Thursday, October 22
Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles Street West
7:00 – 8:30pm | FREE

Visit eventbrite to RSVP.

Ticket holders must arrive before 6:45pm to claim their seat. There will be a rush line for non-ticket holders.

What is a “global city”? Are distinctions such as urban and rural, society and nature, or city and suburb still useful? When almost all the earth’s surface is subject to human technological intervention, is it time for a new way of understanding urbanization?

Four decades ago, the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre prophesized that the complete urbanization of society was inevitable. Today, we have come to accept a process of global urbanization derived from a set of complex relationships — political, economic, environmental, among others — that bring diverse territories together.  Yet, particularly for those who plan and design cities, there remains a deeply held belief in the value of making distinctions between “cities” as dense agglomerations of culture and capital, and other urbanizing territories.

Part of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto’s Fora series, “Uber Urbanism” will critically examine the central role that the concept of “city” has in framing how we understand (and study) urbanism, and whether or not cities are a unique “species” among the world’s geographies.

Featured speakers:

Neil Brenner is a geographer, Professor, and Director of the Urban Theory Lab at Harvard University, whose most recent publication is Implosions / Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (Jovis, 2014). Together with the Urban Theory Lab, Brenner also recently produced an exhibition, Operational Landscapes: Towards an Alternative Cartography of World Urbanization, which explored the emergence of an urban fabric in some of the most “remote” regions of the world.

Jesse LeCavalier is an architect, theorist and member of the faculty at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. LeCavelier’s work examines the logistical architecture of major actors in the new economy such as Walmart and Amazon, and he is the co-author of This Will _ This (Standpunkte, 2009), among other publications.

The Daniels Faculty’s Richard Sommer, Dean and Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, will moderate the discussion.

This is a ticketed event. Visit eventbrite to RSVP.