THE FABRIC OF SPACE : WATER, MODERNITY, AND THE URBAN IMAGINATION: MATTHEW GANDY LECTURE

The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination Matthew Gandy was born in Islington, North London, and completed his PhD at the London School of Economics in 1992. He has taught at the University of Sussex (1992-1997) and at University College London (1997-2015) where he was Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory from 2005-11. From 2015 he has been Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography at the University of Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow of King's College. He has been a visiting professor at several universities including Columbia University, New York; Humboldt University, Berlin; Newcastle University; Technical University, Berlin; UCLA; and UdK, Berlin. His books and edited collections include Concrete and clay: reworking nature in New York City (2002), The return of the White Plague: global poverty and the "new" tuberculosis (2003), Hydropolis (2006), Urban constellations (2011), The acoustic city (2014), and The fabric of space: water, modernity, and the urban imagination (2014), along with articles in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, New Left Review, Society and Space and many other journals. He is a co-editor of International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and serves on a range of editorial boards. He is currently researching the interface between cultural and scientific aspects to urban bio-diversity and is holder of an ERC Advanced Grant exploring spontaneous spaces of urban nature. His book Moth is forthcoming in the Reaktion animal series in the spring of 2016.