October 5, 2011

Lab Team member Charles Montgomery shares insights from his first week at the Lab, during which he and his collaborators conducted experiments to see how city spaces and systems influence our emotions, our behavior, and our happiness. How might these insights alter the way we build and live?

Pictures from the Event 

Photo © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

As consumers, we move through the world in a very particular manner. Our habits of consumption shape our cities, our bodies, and our thoughts. Is it possible to map new habits and ways of being in the city? How can sensing our environment activate nonconsumer patterns? What are the bodily and environmental skills needed to develop new possibilities? Join creative consulting and design collaborative spurse to collectively map out testable alternatives.

Photo used by permission under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) License from the justified sinner.

Since World War II, North Americans have invested much of their newfound wealth in suburbia. But its promises of space, affordability, and upward mobility have proven hollow. This prescient film predicted in 2004 that when oil prices began to rise dramatically (as they did in 2008), the end of suburbia would only be the beginning of a much greater unraveling of the American Way of Life.

Join director Greg Greene after the film in a discussion of the current state of cities in North America, and how New York can become resilient to near-future shocks such as peak oil, freak weather, and deepening economic turmoil.

6 pm open seating
6:15 pm screening

An Archtober event

Image: courtesy of Gregory Greene