Symposium at Harvard this Fall Will Seek New Policies and Tools to Benefit Global Slums
CAMBRIDGE, MA – There are very few signs that slums will transition out of the urban landscape in the foreseeable future. Even after more than one and a half centuries of policy interventions, starting from efforts to address the effects of industrialization in Europe, slums persist in almost every geography on the planet. Slums are not only visible in the Global South, but are reappearing in old and new manifestations in the Global North. Their persistence can be linked to a number of political and economic failures to effectively address poverty and inequality, distorted land markets, and systemic social exclusion. These failures are, in turn, rooted in the very way policymakers, global media, and intellectuals conceptualize and represent how, why, and by whom slums are produced, maintained, and reproduced. Slums continue to be imagined as urban aberrations, something that falls outside of (or delinked from) urban ecologies.
A diverse group of academic, policy, design and media experts, as well as community representatives will bridge historically siloed narratives about slums and discuss innovative ways to address them.
Confirmed speakers include:
Line Algoed, Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research
Somsook Boonyabancha, Asian Coalition for Housing Rights
Martha Chen, Harvard Kennedy School and WIEGO
Michael Cohen, The New School
Alejandro de Castro Mazarro, Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (2019)
Brodwyn Fischer, University of Chicago
George Galster, Wayne State University
Sumila Gulyani, The World Bank
Alejandro Haiek Coll, LAB.PRO.FAB
Chris Herbert, Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies
João Marcos de Almeida Lopes and Luiza Sassi, Usina Centro de Trabalho para o Ambiente Habitado
Jorge Francisco Liernur, University Torcuato di Tella
Ranjani Mazumdar, Jawaharlal Nehru University
George McCarthy, Enrique Silva, and Martim O. Smolka, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
Rahul Mehrotra, Harvard Graduate School of Design and RMA Architects
Sheela Patel, Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres
Janice Perlman, The Mega-Cities Project
Edgar Pieterse, African Centre for Cities
Michael Uwemedimo, Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform and University of Roehampton
Charlotte Vorms, University of Paris
Peter Ward and Jacob Wegmann, University of Texas at Austin
Theresa Williamson, Catalytic Communities
Nicholas You, Global Business Alliance
M. Lorena Zárate, Habitat International Coalition
The symposium, which is free and open to the public (registration required), will be held at the Harvard Center for Government and International Studies (1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA). It starts on the evening of Thursday, September 20, with a keynote about the representation of slums in film and media, and continues on Friday and Saturday, September 21 and 22, with full days of presentations and discussions.