The award-winning L.A. scholar and author of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear makes a rare Seattle appearance. His latest work of informed alarm is Who Will Build the Ark? The Architectural Imagination in an Age of Catastophic Convergence, in which he surveys what sort of cities will be built in our age of An Inconvenient Truth, record oil prices, and global warming. Our guess–the slums of Rio and Lagos may become a new urban template. BRIAN MILLER

Thu., Nov. 6, 7 p.m., 2008