You can draw a blueprint for happiness.

Mark Kingwell

In his latest book, Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, renowned cultural critic and philosophy teacher Mark Kingwell examines our relationship with cities: how they shape us and how we shape them. Specifically, Kingwell explores the sights, smells, and forms of the city, reflecting on how they mold our notions of identity, the limits of social and political engagement, and our moral obligations as citizens.

Kingwell is specialist in political and cultural theory, especially justice and citizenship and related topics in the philosophy of art, architecture and design. A prolific author, he is also one of U of T's most popular and effective teachers. A case in point: in his senior seminar, every single
student said they would re-take the course. Kingwell teaches a large introductory philosophy class to some 500 students, as well as courses in aesthetics, literature and philosophy and political philosophy to name a few.  As part of the Trinity One program, he also teaches an intimate first-year seminar on ethics and the creative imagination for a maximum of 24 students.

There are likely many explanations for Kingwell's popularity — students describe him as funny, intellectually stimulating and creative — but certainly one of the main reasons his classes are so dynamic is because he brings his research into the classroom — and vice versa.

"There are lots of connections between my research and my teaching — in fact, it's almost impossible to conceive one apart from the other," says Kingwell.  "This is maybe most obvious in my books on happiness (Better Living, 1998) and citizenship (The World We Want, 2000), which link directly to the teaching I do in my large introductory and political philosophy classes.

The ideas in Concrete Reveries are a little more particular to teaching in my third-year philosophy of art course or my graduate seminars in politics and architecture, he says.  But consciousness arises even in Introduction to Philosophy as a central philosophical issue, and so do basic things about how built forms determine consciousness. The lecture hall, for example, instantiates a threshold concept, ideologically structured by its arrangement of spaces and positions. We enter it and take on roles and behaviours, and enact power relations, specific to the idea of  philosophy and education.

"Concrete Reveries investigates a nested series of such threshold  functions in everyday life — just as philosophy does more generally — by putting the ordinary into question, making the familiar  interestingly strange," says Kingwell.