With increasing urbanisation the sustainability of urban development is becoming of crucial importance. The first wave of mega city growth took place with little concern for the environmental damage that it would cause, the unhealthy nature of the city and the social dislocation that would follow. For example, air pollution, caused by the unchecked expansion of car use, is now understood to have serious impact on health, especially amongst school age children. Furthermore, water quality is often problematic with plastic pollution and increasing problem. After overviewing these problems this taster lecture will then turn to look at how mega cities are attempting to mediate these issues and the many challenges they face in doing so. Within this it will also explore how social justice can be achieved in such actions i.e. how can the most marginalised groups, who are most often hit hardest by the negative aspects of rapid urban growth, be included in the more equitable development of the city.
The lecture will then turn to explore how while mediation has had some success it is clear that new approaches are needed in the future as cities need to move towards post-carbon futures, improve the health of their population and become more inclusive overall. This will see a change in the role of urban planners as they are moving beyond traditional planning roles, such as the design of cities, to having to take a more holistic approach to planning which includes environmental, social and political aspects of urban development. The lecture will be based on the experiences of numerous mega cities from both the global north and south with particular attention paid to the role of planning in the recently launched Dubai 2040 masterplan which has the potential to become the new best practice in sustainable planning for mega cities.
Dr John Round
Senior Lecturer in Human Geography
John Round is a socio-economic geographer whose main research interest is concerned with how people/households develop tactics to cope with marginality in all its forms. His PhD examined how senior citizens survive in the Russian far north east city of Magadan in the face of extreme economic marginalization and hostile climatic conditions. After this he researched the experiences of middle aged men in St Petersburg in relation to changing notions of work in the early post-Soviet period. From this he developed an interested in informal economic practices as a coping tactic to economic exclusion and this led to a large scale project, funded by the ESRC, exploring the nature and role of the informal economy in Moscow and Kyiv concluding that informality is an integral part of the post-Soviet everyday.
John’s research is influenced by the work of Lefebvre in relation to (non)theories of the everyday and state/society relationships and de Certeau with regard to the construction, and difference between, the strategies and tactics of everyday life. He is currently working on a major long-term project, supported by the Open Society Foundation, to explore the everyday experiences of labour migrants in Moscow and Kazan from Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. This project, undertaken alongside Dr Irina Kuznetsova from Kazan Federal University and Professor Sergei Sergei Ryazantsev, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, examines the problems labour migrants face in Russia and the impact of migration on those remaining at ‘home’. It is particularly interested in how migrants access social welfare, such as health services; the precarious nature of their employment; problems with registration and housing and interactions with the state.
He is currently spending most of his time at the National Research University, Higher School of Economics in Moscow, where he is part of the Faculty of Sociology and the Centre of Advanced Studies. He recently completed a five month fellowship at the University of Hokkaido and will be undertaking a fellowship in 2014 at the University of Helsinki.