The Department of Geography & Urban Studies Fall 2018 Speaker Series presents Dr. Asha Best (Clark University) who will be giving a lecture titled "Alternatives to the City: Black Mobilities and the Post-1965 Urban Landscape".
Neoliberal urbanism has become the predominant lens through which the city is studied and planned. Against related frames of neoliberal urbanism and gentrification, Asha Best asks how ordinary black vernacular urban practices figure not only into the city’s imagined futures, but into urban theory. Often figured as a problem that urban planning must solve, these vernacular urbanisms illustrate the logic through which black and migrant populations imagine, create, remake and inhabit the urban. Here, Best turns towards black urbanism as a generative framework for approaching urban geography, urban planning and urban futures. In particular, she relies on archival and ethnographic research conducted in Caribbean neighborhoods of East Flatbush, Brooklyn to illustrate how black urbanism sheds light on histories of displacement and dispossession, as well as histories of how ordinary black life persists under deprivation. Drawing on mobilities studies, postcolonial urban theory and black geographical methods, Best suggests that the importance of black urbanism lies in rather familiar territory— “the right to the city”.
Presented by the GUS Graduate Student Association