The City of Our Dreaming: The Alchemy Lecture

The third annual Alchemy Lecture brought together four ＂Alchemists＂--thinkers and practitioners working across disciplines and geographies--to share a constellation of ideas for the future. Their urgent, poignant and inventive lectures compose The City of Our Dreaming, which shares their ideas for cities and how to shape them according to community needs. Together, V. Mitch McEwen, Laleh Khalili, Gabriela Leandro Pereira, and Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offer new models for crafting architectures of freedom in disparate imagined spaces. From suggesting a city modeled on buoyancy that reconsiders displacement to a dream of radical kinship and bonds through reciprocal giving, to ＂projects paved by the audacity to inhabit＂ that are built from dreams--the site from which all Black emancipation begins--and to the ways collectives form at the thresholds between things, The City of our Dreaming is a clarion call for new conceptions of city life. The Alchemists imagine the architectures and infrastructures that make possible, inevitable and irresistible gestures of freedom, modes of sustenance, and the necessity and pleasure of breaking bread together.

Laleh Khalili is the Al Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter. She has written or edited seven books, including Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration.

V. Mitch Mcewen leads Harlem-based Atelier Office and teaches on the faculty at Princeton University’s School of Architecture. She is one of ten co-founders of the Black Reconstruction Collective, and her design work has been commissioned by MoMA and the Venice Architecture Biennale US Pavilion.

Gabriela Leandro Pereira is a professor on the Faculty of Architecture at the Federal University of Bahia. She is a member of the Lugar Comum Research Group and coordinator of the Corpo, Discurso e Território Study Group.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician. She is the author of eight books, including her latest nonfiction project Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead. Her 2021 album, Theory of Ice, was shortlisted for a Polaris Music Prize.