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Simon Goldhill

Title:  “Humanity’s Urban Future”

Abstract: In 1800, some 8% of the world lived in cities; it will soon be 80% of us who inhabit an urban environment. Humanity has become an urban animal. Yet planning the city, inhabiting the city and understanding the urban remain profoundly difficult questions, and despite the long history of thinking about cities, the ability to learn from the past seems to be restricted. I currently am the co-PI on a ten-year project which aims to change the discourse of the urban, both for academics and for practitioners. In this paper, I will introduce the main routes of the project and explore how we might understand and intervene in the urban environment with more instrumental wisdom.

Bio: Professor Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and Foreign Secretary of the British Academy. His books have been translated into twelve languages and won three international prizes. He has also broadcast all over the world on radio and TV. He was the director of the Centre of Research for Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge, and is currently deputy chair of the ERC Synergy Panel. He has researched and published not only on antiquity but also on 19th-century culture, religious conflict, and modern literature and culture. He is currently co-PI of the CIFAR project “Humanity’s Urban Future”.

Affiliation: University of Cambridge and British Academy, Great Britain