Video, Past Event, Urban Issues, Environmental Justice
Matt Hern: In Defense of an Urban Future
An ecological future has to be an urban future, but that vision rests on remaking our cities as something other than crass investment mechanisms populated by greed and shoppers. We have to reimagine cities as something better: compact, accretive, self-determining places full of commonality, and vibrancy. This rendition of density requires a politics that commits to participatory difference, equity, hospitality and friendship. In many ways Vancouver is actively undermining these possibilities, but like in all cities there remain the seedbeds for a transformative, ecological urbanism.
Speaker Bio
Matt Hern lives and works in East Vancouver (Coast Salish Territories) where he founded the Purple Thistle Centre and Car-Free Vancouver Day. His writing has been published on all six continents, translated into ten languages and he continues to lecture widely. He teaches at SFU and UBC and his most recent book is Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future. See www.mightymatthern.com for more.
Co-Presented by
SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and SFU Urban Studies
