Victoria Nguyen, Mellon postdoctoral fellow candidate, will give a lecture, ‘‘Designing Sustainability: Containment, Circulation, and Contingency in Beijing.’’ This lecture investigates the lived and imagined effects of urbanization without limits at precisely the moment when amplifying visions of ecological precarity are dominating debates in the earth sciences.

In the context of China’s unprecedented mass urbanization program, it interrogates the logics of sustainable design that animate urban development in China today. Thinking across the vital interconnections of air, water, and land in the life of the city, I examine how China’s recent Sponge City Initiative mobilizes the closed world logics of sustainability discourse to address the challenges of urban water management, asking after the excesses and contingencies that might exceed and escape such paradigms.