2019 | Ayona Datta
Finisterra Annual Leture was attended by Ayona Datta, Professor at University College, London (UCL). 'The smart safe city': curating gendered time, speed and violence in the networked periphery
Ayona Datta is Professor of Human Geography in University College London. Her broad research interests are in postcolonial urbanism, smart cities, gender citizenship and urban futures. In particular, she examines how cities seek to transform themselves through utopian urban visions of the future and their impacts on everyday social, material and gendered geographies. She uses interdisciplinary approaches from architecture, urban planning, feminist and urban geography, combining qualitative, digital/mapping and visual research methods to examine urbanisation and urban development as experiments in urban futuring.
Her publications include books and book chapters: Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections (2011); The Illegal City: Space, Law and Gender in a Delhi Squatter Settlement (2012); Mega-urbanization in the Global South: Fast cities: and new urban utopias of the postcolonial state (2017); Social media and the City: Of the people, for the people, by the people (2019).
Of the 66 participants we obtained 22 evaluations:
To the question: Initiative and organization of the event
- 59% considered it to be VERY GOOD;
- 23% found it EXCELLENT;
- 18% GOOD
To the question: Relevance of the theme presented
- 46% - Very Good;
- 32% - Excellent.
- 14% - Good
- 8% - Sufficient
Suggestions for topics in future Annual Lessons:
1) Projects that cross human geography and physical geography;
2) Requalification of old industrial areas;
3) Challenges for spatial planning in terms of: i) socioeconomic inequalities; ii) climate change; iii) regional development;
4) Precariousness in academia in the Portuguese and European context: main challenges;
5) Geographic Information Science: current methods.
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