Author Meets Critics: Des Fitzgerald, The City of Today is a Dying Thing

Cities are bad for us: polluted, noisy and fundamentally unnatural. We need green space, not concrete. Trees, not tower blocks. So goes the argument. But is it true? What would the city of the future look like if we tried to build a better life from the ground up? And would anyone want to live there? In “The City of Today is a Dying Thing” (Faber 2024), Des Fitzgerald takes us on an urgent, unforgettable journey into the future of urban life, from shimmering edifices in the Arizona desert to forest-bathing in deepest Wales, and from rats in mazes to neuroscientific studies of the effects of our surroundings. Along the way, he reveals the deep-lying and often controversial roots of today's green city movement, and offers an argument for celebrating our cities as they are - in all their raucous, constructed and artificial glory.

Coinciding with the launch of the paperback edition of the book, Prof. Fitzgerald will introduce his work which examines the “the deep-lying and often controversial roots of today’s green city movement” before an  interdisciplinary panel of scholars from the University of Sheffield offer responses.
 

Speaker: 

Des Fitzgerald, University College Cork. Des is Professor of Medical Humanities and Social Sciences at UCC - where he’s based at the Radical Humanities Laboratory, and in the Department of Sociology & Criminology. A sociologist by training, Des has particular interests in sociologies and histories of the psychological sciences, in social and cultural theory, and in urban studies. Before returning to UCC in 2022, I taught or researched at the University of Exeter, Cardiff University and King's College London, and Aarhus University. My work has been supported by the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, the Volkswagen Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) among others. 

Respondents: 

Dr Liam Healy (Architecture and Landscape, University of Sheffield). Liam’s research interests focus around situated critical, speculative design practice and research, DIY design, care, the notion of the Anthropocene, and more-than human entanglements with design. Liam is currently working on an AHRC funded research project exploring access to woodlands with Forestry England, and an ongoing ethnography of bike trail builders drawing on architecture, participatory design and inventive methods.

Dr John Miller (English, University of Sheffield). John’s research focuses on writing about animals, ecology and empire from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular emphasis on the late Victorian period. He is President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK & Ireland.)

Dr Bridget Snaith (Architecture and Landscape, University of Sheffield). Bridget is a UK Design Council Expert in built environment design, and a partner with Shape Landscape Architecture, a London based participative design practice for public greenspace design. She has been designing urban landscapes with London’s diverse communities for over 20 years.