This conversation with two members of a relatively new whistleblowing platform—we called them Sarah and Cleo to preserve their anonymity—intends to present the latter. It allows people working on development projects in London to leak information that can be used by local inhabitant associations to organize in time their defense against their planned eviction. We discuss the platform both theoretically—the conceptual approach to disobedience will be presented in the next conversation with Elena Loizidou—and practically, through the perspective of (often young) architects working in development projects, and the ones of local associations through the workshops organized by Concrete Action. Information ...

Charles Correa (*1930 in Secunderabad) has played an instrumental role in the shaping of postcolonial architecture in India. He has also been a pioneer in addressing crucial issues of housing and urbanization in the Third World, including the proliferation of squatters. This anthology assembles a selection of essays and lectures whose subjects range from the metaphysical to the decidedly pragmatic and deal with architecture, urban planning, landscape, and individuals such as Le Corbusier, Isambard Brunel, and Mahatma Gandhi. It also contains a reprint of his seminal book The New Landscape (1985), long out of print, on urban development in the Third ...

Following our recent debate “Politics of Spatial Segregation” that shed light on racist Danish housing policies and the notion of structural discrimination co-hosted with CAMP – Center for Arts on Migration Politics in Copenhagen on 22 March, Margarida Waco from The Funambulist met with the two co-founders of the association Almen Modstand (Common Resistance), Fatma Tounsi and Marie Northroup, for a conversation about current legislation and the founding pillars of the association. The starting point of the conversation was a new strategy to rid Denmark of a parallel society by 2030 presented by the Danish Government in March 2018. To counteract ...

The third installment of the Reader explores the unholy trinity of land, property and value – the life force of cities everywhere. In this issue António Andrade Tomás reveals the vice and violence that permeate the act of securing land and home in Luanda; Andile Mngxitama challenges rhetoric that positions land theft in South Africa in the realm of material dispossessions and asks us to plumb deeper; Billy Kahora reflects on the state of the ‘estate’ of his Nairobi childhood; and a transformative vision for the Lagos National Theatre is presented in four conversations and seven performative pamphlets.

This volume is a call to practical action leading on from the theoretical approaches seen in Volume 2: The Studio. It presents a further selection from the Future Architecture platform call for ideas, and focuses firmly on the nitty-gritty of practice with projects and strategies that are on-site or site ready to shake up that future. These are the inspirational solutions and ideas, which could soon be transforming the landscape of architecture and our cities, reasserting the agency of what architecture in its widest sense can offer and mean. Contributors include: Aleksandra Zarek; Andrej Strehovec; Plan Común; Esen Gökçe Özdamar and ...

How can you navigate towards something when there are no fixed points when you cannot determine your position? How do you know where to go, or even know when you have got there? This fourth volume in the Archifutures series investigates how architecture, traditionally considered to be a future?oriented activity, can best respond as we find ourselves on the threshold of a “post-futurist” condition where the future is not necessarily ahead of us, but everywhere and – perhaps most especially – “now”. Contributors include: Nora Akawi, Florian Bengert, Filipe Estrela, Mariabruna Fabrizi, Nikita Gyawali, Ana Jeini, Holly Lewis, Fosco Lucarelli, Brett ...

We live in challenging times. There is overwhelming evidence that massive change is required in order to survive impending environmental collapse. Yet this fifth volume in the Archifutures series takes the position that the “apocalypse” is not an imminent event, but an insidious process that is already happening. Communities everywhere are facing it on a day-to-day basis. Many are already resisting and adapting. Despite the implied drama of the word “apocalypse”, the reality is actually far more mundane: surviving it is not about building bunkers, it is about building resilience – everywhere and in all kinds of ways. Contributors include: Bora ...

Now is not a time for metaphorical sticking plasters or vanity projects, it is a time for change and a time for action. The mandate of architects and urbanists today goes way beyond designing buildings, it includes changing behavior, influencing and impacting policy, and building bottom-up agency with new understandings of value, justice, and cultural production. This task is best achieved by sharing not just strategies but also practice – completely openly and freely. This sixth volume in the Archifutures series for the Future Architecture platform, therefore, focuses on emerging narratives and strategies that can help architects adapt their practice towards ...

This conversation with Stéphanie Dadour evolves around her doctoral dissertation that studies architectural theory and practice in the end of 20th-century North America. We explore a particular chapter of this dissertation to continue a series started with Olivia Ahn and Karen Tongson, about the gendered spatial paradigm constituted by the American suburbia. Citing the works of Mary McLeod, Beatriz Colomina, Joel Sanders and other feminist/queer thinkers and architects, we address architectural elements proper to this paradigm, such as the lawn, the curtain, or the window as instances of gendered apparatuses. We conclude the conversation by examining anthropometric studies, as well ...

In this issue, we’re looking at how socially engaged artists are challenging mainstream habits of seeing and doing that exclude the lived experience and creative potential of large swaths of people who do not fit into—or rather, who have been systematically oppressed by—the social norms and physical expectations of capitalist society. Rather than view difference in negative terms, these artists are using their work to affirm physical, sensory, emotional, and cognitive difference as “to be expected and respected on its own terms as part of ordinary human experience,” as Colin Cameron wrote in a 2001 article on Disability Arts that ...

Atlas Survival Shelters in Montebello was started by a man who makes luxury metal doors for Beverly Hills homes. After having difficulty finding a proper bomb shelter, he decided to build his own. Visiting Atlas, you only get a whiff of the Right Wing Prepper tendencies that seem to inform the place, like a magazine they make about bunkers with a cover showing an armed man surveying the landscape behind a stack of sandbags. On their website, hundreds of photographs show their corrugated metal shelters furnished in a midwestern style, complete with decorative oar, a painting of dogs playing poker, ...