The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places w/ Photographer & Urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

View photographs and hear stories from Bendiner-Viani's latest book about the everyday places that are vital to building community!

The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places w/ Photographer & Urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Talk Highlights:

  • Discover the connection between belonging and place
  • Learn about the essential role of everyday places in building coherent societies, and helping people talk across difference, especially in a polarized society
  • See how everyday places can help to overcome the epidemic of loneliness 
  • Examine the impact of changing neighborhoods, gentrification, and development
  • Find out what "visual urbanism" is!

About this Event:

Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? In this talk, building on her new book The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places, 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 do the essential work of helping us become communities, laying the foundation for a functional interconnected society, even in the most polarized of times. 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 Speaker:

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 for a decade 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.

All photos by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

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