In her talk, Dr Karen Till will explore the limitations and possibilities of considering urban ecology as a means to ‘think the city differently’. Her starting premise is simple: how might we begin to challenge dominant paradigms in urban theory, including resilience and neoliberal speculative urbanisms, that define ground merely as property and contain time according to desire and fear? Using examples from cities around the world, the talk will address the concept of the wounded city and a place-based ethics of care according to intersecting urban temporal and spatial meshworks that include: social and material environments, relational networks, local pathways, alternative exchange systems, affective ecologies, enacted assemblages, and urban ecosystem wholeness.
About the speaker
Dr. Karen E. Till is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the National University of Ireland at Maynooth. A cultural and urban geographer, Karen is working on a book entitled ‘Wounded Cities’. It is a comparative ethnographic project about cities marked by histories of state-perpetrated violence, with case studies in Berlin, Bogota, Cape Town and Dublin.
Required Reading
[button link=”https://www.africancentreforcities.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Till_KE_2012_WoundedCities_PG.pdf” style=”download” color=”red” window=”yes”]Wounded Cities 2012[/button]