Chair: Christene D’Anca (U of California, Santa Barbara)

0:0:19 Carole Delaitre (Trinity College, Hartford), “A new Eden? Rebuilding Notre Dame de Paris in the time of climate change”

0:22:51 Anastasia Gkoliomyti (Tokyo Institute of Technology), “Architecture’s Response-Ability towards Resilience: Lessons from Japan’s Architectural Ethnographies”

0:34:50 David Vivian (U of California Santa Barbara), “When Sci-Fi Meets Cli-Fi: Reimagining the City in Caribbean Science Fiction”

ABOUT:
(link to conference program: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n/2022-conference/programme/ )

This conference explores the theme of crisis and response as conveyed in cultural representations of urbanity. The 2020-21 pandemic has led to widespread speculation about how cities will change over the decades to come in response to the vulnerabilities of urban populations exposed by the virus. Other recent events have foregrounded the various roles that cities play as sites of political contestation and social conflict. Meanwhile, the nexus of existential threats associated with climate change has lent even greater urgency to the question of how cities must evolve, and whether they can do so in ways that promote more sustainable, equitable, and socially cohesive modes of existence.

The triumphalist tone that much urban theory took on at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is being heard less. Now, it seems, is a time for recognition of profound uncertainty, a time for learning from the numerous crises cities have overcome in the past. In particular, it is a time for awareness of the particular challenges facing peripheral cities, shrinking cities, and cities in the Global South. Many of the watchwords of the UN document--resilience, efficiency, development, consumption, sustainability--are themselves subject to critique, raising larger questions about how the proper goals of urban development should be defined and what principles should guide city planners and city dwellers in an era of proliferating challenges.

This conference was organized by the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS), with generous support from Governor’s State University, University of Helsinki, and the University of California Santa Barbara’s College of Letters and Science, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC), Graduate Center for Literary Research (GCLR), Department of French and Italian, and Comparative Literature Program