By combining millions of data points with stunning design, they investigate how flights stack over Heathrow, who lives longest, and where Londoners love to tweet. The result? One hundred portraits of an old city in a very new way.

    From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from.Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.

    Architecture is a strange mixture of persistence and flux, an amalgamation of elements -- some that have been around for over 5,000 years and others that were (re)invented yesterday.  The fact that these elements change independently of each other, according to different cycles and economies, and for different reasons, turns each building into a complex collage of the archaic and the current, the site-specific and the standard, mechanical smoothness and the spontaneous.  Only by looking at the elements under a wide lens can we recognize the cultural preferences, forgotten symbolism, technological advances, mutations triggered by intensifying global exchange, climatic adaptions, political calculations, regulatory requirements, new digital regimes, and, somewhere in the mix -- the ideas of the architect that constitute the practice of architecture today.A collection of these essential elements into 15 books in a package launched at the 2014 Venice Biennale that allows us to look through a microscope at the real fundamentals of our buildings and see again the essential design techniques used by any architect, anywhere, anytime.

    This book shows how colonialism, far from being simply a fixture of the past as is often suggested, remains a crucial component of Palestinian and Israeli realities today. Abowd deftly illuminates everyday life under Israel’s long military occupation as it is defined by processes and conditions of "apartness" and separation as Palestinians are increasingly regulated and controlled. Abowd examines how both national communities are progressively divided by walls, checkpoints, and separate road networks in one of the most segregated cities in the world. Drawing upon recent theories on racial politics, colonialism, and urban spatial dynamics, Colonial Jerusalem analyzes the politics of myth, history, and memory across an urban landscape integral to the national cosmologies of both Palestinians and Israelis and meaningful to all communities.

    Architecture has long been a subject matter for photographers, who utilize the medium not just to document the built world, but also to reveal wider truths about society. This book features chapters devoted to various artists--among them, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Ed Ruscha, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky and Iwan Baan--and includes 220 color and duotone images. Each chapter opens with a text introducing the artists' work, followed by reproductions of their photographs. Arranged chronologically, the book documents the birth of the skyscraper against the backdrop of the Great Depression; the rise of the modernist tradition in America, post-colonial Africa, and India; the effects of industry on 1960s Europe; the increasing suburbanization of America and Europe; and the consequences of today's mass urbanization in Asia, the Middle East, and South America. Far-reaching and penetrating, this volume reflects on the ongoing dialogue between photography and architecture.

    In an accessible but scientifically aware manner, architect and author Klaske Havik (born 1975) argues that literary authors most effectively portray the concept of lived and experienced space, evoking memories and imaginations in their readers. Havik offers new methods for -reading- and -writing- places, from the architectural to the urban, by engaging with three particular techniques of literature: description, transcription and prescription. This triad of interrelated concepts forms a -bridge- that connects to different literary discourses, which Havik translates into the domain of architecture and urban planning. This revised framework for architectural research, writing and reading encourages professional writing to recognize that each place is a complex and stratified phenomenon--a -lived- place. Throughout this theoretical discourse are thorough analyses of the work of Steven Holl, Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas.

    Di Palma argues that a convergence of beliefs, technologies, institutions, and individuals in 18th-century England resulted in the formulation of cultural attitudes that continue to shape the ways we evaluate landscape today. Staking claims on the aesthetics of disgust, she addresses how emotional response has been central to the development of ideas about nature, beauty, and sublimity. With striking illustrations reaching back to the 1600s—husbandry manuals, radical pamphlets, gardening treatises, maps, and landscape paintings— Wasteland spans the fields of landscape studies, art and architectural history, geography, history, and the history of science and technology. In stirring prose, Di Palma tackles our conceptions of such hostile territories as swamps, mountains, and forests, arguing that they are united not by any essential physical characteristics but by the aversive reactions they inspire.

    editors, Evelien van Es, Gregor Harbusch, Bruno Maurer, Muriel Pérez, Kees Somer, Daniel Weiss ; with contributions of Enrico Chapel and 25 others.

    With Reclaiming the Don, Jennifer L. Bonnell unearths the missing story of the relationship between the river, the valley, and the city, from the establishment of the town of York in the 1790s to the construction of the Don Valley Parkway in the 1960s. Demonstrating how mosquito-ridden lowlands, frequent floods, and over-burdened municipal waterways shaped the city's development, Reclaiming the Don illuminates the impact of the valley as a physical and conceptual place on Toronto's development.Bonnell explains how for more than two centuries the Don has served as a source of raw materials, a sink for wastes, and a place of refuge for people pushed to the edges of society, as well as the site of numerous improvement schemes that have attempted to harness the river and its valley to build a prosperous metropolis. Exploring the interrelationship between urban residents and their natural environments, she shows how successive generations of Toronto residents have imagined the Don as an opportunity, a refuge, and an eyesore. Combining extensive research with in-depth analysis, Reclaiming the Don will be a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Toronto's development.

    A leading documentary photographer who was active in the New York Photo League in the 1930s, Siskind moved beyond the social realism of his early work as he increasingly came to view photography as a visual language of signs, metaphors, and symbols--the equivalent of poetry and music. Through the forties and ifties, he developed new techniques to photograph details and fragments of ordinary, commonplace materials. This radical new work transformed Siskind's image-making from straight photography to abstraction, from documentation to expressive art. His concern with shape, line, gesture, and the picture plane prompted immediate comparison with abstract expressionist painting, particularly with the art of Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. It took some years for Siskind's unprecedented photography to gain full acceptance, but, by the 1970s, he was an acknowledged master, publishing and exhibiting widely. Siskind was also one of the founding donors who established the archive at the Center for Creative Photography.Aaron Siskind's oeuvre is so original that it defies classification, and it has not received the sustained critical attention that it richly merits. In fact, there are no other books on Siskind currently in print. Aaron Siskind presents the first complete retrospective of this legendary photographer. It highlights important, rarely published bodies of work from Harlem; from Bucks County architecture; and from the "Tabernacle," "Gloucester," "Martha's Vineyard," "Louis Sullivan," and "Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation" photo series. The book also includes an introduction by Gilles Mora, an expert on modern American photography, and texts by critic and photographer Charles Traub. This study, based on the Siskind archives at the Center for Creative Photography and supported by the Aaron Siskind Foundation, fills a resounding editorial void around one of the most challenging and important figures in the art of American photography.

    Bottom-up initiatives are cropping up around the world, but institutions, government offices and developers often find themselves uncertain how to collaborate with and empower these impassioned citizens and communities. Offering solutions to this disconnect, We Own the City analyzes this international trend through five case studies, focusing on Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Moscow, New York and Taipei, each of which discusses different dynamics and intensities of citizens' redevelopment processes. This volume delves into the complexities surrounding the role of today's city-makers and the potential and actual tensions between civil society and government, and it further provides new foundations for inclusive urban development plans which will set the standard for future public governments, housing authorities, architects, town planners and real-estate developers.

    Alongside its megastructures, high-rise residential buildings, and franchised convenience stores, Jakarta’s massive slums and off-hour street markets foster an unsettled urban population surviving in difficult conditions. But where does the vast middle of urban life fit into this dichotomy? In Jakarta, Drawing the City Near, AbdouMaliq Simone examines how people who the largest part of the population, such as the craftsmen, shopkeepers, and public servants, navigate and affect positive developments.In a city where people of diverse occupations operate in close proximity to each other, appearance can be very deceptive. Set in a place that on the surface seems remarkably dysfunctional, Simone guides readers through urban spaces and encounters, detailing households, institutions, markets, mosques, and schools. Over five years he engaged with residents from three different districts, and now he parses out the practices, politics, and economies that form present-day Jakarta while revealing how those who face uncertainty manage to improve their lives.Simone illustrates how the majority of Jakarta’s population, caught between intense wealth and utter poverty, handle confluence and contradictions in their everyday lives. By exploring how inhabitants from different backgrounds regard each other, how they work together or keep their distance in order to make the city in which they reside endure, Jakarta, Drawing the City Near offers a powerful new way of thinking about urban life.

    Yet sprawl persists, and not by mistake. It happens for a reason.As an activist and a scholar, Benjamin Ross is uniquely placed to diagnose why this is so. Dead End traces how the ideal of a safe, green, orderly retreat where hardworking members of the middle class could raise their children away from the city mutated into the McMansion and strip mall-riddensuburbs of today. Ross finds that sprawl is much more than bad architecture and sloppy planning. Its roots are historical, sociological, and economic. He uses these insights to lay out a practical strategy for change, honed by his experience leading the largest grass-roots mass transit advocacyorganization in the United States. The problems of smart growth, sustainability, transportation, and affordable housing, he argues, are intertwined and must be solved as a whole. The two keys to creating better places to live are expansion of rail transit and a more genuinely democratic oversight ofland use.Dead End is, ultimately, about the places where we live our lives. Both an engaging history of suburbia and an invaluable guide for today's urbanist, it will serve as a primer for anyone interested in how Americans actually live.