On 19 May 2014 LSE Cities’ Ricky Burdett presented at ‘The Decent City’, The Social Science Research Council, Brooklyn, New York in a discussion on Rio de Janeiro. Other panel members were Teresa Caldeira, University of California, Berkeley and José Castillo, arquitectura 911 and Harvard University.
Richard Sennett opened the conference examining the conference theme ‘What is a decency city?’ with Diane Davis, Harvard University and Ira Katznelson, Columbia University and the SSRC.
This conference aimed to probe a deceptively simple question: What is a decent city? Clear that such a city is not quiet, orderly or predictable, each of which is alien to robust urban life. In inviting considerations in a zone between more utopian reflections on the one side, and highly-focused instrumental policy considerations on the other, the conference aims to deploy a spatial imagination to interrogate design, toleration, and inequality as key concepts and sites as we search for thresholds of urban decency and means to achieve them.