Cities After…Miodrag Mitrašinović on Public Space, Oligarchy and Urbanization - Pt. 4

d@w Contributor:

May 17, 2022

[S02 E08] New

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán speaks with Miodrag Mitrašinović, one of the world’s foremost researchers on public space. Robles-Durán and Mitrašinović consider differing definitions of "public space," contrast Hudson Yards in Manhattan with Corona Plaza in Queens as distinct public investments with vastly different impacts on New York City’s residents, and speculate about a more equitable future in which communities can reappropriate the means of production of urban space away from oligarchs and philanthropists in order to build spaces that serve larger cultural, social, and political processes.

About our guest: Miodrag Mitrašinović is an architect, urbanist, author, and Professor of Urbanism and Architecture at Parsons School of Design, The New School university in New York City. His scholarly work focuses on two parallel and complementary lines of inquiry. First, on the role design plays as an agent of social and political change, and as catalyst for critical urban transformations; Secondly, Miodrag’s work also focuses on the generative capacity and infrastructural dimensions of public space specifically at the intersections of public policy, urban and public design, and neoliberal processes of privatization of public resources. Miodrag is the editor of Architecture and the Public World: Kenneth Frampton, co-editor of Public Space Reader (with Vikas Mehta), co-editor of Emerging Public Realm of the Greater Bay Area: Approaches to Public Space in a Chinese Megaregion (with Timothy Jachna), the editor of Concurrent Urbanities: Designing Infrastructures of Inclusion, co-editor of Travel, Space, Architecture (with Jilly Traganou), and author of Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space.

Cities After... is a Democracy At Work production. Launched in May of 2021, it is a bi-monthly podcast about the future of cities; grounded in our daily urban struggles, it is part dystopian and part utopian. The intention is to entice civic imagination into action, because a more just and sustainable urban future is possible. A new episode is released every other Tuesday at 4pm EST.

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LEARN MORE about this new podcast: Cities After... hosted by Miguel Robles-Duran

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