Urbanization Lecture Series
Series of Lectures with Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
Read a summary of the event: Exploring a city’s narrative
Tuesday, Oct. 21: “Migration: Storytelling the City” (6:30PM, Piper Auditorium GSD)
The worldwide stampede to urban areas has produced a set of narratives about the city; dislocation demands recollection. What are the official and unofficial stories of our cities? How do they attract migrants? The mystery of the self as it relates to the mystery of the city.
Wednesday, Oct. 22: “Alienation: The Sadness of Cities” (6:30PM, Piper Auditorium GSD)
Each city has its own sadness: loneliness, inequality, slums. After we have stayed in a city awhile, it becomes mapped with love, experienced and lost. The conjunctions between poetry and urbanism.
Thursday, Oct. 23: “Community: What is the City but the People?” (6:30PM, Stubbins 112, Gund Hall GSD)
Cities can be resilient not just in their physical structure but in their spirit. In the absence of a functioning government, they survive through a series of solidarity networks that sustain the populace, small solutions for the big city. What role does the state have in fostering them? How do we fashion a city that may not include everybody, but excludes nobody?
What is the city but the people?” asks Shakespeare in Coriolanus.
In this series of lectures, writer Suketu Mehta looks at the urban human being, exploring themes of migration, loneliness, and community in the world’s cities. Mehta is author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004), which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He has won the Whiting Writers Award and an O. Henry Prize for his essays and fiction, which have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper’s, Time, and Newsweek, and featured on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and “All Things Considered.” Mehta is currently working on a book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Both venues are in Gund Hall, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy St, Cambridge MA
Cosponsored with the Harvard Graduate School of Design
