Born in Peru, Fernando Calderón-Figueroa accompanies us to learn about how cities have been designed to welcome or not their citizens. His research focuses on geography and territoriality with a focus on different international cities. He describes his fascination for how amazing humans have developed technology to adapt to their needs and create shelter. However, he questions the impact of built environments in urban design, and the concept of trust among people in relation to those contexts. He posits that there is a history of displacement, gentrification and social mobility that responds to how cities evolve and change over time. Listen to know more about our favourite spaces in the city of Toronto and our relationships with them.

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Biography:
Fernando Calderón Figueroa is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto. Fernando’s main interests are urban and political sociology, social policy, and quantitative and computational methods. His dissertation addresses the relationship between the built infrastructure of cities and social capital in three different contexts: Canada, Peru, and Colombia. Fernando is a member of the Urban Genome Project, where he conducts interdisciplinary research on urban social policy and neighbourhood change.
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Cite this podcast (APA):
Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, June 29). CES5E8 – geography territoriality and land. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces5e8-geography-territoriality-and-land

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Sources:
Olson, A. W., Calderón-Figueroa, F., Bidian, O., Silver, D., & Sanner, S. (2021). Reading the city through its neighbourhoods: Deep text embeddings of Yelp reviews as a basis for determining similarity and change. Cities, 110, 103045. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.103045