In May, Professor Roger Keil, from York University, will be at UFMG as a guest in the FUNDEP/IEAT Chairs program. During his stay at the university, the professor will give seminars and a conference open to the public on the process of global suburbanization.

On May 9, Professor Roger Keil will give the Great Conference Mobilities, microbes, metabolisms: infectious disease in the suburban century. The activity will take place in Auditorium 1 of the Faculty of Economic Sciences at UFMG, at 2:30 pm.

To participate in the conference, you must register through the UFMG Event Management system. Anyone who registers and signs the attendance list will be entitled to a certificate. The conference will be held in English, with simultaneous translation into Portuguese.

Global suburbanization – defined by peripheral growth in cities and towns around the world – has increased mobilities between human communities and between humans and non-human nature. In many parts of the globe, rural-urban migration continues, with the presence of urban regions extending further into previously non-urbanized areas, and formerly urbanized spatial relationships are being redefined through complex processes of post-suburbanization.

“In other words, as urban planner AbdouMaliq Simone of the University of Sheffield in England reminds us, it is not entirely clear where the urban ends, as there are many intertwined movements underway between people moving between the urban and non-urban worlds. previously dichotomized. These movements drastically altered the relationships between global suburbanization and infectious disease, shifting metabolic fluxes across vast expanses of urbanized terrain and beyond.” – highlights Professor Roger Keil.

At the conference, Professor Roger Keil intends to explain that such aspects can be usefully studied in the epistemic domains of suburban political ecology and political pathology, as they are two conceptual and empirical domains that speak specifically about the breaking of boundaries and lines between the urban and the rural, the social and the natural, and the built and the unbuilt. “Indeed, neither the embodied movement of disease (through pathogens such as viruses and bacteria in human and animal bodies) nor the boundless metabolism of the political ecologies of the sprawling city can be meaningfully observed, contained, and explained in the ancient structure of the interior. urban and suburban exterior” – concludes Professor Roger Keil.

Seminars at UFMG address life in urban society and the outskirts of cities in the context of the climate emergency

On May 4th, Professor Roger Keil will give the Seminar “After Suburbia: Living in urban society” in the postgraduate program in Economics (Cedeplar), at 2 pm, in a location to be confirmed. The seminar will be in English, without simultaneous translation. On the 11th of May, Professor Roger Keil will be at the Seminar “Political ecology beyond the city: Situated peripheries and the challenge of the climate emergency” at the Auditorium of the Institute of Geosciences of UFMG, also at 2 pm. Both seminars are open to the public and do not require registration to attend.

About the professor

Roger Keil is a professor at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University. He researches global suburbanization, urban political ecology, cities and infectious diseases, infrastructure and regional governance. Among his publications are Suburban Planet (Polity, 2018) and After Suburbia (UTP, ed. with Fulong Wu, 2022), as well as Pandemic Urbanism (Polity, 2023) and Turning Up the Heat: Urban policy ecology for a Climate Emergency (MUP , ed. with Kaika, Mandler, and Tzaninis, 2023). Co-founder of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA) (INURA), he was the inaugural director of the CITY Institute at York University, and was co-editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.