The Cities We Need

An expressive book of prose and photographs that reveals the powerful ways our everyday places support our shared belonging.

Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? In The Cities We Need, photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani introduces us to the complex, political, and eminently personable stories of residents who answered this question in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California. Their universal stories and Bendiner-Viani’s evocative images illuminate what’s at stake in our everyday places—from diners to churches to donut shops. In this culmination of two decades of research and art practice, Bendiner-Viani intertwines the personal, historical, and photographic to present us with placework, the way that unassuming places foster a sense of belonging and, in fact, do the essential work of helping us become communities.

In this unique book, Bendiner-Viani makes visible how seemingly unimportant places can lay the foundation for a functional interconnected society, so necessary for both public health and social justice. The Cities We Need explores both what we gain in these spaces and what we risk losing as they are threatened by gentrification, large-scale development, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, Bendiner-Viani shows us how to understand ourselves as part of a shared society, with a shared fate; she shows us that everyday places can be the spaces of liberation in which we can build the cities we need.Introduction: A Social Distance
1 Placework
Mosswood Portfolio One
Becoming Yourself
2 Feeling Free and Being Valued
Prospect Heights Portfolio One
3 I Be All Over
Mosswood Portfolio Two
4 Landing Someplace Safe
Prospect Heights Portfolio Two
5 Probably the Supermarket
Mosswood Portfolio Three
Becoming Community
6 Enduring Talk and Casual Talk
Prospect Heights Portfolio Three
7 Every Thursday
Mosswood Portfolio Four
8 Where Are You Able to Connect?
Prospect Heights Portfolio Four
9 The City We Want
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography“The Cities We Need is an aesthetically attractive and emotionally moving book of photographs and prose that makes the case that residents of two neighborhoods—one each in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California—find their sense of belonging and freedom to be their most authentic selves through the “everyday places” they encounter on a daily basis...The Cities We Need is a book we need to remind us that personal well-being should be a crucial measure of a city’s success and deserves the same kind of consideration as more quantifiable factors like economic investment or population stability... Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani has used her camera, along with her prose, to hold up a mirror that reflects back to us a city that we should, but do not always, want to see. The Cities We Need reminds us that the most intimate of experiences—on the block or in the corner store—is what makes urban life special and helps urban dwellers feel emotionally fulfilled as human beings.”
—The Journal of Urban Affairs

“The Cities We Need offers a new kind of urban history, weaving together archival research, oral histories, autobiography, and daydreams…This book sets a new bar for holistic urban research.”
—Places Journal

“The book’s text rests on Bendiner-Viani’s continuing observations on neighborhood life and the diverse work of housing activists, artists, community gardeners, small business owners who stimulate our thinking about and cultivate the gratifications of dailiness. Each of the nine chapters is a rich feast of story, observation, analysis, and experiential impact – and of course, there are Bendiner-Viani’s photographs, displayed most effectively. She aptly cites the work of many authors, researchers and practitioners. Most moving and impactful are the recollections and assertions of the residents themselves; in describing her moments with her guides, she also recounts the unfolding of her own awareness, which is also our own as we follow down the sidewalks and into the parks with her.”
—On the Seawall

"Beautiful photographs… we're not talking about images that are filled with people, but the stories are very rich inside them."
— KQED


“In her new book, Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani reveals the warm humanity that animates city blocks, corner stores, park benches, and casual neighborly nods. Most importantly, she knows that cities are essential because of the people in them and the mix of relationships, care, emotions, needs, and 101 reciprocities that they make in community with one another every day. These are the great urban stories we need and deserve.”
—Kemi Ilesanmi, Former Executive Director, The Laundromat Project

“There's a tenderness about this book that leaps off the page. Reading it, we can’t help but feel that we are becoming better human beings. It is a book to savor, a feast for your eyes and heart. And what’s more: it shows us how to make the cities we need. This book will speak to everyone, and most of all to those of us that want to create cities in which we can all prosper.”
—Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, author of Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All

“Meditative and deeply researched, piercingly provocative as the author probes the underlying issues that often threaten cherished places, but also affectingly personal via the words of the tour guides, The Cities We Need might just be the book you need right now for many examples and doses of everyday joy and community.”
– Civil Engineering Magazine

“In her new book, Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani reveals the warm humanity that animates city blocks, corner stores, park benches, and casual neighborly nods. Most importantly, she knows that cities are essential because of the people in them and the mix of relationships, care, emotions, needs, and 101 reciprocities that they make in community with one another every day. These are the great urban stories we need and deserve.”
—Kemi Ilesanmi, Former Executive Director, The Laundromat Project
 
“There's a tenderness about this book that leaps off the page. Reading it, we can’t help but feel that we are becoming better human beings. It is a book to savor, a feast for your eyes and heart. And what’s more: it shows us how to make the cities we need. This book will speak to everyone, and most of all to those of us that want to create cities in which we can all prosper.”
—Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, author of Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us AllGabrielle Bendiner-Viani is a visual urbanist and cofounder of the interdisciplinary studio Buscada. She is the author of Contested City, a finalist and honoree for the Brendan Gill Prize. A widely exhibited photographer, she holds a doctorate in environmental psychology from the Graduate Center, CUNY.