The second annual Alchemy Lecture brought together four “Alchemists”—thinkers and practitioners working across disciplines and geographies—to share a constellation of ideas for the future. Their urgent, poignant and inventive lectures comprise The City of Our Dreaming, which shares their ideas for cities and how to shape them according to community needs. Together, V. Mitch McEwen, Laleh Khalili, Gabriela Leandro Pereira, and Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, offer new models for crafting architectures of freedom in disparate imaginative spaces. From suggesting a city modeled on buoyancy that reconsiders displacement and a dream of radical kinship and bonds through reciprocal giving, to “projects paved by the audacity to inhabit” that are built from dreams—the site from which all Black emancipation begins—and the ways collectives form at the thresholds between things, The City of our Dreaming is a clarion calls for new conceptions of city life. The Alchemists imagine the architectures and infrastructures that make possible, inevitable and irresistible gestures of freedom, modes of sustenance, and the necessity and pleasure of breaking bread, together.

Laleh Khalili is the Al Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. She has written or edited seven books, including Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration. 

V. Mitch Mcewen leads Harlem-based Atelier Office and teaches on the faculty at Princeton University's School of Architecture. She is one of ten co-founders of the Black Reconstruction Collective, and her design work has been commissioned by MoMA and the Venice Architecture Biennale US Pavilion. 

Gabriela Leandro Pereira is a professor at the Faculty of Architecture at the Federal University of Bahia. She is a member of the Lugar Comum Research Group and coordinator of the Corpo, Discurso e Território Study Group. 

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician. She is the author of eight previous books, including her latest non-fiction project Theory of Water: Nishnaabeg Maps to the Times Ahead. Her last album, Theory of Ice, was shortlisted for a Polaris Prize.