Des Fitzgerald: Green urbanism, health and city futures

07/03/24 • 51 min

⁠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.

Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

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

You can find Des professionally at UCC and on X.

Thanks for listening.

Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

Previous Episode

Victoria Jane Marshall: Mapping the periurban

⁠In Episode 110 of A is for Architecture⁠ Victoria Jane Marshall, senior lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the National University of , discusses themes and methods underpinning her recent book, Periurban Cartographies: Kolkata’s Ecologies and Settled Ruralities, which she published with Oro Editions in spring this year.

As Victoria notes, an increasingly public concept, the periurban describe those parts of urban peripheries that are ‘generally imagined [...] as “becoming urban” and generally, in doing so, it sort of erases the rural in the imagination - of it just being a zone which is on its way to becoming urban, like a transition zone’. Instead, Victoria proposes, thorough the lens of a deep mapping in Kolkata, Bengal, we might instead ‘look more flat, and more even, at everything that's going on, and, and not bifurcate, not separate urban and rural, and not separate society and nature, but look at how they're all entangled together.’

It's a beautiful book, and Victoria's a great talker, the mapping is wonderful, so listen to her, see the book, and get freshness.

You can find Victoria professionally at her work and on LinkedIn. The book is linked above.

Thanks for listening.

Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

Next Episode

Tony Fretton: The social art of architecture

⁠A is for Architecture’s 112th episode is with the British architect, Tony Fretton. Previously founder and principal of Tony Fretton Architects, and more recently acting as a design consultant, and previously Chair of Architecture and Interiors at TU Delft, Tony’s work includes Westkaai, Residential Towers, Antwerp, The British Embassy, Warsaw, Art Museum, Fuglsang, Denmark, and the The Red House and the Camden Arts Centre, London.

Speaking of his work on galleries, Tony says: ‘I think it's much more subtle and much more interesting to make buildings which sometimes are impressive and visible, and sometimes [...] very low visibility. That's much more interesting, much more intellectually satisfying. And how can you make somebody feel comfortable, without [them] even seeing you do it? That's the measure of a good host, a good person, that you let people see the work. [...] In Furslang we made a series of rooms which are different in character: one is for temporary exhibitions, and the other for small scale works in gold frames, and then there was section on Danish Impressionism. But each of them shares a vocabulary but it's treated in slightly different ways so that as you go through the room, you see the art but in the periphery of your vision the room stimulates you’.

Sums it up rather neatly.

You can find Tony on Instagram, on at tonyfretton.com, too.

Thanks for listening.

Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick