Speculative Futures with Lafayette Cruise
Imagine a society that truly equitable, sustainable, and joyful. What is the future history that got us there?
Lafayette Cruise (MCP ‘19), Writer at the Guild of Future Architects , joins Emmett McKinney (MCP ‘20) and Allison Lee (MCP ‘22) for a conversation on speculative fiction as an urban planning tool.
Read his MCP thesis, Musings from the Margins of a Polychrome Future, here.
Emmett McKinney:
Welcome to CoLab Radio. This is a publication of the Community Innovators Lab at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, dedicated to centering the first person narratives of activists, scholars and researchers doing the work of social justice. And we took this past summer to kick off the CoLab Research Group. Originally formulated as a traditional academic research group where we would put out papers and studies or the like, come February 2020, we thought we really needed a different tool. So over the course of the semester, and through the summer, we put together an anthology of works titled "The Blossoming". And that culminated in a series of works that will be published on CoLab Radio. But the central theme of those was to ask, not just what do we want the future to be, but what does the future feel like? What are the details? What is it like to be myself in the future? And then to work back from there, to figure out how we act now.
My name is Emmett McKinney, and I am delighted to have with me here today, my co-producer at CoLab Radio Allison Lee, as well as Lafayette Cruise. And we are here today to talk about the theme of “Speculative Fiction”. It has been a disruptive year, to say the least, in 2020, and at least in my experience, it's really challenged some of the basic logics and assumptions about how the world works. And between the pandemic, the social justice uprisings in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor's murder, as well as the economic crisis, I think a lot of folks are asking, what does the future look like after this?
Many of the tools that we use to understand the past don't seem quite so adequate anymore. And so we're here today to talk about speculative fiction. And in this moment of change, to think about the tools that we need to actually bring about a world that's a little more just, a little more sustainable, a little different than one we have right now. So with that, I'm delighted to introduce Lafayette, who is one of the forefathers of this idea at DUSP and then we'll move on to Allison.
Lafayette Cruise:
Thanks Emmett. So I'm not definitely not the forefather, I know people who graduated two years before me who, their theses were speculative — Grant [Tank Williams] wrote a series of speculative fiction pieces for activists in rural America, and Jessica Myers, who actually inspired me to check out this author N.K. Jemisin, her thesis was a series of podcasts. So I think with most things in this moment, it's like, “oh, these things have already existed, we just haven't highlighted them.”
So I graduated in 2019. So I started in 2017. I really came in thinking about, I wanted a space to imagine new policy solutions. I'd worked for about four years as a transportation planner in Chicago, and had the fortune of being connected with Phil [Thompson] and Dana [Cunningham] one day, and they told me about CoLab and the ethos of DUSP and like, oh, this sounds like a place for me, because I'm already working as a planner so I don't necessarily want to go to a traditional planning program but I do want to, there were some very tricky and complex issues that I think I would like some time to think more creatively about.
I came in as HCED (Housing, Community, and Economic Development Program), spent a summer working for Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson, on small business services and workforce development. And through a series of -- do you want me to talk about the thesis process?
Emmett McKinney:
Sure. I do want to get there. Let's have Allison introduce herself. Allison?
Allison Lee:
Sure. So I'm Allison. I joined DUSP in the fall of 2019, coming from a background in heritage and architectural conservation. Prior to moving to Boston, I was based at The University of Hong Kong and worked on conservation projects in Hong Kong, in Myanmar, and in Nepal. During my first year at DUSP, I worked with CoLab as a research assistant and have been involved with CoLab radio for some time now. This year, I'm taking time off to work and will return to MIT in Fall 2021. So I am somewhat in the middle of my DUSP career. And I'm still very much involved with initiatives coming from the university and from the student body.
Emmett McKinney:
Thanks, Allison. It's sort of nice to have the three of us here with me, Lafayette and Allison to talk about the process of being speculative, because that's not typically thought of as part of a standard academic toolkit. So my first question to you Lafayette is, what drew you to speculative fiction as a thesis process? And what did that bring you that other courses of study had not?
Lafayette Cruise:
Yeah, that's funny, I feel like I've always been a fiction nerd. I don't think I used to admit that openly. But now, I know, that's very much, when I see stories or read stories and be like, what is it like to actually live in this world? What was the political history of this place? I think it goes back to the question that I asked in bringing me to DUSP was, how do we imagine something different? How do we ask different questions? And when we offer solutions, what does that actually feel like? Like when I say, I want an equitable future? What does that actually mean? What does it actually feel like? So I will say, my original plan was to organize a conference pairing speculative fiction media makers and urban planners to do world building exercises, which is a lot to do.
And some friends and I are still -- that is a long term goal. But over-ambitious to do in the semester that I was preparing for it, when I was taking too many classes, and dealing with a lot of stuff. And so I was like, let me pare it down. I want to engage with people on this, but what is the speculative future that I want to live in? If I think that planners need to be better at defining and building their worlds, what does that mean for me?
“How do we build this speculative world that we do not exist in right now, and probably don’t have much of the past to give us that vision?
We need to create a vision of what will happen.”
Emmett McKinney:
And so what did you write about in your thesis?
Lafayette Cruise:
The bulk of my thesis was a speculative fiction of Chicago in 2119. And there are a bunch of different parameters I made.
Emmett McKinney:
So just clarify that's 100 years in the future.
Lafayette Cruise:
Yes, 2119, 100 years in the future. So in the context, Chicago's still there. There have been investments in transportation. Obviously a lot of technological advancements, but I really wanted to focus on the social. So dealing with, what are the changing demographics of climate-displaced people, and the politics of how will class and national status and the circumstances with which you were displaced, and get to choose or not choose when to move. How that affects society.
It's funny, one of the themes in the story is police reform and how it still fails 100 years and looking back at it now it's like, oh, okay, maybe I should have been more imaginative. I could have been more imaginative. And just in it, I was imagining that there was a compromise where we have social workers on the police force, but there's still issue with police shooting.
Emmett McKinney:
It raises an interesting question, right? That, is a speculative future necessarily a utopia? Not necessarily, and gives an opportunity to draw out the tensions. And the idea that it's gonna take a really long time to fix some of the things that are wrong.
Lafayette Cruise:
That's the thing I go back and forth about with a lot of people. Someone has sent me this paper that I still need to read about the benefits of utopian thinkers, and really trying to flesh out big social issues, and how utopian thinking is a lot better at that. Especially if you go in and go in with the knowledge that because humans are involved, it will not be executed perfectly. But if you strive for something better, you'll get something better. But I mean, that's also the thing, because I wanted to make a human story, there's always going to be human issues.
What does like dating, what does love look like in the future? Because I'm assuming we're still going to have, as humans, the desire to find love and find partnership. And so what does that look like in a different context?
Emmett McKinney:
That's such an interesting theme. And I think it's a needed perspective, especially in urban planning, as we bore full steam ahead towards a world of autonomous vehicles and smart cities and artificial intelligence being infused into everything we can think of, remembering that there are still going to be humans in the future, forces us to develop a comfort and competency with imperfection. And to relieve ourselves of the idea that we can ever solve everything and it implies that maybe there's a different mission.
Lafayette Cruise:
One of the questions I always want to know is, how do I imagine who belongs in the future. Like you kind of alluded to is, you forget that humans are there. But then even more specifically, what types of humans belong in the future?
Emmett McKinney:
So who belongs?
Lafayette Cruise:
Are you asking me rhetorically?
Emmett McKinney:
No, that's not rhetorical. I want to know, in your vision of the future, who belongs?
Lafayette Cruise:
In the broad sense, everyone. In the sense I'm trying to explore is, what does it actually mean to encourage to let people know that they belong? Because, I think of in our renderings of cities in the future, we never have people experiencing homelessness. And so either we have found a way to end that and ensure housing for people, or we haven't, which often there's nothing offered in that solution. And so, we don't imagine that people without homes belong in our communities. And we often don't articulate that explicitly, but in our policies and in our design, in our imaginations and the stories we tell, we make that very clear.
Or even children. We don't plan cities for children. Maybe families, but not specifically a city for children, or the physically disabled, or different neurological ways of being. We don't say that explicitly, we often say everyone belongs in the future, but don't really define what that means. And also I can't fully define that, because I don't know.
Emmett McKinney:
Right. So Allison, I think it's high time for you to weigh in. I think one reason it's really great to have you in this conversation is because you bring some expertise in cultural preservation, and writing in the present about how we remember the past. And I'm wondering about, if you think there's a parallel there between deciding and having preserved what we remember from the past, and projecting what you think the future ought to look like?
Allison Lee:
It's actually very interesting - Lafayette something that you brought up - that you said explicitly that you chose to focus on re-imagining a future from the social perspective, and not from a technology perspective. And that explicit difference is interesting because we often do focus a lot on the technological. We're constantly thinking about a new future, a new vision, what are the possibilities with technology, and what's new, and re-innovating that all the time.
“...why have we kicked aside that very integral part of being human, and have been more in love with the idea of technological innovation to solve our problems?”
And yet, when it comes to the social realm, we don't really think about that. And we don't really apply the same approach, when assessing how we function as a society and where we came from, and where we want to go in the future. So I think from a social and cultural conservation point of view, there's not as much emphasis on how cultures and societies function, and how they used to function, and how they almost want to function. It's looked at as secondary to other factors.
And I don't know why we pushed that to the background. It's something that we really might need to look very deeply into ourselves and do some reflection as to why have we kicked aside that very integral part of being human and been more in love with the idea of technological innovation to solve our problems?
Emmett McKinney:
It's a fascinating question. And it's one that I've grappled with also, being that I'm probably more inclined towards words versus numbers. But I've found it sort of challenging within technical spaces in MIT, not to say there are only technical spaces, but in ones that are more oriented towards tech, I find it difficult to push that social vision forward and to make it stick and not make it roll off the glass, silicon, and steel backs of whatever other ideas are out there. I'm curious about how that attention to social reality as co-equal with technological reality, defines your work at DUSP.
Allison Lee:
Actually this kind of brings up questions that we've been investigating in another CoLab Radio series, which is "Decolonizing Science" -
Emmett McKinney:
Shameless plug.
Allison Lee:
Yeah, look at this plug right here. But it really does relate, in that it brings up questions of a multi-linear narrative. And having very different complexities and different perspectives and different people part of the conversation. And so I think in any work that I do and want to do in the future, there needs to be an openness in involving all different parties. And one of the scariest things about it is that it's super messy.
It's not a question. It's not a goal-oriented question. There is not one solution. There's not one path to get to that goal. And so it's something that we don't know how to deal with, at DUSP, as a student, as planners, also as a society. It's something that we may have been better at in the past. But we certainly aren't going in that direction. We want things to be much more streamlined, much more simplified, much more clear. So yeah, I guess I just try to always keep that in mind, is that there is very much a difference in how people approach situations, what they're experiencing, and I try to not apply my own singular narrative. And even my own is quite complex and multi-linear as well. But just keep that in mind that this is all very diverse.
Emmett McKinney:
You brought up this idea of messiness, and I think that it's so apt. One thing I've noticed, at DUSP and in the planning world more generally, is that the word "solution" gets tossed around a lot, like "climate solution", "housing solution". And it implies this algorithmic, very clean and tidy vision of the world. And maybe there's no better word out there, and I think if you if you actually pressed most people on this idea, they would say, okay, well, this solution that we're proposing isn't going to fix it, obviously. But still, in our lexicon there is encoded this idea that we'll fix one thing and be on to the next.
And what I think is fascinating about speculative fiction as a medium, is it forces you to engage the question, "And then what?" It forces you to think about time and think that if these things are going to take a long time to deal with, we're still going to be dealing with this messiness in 25 to 30 years. So maybe, for me in the present, that means backing a little bit more off of looking for a solution to a problem, and maybe progress is more the goal. To sort of move incrementally with the knowledge and acceptance that we're going to have to keep reassessing.
Allison Lee:
Definitely. One of my favorite professors that I've had, he said, from from the get go, that 20% of planning is doing things for the future, and 80% is fixing problems that planners did in the past. So I just love that idea - I don't love the idea - but I love the quote that, this is an evolving process and it's not, one problem, solution, on to the next one. It's something that we are constantly iterating over time. And in that sense, this is an endless process. And it should be an endless process, because we're always changing, and we're always growing and evolving.
Image Credit: Guild of Future Architects
Emmett McKinney:
Lafayette, you've put a fine point in this argument by saying, all urban planning is speculative fiction. Can you make that argument for us and and we'll run from there?
Lafayette Cruise:
So it's interesting, I like the bringing in of timelines and linearity of time, because I feel like when you engage - and even with that quote that you said Allison - when you engage in a planning process, you're both dealing with the past and projecting into the future. But because you're not present in either one, you can only use stories and imagination to really articulate what that looks like and what that felt like.
Often we treat planning, especially as we've made it more technical, as a predictable series of processes; that the constraints that we're dealing with today are inevitable. But the fact of the matter is, those constraints can change rapidly. They can change over time - the society, the city, the place that you're dealing with now is not the same.
I really draw on my planning experience, becoming a planner in Chicago, and like Daniel Burnham. Here was a man who had tabula rasa, after the city burned down. A bunch of people were like, "What do we want our city to look like? Let's imagine it, let's dry it. Let's sell a compelling story. And let's build it." And so the city that we live in was imagined by someone who built the houses that you live in, someone imagined a story of, "This is what it's like to be a family in this house in the future. And so I will build it."
Emmett McKinney:
Indeed, he made no small plans. True to his word.
Lafayette Cruise:
He made no small plans. He had to power to stir a man’s blood. So that’s the thing. We can't predict the future. We can't even control the future. We can set the stage for it and determined the constraints that we want to build for it, but we don't have any control of it. And so to treat it as fiction frees you up a bit more to adapt. To ask new things. To be like, "This is a constraint now, why does it have to be?" Imagine a future where it's not a constraint? What is the future history that got us there?
“Often we treat planning, especially as we’ve made it more technical, as a predictable series of processes; that the constraints that we’re dealing with today are inevitable. But the fact of the matter is, those constraints can change rapidly.”
Emmett McKinney:
In the fields of science fiction, it's commonplace to bend the laws of physics. Like to create a tesseract, there are wormholes and time travel is possible. And all types of things that would be totally outlandish. This is a first draft idea here, but it seems like one of the recurrent problems we run into in urban planning are just deeply entrenched structures. My area of expertise is in transportation planning and usually at the end of the paper, somebody will say something like, "We should really densify in this area." And then they'll just say like, "But changing the zoning code and changing the way that people have been developed and located themselves would take decades, if not centuries."
And so maybe what speculative fiction allows us to do, is to bend that law of physics. To take what seems like the basic constraint of our society, as it is things that seem immutable, and to say, "What if we just put these over here?" And the scene that I'm thinking of is the one of Ellen Page in Inception when she's walking along in the city and she just bends the ground up over the sky. Which comes with its own problems, as she soon realizes, but that I think is the level of ambition we should be thinking about. So maybe Daniel Burnham's quote is correct. Maybe we should be making no small plans, and there's something of an irony here. That we need to be making no small plans, but in a different direction.
Lafayette Cruise:
Because I mean, we talk about the impossibility of things. What was the first feature film, that French one, Journey to the Moon? Like the concept of a rocket - that just seemed completely fanciful, and now we have private space companies. Even the concept of tesseracts and stuff like that, and travel. Maybe they are impossible for us, but there is some sort of physics to get something close to that, that maybe thousands of years in the future that we'll adapt to.
And I think that's what comes to the time thing - the things we're imagining may not be for us, it's for someone else. And so why not? Why would we hamstring them with the constraints of the present?
Allison Lee:
Yeah, and this is a really great question too now, and very timely, because we're in a period of time that the unthinkable has happened. That we couldn't have foreseen and a lot of stuff that were systems that we had planned for are kind of being thrown out the window. So is this a time to reassess planning's role and what is possible, because so many things we did not think are possible are our reality in the present?
Emmett McKinney:
Yeah, absolutely. As far as rethinking planning goes, it's important to point out that there are two different types of possibilities here, in this present moment in 2020, which I'm sure will be remembered as the year of three simultaneous crises: of racial justice, of public health, and of economic crisis. These crises - some are positive, some are negative. Both were unthinkable a year ago. The pandemic - definitely negative in every respect. The social justice crisis, I think, is full of potential. It's long overdue. I'm thinking about the James Baldwin quote, about not needing a soft rain, but the thunder and the lightning. I'm sure I'm not doing that justice.
“I think that now makes it an essential time to grapple with complexity of a lived experience... and maybe fiction gives us the space to do that.”
But my point is that, in this moment, we're at a moment of disruptive change that could go one of two different directions. And we're both living with a sense of opportunity and possibility, as well as profound mourning and loss. And I think that now makes it an essential time to grapple with complexity of a lived experience of being a human on planet Earth. And maybe fiction gives us the space to do that. It doesn't force us to fit everything into a tiny little model of if the world is good or bad right now, because the truth is, it's both.
To move to a practical space, what do you guys think are the specific capabilities that a speculative and fictive approach to planning will take? I'm imagining a listener thinking, this is all super interesting hearing you guys dish about rocket ships and science fiction and inception. But what does this have to do with the project that I'm going to do this week or next week?
Allison Lee:
Well, actually, if you don't mind Lafayette, I would love to hear from from you because you are actively working in this space with the Guild of Future Architects. So, just quickly for me, this is a process, I'm still a student, I'm still exploring this space and this field, but Lafayette, you have spent a lot of time really engaging with this question, and trying to go through the process as an exercise, but then the process of something to be implemented. So in that space between the imagined and the reality.
Lafayette Cruise:
It's funny I always talk about it like, this is my practice, but I'm still trying to practice to figure it out. Because the reason why I try to pair planning with speculative fiction and say that they are the same is because... Right now, I working with the City of Racine to try and implement a series of rental housing reforms - sorry, City of Racine, Wisconsin - to implement a series of housing reforms. And there is a technical process of getting the city ready to implement that. And I think everyone in the city will admit this - there has not been a compelling story saying why we're doing this.
Because on its own, the steps that we're taking in the short term, they will have an impact. But really, what I'm trying to get everyone to communicate is, what is our vision for what it will be like to live here? The things that we do now, the process is unfamiliar, and it's rough, but we're not doing this for us in the moment, we're doing this for future generations of Racinians. So that when you rent a house, you can trust, it'll be quality, it'll be healthy, it'll be safe, it'll be affordable.
But then on top of that, what does it mean then to be affordable? What does the economy of Racine look like? What does it mean, as we deal with police violence, what does it mean to be a black person, a person of color in the city of Racine? How do I build this speculative world that we do not exist in right now, and probably don't have much of the past to give us that vision? So we need to create a vision of what will happen.
And so that is the thing that I'm slowly working on and trying to help develop even thinking about communication. What are we working towards? Because we haven't seen it in the past. The future of this country, the future of our relationships, the future of our communities - you don't have complete models of the past. We're drawing from some knowledge, we're picking here and there, but what we're trying to achieve, we haven't been to. We're trying to imagine. And so for me as a planner, as I do the small steps of, how do I get departments to work together? Why do I explain to them why we're working together to do this? I need to create, here is something that you can hold to and have reference to, as we're moving forward.
Emmett McKinney:
So what I'm hearing from that is, it's storytelling. To the untrained observer, you see all these different city initiatives, and we're trying to build housing over here, build a transportation line over here, brace ourselves for a changing climate. And to the lay observer, they might be thinking, where does all this fit together? But the power of speculative fiction is to identify that through line, the basic plot of the future, and help organize all these individual initiatives as part of that future vision. Is that a fair summary?
Lafayette Cruise:
I love the mindset that everything everything we do is a story. We're telling a story. Stories are the basic form of human communication and information gathering. And so understanding, what is the story I'm telling? From a city perspective, what's the story you're telling your residents as you interact with them? Are you conveying that, “I am happy to work for you, I am here to work for everyone?” Or are you conveying, “You're wasting my time",” or “I'm just here to do my one job, I have no vision for you or your family.” And that's the thing. How do we, one, tell the story for the city, but then also - stories change the public's expectations of what is possible. And then what they expect is possible changes what they demand of planners.
You talked about self driving cars. If they hadn't seen it in a movie - if it hadn't been in the Jetsons, people would not have an image that they go to and be like, I want that. How can we get that ? Someone who's gone to MIT or Cal or whatever, and been like, I saw that in the movie once and I've been spending all of my high school career trying to figure out how to make this possible. While we as planners are adjusting to it.
Emmett McKinney:
So imagining new possibilities. I suppose it goes raise an interesting line of critique about smart cities and the city of the future, which is that, to an extent our vision of the future has been fed to us by people who have an entrenched interest in the status quo. If our idea about mobility is informed by the Jetsons... I guess I'm identifying this cycle here.
Stories change the public's expectations of what is possible.
What they expect changes what they demand of planners.
Lafayette Cruise: I was having a conversation with my parents about the propaganda of the Jetsons. How that shaped their generation's imagination of... like the future is suburbs in the city. There are no people of color. You don't interact with your neighbors because you don't have to. And so those stories shape our imagination. They shape our culture. That's why in HGTV people are like, "I don't want to see my neighbors." It's like, why not?
Emmett McKinney:
Speaking from personal experience, every time I walk down the hall on the second floor of DUSP, I look in the glass windows over at the Senseable City Lab. And invariably, there are some amazing data visualization displays. I think that's an interesting form of speculative future. It's colorful, it's engaging, and it's data.
And I think that there is a lot of truth in it, but there's also some sort of smoke-and-mirrors. It's presented in a way - and this is by the way not a specific critique of the sensible city lab. It's more a comment on the way that we understand futuristic technology in general. There's a degree of advertising that comes with it. And I imagine there's something to that in the design and architecture field as well. Allison, what do you think about the role of design and renderings as a tool of planning?
Allison Lee:
It's interesting - you bring up renderings. That's definitely a lot of speculative fiction. It's one person or one team's vision for what they not even necessarily plan to implement, but the idealized version of what they plan to implement. I think designers have more of a history and perhaps an inclination for varying their communication strategy. Much more so than planners historically. And that's problematic for the planners.
I think that we, as a field and also as a larger community, don't give enough emphasis to communication strategies. And this goes back to narratives, to storytelling. People understand information in very different ways, and we need to tap into that more. And we need to expand not only how we do data collection, or envision the future, but then how we're communicating it to people and with people and forming narratives together.
But yeah, communication is really something that especially today, for many reasons our country is struggling with, very seriously, a lack of communication between people. A lack of understanding. A lack of willing to engage and discuss and bounce ideas off each other and listen. And so I think at all is a problem of communication, and maybe speculative thinking, and approaches that are different in that sense have a role to play in how we imagine our future in planning together and creating narratives together and then thinking outside of the box in that way.
Emmett McKinney:
So allow me to play devil's advocate here. I think in planning contexts, we spend a lot of time talking about being really responsive to the present moment, to understanding the history of a place, understanding its culture as it is. And to not impose our own vision on it, especially coming from a place like MIT. That's not really our place. The question is, is speculating about a better future in tension with our commitment to responding to the present? Can we do both of those things in good conscience?
Allison Lee:
“I think designers have more of a history and perhaps an inclination for varying their communication strategy. Much more so than planners historically. And that’s problematic for the planners.”
I think we can, and I think we need to. And I also, just to add more complexities, I think you need to also look at history. Just to keep it complicated. Look at history, and look at who recorded that history, and what the history contains and what it omits, as well as the present. What do we see, and what do we not see? So, yeah, I think that it's something that we need to figure out how to integrate all at once. And it's not to say that we would do it perfectly. It's a large task to handle but there has to be an intention to try. And I think even asking the types of questions that they're asking, at least, is already kind of pushing back against any singular simple approach to planning.
Lafayette Cruise:
So the thing with my thesis is, I call it, "Musings from the Margins of a Polychrome Future" because I'm trying to take stories from marginalized groups now and project them into the future. And so you have to be honest about what the present is, how we got there. The present that you exist in didn't just happen. Systemic racism didn't just happen. This pandemic didn't just happen. This climate change didn't just happen. There was a history of decisions and different interacting events that led to where we are. And so it'll take a future history of different events, different policy decisions, cultural events, that will lead to the future that we want.
Emmett McKinney:
This world wasn't accidental in the past, and it's not inevitable in the future.
Lafayette Cruise:
I think there is some chance to everything, but there are critical inflection points where we could have made alternative decisions.
Allison Lee:
To complicate it too, when it comes to something that's a bit more quantitative, it gets even more complex, because, what questions are you asking? And then your methods of analyzing, and then your methods of data collection. How do you fit speculation and fiction into something that's supposed to be accurate, and measurable, and answer those types of questions?
Emmett McKinney:
This is, I think, a critical question. And I think there is a growing body of scholarship on this precise thing. How do we square our social values with our need to mathematize and quantify things in a world of limited resources? I think that the reality is that fields like statistics are already shot through with subjective judgments. And to some degree, the very question you're asking or experiment you're running, or what you choose to publish as knowledge, reflects a social network.
From practical things like what variables you choose to include in a model, where you set a significance value - why is it that we've decided that a probability of the null hypothesis being correct being less than one in 20, is a significant threshold? And how does our notion of significance in a mathematical sense square with our sense of significance in a social sense?
You could go on and on. but then even if you take these quantitative findings in a research sense, then you can filter it through the question of, which journals are getting attention? And who are the individuals who are deciding which journal to publish in? And is there a reviewer who's just having a bad day?
So I think that already, it's not like we are receiving some knowledge from the quantitative god that's etched in stone on a tablet. Maybe it's presented to us that way, but I think that if we're going to be better mathematicians in the future and better statisticians, I think it's time that we acknowledge that even the numbers that we use now, are not themselves irrefutable.
And I guess going forward, what that means is transparency. If we are much clearer, in not only our academic papers, but also in the press, and in our conversations, about what models are - if we make that clear up front, and put a disclaimer saying, "A machine guessed this about the housing market in the future," or whatever, "it's on us to make a decision," then maybe that's the way forward.
“How do we square our social values with our need to mathematize and quantify things in a world of limited resources?”
Allison Lee:
I have a question for the two of you, as you are both ahead of me in this career in planning, I would say -
Emmett McKinney:
- Career is a strong word -
Allison Lee:
- then trajectory. Emmett, as as someone who's just graduated, and then Lafayette, also who graduated a year ago, are you hopeful? Are you hopeful seeing what you've seen as to whether we are expanding our notion of planning, or whether we are expanding our notion of what needs to happen in the future, if we're being more inclusive. What things are elements that make you hopeful, and also elements that make you anxious, or make you worried?
Lafayette Cruise:
These past two weeks are not the weeks to ask me about hope.
I feel like I am always hopeful. But I think the path forward to the hopeful future is not going to be one that we enjoy.
I feel like I've spent a lot of time this year - I wrote a story about oak savannas and tall grass prairies and the role of fires. And it's funny, especially with the fires that were going on in Australia, the fires were going on in California, the fires in the Amazon. Fires are natural things, but when we've spent generations repressing them and trying to suppress them and trying to deny a natural process of change, they become worse. And I feel like we are seeing what happens when you create an entire social, political, economic structure on oppression, suppression and control. And we are seeing the fire that is burning. And that is good for the ecosystem. It's good for the future. But it is scary to go through. I think that's the thing that I'm having a hard time dealing with, is that we need to keep it going but I don't want to.
Fires are natural things,
But when we deny a natural process of change, they become worse.
We are seeing what happens when you create an entire social, political, economic structure on oppression, suppression and control.
We are seeing the fire that is burning.
I want to have the basic millennial life that they put on the graduation poster for me way back in 2013, where I can volunteer and the world will be fine, and progress will happen. But we're seeing that if we aren't going to change, the world is already changing. We're going to have to deal with natural disasters, or the disasters that we've created, and are manifesting through nature. We going to have to deal with the economy. We're going to have to have really painful conversations about how we relate to each other.
And so I'm hopeful about that, because they need to happen, and they will happen. It's just I don't know when it will end. But I know something good will emerge from that.
It's also revealing the good things that are already there, like mutual aid societies and their reemergence, or a lot of land restoration of a lot of indigenous and black and of color farming communities and trying to rethink how food happens. So there are good things that are emerging that we're seeing, as the larger system that we have crumbles, but I think it's going to be a painful process.
Emmett McKinney:
Thank you Lafayette for that reflection. That’s really moving to me. I think I do have hope, but it’s not a blind one. I have no expectation that I will sit here and do nothing, and the world will just go back to the way it was. Lafayette is right. Fire is such a powerful symbol because yes it is terrifying and it feels like it’s out of control. And to put a fine point on it, fire destroys. Things in our present have been and will be lost. The people that died in the pandemic are not coming back. The political institutions that we are in the process of tearing down, if we do it right, won’t come back. There are things that, every single one of us, have lost and we’re not going to reclaim.
Hope can be this thing where we could be like, “maybe one day, everything will just be fixed and we can back to the way it was.” It won’t and it shouldn’t. Maybe something that gives me hope it the resilience that I’ve seen. It’s the very communities, the same individuals, who are most hurt by the pandemic, by the economic collapse, who have been under the boot of racism for centuries - it’s those same people who are leading us to a brighter future. And if that can start right now, in the hardest of times, then I hope those same people will be unstoppable when given the resources they deserve.
Allison Lee:
Thank you both for your thoughts on that. That’s a lot for me and for anyone listening to reflect on, so thank you.
Emmett McKinney:
Course. Do you have hope? Turning it back on you.
Allison Lee:
I do have hope. Just seconding what you both said. I think it’s going to be a long and arduous road, but something I do have hope for is that we’ve seen how people can come together and ask the questions. Again, and speculative fiction - going back to it - it’s asking the questions and it’s looking at, with a very focused eye, on what exists and what is working and what is not working and trying to reimagine something different.
And whether that leads to something or not - hopefully it will lead to many changes - but I think the process in this case is extremely important.
Emmett McKinney:
A word that comes up for me when I think about speculative fiction is also “inclusion”. If you think about a future world, it’s a fictional one that’s appealing and beautiful. If you think that that world is fictional, then you can also fabricate your own idea, your own self in it. So maybe speculative fiction is a tool for this type of mobilization. And we can say, “some future will arrive, and it depends on what we create.” And maybe telling that story about it allows people to see themselves in it. And there’s something redemptive in that.
Lafayette Cruise:
I like that thought.
Emmett McKinney:
We’ve been going on this conversation for a while, and one sentence that’s not come up is the famous Audre Lourde quote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I return to that often, because in this moment of uncertainty, I find myself reaching for the same tools that people have used in the past to feel strong.
And I didn’t really answer the other question that Allison asked, “What do you feel anxious about?” What I feel anxious about is that, the things of the past, that seemed so certain, that I’ve built my life around to this point, are no longer as trustworthy. It feels a little bit like the ground has shifted underneath me, which is good but also kind of scary. Maybe I don’t have the tools yet to go forward in this new world. Maybe I’m going to have to build a new set of tools, and that’s going to be hard.
Lafayette Cruise:
The thing that makes me anxious are the dynamics of community, especially as I consider where do I live, where do I work, what does community mean for me? We don’t live in a society that’s very good at repairing damage. One of the big parts that’s going to need to happen for our communities is healing. Asking people to slow down for public health is hard; asking people to slow down so they can have difficult conversations at a community level is going to be much harder.
And I think there are people that want to do that but it’s going to take time. And as someone who sees a need for that, but is also very uncomfortable doing that, I’m anxious about what the process will look like. What my role, and my own relationships and communities will be.
Because that’s also the hard thing - what does it mean to imagine a future for yourself?
Emmett McKinney:
That word community stuck in my mind because if we get into a silo-ed scenario, where each of us creates our own speculative fiction about the future, and if those are in conflict - if my world is red and yours is blue - then they might be mutually exclusive. But it seems as if that co-generation process is so essential. That we need to collectively decide, right now, what type of world we want to live in in the future.
Allison Lee:
That’s a really hopeful thought. I guess something that I’m anxious about is the notion of coming to a conclusion of a shared world, and that we all share what we want out of the future. I just… I don’t know if that’s in the cards - to have one shared vision of the future. And I don’t know if that’s something that we should necessarily aim for. The question for me is how can we have very different versions of what we want for the future, and still all be able to live those versions in a way that doesn’t harm your neighbor’s vision of his/her future? And that’s the really complicated part.
And maybe, just tossing it out, one thing that we need to do at least to scratch the surface of this, is understand how everything works together. So understand how everything’s intertwined, how one action influences another action, and see the bigger systems picture of this. At least just for understanding how things - not even a solution, but just to have the slightest idea of the cause and effect. But that’s really the major challenge in my mind, one that I certainly don’t have the answer for and that sometimes keeps me awake at night.
Emmett McKinney:
The challenge of getting to a systems-view.
Lafayette Cruise:
It’s interesting, because I think that’s where I always see the role of planners. We don’t see the entire system but we see a bunch of systems interacting. And by being at those intersections, you can hold those multiple stories and the tensions and the aspirations. At least in my aspiration of what planners do, it is they both have their own visions for the future but they also hold space for the intersections of other visions.
There is an effort to flatten the world and make it understood. The beauty of fiction is that you don’t have to know all the details to live in it, to embody it. So if we get better at not needing to know all the details but still hold space - the future can be messy but it’ll just have more texture. It’ll have more topography. It’ll be more interesting.
Emmett McKinney:
I love that. It’ll be more flavorful.
Lafayette Cruise:
‘Cause we’ll have time to explore.
Allison Lee:
Yes I absolutely love that. Embrace the chaos.
Emmett McKinney:
Ya, and I think this gets to something that’s really personal for a lot of people, which is the need to feel control. A degree of control over one’s own life and over the future. And so I think the idea that we’re floating here is going to ruffle some feathers. That maybe what we’re trying to do is create a more complex world. Does that strike at the very foundation of what planning is? Did we break it?
Lafayette Cruise:
I think it’s more like providing like a trellis. Because I think there is something nice about something you can fall back on when things are uncertain but also the freedom to explore and do different things and interact. It’s like a garden. You need stakes for something to grow on but also you can’t control it and you have to be okay with that.
Emmett McKinney:
Maybe that’s what we’re doing. Maybe we are laying down a foundation and intentionally leaving room, or intentionally facilitating that growth of complexities that we can’t even anticipate.
Lafayette Cruise:
I like it. And I think that’s the lie of capitalism - you’re trying to control everything so you can get everything. [But] you can’t control anything. And if you embrace that, it’s a lot more joyful. Life is a lot more joyful if you stop trying to control everything.
“At least in my aspiration of what planners do, it is they both have their own visions for the future but they also hold space for the intersections of other visions.”
Emmett McKinney:
Do you guys want to wrap up with a few parting thoughts about how speculative fiction will inform your practice going forward?
Allison Lee:
I’m just thinking because we planned this to be pretty focused about Lafayette’s work, and speculative fiction, and it’s turned into being a very reflective session between the three of us and I really appreciate that.
I guess incorporating this into my work, I would say having honestly more sessions like this, because my head is spinning right now with so many things, so many questions - we could talk about this for hours but we probably shouldn’t. I think engaging with these types of questions and having this space between people to throw out ideas, however silly and nonsensical they could be - I think it’s important and we don’t do this that much in planning school, at least from my short experience so far. So I would encourage having more of these kinds of spaces.
Lafayette Cruise:
I appreciate that. Another reflection on this conversation, but that’s generally how I try to, at least with my practice, create these spaces. Again, I think planners are so well positioned because I think in more technical spaces we can try to bring more imagination and play, and the legitimacy of play into governance and planning and smart city whatnots. But I also think we try to bring the rigour of planning to fun spaces, not to ground it, but to be like, “what you’re saying is relevant, it’s valid, how do we make this real?” Who’s already doing this? Because a lot of the things we imagine, someone’s already trying.
This will be my plug for CoLab. Working for Katrin [Kaeufer] and the ‘Just Money’ program, and being like “Oh, there are people who look at money differently, and are making financial institutions that are interacting with money differently.” The system that we have - one, it’s not just black and white, but also it doesn’t have to be this way. It hasn’t always been this way.
Emmett McKinney:
To realize that we already live in the future ~
Lafayatte Cruise:
Ya, that’s the thing - more often that not the future is already now. Someone is successfully doing what you’re trying to do and trying to scale up.
Emmett McKinney:
I think that a closing reflection for me is that, this conversation brought up a few ideas that startled me a little bit. Like the idea that maybe we should be building a world of more complexity. I’m a little scared of that. Honestly, that seems really big. And I think that a lot of the most interesting ideas and the greatest victories come from when you touch on something that scares you at first. When you’re like, “oh that’s way too hot. I cannot touch that.”
And I think finding the courage to actually step forward into that - maybe that’s where the breakthrough is. I think that is something that I want to carry forward. And to suggest that the feeling that’s a mix between fear and joy, is a really good sign that you’re onto something interesting.
If you are still listening, as a listener, thank you for going on this journey with us. As Allison said, this turned out really a lot bigger than any of us were anticipating but again maybe that means it is a success.
Lafayette, do you want to tell us one more time what the title of your thesis was?
Lafayette Cruise:
"Musings from the Margins of a Polychrome Future”
Emmett McKinney:
Awesome.
Thank you so much for listening. We anticipate this won’t be the last of this type of conversation, but if you want to get involved, if you have a story to tell, if you want to just come and shoot the breeze with us, please please do because there are more ideas than we can handle in one episode here.
So thanks again, and signing off.