We think that we've discovered everything, but perhaps it is the everyday places around us – the cities we live in – that need to be rediscovered. Bradley Garrett is interested in uncovering hidden places in soil, sea, cities and space. He provides a manifesto combining philosophy, politics and adventure on our rights to the city and helps us to understand the twenty-first century metropolis. He'll also tell us how to place-hack the city we live in. With Leo Hollis, author of Cities Are Good For You: The Genius of the Metropolis, and Anna Minton, journalist and author of Ground Control.

Speaker biographies:

Bradley Garrett is a lecturer in the economy, governance and culture research group at the University of Southampton. His research interests revolve around heritage, place, urbanity, ruins and waste, ethnography, special politics, subversion and creative methods. His doctoral research was a visual ethnography with urban explorers, people who trespass into, and often photograph, off-limits urban spaces. This was one of the first multimedia theses in geography, being comprised of text, photography and video. He is the author of two books, Explore Everything: Place Hacking the City and Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital.

Leo Hollis is a writer, historian and urbanist. He is the author of two books on London’s history, The Phoenix: The Men Who Made Modern London and The Stones of London: A History in Twelve Buildings. His most recent work is Cities Are Good For You: The Genius of the Metropolis.

Anna Minton is a writer and journalist and a Reader in Architecture at the University of East London. She spent a decade in journalism, including a stint as a corporate reporter on the Financial Times. She then began to focus on longer projects for think-tanks and policy organisations and is the author of numerous reports, including the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Viewpoint on fear and distrust. Between 2012 and 2014 she was the 1851 Royal Commission’s Fellow in the Built Environment. Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City was her first book.

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