Cities@Tufts Lectures – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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 immigration. Drawing from examples observed in public spaces (streets, plazas, sidewalks, and empty lots), as well as in cultural representation (film, photography, literature), this book exposes the quiet agency of those excluded from urban decision-making but who nonetheless find ways to carve out spatial autonomy for themselves. Absent from the map or postcard, the quicksilver spatial phenomena documented in this book can make us rethink our definitions of culture, politics, inclusion, legality, architecture, urban planning, and public space.

About the speaker

Megan Saltzman (PhD, University of Michigan) is a teaching professor at Mount Holyoke College in the department of Spanish, Latin American, and Latinx Studies, where she also contributes to the Five Colleges of Massachusetts Architectural Studies Program. Her research focuses on contemporary urban culture of Spanish cities with a transnational and ethnographic approach. Her 2024 book, Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona combines literary and visual arts with fieldwork to expose how everyday practices in public space (sitting, playing, street selling) not only challenge the city’s policed image but also serve to carve out autonomy from below. Megan has published on urban cultural themes in Spain related to gentrification, spatial in/exclusion, immigration, nostalgia, recycling, urban furniture design, grassroots cultural centers and “artivism.” Most recently Megan has been teaching courses that revolve around three themes: (1) urban studies, (2) material and non-human culture, and (3) ethnically hybrid identities. Besides teaching at Mount Holyoke, Megan has enjoyed teaching at a variety of colleges, including the University of Otago (New Zealand), Grinnell College, the University of Michigan, Amherst College, West Chester University, and this coming fall at Sophia University in Tokyo.

In addition to this audio, you can read the full transcript of the conversation and watch the lecture recording on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman. 

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation,

 Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor. The original portrait of Hessann Farooqi was illustrated by Jess Milner, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn. 

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

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 settler colonial theory to examine environmental racism in Canada to highlight the symbolic and material ways in which the geographies of Indigenous and Black peoples have been characterized by erasure, domination, dehumanization, destruction, dispossession, exploitation, and genocide. She offers a historical overview of cases of environmental racism in Canada and outlines how she has been addressing environmental racism over the last 10 years in partnership with Indigenous and Black communities, and their allies. About the speaker

Dr. Ingrid Waldron is Professor and HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social Justice Program in the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University. Her research focuses on environmental and climate justice in Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities, mental illness and dementia in Black communities, and COVID-19 in Black and South Asian communities. Ingrid is the author of the book There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities, which was turned into a 2020 Netflix documentary of the same name and was co-produced by Waldron, actor Elliot Page, and Ian Daniel. She is the founder and Director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health Project (The ENRICH Project) and helped develop the federal private members bill a National Strategy Respecting Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice (Bill C-226). Bill C-226 was approved at Senate on June 13, 2024, and given royal assent on June 20, 2024, becoming the first environmental justice law in Canada. Dr. Waldron’s book entitled From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter: The Impact of Racial Trauma on Mental Health in Black Communities, was published on November 25, 2024. It traces experiences of racial trauma in Black communities in Canada, the US and the UK from the colonial era to the present.

In addition to this audio, you can read the full transcript of the conversation and watch the lecture recording on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman. 

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation,

 Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor. The original portrait of Hessann Farooqi was illustrated by Jess Milner, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn. 

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

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 inaccessible terrains. By connecting Black ecologies from Lagos and the Niger Delta to New Orleans and South Carolina, this presentation examines how communities adapt to environmental challenges, preserve cultural heritage, and develop alternative socio-ecological systems as forms of political and ecological empowerment.

These contemporary case studies of resistance and resilience reflect the enduring legacies of maroon societies across the Black Atlantic, offering new insights into global struggles for human rights and environmental justice.

Charisma Acey is Associate Professor and Arcus Chair in Social Justice and the Built Environment in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on environmental justice, urban sustainability, and equitable access to basic services in cities. Dr. Acey's work spans the Americas and Africa, addressing issues such as climate vulnerability, access to clean water and safe sanitation, women's empowerment, and urban agroecology.

She currently leads projects on air quality and food justice in California, employing participatory action research to identify inequitable policies impacting vulnerable communities. As Faculty Director of the Berkeley Food Institute and co-founder of the Dellums Clinic to Dismantle Structural Racism at the Institute for Urban and Regional Development, she champions interdisciplinary approaches to urban planning and environmental governance.

Dr. Acey holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and a Master's in Public Policy from UCLA. She is a UW-Madison Health Equity Leadership Institute Scholar. Her work has been recognized with awards for excellence in community-based scholarship. Dr. Acey's publications appear in journals such as World Development, Landscape and Urban Planning, and The Lancet Global Health

In addition to this audio, you can watch the video and read the full transcript of the conversation on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman. 

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation,

Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor, the original portrait of Charisma Acey was illustrated by Anke Dregnat, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn. 

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

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 dissemination approach for populations underrepresented in the archive yet overrepresented in land-based battles for urban space. This talk focuses on HTA's current work to examine past and present grassroots strategies for tackling economic justice.

Karilyn Crockett’s research focuses on large-scale land use changes in twentieth century American cities and examines the social and geographic implications of structural poverty, racial formations and memory. Karilyn’s book "People before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making" (UMASS Press 2018) investigates a 1960s era grassroots movement to halt urban extension of the U.S. interstate highway system and the geographic and political changes in Boston that resulted. In 2019 this book was named one of the “ten best books of the decade” by the Boston Public Library Association of Librarians. Karilyn holds a PhD from the American Studies program at Yale University, a Master of Science in Geography from the London School of Economics, and a Master of Arts and Religion from Yale Divinity School. She has previously served in Boston city government; first, as Director of Economic Policy & Research in the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development and later as the City of Boston's first Chief of Equity, a Cabinet-level position. She is a professor of urban history, public policy and planning at MIT and currently leads the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce in partnership with the Boston Federal Reserve Bank to assess the regional racial wealth gap.

In addition to this audio, you can watch the video and read the full transcript of the conversation on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman. 

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation,

Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor, the original portrait of Karilyn Crockett was illustrated by Anke Dregnat, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn. 

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

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 movement is an end in itself, and even as if movement is in itself freedom. The human costs have included unbearable burdens measurable as financial, health, safety, equitability, livability and environmental costs. Together these burdens impair human autonomy; that is, by constraining people’s choices about where and how to live, they diminish freedom. Automobility, promoted as a deliverer of freedom, has instead imposed car dependency, a kind of unfreedom. Paradoxically, many engineers now pursue so-called “autonomous” (robotic) driving, promising thereby to sustain unsustainable quantities of movement, when the sole worthy end of movement is not machine but human autonomy. To escape the traps that these errors set for us, we must trace them to their origins. Though engineering is defined as applied science, history reveals that the origins and persistence of prevailing traffic engineering principles lie not in scientific research but in power politics, and that such principles have more in common with religious dogmas than with natural laws. Far more practical possibilities await us when we escape the confines these dogmas impose on us and recognize movement as a secondary good that serves us only as it contributes to human autonomy.

Peter Norton is an associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. He is a member of the University of Virginia’s Center for Transportation Studies and has been a visiting faculty member at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Norton is the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, and of Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving. He is a winner of the Usher Prize of the Society for the History of Technology, and a frequent speaker on the subject of sustainable and equitable urban mobility.

In addition to this audio, you can watch the video and read the full transcript of the conversation on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman. 

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation,

Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor, the original portrait of Peter Norton was illustrated by Anke Dregnet, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn. 

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

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 the principles of cooperatives with a dedicated social purpose. 

Today, we're sharing a recording from the first session of the academy, "Why social coops offer potential transformation of care and more." This conversation features Doug O'Brien from the National Cooperative Business Association, John Restakis from Synergia Institute, Minsun Ji from RMEOC, and Matthew Epperson from Zolidar.

In addition to this podcast, the video transcript and graphic recordings are available at Shareable.net.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman. 

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation and SHIFT Foundation.

Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Deandra Boyle and Grant Perry. Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor, the original portrait of Karin Bradley was illustrated by Anke Dregnet, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn. 

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

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 architect groups across Europe, Asia and Africa. Architects Without Frontiers asks, how do we go from just pontificating about the multiple and intractable challenges of our fragile planet, to actually acting on them?

Prof. Esther Charlesworth works in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University, where in 2016 she founded the Master of Disaster, Design, and Development degree [MoDDD] and the Humanitarian Architecture Research Bureau [HARB]. MoDDD is one of the few degrees globally, enabling mid-career designers to transition their careers into the international development, disaster and urban resilience sectors.

In addition to this audio, you can watch the video and read the full transcript of their conversation on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman. 

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation and SHIFT Foundation.

Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Deandra Boyle and Grant Perry. Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor, the original portrait of Karin Bradley was illustrated by Anke Dregnet, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn. 

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

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 broader project of urban development. Kinkaid shows how this transformation encodes differentials of value that are racialized and racializing and risk contributing to Tucson’s uneven urban geographies. Kinkaid then turns to community visions of food-based development to imagine alternative trajectories for the project of gastrodevelopment.

Dr. Eden Kinkaid (they/them) is a human geographer and social scientist whose work focuses on themes of sustainable and equitable food and agricultural systems, place, race, and development. They have researched these themes in north India and in the U.S. Southwest. In addition to this line of research, they publish on topics of feminist, queer, and trans geographies, geographic theory, creative geographies, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia. Their work has been published in Urban Geography, Progress in Human Geography, Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environment and Planning D, and various other journals and books. Eden has served as an editor at Gender, Place, and Culture, The Graduate Journal of Food Studies, and you are here: the journal of creative geography. You can learn more about their work on their website or by following them on social media @queergeog on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky.

In addition to this audio, you can watch the video and read the full transcript of their conversation on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman. 

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation and SHIFT Foundation.

Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Deandra Boyle and Grant Perry. Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor, the original portrait of Karin Bradley was illustrated by Anke Dregnet, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn. 

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

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 Berlin and Gothenburg. An argument will be made for that we need to reconsider what municipal infrastructure should entail, i.e. not only the traditional infrastructure for transport and waste but also new infrastructure for repairing and sharing.

Karin Bradley is Professor of Urban and Regional Studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Her research concerns planning and policy for sustainability transitions, the role of civil society, alternative economies and justice aspects of transitions. She has been the co-director of the eight-year research programme Mistra Sustainable Consumption – from niche to mainstream that engages researchers from different disciplines as well as municipalities, civil society organizations, companies and national authorities in Sweden. She has had several assignments for the Swedish government, including leading a public inquiry on the sharing economy.

In addition to this audio, you can watch the video and read the full transcript of their conversation on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman. 

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation and SHIFT Foundation.

Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Deandra Boyle and Grant Perry. Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor, the original portrait of Karin Bradley was illustrated by Anke Dregnet, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn. 

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

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. It will explore how planning practices embed minority rights, shedding light on the transformation of political and legal frameworks into urban planning, and assessing their impact on state-minority relations.

Orwa Switat is a visiting scholar at the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. He is a scholar, practitioner, and activist in the realm of state-minority relations in urban planning. He holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. His research has critically examined the intersections of urban planning and state-minority relations. Complementing his advanced degrees, he possesses BAs in both Philosophy and Political Science from Haifa University. 

In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Orwa has dedicated his work to promoting the rights of Palestinian communities in Israel in the context of planning, advising planners and civil society on spatial justice and inclusion. From 2019 to 2023, Orwa served on Haifa's municipal committee for historical preservation, influencing policies to honor and reflect the Arab Palestinian Heritage of the city.

In addition to this audio, you can watch the video and read the full transcript of their conversation on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman. 

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation and SHIFT Foundation.

Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Deandra Boyle and Muram Bacare. Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor, the original portrait of Mark Roseland was illustrated by Anke Dregnet, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn. 

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.