The City of Today is a Dying Thing - Des Fitzgerald

Event details

Join YESI’s Health and Environment theme for a lecture by Des Fitzgerald, a professor of medical humanities and social sciences (University College Cork), as he discusses his acclaimed book The City of Today is a Dying Thing—a provocative and thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between urban life, health, and the environment.

We have had the idea for a long time that cities are bad for us - that there is something about the noise, the stress, the clamour, the sense of competition, that is just not good for people who live in cities, and that is especially not good for their psychological well-being. This notion has more recently been joined by a second idea, which is that one important way to alleviate this problem is through the provision of green space. Today, there is general agreement that increasing people's nature-contact has a psychologically beneficial effect, and that this effect repairs at least some of the ravages of urban living. 

The City of Today is a Dying Thing - the title is a quote from modernist architect and unexpected vegetation-enthusiast Le Corbusier - is an attempt to think critically about this 'green is good' rhetoric.  Drawing on conversations with leading figures, and visits to experimental urban spaces, in the book and talk I'll suggest that we actually need to situate the recent fetish for green urbanism within a much longer history of reactionary counter-urban tendencies, and thus to think more critically about the nature-politics that underpins it. Abandoning ruritanian nostalgia, might we even learn to love - and learn to live well in - the noisy, diverse, hybrid spaces we call cities?