Author Event! Bruno Carvalho's "The Invention of the Future"!

Join us on February 5th at 6pm as we host Bruno Carvalho in conversation with Sandy Zipp to discuss his latest book, The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World. Signed copies of the book will be available for pickup.

About the book:

For the past three centuries, urban dwellers and planners have imagined future cities that would be radically different from those of the past. Planners pursued progress, whether focused on flying vehicles above, sewage systems below, or daily life in between. Yet, as Bruno Carvalho shows in this original and wide-ranging history, which features some sixty illustrations, modern cities continuously defied predictions. Visionary designs and technological innovations created dramatic, unforeseen outcomes, and the ongoing urban boom is a story of continuity as well as rupture. A compelling history of imagined futures and the transformation of urban life, The Invention of the Future also suggests what we might learn from the stories of our cities as we shape them for the twenty-first century.
Moving between large-scale changes and detailed examples, this captivating narrative tells the story of key moments and turning points: the rebuilding of Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake; the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for Manhattan; Parisian reforms from 1853 to 1870; Le Corbusier’s plans for South American cities in the 1920s and 1930s; the postwar victory of the car; the utopian capital of Brasília; and urban growth in Africa.
In recent decades, Carvalho argues, the capacity to invent urban futures has become increasingly constrained. Social and environmental challenges loom large. But the story is not over. While cities helped create current problems, compact and transit-rich urbanization might be our best hope to combine high living standards with sustainability. Sometimes, moving forward can involve reaching back to the future.

About the author:

Bruno Carvalho specializes in urban life and how cities change. He is the author of The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World (Princeton University Press, forthcoming in January 2026).The book opens in the 1750s, when city dwellers and planners began to assume that the future would be radically different from the past. It recasts modern urbanization within a history of competing visions, amid dramatic technological, intellectual, and cultural transformations. The book argues that the futures of the past can help us better understand the history of built environments, as well as our own crossroads in an increasingly urban world. He is a professor at Harvard University, where he teaches courses on cities. Along with The Invention of the Future, he is the author of Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro.

About the moderator:

Sandy Zipp is a cultural, intellectual, and urban historian with particular interest in United States political culture since World War II, 20th century cities and urbanism, the built environment, and nonfiction writing. His most recent book is The Idealist: Wendell Willkie's Wartime Quest to Build One World (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020). He is also the author of Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford, 2010) and the co-editor of Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs (Random House, 2016). He is the Director of the Urban Studies Program at Brown University, and he also serves as Vice President of the Board of DownCity Design, a community-based urban design studio in Providence.

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