Editors’ Letter
50: Today’s Global
The hyperconnected world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has revealed that effortless mobility, wealth, and access for some has been attained at the cost of immobility, inequity, and displacement for others. We have entered a phase of critical backlash against globalization, which is for some a critique of international integration, for others a critique of global capitalism, and for most, a shared global concern over climate crisis. The contradictions propel us to ask: What is today’s “global”?
Harvard Design Magazine’s 50th issue is edited by Sarah M. Whiting and Rahul Mehrotra. Its theme, “Today’s Global,” aims to avoid a simple and ineffective return to a mere celebration of the local or the regional. This is a moment instead to foster a nuanced understanding of where design “sits” vis-à-vis our planet and to advance a more productive discourse on globalization. The issue relies on novel examples of design—and even the design of writing—to further today’s global from multiple vantage points.
What, for example, are the new rubrics by which we organize, understand, and situate our agency as architects and planners in the world beyond imagining it in terms of binaries? How might we slow the current pace of consumption and production, set by capitalism’s ever accelerating metronome? What might define the global design imaginary in the throes of a planetary climate crisis? How might we instigate new forms of collaborations that transcend national boundaries, and new forms of knowledge production that transcend our current notions of interdisciplinarity? Could design foster a planetary civil society? How might designers situate or align themselves with these new formations of patronage? And what role might schools have in articulating and advancing a contemporary understanding of the global?
Articles
Table of Contents
Editors' Letter
Editors’ Letter
Sarah M. Whiting & Rahul Mehrotra
Essay
From Model Village to Groundwater Earth
Anthony Acciavatti
From the Grand Tour to the …. What?
Alex Anderson
Globalized Templates and Urban Imaginaries
Edgar Pieterse
Globalizing Urban Governance
Anel du Plessis
Men of Honor and Taste
Romi Khosla
Reading Architecture in an Era of Globalization
Nicolai Ouroussoff
Seeing Ukraine Then and Now
Jerold S. Kayden with photographs by Christina E. Crawford
Summit Urbanism: The Anticipatory Modernism of Non-Alignment in Sri Lanka
Anoma Pieris
The Elastic City
Els Verbakel
The Other Global Regime: Architects and Urban Planners in the Age of “International Development”
Tom Avermaete & Maristella Casciato
The Permanent Temporariness of Heritage
Lucia Allais, Sandi Hilal & Alessandro Petti
The World-Cities of the Global Age
Diana L. Eck
Interview
A “Mondialisation” to Strive for, Rather than a Globalization to Succumb to
François Jullien & Sarah M. Whiting
A World Architecture
Kenneth Frampton & Sarah M. Whiting
Against Neoliberalism’s Globalization: A Conversation with Rem Koolhaas
Sarah M. Whiting
City Architecture
Christopher C. M. Lee & Ron Witte
Globalization in Time
Arjun Appadurai & Rahul Mehrotra
Post-West Globalization
Peter G. Rowe & Shiqiao Li
Shahidul Alam on the Majority World
Charles Shafaieh
Shared and Specific: Landscape’s Global Horizons
Kate Orff & Sarah M. Whiting with photographs by Richard Misrach
Tropical Architecture: A Focus on the Local
Bruno Stagno & Rahul Mehrotra
What if Africa, not Europe? A Conversation with Lesley Lokko
Sala Elise Patterson
Photo Essay
Placing Together and Taking Apart
Sumayya Vally with introduction by Natalia Grabowska
Special
Call & Response: “What Does it Mean to be a Global Practitioner Today?”
Jennifer Newsom, Momoyo Kaijima, Cecilia MoSze Tham, Bryan C. Lee Jr., Anne Lacaton, Jorge Francisco Liernur, Liz Ogbu, Naksha Satish, Aeshna Prasad, Farshid Moussavi, Marina Tabassum & Ken Yeang
Peace is Hard Work on the Ground: An Excerpt from BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions
Malkit Shoshan with introduction by Ole Bouman
The Global Villager
Roundtable with Tiantian Xu, Zhao Yang, Yanfei Shui, Mark Lee & Yun Fu
Colophon
Editorial Director
Julie Cirelli
Production Manager
Meghan Ryan Sandberg
Guest Editors
Sarah M. Whiting
Rahul Mehrotra
Graphic Design & Art Direction
Alexis Mark
Copyeditor
Rachel Holzman
Indexer
Kevin Broccoli
Researchers & Interns
Ilana Curtis, Amelia Gan, Elitza Koeva, Vivienne Shi
Printer
Flagship Press, North Andover, Massachusetts, USA