Emily Badger, "The New York Times" urban policy writer, will deliver this year's Lewis Mumford Lecture at The City College of New York on Thursday, April 27. Her talk, 6 - 7:30 p.m. in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture's

Sciame Auditorium, is entitled, "Pressing Change in the Increasing Inflexible City." It will focus on how cities must change as the nation emerges from the pandemic. To watch virtually, a Zoom link is available.

Her Mumford lecture discusses how cities will respond to the changing dynamics of urban life. Buildings that once housed businesses will have to be modified to accommodate the needs of those who will soon live there. Hotels, once temporary lodgings for people on the road, will have to be adapted as single-room-occupancy spaces for those who need permanent addresses. Sidewalks will turn into eateries, and parking lanes will become bus corridors. Increasingly, roads dedicated to cars will be adapted as bicycle paths and walkways for pedestrians.

In a recent article,Badger likened the process of transforming an urban office tower into apartments to solving a twenty-five story Rubik's cube. Some buildings have operational windows, making them more suitable for habitation. Others, like modern hermetically-sealed office towers, require far more extensive – and expensive – modification. Local rules add still more complexity. In San Francisco, for example, there are stricter seismic requirements for apartments than offices. In other places, like Manhattan, building age and location-related legal limits constrain the number of office floors that can be turned into residences.

Despite the mounting pressure for flexibility in the urban environment, many US cities have become increasingly inflexible to change, largely through decades worth of building and zoning codes layered upon good intentions and not-in-my-backyard politics. Adapting cities for the future — from the level of individual buildings to citywide policy — will require understanding and confronting a decades-long legacy of inflexibility.

Badger writes about cities and urban policy for The Upshot from the Times' Washington bureau where she covers the interconnections between housing, transportation, and inequality.