Cities out of Control: The New Frontier of Urban Speculation and Precarious Citizenship

Date: April 14, 2015
Time: 16.00
Place: santralistanbul Campus, E1-201

Speaker: Prof.Michael Goldman

The seminar is organized by İstanbul Bilgi University Department of Sociology.

This talk highlights the new development mandate to transform our cities into “global cities,” a strategy to ostensibly combat the world’s biggest problems of stagnant economic growth, environmental degradation, and poor public health. Through a comparative analysis of cities in the U.S., Europe, Asia and through a genealogy of the idea of this new global urbanism, the talk reveals some of the contradictions of the strategy and its major effects, including the spread of the financialization of the city, social dispossession and urban revolt.

Prof.Michael Goldman:
Professor Michael Goldman teaches at the University of Minnesota (USA) in Sociology and Global Studies, and is the author of Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization (Yale University Press) and Privatizing Nature: Struggles for the Global Commons (Rutgers University Press). His next book analyzes the convergence of three global trends: the making of global cities, urban revolution, and the financialization of the economy. Professor Goldman has been the recipient of numerous awards including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Research and Writing Fellowship, Yale University Agrarian Studies Fellowship, Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellowship at UC Berkeley, Fulbright Fellowship, American Institute for Indian Studies Fellowship, and the McKnight Presidential Fellowship at the University of Minnesota. His work has been translated into Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, French, and Japanese.