The City of Our Dreaming

The Alchemy Lecture 2024

Author  Laleh Khalili , V. Mitch McEwen , Gabriela Leandro Pereira and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Series edited by  Christina Sharpe
The City of Our Dreaming

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…