The Graduate Student Association of the Department of Geography and Urban Studies invites you to the first installment of the Fall 2021 Speaker Series.

Dr. Nikhil Anand, University of Pennsylvania

“Dwelling in the Inhabited Sea”

As coastal cities face accelerating rising sea levels and an increased frequency of extreme weather events, Inhabited Sea is a transdisciplinary research collaborative of designers, planners, scientists and artists that draws attention to the ways in which human and non-human life dwell in wet cities. Working together since 2019, the collaborative asks what kinds of urban processes are brought into view when attending to how life is made in and with water. In this lecture, I present some findings of this work to show how the practices of human and non-human dwelling in the mixtures of urban wetscapes problematize flat and linear practices (of planning, design, and engineering) with which cities are made and maintained. Inhabited Sea instead calls for an attention to the cyclical temporalities, the tenuousness, and the stories with which cities are occupied in the meantime, between the catastrophic events of the past and future.