Co-organized with the SVA MA Critical Theory and the Arts program, the Lewis Mumford Symposium is a series of presentations and conversations intended to celebrate thinkers and writers working in the spirit of urbanist Lewis Mumford.
For the first part of this series we welcome author, editor, and filmmaker Cassim Shepard, who will present ideas from his new book Citymakers: The Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism (Monacelli, 2017). In Citymakers, Shepard, synthesizes six years of research and reporting as the Founding Editor of Urban Omnibus, one of the leading publications charting innovations in urban practice in New York City. He places these practitioners and projects in fresh dialogue with thinkers across the diverse canons of urban theory, drawing from economics, sociology, architecture, and art history.
Cassim Shepard produces non-fiction media about cities, buildings and places. Trained as an urban planner, geographer, and documentary filmmaker, Shepard served as the founding editor-in-chief of Urban Omnibus, an online publication of The Architectural League of New York. His film and video work has been commissioned by and screened at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the United Nations, among many other venues around the world. He teaches in the Urban Design program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and has been a guest lecturer in the Cities Programme of the London School of Economics and a Poiesis Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He studied filmmaking at Harvard University, urban geography at Kings College London, and urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Citymakers: The Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism, published by Monacelli Press in 2017, is his first book.
