Walter D. Greason, Ph.D., associate professor and chair of the Department of Educational Counseling and Leadership, is the featured speaker in the “Future of Cities” speaker series on sustainability, race, and technology in cities of the future hosted by the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech on Wednesday, April 17 at 7 p.m. Preregistration is required to attend Greason’s presentation, “Wakanda, Afrofuturism, and the Future of Cities.”
Greason is the author of “Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey,” and the co-author, with Anthony Pratcher, of “Planning Future Cities,” as well as co-author, with Julian Chambliss, of “Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History.” He is also the creator of the Wakanda Syllabus, a bibliography of resources for exploring the artistic and cultural context of Marvel’s Black Panther comics and the fictional world of Wakanda.
The “Future of Cities” speaker series provides the opportunity to explore the city as a complex system with physical, social, economic, technological, and environmental dimensions that change over time and interdependently shape the city and its inhabitants. It examines theories about city formation, structure, change, and imagination about its future with implications for sustainability, in the context of a rapidly globalizing world. Planning and managing cities and their future requires an understanding of several interconnected systems that affect the physical and non-physical aspect of the city.