GLOBAL METROPOLITAN STUDIES
December 2021 Newsletter
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Welcoming new GMS DE students
We are pleased to welcome five new GMS DE students this month. Adrienne Dodd, a PhD student in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, is interested in climate change, natural hazards, climate displacement, just climate adaptation and resilience. Matt Falcone is a PhD student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, studying environmental fluid mechanics, climate change adaptation, coastal resiliency, nature-based solutions, and infrastructure. Cheng-Kai Hsu is a PhD student in City and Regional Planning and is interested in micromobility, public health, environmental exposure, and mobile sensing. Sarah Lee is a PhD student in History, researching the Central Valley, urban history, the history of policing, racial capitalism, uneven development, and agroburbs. Michael Virtucio is a PhD student in Civil and Environmental Engineering and studies transportation networks, agent based modeling, disaster resilience, and public transportation. Please join us in welcoming Adrienne, Matt, Cheng-Kai, Sarah, and Michael!
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Welcoming new GMS faculty affiliates
GMS is also pleased to welcome four new faculty affiliates this month. Adda Athanasopoulos-Zekkos is an Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Marta González is an Associate Professor jointly appointed by City and Regional Planning and Civil and Environmental Engineering. Zoé Hamstead is an Assistant Professor in City and Regional Planning. Zachary Lamb is also an Assistant Professor in City and Regional Planning. Welcome to Adda, Marta, Zoé, and Zachary!
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Summer 2022 Research Funding
GMS will again be offering summer research funding for DE students in Summer 2022. Students can receive up to $5000, and applications for pre-dissertation research are especially encouraged. For further information, please see the GMS site. Students will submit a PDF application to the following Google Form. Please see the form for complete requirements of the PDF. A faculty recommendation on behalf of the student is also required, to be submitted at a separate faculty Google Form. Applications are open now and are due by February 28, 2022. |
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Spring GMS Events
GMS is currently finalizing the events schedule for the Spring 2022 semester. We will be sponsoring several follow-up events to further our new Critical Infrastructures initiative. GMS will also be sponsoring multiple book talks in the coming semester. Finally, we are interested in offering further professional development events in the Spring. If students are interested in any particular professional development topics, we welcome suggestions!
Attendance at GMS events will continue to be limited to UC Berkeley affiliates who have pre-registered. Attendees will have to show their green campus access badge for admittance.
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Recombinant urbanization
Sai Balakrishnan
Assistant Professor
City and Regional Planning / Global Metropolitan Studies
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My previous research, which culminated in a book titled Shareholder Cities: Land Commodification along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press 2019), looked at the urbanization along massive new infrastructure projects called economic corridors in post-liberalization India. The focus of the book is the production of private mega-enclaves amidst agricultural fields along these corridors. Corridor urbanization defies our familiar binaries of city and village, and our inherited disciplinary silos of agrarian and urban studies. Instead, the book shows how current uneven urban development accretes onto older histories of agrarian capitalism (tracing back to the Cold-War-era Green Revolution and earlier irrigation projects of the late-colonial period), thus constituting agrarian-urban processes that I call "recombinant urbanization." Embedding urban growth within older agrarian histories and geographies is needed if we are to move beyond the methodological trap of the "city" which renders invisible agrarian processes of dispossession and extraction that are constitutive of urbanization.
My new research asks how these processes of "recombinant urbanization" travel to contexts like Northern California. How can, and why should, we center cities like Fresno and Stockton as the privileged sites of urban theory? How do the networks of smaller cities and towns in N. California, embedded within exclusionary histories of industrial agriculture, open up new terrains for conceptualizing "cities" and urbanization? Most importantly, how can new analytical frameworks that grasp the complicity of the agrarian question in the urban question open up new political possibilities for planners and planning? I am also in the very early stages of exploring a studio in the Central Valley that explores these research questions.
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