Urban Conversations | The Foot, The Pen, The Naive Question (tentative title)

How might walking and writing as an intertwined practice—of attunement, recognition, acknowledgement—make possible an “intimate urbanism”? We’ll explore the promise and challenges of the city at close range, and reflect on how the walker creates possibilities for a richer understanding of the commons by inscribing the curiosity-driven feet onto space and inscribing experiences in those spaces onto the imagination and the page. 

Registration is required for this event. Lunch will be provided.

Speaker: Garnette Cadogan is the Tunney Lee Distinguished Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. He is an essayist whose research explores the promise and perils of urban life, the vitality and inequality of cities, and the challenges of pluralism. Named by the literary magazine Freeman's as one of 29 writers from around the world who "represent the future of new writing” in 2017, he writes about culture and the arts for various publications.

Discussant: Teju Cole has for the past two decades used fiction, essays, and photography to explore place and memory. His books include the novels "Open City" and "Tremor," and the essay collection "Known and Strange Things." He is currently Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing in the English Department at Harvard.

About the Series

As our planet becomes increasingly urban, this series seeks to expand our understanding of cities and urbanization across sites and scales. The Urban Conversations aim in particular to link humanistic approaches with spatial investigations. We host public talks, and provide a venue for researchers to share works-in-progress with an interdisciplinary community, in a conversational format. Urban Conversations is chaired by Bruno Carvalho and Daniel Agbiboa. This event is co-sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard.