This year's BCGIT colloquium will explore globalization and information technology in the context of global cities and built environments. Speakers will consider how the production of urban and architectural space shapes, and is spaced by, the complex array of social, economic and political processes associated with globalization. The colloquium will examine issues ranging from the relationship between digital technology, globalization and urban space, to identity and citizenship in the transnational city. In addition to regular lunch-hour meetings in the Harris Room, a special session in the Spring term featuring Anthony D. King and Mike Crang will investigate significant critical and theoretical debates surrounding research on global cities, and discuss future directions.

Lesley Naa Norle Lokko is a Principal Lecturer and Academic Leader in the School of Architecture and Interior Design, University of North London. She received her architectural degrees from University College London and has taught and lectured in Africa, Europe and the United States. Her research focuses on questions of race and cultural identity and their relationship to architectural and urban culture. She is the editor of White Papers, Black Marks (Minnesota, 2000) and is currently completing her PhD in Architectural Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London.

Michael Peter Smith is currently a Professor of Human and Community Development and the Chairman of the Graduate Group in Community Development at University of California, Davis. He is also a member of the Sociology and Geography Graduate Groups and a Faculty Associate for the Center for California Studies at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on urban social theory, globalization and transnationalism, international migration, and urban racial and ethnic politics. He is the author of Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Blackwell, 2001).

Mike Crang's interests lie in the field of cultural geography. He has worked extensively on the relationship of social memory and identity. He has workedon practices of public and oral history, photography and museums looking especially at examples in the UK and Sweden. This interest includes the study of tourism more generally, and he is currently finishing an edited collection on this theme (Tourism: between place and performance, with Somon Coleman, to be published by Berghahn) as well as preparing for the launch of a new journal Tourist Studies. He is also interested in more abstract issues regarding time-space, action and temporality and edits the journal Time & Society. He has just finished a collection on spatiality and social theory (Thinking Space, edited with N Thrift, Routledge, 2000). His latest project is looking at transformations of space and time through electronic technologies, with specific work based around Singapore's "Wired City" initiative. He is currently director of the MA in European Urban and regional Change.

Anthony D. King, Bartle Professor. Ph.D. 1983, Brunel University. Social production of building form; colonialism and urbanism; social and spacial theory; postcolonial theory and criticism; transnational cultures. His books include the edited collection Re-presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital, and Culture in the 21st-century Metropolis, (New York University Press, 1996), The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (Oxford University Press, 1995) and Global cities : post-imperialism and the internationalization of London (Routledge, 1990) Recent articles include "Cultures and Spaces of Postcolonial Knowledges" for Nigel Thrift et al. Handbook of Cultural Geography, London: Sage, 2002 (in press); "Writing Transnational Planning History," in Joseph Nasr and Mercedes Volait, eds. Imported or Exported Urbanism? London: E and F Spon. 2001/2002 (in press)."The Problem of Global Culture and the Internationalization of Architecture," in Revista Internacional de Sociologia, 2001 (in Spanish) (in press).

Mark Poster is currently a Professor of History at UC Irvine and also teaches in the Film Studies Program and the critical theory emphasis at UC Irvine. He is the author of The Second Media Age (Blackwell, 1995) and a number of articles and essays on social and cultural theory of electronically mediated information. He has also written extensively on postmodern critical theory, including Cultural history and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges (Columbia University Press, 1997) and Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context (Cornell University Press,1989)

Dr. Helaine Silverman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her interests, among others, are the archaaeology of the Central Andes, tourism, and the management of the archaeological heritage. She has written several books and numerous articles on the Nasca Culture in southern Peru, the focus of her doctoral work. More recently, Dr. Silverman has become involved in the historical-anthropolgical study of the creation of archaeological tourism in Peru. On that subject she has published an article "Touring ancient times: the present and presented past in contemporary Peru".



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