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.

On February 28, the Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB) ended its three-month run. The venue will be demolished as part of the transformation of the Shekou waterfront district from factories and warehouses into a cosmopolitan cultural destination. This is indicative of the incredible energy being exerted on developing the city, and the money available to do so.

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.

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!

Shelter is most immediately associated today with conditions of disaster, displacement and destitution. There is an inherent urgency to the word; it is first and foremost a necessity, a human right even. Yet thought of as the absolute minimum necessary to survive, shelter is an architectural stigma. Shelter is not a thing though; shelter is a verb; if there is such a thing as shelter, it is because whatever it is, shelters. Volume #46: Shelter is dedicated to the question of how shelter can be reformulated as an architectural project.

Learning by Doing: A digital interview with Francien van Westrenen, Willemijn Lofvers, Tim Devos and Hans Venhuizen, the intiatiors of Stroom Den Haag's project 'Stadsklas'.

From seventeenth-century painter Claude Lorrain to the modern-day Home Owners Association (HOA), the Picturesque has come a long way. Today it appears that the ineffable charms of what Kenneth Clark described as “the most enchanting dream that has ever consoled man”, is enshrined in the rules and regulations that make up most residential developments across the United States.

‘Radical Interiority’ is a masterful piece of storytelling. It is smart, taut, engaging and propulsive. It symbolizes one of the most genuine values of Volume: to show the forces that shape our world and habitat with and without the conscience intervention of professional designers and planners; to reveal how things are made; and, to claim the utility of architectural intelligence as a mode of thought, as a splendid tool not only to operate in the world but also to explain a state of things.

The housing question is about the system, the (no) rule, and the law. Aspects of it, such as displacement, privatization, (in)equality, crisis are relevant to all of us. In response to how to deal with the question, Ada Colau mentions that we need to look at it across disciplines, nations, relations. She also gives good clues for architects, as well as for architectural education.