Last month, a team of six staff from the Civic Initiative (a business group of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Donahue Institute) were in Islamabad. They held a three-day follow-up conference for alumni from recent cohorts of the Study of the U.S. Institutes Comparative Public Policymaking program that has been held annually by the Civic Initiative since 2010. The SUSI program is funded by the US Department of State Education and Cultural Affairs Office.
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The City in South Asia Conference
The City in South Asia
January 3-6, 2016
Karachi at the Department of Architecture and Planning, NED University
Co-organized through a collaboration between the American Institute of Pakistan Studies and Oxford University Press
View the Program Here
View the Flyer Here
The workshop will explore how the working poor survive in their private and work lives in South Asia’s expanding cities. We seek to encourage discussion on the life worlds of the poor in urban South Asia, specifically how working class men and women experience the economically uncertain urban milieu. The workshop will link the issue of economic marginalization and poverty to larger and pertinent discussion on minority rights, access to land tenure, distribution of wealth, equitable access to resources, gender equity and food security. Related to this, we want to discuss issues of urban form and aesthetics, leisure and pleasure, and the new ways in which young and old reconfigure urban space to create meaningful lives for themselves. How the urban is visualized, what affect it produces, what kinds of creative energies it unleashes and how new media takes on this challenge remain discussions that need further retrospection and analysis.
