‘Where is the center?’ must be the most commonly asked question when tourists enter a city. The center is where the action is supposed to be, where life is vibrant and interesting, where there’s lots to see, where you simply want to go. It is a matter of gravity and (functional) density that attracts visitors to ‘the center’. This tourist gaze is defining for our understanding of the city, any city.

For decades satellite imagery has provided data for, and insights into, a huge amount of different fields of science such as ecology, geosciences, meteorology, and urban planning. Nowadays the usage of satellite imagery has increased overwhelmingly as consumer applications have found their way to the market – think about Google maps, navigation apps and weather forecasts. Correspondingly governments have found the use of the footage interesting for a broad range of practices, both malicious and positive. Positive applications include infrastructural planning, mapping of urban expansions and ecological surveillance, though more nefarious uses have been featured frequently over the last few months: malicious military practices, observed and recorded by satellites, have been revealed to the public via the media. The fact that satellite imagery is increasingly used when it comes to media coverage and public presentations concerning politics and warfare shows the established importance of satellites for a broad range of purposes.

‘Guilty landscape’ is a notion borrowed from the Dutch painter, sculptor, writer, and musician Armando, who wrote about such landscapes more than once. Living in Amersfoort before, during, and after the Second World War, close to a concentration camp situated in the woods, he was very aware that the innocent forest of his youth had witnessed the horrors of war and the Holocaust.

Labelling a martyr is, in a way, an expression of collective guilt. Martyrs are a simultaneous reminder of the hopes and ideals that an individual stood for, and also the oppressive nature of humankind to smother those ideals. Memorializing martyrs then is a way of atoning for this collective guilt and to give renewed hope that the dreams of the fallen can somehow be realized. A popular way of memorializing martyr is to name streets after them – creating a potentially difficult juxtaposition. To what extent can a street, subject to all the pressures of the city, live up to the lofty ideals of an individual? And what does it say of us when a memorialized street itself becomes a symbol of broken dreams? Guy Tillim and Susan Berger have both created photo series that examine this deep irony.

What design can do for… contact! Breakout session for What Design Can Do, Friday May 11th 2012, 13.45–15.30. Open and free for everyone. While almost everyone is connected to one another through the internet and social media, real contact seems to be in decline. Virtual time is replacing public time. This breakout session will try to break through this development and find an answer to the question ‘What design can do for public contact’. Detail of work by Philip Beesley at Venice Biennial Featuring Axel Timm of the German architectural collective Raumlabor; Francisco van Jole, internationally renowned internet journalist; Younghee Jung, leader of Nokia’s corporate research team in Bangalore; and Ole Bouman, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI). Meet us at 13.45 sharp at Leidse Plein, Amsterdam to experience (the limits of) connectivity. This intervention is brought to you by NAI and Archis/Volume with DUS architects. Limited participation available, please RSVP at the latest by Thursday May 10th to rsvp@archis.org.

Volume’s presence at the Storefront For Art And Architecture in New York was well received by a good crowd attending the event. Justin Fowler, editor of the Volume in New York, gave a presentation about his opinion on Crisis, one of the themes of the day. Fowler's presentation tackled issues such as the aging population and war survivors, leading to what he calls a 'Trauma Generation'. The presentation created a link between the trauma generation and urban planning. “Human development corresponds with urban development”, he stated, illustrating his presentation with various projects aiming overcome issues of the aging population.

Volume is present at the last day of symposium on publishing practices at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City. The Storefront hosts a two-day symposium in conjunction with Archizines, an exhibition by Elias Redstone. Volume's New York editor Justin Fowler will participate in the talk on Crisis at 4 pm, or follow the live stream here.

Japanese photojournalist Kazuma Obara recently released a collection of photographs entitled Reset: Beyond Fukushima. Reset visually explores the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, one of the most harrowing results of the 11 March 2011 earthquake off the coast of Tōhoku, Japan. The disaster sparked a critical global conversation regarding whether or not nuclear power should be one of the planet’s primary source of energy, including the long-term effects of nuclear waste. Fukushima Daiichi is now one amongst a growing list of what could be termed ‘guilty landscapes’: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Bikini Atoll, Chernobyl, Tiananmen Square, and Fukushima Daiichi are all places that continue to carry heavy historical baggage. Such a recent apolitical addition to this list reminds us of our collective duty to balance the emotional weight of such places with the desire to progress beyond previous mistakes. Kazuma Obara’s Reset: Beyond Fukushima is published by Lars Müller Publishers.

Without resorting to the tired clichés on the advancements of globalisation/consumer technology/social media/creative economies/additive manufacturing, it would be safe to say that the relationship that architectural publications have with the discipline that they cover is undergoing a transformation. ARCHIZINES showcases the globally developing alternative in architectural publishing, featuring sixty architecture publications from over twenty countries. The publications serve as new platforms for practitioners, theorists, students, and anyone with a vested interest in contemporary architecture (NB: that would include all of us) to provide commentary and criticism of the built environment. Curated by Elias Redstone, ARCHIZINES features publications running from the low-budget fanzine aesthetic (New York’s Evil People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films) to the glossy bound almanac (Toronto’s Bracket) that showcase research (Paris’s Criticat), art (Amsterdam’s foto.zine), and narrative (Beijing’s What About It?) in contributing to the discourse of the spaces and places that we use and inhabit. Having recently visited London and Milan, ARCHIZINES will showcase the diverse and critical platforms in architecture publishing as part of its tour, currently parked in Barcelona until 4 May at Otracosas de Villar-Rosàs. ARCHIZINES world tour will continue, with upcoming visits to, amongst others, New York, Berlin, and Montréal currently scheduled. ARCHIZINES is on now at Otrascosas de Villar-Rosàs (Via Laietana 64) in Barcelona. The exhibition runs until 4 May.

With a global infrastructure crisis looming, there is much debate as to how our roads, sewers, and power lines will be financed in the future.  While privatization was heralded as the solution a few years back, the current economic situation has cast doubt on the strategy. What do we do when the state can’t afford it and the private sphere doesn’t want the risk? Architects are complicit in this debate – affordability is a design issue.  Can we design a new breed of infrastructure that pays for itself?

KRADS is an architectural studio based in Denmark and Iceland. Their Playtime project makes use of Lego to search for new urban concepts and forms. During the first two months studio participants searched for aspects and potentials of the ultimate European skyscraper. The research phase resulted in the Open Tower exhibition, a form-exhausting collection of 676 models in scale 1:1000, which are presented as a grid of 26 linear iterations. "This extensive catalogue of possibilities will serve as the first step to a more precise parametrization of the process and a deepened design process on modeling 8 European skyscrapers in scale 1:100", the initiators explain.

Co-founder of location-sharing platform Geoloqi Aaron Parecki has been tracking every geo-location he has been over the last 3.5 years. The project resulted in a series of maps generated from 2.5 million unique GPS points (approximately 1 point per 2-6 locations), which were tracked by Parecki's smartphone. The different colors of the lines represent different years, in order to reveal how his physical footprint changes over time due to the different locations of his house.

The latest issue of Volume marks a special jubilee: it is the twenty-fifth issue designed by Irma Boom – the award-winning Dutch book designer whose work for clients such as Office for Metropolitan Architecture and Ferrari has earned her the highest regard in the profession. On February 24th 2012, Volume sat down with Irma Boom to discuss among other things her practice, her work with Volume, and her unexpected love for iPads. Arjen Oosterman: "First I was wondering if you could introduce your studio since you’re not an employee of Volume, but have your own office." Irma Boom: "Yes, I’m an external designer – which is a very important detail. [Laughs] The office consists of three people: two assistants, Julia Neller and Sanne van de Goor and me; I make Volume with an ex-assistant, Sonja Haller. The first issues were made with a former student of mine Natascha Chandani (issues 6 to 10) and from issue 11 until now with Sonja. This is the only magazine we do and we’re very proud of working with Volume and Archis."