Can architecture help address issues such as economic inequality and climate change through reshaping society and fostering collectivity? In this event, Irene Cheng and Neeraj Bhatia will present their respective books, The Shape of Utopia and New Investigations in Collective Form, which each unpack issues related to how people gather and form a collective set of agendas to produce an alternative vision of how we can live. After their presentations they will be joined in conversation by James Graham.

Irene Cheng’s The Shape of Utopia (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) documents a pivotal moment in American history when ordinary people ardently believed in the potential to reshape society. Highlighting the inherent political capacity of architecture, Irene Cheng showcases how visionary utopian planners in the mid-nineteenth century used their blueprints as persuasive visual rhetoric that could mobilize others to share in their aspirations for a better world.

Neeraj Bhatia’s New Investigations in Collective Form (AR+D, 2023) presents a group of design experiments by the design-research office THE OPEN WORKSHOP, that test how architecture can empower the diverse voices that make up the public realm and the environments in which they exist. Today, society continues to face urban challenges—from economic inequality to a progressively fragile natural environment—that, in order to be addressed, require us to come together in a moment when what we collectively value is increasingly difficult to locate.