January, 2014
'It’s legal, but is it legitimate?' and 'It’s legitimate, but is it legal?' These are questions rarely discussed in public concerning architecture and urban design. Yet architects have to deal with rules and regulations, and architecture is to a large extent defined by them. So the question is: how to deal with the law? Throughout the pages of this issue, we’ve explored different strategies for dealing with legal problems, whether that be through a direct fight or indirect action, through avoiding, subverting or changing the law. Because in the end law is too important to be left to lawyers.
More Info
July, 2013
The critic is dead. Long live the network! So it goes in our world of diffuse and shared knowledge. But if criticism has evolved into criticisms, how can we interpret and learn from the babble of opinions? This dilemma comes in tandem with another: the crisis of publishing. With declining print sales and slashed subsidies, many critics are out of work. Two fundamental tasks lie ahead: reviving the productive value of criticism, and finding new profitable ways to broadcast it to the world.
More Info
December, 2012
With the exponential growth of urban populations, thousands of new towns and city extensions will be needed in the near future. While governments are seemingly in retreat, the private sector has stepped in to fill the gap. Private-sector development is nothing new, but scale and ambition are on the rise. Single companies now vie to build entire cities, and package their services so that their product can be replicated elsewhere. To tackle this complexity – of building whole cities from scratch – new organizational models are being drafted, financial tools invented, and the dynamic between client, investor, developer, designer, builder, and end-user is fundamentally shifting.
More Info