Past Events

In this talk I will present an overview of my recently published book, Hydraulic City. Drawing attention to the ways in which settlers in Mumbai establish access to water in the city, I begin by showing that urban citizenship is not an event in linear time, but a fickle, distributed and reversible process. Next, I […]

Please join us for the 2018 Martin Wachs Lecture, “Smart Cities: The Future of Urban Infrastructure.” The panel will be cosponsored by the Department of City and Regional Planning, the Institute of Transportation Studies, and the Global Metropolitan Studies program. The panel will include: Ryan Russo (NYCDOT), Tom Maguire (SFMTA), Maria Mehranian (Cordoba Corporation), Susan Shaeen […]

On May 19, 2010, the Royal Thai Army deployed tanks, snipers, and war weapons to disperse the thousands of Red Shirts protesters who had taken over the commercial center of Bangkok to demand democratic elections and an end to inequality. Key to this mobilization were motorcycle taxi drivers, who slowed down, filtered, and severed mobility […]

In this talk I will present an overview of my current book project Protest and Development in Aspiring Global Cities. In the literature on competitive urban policy a special place is occupied by “wannabe world cities” (Short & Kim, 1999; Taylor, 2004), cities that lag closely behind those that have attained a dominant role and […]

This seminar runs 4-5pm, and snacks are available starting at 3:30pm. As ride-sharing technology companies enter the African Continent to tap into its market of one billion people, African cities are adopting and responding to the technology in different ways. Looking at Kenya, a country that prides itself as the tech hub of Africa, there […]

This project engages the jurisdictional implications of two contrasting approaches to subnational governance: a functional approach that conceives government as responding to economies of scope and scale. Its purpose is to provide a given basket of public goods at the lowest cost to every individual across the country, and the ideal outcome is a standardized […]

Infrastructure services such as water, electricity, and mass transit are central to urban livelihoods. Yet large populations in the developing world receive poor quality services, or lack access entirely. This presentation will illustrate the importance of understanding network structure in analyzing the political geography of urban water supply in Bangalore, India. It will focus on […]

Join us to learn about upcoming GMS programs and opportunities for graduate students, to speak with GMS faculty, and to hear from GMS students back from summer field research. We will introduce the opportunities available through the GMS Designated Emphasis and will instruct new students how to apply. Matrix is located on the eighth floor […]

Global Metropolitan Studies sprang to life during a decade of major transformations not only in cities around the world but also in how we study cities. The implications of global urbanization are widespread: from environmental challenges to entrenched patterns of segregation to new configurations of politics and social movements. UC Berkeley created GMS in 2004 […]