Top influencers debate complex ethical questions around what makes a resilient city

No rubber chicken here.

Red-pepper hummus, za’atar-spiced pita chips, a hot-pink puddle of gluten-free gnocchi, topped off by generous slabs of New York-style turtle cheesecake — those were just a few items from last month’s menu that greeted more than 130 people at Mac Hall.

And on the side? A colossal helping of provocative conversations, sparked by Elizabeth Cline, New York-based author of Overdressed: the Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, and Emilie Maine, BA’18, founder of Maine Ethics, an information platform that aims to help you make ethical decisions about contentious matters.

• Above photo, from left: MC of Fashion: The Ugly Reality, Taryn Meyers, manager, engagement, University of Calgary; Elizabeth Cline, keynote speaker and author of Overdressed; Emilie Maine, keynote speaker and founder of Maine Ethics; and MC Sarah Skett, postdoctoral research fellow, sustainability studies. 

Who knew that 20 per cent of China’s industrial waste comes from its textile industry, or that producing 100,000 polyester tops requires 415,755 pounds of coal, or that eight per cent of the contents of American landfills are clothes? The alarming numbers and powerful slides of factory fires, as well as the atrocious working conditions of millions of people in the textile trade, prompted an avalanche of audience questions. 

Next panel discussion addresses urban resilience 

The next event, scheduled for Nov. 27, should prove equally compelling. It's dubbed Cities of the Future: Are Resilient Cities Sustainable?

Moderated by Dr. Craig Gerlach, PhD, the panel will examine the pressures cities will face by 2030 if the projections are right and five billion people inhabit them. How will we answer (and are we willing to ask?) complex ethical questions around the rise of driverless cars, robotics, big data, epigenetics and energy use? With the UN estimating that climate change alone could force up to 77 million people into poverty, how will our social systems begin to cope? Failure to invest in urban resilience could have significantly adverse impacts on the urban poor unless action is taken.

Moving the intellectual horizons forward, our panellists will attempt to answer what makes a resilient city, the very kind that bounces back from physical, social and economic challenges. We like to define a sustainable city as one that balances consumption with the carrying capacity of our planet, but is this realistic? This is the question the panel will attempt to answer — are the ways in which we become more resilient actually more unsustainable in reality?

Join us Nov. 27 in the MacEwan Ballroom where you’ll be sated by delectable vegetarian fare and mentally prodded by urban planners, academics and futurists.