The City of Our Dreaming - (The Alchemy Lecture) by Laleh Khalili & V Mitch McEwen & Gabriela Leandro Pereira & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Book Synopsis

The third annual Alchemy Lecture took place in October 2024 at York University to a sold-out in-person audience and online viewers from multiple continents. Four Alchemists--thinkers and practitioners working across disciplines and geographies--shared their ideas of cities and how to shape them according to community needs. Their urgent, poignant and inventive lectures have been captured and expanded in these pages.

Princeton professor of architecture V. Mitch McEwen borrows the language of the swamp to suggest a city modeled on buoyancy, inviting us to consider floating "as something other than displacement." Iranian-American writer Laleh Khalili dreams of radical kinship, where even strangers have the means and desire to share a table, "creating [bonds] through the rituals of reciprocal giving." In the Bantu/Kongo tradition, Brazilian architect Gabriela Leandro Pereira points to dreams as the site from which all Black emancipation begins, leading to "projects paved by the audacity to inhabit." And Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson examines how collectives form at the thresholds between things, when one "chooses life, Black life, Palestinian life, Indigenous life, the life of the watered, aired and landed . . . over and over again, across every scale, temporality and spatiality. Relentlessly."

These lectures are clarion calls for new conceptions of city life. Here, our Alchemists imagine the architectures and infrastructures that make possible, inevitable and irresistible gestures of freedom, modes of sustenance, and the necessity and pleasure of breaking bread, together.

About the Author

LALEH KHALILI is the Al Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. She has written or edited seven books, including Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration. V. MITCH MCEWEN leads Harlem-based Atelier Office and teaches on the faculty at Princeton University's School of Architecture. She is one of ten co-founders of the Black Reconstruction Collective, and her design work has been commissioned by MoMA and the Venice Architecture Biennale US Pavilion. GABRIELA LEANDRO PEREIRA is a professor at the Faculty of Architecture at the Federal University of Bahia. She is a member of the Lugar Comum Research Group and coordinator of the Corpo, Discurso e Território Study Group. LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician. She is the author of eight previous books, including her latest non-fiction project Theory of Water: Nishnaabeg Maps to the Times Ahead. Her last album, Theory of Ice, was shortlisted for a Polaris Prize.