Practice in Public Lecture Series Presents: The Cities We Live In

Join us in our new home, Cubes designed by LOT-EK, for the inaugural Practice in Public Lecture Series featuring visual urbanist and author of The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places (MIT Press, 2024) Dr. Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani. Dr. Bendiner-Viani and Socrates Sculpture Parks Co-Director Katie Dixon will have a conversation about the importance of the places where we meet and gather and how our relationships both shape and can be shaped by them. Books will be available for sale or you can purchase them in advance by visiting: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049030/the-cities-we-need/

About the book
An expressive book of prose and photographs that reveals the powerful ways our everyday places support our shared belonging.

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. 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. 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.

About the Author 
Dr. Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is a visual urbanist and cofounder of the interdisciplinary studio Buscada. She is the author of The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places (MIT Press, 2024) and Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (University of Iowa Press, 2019), a finalist and honoree for the Brendan Gill Award. A widely exhibited photographer, she was a professor of urban studies at the New School and a fellow at the International Center of Photography and the Centre for Urban Community Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. She holds a doctorate in environmental psychology from the Graduate Center, CUNY.

*RSVPs are encouraged and donations are appreciated though not required for entry.

Host or Publisher Socrates Sculpture Park