Des Fitzgerald: Green urbanism, health and city futures

⁠Episode 111 of A is for Architecture (www.aisforarchitecture.org/20...) ⁠ is a conversation with Des Fitzgerald, Professor of Medical Humanities and Social Sciences at University College Cork, about his fairly recent and quite well-covered book, The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow (www.faber.co.uk/product/97805...) , which he published this year with Faber & Faber.
Green urbanism is undergirded by an expectation - a belief? - that it will deliver on modernism’s promises of emancipated, healthful lives. The City of Today contests this. As Des explains, ‘the book is really an attempt to start […] thinking critically about the growing trend towards green, traditional, small, human scale - I would even say 15 minute - cities [and] that kind of vision of the city is something we need to develop critical language for. […] there's a pretty close mapping between 19th century discourse of the cities effect on character or its capacity to degenerate particular sorts of character in a heritable way [...] and our own discourse about the relationship between particular shapes of buildings and mental health disorders.’
A little bit saucy and rather funny, man, book and podcast.
You can find Des professionally at UCC (research.ucc.ie/profiles/A024...) and on X ( / des_fitzgerald ) .
Thanks for listening.
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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick ( / user-229193274 )