Cities@Tufts Lectures

The Just Us Graduate Student Dinners emerged from a recognition of the quiet crisis of food insecurity and isolation that many graduate students—especially Global Majority, low-income, first-generation, and international students—experience. Academia often disembodies students, extracting them from their cultural food traditions and support networks while offering little institutional concern for...

Since the emergence of the Environmental Justice movement, maps have been pivotal tools in revealing patterns of environmental and social inequality, in legitimizing what many communities already knew – that power and oppression shape the landscape of opportunity and risk. Mapping remains critical to Environmental Justice activism, research, and policy. Maps are often employed as tools of accounta...

Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? In her recent book, The Cities We Need (MIT Press), photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani introduces us to the complex, political, and eminently personable stories of residents who answered this question in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California. Their universal stories and Bendiner-Viani's evocative images illum...

The Pointillistic City extends the classic observation that "neighborhoods matter" for health and well-being, arguing that we need to pay more attention to the other geographic scales that we live at—including streets within neighborhoods and even properties within streets—and how they each affect us. This is analogous to a pointillistic painting, which is similarly organized into dots within obje...

Dr. Monica M. White presented Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and Institution Building." The presentation provided context for understanding agriculture as a strategy of resilience and resistance for African Americans. It will offer a perspective of the labor and commitment to agriculture from those in southern Black rural communities to those building community-based food systems in urba...

Megan Saltzman presented her new book--Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona--which explores how everyday practices in public space (sitting, playing, walking, etc.) challenge the increase of top-down control in the global city. Public Everyday Space focuses on post-Olympic Barcelona—a time of unprecedented levels of gentrification, branding, mass tourism, and immigratio...

Canada was founded on enslavement and dispossession, most exemplified by its assimilationist ideologies and policies, the displacement, subjugation and oppression of Indigenous and Black peoples and cultures, and the expropriation of Indigenous lands. The colonial theft of land and the accumulation of capital have been foundational to Canada's wealth. In this presentation, Dr. Ingrid Waldron uses...

This talk explores how and why city governments can step up to lead on climate action and how resident organizing is critical in making this happen. This talk also explores how to build and sustain the political coalition to ensure climate justice policies can be passed and implemented. Hessann Farooqi is the Executive Director of the Boston Climate Action Network. He is the youngest person and th...

Climate policy increasingly relies on techniques to remove CO2 from the environment as a supplement to cutting emissions: counter-balancing residual emissions in 'net-zero' and reducing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to safer levels. In this talk, Duncan will survey how cities are engaging with carbon removal – reviewing the realistic scope of possibilities such as carbon negative building mate...

Contemporary urban discourse is caught in a binary between the Gentrified City, and the Disinvested City. Maliha Safri's new book presents an alternative urban imaginary: the Solidarity City. Her new co-authored book Solidarity Cities. Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation introduces an alternative spatial imaginary highlighting solidarity relations as definitional features of urba...

Most researchers of environmental and climate justice agree that political and economic inequalities hurt the environment, racial minorities, Indigenous Peoples, and other marginalized communities. Yet, these conclusions are based, almost exclusively, on analyses of the distribution of "environmental bads" (e.g., industrial pollution and toxic waste). Drawing on a longstanding and cumulative multi...

This is a special bonus episode of the Cities@Tufts podcast! Last fall, Tufts University Distinguished Senior Lecturer of Urban Environmental Policy and Planning, Penn Loh, hosted a discussion following the release of a new report, Mutual Aid Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic: Strengthening Civic Infrastructure in East Boston through Community Care . This episode is from that live event, hosted b...

Addressing the climate crisis requires more than incremental reforms; it necessitates a transformative approach that dismantles deep-seated inequalities and confronts the historical injustices embedded in global structures. Achieving global climate justice hinges on decolonizing fossil fuel politics and dismantling obstructionist forces at both national and international levels. By drawing from an...

Throughout US history, street food vending has rarely been considered an improvement to modern society or its capitalist economy. However, beginning in 2008, a new generation of mobile vendors serving high-quality, inventive foods became popular among affluent populations. Ginette Wessel's new book, Mobilizing Food Vending: Gourmet Food Trucks in the American City (Routledge 2024), investigates th...

Reimagining Urban Planning is a talk based on the monthly webinar series of the same name hosted by the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. This talk openly critiques the ways in which Urban Planners have been trained and the impacts it has had in the ways Planners approach the Land, and the People that inhabit the land. This talk will share the key highlights from the series while al...

Urban Environmental Marronage: Connecting Black Ecologies from Coastal Nigeria to the American South explores how marginalized communities in coastal Nigeria and the American South draw upon historical practices of marronage to create autonomous spaces and combat environmental degradation within cities. Marronage refers to the practices of enslaved Africans who escaped to form free communities in...

Hacking the Archive: The Quest for More Just Urban Futures with Karilyn Crockett explores a Boston-based project that gamifies collective memory-driven social research and local knowledge sharing to anchor the intergenerational creation of future urban plans. Hacking the Archive (HTA) is a coalition of two dozen civic, faith-based and archival institutions advancing a novel data gathering and diss...

Measured by distance and speed, today North Americans move more than ever. Movement, however, is but a means to an end; more movement is not in itself beneficial. Movement is a cost of meeting daily needs, and provided these needs are met, less movement is generally advantageous. Nevertheless, since the 1930s traffic engineers have pursued movement maximization in North American cities as if movem...

Cities@Tufts is still on our summer break, but we have a special offering for you this month. For the past eight weeks, Shareable has co-hosted the Social Cooperative Academy with the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center and several other partners. Social cooperatives remain relatively obscure in the United States, despite thriving in various countries for over 30 years. Social coops blending...

Professor Esther Charlesworth's talk for the Boston Salon on May 1, 2024 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...

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 broad...

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...

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....

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 guid...

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 i...