On Environment with Bruno Carvalho: “Where Did the Future Go? Urban Planning and Environmentalism Then and Now”
Lecture Series
29.04.2026 at 18:00
Location: A125, LMU Main Building, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 Munich
This lecture will be given by Bruno Carvalho (Harvard University).
Modern urban planners thought that progress could be achieved, and nature kept under control. Today, climate change often leads us to imagine the future as calamitous. Challenging anti-urban environmentalism across history, this lecture will argue for an embrace of the ecological potentials of cities.
Bruno Carvalho teaches and researches on cities and the environment at Harvard University. He often investigates how socio-cultural processes of the past converge in and with the present. He is the author of the award-winning Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro (Liverpool University Press, 2013) and has published widely on topics ranging from urban beaches to deforestation in the Amazon, bridging history, culture, urban design, and landscape architecture. At Harvard University, he chairs the program in History & Literature and codirects the Mellon Urban Initiative. His latest book is The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2026). The talk will draw from that book as well as from his more recent research on fauna in the modern city.
This event is part of the lecture series “On Environment.” The series is organized by the Chair of Environmental Humanities at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.
Environment is a broad conceptual idea with a history and many meanings. Today, the term is used ubiquitously. We are closely connected to what surrounds us and live in an environment more and less shaped by humans. In this series of lectures scholars from different disciplines address the concept, providing a lens into what it may mean to think environmentally.