Events

Lewis Mumford Lecture: “Rethinking Livability,” Featuring Aimi Hamraie

Please join us on Thursday, March 13, 2025, at 5:30 pm for our prestigious Lewis Mumford Lecture. This year, we have the honor to welcome the renowned designer, researcher, and disability justice organizer, Aimi Hamraie, who will be presenting their lecture "Rethinking Livability."

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. Live captioning and ASL interpretation will be available upon request. For access requests or questions, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu. 

 

Aimi Hamraie (they/them) 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.

"Rethinking Livability": 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 twentieth-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.

Suggested Reading: Hamraie, Aimi. "Crip Mobility Justice: Ableism and Active Transportation Debates." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (2021).

 

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 eleven years.

 

Previous Lewis Mumford Lecturers:

2004 Jane Jacobs
2005 Mike Davis
2006 Enrique Peñalosa
2007 Amartya Sen
2008 David Harvey
2009 Paul Auster
2011 Richard Sennett
2012 Janette Sadik-Khan
2013 Marshall Berman
2014 Theaster Gates
2015 Rebecca Solnit
2022 Yasmeen Lari
2023 Emily Badger
2024 David Gissen