This book reexamines the narrative of architectural modernism through the lens of contemporary issues such as environmental crises and the lasting impacts of colonialism. It challenges traditional perspectives and highlights the need for a more inclusive and sustainable approach to architecture, emphasizing the importance of addressing these critical themes in the context of modern design.
Urban Research as Pedagogy
A methodological and pedagogical toolkit for urban research. Understanding and managing urban change in our global era demands a high degree of specialized and interdisciplinary knowledge. At the same time, city planners, architects, researchers, policymakers, and activists are deeply immersed in the chaotic and often contradictory urban realities that they are asked to address. What is Critical Urbanism? offers an innovative toolkit for engaging these present realities across disciplinary specializations and geographic purviews. Central to the book is the research and pedagogy of the Critical Urbanisms program at the University of Basel, established in collaboration with the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. The program's renowned and emerging urbanists demonstrate the power of working with care and reciprocity across different contexts and institutions, driven by engagement with varied communities of practice. They show how alternative urban futures can be imagined by addressing the historical injustices and global entanglements that shape the urban present. The book is tailored to students, graduates, and teachers of urban studies and related disciplines including architecture, urban design, human geography, architectural history, and urban anthropology.
Archivists of the discontinuous: Architecture at the edge The city as machine. The city as collage. Urban agglomeration as the interim city, as the ersatz or even the abandoned city? Even designations such as the murdered city have been used. Slogans with different meanings and orientations as well as theoretical concepts adopted by very different ideologies and schools of urban planning have entered the intellectual, conceptual discourse on urbanism and urban life, on plannability and entropy, on civil society, ecological urban culture and informal urban economy. The architects Kenny Cupers, a Belgian living in London, and Markus Miessen, a German educated in Scotland, have created an architectural study project that reflects habitats in photos - 'Spaces of Uncertainty'. The work presented here in the form of an exhibition that will be touring Europe until 2004 takes a critical look at the intersecting point of inside, outside and aside architecture. The project is located at the meeting point between a micro and a macro view of the 'city" as contextual myth. Using the example of Berlin - both architects/artists/theoreticians worked in the Libeskind studio for some time - the issue is demonstrated in paradigmatic terms, positioned at the interface between the dissonance, contingency and discontinuity of contemporary life as lived by modern city dwellers.