Special Events & Happenings

The City Talks:
Governing the City Without: The Challenge of Global Suburbanism 

January 19, 2012, at 7:30 p.m.

Roger Keil, Professor and Director, The City Institute at York University

Roger Keil is a Professor of Environmental Studies at York University, where he has taught urban and environmental politics since 1992. His research has focused on politics in large cities affected by globalization. More recently, he has embarked on a study of SARS and the Global City (with Harris Ali). Among his publications are the books Los Angeles (Wiley, 1998) and Nature and the City (with Gene Desfor; University of Arizona, 2004). He has just completed another publication: The Global Cities Reader (with Neil Brenner; Routledge, 2005). Roger is co-editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

While Roger's work has been centered in academia, he is also involved in the public domain as an activist and writer. He is a founding member of the International Network for Urban Research and Action.

The City Talks:
How the earth became a collection of land uses: urban planning and law in historical perspective

February 23, 2012, at 7:30 p.m.

Mariana Valverde, Professor of Criminology, University of Toronto

Mariana Valverde is the Director and a professor of the Centre of Criminology, at the University of Toronto, and does research mainly in the sociology of law.

Profesor Valverde's fields of inquiry are social and legal theory, socio-legal studies, and historical sociology

Currently, Mariana is doing comparative research in the history of urban planning and urban policing, with a focus on how cities have used a variety of tools to separate 'good' from 'bad' neighbourhoods. The time period is the century of the suburb, i.e. 1870s-1970s. An article based on that research, "Seeing like a city", appeared in Law and Society Review, 2011.

She is also planning to do research, in the near future, on public-private partnerships used to build urban infrastructure and urban amenities.

The City Talks:
Seeing Like a City

March 15, 2012, at 7:30 p.m.

Warren Magnusson, Professor of Political Science, University of Victoria

Warren Magnusson is a political theorist with a particular interest in the urban and the local as sites of politics and government. He has written extensively on the theory of local government, the character of urban politics, the nature of social movements, and the forms of political space. His two most recent books are A Political Space: Reading the Global through Clayoquot Sound (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), edited with Karena Shaw of UVic’s School of Environmental Studies, and The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).