Held in 2019, the Puerto Rico Now seminar examined the ways in which hurricanes, debt, and migration are major forces which produce and shape spatial inequalities in contemporary Puerto Rico. The seminar approached Puerto Rico as a network of conflicting forces, demands, and discourses (economic, spatial, political, environmental, historical, memorial, mediatic, aesthetic), and analyzed the Puerto Rican context alongside other spaces that allowed to explore similar questions. These included: What does Puerto Rico have in common with New Orleans Post Katrina? With the Dominican Republic or Singapore? Prior to Hurricane Maria, what did San Juan have in common with Detroit or Miami?

To do our work the class drew on and worked with diverse sources of information including data about population displacement, urban destruction housing values and foreclosures, and reports and analysis of “expert’ bodies such as FEMA, Puerto Rico’s government, and the United Nations. The class considered how local and global organizing challenge spatial inequalities, ­­­and reformatted this information in a way that exposes some alternate images of Puerto Rico prior to these disasters and present some new post-disaster visions of it.

The seminar involved thinking and action with multiple methods of learning and engagements. Our work was, by necessity, multidisciplinary across history, economics, architecture, politics, law, literature, and visual culture as related to the topic of Conflict Urbanism.

This was the fourth in a series of multidisciplinary Mellon seminars at the Columbia Center for Spatial Research on the topic of Conflict Urbanism, as part of a multi-university initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities.

This website collects a student-led publication from the seminar.