Urbanism Beyond Corona: Prof. Ozayr Saloojee to speak at conference

November 16, 2020

9:00 am-7:30 pm

Associate Professor Ozayr Saloojee will participate in a roundtable discussion on “Risk and Normalization” at the Urbanism Beyond Corona conference on Monday, November 16.

The online conference is free and open to the public. It takes place from 9:00 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. PST. To register for Zoom links click here.

This conference reflects on #UrbanismBeyondCorona, a series of Instagram posts initiated by the Urban Works Agency and the Experimental History Project at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA.

From June to July 2020, 118 architects, urbanists, and scholars of the built environment offered predictions, warnings, gifts, hacks, instruments, prompts, and questions that reflected on the role designers and urban actors can play in shaping cities after COVID-19.

Professor Saloojee (@o.saloojee) posted on June 3 about the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests. The image is a white square with a circular photo of two masked Somali women.

“What role can architects and urbanists play in shaping cities?” he wrote. “Show up, stop, refuse and fight ‘whiteness’ and ‘whitespace’ in all its gross, vicious, greedy, racist, grifting, militarizing, formal, aesthetic, spatializing, and brutalizing power – wholesale, from our pedagogies to our practice.”

The conference will begin with multiple, concurrent roundtable discussions involving participants connected by themes: Solidarity, Power, Iterative Urbanism, Public Space and Collectivity, Justice, Resources and Territories, and Biopolitics.

Professor Saloojee is joined at the Risk and Normalization roundtable by Galo Canizares, Mari Fujita, Nataly Gattegno, Jungin Kim, Karen Kubey, Padma Maitland, and Eric W. Rodenbeck.

The event concludes with a keynote address by Giovanna Borasi, director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

The Urban Works Agency and the Experimental History Project at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco are co-presenting the conference. It is part of the After Hope program at the Asian Art Museum.