Stephen Rees's blog

The SFU Urban Studies program presents two public talks by Mike Davis, Professor of Creative Writing, University of California-Riverside, and our Visiting Fellow in Urban Sustainable Development. Details of these talks are noted below

“The Battle of Rio and the Future of the Slum”
Monday, September 26, 2011, 7:00pm
Room 1500, Segal Graduate School of Business, 500 Granville Street (at W. Pender Street), Vancouver
Reservations are required: http://www.sfu.ca/reserve

Brazil is an emerging super-power much praised for targeted welfare programs that have substantially reduced extreme poverty over the last decade. Yet at the same time, Rio de Janeiro remains the most violent big city in the world, with at least one quarter of the population living under de facto governments of drug gangs and vigilantes. This talk offers an overview of the current urban pacification program (UPP) , that is designed to ‘retake’ Rio’s favelas in time for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics. The battle of Rio is a crucial test of the Brazilian state’s actual commitment to urban reform as well as an ambitious application of the so-called Stability and Reconstruction (S&R) doctrine widely advocated as a solution to the problem of ‘failed cities.’

“The Socialist City as Utopian Tool Kit
Wednesday, September 28, 2011, 7:00pm
Room 3310, SFU Surrey
13450  102 Avenue, Surrey
(just south of the Surrey Central SkyTrain station)
Reservations are required: http://www.sfu.ca/reserve

For a half century, from the early 1880s to the early 1930s, socialists and anarchists, designers and activists, vigorously debated how to reconcile the industrial city with both nature and social justice. The alternative visions included the garden city, rational super-urbanism, radical anti-urbanism, ‘district’ urbanism, and the Constructivist emphasis on ‘workers’ palaces.’ In this lecture, Davis will argue that these ancient debates offer solutions or at least invaluable starting points to the vexing challenge of raising mass living standards within 21st-century constraints of environmental turbulence and peak resources.