Mills College alumna and UC Berkeley professor Ananya Roy gave a guest lecture on campus Oct. 29.
Sociology professor Ted Thomas introduced Roy, who graduated from Mills in 1992. She went on to do her graduate work in urban studies and city planning at Berkeley, where her doctoral thesis on gendered poverty in Calcutta won a university-wide award for being the best thesis of the year. Roy spent a semester teaching at Mills for Thomas, while he was on sabbatical. She was then offered a position at Berkeley.
Roy discussed the concept of the modern in architecture and urban design. She discussed modernization as a process of economic, social and political change, and modernism as a celebration of the modern.
The lecture focused on the spatial management of social diversity and on historical attempts to design environments to effect social change. Roy also discussed cities as places that embody the tension between utopia and reality, planned space and lived space.
