A unique blend of travelogue, photographs and poetry, A Stranger’s Pose draws the reader into a world of encounters haunted by the absence of home, estrangement from a lover and family tragedies. The author’s recollections and reflections of fragments of his journeys to African cities, from Dakar to Douala, Bamako to Benin, and Khartoum to Casablanca, offer a compelling and very personal meditation on the meaning of home and the generosity of strangers to a lone traveler. Inspired by the author’s own travels with photographers between 2011 and 2015, the Iduma’s own accounts are expanded to include other narratives about ...

This podcast, recorded with the three founders of Demilit (Bryan Finoki, Nick Sowers, and Javier Arbona) is a precedent for Archipelago since it constitutes both a walk to examine the hyper controlled policed space of downtown Oakland and a receptacle for the echoes of Occupy Oakland that comes as interludes to our discussion. We observe objects and spaces that are produced by securitarian logic that often attempt to dissimulate their function by an aesthetic of the ordinary. Starting from Oakland City Hall where Occupy used to have its encampment, we spend the first part of the conversation around the administrative/corporate center of ...

There are few things in urbanism today so unfashionable as the ceremonial public square. The vast, proverbially windswept plazas built under “really existing socialism” from the 1920s to the 1980s are widely considered to be useless spaces, designed to intimidate or at least impress. Yet if they are only of use to those in power, why is it they have been used so successfully in protest? From Petrograd in 1917 to Independence Square in Kiev during the Orange Revolution, these spaces have become focuses for mass protest. Beginning in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, and taking in Warsaw, Ljubljana, Kharkov and Moscow, Owen ...

This conversation with Karim Kattan introduces the art residency he recently created in Jericho. Entitled el-Atlal (the ruins), this residency allows us to discuss about the political strategy that this Palestinian cultural project intends to adopt and, beyond it, also the concept of ruin in Palestine, as well as this very particular place in the Jordan Valley, a “central margin” as Karim says, between Jerusalem and Amman and the Northern and Southern part of the country. Jericho is at a key moment of its extremely long history, experiencing urban and cultural developments that simultaneously allows it to foresee the future of Palestine and also threatens its fragile ...

Two topics emerge from the third session of Taming the Horror Vacui. One is apparent, the other is fleeting. One is sought, the other is coincidental. Centred around the guided tour given by city planner Emiel Arends in Rotterdam in June 2020, the event firstly deals with the ways in which wind shapes the city and the city shapes the wind. The locations in the tour, explains Arends, are examples of how the city landscape interacts with its aeolian one, and is marked by specific architectural interventions. Rib’s focus on the material language of the city joins Haseeb Ahmed’s ongoing ...

Pick up any academic or popular publication that deals with urban life in Africa and be prepared to be overrun by caricature, hyperbole, stereotypes and moralistic hogwash. Urban Africans are either bravely en route to empowering themselves to attain sustainable livelihoods or the debased perpetrators of the most unimaginable acts of misanthropy. Explanations for these one-dimensional distortions vary from historical path dependency perspectives, to the vagaries of the peddlers of neoliberal globalisation agendas, or to the glorious agency of digni ed actors who persist with their backs straight, chin up despite the cruelties bestowed by governmental neglect and economic malice. ...

The second installment of the Reader is centered on the theme ‘Mobilities and Fixtures’. In this issue Sean O’Toole interviews architect David Adjaye about African cityscapes, snapshot photography and failed utopias; Victor Lavalle uncovers the making of mercenaries in Uganda; Martin Kimani follows the African visa-seeker in the tragi-comedy that is the post 9/11 airport; Sherif El-Azma explores Cairo by foot; MADEYOULOOK and Santu Mofokeng imagine the didactic possibilities of trains; Manu Herbstein documents the ‘car-doctors’ of Accra; Chris Abani discovers the African city of Las Vegas; and Michael Watts examines oil cities.

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 conversation is the second one recorded live at Studio-X Amman Lab (the first one being with Rahel Aima & Ahmad Makia). Recorded with Dena Qaddumi, it attempts to propose a struggle narrative for Palestine that is not focused on Jerusalem to which many of us contribute, thus participating in a debate mostly focused on the 1967 war. By examining the spatial politics of Jaffa-Tel Aviv, Dena attempts to show that similar “ethonocratic” logic of segregation are also at work in an environment admittedly less militarized. This logic also incorporates the same capitalist mechanisms of gentrification at work in other ...

Rosalyn Deutsche is a professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Feminist Theory, and Urban Theory at Barnard College (New York). Her analytical materia prima are the concept of the public sphere, discrepancies in development, and models of public art (public art criticism), such as that done by Krzysztof Wodiczko. One of her most important works is Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusets, 1996). This volume includes the essay Agoraphoobia, which we publish here in a new, revised version of the Spanish translation done by in a new, revised version of the Spanish translation by Jesús Carillo ...

ALVARADO Alvarado is an open-source variable typeface based on vernacular signage found on the namesake street, specifically on the stretch through the Westlake and Pico-Union neighborhoods of Los Angeles which are among the highest population density in the USA: http://primary-foundry.com/typefaces/alvarado/ LICENSE This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is copied above, and is also available with a FAQ at: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL AUTHORS Alvarado has been designed by Hector Torres (astudionameddesire.com) and published by Primary Foundry (primary-foundry.com) DESIGN Alvarado was created by Hector Torres using Glyphs and the Dinamo Font Gauntlet (fontgauntlet.com)

An ‘object’ is a work of architecture that is expressly cut off from its environment. Objects are not exclusive to any particular architectural style, but objectification has long been central to western architecture. Indeed, it might even be said to be the very strategy by which modernism succeeded in conquering the world. It is all-pervasive because it is consistent with the aim of the prevailing economic system: to transform virtually everything into a commodity. In Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma argues that this mindset prevents us from establishing a healthy relationship with the external world and suggests that an alternative form of architecture ...