Wednesday 19 May, 2010, auditorium Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam. Open: 4:30 pm, start: 5 pm. Entrance fee: € 5, reduction fee € 3 (students, Friends of the NAi). Register here. Speakers will include Ole Bouman, Hani Asfour, Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf, and Ronald Wall. Following the release of Al Manakh Gulf Continued, a special issue of Volume Magazine, the NAi will organize a debate in collaboration with OMA, Archis/Volume and Pink Tank. Al Manakh Gulf Continued offers readers another view of urban development in the Gulf region. This time focusing on how the cities remain re-invent themselves and about their position related to the rest of the world.

Al Manakh: Gulf Continued launches tomorrow at 6 pm at Sorbonne University in Abu Dhabi. Dubai Today spoke with Mitra Khoubrou, Partner at Pink Tank and one of the editors of Al Manakh. Listen to the first part of the interview with Mitra Khoubrou below. Click here to listen to the rest of the interview.

Starting September 19th, Sukkah City will pop-up at Union Square Park, New York City. Sukkah City consists of twelve radically temporary structures built by competitors form all over the world. Anyone is invited to submit designs. The sukkah is an ephemeral, elemental shelter, erected for one week each fall, in which it is customary to share meals, entertain, sleep, and rejoice. "New York City will re-imagine the ancient Sukkah phenomenon, develop new methods of material practice and parametric design, and propose radical possibilities for traditional design constraints in a contemporary urban site. Twelve finalists will be selected by a panel of celebrated architects, designers, and critics to be constructed in a visionary village in Union Square Park from September 19-21, 2010. (...) One structure will be chosen by New Yorkers to stand and delight throughout the week-long festival of Sukkot as the Official Sukkah of New York City. The process and results of the competition, along with construction documentation and critical essays, will be published in the forthcoming book 'Sukkah City: Radically Temporary Architecture for the Next Three Thousand Years'." More about the Sukkah and about the competition:

Two weeks ago northern European airspace was closed due to ash coming from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. Data analysts of ITO World took advantage of this major air traffic reboot and created a fascinating video, based on the data retrieved from Flight Radar 24, that shows how the northern European airspace returned to normal use after being closed due to volcanic ash from Iceland. As you can see, a small number flights took already place on April 18. Two days later all airports were opened again.

Please read our press release announcing the release of Al Manakh Gulf Continued in Abu Dhabi. Stay tuned for more information about events to introduce the book.

Despite our skill and experience in manipulating space and material, architects are incapable of addressing the needs of society unless they have first been explicitly asked to do so. Unsolicited architects do not wait to tackle the big issues often overlooked by the market. They create briefs where none are written, discover sites where none are owned, approach clients where none are present, and find financing where none is available. Unsolicited architecture offers an alternative to a reactive, service-oriented role, and instead calls for a new, more socially-motivated approach to procuring projects.

Two-day conference, 3 and 4 May 2010, auditorium Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam. With Jolyon Leslie, Kai Vöckler, Sultan Barakat, a.o. Time: 9.30 am-5 pm (Mon), 10.00 am-5 pm (Tue). Language: English. Click here for the full program of the conference. Please scroll down for details regarding reservation. Architecture of Peace is an international long-term research and action project in which a large number of stakeholders are involved. The project will consist of local case studies, interventions, university research studios, debates, publications and exhibitions. The public kick-off of the programme will be a two-day conference in Rotterdam, The Netherlands on the 3rd and 4th of May, 2010. Participants include architects, urbanists and professionals from the fields of development studies, sociology and conflict studies.

As a team coordinating from multiple time zones, the most effective way to collect and distribute relevant articles into the pool of collective research was to use the online bookmarking service Delicious as a universal reference location. By the conclusion of research in March 2010, we had over 1200 articles and 143 different tags. This by no means qualifies the entirety of the research but presents a cross-section of materials utilized to the research community. Delicious provides a simple means of collection, but lacks the ability to view the material from an alternative perspective. The Al Manakh Research calendar is the first step in the development of a tool to investigate these relationships, a way to understand the volume of our research database. While still in its infancy of development as a research tool, it prompts insightful questions about both the content and our individual research activity. Viewbook Download PDF version —This visualization was created by Jonathan Hanahan.

16-18 April, 2010, Villa Sonsbeek, Arnhem, The Netherlands. With Arjen Oosterman (Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of Archis/Volume) and others. More information here. O.K. Festival is the first event in the Netherlands that offers a survey of independent magazines from all over the world. Under the title 'Welcome Magazines' O.K. Festival presents the energy and the visual explosion of strange, beautiful and original magazines. One by one they present an answer to the uniformity of the mass media. The printed media are falling victim to increasingly strict formats. Sales figures reign. In the gaping hole they leave behind the independent magazine manifests itself. Everything that is excluded by the mainstream media finds its place here. In this sense, the independent magazine offers a sanctuary to designers, illustrators and writers. It is at times defiant and headstrong, but always brimming with energy and playfulness. Readers from across the world are increasingly drawn to its versatility, originality and creativity. O.K. Festival offers an insight into the full spectrum of independent magazines through various activities.

25 March-2 July, 2010, Pacific Design Center (PDC), West Hollywood, CA. Superfront, an L.A. based exposition centre presents the exhibit Unplanned: Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale. The exhibit boldly presents a collection of radical methods for envisioning and producing space at the urban scale. Unplanned is a group exhibit with more than twenty participants a.o Ae-i-ou, Tomorrows Thoughts Today and Alex Delaunay. It spans architecture, urban design, industrial design, conceptual art, and cartography to present an array of experimental work at the urban scale. Multi-disciplinary practitioners address emergent urbanism, 'wild building', and other alternatives to conventional urban planning. "Just as the discipline of architecture faces a re-imagination of itself in this era of slow-motion global capitalism, the human population finds itself crossing the threshold to a predominantly urban existence. Many of the basic tenets underpinning urban planning – Cartesian geometry, programmatic taxonomy, contextualism – have been subject to skeptical investigation and rebellion in architecture throughout the past decade. Yet conventional urban planning continues, the discipline of urban planning operating much as it has since the 1960s (if not the 1860s)."

Cartagen, the institute that describes itself as "a framework for dynamic mapping", has presented a new way of styling of geographical maps. GSS strongly reminds of famous CSS, the style sheets that are used to design the look and feel of webpages. Investigating a GSS file of a map of Rome, it even looks more or less the same. "Just like CSS for styling web pages, GSS is a specification for designing maps. Adapted for dynamic data sources, GSS can define changing geographic elements, display multiple datasets, and even respond to contextual tags like 'condition:poor'. (...) Instead of sending pre-rendered tiles for every zoom level, Cartagen draws maps dynamically on the client side. This means maps can move, adapt, and redraw, and can include as many layers of data as needed." Interesting to mention is that GSS follows the open up of maps and geographical data, and goes even further by placing an open source style layer upon it. It could be a useful tool for people to easily design maps, even without specific cartographic knowledge.

A while ago Jason Kottke spent an article on the mysterious Project Cybersyn, which is described as a "a Chilean attempt at real-time computer-controlled planned economy in the years 1970–1973". Project Cybersyn existed during the government of president Salvador Allende and consisted of a network of telex machines that linked factories with a single computer center in Santiago. From here the principles of cybernetics were used to control the modes of production in real-time, or, as The Guardian describes it: "Voters, workplaces and the government were to be linked together by a new, interactive national communications network, which would transform their relationship into something profoundly more equal and responsive than before — a sort of socialist internet, decades ahead of its time."

By Jonathan Hanahan It is out of our hands and soon into yours: Volume’s special issue Al Manakh Gulf Cont’d — 536 pages on the Gulf region from 139 contributors based in over 20 countries will be launched in just under a month, on April 18, both in the Gulf and beyond. Over a year of researching, questioning, commentating, and evaluating topics that have evolved from the Gulf have been collated into this edition, limited only by the size of your postbox. For many of us, there is no finality in a topic that is eternally evolving, and as the title indicates, continuing. It would be very easy to wipe our hands clean, claim its completeness and move on. But with the excitement of the process and its result still fresh in our memory, we still look for ways to continue the dialogue this journey incited. The project of Al Manakh collects narratives over the year. And with a year of research comes a year of data. The intention now is to engage an alternative vantage into the making of Al Manakh. What we present is a series of visualizations – a quantitative appendix to supplement the qualitative publication – in hope that from looking back, and the reader looking forward, we can enhance the conclusions that represent this schism in time of a continuing Gulf. The forthcoming blog series focuses on the sources, content and relationships that develop through its making: From Process to Production. Visualization 1: A Year of Research A cross-section of the editorial research team: topics, activities, networks, and biases. Visualization 2/3: Sources to Subjects Illustrating where the source and type of information came from to what becomes of it in the print outcome. This prompts questions such as: if 48% of sources are from business news agencies, yet 61% of our content was written by cultural professionals, does Al Manakh what sort of commentary does the project make? Visualization 4: Looking Back and Forward What this analysis means to Al Manakh: Gulf Continued and how it may influence future publications.

Royal Haskoning, the Delta Alliance and the City of Rotterdam invite students from all over the world to enter the third edition of the DeltaCompetition and develop practical, innovative, sustainable solutions to the threats facing delta cities. The organization is looking for new, inspiring and daring ideas and practical solutions from a wide combination of disciplines that integrate urban development and flood risk reduction, fresh water provision and energy production, housing and sustainable infrastructure development, (water) transport and rainwater catchment, and/or smart tools to improve urban development policy, implementation and enforcement and water governance in delta cities. The best three will receive an award with a prize of € 3,000 each. Furthermore, the three winning participants are invited to present their ideas to an international audience of decision makers and experts during the Deltas in Times of Climate Change symposium, to be held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, from 28 September to 1 October 2010.