Des Fitzgerald: Green urbanism, health and city futures

A is for Architecture

⁠Episode 111 of A is for Architecture⁠ is a conversation with Des Fitzgerald, Professor of Medical Humanities and Social Sciences at University College Cork, about his fairly recent and quite well-covered book, The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow, which he published this year with Faber & Faber.

Green urbanism is undergirded by an expectation – a belief? - that it will deliver on modernism’s promises of emancipated, healthful lives. The City of Today contests this. As Des explains, ‘the book is really an attempt to start […] thinking critically about the growing trend towards green, traditional, small, human scale - I would even say 15 minute - cities [and] that kind of vision of the city is something we need to develop critical language for. […] there's a pretty close mapping between 19th century discourse of the cities effect on character or its capacity to degenerate particular sorts of character in a heritable way [...] and our own discourse about the relationship between particular shapes of buildings and mental health disorders.’

A little bit saucy and rather funny, man, book and podcast.

You can find Des professionally at UCC and on X.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick