Buildings swayed as Taiwan’s strongest earthquake in 25 years hit the eastern coast of the small island country. Editor’s note: mentions of death.

Happening in the World: Rescue efforts are underway in Taiwan after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck the eastern coast, killing at least nine people and injuring more than 800, according to the police department. Around 127 people are trapped in collapsed buildings and tunnels, as well as mountainous roads due to the more rugged terrain of the region. The earthquake triggered tsunami alerts earlier in the day in the Japanese and Philippine islands, which were later retracted. The most damage was in Hualien City, where buildings fell and all forms of transportation were disrupted. (BBC)

Happening in the US: To comply with state law, the University of Texas at Austin is cutting its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion staff and closing its Division of Campus and Community Engagement. Texas’s new anti-DEI law, or SB-17, bans public colleges and universities from maintaining DEI offices, holding DEI training, and having departments focused on “promoting differential treatment” based on race, sex, or ethnicity. UT Austin President Jay Hartzell has said the funds will be redirected to “teaching and research.” (CNN)

Happening in NYC: Contrary to recent fears on social media, Lawyers on both sides, tenants and landlords, are saying New York City is not facing a squatter problem. Squatting occurs when someone refuses to leave the space of the homeowner, who must then go to a judge to start a months-long process to kick out the occupants due to the backlog of cases in the state court. There are rare occurrences, like last month when a Flushing woman was arrested after she changed the locks of a home where she said occupants were staying without her permission. Heightened anxiety could be attributed to long delays in the courts for eviction cases, and it often takes months for landlords to evict a tenant. However, unpaid rent is not squatting, where a stranger slides into someone’s empty home. (The Gothamist)

Happening in Our Community: AFFIRMATIONS is an eight-month series of discussions with designers, researchers, planners, preservationists, and activists to affirm and interrogate how to think and redesign the built environment at the intersection of climate, ecological, societal, bodily, and technological crises and defiance. As a project convened to interrogate and affirm how to think and practice the reworlding of societies and ecosystems now, AFFIRMATIONS is intended to align evidence and aspirations. It will summarize and state underrepresented histories and possible futures that emerge from the cracks in the structures of power built on the interdependency of carbonization, extractivism, colonization, racialization, anthropocentrism, inequality, patriarchy, and technocracy. GSAPP students and faculty, together with a cohort of respondents selected from all around the world through an Open Call, are participating in the discussion throughout the academic year. Learn more here.

2019 Earthquake Map from Around the Same Location via Garystockbridge617