GABRIELLE BENDINER-VIANI at Books Inc. Berkeley

Join Books Inc. Berkeley in welcoming Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani for a celebration of her book The Cities We Need!

An expressive book of prose and photographs that reveals the powerful ways our everyday places support our shared belonging.
Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? In The Cities We Need, photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani introduces us to the complex, political, and eminently personable stories of residents who answered this question in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California. Their universal stories and Bendiner-Viani’s evocative images illuminate what’s at stake in our everyday places—from diners to churches to donut shops. In this culmination of two decades of research and art practice, Bendiner-Viani intertwines the personal, historical, and photographic to present us with placework, the way that unassuming places foster a sense of belonging and, in fact, do the essential work of helping us become communities.
In this unique book, Bendiner-Viani makes visible how seemingly unimportant places can lay the foundation for a functional interconnected society, so necessary for both public health and social justice. The Cities We Need explores both what we gain in these spaces and what we risk losing as they are threatened by gentrification, large-scale development, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, Bendiner-Viani shows us how to understand ourselves as part of a shared society, with a shared fate; she shows us that everyday places can be the spaces of liberation in which we can build the cities we need.

“In her new book, Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani reveals the warm humanity that animates city blocks, corner stores, park benches, and casual neighborly nods. Most importantly, she knows that cities are essential because of the people in them and the mix of relationships, care, emotions, needs, and 101 reciprocities that they make in community with one another every day. These are the great urban stories we need and deserve.”
—Kemi Ilesanmi, Former Executive Director, The Laundromat Project
“There's a tenderness about this book that leaps off the page. Reading it, we can’t help but feel that we are becoming better human beings. It is a book to savor, a feast for your eyes and heart. And what’s more: it shows us how to make the cities we need. This book will speak to everyone, and most of all to those of us that want to create cities in which we can all prosper.”
—Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, author of Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is a visual urbanist and cofounder of the interdisciplinary studio Buscada. She is the author of Contested City, a finalist and honoree for the Brendan Gill Prize. A widely exhibited photographer, she holds a doctorate in environmental psychology from the Graduate Center, CUNY.

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