Book Talk: Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani | The Cities We Need

EventIn Person

In Partnership with Housing Works

On Wednesday, October 2 from 6-8 PM, join us for another installment of the Municipal Art Society + Housing Works author series, featuring a discussion with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, writer of the recently published The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places, and writer and social psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove.

The Cities We Need is described as “an expressive book of prose and photographs that reveals the powerful ways our everyday places support our shared belonging” (MIT Press). Join us as the two writers discuss the book and Bendiner-Viani’s practice as a writer and visual urbanist.

Light refreshments and snacks will be available for purchase. Additionally, there will be copies of Bendiner-Viani’s book available for purchase at the event. Doors at 6 PM. Event at 6:15 PM. Email events@mas.org with any questions.

THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT; WALK-INS WELCOME.

About the Book

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. Read more here >

Wednesday, October 2
6:00 PM — 8:00 PM

Housing Works Bookstore
126 Crosby Street
New York, NY 10012

Tickets:
Free!

Attend
  • Writer Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani (Featured Writer) and social psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove (Moderator).
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  • The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places (MIT Press).
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Meet the Speakers

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani (Featured Writer)
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.

Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, DLFAPA, Hon AIA (Moderator)
Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, is a social psychiatrist and the Helen and Robert Fullilove of Community Health at the University of Orange. Since 1986, she has conducted research on AIDS and other epidemics of poor communities. with a special interest in the relationship between the collapse of communities and decline in health. She has published over 100 scientific papers and eight books. Among her books are the highly-regarded Urban Restoration Trilogy, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It, Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities and Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All. She holds two honorary doctorates and is a distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and honorary member of the American Institute of Architects. In the Fall of 2023 she delivered the Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College based on her new research on the “Tao of K-drama.”