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2014-05-06
Reading Urban Society through Material Entanglements
Professor Amin argues, based on a reflection on the infrastructures of informal settlements, that there is political merit in maintaining the distinction between visibility and invisibility. To contrast the agency in equal part – for the poor staking out a right to urban settlement – of visible improvisations forced by infrastructural absence, and for the invisibility of hard-won connectivity to the municipal mains for water, electricity, sanitation and transport.
Ash Amin is Professor of Geography at Cambridge University. He is the author of Land of Strangers and coauthor (with Patrick Cohendet) of Architectures of Knowledge: Firms, Capabilities, and Communities. Ash Amin is known for his
work on the geographies of modern living, for example thinking urban and regional society as relationally and materially constituted; and globalization as an everyday process that thoroughly reconstitutes meanings of the local. He has also contributed to thinking on the economy as a cultural entity, while his writings on race and multiculturalism have helped change policy work on the management of ethnic diversity.
The lecture is part of the ongoing program Resources.13; Radical Shift | Incremental Change: Rio de Janeiro at Mejan Arc, Royal Institute of Art.
Read about our program here.
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/Henrietta Palmer and Katarina Nitsch