Urbanisation in the 21st century: challenges and opportunities
When:
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Venue:
Online
Urbanisation and its impacts are critical challenges of the 21st Century impacting on the way of life and livelihoods of more than half the population of the planet. Cities come to reflect global inequalities, which manifest through environmental, political and socio-economic channels. Urban centres also act as hubs for transnational mobility, concentrating difference while also fostering opportunities for innovative responses to global challenges. In this lecture, we explore how two critical processes – the crisis of labour and climate change – affect cities and urban populations around the globe in uneven ways. First we look at how the growth of the gig economy and the precarisation of labour evolves differently across cities in the world. Second, we focus on the racialized and gendered impacts of climate change in urban environments. Finally, we explore insurgent and creative responses emerging in urban contexts that seek to contest and respond to such crisis context in innovative ways.
This lecture is a taster session for the MA/MSc Cities programme at Birkbeck. It showcases the programme’s interdisciplinarity by exploring how we can apply an interdisciplinary perspective to understand the challenges and potentials of contemporary urban living.
This event is free to attend and open to all interests but aimed at offer holders and potential applicants for the Cities programme.
Contact name:
Mara Nogueira
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Dr Mara Nogueira
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Mara Nogueira is the Director of the MA/MSc Cities Programme and a Lecturer in Urban Geography at Birkbeck. She works on the cross-class politics of urban space production, with an emphasis on the (re)production of socio-spatial inequality in urban Brazil.