Feb
17
6:00pm
Festival of Ideas: Samira Shackle and Ben Wilson, How Do We Re-imagine the City?
By Bristol Ideas
Ben Wilson conducts a global tour of the key metropolises of history while Samira Shackle goes deep into the vast and sprawling modern-day mega-city of Karachi, Pakistan.
Together they explore how our cities are created, managed and how they might be re-imagined.
Cities have sparked most of our political, social, commercial, scientific and artistic revolutions. It is these world-changing, epoch-defining moments that are Wilson’s focus.
Karachi is a place of political turbulence; a melting pot of cultures and religions; a city of lavish wealth and absolute poverty. Shackle uncovers the lives of a few of its 20 million inhabitants so she can tell the bigger story of the city as a whole over the past decade.
With their cosmopolitanism under increasing attack from the revival of nationalism, it has never been more important to understand cities and the role they have played in making us who we are.
This is an advance event for the fourth Festival of the Future City that takes place 20-21 October 2021.
Ben Wilson’s Metropolis: A History of Humankind’s Greatest Invention is published by Jonathan Cape; Samira Shackle’s Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Contested City is published by Granta. Buy both books from Waterstones, our bookselling partners.
It’s important to us that ideas and debate are affordable to everyone. It’s also important that our commentators, artists, writers, poets and thinkers are paid. This is a Pay What You Can event. You are invited to choose your own contribution to the event, from £0 to £8. All proceeds go towards supporting our speakers and sustaining Festival of Ideas. The option to attend for free is available for all online events.
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Samira Shackle credit Peter Fingleton
hosted by
Bristol Ideas
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