Georgia Tech, French Consulate team up for suburban symposium

<img src=”https://media1.fdncms.com/atlanta/imager/outer-city-inner-suburb-will-garner-insigh/u/original/4204145/1320177546-picture_1.png” alt=”“Outer City/Inner Suburb” will probe lovingly into suburbia this weekend” title=”Outer City/Inner Suburb will garner insight from the suburbs of France and Atlanta” width=”600” height=”304” />

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• Georgia Tech will probe lovingly into suburbia this weekend

This should be cool. Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture and the Consulate General of France this weekend will host “Outer City/Inner Suburb: The Physical, Social and Cultural Fabric Beyond the Center,” a symposium of discussions, presentations, and films that will compare the suburbs (or “banlieues”) of France and Atlanta.

Remember the media frenzy over French race riots in 2005? The social conditions of France’s diverse and oftentimes disadvantaged suburban communities have made them infamous for civil unrest, and will be the focus of this weekend-long scholarly soiree. Additional attention will be paid to civil issues facing Atlanta’s own suburbs. From the College of Architecture’s release about the two-day event:

As sites of significant immigrant and first-generation communities, these landscapes offer important insights into the cultural, social, and economic change occurring in France and the United States today. While the banlieues in Paris continue to receive fevered attention, the demographic transformations of the Atlanta metropolitan region over the last twenty years have not been given the attention they merit.

The event, which is part of the 2nd annual France-Atlanta series, features architects, artists, politicians and professors that include French-Algerian filmmaker Yamina Benguiguiand and Pierre Cohen, Mayor of Toulouse. The flyer contains a full schedule, and can be viewed here.

It’s all free and open to the public, so go out and get educated.