're wondering whose fault it is that the people living there live in nasty houses it's the people who built the nasty houses to support the workers that could walk to the factories or walk around the corner and be the domestic workers in those the boss's houses am I putting two final points so so the early pattern in Baltimore was fine scale segregation it's segregation by Street versus alley same thing happened in Louisville the neighborhood I grew up in had alley houses in the back okay fine scale segregation so we'll call that the conservative condition what Disturbed that so this is like the the 1880s 1910s what Disturbed that anybody got a guess The Great Migration Disturbed that as reconstruction was dismantled and blacks and poor whites fled the South and you think well Baltimore's still the South but it wasn't the South um they're they're CR there are more and more black people coming to Baltimore you can't fit them all in those alley houses so they start moving to other neighborhoods and the elites and you can attach a color to that if you want because it would be correct the elites say we don't want that so there what they did in reorganizing the system this social ecological system dealing with segregation what was they reacted to African-American diffusion throughout the City by generating the war the the country's first blockwise segregation ordinance that said that black people and white people have to live on different blocks okay so that's a cycle of resilience a disturbance a reaction of recovery next cycle let's start with the block wise segregation ordinance that's the conservative state that we start with for this cycle what Disturbed that the Supreme Court in 1917 said you can't you can't restrict to whom up a person can sell a house it is their right to sell their house to whomever they want so they invalidated the Baltimore uh or they invalidated all ordinances like that the the ordinance that was brought before the court was the ordinance from Louisville which um the NAACP in Louisville brought they brought that suit and my ancestors were part of that that organization doing that so that's cool so what then happens what do the elites do now oh darn you know foiled again curse is foiled again they established neighborhood Improvement associations and generated deed covenants it's that that said it was you could not sell this person this house to a black person or or a Jewish person and those covenants are still on the deeds in Baltimore although they were um they were ultimately invalidated so they're they're still on the paperwork so that led to neighborhood wise and district-wise segregation so what do you notice there there's a change in scale of segregation and you take that out to 2020 and it's a little hard to see I don't have the city boundary on here but you see the green represents black folks the blue represents white folks and you see that that butterfly pattern which you saw in the downtown Baltimore that black butterfly just extends the white l keeps its place so resilience of segregation is is insured foreign now this means that you've got a system that is deeply enshrined in how American cities work I I haven't done this sort of diagram for other cities but looking at the patterns and knowing how the ordinances were laid out and the deed covenants spread throughout the country Baltimore when it IT established its racial racial segregation ordinance was congratulated oh brilliant Baltimore you're the first how brilliant you figured out how to do this and so lots of cities mimicked that and the the homo that not Homeowner Association the the community um development associations are things that have Spread spread very widely one of the important things about this is that segregation is something that is a regional phenomenon and really infects not just our cities so I mean the thing about redlining it's only in the city boundaries generally there's some of the wards overlap the city boundaries so you're not going to be able to do that analysis for larger areas in in the country but cities it's pretty clear and you see these kinds of patterns of segregation you remember that one-to-one line that I showed you so many cities and so many Metro areas continue to have those kinds of patterns so that's a kind of resilience another thing to say about this is that segregation of this sort and systemic racism systemic colorism systemic classism discrimination on the basis of gender and sex in in how resources are distributed in cities and how vulnerabilities are managed in cities is not something that only occurs in the 239 cities that were redlined in the United States South Africa has an incredibly enshrined spatial segregation pattern and apartheid as a system of moving people black people out of cities into crazy crazy places where there there was no water and not much way to grow anything well that wasn't useful okay are we back all right so so that system was established to prevent black and white people from living together in cities in South Africa all right so there's something if you look at many colonial cities around the world there is a segregation between [Music] um the the European overlords the local administrators and everybody else and very often in some cases especially in Latin America that's a color differential so these kinds of things are are when you think about Urban Ecology around the world this is something that needs to be considered not just in the United States not just in the old Industrial cities so here's um a way to look at this in this context segregation is defined as systemic institutional and instant individual actions I'm not letting the individual bigotry off the hook but that's not the whole story so my you know Mom and Dad sort of didn't let me know the whole thing that isolate racial or ethnic groups into spatially distinct locations de jure or de facto that's segregation that is a pattern that is a matter of spatial heterogeneity ecology is also a highly spatially structured kind of approach to the world the structure and function of the biophysical components of urban social ecological systems this can represent benefits and burdens to people okay and ecological heterogeneity to follow that that loop on on your your right can be used to support differential apportionment of environmental benefits and burdens based on race think about the the flood plain versus Highlands that I showed you in in Louisville and segregation in turn can result in spatially differentiated environmental structures fluxes and Dynamics associated with race and so we ecologists and Professor shell has and his group and colleagues have been major proponents of this kind of idea we need as ecologists to take into account race racialized status and segregation as part of the drivers of urban systems so ecologists look for soils or air or temperature rainfall we need to look for racialized status and segregation as well segregation what are my big points segregation is a an urban Universal there are places where it's not based on race they're places where it's a little bit less conspicuous they're places where it's largely class based and segregation has these various Dimensions racialization ethnicity wealth gender and others racist socially and economically created a lot of some some of my older biological colleagues when you tell them that they kind of twitch what does that do for evolution well it doesn't change anything about Evolution but it just tells you that race was is not entirely an evolutionary phenomenon segregation is a process segregation comes from Latin meaning separate from the flock it happens to people generally that doesn't mean that there can't be Affinity groups and people can't it doesn't mean that people shouldn't just determine who they want to associate with at various times and and places but segregation in the sense that I've been using it is something that a system imposes the the role of the um the world of the elites says who is out and who is in and the ecological implications of this are understudied so I hope you remember the resilience thing segregation and racial disadvantage and the aspects of vulnerability that are associated with it the denial of access to amenities that is associated with that is part of a very resilient social process that has yet to be discovered series of ecological implications that is what I wanted to tell you this evening so thank you for your attention [Applause] David wants me to remind you that there's a glass of water there I am going to try and call up some questions that are coming in off of my mm-hmm sir thank you so much that was just an amazing talk I'm going to think of the word resilience in a very different way from now on all my work here is done and I'm going to see if I can find the question I want to start by opening it up to those who are here and then I'll be looking for the online questions in a moment don't be shy and I'm going to have you move into the spotlight oh that's all right over here I I wonder do you know of any examples where cities or governments have taken steps that effectively change that that system is bigger than City governments and there I mean there you can point to to to things like um better or more more Equitable location of of affordable housing as a way to do that you can think about um transportation improved transportation between resident residential areas and areas where work is is concentrated but think about what's trying to be overcome there the whole post-war evacuation of jobs and Industry from the city into the suburbs where it was cheaper to buy land and where the the political structures were eager to have anything built on it how do you compensate for that I mean this and and the cities aren't in charge of that right so it's it's a I think we need to be aware of the the richness of this this perverse system and poke it wherever we can one of the reasons that I showed this Ecology of segregation as kind of a system is to say maybe a racist system requires an anti-racist response and as a theoretician that's my contribution to say here's a structure to think about this that might help you to poke at the things you can poke at do you think the legislation so in California we have sb9 that's showing up um which is trying to change single-family zoning to four Lots what is your thought about zoning where that sits within your Cycles where uh it's it's a it's an it's an anti-racist intervention potentially so maybe an anti-classist intervention as well I haven't so I haven't thought about how to take the model and and show how something bumps out into another cycle right we might establish a new kind of positive resilience cycles and so the the changing the zoning zoning it seems very very innocent right seems very innocent it's it's not and so I think that that initiative that sounds really pretty useful and again maybe California is a example for the rest of the country it's headed your way thank you for your presentation with for me it was very very thought provoking I happen to be a Forester by training but I was born and I've spent my entire life in urban areas but professionally I've always been just focused on non-urban areas until very recently and um I'm wondering if you could speak or elaborate a little bit on institutional racism when it comes to access to Green Space to shade from trees a tree shade from hot sun Etc maybe elaborate a bit on the urban area and trees forests Urban forests and institutional racism you know it's it's a really it's a tricky business because so often and when Baltimore's a really great example the um places where there are trees are are wealthy and often white and or upper class of various kinds and the places where there are few trees or no trees are tend to be populated by black and brown folks and and people who have less power less connections with power structures and less wealth and you want to make available to people the tools to have a pleasant environment a safer environment a less heat stressed environment but it's a kind of thing that has to be done in collaboration with people with with people we have a one of our historical geographers did did a history of of Forestry in in Maryland and how it connected with with the city and well Baltimore is Maryland's only official City by the way and one of the things that that he found is that there's deep-seated dislike of trees in some communities and like the Eastern European neighborhoods in East Baltimore he the state the city Forester went into to um to help people with trees and and there's a quote in in this this man's book Jeff Buckley that says that the city Forester said I would have thought that giving people trees or having trees planted in in various neighborhoods was just the easiest thing to do until I tried to plant trees in front of people's houses and and they and people would say if I wanted a tree I'd live in the country um and and one one woman from Eastern Europe said I want pure unadorn adorned concrete so there's um there are different viewpoints you know I mean I love trees I walk around the city of Poughkeepsie and I said God why aren't there trees here why is it so hot why I want I want trees on my walk um but there there's a real need to have conversations and to understand where people are coming from maybe some of the people will end up being convinced that trees are a good thing there's a lot of fear of trees and especially underserved neighborhoods that they're their beacons for crime and how do we deal with as people who've studied this and you look at the city as a whole and the places where there are more trees regardless of income or or racialized category are places where there's less um property and violent crime so there we there's a real need to have discussions to sort of talk with people to find out what their fears are and and maybe help understand some other ways to think about trees when the city of Baltimore when the the tree Baltimore gives away trees the rich white people come and get them that nobody else comes and gets the free trees so there's a there's a there's a culture of trees and there's a culture of something else and we need to know better how to deal with that great talk I really enjoyed it I've always been curious by the fact that in the States you tend to have the more affluent people on the higher Hills like here in Berkeley in Louisville and the poor in the city centers in the Flatlands and yet if you go to Europe it's kind of in Latin America it's kind of flip-flop that the Richer and the flat and City centers and the poor are up on the Hills I guess I'm curious is is the factor of investment in infrastructure or accessibility to power or what are some of the factors why are we so different from the rest of the world and how we segregate well I mean you look at European cities and and the wealth is in the middle and the the poverty is is out is on the fringes as well I I think a lot of it is that that other cultures around the world don't hate cities since Thomas Jefferson at least the United States has hated cities um and this there's scholarship that that that documents that and so people flee the cities people flee the cities um the hill business is again if the if the desired land is on the flat and the rich people are living there where does everybody else get uh and and very often those places the the dangerous slide prone uh slopes are are unregulated or the government says no you may not Bill there and there's just such pressure for people moving into the city for the perceived benefits education medicine jobs in many places around the world that they end up on these horrible places or in sometimes the horrible places are flood Plains sometimes the horrible places are are the are the slopes but I think we just have a different view of how a city is put together in in the United States and what cities are for or who they're for I'm letting you call for the questions because I can't really see yeah being right here thank you for such a great talk um in in your cycles of resilience you mentioned that the things disturbing that cycle they seem to come also from the very same power structure yes [Laughter] Bingo the question is are there any examples of like uh Grassroots social movements or other types of disturbances that may come from a different place not the same power structure yeah there are some and and I could model those I haven't done them yet some of the uh histories of of Highway construction or stopping Highway Construction in Baltimore is a good example of that [Music] um what else some that's okay that's a really good example what else is a good example in Baltimore that let's that's an you know that's that's an example of Grassroots and some some effort is being paid by Community groups on how to how to manage local vacant lands how to manage the vacant Lots how to care for vacant Lots obviously um land trusts have a role to play there that's another another example sorry I'm being a little slow tonight foreign okay so I may give you a slightly hard one here um so you had mentioned how we have a cycle right in this resilient cycle essentially is propagating segregation in multiple Generations so it stands to reason that some type of anti-racist strategy with the same amount of energy is needed to be able to disrupt the cycle yeah but it seems like some metaphysical Multiverse Theory where we have to be able to have enough energy to disrupt that system so is that even possible in a system of capitalism that was built on the very basis of segregating peoples I hope the answer is yes but it's just a hope I mean all what what I'm capable of do capable of doing is pointing toward to a structure and hopefully people who are better at thinking about social movements or fomenting social movements than I am can say all right here's how we as experts in in organizing and energizing populations and [Music] um trying to manipulate where possible power structures that's that's what seems to me to be possible yeah but how how do we how do we live in capitalism and and and mess it up at the same time thank you um great talk how do we think about urban renewal how do we think about gentrification in these processes that you've been thinking about from a system perspective gentrification is often spoken spoken of as a natural phenomenon it's just what happened we have a market and that market if you improve the Environmental Quality in a neighborhood the market will drive up the prices and that means that people who are on on limited of limited means will not be able to continue to pay the rents or buy buy houses there that's a matter of policy that can governments policies policy makers um activists can work to put in place constraints yeah I'm going to say it constraints on the market that's that's one of the jobs of government is to to to to to manage markets but we have a myth in this country that the market is managing everything else herb oh God urban renewal I mean that that that that um who James Baldwin called that negro removal um it's it's another tool of of it I mean what okay in in my history my family history we were Pawns in the real estate industry generating more profit by scaring white people with me you know um so urban renewal is a is is kind of a mess and you think about those those little houses the alley houses in Baltimore those were some of the main targets there's still a few standing as you saw because I took those pictures um these alley houses were major targets for urban renewal a lot of them didn't even have sort of a connection as a sewer system and um so yeah was that a good thing because they were kind of they were built to be crap right and they were crap and they hadn't been maintained so what's the option but but do you how do you manage to improve people's housing without leaving them in in the lurch urban renewal is I just I don't have a this is my personal bias I think that urban renewal is a highly misused has been a highly misused tool okay um yeah thank you again a really really lovely talk um and yeah my question is just sort of about like you know dealing with the like inherent like Wicked complexity of like Urban segregation in the United States like even as like you know bright-eyed undergraduate like I I don't know what to do like who like are there any what countries or cities around the world are are doing it right and do you realistically think that it's possible to implement any of those in the U.S considering the like WIC complex history and also like things like the abysmal public transit and things like that do you who's doing it right and do you think it's possible in the U.S okay that's a that's a really good question I think there's some some uh nice examples like in in Concepcion Chile for example I don't have the details but that's that's I so I think there's there is possibility but I think we're we're a lot of us are just gonna have to get angry and and kick social movements and uh to to action because yeah one last question uh thank you for your lectures Professor one question I had was around what you mentioned earlier about poking holes as a form of like you know what would be the means of reparations how would you go about fixing the issue so one thing would be to like sort of identify who's exactly being a disadvantage historically and throughout over time in in the cycles that you've mentioned uh is there a framework for understanding uh what is a better solution is it poking holes and figuring out solutions that can be enacted upon regardless of them affecting the worst affected over time or is there some need to actually be good at identifying who's been most affected so far across state lines because policy affects different jurisdictions and then kind of like you know building a plan around that so A is there a framework for such a for such sort of thinking around policy based reparation and then B how would you actually um yeah like uh prioritize people or communities this may not be the the most um this may not be the best response but one of the things that I think is really important is to have us all have Society understand that the conditions in segregated places are are there are the result in large part of something beyond what the people in those places do or have the capacity to do there is way too much blaming the people who are in vulnerable and hazardous positions and unempowered positions blaming them for that and I think we need just to one of the reasons that I think that this kind of framing or this kind of model this kind of conceptual model is important is that yes it's a wicked problem but I can point to some high points that help you understand the the negative resilience of this and once you understand the negative resilience of this you can begin to say what kinds of place what kinds of places what kinds of interactions might be something that you can approach it would be nice to say well let's just start all over let's just start all over but so I I think that's why I stop blaming people for for living in slums slums were created um and we need people to understand we need society as a whole to understand that this is something we've all created and it's wrong and how do we get some moral courage to to attack the parts of it we can moral courage resilience and moral courage my takeaways um really Steward on behalf of the College of environmental design and the rest of the College of Natural Resources you have spent two beautiful days with our College our students and our faculty we can't thank you enough for sharing that and perhaps sending us all out to march to make a difference David and I would both like to thank some folks who have been really helpful in setting up the past couple of days Cassie and Catherine Sam Joe Adele and Dao I don't think they're all still here right now but thank you so much for your hard work and having this organized those of you that missed it live we wish you were here but it was great thank you so much Stuart thank you [Applause]