Date: Thu, March 2, 2023

Time: 5:00 PM – 7:30 PM PST

Location: CCA

Join us for a lecture and dialogue between Bz Zhang, Ratha Lai, and Shreya Shankar, who each bring stories of building and unbuilding, using tools of architecture and organizing in service of climate justice movements, particularly from the vantage point of the five refineries in the Bay Area as sites of extraction and resistance. While acts of settlement and extraction are necessarily sited and embodied violences (pipelines through ancestral sites, refineries along beaches, wells opposite windows, chemicals in lungs), the extents of their impacts transcend borders, creating transnational frontlines, connected through global struggles for land, air, and water sovereignty. Meanwhile, the scales, forms, and boundaries of these sites are often intentionally obscured and thus difficult to dismantle. Using Richmond and California as focal points in a planetary network of petrochemical urbanisms, this conversation aspires to unveil past and present representations of urban sites of extraction, the role of architecture's complicity, and possible futures—including possible future design practices—as informed by contemporary climate justice movements. Through analysis and discussion of these sites, in service not of development, but climate justice and frontline communities themselves, our conversation centers community expertise in defining next steps for just transitions.