Regner Ramos writes on the UCL Urban Laboratory’s Urban Constellations book launch and panel discussion, held on 20 November in the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment.

It was a ‘short and sweet’ event, in tune with the structure of the book being launched by Matthew Gandy, its editor, and the UCL Urban Laboratory. When Gandy, the former director of the Urban Laboratory, commissioned Urban Constellations nine months ago – I’m not sure if the gestation period was intentionally this length and was too shy to ask – he had a very particular idea in mind for what he wanted to publish.

Rather than a conventional collection of academic papers, Gandy approached various city scholars and Urban Laboratory staff, graduate students and collaborators, and asked them to submit essays that did not exceed twelve-hundred words. Admittedly, I was relieved to find out that experienced academics found this as challenging as I would myself.

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