This event takes places in front of the Mobile Architecture Platform Apparatus (MAPA), a bicycle-powered mobile archive of scanned building parts for co-envisioning new worlds out of dismantled old ones, part of the “Views of Planet City” exhibition at the SCI-Arc Gallery (September 13, 2024 – February 14, 2025).

John Cooper introduces Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin and JoNina Abron-Ervin, describing them as – like the projects in “Views of Planet City” - “actualizing a speculative and apparently impossible future”.

At 10:54, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin reviews his life of activism as Black radical urbanism: resisting corrupt top-down urban planning in Chattanooga in the 1980s, and defending the public transit system in Atlanta in the 1990s. He concludes with a message to architects at the present moment: “The skills you have are so powerful, so wonderful ... that you can transform the world. … We can no longer afford cynicism. We have to afford ourselves hope..”

At 40:48, JoNina Abron-Ervin provides an overview of the historical roots of the current national housing crisis, describing how the rebellions in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark and other American cities in the 1960s led to the Kerner Commission Report (1968) analysis and policy proposals. She describes how in the 1970s, the housing activist Yolanda Ward, published “Spatial deconcentration”, which revealed a hidden agenda behind the Kerner report, namely reducing the likelihood of further violent disorder by dispersing large Black communities. This strategy enabled the first wave of gentrification, which continues transforming cities.

At 59:11, To Cooper’s question about the post-revolutionary city, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin argues for the strategy of expropriation rather than gaining concessions, as illustrated by the free food programs of the Black Panther Party and cooperative unions in the 1960s. He goes on to describe the analogous development in the 1960s of self-organizing cooperatives formed to defend Black communities against the Ku Klux Klan.

At 1:22:16, the speakers engage with comments and questions from the audience concerning architectural pedagogy, community involvement, capitalism, the ongoing struggle for change.