This year we started a new series of online meet-up sessions. We aimed to expand our platform of urbanists around the to get together online and share ideas, cooperate and foster a community and we were delighted to have participants from diverse places and discuss topics related to cities and were inspired by these conversations. We had participants from Tokyo, Okayama, London, Cairo, Nairobi, Malmö and Edinburgh with various backgrounds.
Here is a brief recap of each session.
#1 Urbanist Book Club 1
In the first session, we brought together our favourite books on cities. It was interesting to see a variety of books including classics by Jane Jacobs and city-specific books such as Tokyo Totem and Nairobi Noir.
Some books we’ve talked about
#3 Urbanist Book Club 3
In the third session of the book club we discussed children’s perspectives on cities, and we had a nice conversation on how to make friends in the city.
Books that we talked about
Other things we talked about
#5 Share your projects
Based on all the interesting projects the participants were involved in, we asked them to talk about their projects and work. We heard inspiring projects and talked about how to meet people in the field of urbanism when moving to a new city.
⭐️KEY topics that came up through the meet-ups
#2 Urbanist Book Club 2
Based on the insightful discussions in Session 1 we had another book club where we talked about a wide range of books and topics including The Dark sides of cities, and religious practices in cities.
#4 Urbanist Film Club
Following the book clubs we had a session on films about cities. It was interesting to see a variety of films and we talked about poetic urbanism based on the use of poetry in one of the films. We also talked about how films and documentaries can tell us about places that we cannot visit.
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✏️Key themes and approaches that we talked about in the meet-ups