The Crowd: Being together in a time of crisis (Lecture by Colin McFarlane)

September 29 (3 pm, Melbourne time)

Abstract

Urban life is predicated on urban densities and crowds. But while the former are typically understood and managed as problematics of urban governance, the crowd has more often been position as the city ‘in the wild’: unpredictable, suggestible, and a phenomena that might as much be generative of progressive urbanism as overbearing threat. The position of density and the crowd, and the relation between them, resonates with and exceeds the frame of formal and informal in urban thinking. This presentation reflects on how the pandemic has unsettled these relations, reflects on the position of the informal within them, and considers the implications for urban research.