Collective Consciousness

By David Topping

Photo by Tom Podolec from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

“Philosophers tend to focus on the ‘why’ of that question ‘why are you here’—I wanna focus on how the here relates to the why, which is to say, why are you here, why are you some place in particular?”
That’s the central question of the lecture Mark Kingwell gave at the end of January for Lakehead’s new Advanced Institute for Globalization and Culture. Just added by the Institute (acronymically, aig-c; phonetically, “agency”) to their YouTube channel, the hourish-long lecture explores cities in general and New York, Shanghai, and Toronto in particular, trying to make sense of how cities work not just physically but consciously. The lecture, wholly worth watching in its entirety, is tied to Kingwell’s book Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, which we have not yet read yet but that we’re totally going out and buying right after we finish watching Kingwell’s lecture one more time.
Video of the full lecture, uploaded in five parts, is after the fold.

Hat tip to Urban Toronto.