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, the renowned designer, researcher and disability justice organizer, will deliver this year's at T��ɫ��Ƶ on Thurs., March 13, 2025. The talk begins at 5:30 p.m. in the Sciame Auditorium and is entitled "Rethinking Livability.” The lecture is free and open to the public.

Hamraie is associate professor of Medicine, Health, & Society at Vanderbilt University, and director of the Critical Design Lab, an international collaborative of disabled designers, artists, and researchers. Hamraie’s scholarship focuses on design, architecture, and urbanism, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies. They are the author of “Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability” and the forthcoming book, “Enlivened City.” Hamraie is also presidential appointee to the U.S. Access Board and a 2022 United States Artists Fellow in Media.

Architects and urbanists often invoke “livability” in the pursuit of more healthy, sustainable, and economically robust cities. Related to these goals are the imperatives of urban “activation,” mobility, and beautification in shaping the “urban good life.” But underlying these commonsense goals are normative ideas of life itself, particularly what types of embodiment, movement, and activity the built environment ought to promote. Drawn from Hamraie’s forthcoming book, “Enlivened City,” this lecture traces ideologies of livability from 20th century urban renewal efforts through contemporary New Urbanism, with a specific focus on what Hamraie terms “urban ableism,” an infrastructural preference for ablebodiedness that pervades the imperatives of health, sustainability, and economy. As alternatives, Hamraie draws on urban speculative fiction and the work of disabled artists and designers to imagine alterlivability, or conceptions of the “urban good life” grounded in radical forms of accessibility, hospitality, and interdependence.

For those interested, Hamraie’s "" (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2021) is suggested reading.

Live captioning and ASL interpretation will be available upon request. For access requests or questions, please contact: ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu .
 
About the Lewis Mumford Lecture
Each spring, the Spitzer School of Architecture and its Urban Design Program present the Lewis Mumford Lecture and seminar. Named for writer, architecture critic, and urbanist Lewis Mumford, who attended City College, the series invites the world’s most distinguished urbanists to speak freely and publicly about the future of cities and the social purposes of architecture. This series was initiated by the late , distinguished professor of architecture and director of the Urban Design Program at the Spitzer School, and curated by him for 11 years.
 
Previous Lewis Mumford Lecturers
Marshall Berman Rebecca Solnit Yasmeen Lari Emily Badger David Gissen
Click for more information about the Mumford Lecture.