Matt Hern ~ "Bottom Up Urbanism - Citizen Engagement"

Purple Thistle

Matt will talk about a radically democratic urbanism built on neighbourhood-based horizontal organizing. He will be using the Car-Free Vancouver and the Purple Thistle projects as a recent local example, as well as innovative models like Havana’s urban gardens, Buenos Aires’ autonomistas and Community Land Trusts to describe a participatory urbanism that necessarily requires a high tolerance for messiness. It is a vision that rejects cities as vehicles for capital accumulation, suggesting instead cities as sites for encountering strangers and practising democratic citizenship

Matt lives and works in East Vancouver with his partner and daughters where he founded the Purple Thistle Centre and Car-Free Vancouver Day.  His writing has been published on all six continents, translated into ten languages and he continues to lecture widely. He holds a PhD in Urban Studies and teaches at SFU and UBC. His last books are Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn’t Always Better (2007) and Everywhere, All the Time (2008). His new book about Vancouver’s urban design and development titled The City from Below: Finding Common Ground in a Liquid Vancouver will be released in the fall of 2009