Cities are Back in Town seminar: The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow

WEBINAR | BOOK DISCUSSION

We are living in one of the greatest periods of urbanisation in human history, with more cities in the world today than ever before. But is this definitely a positive thing? Are cities actually good for us? And what would the city of the future look like if we tried to make one that definitely was - would anyone want to live there?This book is about the fascinating and sometimes strange world of the people asking these questions - people trying to remake our cities from the literal ground up. It's the story of an attempt to get a hold of what the city of the future might look like according to some of the most influential and far-sighted people working to change it; to figure out when and how it was, exactly, that we all became convinced that city life was so bad for us. It's also a book about trees.

Speaker

Des Fitzgerald, Professor of Medical Humanities and Social Sciences at UCC

Des Fitzgerald is a sociologist and medical humanities scholar based at the Radical Humanities Laboratory, and Department of Sociology & Criminology at University College Cork. His interests are in sociologies of the psychological and brain sciences, which he has most recently transacted through an interest in how urban studies and architecture have taken up insights from these fields. He is the author, most recently, of The City of Today is a Dying Thing (Faber and Faber: 2024) and The Urban Brain (with Nikolas Rose. Princeton: 2022). He is a graduate of University College Cork, the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics, and his work has been supported by the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, the Volkswagen Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) among others.