This year, students and faculty will have an opportunity to engage with current and exciting research on a variety of issues related to urban Asia during the 2012-2013 Urban Asia lecture series starting Thursday.
Professor Alana Boland in the Department of Geography and Program in Planning at the University of Toronto will deliver the first talk – Both Spectacular and Mundane: The Greening of Urban China, 1990-2010 – Oct. 25, from noon to 2pm, at 626 York Research Tower. Subsequent talks will be held at the same place and time on the last Thursday of each month (excluding December).
Boland’s current work focuses on state regulatory initiatives aimed at improving urban environmental conditions, 
particularly at the community-level. She is also interested in the economic-environment nexus that influenced the development of Chinese cities during the 1950s and 1960s.
Singapore’s skyline
She recently led a group of students to Chengdu, China, to observe the impact of China’s “Open up the West” urban development program which began in the early 1980s. Her most recent publication, Public Participation in China’s Green Communities: Mobilizing Memories and Structuring Incentives, published in Geoforum, looks at the development of two green communities in Guangzhou, China.
Forthcoming speakers in the series will include:
Tania Ahmad | Nov. 29: Ahmad of the Department of Anthropology at York University will speak on a form of politics stemming from non-participation and domestic confinement in a talk titled “Socialities of Indignation: Denouncing Party Politics in Karachi, Pakistan.”
Karen Coelho | Jan. 31: Coelho of the Madras Institute of Development Studies in Chennai, India will deliver a talk, titled, “Precarious Work and Persistent Poverty in a Resettlement Site: A Study of Kannagi Nagar, Chennai.”
Anne Rademacher | Feb. 28: Professor Rademacher of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University will present her research on urban issues in Katmandu, Nepal.
Kenneth Cardenas| March 28: In his talk, Cardenas of Department of Geography at York University will trace the role played by the idea of ‘irrationality’ in how Manila’s past and future is being imagined. His talk is titled “Disasters, Climate Risk and Exclusionary Modernity in Manila.”
The series is organized by the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) and the City Institute at York University.
For more information, contact ycar@yorku.caor visit YCAR’s Urban Asia Series 2012-2013 web page.