23 to 25 September, Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam PICNIC 2009 PICNIC is a cross-discipline platform for creative conversation and collaboration. It's a unique festival featuring a strategic conference, complimented by hands-on workshops and matchmaking sessions. One of the themes sounds especially interesting when considering the built environment: Exploding Media Exploding Media will showcase the latest changes in media technologies impacting user interaction, engagement, and communications with a special focus on gaming, connectivity and real-time social media. This is the story of the extraordinary transformation of Media from all the creative and technological aspects. From traditional storytelling to the impact of gaming on education, from city interaction and augmented reality to the Metaverse, this narrative will feature the latest innovations and disruptions that the media industry is facing. We will look at the emerging opportunities and business implications for the creative industry that these changes will bring. Speakers will be the creative geniuses pushing the envelope on these new developments. For a more elaborate analysis of what this years PICNIC has to offer those interested in the spatial implication of technology check out The Mobile City

1 & 2 October 2009, Westergasfabriek Amsterdam Tommorrow, International Urban Planning Congress Amsterdam Metropoles - world cities - are lead players in the global economy. Though they cover just 2 percent of the earth’s surface, cities consume 75 percent of the resources utilized by humankind. In the early 20th century, when Alderman F.M. ‘Floor’ Wibaut (1859-1936), a pioneering steersman of Amsterdam’s urban development and social housing policy, was politically and professionally active, the growth of major cities around the world seemed to attain an absolute peak. Endeavouring to steer the city’s ongoing development was therefore an exercise as urgent as it was logical. It was at this time that town and regional planning emerged in a fruitful interchange of knowledge and experience between administrators and specialists. Half the world’s population now resides in cities. Metropolises are sprouting up in Asia, Africa and South America at an unprecedented rate. Within 20 to 30 years some three quarters of the world’s population will be living in cities, giving rise to new issues. Cities elsewhere will over that same time-span need to find a response to population growth that is levelling off or even shrinking populations. The fields of urban development and spatial planning, now a century old, are faced with new challenges. ‘The future governance of Amsterdam will be focused on the material prosperity and mental welfare of the great mass of workers. Tomorrow the meaning of the word “prosperity” will be something quite different to what this word meant to Amsterdam in bygone times as chronicled by our historians and eulogized by our poets …. The advancement of prosperity as a responsibility of governments will in future entail the implementation of governmental provision of collective amenities across an ever-broader range of that great multitude’s collective needs, in every domain where collective services prove to be more efficient than individual provision. … ‘We are seeing the emergence of the view that the promotion of welfare – as far as this can nowadays be a task assumed by government – must be based on the exertion of governmental powers to introduce collective amenities for acknowledged needs wherever social expediency requires it.’ Dr F.M. Wibaut in his ‘Tomorrow’ speech (1925) With: Ken Livingstone, Maarten Hajer, Hermann Scheer, Tim Lang, Eric Corijn, Dieter Läpple, LaDonna Redmond, Michael Madison, Kees Christiaanse, Irina Ivashkina, P.K. Das, Edi Rama more info can be found here and in this PDF

This is the first of the FWD series, which summarizes hand picked content I find elsewhere on the web and would like to share with you. from the In the Shadow of Progress a picture show on the GOOD website. The stark reality of this moment in time is that many people are losing their jobs, their homes, and their ways of life. Yet amid what can seem like ceaseless news of loss, there are those who refuse to surrender hope. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Tent City, a temporary encampment below a freeway in Nashville, Tennessee, where hard-pressed and otherwise homeless strangers have come together to form a community. - see the entire picture show on GOOD From the harsh reality of Tent Cities we move to how the instruments with which we engage these problems are changing. In his piece The End to Movements on arthurmag.com(via Burak Arikan) Douglas Rushkoff poses a theory that the phenomenon of 'movements' as a means of civil activism has reached its limits. (Also check out the recent interview with Ruskhkoff and Kurt Andersen on Design Observer)

First of all, I must make a warning: I will not recur to airing a quick succession of 140 characters tweets, nor will I use the latest live-feed technology to try and let you understand how Beyond Media felt to me like a festival haunted by its very initial premises. Nope. Instead, I’ll go back to the very old means of putting up one word after the other, and one paragraph after the other, and try to telescope you into the heart of that simple argument by means of a very personal interpretation. When I say that this Festival is “haunted by its very initial premises” I do not mean that showing the audiovisual media which are today quintessential to architecture representation should bear any special problem. On the contrary, it is only natural and logical that someone should be doing it. At its 9th edition, the Florence festival also has it in its curriculum to be one of the first to do so. The ghosts I am referring to, instead, are those of the so-called digital culture. When Beyond Media was initiated by multitasking Marco Brizzi in 1997, it was only too obvious to a given few that digital tools were there to change the way we worked, the way we designed reality, the way we represented it and also thought about it. By then, it was also acceptable to let yourself immerge in the fascination that is due to the enormous possibilities granted by these new tools.

The waning revenue of print-publishing in the arena of newspaper's and magazine's would suggest that the future looks grim for architectural journalism on paper, but the magazines and journals that have been launched over the last months would suggest otherwise. Why would one start a new publication when magazines are dying, and advertising revenues are down. Big advertising dependent boys like Domus are surely having a hard time right now. Although when one follows this argument: "When the markets are down and the economic indicators turn south, the architect begins to think, to write, to theorize. When the markets are up we “do” and don’t think much" which makes David Gissen wonder how to actually map this. Some of this seems to make sense, introducing this argument at least makes a good excuse to make a list of the periodicals that have captured my attention lately. First up is Conditions, a Scandinavian quarterly and perhaps the best to prove the above theory, since it's founded by three architects and not by historians, academics or full-time theorists. 1_conditions1coverphoto4 The driving idea behind beginning a new magazine for them as stated in their manifest: In opposition to ignorance and superficiality this magazine is conceived in order to search for knowledge and predicaments of our continuously evolving society. It is organized in a fluctuating network of agents reflecting the present globalized state of a dynamic society, economics, politics and culture which are the motivators of architecture. Through a play of thoughts in an open ended forum, predefined "facts" will be unsecured and constantly reinvented. The forum will gather the architect, client, politician and the public, a communion of ideas creating conditions for evolution. Clearly a reaction against the bubble before it bursted. Their first issue is themed: "A Strategy for Evolution" which already bolsters a contradiction between conscious planning and the unconscious processes unfolding in nature. The issue is not a making a single argument but presents a variety of voices, approaches and interpretations to the theme. Check out the table of contents of issue #1, and their call for submissions for their second issue "Interpretation & Copy" While Conditions' existence is dependent upon advertising the next series of publications are supported by institutions. Bracket is an annual publication with their first issue on Farming coming up this Winter, so we'll have to wait and see what will be delivered. I'm curious what kind of publication it will be, because it the brainchild of not the smallest names on the web: Archinect and InfraNet Lab. Bracket will cover: (...) issues overlooked yet central to our cultural milieu that have evolved out of the new disciplinary territory at the intersection of architecture, landscape, urbanism and, now, the internet. It is no coincidence that the professional term architect can also now refer to information architects, and that the word community can also now refer to an online community. [bracket] is a publishing platform for ideas charting the complex overlap of the sphere of architecture and online social spheres. P.E.A.R, Paper for Emerging Architectural Research is the most recent addition to architectural publishing, they had their launch in London roughly a month ago. I haven't seen it yet, but they call themselves an architectural fanzine which sounds refreshing: "P.E.A.R. aims to re-establish the fanzine as a primary medium for the dissemination of architectural ideas, musings, research and works." pea-2 image003 New Geographies is a new journal published by Harvard University Press, while I haven't held one in my hands yet, the first striking encounter was that their first issue had an identical title to one of Volume's, namely "After Zero." Besides titeling, New Geographies also seems to be in sync with Volume's efforts to go beyond the disciplinary boundaries of architecture, and to seek out new terrains which are mostly bigger in scale ('geographies') for the application of architectural intelligence. New Geographies journal aims to examine the emergence of the geographic —a new but for the most part latent paradigm in design today—to articulate it and bring it to bear effectively on the agency of design. After more than two decades of seeing architecture and urbanism as the spatial manifestation of the effects of globalization, it is time to consider the expanded agency of the designer. Designers are increasingly compelled to shape larger scales and contexts, to address questions related to infrastructural problems, urban and ecological systems, and cultural and regional issues. These questions—previously confined to the domains of engineering, ecology, or regional planning—now require articulation through design. Encouraging designers to reexamine their tools and develop strategies to link attributes previously understood to be either separate from each other or external to the design disciplines, those questions have also opened up a range of technical, formal, and social repertoires for architecture and urbanism. Although in the past decade different versions of landscape and infrastructural urbanism have emerged in response to similar challenges, this new condition we call “the geographic” points to more than a shift in scale. (more here ... ) Finally there is the already a bit older Footprint, established at TU Delft's DSD in Fall 2007 (thus a pre-crash publication) is a typical academic journal. What makes it special is that all content is available for free download (pdf), all you need is a free registration. Of course this is just a list, that happens to end here. I'm curious to know if there are more recently initiated publications worthy of knowing about? Leave a comment!

Register deadline: July 24, 2009 / Submit deadline: August 7, 2009 Student Edition Register deadline : October 16, 2009 Submit deadline: November 2, 2009 picture-6 Paraphrasing the earlier WPA (Works Progress Administration) of 1939, this WPA (Working Public Architecture) is seeking to exploit the potential of the infrastructure investments of the Obama administration as a opportunity to exhibit the power of architecture's imagination is applicable to more than generating icons. Architects are called upon to take back the streets, to apply their architectural intelligence beyond the traditional boundaries of their discipline. cityLAB, an urban think tank at UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, announces a call for entries to “WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture.” WPA 2.0 is an open competition that seeks innovative, implementable proposals to place infrastructure at the heart of rebuilding our cities during this next era of metropolitan recovery. WPA 2.0 recalls the Depression-era Works Projects Administration (1935-43), which built public buildings, parks, bridges, and roads across the nation as an investment in the future—one that has, in turn, become a lasting legacy. We encourage projects that explore the value of infrastructure not only as an engineering endeavor, but as a robust design opportunity to strengthen communities and revitalize cities. Unlike the previous era, the next generation of such projects will require surgical integration into the existing urban fabric, and will work by intentionally linking systems of points, lines and landscapes; hybridizing economies with ecologies; and overlapping architecture with planning. This notion of infrastructural systems is intentionally broad, including but not limited to parks, schools, open space, vehicle storage, sewers, roads, transportation, storm water, waste, food systems, recreation, local economies, 'green' infrastructure, fire prevention, markets, landfills, energy-generating facilities, cemeteries, and smart utilities.

Too good, not to share. A beautifully crafted animated infographic clearly making the point in favor of eating local produce, and illustrating the consequences of our globalized food industry. The video was produced by Canadian food movement mayonnaise brand: Hellmann's Hellman’s - It’s Time for Real from CRUSH on Vimeo. via information aesthetics

International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam: Open City from 24-9-2009 to 10-1-2010 With its young architecture biennale, Rotterdam will again make an effort to grasp the attention of the architecture world. After three architecture biennale's on mobility (2003), 'the flood' (2005) and power (2007) on the 24th of September the fourth biennale will open, themed: Open City and curated by Kees Christiaanse (...) an Open City is a place where different social groups co-exist, cultural diversity is present, differences in scale are visible, and urban innovation and probably economic development are taking place. When all these factors come together, it can have a positive effect. We can then speak of an Open City. Open City is not a city; it is a condition of a part of the city. The word ‘condition’ indicates that the situation is finite, that the situation changes owing to other influences. And I’m only talking about parts of the city because it’s an illusion to think that the whole city can be designed as an Open City, or that this can be engineered. Usually for political reasons, every city contains areas that are potentially open, and other areas that will never be open. - Kees Christiaanse, interviewed by Archined This main theme will be worked out by international teams of curators in six sub-themes: Community, Collective, Refuge, Squat, Reciprocity and The Make-able City Volume will work with sub-curators Bart Golhoorn of Project Russia and Aleksander Sverdlov, who work on the theme 'collective' to make a collaborative Volume issue (#21). Also Partizan Publik's project Social Housing after the Soviets will be part of this issue and the IABR exhibition.

Platform21 Prinses Irenestraat 19, 1077 WT Amsterdam (view on map) 13 March - 30 August 2009 / Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 12:00 - 18:00 / Free entry Marty's Camera Repair (via platform21) Platform21 keeps on celebrating the DIY attitude, after they showed us how we could hack Ikea (as did some blogs), they now bring us a re-appreciation of the 'repairing'. Platform21 = Repairing starts with the idea that repair has been underestimated as a creative, cultural and economic force. If we don’t start looking at repair as a contemporary activity soon, an incredibly rich body of knowledge – one that contributes to human independence and pleasure – could be lost. The situation is especially puzzling when you consider current global interest in other ideas related to sustainability, such as recycling and the cradle-to-cradle philosophy. With Platform21 = Repairing we aim to raise awareness of a mentality, a culture and a practice that not so long ago was completely integrated into life and the way we designed it. It is not too late. Also check out Platform21's Repair Manifesto in English or in Dutch and the commentary it got. 4375-454-803

Only two years after the pioneering, arty visions of food production in cities featured in 2007 exhibition Edible cities at NAi-Maastricht, we can say that today urban agriculture is considered as an important feature in architecture design and urban planning. And that it's a fashionable topic too. 
’In the past if you were proposing to put gardens on top of your buildings, you were considered as crazy. Now you're considered crazy if you don't’, said architect Andre Viljoen, one of the speakers at the Foodprint symposium, hosted by Stroom, Den Haag on June 26. Integrating food production with urban activities might sound strange, but in fact cities are always shaped after the type of food system feeding them. 
Author of the influential book Hungry City, Carolyn Steele explained that the first cities were born in the so-called 'fertile crescent' in order to manage the surplus of food production in the surrounding countryside. In pre-industrial cities the wealth of the city was linked directly to the wealth of its countryside: Ambrogio Lorenzetti's fresco ‘Allegoria del Buon Governo’ represents the 'good government' as a balance of city and countryside. 
In pre-industrial cities food production had to be located in proximity to urban settlements – as German economist Heinrich von Thuenen formalized in his 1826 model. But after the introduction of railroad transportation, and the introduction of industrial processes in agriculture, food production started to progressively disconnect from cities, which in turn could explode in size and population.

Your web-editor is presently traveling around the former Soviet Union, last week in Tblisi and this week residing in Moscow doing research on how people are dealing with life the Microrayon, the large-scale social housing projects developed throughout the entire former Soviet Union. The Social Housing After the Soviets project is a comparative study of the opportunities and the urgencies of public and private use of the Microrayon. Research will be published in Volume and at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam: Open City, as a part of the exhibition by sub-curators Bart Goldhoorn, Alexander Sverdlov and Anna Bronovitskaya under the sub-theme: Collective Follow how the research is developing on the Social Housing after the Soviets blog

Bauhaus City - Get on Site! The Bauhaus Dessau calls students from around the world to attend its anniversary year Summer School. From 22 – 31 July, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation will hold an international Summer School entitled ‘Bauhaus City - Get on Site!’. On the occasion of its 90th anniversary, the institution invites young artists, architects, designers as well as the interested public to come to Dessau and explore the Bauhaus architecture on site. Parallel to the anniversary exhibition ‘Modell Bauhaus’ which will be shown in Berlin at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, the Summer School in Dessau offers students from all over the world the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of the Bauhaus at one of its original sites. In six workshops the examples of Classical Modernism built here will be examined through performative actions and urban interventions. Hidden traces and connections will be brought to light. The Summer School will look at the experimental housing estate Dessau-Törten, the Bauhaus buildings, the Masters’ houses, the employment office and the restaurant Kornhaus. The workshops are run by INTERBORO, New York; MUF, London; Michael Zinganel, Graz; Wochenklausur, Vienna; Kuehn Malvezzi, Berlin and Gods Entertainment, Berlin. A series of public lectures accompanies the Summer School programme.

On Friday June 5th, 2009 Al Manakh’s series of international Debates on Tour took place at the ADACH Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale of Art. For this occasion architect Rem Koolhaas and curator of the ADACH Pavilion Catherine David engaged in a conversation with Ole Bouman on the curiosities and conditions that has drawn their practice and vision to the Gulf cities such as Abu Dhabi. In this, they discussed the specific urban conditions of cities in the region, and how these influence and are determined by the social/economic make-up and cultural manifestations of the city itself. Also discussed is how exposure to these circumstances has influenced the practice and personal perspective of these two internationally acclaimed cultural producers. Comments and questions from audience members - such as Mishaal Al Gergawi (of the Dubai Culture & Arts Authority) and Kaiwan Mehta (Mumbai based architect and particpant in the ADACH exhibition) – supplemented the discussion with further insight to the relationship between the cultural ambition and political will, as well as the relationship between cultural frameworks and the actual urban plan of a city.

In 1972 the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth in which they explored the scenario of what would happen in a world driven by limitless growth using finite resources. About 40 years later we are experiencing the clash of these colliding vectors. The bigger the boom the worst the bust, and there is no place on the globe were the spatial implications of the unfolding scenario of The Club of Rome is more evident: Detroit, Michigan. Detroitification is the fear of every American city. But Detroit is also giving birth to the ideas that will perhaps transform it from a symbol of despair into a beacon of hope. Detroit and other cities in the Rust Belt area have abandonned the idle hope for another boom. In the Detroit areaa a new paradigm is emerging that can help to break the negative spiral. This new spark that has entered the Detroit mind is the shrink paradigm. The spatial implications of this paradigm will be such that the urban landscape will become less urban, a hybrid between a rural landscape and the metropolis, a type of '21st century countryside'.

Largely hidden from the view of the city dweller, a worldwide network of food producers and supermarket chains takes care of our supply of daily food. This is very convenient, but it is also the cause of many problems. A handful of distributors decides what we eat. For the most part the people who produce the food are invisible. The natural seasons are passed by. Transport puts a heavy toll on the environment and climate. Supply is dependent on the amount of fuel available. There is hardly any knowledge of how our food is actually produced. The return of food production to the city might help to increase this awareness and might also create healthy and safe food within the boundaries of a more sustainable city. This requires a new way of looking at the city, where nature, the production landscape and the recreational landscape are linked to urbanism in a more ‘natural' way. With Foodprint Stroom aims to explore the possibilities of The Hague as a production landscape and to develop utopian, appealing and feasible proposals. Speakers Henk de Zeeuw, Paula Sobie (CA), Debra Solomon, Katrin Bohn (UK), André Viljoen (UK), Jan Willem van der Schans, Janneke Vreugdenhil, Christina Kaba (ZA), Nils Norman (UK), Menno Swaak, Paul Bos, Onno van Eijk, John Thackara (UK), Bart Pijnenburg, Gaston Remmers, Tracy Metz, Christien Meindertsma, Joep van Lieshout, Nicole Hoven, Maarten Doorman, Will Allen (VS), Jago van Bergen, Vincent Kuypers, Dick Veerman, Carolyn Steel (UK), Gerwin Verschuur, Winy Maas, Annechien ten Have en Rob Baan.

Drawings, photo-montages, renderings and models have always been powerful means to convey ideas, present scenarios and research the future. The publication Beyond Architecture provides us with a bulky collection of sometimes intelligent and mostly enchanting and simply stunning imagery of how artists are dealing in their work with architecture and the city. For architects it is interesting to see 'their' subject approached by other disciplines. Many artists are using similar architectural techniques, but the difference lies in that for artists the drawing, model and photo-montage is the final product, where for the architect it is a means to an end i.e. to build. According to Lukas Feireiss the book: "charts novel ways of discovering and negotiating the potential of the urban in visual culture, thus also providing alternative and valid critical insights into understanding the city" Where architects in general produce their imagery as means to project the future, the artists in Beyond Architecture are investigating the potency and problematics of the present. The book presents the imagery without accompanying judgement or analysis. The absence of accompanying essays or a framing of the content is a missed opportunity and result in confusion.