Join us for the Hopper Lecture “Sustainable Cities: Enhancing Sustainable Transitions Through an Understanding of Risk” presented by Professor Patricia Romero-Lankao.

Urban areas can play a key role in the transformations that are required in humankind’s ways of understanding and responding to climate and sustainability challenges. Fulfilling this role, however, will require bringing together urban planners, social and physical scientists, business leaders, engineers, and others representing diverse knowledge and power domains. Such an undertaking creates its own set of seemingly intractable complications. This presentation begins with a brief description of the current state of an interdisciplinary understanding of how climate and urbanization contribute to intra- and interurban inequalities in risk. It will then examine across global to local scales, how urban areas, as places with unique social, institutional and environmental histories, shape risk. It will close with some remarks on how urban actors might enhance the capacity of urban populations to mitigate risk and adapt in fair and sustainable ways.

Paty Romero-Lankao has a joint appoint as a Senior Research Scientist at the Transportation and Hydrogen Systems Center of National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the University of Chicago’s Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation.

Rozanski Hall, Room 102