Past Events

GMS Core Faculty Brandi Thompson Summers will be discussing her research and her book, Black in Place, with Samir Meghelli, curator of the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. The online event is sponsored by the Smithsonian ACM and American University’s Metropolitan Studies Center. For details on how to attend, please see the DC Public Library.

Video recording available!   Talk on Vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/452650292   Environmental harms have time horizons that differ across environmental policy arenas. Pollutant exposure typically involve slow moving, steady tempo events with long duration, and often become part of the everyday landscape. When and how do people mobilize around slow-moving harms in cities? Based on extensive […]

Co-sponsored by the Department of City and Regional Planning and the ARCUS program. While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as “Chocolate City,” it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor. Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.’s shift to […]

This event has been cancelled due to the campus closure for large events and classes due to COVID-19. We hope to reschedule for the fall. In this talk I will review a 12 years-long project that transformed an illegal squatter settlement built by indigenous Amis people from east coast Taiwan into a legal and permanent […]

In conventional processes of gentrification, upper class residents start populating traditionally lower-income neighborhoods eventually causing an economic and spatial transformation that starts displacing the original residents. In Caracas, massive construction of social housing in central areas of the city carried out by the Venezuelan Grand Housing Mission (Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela, GMVV) is producing a […]

This event has been cancelled due to the campus closure for large events and classes.   GMS is pleased to co-sponsor the conference ‘Power at the Margins II: Mobilizing Across Housing Injustice’ (PATM II). The conference, organized by two GMS DE students, Christopher Herring (PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology) and Laura Belik (PhD Student, Department of Architecture), will […]

Francesco Bandarin will speak on the restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral after the April 15, 2019 fire that destroyed the structure’s roof and spire. The lecture will include an assessment of the damage, a presentation of the current restoration activities, and a discussion of the reconstruction policies of the cathedral.  As Assistant Director-General for Culture and Director of the UNESCO […]

The smart city concept as a modern proposal for city management to respond to rapid urban development has gained particular significance and popularity and recently has become a new paradigm of urban development and socio-economic growth. Nevertheless, there is no single common definition of the smart city, and disputes mean that such a definition will […]

A Matrix Lecture by Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor, author of Race for Profit. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained  intact after redlining’s end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to […]

  How can “smart cities” serve to connect citizens and government? We utilize an increasingly common  stimulus in urban life — large electronic kiosks with advertisement screens — to test the way that one type of smart city technology can be used to encourage civic behavior. We partner with LinkNYC, which  operates the high definition […]