Student News!

Draper graduate Scott Bankert (May 2010) will be presenting his paper,"Impossible Cities (Personal Accounts of Wonder in the Global Everyday)" at the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs' conference on "The Transformation of the 21st Century City" in October. Scott's paper description is below:

In Rio de Janeiro’s downtown, a vast tented city cloaks beneath its pitched blue tarps myriad, provisional, black-market businesses that can be seen uncannily from the windows of adjacent high-rise global commerce and governing institutions. Encountering this double occupancy in Rio’s downtown leaves one with a feeling of wonder–-an unsettled urgency requiring movement, encounter, revelation in order that these seemingly contradictory spaces divulge their secret inner workings and relationships. Through scholarly research, participant observation, photography and the written word, this project engages the spatial predicaments erupting in Rio de Janeiro and in cities across the planet in hopes of finding better ways of addressing the perplexing social conditions that emerge from everyday spatial situations.

Congrats, Scott!