Urban Floods: Interdisciplinary Perspectives - Conference
Urban Floods: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Thursday, April 12, 2018 6:30-8:30pm, followed by a reception
2911 Broadway
A conversation on climate and catastrophe with Solomon Hsiang, University of California, Berkley and Saskia Sassen, Columbia University
Friday, April 13, 2018 9:00am-5:00pm
2911 Broadway
All day conference.
Full schedule and link to registration is available here.
The Center is pleased to support the Initiative on Extreme Weather & Climate as they present: Urban Floods: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
This unique conference seeks to bridge the gap between physical scientists – who draw on physical observations, quantitative data analysis, computer simulation, and visualization – and social scientists and humanists who focus on participant observation, case studies, and other interpretive methods.
Our focus for this conference is the relationship between physical development choices and environmental risk, with specific focus on large-scale urban floods.
This one-day conference will address major urban floods, past, present and future. The goal is to understand these events in as holistic a way as possible, considering scientific and humanist questions together, and informed by historical context. We will focus on global linkages between extreme weather events, with a focus on South Asia and the United States. We ask how these disasters reflect the confluence of urban development decisions, natural climate variability, and human-induced climate change. What are the relative roles of urban development decisions, e.g., reclamation, zoning, patterns of land use and urbanization, natural climate variability, and human-induced climate change? How does scientific knowledge and risk get translated and how does the answer depend on where we are in the world and the historical context of local priorities? What do these events of the recent past teach us about the future, when these cities will be increasingly encroached upon by rising seas?
The conference is envisioned as the first in a series on the theme of Science and Global Urbanism organized through the Center for Science and Society, and the Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate.
Supported by ISERP with co-sponsorship by Center for the Study of Social Difference, the Center for Spatial Research, and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Full schedule and link to registration is available here.