Jamie Wang

Storying Urban Sustainable Futures: a More-Than-Human Lens

As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, there is growing enthusiasm for building sustainable, livable and “natural” cities. At the same time, the imaginary of an alluring urban ecofuture is often driven by a narrow version of sustainability, paired with high-tech and persistent economic growth. What kinds of sustainable futures are we calling forth, and at what and whose expense? What kinds of other possibilities are squeezed out in the process? Drawing on her new book Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore, and more recent research in Hong Kong, Jamie Wang will examine the multifaceted and contested stories of urban sustainability and urban environmental issues through a more-than- human lens. Using an interdisciplinary urban environmental humanities approach, Wang will look at how diverse biotic and abiotic elements such as urban greenery and infrastructures co-shape cities and their social-cultural and economic relations. As the talk highlights the disconnection and illogic of some taken-for-granted urban sustainability solutions, it asks what it might mean to reconfigure contemporary practices and ethics toward more multiplicitous ways of living in an increasingly urbanized environment.

Jamie Wang is an urban environmental humanities scholar and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong. She is author of Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore (MIT Press, 2024), and editor at the journal Feminist Review. Her current writing and thinking examines sustainable urban-making, technological imaginaries, and multimodal storytelling in the context of climate change and environmental injustice. For more information, please visit jamiewang.org.

Light refreshments will be served. This event is open to Columbia University affiliates with a valid university ID. Any questions on the events can be directed Diana Guo, dg3372@columbia.edu; Vinita Govindarajan, vg2588@columbia.edu; Mauricio Enrique Rada Orellana, mer2245@columbia.edu

The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS) is organized by the second year PhD students in Urban Planning: Vinita Govindarajan, Diana Guo, and Mauricio Rada Orellana.