Lecture by Shannon Mattern

e-flux Architecture presents “Civic Adjacencies,” a lecture by Shannon Mattern at e-flux on Tuesday, November 12 at 7pm.

This talk—scheduled for a week after the 2024 US presidential election yet planned two months before it—is motivated by both concern and hope for America’s and the world’s public institutions. Conceived and concretized across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, America’s civil society institutions—schools, libraries, parks, public health organizations—have been transformed and diminished by austerity governance, privatization, declining public trust, and myriad other socio-economic, cultural, and technological shifts. How might we reinvigorate the civil sector by reconcieving the public institution, imagining new configurations of and solidarities between those that exist, while proposing new connections to the many heavily subsidized, quasi-public systems that operate in adjacency? Thinking across architecture and urban, organization, graphic, and service design; integrating historical precedent, from the City Beautiful movement to the New Deal and beyond; drawing on global exemplars; and welcoming audience participation, we’ll consider what’s possible when we imagine new spatial arrangements of and adjacencies between our public knowledge, cultural, and care institutions and the infrastructures that support them. 

“Civic Adjacencies” is presented as part of e-flux Architecture Lectures, a monthly series inviting researchers and practitioners to discuss timely issues in contemporary architecture, theory, culture, and technology.

Shannon Mattern is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies and the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania and the Director of Creative Research and Practice at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. From 2004 to 2022 she served in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. Her writing and teaching focus on media architectures and information infrastructures. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media; and A City Is Not a Computer. She also contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal and regularly collaborates on public design, interactive projects, and exhibitions. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility                     
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.          
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator that leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.                   
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.