The Cities We Need: Author Talk with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places is an expressive book of prose and photographs that reveals the powerful ways our everyday places support our shared belonging.
In this webinar, author Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani shares images and excerpts from the book.
Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? Photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani introduces us to the complex, political, and eminently personal stories of residents who answered this question in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California. Their universal stories and Bendiner-Viani’s evocative images illuminate what’s at stake in our everyday places — from diners to churches to donut shops. In this culmination of two decades of research and art practice, Bendiner-Viani intertwines the personal, historical, and photographic to present us with placework, the way that unassuming places foster a sense of belonging and, in fact, do the essential work of helping us become communities.
This author talk was presented as part of the Preservation League of NYS's Preservation Book Club. Thank you to our sponsor, the Peggy N. & Roger G. Gerry Charitable Trust.
About the Author: Dr. Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is a visual urbanist and cofounder of the interdisciplinary studio Buscada. She is the author of The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places (MIT Press, 2024) and Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (University of Iowa Press, 2019), a finalist and honoree for the Brendan Gill Award. A widely exhibited photographer, she was a professor of urban studies at the New School for a decade and a fellow at both the International Center of Photography and the Centre for Urban Community Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. She holds a doctorate in environmental psychology from the Graduate Center, CUNY.