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Kamran Ali moderating a panel, titled Megacity: Urbanisation, Challenges and Opportunities with Nadi Abusaada, Nancy Lin, Pamela Nguyen Corey and AbdouMaliq Simone (remote) at March Meeting. Sharjah Art Foundation, 2023
In the neoliberal era, cities pose novel challenges and offer previously unimagined opportunities for its inhabitants, such as educational and professional advancements as well as living circumstances that are no longer circumscribed by rural societal formations. Still, new urban migrants face persistent discrimination, highly unequal access to housing and services and increasingly toxic environmental conditions. Growing and sprawling urban settlements also enact extractive relationships with the informal labour economy and with the natural resources around them. Urbanisation, arguably, deeply shapes the most innovative and emergent cultural formations, in music, cinema, art and media.
The panelists, whose expertise represents a wide range of practices and theoretical positions, will reflect on the above-mentioned issues related to urbanisation, ranging from the rise of megacities and their histories, to the current challenges of inequalities and environmental issues.