Kian Goh on Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice
On 27-October, Kian Goh shared From Urban Resilience to Climate Justice as part of the 2021 Fall Urbanism Lecture Series, co-hosted by the City Design & Development Program (CDD), SMArchS Urbanism Program, and Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT. Kian Goh, RA, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and her current research investigates the urban spatial politics of climate change adaptation.
In her lecture, Kian Goh unpacks the spatial politics of urban design through the lens of climate adaptation; focusing on power dynamics and political structures she traces flows of ideas and influence between sites and adaptation strategies in Southeast Asia, North America and Europe. Her research presents a new socio-spatial typology of urban adaptation that incorporates top-down and bottom-up approaches driven by the need to adapt to climate change.
Exploring the dualism between top-down and bottom-up community driven design processes and the exploitative economies of disasters, her comparative analysis exposes the imbalance in climate response, economies of access and community engagement and agency in the development of the urban environment. Speaking to the socio-spatial and technological legacy of colonialism, power production and the resurgence of colonial practices, marginalization, and isolation, Kian proposes a framework for designing equitable and just urban adaptation responses.
By Joris Komen, Norman B. (1938) and Muriel Leventhal Fellow, Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.
