The CITY Institute Seminar Series is open to the public and includes talks and events on all things urban. Speakers include: academics, practitioners, alumni, CITY visiting scholars and postdoctoral fellows, and others.
Winter 2026
| Date | Time | Title | Speakers |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 22, 2026 | 2:45 - 3:45 pm | The Urban Dimensions of Wildfires (Y-EMERGE Disaster Seminar Series) | Harris Ali (Director, CITY Institute, Professor, Sociology, York University) |
| February 4, 2026 | 2:00 - 3:30 pm | Psychiatric Epidemiology and Urban Sociology in 20th-Century Canada: Another History of Knowledge in the field of Mental Health | Emmanuel Delille, Associate Researcher, Centre Marc Bloch (Humboldt University, Berlin) and Associate Professor, Nagoya University |
| March 5, 2026 | 2:00 - 3:30 pm | Beyond Poverty: Socially Embedded Push Factors in Adolescent Rural-Urban Migration | Sylvia Gyan, Visiting Faculty Fellow, University of Ghana and Visiting Scholar, Global & Environmental Health Lab, Dahdaleh Institute |
Fall 2025
| Date | Time | Title | Speakers |
|---|---|---|---|
| September 11 2025 | 2:30 to 4:00 PM | Inhabiting the afterlives of extended urbanization in Noida, India The hauntings of housing in a city stretched between the state and capital | Devra Waldman (Florida State University) |
| September 12 2025 | 1:00 - 3:00 PM | BOOK LAUNCH - Queerburbia: A Dialogue about LGBTQ2S Suburban Place-making | Alison Bain (York University) and Julie Podmore (John Abbott College) |
| October 30 2025 | 2:30 to 4:30 pm | The State of (Anti-)Racism in Germany | Mahir Türkmen ( PhD Student, Institute for Social Research Frankfurt, CITY Institute Visiting Scholar, Fall 2025) |
| November 7, 2025 | 10:00 - 11:00 am | Nurturing Infrastructures of Care: Centering Healing, Imagination and Solidarity in Polycrisis Response with Dr. Chiara Camponeschi | Chiara Camponeschi (Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Dahdaleh Institute) |
| November 18, 2025 | 3:00 - 4:00 pm | The Misrecognition of Misrecognition: Caste, Recognition and the Politics of Waste Work in Urban India | Harsha Anantharaman (YCAR Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies), Aarushie Sharma (PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, York University) |
| November 25, 2025 | 1:30 - 3:00 pm | City Hall – a material expression of elite power, urban democracy or an active civil society? | Laura Kolbe (Professor, Department of History, University of Helsinki, CITY Institute Visiting Professor, Fall 2025) |
Winter 2025
|
Date |
Time |
Title |
Speakers |
|---|---|---|---|
|
January 30 2025 |
5:00 to 6:30 PM |
Bringing Lefebvre to urban planning in Geneva |
Karine Duplan & Sebastien Lambelet |
|
February 27th 2025 |
12:30 to 1:30 PM |
Impact of Wildfire Smoke on Labour and Buildings |
Lindsey Rolheiser |
|
March 7 2025 |
1:00 PM to 2:30 PM |
Jakarta: The City of a Thousand Dimensions |
Abidin Kusno, Kanishka Goonewardena, Shubhra Gururani, Kenneth Cardenas |
|
March 21 2025 |
4:30 to 6:00 PM |
Contested Security Politics in Post-Bankruptcy Detroit |
Stefan Treffers |
|
March 31 2025 |
12:00 to 1:30 PM (TBD) |
Seeing Democracy Like a City |
Ross Beveridge |
Summer 2024/ Fall 2024
|
Date |
Time |
Title |
Speakers |
|---|---|---|---|
|
April 9 2024 |
5:30 - 7:30 PM |
Access to Post-Secondary Education: For whom? For what? |
Beverly-Jean Daniel, Tanya Aberman, Miles Turner, Vidya Shah, Sonia Lewis |
|
April 24 2024 |
1:00pm to 2:30 pm |
Problematising cycling equity: City-wide networks and differentiated infrastructures in Mexico City and Toronto |
Thomas Van Laake |
|
May 9 2024 |
1:00pm to 2:30 pm |
Graduate students roundtable: Researching Climate Change in Canadian Cities (co-sponsored by Robarts) |
Graduate Students |
|
June 14 2024 |
1:00pm to 2:30 pm |
Building an “inclusive city”: The production of “winning” and “losing” communities as part of the “urban revitalization” of old pericentral neighborhoods of Brussels |
Alexandre Donnen |
|
August 12 2024 |
1:00pm to 2:30 pm |
Walking the City Series: Aki’s Echo with Professor Lisa Myers |
Lisa Myers |
|
September 19 2024 |
11:00 to 1:00 PM |
"Parochial Territorializations. Towards a critique of insular worldbuilding" |
Anke Schwarz |
|
October 25 2024 |
8:00 AM to 7:00 PM |
** CITY Institute Graduate Student Conference |
Graduate Students |
|
December 6 2024 |
11:00 to 12:30 PM |
Book Talk – Outlaw Capital: Everyday Illegalities and the Making of Uneven Development |
Jennifer L. Tucker |
|
December 12 2024 |
3:30 to 5:00 PM |
Social spatial patterns of urban development and how they are affected by ‘big tech’ |
Constance Carr |
Fall 2022 / Winter 2023
| Date | Time | Title | Speakers |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 28 | 1:00pm to 2:30 pm | Time and Race in Postwar Urban America | Prof. Paul Lawrie |
| November 25 | 1:00pm to 2:30 pm | Power to the People: Electricity and Urban Life in Nineteenth-Century Nigeria | Prof. Damilola Adebayo |
| January 27 | 1:00pm to 2:30 pm | (t.b.d.) | Dr. Araby Smyth |
| February 24 | 1:00pm to 2:30 pm | (t.b.d.) | (t.b.d.) |
| March 17 | 1:00pm to 2:30 pm | Urbanism without Guarantees: A parallax view of everyday life and place-based urban political economy, by | Prof. Christian Anderson, University of Washington Bothell, EUC Scholar-in-Residence |
| April 14 | 1:00pm to 2:30 pm | Art in the Korean Smart City | Dr. Melanie Wilmink |