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The City of Our Dreaming

The Alchemy Lecture 2024

Laleh Khalili V. Mitch McEwen Pereira Leandro Gabriela Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

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Hardback

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English
Knopf Canada
28 October 2025
Four Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas.

Four Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas.

The third annual Alchemy Lecture took place in October 2024 at York University to a sold-out in-person audience and online viewers from multiple continents. Four Alchemists-thinkers and practitioners working across disciplines and geographies-shared their ideas of cities and how to shape them according to community needs. Their urgent, poignant and inventive lectures have been captured and expanded in these pages.

Princeton professor of architecture V. Mitch McEwen borrows the language of the swamp to suggest a city modeled on buoyancy, inviting us to consider floating ""as something other than displacement."" Iranian-American writer Laleh Khalili dreams of radical kinship, where even strangers have the means and desire to share a table, ""creating

bonds

through the rituals of reciprocal giving."" In the Bantu/Kongo tradition, Brazilian architect Gabriela Leandro Pereira points to dreams as the site from which all Black emancipation begins, leading to ""projects paved by the audacity to inhabit."" And Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson examines how collectives form at the thresholds between things, when one ""chooses life, Black life, Palestinian life, Indigenous life, the life of the watered, aired and landed . . . over and over again, across every scale, temporality and spatiality. Relentlessly.""

These lectures are clarion calls for new conceptions of city life. Here, our 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.
By:   , , ,
Series edited by:  
Imprint:   Knopf Canada
Country of Publication:   Canada
Volume:   3
Dimensions:   Height: 211mm,  Width: 139mm,  Spine: 12mm
Weight:   275g
ISBN:   9781039058064
ISBN 10:   103905806X
Pages:   184
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

The Alchemy Lecture is a partnership between York University and Knopf Canada, organized by Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York, CHRISTINA SHARPE. She is the author of In the Wake- On Blackness and Being; Monstrous Intimacies- Making Post-Slavery Subjects; and Ordinary Notes. LALEH KHALILI is the Al Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. 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 at 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 Territ rio Study Group. LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician. She is the author of eight previous books, including her latest non-fiction project Theory of Water- Nishnaabeg Maps to the Times Ahead. Her last album, Theory of Ice, was shortlisted for a Polaris Prize.

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