A Cosmopolitan Urban Meadow for the Northeast
37: Urbanism’s Core?
The purpose of Harvard Design Magazine, no. 37 is to foreground these urgent issues of epistemology and praxis; to explore new directions for research and theoretical formation emerging from these conditions; and to highlight strategies, processes, and practices of intervention that are being proposed in response to emerging environments. The issue is organized around these overlapping and interrelated lines of inquiry. It includes essays that address contemporary conditions of the urban and propose frameworks for understanding processes of urbanization across a broad geography; that engage issues of scale, publics, governance, poverty, social inequality, violence, extreme differentiation, abandonment, risk and resilience, informality, temporality, hybridity, media,and network cultures. Other contributions propose strategies for intervening at multiple scales; they show the diversity of critical approaches and practices emerging in response to contemporary states of urbanization in different parts of the world.
Together, the contributions to “Urbanism’s Core” make an argument for bringing theory into closer dialogue with practice, design into collaboration with planning. Most of all, they argue for the importance of conceptual frameworks for understanding conditions that are dynamic, synchronous, and multiply contingent on factors at divergent scales; that foreground questions of social justice, poverty, citizenship, and sustainability; that deal both with “big numbers” and the specificity of complex differentials—concepts, in other words, that enable us to intervene with legitimacy, intelligibility, and efficacy in the multiple conditions of the contemporary urban.
—Eve Blau (excerpted from the introduction)
Articles
Table of Contents
Essay
A Cosmopolitan Urban Meadow for the Northeast
Michael Luegering, Peter del Tredici
Accessibility Wars
Interboro Partners
Adaptive Urbanism: Sensing the Interstices of African Cities
Edgar Pieterse
As if Alteration
Thordis Arrhenius
Beyond the Smart City: Everyday Entanglements of Technology and Urban Life
Mark Shepard
Cities and Villages: Finding Common Ground through Architecture
Momoyo Kaijima
Dark Matter, Ditch Urbanism Revisited
Wouter Vanstiphout
Detroit Future City
Chris Reed, Toni L. Griffin
Geo-Architecture: A Prehistory for an Emerging Aesthetic
Hashim Sarkis
Incremental Urbanism from Montreal
Peter Rose, Rahul Mehrotra
Introduction: The Common Ground of Urban Praxis
Eve Blau
It Is a Fundamental Right to Have a Place to Live in Well: 2Up2Down / Homebaked
Jeanne van Heeswijk
Kumbh Mela
Iwan Baan
Living the Security City: Karachi’s Archipelago of Enclaves
Sobia Ahmad Kaker, Stephen Graham
Lluis Ortega: F451, Spain
F451, Lluis Ortega
Network Design: Dream Your City
Ecosistema Urbano
Political and Epistemological Scales in Chinese Urbanism
Jianfei Zhu
Pre- and Post-Architecture
Philipp Oswalt
R-Urban: Resilient Agencies, Short Circuits, and Civic Practices in Metropolitan Suburbs
atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa)
Reversible Infrastructure
Federico Parolotto
Revisiting the Urban Grid: Applied Research
Joan Busquets
South America Project: A Synthesis of Scales
Felipe Correa
Superstorm Sandy and the Age of Preparedness
Joyce Klein Rosenthal
The Grand Projèt: Creating Urban Centralities in Distinct Contexts
Kees Christiaanse
The Haunting Presence of Urban Vampires
Miguel Robles-Duran
The Kind of Problem an Urban Region Is, Early in the 21st Century
Alex Krieger
The Other Brooklyn
Camilo José Vergara
The Violence of Sustainable Urbanity
Erik Swyngedouw
Urban Informality: Remnant of the Past or Wave of the Future?
Diane E. Davis
Urban Theory Without an Outside
Neil Brenner
Why Implementation Matters
Jerold S. Kayden