HOW HEAVY IS A CITY?

This event brings together scientists, publishers, architects and researchers to discuss the contemporary magnitude of the city, which is the main focus of the 7th Lisbon Architecture Triennale and its accompanying book.

To ask this today means to intercept the emerging figure of the technosphere and its staggering planetary magnitude. The contemporary city scatters in all directions. It is a vast and growing system propelled by the combustive dynamics of fossil fuels. It is an offshoot of the biosphere, made up of all its 8.2 x 10⁹ human constituents, and all that keeps us alive, including domesticated animals and plants, fisheries, plantations, farmland, infrastructure, institutions, energy supplies, global transportation systems, and nature reserves. It is a city enmeshed within a multiplicity of other species’ cities.

To ask how heavy a city is, is also to sketch a coalition between different knowledges, bringing together thinkers, activists, poets, artists, historians, Earth scientists, philosophers, architects, and cyberneticians. This book is an insight into the multiple convergences necessary to think with others and renew the most beautiful word for cohabitation: city.

Copies of the book will be available to purchase following the talks.

Lilet Breddels is an art historian and lives and works in Amsterdam. She is director of the Archis Foundation, a cultural think tank promoting the debate on spatial and urban urgencies and publisher of Volume Magazine. Since May 2022 she has been part of Ro3kvit, Urban Coalition for Ukraine.

Andrew Pickering is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Exeter. He has PhDs in particle physics and science studies and is a leading figure in science and technology studies, writing on topics running from the history of particle physics to cybernetics and the environment. His latest book is Acting with the World: Agency in the Anthropocene (2025).

Jan Zalasiewicz is Emeritus Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester, previously of the British Geological Survey. He is a member of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. A field geologist, palaeontologist, and stratigrapher, he is a coeditor of The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit (2019).

John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog are co-founders of Territorial Agency and the chief-curators of the 7th Lisbon Architecture Triennale—How heavy is a city? Their work connects architecture, science, art and technology to shape the future of territories in the Anthropocene. They run Diploma 4 at the AA.

Please get in touch to let us know of any access requirements that you might have and how we can best accommodate these. If you are unable to attend physically but would like to participate in the event remotely please email publicprogramme@aaschool.ac.uk