Vyjayanthi Rao at Urban Democracy Lab - NYU
Deen Sharp
Terreform co-director and new Managing Editor of Public Culture, Vyjayanthi Rao, will be presenting at Urban Democracy Lab's Engaged Urbanists Working Group this Monday, October 14.
Rao is an anthropologist and writer studying architecture, infrastructure and social life in large cities. She has written several essays and have edited two books so far. The first is Speculation Now: Essays and Artworks, which draws together multi-disciplinary reflections on speculation and speculative practices in contemporary life and artistic practices. The second, titled Occupy All Street: Olympic Urbanism and Contested Futures in Rio de Janeiro, is a collection of essays exploring the spatial transformation of Rio in the shadow of the 2016 Olympic Games. The book was launched at CUNY Graduate Center with David Harvey and the editors, Rao, Mariana Cavalcanti, and Bruno Carvalho. The event was chaired by Amy Chazkel, Associate Professor of History, CUNY, Queens College and the Graduate Center. It was sponsored by the Public Space Research Group, Graduate Center, City University of New York.
See more from Terreform’s archive. From Storefront New York to HAND annual meeting, “The Center Cannot Hold” and the Nexus Between Urbanization.
OCCUPY ALL STREETS: OLYMPIC URBANISM AND CONTESTED FUTURES IN RIO DE JANEIRO
Bruno Carvalho, Mariana Cavalcanti and Vyjayanthi Rao Venuturupalli, Editors
Contributors: Bruno Carvalho, Mariana Cavalcanti with Julia O’Donnell and Lilian Sampaio, Gabriel Duarte with Renata Bertol, Beatriz Jaguaribe with Scott Salmon, Guilherme Lassance, Bryan McCann, Theresa Williamson, and Vyjayanthi Rao Venuturupalli
“Occupy All Streets is a brilliant and searing indictment of the injustice, violence, militarisation, elitism and mind-boggling waste inherent in planning and organizing Rio as host city of the 2016 Olympics.
Through punchy prose and superb visual material, its contributors expose the myths that sustain mega-event urbanism; draw out the deep histories of branding Rio as an aesthetically exceptional city; and, most important of all, explore the possibilities that exist for organizing megacities more justly.
An extraordinary book!”