Spring 2024
%20(500%20%C3%97%20500%20px)%20(1000%20%C3%97%201000%20px).png)
.png)
All colloquia are held via Zoom webinar from 12:00-1:00 pm ET
Recordings will be made available after the presentation
​
January 24th
Jess Myers presents Here There Be Dragons: Urban Research Methods
In this talk, Myers will discuss her eight years working on the research, design, and production of the urbanism podcast Here There Be Dragons. HTBD starts with residents first and seeks to forefront methods from the social sciences as crucial techniques in the analysis of the built environment. The podcast covers one city per season. Myers has sat down with residents in New York, Paris, and Stockholm to discuss what inspires their feelings of belonging and tension in their cities. Through these interviews HTBD traces a post occupancy study of urban policy, design decisions, and social attitudes.
JESS MYERS is an urbanist and assistant professor of architecture at Syracuse University whose practice includes work as an editor, writer, podcaster, and curator. In the past, Jess has worked in diverse roles—archivist, analyst, teacher—within cultural practices that include Bernard Tschumi Architects, the Service Employees International Union, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Rhode Island School for Design. Her research engages sound and multimedia platforms as a means to explore politics and residency in urban conditions. Her podcast Here There Be Dragons takes an in-depth look at the impact of security narratives on urban planning through the eyes of city residents in New York, Paris, and Stockholm. Her work can be found in Urban Omnibus, The Architect’s Newspaper, Log, l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Avery Review, The Architectural Review, Places, Dwell, and the Funambulist Magazine. Her 2022 exhibition, A Pause Is Not A Break, was recently on “view” in Providence Rhode Island, Ames, Iowa, and Ottawa, Canada.
February 7th
Maya Singhal presents How to Fight a Mega-Jail
In 2017, New York City committed to a plan to close Rikers Island Jail Complex and build four smaller jails around the city in Manhattan’s Chinatown, Downtown Brooklyn, Mott Haven in the Bronx, and Kew Gardens in Queens. The Chinatown jail is planned to be built on the site of the current jail in the neighborhood, but rather than repurposing or remodeling the building, the city plans to demolish it and build a 300-foot mega-jail, which would be the tallest jail in the world. The fight against the new Chinatown jail has drawn together a diverse coalition concerned about the effects of the jail on the Chinatown population and the predominantly Black and Latine populations incarcerated inside it. This talk explores how concerned groups are working to bridge their differences and develop strategies to fight the new jail construction.
Maya Singhal is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. They completed their PhD in Anthropology at Harvard University, and they also hold MA degrees from the University of Chicago and New York University and a BA from NYU. Singhal’s research is interested broadly in how people navigate violence across generations. More specifically, their recent work deals with crime, capital, and mutual aid in African and Chinese diasporic populations. Singhal’s current book project is an ethnographic and historical study of African American and Chinese American self- and community defense in New York City and the histories of extralegal neighborhood protection (e.g. gangs, neighborhood patrols and associations, etc.) that inform these present-day efforts towards safety.
March 7th
Mark Roseland presents Advancing Urban Planning with Community Capital Compass
Contemporary planning approaches often fall short in addressing the cascading environmental, economic, and social issues planners and their communities face. Planners need comprehensive, forward-thinking approaches that prioritize sustainability, equity, and inclusivity.
Mark Roseland’s new book, Toward Sustainable Communities: Solutions for Citizens and Their Governments, is the definitive guide to the why, the what, and most importantly, the how of creating resilient, healthy, equitable, and prosperous places.
Dr. Roseland will introduce the book’s innovative Community Capital Compass as a powerful tool for maximizing the environmental, economic, and social benefits of complex community and regional decisions. The Compass promises a transformative, equitable, resilient, and sustainable approach to urban development.
Mark Roseland is Professor and past Director of the School of Community Resources and Development, Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions, at Arizona State University, and Senior Global Futures Scientist with the ASU Global Futures Laboratory. Before coming to ASU, he was at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, where he was a professor of planning in the School of Resource and Environmental Management and director of the Centre for Sustainable Development. He is a Registered Professional Planner (RPP) and a member of both the American Planning Association and the Canadian Institute of Planners, and he has worked as Chief City Planner for a municipality in the Metro Vancouver area. He has been cited by The Vancouver Sun as “one of Vancouver’s top 50 living public intellectuals,” has received both the SFU Sustainability Network Award for Excellence in Research on Sustainability and the SFU President’s Award on Leadership in Sustainability, and he is a Fellow of the ASU Knowledge Exchange for Resilience. Dr. Roseland lectures internationally and advises communities, governments, and organizations on sustainable development policy, planning and implementation. He guides cities and organizations on a variety of sustainability-related plans and associated decision-support and implementation tools. Dr. Roseland advises Boards on their sustainability practice and guides executives on their sustainability thought leadership. He has advised a range of organizations including local governments, state/provincial and federal agencies, foundations, developers, and media organizations. He has produced sustainability plans, performance assessments, policy documents, communications strategies, and tools for monitoring, decision-support and implementation. In addition to his field-defining research, teaching and publications, Dr. Roseland helps produce practical innovations in areas such as mobility, food, housing, energy, climate, planning, and economic development. Dr. Roseland is also the Founder and Director of Pando | Sustainable Communities, Pando LinkedIn, and the Community Capital Lab.
March 14th
Orwa Switat presents Reciprocal Relations: The Coevolution Between Planning and Constitutional Rights
Minorities in cities worldwide confront disparities, advocating for rights within a dynamic interplay of urban planning and constitutional legal frameworks. How does the coevolution between planning and legal frameworks shape the status of minorities?
This lecture will dissect the coevolution of British constitutional rights and the status of minorities in the urban planning of London, post-WWII. It will explore how planning practices embed minority rights, shedding light on the transformation of political and legal frameworks into urban planning, and assessing their impact on state-minority relations.
Orwa Switat is a visiting scholar at the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. He is a scholar, practitioner, and activist in the realm of state-minority relations in urban planning. He holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. His research has critically examined the intersections of urban planning and state-minority relations. Complementing his advanced degrees, he possesses BAs in both Philosophy and Political Science from Haifa University. In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Orwa has dedicated his work to promoting the rights of Palestinian communities in Israel in the context of planning, advising planners and civil society on spatial justice and inclusion. From 2019 to 2023, Orwa served on Haifa’s municipal committee for historical preservation, influencing policies to honor and reflect the Arab Palestinian Heritage of the city.
March 27th
Karin Bradley presents How Local Gov Can Use Grassroots Initiatives for Sustainability Transitions
In cities across the world grassroots initiatives organize alternative forms of provisioning, e.g. food sharing networks, energy cooperatives and repair cafés. Some of these are recognized by local governments as engines in sustainability transitions. In this talk, I will discuss different ways that local governments interact with, and use, such grassroots initiatives, drawing from case studies in Berlin and Gothenburg. An argument will be made for that we need to reconsider what municipal infrastructure should entail, i.e. not only the traditional infrastructure for transport and waste but also new infrastructure for repairing and sharing.
Karin Bradley is Professor of Urban and Regional Studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Her research concerns planning and policy for sustainability transitions, the role of civil society, alternative economies and justice aspects of transitions. She has been the co-director of the eight-year research programme Mistra Sustainable Consumption – from niche to mainstream that engages researchers from different disciplines as well as municipalities, civil society organizations, companies and national authorities in Sweden. She has had several assignments for the Swedish government, including leading a public inquiry on the sharing economy.
Her publications include “Community repair in the circular economy: Fixing more than stuff” (2022, with Ola Persson), “In search of sufficiency politics: The case of Sweden” (2021, with Åsa Callmer) and “Planning for sharing: Providing Infrastructure for citizens to be makers and sharers” (2017, with Anna Hult).
April 17th
Eden Kinkaid presents Consuming the Creative City: Gastrodevelopment in a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy
Scholars have recently coined the term “gastrodevelopment” to refer to the leveraging of food culture as a resource and strategy of economic development. Drawing on a case study of Tucson, Arizona – the United States’ first UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy – Kinkaid uses the lens of gastrodevelopment to examine how food culture is transformed into a form of symbolic capital that animates a broader project of urban development. Kinkaid shows how this transformation encodes differentials of value that are racialized and racializing and risk contributing to Tucson’s uneven urban geographies. Kinkaid then turns to community visions of food-based development to imagine alternative trajectories for the project of gastrodevelopment.
Dr. Eden Kinkaid (they/them) is a human geographer and social scientist whose work focuses on themes of sustainable and equitable food and agricultural systems, place, race, and development. They have researched these themes in north India and in the U.S. Southwest. In addition to this line of research, they publish on topics of feminist, queer, and trans geographies, geographic theory, creative geographies, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia. Their work has been published in Urban Geography, Progress in Human Geography, Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environment and Planning D, and various other journals and books. Eden has served as an editor at Gender, Place, and Culture, The Graduate Journal of Food Studies, and you are here: the journal of creative geography. You can learn more about their work on their website or by following them on social media @queergeog on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky.
May 16th
Esther Charlesworth presents Architects without frontiers: A journey from divided cities to zones of fragility
Prof. Esther Charlesworth’s talk focused on her nomadic design journey across the last three decades. In trying to move from just theorizing about disaster architecture to designing and delivering projects for at-risk communities globally, Esther started both Architects Without Frontiers (Australia) and ASF (International); an umbrella coalition of 41 other architect groups across Europe, Asia and Africa. Architects Without Frontiers asks, how do we go from just pontificating about the multiple and intractable challenges of our fragile planet, to actually acting on them?
Professor Esther Charlesworth works in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University, where in 2016 she founded the Master of Disaster, Design, and Development degree [MoDDD] and the Humanitarian Architecture Research Bureau [HARB]. MoDDD is one of the few degrees globally, enabling mid-career designers to transition their careers into the international development, disaster and urban resilience sectors.