By Caroline Bos (UNStudio) The principals of self-organization and professionalization seem to be at odds – especially in the world of architecture. While self-organization has been lauded for its ability to create buildings where no capital investor would dare, professionalization is seen as rigid and inflexible. Can the two find a compromise? Caroline Bos, co-founder of UNStudio, sees professionalization not as inherently antagonistic, but potentially a useful counter-balance to self-organization. Some years ago, as part of a study group organized by Luuk Boelens, I visited Villa 31, one of the oldest and best-known informal neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. This is where we met Alicia, an immigrant from the north who had lived in the Villa since 1974 and had moved incrementally through various layers of self-organization. (1) As a new inhabitant she had initially participated in the construction of her own self-built house and services, such as water, sewage, and electricity, fulfilling her most basic individual needs. As time went on, Alicia became involved in community projects; a flourishing subsidized canteen had later made way for sponsored computer programs. Thus her self-interest became mixed with community interests and she had learnt to liaise with various donors. Finally, Alicia had to some extent participated in the management or the governance of the Villa. At this level, her original self-interest had expanded and developed to encompass a more comprehensive approach and understanding of shared benefits.

By Rory Hyde Click here to view the full version. The decline of the welfare state and the seemingly relentless drive toward privatization is one narrative within the larger tide of change sweeping through the decades. Starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union – the ‘end of history’ when political and social life would supposedly plateau into a period of numb democracy – the Timeline for a New Order traces an arc to today marked by bubble economics, citizen revolt, technological disruption and climate shocks, and extrapolates to a future world not unlike our own but grayer, greener and more individualistic. This is neither utopia nor oblivion, but something in between, invisible to those who live it, and believable enough to prepare for. This article was published as part of Volume #30: Privatize!.

[The Purge] Ink Tank is an evolving artist collective with the expressed purpose of executing creative ideas in all media. Under the name Last New Year, the group created a number of installations and interventions in and around an impoverished home in Austin. Last New Year is a celebration of the end. The project elaborates on the idea of a fictional group of people living in the home, who would react to the prophesied end-of-times 2012 date. The most remarkable intervention of the project was Chris Whiteburch's 'The Purge', a giant wooden artwork that expresses how the house would explode as soon as The End is there. Check out this article on Colossal to see more photos of The Purge.

We fell in love with 'American Palimpsests', a fascinating photo series by American-Iranian-Jewish photographer Stacy Arezou Mehrfar, who currently resides in Australia. The series portrays the typical American suburb as an unstoppable force that colonizes natural environments without any sense of context or pre-existence. "'American Palimpsests' discusses the sterilization of the natural landscape into new suburbia", Mehrfar explains. "Many of the new developments I photographed for American Palimpsests now lie empty, and the subprime crisis has left the development of many neighborhoods incomplete. Based on the current state of older American suburbs, I wonder what will become of those empty new suburbs in 30 years time." Click here to enjoy the entire series.

25 February - 4 March, 2012, Mediamatic Fabriek, Amsterdam. Opening on 24 February, 17-20 h. Curated by Katja Novitskova and Rory Hyde. Featuring works by Martti Kalliala, Katja Novitskova and Rory Hyde, DUS Architects, Liam Young, Sascha Pohflepp, Femke Herregraven and Chris Lee + more. Click here for more information. The harnessing of the immense power of the atom is one of the great achievements of the 20th century, one that both poses great risks and offers great opportunities. Under the Beach, a Radiant City, an installation by Finnish architect Martti Kalliala, explores a future scenario where the risks of spent nuclear fuel are turned into an opportunity for leisure. Inspired by the afterglow of nuclear waste, Kalliala created an artificially hot beach in Mediamatic FABRIEK, the new gigantic exhibition space of Mediamatic. For ten days of winter you can immerse yourself in the radiance of the thunderbolts of Zeus. Radiant Picnic on 4 March All the fun of a summer resort: with music, volleyball and picnic food. Bring your own 'poisonous' snacks, your whole family and relax on the radiant warm-spot. New Order Mediamatic’s New Order exhibition series explores a world in which energy has become a fundamental principle of our society. Five consecutive solo shows feature new works by Dutch and international artists, designers and architects, each responding to various elements of society - such as politics, economy, health, food and experience - which together combine to outline a complete future world.

It’s only been seven years now, since Volume started its quest of how ‘to go beyond architecture’. In this time where optimism, nearing indifference, was still the rule, and record after record was being broken, it seemed inescapable to rethink architecture’s contribution to society. And to check anew what society would need of architecture. In the 1970s and 1980s, disappointment in modernism’s results produced postmodernism. More specifically, postmodernism targeted modernism’s inability to transform its program of rigorous equality to more individualized ways of working (despite brave, but all too fragmented attempts to do so). Modernism was born from industrial society and – using its methods of production – promised a better world for all. Postmodernism was born from consumer society and promised a better product for those who could afford it; the assumption being that society had reached a level of affluence in which everyone was able to purchase at will. This shift from program to product came about during a period where the dominance of the market as the sole economic principle was paramount. The American model of creating ever more to satisfy everyone’s needs, irrespective of the distribution of goods and services between members of society had won over the European model of keeping everyone ‘on board’ first and then moving to higher levels of quality and affluence in society.* Solidarity had to give way to maximizing profitability; the ‘every individual contributes to his or her capabilities’ principle was replaced with a Darwinist competition model. Like it or not, we’re seeing the end of that development, though at present the picture is still a bit blurred. During the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, ‘the market’ was the path to a golden future and privatization was the way to go. There were some examples showing that privatization didn’t necessarily lead to cheaper, better products and services; but this didn’t change the general appreciation of the principle. Over the last five years of consecutive financial crises, the assumed superiority of neoliberal ideology has been questioned and debated more fundamentally. But it hasn’t ended privatization; for now it is still called upon as strategy to save what we have. The immense debts that were incurred from the festive consumerism-for-all from previous years necessitated a recalibration of private and public spending, with budget cuts and privatization as default prescriptions to cure the disease. Earlier, privatization was sold to the public as liberty and free choice, as the better option; today it is presented as a potentially painful but inescapable reality. Up to this point, privatization is understood as the transfer of public services to the private sector. Instead of a local, regional, or national authority, a private company provides or produces the service or product. Low-income housing (formerly known as social housing), public transport, health care, higher education, and all sorts of social arrangements are being left or transferred to the market. But today privatization has yet another dimension. Now larger institutional and public investment has practically come to a standstill – especially the building sector, which is confronted with a thirty to fifty percent reduction in investments in Europe – and private initiative has to come to the rescue. Small-scale and bottom-up initiatives have to compensate the loss. By themselves or in small groups or entities, people can build their own home and workspace, can supply their own energy and security, set up their own schools, etc. The limits that governments, developers, and investors are running up against, because they cannot get a hold of funds or cannot sell their products, can be compensated by an accumulation of individual small-scale investments. Crowd funding for cultural products is yet another expression of this trend. It is challenging to consider what frameworks are needed to make this work on a larger scale. Can the adding up of individual plots and houses produce more than a sea of differences, a monotonous diversity? Can mixed neighborhoods come into being without top-down planning and urban design? Or slightly more radical, can parts of the infrastructure (maintenance and maybe even construction) be left to bottom-up initiative? This produces the fascinating prospect of collective or communal interests being addressed by the stakeholders themselves; a bottom-up socialism, or at least local communality as a basis for action. All of a sudden the unstoppable trend towards large-scale and global is complemented by small-scale and local. A new balance between local and global has to emerge from all of this with a new role for the government to guard communal and collective interests of the individual and the larger entities that together form the organism of our society. And it will come with a new role for design and the designer. Less focused on authorship, more on making things happen. In this issue of Volume we’ve privatized parts of the magazine, taking a page from the rest of the publishing world. In black we present ‘Volume’ contributions (not necessarily produced by the editorial team), in red ‘private’ ones, presenting a personal take or position. The latter are often as much ideas as advertisements or advertorials for an activity, product, or firm. It’s to the reader to judge if the outcome is more than the sum of the individual parts. * See the Timothy Mitchell interview in Volume #30.

In this article on The Awl, Victoria Johnson presents a collection of fascinating maps of fictional places that serve as gateways to imaginary lands. One of the maps in the collection was taken from L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. Baum drew forty individual maps for this novel. This is the major one that shows the entire land the story takes place in: "The Emerald City, in the center, is surrounded by four distinct countries. The countries are bordered by deserts (Great Sandy Waste is the obvious winner here and a great potential new name for the litterbox). Beyond the deserts like a number of intriguing countries that make at best a passing appearance in the story, such as Merryland and the Country of Gargoyles. 'Kansas' of course appears nowhere." Click here to view more fictional maps. Inspired? Check out this article on Boing Boing that refers to more sources with fantasy maps.

Seeing this picture, you wouldn’t think of Volume as cornerstone. But ‘The Block’ issue (Volume #21), produced in parallel to the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam in 2009, was instrumental for creating the exhibition 'Block City/The Past, Present and Future of Mass Housing' at Jaroslav Fragner Gallery in Prague. The exhibition is based on a fifteen-year research of Dutch architect Bart Goldhoorn into the possibilities of housing development in the future. His concept of the 'Block City' is a combination of analysed housing complexes of the 1960s and the 1970s as well as the contextual, individual, but also very expensive 'Designer City'. Goldhoorn had the opportunity to test this concept in a new town for 40 000 inhabitants south of Moscow. The outcome of his endeavour are four master plans and 150 models of housing blocks created by architects from around the world which are part of a touring exhibition from 2011. Click here for more photos of the exhibition.

Wednesday 15 February, 6-7 pm, at ARCAM, Amsterdam. Make a reservation at rsvp@premsela.org. Premsela, the Netherlands Institute for Design and Fashion, will host a panel discussion on design and trust at the architecture centre ARCAM in Amsterdam on Wednesday 15 February at 6 pm. It takes place in connection with the conference Social Cities of Tomorrow.
 Coinciding with the discussion will be the launch of Volume magazine’s fourth and last Trust Design supplement. The series has been produced in cooperation with Premsela. The Arcam discussion and magazine supplement will focus on the private vs the public. Over pizza and drinks, Premsela's Tim Vermeulen will speak to the researcher and writer Scott Burnham, project manager of Premsela’s Trust Design project; Michiel de Lange, co-founder of The Mobile City and a new media lecturer at Utrecht University; and Henry Mentink, co-founder of MyWheels. Come and listen, participate in the discussion, and enjoy a slice of pizza. Admission, pizza and drinks are free. Due to limited seating please RSVP to rsvp@premsela.org. Trust Design is a Premsela research project set up to investigate the relationship between trust and design. How can design respond to the contemporary crisis of confidence? What are the components of trust? Can you design trust? And can you trust design? Trust Design 4 is supplement to Volume's upcoming issue, Privatize!

Josef Kellndorfer and Wayne Walker of the Woods Hole Research Center recently worked with the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey to create an extremely detailed map of all the trees in the United States. It took the team six years to collect the data for the map with help from a space-based radar, satellite sensors, computer models and a massive amount of ground-based data. They managed to visualize the American forests with an accuracy of 30 meters. Click here for the full map.

Remember our December Special? New subscribers to Volume magazine were in the running to win a unique Worldmoon jewel designed by DUS Architects. Watch the official lottery drawing by our Editor-in-Chief Arjen Oosterman and find out who's the lucky winner!

International conference and workshop, 14-17 February, 2012, Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam. Visit socialcitiesoftomorrow.nl for more information. Our everyday lives are increasingly shaped by digital media technologies, from smart cards and intelligent GPS systems to social media and smartphones. How can we use digital media technologies to make our cities more social, rather than just more hi-tech? This international conference brings together key thinkers and doers working in the fields of new media and urbanism. Keynote speakers such as Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko and Dan Hill will speak about the promises and challenges in this newly emerging and highly interdisciplinary field of urban design. The keynotes will be accompanied by presentations of ‘showcases’ from various disciplines, such as architecture, art, design, and policy. Social Cities of Tomorrow explores how urban designers, interface developers, app builders, policy makers, housing coorations, artists, scientists and others can use digital technologies to organise citizen engagement, and to contribute to our social cities of tomorrow.

Mapping the Earth is a classic problem. There's no right way to do this perfectly in a way that depicts the shape and size of the surface in a proper way, argues Jack van Wijk, Full Professor Visualization at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). To explore new ways of unfolding the Earth Van Wijk developed a series of myriahedral projections. "Why not just take a map of a small part of the earth, which is almost perfect, glue neighboring maps to it, and repeat this until the whole earth is shown? Of course you get interrupts, but does this matter? What does such a map look like?" Click here for the full series.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has witnessed a big break-through in 2011. With our wonderful Volume #28: Internet of Things, we have done our part of the job to understand the impact of this new technological frontier for urban life. Therefore it is interesting to start this year with a retrospective to the projects that shaped the development of the Internet of Things in 2011. IoT website Postscapes presents the Internet of Things Awards 2011, let's say the Oscars for geeks. Over 100 projects have been sent in and over 16,000 people have voted for their favorite projects in different categories such as ‘consumer products’, ‘design fiction’, ‘DIY projects’, and ‘environmental implementation’. The list is absolutely worth scrolling down, as the projects give a good glimpse of what the IoT could mean to our future lives. From earthquake alarm systems to a talking tree. And from wireless winegard monitoring systems to Rymble, an object that brings your social network to the real world, and won the award of best consumer product.

What's your knowledge about famous architecture? In the Covers/Versiones project by artist Luis Urculo, famous architectural sculptures are rebuilt by daily familiar objects like, books, cups, knives and matchboxes. Although the project is pretty much of an artwork, it works like a guessing game. Can you recognize the building before that name is displayed? It is certainly not a cinch, but therefore more fun if you guess the right one. To warm you up a little here is a present to clarify the idea. Number 10: WoZoCo by MVRDV in Amsterdam

Join Volume, Mark Wigley, Jeffrey Inaba, C-LAB, and guests at Project No. 8 (Ace Hotel location, 22 W. 29th Street, New York, NY) from 7-9 pm on Tuesday, 13 December 2011 for holiday cheer and urban conspiracy... i.e. the launch of Volume #29. Copies will be for sale, but drinks and music are complimentary. Click here for more information.

December is the month to guarantee yourself or a loved one a yearlong source of inspiration. Buy a subscription to Volume now and you will get a unique limited edition Volume bag for free and be in the running for the Worldmoon jewel. Click here to subscribe! Commissioned by Alicia Framis for the Moon Life project, Amsterdam-based DUS Architects have designed a masterplan for the moon captured in the form of a jewel at a scale of 1:140,000,000. The jewel can be worn as a brooch or a necklace. (This offer is valid from Dec 1st - 31st, 2011. A winner will be selected at random from all the new subscribers from that period. The winner will be announced in the second week of January 2012 and will receive the jewel in a special gift box, free of charge.) Click here to subscribe to Volume.