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?

The central hub of the United Parcel Service (UPS) processes, on average, 1.6 million packages per day. That's almost twenty per second. Such an intense flow forces operations to be internally consistent, but also demands an enormous amount of flexibility due to unpredictable externalities. What if a road is closed, or a machine breaks? Ghazal Jafari investigates the UPS's contingency management system and looks at this logistical behemoth venturing into new territories.

Latin America is a place, but it's also a project. Its history as a colonial project gave birth to a radical one of decolonization. With revoutionaries like Simón Bolívar and José de San Martin, the idea of Latin America as a collective whole emerged and has persisted up to this day. Godofredo Pereira looks at the failed proposal of a pipeline running between three countries to question whether such a mechanism can't be used to realize such a project, that of Latin America itself.

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.

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.

On Wednesday 27 January, The Rijksmuseum will host the launch of 'Aldo van Eyck, Seventeen Playgrounds'. The book, by Anna van Lingen and Denisa Kollarova, highlights and discusses the seventeen remaining playgrounds in Amsterdam by Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck.

The introduction of digital technology into spatial contexts of refuge mobilizes a virtual geography of information, such as how many refugees are there, how many are HIV positive or pregnant, and where are they moving to. By inserting digital technology in the process of basic aid, human rights have been transposed to the digital sphere, yet incorporating advanced digital infrastructures in contexts where bricks and bread would be more than enough initiates a self-eliminating hoax, seeing as how, frankly, it is the exact same digital technology that keeps famines in place, targets relief-hospitals with drones and leaves migrants to drown. When we are all just one scan and click away to be saved, are we also too easily and often left to fate?

Ben Vickers - Curator of Digital at the Serpentine Galleries and initiator of unMonastery - sat down with Vinay Gupta - one of the world's leading thinkers on infrastructure theory, state failure solutions, and managing global system risks - to speak about practices and politics of decentralization. In 2002 Gupta invented an open-source solution to 'house the world'. The hexayurt shelter is designed to be manufactured anywhere in the world at any scale and from local materials.

For our 10th anniversary, we received a wonderful gift from one of our Japanese readers. This is simply amazing, you have never seen anything like this!

Volume wants to thank all of you who showed up at our events in New York and Amsterdam. Without you, it wouldn't have been as great as it was. We are looking forward for the next ten years!