"Rethinking Livability" is the topic of Aimi Hamraie's Mumford Lecture on Thurs., March 13, 2025 at 5:30 p.m.
Aimi Hamraie, the renowned designer, researcher and disability justice organizer, will deliver this year's Lewis Mumford Lecture at The City College of New York on Thurs., March 13, 2025. The talk begins at 5:30 p.m. in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture's Sciame Auditorium and is entitled "Rethinking Livability.” The lecture is free and open to the public.
Hamraie is associate professor of Medicine, Health, & Society at Vanderbilt University, and director of the Critical Design Lab, an international collaborative of disabled designers, artists, and researchers. Hamraie’s scholarship focuses on design, architecture, and urbanism, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies. They are the author of “Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability” and the forthcoming book, “Enlivened City.” Hamraie is also presidential appointee to the U.S. Access Board and a 2022 United States Artists Fellow in Media.
Architects and urbanists often invoke “livability” in the pursuit of more healthy, sustainable, and economically robust cities. Related to these goals are the imperatives of urban “activation,” mobility, and beautification in shaping the “urban good life.” But underlying these commonsense goals are normative ideas of life itself, particularly what types of embodiment, movement, and activity the built environment ought to promote. Drawn from Hamraie’s forthcoming book, “Enlivened City,” this lecture traces ideologies of livability from 20th century urban renewal efforts through contemporary New Urbanism, with a specific focus on what Hamraie terms “urban ableism,” an infrastructural preference for ablebodiedness that pervades the imperatives of health, sustainability, and economy. As alternatives, Hamraie draws on urban speculative fiction and the work of disabled artists and designers to imagine alterlivability, or conceptions of the “urban good life” grounded in radical forms of accessibility, hospitality, and interdependence.
For those interested, Hamraie’s "Crip Mobility Justice: Ableism and Active Transportation Debates" (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2021) is suggested reading.
Live captioning and ASL interpretation will be available upon request. For access requests or questions, please contact:
ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu
.
About the Lewis Mumford Lecture
Each spring, the Spitzer School of Architecture and its Urban Design Program present the Lewis Mumford Lecture and seminar. Named for writer, architecture critic, and urbanist Lewis Mumford, who attended City College, the series invites the world’s most distinguished urbanists to speak freely and publicly about the future of cities and the social purposes of architecture. This series was initiated by the late Michael Sorkin, distinguished professor of architecture and director of the Urban Design Program at the Spitzer School, and curated by him for 11 years.
Previous Lewis Mumford Lecturers
Marshall Berman Rebecca Solnit Yasmeen Lari Emily Badger David Gissen
Click here for more information about the Mumford Lecture.
About The City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. Education research organization Degree Choices ranks CCNY #1 nationally among universities for economic return on investment. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. Labor analytics firm Lightcast puts at $3.2 billion CCNY’s annual economic impact on the regional economy (5 boroughs and 5 adjacent counties) and quantifies the “for dollar” return on investment to students, taxpayers and society. At City College, more than 15,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. In 2023, CCNY launched its most expansive fundraising campaign, ever. The campaign, titled “Doing Remarkable Things Together” seeks to bring the College’s Foundation to more than $1 billion in total assets in support of the College mission. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.
Thea Klapwald
e:
tklapwald@ccny.cuny.edu