Reposted from Helen Knight's MIT News Story, posted on January 21, 2019.
For many years, China has been struggling to tackle high pollution levels that are crippling its major cities. Indeed, a recent study by researchers at Chinese Hong Kong University has found that air pollution in the country causes an average of 1.1 million premature deaths each year and costs its economy $38 billion.
Lisa Peattie, a celebrated scholar and a lifelong activist who was Professor of Urban Anthropology in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and recipient of the ACSP Distinguished Educator Award, passed away on December 13th, 2018. She was 94.
She was born in Chicago, IL and raised in Illinois, Mexico, and Guatemala. Peattie’s international upbringing, surrounded by her parents’ fieldwork in Morelos and Yucatán, Mexico, nurtured an early interest in the connections across academic disciplines.
We are experiencing unprecedented levels of displacement as conflict and crises fuel what is widely regarded as one of the worst humanitarian crises on record. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates 68.5 million individuals are forcibly displaced worldwide -- and nearly 60 percent of these individuals are seeking shelter in urban areas, not refugee camps.
Can we redesign governance to improve public engagement processes - and can we expand our definition of a public to include an increasingly complex and diverse group of individuals and opinions? The Move, a podcast and collaborative learning platform, aims to gather people of all backgrounds seeking to facilitate real civic engagement to support cities, communities, and other institutions in creating the space needed to peacefully struggle and make meaningful progress in a democracy.