Urban Conversations | Henry Grabar discusses Under Construction

Date and Time

April 28, 2025
12:00PM - 12:00PM EDT

Location

Plimpton Room (Barker Center 133)

Photo Lunch atop a Skyscraper credit Charles Clyde Ebbets 1932

Lunch atop a Skyscraper - Charles Clyde Ebbets, 1932  

Urban Conversations
Speaker: Henry Grabar
In conversation with Rachel Meltzer

Why has it become so difficult to build housing in the American city, and what does this tell us about the country's larger problems building things? In this talk, journalist Henry Grabar discusses some of the directions of his research and reporting on this subject.

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

About the Speakers

Henry Grabar is a journalist in Cambridge. He's a staff writer at Slate, where he writes the Metropolis column, and was the author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (2023) and the editor of The Future of Transportation (2019). He was a 2024 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. 

Rachel Meltzer is the Plimpton Associate Professor of Planning and Urban Economics at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

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, and is co-sponsored with the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard.