Volume #48: The Research Turn contains the exhibition catalogue for BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping, the Dutch entry at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia, by Malkit Shoshan. BLUE focuses on the most prominent footprint of the United Nations’ peacekeeping operations: the compound.

We're retreating! With Het Nieuwe Instituut, we're holding a public discussion on July 2 with Merel Noorman in Arnhem as a part of SONSBEEK '16 on the social and ethical dimension of the relations between humans and artificial intelligence. If you are in the area, please stop by an join the discussion!

Can design contribute to improving the living standards of populations in conflict zones? On Thursday 7 July, Het Nieuw Instituut organizes Thursday Night: Reflecting On Venice: Design Positions at the Front. During this event, a conversation with the curators of the Austrian, German and Dutch pavilions of the Venice Architecture Biennale takes place.

The political left has had a rough few decades; everything just seems to be going in the other direction. Instead of romanticizing what it would be like ‘only if’, we’d better get to work on figuring out how to turn the engine of progress around. Volume spoke with Adrian Lahoud about the stakes of architectural research within the academy today and how it might contribute to moving towards the horizons of the left.

Buildings get built, inhabited, and begin to come undone. Political regimes rise, have their fun, and fall. The knowledge that goes into and comes out of such processes lives a different kind of life, though. Ideas are birthed, yet their death is an impermanent state of forget. Buildings can impress and politics can mobilize, but knowledge is wild; there’s no telling just what it will do. With immateriality comes a certain type of power, which industrialism has taught us can be wielded to virtuous effect of both benefit and harm. All it takes is setting our mind to it.

During the Venice Biennale 2016, Volume organizes 'Whose Side Are You On?': a breakfast discussion on the possible role of architecture in UN Peacekeeping Missions. In addition, Volume #48: The Research Turn will be officially launched.

An opinion-piece by ArchDaily's Jesse Connuck in response to Nick Axel's essay 'Cloud Urbanism: Towards a Redistribution of Spatial Value' as featured in Volume #47: The System*.

Dredging is the mechanical process that keeps water, water. Yet due to natural fluid dynamics, silting is an ongoing process. So we have to continuously take subaquedous sediment from one place and move it to another, releasing a host of disruptive ecological processes along the way. The Open Workshop has developed a strategy for Toledo, Ohio to use dredged material for both extending the city's civic space and cleaning up Lake Eerie.

The welfare state was pretty great while it lasted, wasn't it? Yeah, those were the days, golden, even. But now, sad to say yet no point to lament times have changed; things are different. Planning used to be the way society would stay on track and moving forward. Today, for better or worse, we have the market. There are reasons why the market came to take the place of the state, but the real question is, now that we have it, how can we make the market work for us?

It’s not the latest Hollywood production, the ultimate sound experience, or Apple’s next level consumer lock-in product line. And despite its ominous ring, it isn’t the enemy either, like how the NSA is framed as one. THE SYSTEM* indicates the complex interaction of the economy, professional practice and personal choice. The asterisk draws attention to the ambiguity of such a term while hinting at an intention to change ‘it’, whatever it is.

THE SYSTEM* indicates the complex interaction of the economy, professional practice and personal choice. The asterisk draws attention to the ambiguity of such a term, while hinting at an intention to change ‘it’, whatever it is. What the system does, on the other hand, is perhaps more easily understood: it organizes things. The system is a set of institutions and infrastructures that shape the contours of resource flows and modulate the rhythms of material cycles. The system doesn’t just distribute and determine availability though; it frames the imagination and conditions creative activity there within.

Two recent trends have recently emerged from the United States’ real estate market that pick up on societal transformations in the way architecture and the city is inhabited. If synchronized, they stand to alter the principles underriding contemporary logics of urban development. They do so by embodying an alternative system of values, framing its spatial articulation as a critical design project.

On February 28, the Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB) ended its three-month run. The venue will be demolished as part of the transformation of the Shekou waterfront district from factories and warehouses into a cosmopolitan cultural destination. This is indicative of the incredible energy being exerted on developing the city, and the money available to do so.

Life is rough in the concrete jungle; only the strongest survive. Yet when it comes to things like plants or animals, qualities of agility and dexterity trump physical size or brute force. Indeed, we like to think that the city is ours - that it belongs to us humans - but pests thrive in the city much better than us. The city can be alienating and make us feel like we are completely detached from nature, when in fact 'nature', the non-human, is all around us. Urban Fauna Lab reports on communities from throughout the globe who look for love in all the obvious places - so obvious we might not think to look.

Photographer Steven Wassenaar his work on Paris' slums has been nominated for de Zilveren Camera 2015. Steven made contributions to Volume, among which his article 'Coping with Slums and Slabs' for Volume #16: Engineering Society, which focuses on France's urban policy towards slum-living.