Four specific announcements from the NYC city government in recent days, taken together, demonstrate a clear story of the city harnessing its fiscal and policy powers to shape how resources flow, what gets valued, and how. In turn contributing towards a more affordable, thriving city for all its inhabitants.

NYC pension funds step up investment in affordable housing

The Comptroller announced that the city’s pension funds (there are five of them) will invest $4 billion in “affordable housing production and preservation” over the next four years.

It sounds a lot, but in the context of the funds’ total assets of around $300 billion it’s not exactly huge. And of course it prompts the usual question of tensions between pension funds’ fiduciary duty to maximize returns (in this case, for the pensions of city workers), and the need to keep rents affordable.

But it puts a clear spotlight on the fact that as pension funds allocate proportions of their assets to real estate, how they do so is key. (The four areas being prioritized with these investments are broken down here).

Some city workers have pushed the comptroller on whether this is prioritizing a politically-aligned investment strategy rather than focusing solely on profit maximization. But that perspective overlooks the fact that irresponsible investment in real estate creates feedback loops through deepened inequality that in turn generate systemic risks for the economy as a whole. In other words, done right this strategy can make a contribution to affordability while also generating stable returns for workers’ pensions over the long term.

Pied-à-terre tax

Meanwhile the NY State Governor, with support from the Mayor (and, the administration says, 93% of New Yorkers) has proposed a “pied-à-terre tax” on luxury second homes in NYC that are valued at $5 million or more.

The tax aims to enable the city to levy an annual surcharge on the ultra-wealthy who own second homes in NYC but don’t live here, generating a projected $500 million a year: a targeted approach to shifting resources in ways (albeit distributive rather than pre-distributive) that are unlikely to dampen continued investment in the city’s broader economy.

Clean energy and efficiency investments in NYCHA

One in sixteen New Yorkers live in its public housing (NYCHA). Many NYCHA developments are underfunded and overlooked when it comes to basic maintenance and repairs, as well as climate resilience and upgrades.

I remember walking along the Coney Island boardwalk seven years after superstorm Sandy: new water-front apartment buildings with enticing names like “Ocean Dreams” were sprouting up while hoardings outside the nearby NYCHA developments described still-underway damage repair work from the storm.

This Earth Day, one of the city’s priority announcements was “innovating at scale”, an update and extension of the NYCHA sustainability agenda. It sets out targets for heat pump installation, efficient lighting and water, induction stoves, resilience measures and more: building on previous steps, yes, but sending a signal of where and how investment will be prioritized.

Now it’s a question of following through, and ensuring that climate improvements come hand in hand with basic maintenance improvements. City Limits (where I serve on the board) has a good summary of the announcement and its implications.

And the Urban Forest plan

Another Earth Day announcement was the NYC Urban Forest Plan, which aims to increase the city’s tree canopy to 30% city-wide by 2040 from its current 23.4% - protecting the trees that the city has, and planting more.

I bet the fact that it’s currently 23.4% percent comes as surprise to many readers. More on the city’s plant and animal inhabitants is in this gorgeous inventory by the NYC Biodiversity Taskforce: “Oaks, Our City and Us.”

On their own, each of the measures above may not seem that transformational. But taken together - and with many others - they work as kind of acupuncture of change. They are are opening up the space for the city to imagine what it can be, should be. Moving from a mentality of “well that doesn’t work” to “let’s do this.”

An interview with US Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez really stayed with me after first listening to it.

She spoke about the way that clean energy and energy efficiency measures are often framed in ways that have little to no connection with the lives of communities they are being imposed on, ignoring local knowledge and practice and in turn inspiring inevitable push-back.

“There’s been this obsession with technology and whatever lobbyist is in your office shilling triple-glazed, argon-filled windows. And a blindness to the actual skilled trades of: You know what? If you put the long side of your house facing south, you put an eave on it — if you put a skirt around a mobile home — a metal sheet that connects the bottom of the mobile home to the ground — that creates an air gap and saves a [expletive] ton of energy. And now those folks, a lot of whom are on fixed income living in a mobile home, their energy bill just went way down…

We ignored a lot of the things that we know in the trades are the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency and utility and a progressive tax system. That’s one of the things that bothers me. The electric vehicle tax credits, the heat-pump tax credits — those were profoundly regressive tax strategies.”

Yet shifts are underway in many contexts that finally center the fact that climate change is a deeply human experience (and like all human experience, full of inequities), and that efforts to address it have to take that into account.

Five recent examples:

Here in NYC, the city administration is saying that while the state is trying to delay its climate targets on an affordability basis, it sees climate action in the opposite way - that done right, it will bring down energy costs and improve affordability.

The city’s new climate and environmental justice chief Louise Yeung has said:

“The cost of living is increasingly difficult for New Yorkers to remain in the city and to have a good quality of life. Embedded in that is also the amount of money that we are paying for our utility bills, the amount of money that we are spending to rebuild after it floods, and there’s so many ways that our climate solutions can be part of our economic justice. Climate solutions can be part of our affordability.”

On a personal note: installing solar panels on our roof last year was a way more complicated and long process than it needed to be, but now that they’re up the drastically reduced electricity bills and seeing that our grid dependence is around 2% on average is pretty awesome.

In Europe, a new regional program hones in on the urgency of access to affordable housing, and the fact that climate measures have to come in tandem with affordability. In parallel the “TASH” initiative (Taskforce on Affordable and Sustainable Housing) - which I sowed the seeds for in its early days - spotlights what that means for financing.

In their new report “Living at the crossroads: affordability, climate and real estate investment” the TASH coalition lifts up the fact that “most institutional capital in European housing remains concentrated in short-term, asset-level risk management models that can exacerbate un-affordability, poor climate outcomes and market volatility.” They call for policy that supports scaled investment in innovative models, currently at the fringes, that are aligned with housing rights and with climate goals.

In Antigua, government leaders recognized that an energy and resilience shift - and securing the financing to make it happen - was going to involve bringing along multiple sectors, from utility companies, to residents, to builders. As a speaker on the recent built environment course I taught put it, that work is complex, takes time, and crucially it involves finding language that lands with the actors you need to move.

And then of course, the insanity that has been the US and Israel’s war on Iran and Lebanon has made the risks of fossil fuel dependence - even putting climate impacts aside - clearer than ever.

Later this month, 85 countries are gathering in Santa Marta, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, for the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels. Following petrostates’ sabotaging of fossil fuel-phase-out commitments at Cop30, Brazil initiated this process that seeks to make change happen faster than politically-negotiated texts by moving in numbers and harnessing market forces.

And in an example of an economic and political dynamic happening across the continent and beyond, China is currently massively scaling up solar panel exports to Cuba as it grapples with sweeping blackouts exacerbated by the oil blockade.

It’s close to impossible to be optimistic these days without sounding willfully naive. But it’s by joining the dots and seeing the patterns between shifts that are happening in multiple, diverse contexts that the space for alternative ways forward begins to expand dramatically.

Through 2026, It’s Material is sharing examples of building(s) in lyrics, a kind of “acupuncture of meaning” to explore the back-and-forth connection between building/s and our lives.

This week, a lyric from Compay Segundo’s Balcón de Santiago, a classic example of Cuban son (Cuban bolero-son to be precise).

“Cuando yo llegue a mi Oriente querido
Cuando yo asome al balcón de la capital
Cuando yo sienta sonar las campanas de la catedral
Doy un salto de alegría y les digo a los viajeros
Estamo’ en Santiago
Como custodia dejo atrás la Virgen de la Caridad
La que me vio partir, la que me vio llegar

Ya te diré, te diré mis penas
Ya te contaré, te contaré mis alegrías
Cuando yo me vaya te diré adiós, adiós
Virgen mía….”

“When I reach my beloved East
When I appear on the capital’s balcony
When I hear the cathedral bells ring
I’ll leap for joy and tell the travelers
We’re in Santiago
As my guardian, I leave behind the Our Lady of Charity
She who saw me depart, she who saw me arrive

I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you my sorrows
I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you my joys
When I leave, I’ll say goodbye, goodbye
My Virgin….”

He’s singing of Santiago de Cuba, in the East of the island. The Virgen de la Caridad is a patron saint of the country. And Santiago is known for its balconies. Balconies may be simple structures but they brim with emotional connotations (as do benches, from a previous post). They bridge the inside and the out, create viewpoints for comings and goings, vantage points over horizons.

Santiago and the East of Cuba is also where Cuban son originated, before the music was carried across the whole island and became part of its identity. It emerged through the creolization of African and European rhythms, singing styles and instruments. Last December, Cuban son was officially added to UNESCO’s “list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity" (it’s quite a process to get on that list).

Cuba’s being squeezed like never before by the US, with a new blockade of oil from Venezuela and stronger currency restrictions on top of existing sanctions. Fuel is hard to come by, garbage is piling up as a result, what was left of the economy is at breaking point and its future is uncertain.

I’ve been taking inspiration recently (very much on the lookout for inspiration!) from Eduard Glissant’s “Traité du tout-monde” / “Treaty on the whole-world”. From the Caribbean Island of Martinique, Glissant saw the world through an archipelagic lens, sea-beds forming a continuous connection, single-identity-definitions being meaningless and all existing “in relation.”

He foresaw that “regions of the world [would] become islands, isthmuses, peninsulas, lands thrusting out, mixing and connecting and yet which endure.”

*****

Also check out:

• “No water or electricity, and children begging in streets filled with rubbish – but this is why I won’t leave Cuba / Whether you blame the US or the communist regime, there is no doubt that this is an island spiralling into tragedy” by Ruardih Nicol in the Guardian

• And for Spanish speakers, Leonardo Padura’s latest novel Morir en la Arena is an astonishing portrait of the last 50 years of the country, told through the lens of one family, their friends, and a patricide

As China welcomes the year of the fire horse, the season of celebration is bitter for former residents of Wang Fuk Court in Hong Kong.

Two months ago, fire swept through seven of the eight towers in the apartment complex. A hundred and sixty-eight people died, and over 70 were injured. The survivors are haunted by trauma and loss - of relatives, friends, and homes - while trying to navigate a new reality.

Parallels between the Wang Fuk Court fire and the 2017 Grenfell fire in London are striking. And while the fires represent extremes of negligence and harm, their causes reflect flaws that pervade the ways that buildings are constructed and maintained.

The parallels include:

Resident warnings going unheard

One of the Grenfell survivors said “to predict something is going to happen, and have it happen and not be able to stop it. There’s no words for that.”

Residents of Grenfell and of Wang Fuk Court warned of fire risks, and their warnings went unheeded. Just like how garment workers in the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh had warned of dangerous cracks in the building’s walls. The factory bosses ignored the warnings and on 24 April 2013 the building collapsed, killing 1,134 people.

Hazardous materials

In Grenfell and Wang Fuk Court the materials used for renovation processes were highly flammable, enabling the fire to spread quickly throughout the buildings. At Grenfell, the primary cause of the fire spreading to the extent it did was aluminum composite cladding installed in 2016. At Wang Fuk Court polystyrene boards covering the windows while renovation was underway, flammable safety netting and bamboo scaffolding fueled the blaze.

Which leads to….

Cultures of corruption

The Grenfell Tower inquiry concluded that there was “systematic dishonesty” by the manufacturers of the cladding and insulation, who “engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing process, misrepresent test data and mislead the market.”

In Hong Kong, 13 consultants, contractors and subcontractors involved in the renovation at Wang Fuk Court have been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter and corruption.

Dorz Cheung survived the Wang Fuk Court fire with his 87-year-old grandmother. They are now living in a temporary space less than a third the size of their former apartment. He says:

“The anger stems from the fact that it’s not just negligence, but a man-made disaster.”

Imagine what a transformation in building processes could look like. Starting simply with recognizing the dignity of residents, with ensuring integrity in materials and with prioritizing care over greed. Interests are entrenched, and systems take time to change but any shift in hearts, minds and action is a step in the right direction.

*****

• This CNN story profiles people whose lives have been upturned by the Wang Fuk Court fire, including Yip Ka-kui whose wife died after rescuing four neighbors, and Purwanti, the sister of Yasmiati from Indonesia, one of 10 domestic workers who died in the fire.

• The UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission produced a series on the human rights dimensions of the Grenfell disaster, from the right to life, to children’s rights, to access to justice.

Through 2026, It’s Material is sharing examples of building(s) in lyrics, a kind of “acupuncture of meaning” to explore the back-and-forth connection between building/s and our lives.

This week, the title lyrics from David Byrne’s song “Glass, concrete and stone”, from the album Grown Backwards.

“Gonna be on my way, try to pretend, it’s not only

Glass and concrete and stone

That it’s just a house, not a home.”

Take a listen, close your eyes, and enjoy the drums and the cello as well as the words.

There’s the often unrecognized emotional dimension of building materials like glass, concrete, and stone, which create buildings, which in turn become homes, filling up with experiences and memories, creating attachment.

There’s also the fact that turning a raw material into a building material is perhaps one of humans’ oldest activities, along with language.

And there’s the fact that building materials are tied into intricate economic, social and environmental dimensions. During a recent course I taught on human rights and the built environment, one of the faculty began her presentation by asking “how often do you enter a building, and wonder who produced the materials it is made from?”

The materials can often be traced back through long and complex supply chains, involving workers in extraction, production and transportation. Any thinking about the ethics, environmental impacts and possibilities for transformation in the built environment has to take its materials into account. Check out earlier It’s Material stories on building materials below.

And…a shout-out to my eldest son for recommending this week’s building-related lyrics. He got into Talking Heads, and then in turn its former lead singer David Byrne, after we watched the movie of the live performance of their Stop Making Sense album. (Which, speaking of buildings, my husband and I had first seen in the tiny brick-built converted firehouse “Cinema Village” in NYC’s West Village for his birthday - we were the only ones in the audience).

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A few more takes on building materials…

Through 2026, It’s Material is sharing buildings in lyrics, a kind of “acupuncture of meaning” to explore the back-and-forth connection between building/s and our lives.

This week, a lyric from Bad Bunny’s “NUEVAYoL”, ahead of his Super Bowl halftime show. Bad Bunny’s gone super-mainstream but if you haven’t yet heard of him, chances are you will have done after Sunday.

The song, on its surface about New York summers, includes:

“Un shot de cañita en casa de Toñita
y PR se siente cerquita”

Which translates roughly to “A shot of rum at Toñita’s place / and Puerto Rico feels close.” With Toñita’s place being The Caribbean Social Club in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Maria Antonia Cay - Toñita - opened the club in the ‘70s as a place for the local baseball team and their families to hang after games. In the 90s, the now soon-to-retire first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress, Nydia Velázquez, held her first campaign meeting there. Over the years, as Williamsburg prices have soared, developers have pressured Toñita to sell. Velázquez said at the club’s 50th anniversary that when Toñita “purchased her building in the ‘70s, she was making a statement: ‘If you don’t want to leave, you have to own.’”

Most of Bad Bunny’s songs are rooted in Puerto Rico itself. And in 2025 he decided to do a 30-show residency on the island instead of including the mainland US in his tour for the album Debí Tirar Más Fotos, given the risk that his fans would be targeted by immigration enforcement at venues.

NUEVAYoL though, of course, is firmly set in NYC. It gets to the heart of how New York - and more broadly the country as a whole - is built by immigrants. It also gets to the intractable ties between the US and the countries of the Caribbean (watch the video above all the way to the end).

Later in the song the lyrics feature Juan Soto, the Dominican baseball player for the NY Mets (and previously the Yankees).

“Con los Yankees y los Mets, Juan Soto
A correr, que otra vez la sacamo’ el estadio”

(With the Yankees and the Mets, Juan Soto / Better run, we hit it out the park/stadium again).

The “stadium” here could be the Yankees Stadium in the Bronx, or Citi Field in Queens. On Sunday, Bad Bunny will perform at the Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, at the US’ biggest sporting event of the year. It’s an event where the power dynamics of money, culture and politics get distilled through football and at a time when the high-profile killings of two US citizen protestors by immigration officials is just the tip of the iceberg of a system of abuse of immigrants in jails, detention centers, streets and workplaces throughout the country.

The US is approaching its 250th anniversary. It’s as if the always-in-tension narratives of its soaring promise and harsh realities are coming to a head. Breaking up both those narratives with complexity, creativity and startling humanity that ripples across borders is needed more than ever.

*****

Also check out:

• El Hilo’s latest podcast “Estados Unidos y la política del enemigo interno” (“The US and the politics of the internal enemy”). The podcast in Spanish and the English transcript are both here.
  

• The “Memoirs of Bernado Vega: A contribution to the history of the Puerto Rican Community in New York”
  

• “How the Superbowl will affect the South Bay”, a short listen from KQED
  

• Past “Buildings in Lyrics” - get in touch with suggestions!
  

• And I share it a lot, but Julie Mehretu’s painting “Stadia II” captures many of the dynamics that will be at play on Sunday

In Shuffering and Shmiling, Fela Kuti carries the listener into buildings - specifically churches and mosques - and then out again.

You have to hear it to experience it. I say “hear” but that seems inadequate. Like all the best music, more like “be in it” to experience it.

The track kicks off with a 10 minute instrumental intro. Kuti used these intros to get the listeners’ minds focused, clear of any clutter that may be clouding them. And then…

“I want you all to please take your minds

Out of this musical contraption

And put your minds into any goddamn church

Any goddamn mosque

Any goddamn Celestical

Including Seraphoom and Cheruboom

Now, we are all there now

Our minds are in those places

Here we go…”

The song critiques the way that religions’ promise of heaven in the future can lull a population into acceptance of hardship in the present. (“Suffer, suffer for world / Enjoy for heaven / … Every day, for house / Every day, for road / Every day, for bus / Every day, for work).

Then it brings the listener back out of those places, creating the space for Kuti to share his message with his audience.

“My people, my people

My people, my people

We now have to carry our minds

Out of those goddamn places

Back into this musical contraption

Right opposite you

Now we are back here”

Listening on headphones is one thing, but the place to have heard the song performed live is The Shrine in Lagos. (Learn more about The Shrine here).

Wherever you listen though, what a brilliant example of the teleportative and transformative power of music.

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This year It’s Material is sharing examples of building(s) in lyrics. Share your suggestions!

What you may not know, is that It’s Material is a company too. Check out the short video above, for an intro to why It’s Material does what it does, and how.

We focus on “arenas” with huge potential for building connection across silos and driving change (whether transformational, or incremental!). Those arenas are finance, tech, cities, sports, and all things built environment - i.e. infrastructure, real estate, architecture, design and engineering.

If you are looking for ways to overcome obstinate obstacles, expand who you engage with in creative ways, tease out clarity from complexity or get something new off the ground (lightly and effectively), then get in touch!

And if you’re here for the newsletter insights and updates, fear not, stay put - regular programming will follow!

The US moves on Venezuelan oil made me look back at the Masters dissertation I wrote (some time back!) on the US and oil, not in Venezuela, but in neighboring Colombia.

There are parts of the dissertation I now see as over-simplified, but the core argument and many of its points have strikingly stood the test of time. A reminder of the power-fueled cycles of history…imperialism, revolution, broken ideals, cronyism, imperialism, and so on. And a reminder to always be looking for the openings around the edges of headline-history, and for the humanity that is the continuous undertow.

Here’s one paragraph from the dissertation that’s a reminder that the current US maneuvers are a continuation of a long-established trajectory.

“There are clear parallels between a national security emphasis on the protection of hegemonic power, and the enhanced inequality that capitalism, despite its benefits, has brought in tow. This point was made clear when, in the same year that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted (1948), head of the US State Department’s policy planning staff George Kennan said: ‘We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of the world’s population…Our real task in the coming period is…to maintain this position of disparity…We should cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human rights’ (quoted Ishay et al, 1997: 391). A brief note is in order here in response to Kennan’s comment, on the value and role of universalism, bearing in mind that ‘rights have to be universal or do not exist at all’ (Restrepo, 2001: 111). Kennan’s statement encapsulates the realist argument against the universalism of human rights, namely, that as humanity is founded on power concepts it will always be inherently unequal, therefore efforts to work towards illusory universal goals are misguided and destined to fail. While it is true that humanity can be defined by its inequality, that is only half of the definition. It can also be defined as the perpetual struggle against inequality and against the abuse of power. Universalism is the expression of this struggle, and without it history and indeed human existence itself are rendered meaningless.”

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• The full dissertation, “To what extent does a corporate-state security consensus undermine human rights?” can be downloaded here.

• The image above is of a cover that the book binder Nina Judin, who lived with my parents while she did her book-binding training, created for the dissertation as a gift. Thank you, Nina.

So another year rolls around, and here in NYC it kicked off with a hopeful mayoral inauguration on a cold but bright January day, followed quickly by the arrival and perp-walk of dictatorial Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro into a Brooklyn detention center after the US transactionalist-in-chief harnessed the might of the military to whisk him and his wife out of the country, which would lead to understandable relief for many Venezuelans were the action not throwing into doubt any recognition of territorial sovereignty and self-determination and not followed right away by a ramping up of repression by the remaining regime.

Meanwhile, resistance and protests over the growing costs of living are on the rise, including in Iran and Saudi Arabia, with governments responding by cracking down.

So, with that cheery opening…here’s what to expect from It’s Material this year.

You’ll receive a weekly song lyric reflecting buildings and infrastructure in some form.

As most readers know, I am passionate about the way in which what gets built (and maintained), where, how, for and by whom, has always shaped human existence - and will continue to shape our future. Yet working for change in infrastructure and construction can quickly lead into professional silos, or wonky language that obscures the deep human relevance. Through song lyrics I aim to create a kind of “acupuncture of meaning”, unlocking sparks of recognition and action relating to buildings, and building.

You’ll also receive “Short Takes” (I may as well use my straightforward surname for something!), which will unpack a trend or emerging angle I’m seeing, a strategy I’d like to highlight or a dose of inspiration I’d like to lift up.

Enjoy!

And here’s the first of each.

Building(s) in lyrics: Straight to Hell

The Clash song “Straight to Hell” includes these lines:

“Speaking King’s English in quotation

As railhead towns feel the steel mills rust”

The song brilliantly captures the “f*ck you” way in which economic or political power is experienced by those at its hard edges, starting with rusting steel mills in Northern England - its not the “towns” feeling the steel mills rust of course but their residents and workers, experiences that are echoed in so many places around the world as industries decline and investors move on.

The lyrics then switch to the perspective of a child fathered by an American soldier in Vietnam - “Wanna join in a chorus / Of the Amerasian blues?…” - then broaden to the experiences of immigrants “anywhere, most likely could be any frontier…any hemisphere.”

There are the places within songs, and also the places where they come to life. Joe Strummer apparently wrote the Straight to Hell lyrics in December 1981 in New York City.

“I’d written the lyric staying up all night at the Iroqouis Hotel. I went down to Electric Lady and I just put the vocal down on tape, we finished about twenty to midnight. We took the E train from the Village up to Times Square. I’ll never forget coming out of the subway exit, just before midnight, into a hundred billion people, and I knew we had just done something really great.”

Do let me know of lyrics referring to buildings or infrastructure. (Any language is fine). Share it in the comments or message me!

Short Take: “World Inequality Report 2026”

The “World Inequality Report 2026” came out late last year, and I meant to share it at the time. Its chapter on climate and inequality makes an important addition to how accountability for carbon emissions is calculated: factoring not only emissions from consumption of goods and services, but also ownership of capital, particularly ownership of shares in companies.

The report finds that:

“The global wealthiest 10% of individuals account for 77% of global emissions associated with private capital ownership, underscoring how the climate crisis is inseparable from the concentration of wealth. Addressing it requires a targeted realignment of the financial and investment structures that fuel both emissions and inequality”.

And, echoing the rusting steel mills of The Clash song, it adds:

“Policies designed to mitigate [climate change] are transforming how wealth is created, distributed, and preserved. The intensification of physical climate risks, the repricing of assets, and the reallocation of investments toward green sectors will have far-reaching implications for the global distribution of private and public wealth”.

Climate strategies, and human rights strategies, so often overlook the ownership patterns that underpin the economy. In doing so they miss out on opportunities for more meaningful and systemic change.

Where does the “real” and “imaginary” collide more than in a theater?

A highlight of 2025 was a short tour of the Corral de Comedias in Alcalá de Henares, a city to the northeast of Madrid. The theater first opened in 1602, as a patio tucked between houses alongside the city’s main plaza. (At the time the plaza was called Plaza del Mercado. Later it was renamed Plaza de Cervantes, as Alcalá is where the author of Don Quixote was born).

I say tour, but this was different, a simple and immersive monologue by the guide, who transported us back with her words and gestures through the stages of the theater’s life. At first, the plays were religious. They communicated stories written in Latin to an audience that didn’t speak Latin. Resident animals from the patio were shooed to the side before performances.

The theater evolved into a place for entertainment. Hundreds crammed in to watch long plays - calling out for lines to be repeated if they hadn’t caught them over the din of the audience. Female spectators stood in a cordoned-off area at the back, fanning themselves in the heat and using their fans to communicate with suitors in other parts of the theater, giving rise to the “lenguaje del abanico”, fan language.

The theater established connections with the court in Madrid, linkages that meant it kept going when the majority of other Corrales (courtyard theaters) were shut down for their unsanitary conditions. It was given a more solid structure, with a network of beams supporting a domed roof.

Eventually though it entered a period of decline, as people found other forms of entertainment. It became a cinema for a while, then students at Alcalá University researched its origins, took a look behind the movie screen and discovered the structure of the theater still largely intact, leading to its renovation and re-opening in the 2000s, done carefully and thoughtfully so that when you walk down under the stage you can still see the original patio from the 1600s.

During her tour, the guide showed us technological innovations that were used in productions back in the day. A kind of spinning barrel that makes a sound just like the wind. Another contraption that makes the sound of thunder. A platform beneath a stage trapdoor that enabled actors to magically appear, or disappear. Creative artifice.

We returned to the theater for that evening’s performance. (We had booked late, so were seated to one side, meaning that my view was partially obscured by a beam which at first annoyed me until I realized that was just right, a reminder of the structure that was holding us together to share this slice of time, just as it had many audiences past).

The play happened to also be a monologue, a performance of El maestro Juan Martínez que estaba allí (The master Juan Martínez, who was there). It’s based on the journalistic account of the life of a flamenco dancer and teacher traveling through Istanbul, Romania and then Russia, just as the Russian revolution broke out in 1917.

As the play draws to a close, Martínez looks out from the Odessa docks to a boat that is likely taking him back to Europe, after six years of chaos and hardship. Suddenly he feels frozen to the spot. What will “home” be like, and will people remember him? Which is real, he wonders, the life in Russia he is leaving behind or the one he is about to return to?

Martínez’ confusion echoes that of Segismundo, a character in La Vida es Sueño by Calderón de la Barca, whose plays were also performed at the Corral in Alcalá.

“¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.

¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,

una sombra, una ficción,

y el mayor bien es pequeño;

que toda la vida es sueño,

y los sueños, sueños son.”

***

“What is life? A frenzy.

What is life? An illusion,

A shadow, a fiction,

And the greatest good is small

As all of life is a dream,

And dreams, are but dreams.”

I was mind-blown by the way that words written at a point in time travel across years, centuries, to convey stories and experiences to people in the future.

I keep coming back to that experience in the theater, as something essential. Something profoundly human, and perhaps reassuringly so, as accelerated technology encompasses language itself and makes the distinction between real and unreal more blurred than ever. If we remember that this blurriness has always been a part of existence it can become less disorienting. We can lean into it with all the curiosity and wonder, creativity and playfulness that make us human in the first place. We can keep hold of the agency to choose what to believe, and what to question.

Our local, low-cost gym was Blink, on Steinway Street in Astoria. Their primary color was orange, and there was a cheery all-are-welcome vibe about the place. It was even set out explicitly in their slogans, “The gym for every body”, and “Mood above muscle”.

You would swipe in with a tag on your keychain at the front desk, where two employees were on hand to welcome customers and help out with anything that might come up. In the locker rooms of course the modus operandi was people plugged into their own content on their phones, going about their business while listening to music, or a podcast, or calling a friend.

But sometimes there’d be chit chat among the gym-goers. I remember getting into a discussion with two other women, one much older than me, one younger, about mountains or big hills we had either climbed, or would like to climb. Invariably in front of the changing room’s wide mirror someone would be posing in a conscious yet unselfconscious way for selfies, holding their camera up at this angle or that to get the best shot.

Blink was owned by Equinox - a “luxury fitness and health club” company. Equinox in turn was (is) owned by the huge real estate firm Related Companies, which in turn is owned by billionaire and long-time Trump pal Stephen Ross. All those layers didn’t really make their presence felt in the Blink on Steinway. Until things began to change.

The first thing that happened was the name above the entrance. The bright lettering “Blink Fitness” was replaced with “PureGym” in teal green. Over a period of a few weeks, the cheesy signage inside (”I blink therefore I am”, “Blink and be merry”) switched to nondescript PureGym messaging and emergency cords marked with big red arrows went up on each wall.

Contractors came in and worked on an elaborate project in the entranceway. It turned out to be the installation of two of those revolving door containers that you get at airport security. Scan a QR code on your phone, enter a plastic tube and the door revolves shut behind you. Wait a few seconds praying that the thing works, then the other side opens up and releases you into the gym. Then the reception table was removed, along with the employees who used to stand behind it.

Blink had gone bankrupt - the “mood above muscle” membership model hadn’t worked out for Equinox-Related-Ross. And PureGym bought them out. When I learned that PureGym is a UK company I thought, as an American Brit, ok, that’s kind of cool. But when I learned that PureGym is joint-owned by two private equity firms, Leonard Green & Partners and the giant KKR, I thought well that’s less cool. It explains why the gym now feels pretty much like an extraction machine, even if it is less crowded because the “bring a friend for free” perk has gone and the equipment paired down a bit accordingly. Gone are the elements of fun and the presence of human staff, so that our weight-lifting tread-milling bodies generate healthy corporate returns.

I still go a couple of times a week. One time I thought I’d make more of an effort to chat with other gym goers to compensate for the overall reduced humanity but my conversant’s politics riled me up (with a derogatory and generalized dismissal of all Trump voters, agghhh), and I went back to listening to my music, watching the CNN headlines slide by on the screens above my head, and bemoaning the increasing atomization of the world.

PureGym’s motto is a rather cold and functional: “stronger than yesterday.”

The day after the election Mamdani introduced his transition team standing at the bottom of the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Corona Park - a huge steel globe that was erected for the World’s fair in 1964. It’s where my son and his friends posed for photos after their middle school graduation. It’s where we’ve strolled countless times after football matches on the park’s many pitches. It’s where, as COVID restrictions began to lift, families gathered under cherry blossoms and the simple fact of human connection was astonishing and heartbreaking at the same time, for its fragility.

There’s so much inspiration to take from the campaign.

The prioritization of listening to what matters to people (how very novel). The recognition that even during hard times messages of hope can inspire people to imagine alternatives and take action towards them. The much-needed expansion of politics, galvanizing people to vote who were otherwise disillusioned by the process. And the way that it tapped into the specificity of what people love about the places they live, despite day-to-day struggles: the food joints, the hustle, the places of worship, the laughter, the banter in many languages.

The campaign also centered the dignity of the work that makes the city run - reflected in a visit on the last night to LaGuardia Airport (which, like the city’s biggest airport JFK, is in Queens) to speak with night shift workers.

It has often struck me that the subway map of NYC shows how the financial centre of Manhattan is dependent on workers from the outer boroughs, attached to them by umbilical cords of transit lines. The campaign has revitalized a form of politics that recognizes workers not only in terms of collective power but also connects with the multi-faceted dimensions of their daily lives: grounded physically in place as well as in online spaces.

I asked the driver of a yellow taxi cab last week what he thought of Mamdani’s win. “All politicians are the same,” he said. “Biden, Trump…nothing changes for us.” My son - the one whose graduation was by the Unisphere - also has a (healthy yet overstated) cynicism, having been dramatically disillusioned by the character of Mayor Carcetti in the Baltimore-based show The Wire. (Anyone who’s seen it will know what I mean).

Making the lives of New Yorkers better and more affordable won’t be easy, with headwinds from local and federal obstacles and a firehose of disinformation. But not to try would be a pretty depressing resignation to the status quo. Succeeding will involve creativity, and grit, and continuing to tap into the simple yet too-often-buried bonds of our shared humanity.

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• Through the “I live here - Queens” project Queens residents share the words for “I live here” in the multiple languages spoken in the borough, in writing and video
  

• “The Mamdani coalition” podcast from WNYC analyzes how the city’s neighborhoods voted and what that says about wider political shifts

A story that’s touched a nerve across the internet this week is Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make way for his new ballroom. It will - probably - be white on the outside but with a lot of gold on the inside, and is financed by donations from the likes of Amazon, Apple, Palantir Technologies, and Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman.

In this world of bifurcated digital feeds, mine has been full of analogies between the demolition and the Presidency as a whole - a wrecking ball being brought to democracy, the destructive will of one man’s ego laying waste to the country’s past. Other feeds are no doubt celebrating the boldness of the change.

The move follows a long tradition of what could be described as authoritarian monumentalism, as power-hungry leaders seek to project that power into building - from statues, to ballrooms, to whole cities.

Meanwhile in Europe, the investigative newsroom CORRECTIV has been shining a light on a more everyday form of demolition.

Buildings - their materials, construction processes and energy use - contribute 36% of Europe’s CO2 emissions. The EU has a bold plan to renovate 35 million buildings to improve energy efficiency by 2030 - but at the same time isn’t tracking buildings that get demolished and replaced by new ones, which the non-profit campaign HouseEurope! has put at a rate of around one every minute.

As the CORRECTIV article points out, when existing housing is demolished and rebuilt, it’s often people with low incomes who lose their homes. It’s a reflection, once again, of misaligned economic incentives, that in a region where access to affordable housing is a major challenge and construction and demolition waste makes up a third of the waste stream there’s still a pervasive cycle of demolishing and building new.

There are signs of a narrative and cultural shift underway though. And with them, the economic shifts may follow (including a more diversified market). Prestigious architectural awards are going to designers who transform existing buildings and ensure affordability - a few years ago the Pritzker was awarded to Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal whose manifesto calls for architecture to “never demolish, never remove - always add, transform and reuse.”

“Demolition is a form of violence,” Lacaton has said.

The Financial Times architecture critic Edwin Heathcote recently wrote a piece called Adapt or die. “Architecture’s dark, dusty side is a shadow world in which buildings are demolished to make way for the new”, he opens. And goes on to describe inspiration and momentum in countries like Germany, Belgium, and the UK, where the Tate Modern’s “turbine hall” is an iconic example and where a “Don’t waste buildings” campaign is underway.

Reuse is not yet the norm, Heathcote concludes, but “if we are more exposed to the benefits…to the value of urban memory and the sheer mad waste of crunching up all that debris, we might begin to see the potential and the beauty in what already exists.” Something that my New York project, “51 to 1 - Building NYC” seeks to do in a small way.

A gorgeous example of the kind of built environment storytelling that we need so much more of is Radio Ambulante’s recent podcast, “Inventario del exodo”. You can listen in Spanish and access the Spanish transcript here, and the English transcript is here.

In Venezuela, the fact that almost eight million residents (nearly a quarter of the population) have emigrated in recent years has left over a million empty homes, usually still containing the furniture and belongings of their former inhabitants.

The podcast narrates the story of people who at some point need to decide what they are going to do with all those belongings, in absentia. We also hear from Mayrin, who has created a new profession for herself helping overseas residents do just that, stirring up all kinds of emotions along the way.

Soledad, a lawyer who now lives with her daughter in Chile, says:

“No es lo que valen esos objetos en dinero. Las memorias que están indisolublemente asociadas. Una silla no es solo una silla. Una silla es donde te sentaste a amamantar a tu hija.”

“It’s not what the objects are worth in money. It’s the memories that are embedded in them. A chair is not just a chair. A chair is where you sat to breastfeed your daughter.”

The stories have a profound sadness about them. They are also beautiful stories of care, built up over time. And if you keep listening (or reading) there is a story of hope - of things coming full cycle - at the end.

During the kick-off session for a global course I’m teaching on human rights and the built environment, Luis Quintana of Todo Accesible said that “we got a man to the moon in 1969 but today I still can’t get to the 7-Eleven store around the corner from my home.”

Luis has navigated life in a wheelchair since a car accident in his 20s that injured his spine. The built environment in and around Mexico City, where he lives, is not designed for people in wheelchairs - as is the case in the majority of cities, towns and villages around the world. Nor is it designed with people in mind who have multiple other disabilities - visible and invisible. This is despite the fact that about 16% of the World’s population lives with a form of disability. Luis founded Todo Accesible to help make buildings and places more accessible for everyone.

As with so much built-environment decision-making, not designing for inclusion reflects short-term thinking and narrow definitions of value.

Multiple studies have shown that universal design at the outset of a project costs much less than making retroactive changes. And of course by not doing so, you are significantly restricting who can live in or use the place you build - whether it’s an apartment building, offices, a museum, transit system, or library.

I was amazed - though sadly not that amazed - when the Hunters Point public library here in Queens, NYC was built and opened (picking up design awards along the way) before people realized that the tiered platforms at the center of the building were inaccessible for people in wheelchairs, or for strollers. Which led to closures, long drawn-out lawsuits, and finally, costly retrofits.

Medellín, Colombia is recognized globally for its pioneering social urbanism strategy that has connected peripheral neighborhoods to the center with cable cars, and to each other with green corridors. Yet disability advocates still have to fight hard for improved access. Luz Amparo Sánchez of the community development organization Corporación Región talks about the importance of working in close partnership with disability justice groups, like Fuerza Incluyente.

“Together, we understood the right to the city as a right to live, to occupy, to transform, to enjoy the city…”

“Conjuntamente hemos entendido este derecho a la ciudad como derecho a vivir, a ocupar, a transformar, a disfrutar la ciudad.”

The idea of together - the simple fact that designing inclusively means that people can be together - is echoed by Jordan Whitewood-Neal of the DisOrdinary Architecture Project in the UK.

Interpreting the phrase “in common” for a festival of that name, he says it “is also asking where we have in common. Which I think is an incredibly important question because it addresses the spaces that we can both inhabit and use together, or can’t use together”.

Questions of disability, ability and access extend to the mind as well as the body.

Also in the UK, the British Standards Institute has issued a “publicly available specification” (PAS) called “Design for the mind – Neurodiversity and the built environment”. It is believed to be the first standard developed by a national standards body that “provides built environment guidance for multiple sensory processing differences and conditions.”

Covering elements like lighting, acoustics, layout, way-finding and other sensory design considerations the guidance takes into account the interplay between our experience of the built environments and our minds.

During the session with Luis Quintana one of the participants wondered why, when both the moral and business case are clear, projects often overlook disability.

Great question. I think it gets to the heart of siloed and short-term decision-making. Siloed, given the disparate motivations of people investing in, owning, designing and building places, across which end-users in all their diversity are often not represented. And short-term, in that the extended life-span of a project and the multiple economic (and social, environmental) knock-on effects of building thoughtfully are not factored into the costs of getting the project built.

Building “together” might feel like extra work for those who want to complete a project and get on to the next. But done right it saves time and money, generates inspirational points of connection and leads to a better experience for everyone.

Needless to say, my “Climate Week” NYC focused on building - literally - and on the stories we tell…

Living here in New York I didn’t have far to travel to participate, hitting up sessions in between other commitments. But in this world of closing borders and rising fear I was more aware than ever that the opportunity to move from place to place and connect with people from multiple countries is something to be deeply appreciated, and respected.

I kicked off the week with an NYC “Film Green” session on Sustainability and Circularity on Set - part of the Climate Film Festival.

Think of any films or series that you’ve seen, and the sets that bring them to life - each one involving construction and materials that often end up in landfill.

A production in NYC sends around sixty dumpsters of materials to landfill - lumber, furniture, appliances, clothing - piling up through multiple productions to around 20,000 tonnes each year.

Through this specific lens of film sets, the perennial obstacles that surface time and again in construction processes came up:

• Time and budget constraints, and the need to make project economics work for sustainability and vice versa

• Silos between departments and decision-makers

• And the power of thinking about the whole lifecycle of a project right from the outset (something I keep coming back to!)

Participants were all finding ways to innovate in their ecosystem.

For example, Anu Schwartz of IATSE’s local 829 (theatrical employees’ union) advocates for ground-up approaches - thinking carefully about which materials are selected from the outset - and tries to instill a culture of sustainability across set crews.

Local 829, together with photographers’ Local 600, organized a resolution that was adopted at the union federation’s quadrennial in Hawaii this Summer, which calls on:

“every Local Union to do their part, with industry partners on behalf of the health and safety of our crews, by endorsing and encouraging carbon-neutral productions and working to establish best practices that reduce waste on every set, stage, and shop.”

Read the full resolution here.

Emellie O’Brien of Earth Angel (“making movies without making a mess”) gathers the data to support films’ sustainability journeys. She emphasized that waste removal costs like transporting and tipping are expensive, so with good pre-planning reducing waste can dramatically save costs.

Philippa Culpepper, a set decorator (“arguably the largest consumers on set”), is raising awareness among an East Coast group of the Set Decorators Society of America about the whys and hows of reducing sets’ climate footprints.

And producer Amanda Jabes said that a set feature or prop doesn’t have to sit in a storage unit creating dust when it could have a second life on another set. She provided the the very practical example of how she re-used the staircase from Logan Roy’s apartment in Succession for a very different Gotham-context in Penguin.

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The German Green Building Council (DGNB) and the American Institute of Architects hosted an event for DGNB’s new collaborative project called “SHIFT”.

SHIFT recognizes the limitations of identikit “green” buildings. (Put “green buildings” into Google and you’ll get a swathe of them). And of what it describes as five “principles of failure” of modern architecture: i. Uniform architecture ii. Resource ignorance iii. Short-term responsibility iv. Car-centric urbanism, and v. Social ignorance. It’s gathering examples of inspirational architecture that offer a better way forward, drawing on practices already underway around the world.

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Football for Future brought an awesome group together for the launch of “Pitches in Peril”. The report shines a light on how the world of football from the grassroots to mega events is threatened by growing climate impacts, while acknowledging that mega events contribute a lot of emissions themselves.

It found, for example, that two thirds of the grassroots pitches where football legends like Messi, Salah, and Troost-Ekong learned to play will face unsafe or unplayable heat conditions by 2050. And that most of the stadiums hosting the 2026 World Cup have already had days when they have exceeded safe-play thresholds as a result of climate hazards - with the most climate-vulnerable being those in Miami, Houston, Monterrey, and Dallas.

The report calls for reimagining sports infrastructure and activating players and fans around climate. Real climate action, it says, will mean bringing “adaptation, imagination and equity to the the heart of the game”.

Once again - as with the teens I’m working with on Generation 2026: Youth Media Forward - I was reminded of the enormous risks and possibilities posed by the upcoming 48-nation World Cup.

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Over at the Climate Film Festival’s Narrative Change Summit a panel of funders shared their work supporting shifts in narrative to drive climate action. I was glad that a spotlight on real estate came up - even though it wasn’t framed as such.

Real estate is still way too under-looked when it comes to climate impacts, given it accounts for sixty percent of the world’s assets and has a mega planetary footprint, while also intersecting with the fundamental reality of who has a decent place to live, and who doesn’t.

One of the highlighted impact films was Raising Liberty Square, which tells the story of climate gentrification in Miami. Developers that traditionally built along the coastline have moved inland to higher ground, razing a public housing project for a new mixed-use development.

“Miami is ground zero for sea level rise,” says one of the residents. “When I was a child my grandfather always would say, they are going to come take Liberty City because we don’t flood.”

As the film’s website puts it:

“The dramatic changes happening in Miami’s Liberty Square are a looking glass for contemporary issues of wide-scale significance: the affordable housing crisis, the impact of systemic racism and climate gentrification. Miami is experiencing sea level rise before the rest of the country. What is happening in Liberty Square is a prescient story of what is to come, and strategies put to the test here are being closely observed by the rest of the world.”

It’s prescient of what is going to scale - and it’s also an expansion of cycles of displacement that communities around the world have faced in the name of climate-related development and redevelopment, from Lagos to New Orleans. As climate change intensifies, questions of what gets built, where and how will determine how just or unjust a future emerges.

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NYC schools were closed on Wednesday so I brought my family to the roof of the Javits Center (on what’s come to be recognized as my occasional - or in their minds perhaps not occasional enough - built environment-related excursion).

The huge convention center had previously gained a reputation as the “Darth Vader” building, for its swathes of dark glass that killed multiple birds as they migrated along the Hudson River.

NYC Bird Alliance ran a tour describing how the Javits Center has worked to turn that reputation on its head - installing bird-proof glass and a green rooftop covered with grass, an orchard and a farm.

The surrounding gleaming towers of Hudson Yards (without bird-proof glass) and the scale of the convention center itself (all that cooling required for empty air) caveated the transformation for me, but did create a sense of possibility.

What if the most is made of cities’ rooftops - including expansive warehouse roofs - for cooling vegetation, energy generation, habitats, play space, whatever makes most sense in a particular context?

What if we respect the materials that form a city’s built environment - and the labor that goes into them - and dramatically reduce and reuse construction and demolition waste in creative ways. (In NYC for example, this waste is 60% of the city’s waste stream).

And what if we could move to a process of building that always questions the purpose of new builds, how that purpose may be achieved differently, and who (including migratory birds) may be impacted?

In “Tech and the city: Part 1” I unpacked ways in which technology is increasingly integrated into how people move through urban areas, the risks that arise for human rights and how “smart city” tech can be harnessed responsibly. Since then, UNDP Asia Pacific has published a toolkit on this, which I co-authored with others.

Now here’s part 2. As promised it takes a look at the physical rather than digital dimensions of tech. These dimensions are complex and significant, extending from mines to data centers to office buildings…

I’ve written previously on the growing demand for minerals like lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper (which some governments deem “critical minerals” - as in critical for their own tech, defense, energy and geopolitical interests). This demand is expanding extraction in often biodiversity-rich, indigenous and water-scarce regions.

Meanwhile the growth of big data is fueling investments in new data centers - warehouse-like structures stacked with computers for storing, processing and managing data.

The US has been rolling out a strategy to dominate the “physical AI stack”. It’s in this context that OpenAI and others’ Stargate Project, for example, plans to invest $500 billion over the next four years building AI infrastructure in the United States. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said matter-of-factly, “I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time”. Before adding, “but I don’t know, because maybe we put them in space.”

In Southeast Asia, Malaysia is betting on becoming a regional data center hotspot, leading to concerns over pressure on energy and water supplies. There’s also growing push-back against data center expansion in Mexico, Chile and other parts of Latin America.

China is bringing its own approach to scale, building as well, while also leveraging its access to and control over vast amounts of data and making drives in efficiency. Interesting Engineering contrasts the Chinese and US strategies in this piece.

While data center infrastructure is often in rural areas, by smaller towns or on city outskirts, the major tech firms also have growing real estate footprints in urban centers as they expand their office presence. This trend slowed somewhat in the pandemic but is now on the rise again.

The Economist recently set out a scenario for artificial general intelligence titled “Eureka all day long” (alongside a more dystopian one, in which robots take over).

In the so-called “eureka” scenario, AI developments lead to unprecedented economic growth. “If the evangelists of Silicon Valley are to be believed,” The Economist writes, “this bang is about to get bigger. They maintain that artificial general intelligence (AGI), capable of outperforming most people at most desk jobs, will soon lift annual GDP growth to 20-30 a year, or more.”

Assessments like these seem willfully removed from the planetary implications of growth. The 1972 warning in the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth”, anyone? They are also removed from the growing physical risks to infrastructure itself, from the impacts of rising sea levels and extreme weather.

A blind race to expand is being fueled by competition between companies and competition between nations. We also seem to be heading along a trajectory in which land, resources, data, and also creativity are consolidated into smaller and smaller groups of mega-owners.

In this somewhat daunting context my appeal is two-fold.

One is simply that we pay attention to the physical/spatial implications of big tech as well as its digital/virtual implications. The two dimensions are deeply connected and both are hugely consequential for humanity’s future.

The second is that we unleash knowledge, imagination, creativity to make space for other scenarios. Scenarios in which, for example:

• Local and national governments take a longer-term and less piecemeal perspective on how land is used, what is prioritized and how conflicting demands are balanced

• There’s symbiosis between rural and urban areas - growing urban areas take on more of the burden of their own resource and energy generation in micro or even macro ways, while the vital roles of rural ecosystems and communities are recognized and respected

• Major breakthroughs in efficiency and circularity mean that the amount of resources and energy needed in the first place is reduced

• Finance flows get smarter and factor the feedback-loops to the economy of environmental and social “externalities”, rather than adopting what often seems like a herd mentality behind the latest shiny thing regardless the consequences

• And ownership patterns are transformed, with expanded access to the benefits of resources and data itself.

Look hard - or maybe not so hard - and we’ll find that movements in these directions are underway in multiple geographies and contexts. It’s a question of making linkages between them, and bringing wind behind their sails.

Back in 2021, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a 12-story apartment tower in Gaza where the Al Jazeera and Associated Press bureaus were based.

Journalist Laila Al-Arain wrote at the time:

“Watching the footage of the falling building left me in shock. It collapsed like one of the many towers that my children make out of magnetic tiles or Jenga blocks. It was gone in seconds.”

Then her brother texted her to say that their grandfather had an apartment in that building, which he had “bought with his life savings and left for his children to inherit”.

“It was now reduced to rubble and ash. This is a lesson that Palestinians across generations have never been allowed to forget: Home is fleeting and can be taken away at any moment.”

Fast-forward to today, and the majority of residential buildings in Gaza have been either damaged or destroyed. Alongside the trauma of death and starvation - as well as continued attacks on the media, with four Al Jazeera journalists killed this week in a targeted strike - is the trauma of erased places: homes, streets, alleyways, markets, businesses and stores.

It is in this context that senior leaders of the consulting firm Boston Consulting Group advised on the creation of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is weaponizing aid, and also developed a “financial model” for Gaza’s postwar reconstruction.

As the Financial Times has reported at length, in this model Palestinians would be incentivized through “relocation packages” of US $9,000 per person to leave to countries like Somalia, UAE and Egypt, and investors incentivized to develop. The vision for redevelopment also had input from staff of the Tony Blair Institute.

BCG has fired two partners involved and is subject to a parliamentary inquiry in the UK. It has said its involvement with the work in Gaza was the result of deliberate individual misconduct - a classic “bad apples” response - and that it has launched a “firm-wide effort to ensure our controls are not circumvented and to strengthen our speak-up culture.”

The consultants’ role is an extreme example of top-down hubristic masterplanning that ignores local context and experience, or in fact worse, that is perfectly conscious of local context and moves ahead all the same.

Zooming out, it is part of a pattern that has played out over human history, from ancient civilizations, through the two World Wars and regional wars, and is accelerating again today as the competition for land and resources intensifies. A pattern in which state and private interests converge to displace, other and erase, ignoring our shared humanity, which includes our experience of home.

The Noguchi Museum is close to my heart, perhaps because it’s close to home. Also because there is a particular atmosphere that is hard to put into words until you experience it. I happened to arrive the other day just as a free weekend tour was getting underway which helped me see the museum in an even more inspirational light.

The museum was created by Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. He opened it in 1985, three years before he died. Museum exhibits tend to have a temporariness about them - with an artist’s work on display for a few months, say - and he was drawn by the idea of having a permanent place for his work. Which reflects no small ego of course, but then why the hell not, if you’ve built up a lifetime of work and can afford a museum because some of your designs have scaled to mass-production?

Three things struck me on this visit.

One was how Noguchi’s work reflects the inseparability of our material and spiritual worlds, and how humans and our creations are part of nature. A corner of the museum is exposed to the elements so that natural light, weather and sounds interact with the sculptures (crossing planes, birdsong, wind) - while in the garden there’s no separation at all.

The second was the language/s of the stone itself, showing marks from when it was excavated, handled or moved, in countries that include Japan and the US, Italy and Uruguay.

And speaking of language, Noguchi intentionally kept the signage and labelling in the museum minimal. His sculptures have names that hint at meanings but other than that their interpretation is wide open to the viewer.

The third thing that struck me was how art plays with time. Pieces created during and in the wake of the second world war like This Tortured Earth and Lunar Infant convey human fragility and destruction in ways that are all too resonant today.

And bronze casts of bold designs for playgrounds - including “Play Mountain” that was designed to fill a whole of a Manhattan block but never came to fruition (Robert Moses, surprise-surprise, was an obstacle to many of Noguchi’s public space ideas) mean that the concept outlives its creator and can inspire future designs in unpredictable ways.

Many people are tired of - and skeptical of - “experts” these days.

That can be seen as a dangerous trend, casting doubt on science and facts. But it also really begs the question who is an “expert”. Everyone's an expert on their own experience of life and their hopes for the future. Part of the problem is there is not enough space in which people’s views are heard and taken into account. Often people are approached with supposed “expert” views, or with tokenistic frames of engagement, that seem disassociated or disconnected from their own realities.

Yes, there is the global sphere of social media. Yet given the monetization of algorithms it plays to certain voices being amplified and others being crowded out (a performance economy that rewards conflict), and despite what could be a glorious diversity of perspectives in a weird way instead often reinforces over-simplification and single stories over multiple stories.

More and more I’m convinced of the value of creating space to listen to people’s stories and perspectives as individuals, yet with broad simple frames that hold them together - from which points of connection emerge, and from which change in hearts, minds and action can begin. It’s an approach I took with “30th Ave - A Year in the Life of a Street” and am taking forward in two other ways.

One is through the upcoming 2026 World Cup which will be hosted by Mexico, Canada, and the United States.

There are the major overarching stories that will be in the spotlight - how tightened immigration policies and travel bans in the US come up against the very idea of a “world” cup, the likely disruptions to matches from heat and extreme weather, the crazy scale and inequalities of mega-events, in this case with 48 national teams competing.

There will also be the individual experiences connected to the event. Experiences of people working in the stadiums, or behind crowded bars, or driving taxis while listening to a game on the radio, or accompanying a team as part of its entourage. Experiences of fans watching with friends or family in their homes and cafes (around 1.5 billion people watched the final of the last World Cup), and of diaspora communities in host cities and beyond seeing the opportunity to celebrate their culture and food.

I’ve set up “World Cup Memories” as a place for sharing these experiences, whether good or bad, and wherever they take place. The stories that have begun to come through already start unravelling simplicity, and opening up new points of connection. (Share yours!).

I’m similarly learning the value of a clear yet simple frame to create space for creativity in a youth media initiative I’m running with teenagers in four of the World Cup host cities (Guadalajara, Los Angeles, New York-New Jersey, and Toronto).

We’ve had sessions on “Whose Story?”, “Sports, our neighborhoods and cities”, “Sports and accountability” and “The future of sports media”. The unique stories the young participants have created are inspiring: from an interview with a Oaxacan basketball coach in Los Angeles, to an honest essay about learning to put aside the dream of being a professional athlete and to appreciate what emerges in its place.

(Over and over I’m reminded of the power of specificity over generalities, something else that’s often lost in “expert” spaces).

The second initiative is NYC 51 to 1, which is asking New Yorkers throughout the five boroughs (from District 51 in Staten Island, through Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, to district 1 in Manhattan), about a building or place that means a lot to them, and what they would like to see in the future.

On one level, this approach shifts the frame to celebrate what already exists, rather than an urban planning and development dynamic that often begins with problems to be solved. It opens a window for imagination. And ideally it also helps to strengthen agency: emphasizing that whoever you are you have valuable expertise on the place where you live.