Brown Bag Seminar, University Center for Social and Urban Research

UCSUR’s Brown Bag Speakers Series Presents…

Tyeshia Redden, PhD, Visiting Professor, Gettysburg College

Friday, March 23, 2018

Title: Urban Apartheid & the 2016 Summer Olympics

Tyeshia Redden is an urban planner whose work examines housing, urban governance, and social policy. Before receiving her Ph.D. in Design, Construction, & Planning from the University of Florida, she was employed by DeKalb County Government as an economic development and housing research analyst in the metro-Atlanta region. Dr. Redden's talk focuses on her work that examines the forcible evictions preceding the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Redden argues that the evictions, coupled with a strategic disinvestment in transit nodes, were a component of a larger municipal plan of urban apartheid. The study links hyper-commodification of the urban landscape to urban governance failures and asserts a healthy community of scholar-activists exists globally, leveraging their academic skillsets to address social inequalities. Redden is currently a Visiting Professor at Gettysburg College and conducting a grant-sponsored neighborhood resilience study in Gainesville, Florida.