Social Housing: Winners and Losers – Social Housing and Working Class Heritage

Triumph of the City: how our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier and happier
Speaker: Professor Edward Glaeser
Chair: Professor Henry Overman
This event was recorded on 14 March 2011 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

Building and maintaining cities is difficult and density has costs, but in this presentation Professor Edward Glaeser will argue that these costs are worth bearing, because whether in London’s ornate arcades or Rio’s fractious favelas, whether in the high rises of Hong Kong or the dusty workplaces of Dharavi, our culture, our prosperity, and our freedom are all ultimately gifts of people living, working, and thinking together — the ultimate triumph of the city.

Steal away, steal away home, I ain’t got long to stay here

Many of today’s urban dwellers often face sorrow with the loss of their homes, work and everyday life. Similar to the plantations that used African slaves, the spread of contemporary mega-developments continues to expand standardised social and economical interactions without really changing their form or function.
At the same time, efforts made by residents in major cities of the world, such as Sao Paolo, Jakarta, Mexico City, or Delhi, reveal what the city has largely been all along – a place where materials can be taken out of their usual contexts, uses, and meanings, then pieced together to produce unforeseen and not readily controllable outcomes.

Through this Knowledge Works lecture Professor AbdouMaliq Simone will examine the urban processes of various modern cities highlighting how they function and how they create specific ways of existing, thinking, seeing, claiming, affecting, informing, and making that are bound to no one, yet bound everyone.

Sorrow thus becomes the tactic: belong nowhere and everywhere.

Professor AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist with a particular interest in emerging forms of social and economic intersection across diverse trajectories of change for cities in the Global South.

In the heart of Johannesburg, there is probably no building more notorious than Ponte City. The cylindrical tower with a hollow core was built in the 1970s as luxury apartments only for whites. In the ensuing decades, as whites decamped to the suburbs, Ponte became a symbol of urban decay, overrun by drug dealers and gangs and dubbed “suicide central” because of the number of people who chose to end their lives by hurling themselves off the tower.

Watch the trailer:

Full documentary: http://www.vocativ.com/video/culture/society/south-africas-tower-trouble/

Exploring the work of Margaret Mead, this film investigates the 12 months Mead spent with the Samoans in the Twenties.
Her resulting book, Coming Of Age In Samoa, had a huge impact on Western culture.
Mead believed cultures like the Samoans could teach people how to live in harmony. Her book depicts a society of free love — devoid of jealousy and teenage turmoil.

But, decades later, her work was criticised as being tainted by her romantic views and strong belief in liberal values.
Tales From The Jungle examines whether Mead’s study was merely misinterpretation and romantic wishful thinking.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Freeman

An interview with Susan Parnell, Executive Member of the African Centre for Cities and Co-Editor of ‘Africa’s Urban Revolution’, published by Zed Books. Sue discusses informal settlements, the effects of global environmental change & the true economic potential of Africa’s cities.