Cities Against the State / David Wengrow

David Wengrow will question the definition of 'urbanisation' for the final event of The Ambivalence of Design AA-Yonsei Lecture Series.

Building on his work with David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything), David Wengrow will briefly introduce a new collaboration with Forensic Architecture (Eyal Weizman). They suggest an alignment between these two projects, which both seek to query the authority of state narratives by extracting counter-archives of information: respectively from the archaeological record, and from crime scenes. To explore this alignment, Wengrow will discuss the case of 6000-year-old settlements identified by archaeologists on the Bug-Dnieper interfluve, in modern Ukraine, which have been used to question the definition of “urbanisation” and the position of the modern state as a telos of human social development.

DAVID WENGROW is Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London and has been a visiting professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and at the universities of Auckland and Freiburg. He is the author of four books, including What Makes Civilization?, The Origins of Monsters, and international best-seller The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (co-authored with David Graeber).


The AA-Yonsei Lecture Series The Ambivalence of Design is organised by James Kwang-Ho Chung & Brendon Carlin (Unit Masters, AA Diploma 19), Jooeun Sung (Professor, Yonsei University) and Jae-Won Yi (Adjunct Professor, Yonsei University).





This event is funded by the British Council grant (British Council UK-Korea Virtual Academic Collaboration grant).