Ananya Roy in Conversation with Laura Postarini and Tyrene Calvesbert

GSAPP Conversations

UP students Laura Postarini and Tyrene Calvesbert speak with Ananya Roy, Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare and Geography and inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin, in advance of her lecture at the school on February 25, 2019. They discuss Ananya Roy’s current research around metropolitan segregation and racial banishment in Los Angeles, and decolonization of the urban planning discipline in the United States. “What might decolonial logics look like? In urban planning, it starts with thinking about the role of our discipline and profession in this colonial violence…I want to know what reparations urban planning is going to make for the tremendous colonial harm that we have inflicted. I want to know how our instruments of planning are deeply colonial or imperial, or rooted in the extermination of indigenous people in this country. What then do we do with those instruments? The moment of Trumpism ironically is an opportunity for us to have these conversations.” – Ananya Roy