Intersections - Des Fitzgerald

Join us for the next instalment in our 2026-2027 Intersections series, jointly hosted by the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape and the Farrell Centre. Attendance is free of charge, but booking is required to guarantee your place. 

Book here

The City of Today is a Dying Thing

We have had the idea for a long time that cities are bad for us - that there is something about the noise, the stress, the clamour, the sense of competition, that is just not good for people who live in cities, and that is especially not good for their psychological well-being. This notion has more recently been joined by a second idea, which is that one important way to alleviate this problem is through the provision of green space. Today, there is general agreement that increasing people's nature-contact has a psychologically beneficial effect, and that this effect repairs at least some of the ravages of urban living. The City of Today is a Dying Thing - the title is a quote from modernist architect and unexpected vegetation-enthusiast Le Corbusier - is an attempt to think critically about this 'green is good' rhetoric.

Drawing on conversations with leading figures, and visits to experimental urban spaces, in the book and talk I'll suggest that we actually need to situate the recent fetish for green urbanism within a much longer history of reactionary counter-urban tendencies, and thus to think more critically about the nature-politics that underpins it. Abandoning ruritanian nostalgia, might we even learn to love - and learn to live well in - the noisy, diverse, hybrid spaces we call cities?

Biography

Des Fitzgerald is a sociologist and medical humanities scholar whose work aims to explore the connections between the humanities and the biological sciences. H eis Co-Director of the Radical Humanities Laboratory at University College Cork and has written on topic include cities, autism, mind-wandering, stress, and, most  recently, parenthood and grief, His research His most recent books are The City of Today is a Dying Thing (Faber & Faber, 2025) and The Urban Brain (Princeton University Press, 2023). His new book, Birth Weight, will be published by Faber & Faber in 2027