About

Writing Cities is a student-led collaboration and a process of exchange between graduate students from the Cities Programme and Urban@LSE at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and Harvard Law School. It emerges out of a process of inquiry and discussion about the city, in which energy has been invested by students and faculty members. Writing Cities aims to foster research on cities that cuts across disciplinary boundaries and addresses a broad audience. As popular and academic interest in cities increases, the notion of “urban studies” has become ever more diffuse and contested. Within this shifting territory, new critical research and rigorous theory is needed to ensure vitality in such a broad, inter-disciplinary field. As emerging academics and practitioners situated between the social sciences, humanities, and practice, Writing Cities aims to initiate a conversation on future scholarship on and engagement with cities.

Since 2008, Writing Cities has organized a series of conferences on a rotating basis between London, UK and Cambridge, MA and has produced three publications compiling a selection of working papers and documenting the interdisciplinary processes of the workshops. Writing Cities has substantially benefited from the generosity and intellectual commitment of Gerald Frug, Richard Sennett, Fran Tonkiss and Lawrence Vale; and from the institutional support of the LSE, MIT and Harvard.