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Informal City: Caracas Case is the result of an urban research project initiated in the Venezuelan capital by the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes) and Urban-Think Tank. This publication is a form of compendium of informal and cultural developments that pertain not only to Caracas, but to almost every Latin American metropolis. Including contributions from Saskia Sassen, Sabine Bitter, Helmut Weber, Neil Smith, Marjetica Potrc, and Armando Silva, it offers a new urbanism applicable to cities around the world and makes the need for a profound change in our understanding of urban culture evident.

Informal City: Caracas Case

The sixth issue of SLUM Lab is the first to have a global scope, presenting an array of projects from around the world that reveal facets of the destructive capacity of contemporary city-making and ideas for alternative futures. Produced as a free newspaper bringing together studio material or directed projects from Columbia University GSAPP, the City College of New York’s landscape architecture program, and ETH Zürich, as well as invited essays, the publication was launched during New York’s Urban Design Week and includes contributions from Charlie Koolhaas, Michael Sorkin, SUPERFRONT, Lydia Kallipoliti, Michael Young, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Interboro Partners, and David Grahame Shane.

SLUM Lab 6: Last Round Ecology

Since 2014, CARTHA has provided a platform for critical thinking on architecture and society. Founded by an international team of architects and designers, it aims to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical approaches to contemporary architecture. Each year, CARTHA initiates research and publishes four issues on a topic in its online magazine, which are then brought together in an annual book. In 2016, CARTHA collaborated with the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Titled Making Heimat: Germany, Arrival Country, the pavilion explored the challenges and potential the recent influx of refugees to Germany has posed for architecture and urban design, and contributions to this volume further reflect on this topic. Alongside ‘Bringing it All Back Home’, CARTHA on Making Heimat includes essays from Arno Brandlhuber and Marina Otero Verzier, as well as interviews with Iverna McGowan of Amnesty International, David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, and Giovanna Borasi from the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

CARTHA on Making Heimat

‘Bringing it All Back Home’

A special publication produced by Urban-Think Tank and the TdLab at ETH Zürich,Markets in the Tropicspresents the research, debates, and encounters that emerged from two summer schools with Universidad del Norte focused on thecentro histórico of Barranquilla, Colombia. Published as a limited edition newspaper, it gathers local and international expert opinions on the current trade-offs facing the city, and examines the potential of furthering participatory and trans-disciplinary methodologies in urban design. Encompassing historical recollections, future scenarios, interviews, and workshop findings, the publication also includes contributions from Armando Silva, Roland Krebs, Christian Sieber, Peter Mörtenböck, and Helge Mooshammer.

Markets in the Tropics

The fourth issue of SLUM Lab explores the creation of bridges, connectors, and overlaps as opportunities for a new generative architecture, which focuses on catalytic site interventions that unify the fragmented urban fabric of developing world megacities. Produced as a free newspaper to coincide with and document the Spring 2010 Columbia University GSAPP design studio that took place in São Paulo, Brazil, the publication includes contributions from Andreas Rudolph, Ligia Nobre, Kazuo Nakano, Pedro Rivera, Denise Hoffman-Brandt, Eric Rothstein, Marcos Rosa, Maria Paola Sutto, Jorge Mario Jáuregui, and Teddy Cruz, as well as a selection of student work.

SLUM Lab 4: São Paulo Architecture Experiment

The São Paulo Architecture Experiment documents a collaboration between the São Paulo State Housing Secretariat (SEHAB), Urban-Think Tank, and various international partners focused on a reconsideration of minimal habitation in dense urban space. The project proposes that architects eschew their conventional role in traditional hierarchies and instead act as an enabling connection between the opposing forces of top-down planning and bottom-up initiatives. The book focuses on issues related to São Paulo’s urban development, covering topics such as water management, waste recycling, slum morphology, and economic development.

São Paulo Architecture Experiment

It’s 2017. The millennium is in its teenage years—and it shows.

The world is acting out—making rash, impulsive decisions whose repercussions may be irreparable. The body politic is moody, volatile, and uncompromising. We were born into Y2K and 9/11; our youth is part of a string of crises and rapid evolutions. Can the physical landscape weather our collective turmoil? Adolescence may be “just a phase,” but architecture, infrastructure, and policy are hard to undo.

What does it mean to be 17 in 2017? This issue of Harvard Design Magazine checks in with teens of all sorts—humans, buildings, objects, ideas—and their impact on the spatial imagination. Like a bildungsroman for the built environment, “Seventeen” dives into the treacherous, exhilarating limbo of the teen years to understand and reclaim this global adolescence.

Though stereotyped as indignant or apathetic, teenagers are also wildly optimistic, passionate, creative, and resourceful. But teenagehood is not just a physical and emotional transition; it is also a spatial one. Bursting out of their childhood homes, teens crave autonomy—so they roam  the streets, escape to virtual worlds, or hide out in bedrooms; they claim vacant lots, parks, and garages as turf; and they cruise, chill, or hang—euphemisms for the “whatever” that may or may not occur in these marginal spaces. For a discipline that defines space according to program and purpose, the nebulous teen hangout  is easily overlooked; but openness, placelessness, and aimlessness offer a realm for fantasy, common ground, and action—especially in times of challenged freedoms.

Like all teenagers, we are asking: who are we, where do we fit in, and how can we, too, make our marks—as impactful designers and as an evolving discipline? In a divided, temperamental 2017, there is much to learn from the teenager.

Seventeen

‘Athens: Arrested Development’

On December 7, 1972, a few hours into their mission, the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft turned away from their destination – the moon – and looked back to where they had come from – the Earth. They photographed what they saw, and their photograph of a fully illuminated Earth has become one of the most widely distributed images of all time. What captured the world’s imagination on that day was not an image of what lay in outer space, but a new image of our own world; a new way of perceiving what we thought we understood.

Space Matters: Exploring Spatial Theory and Practice Today

‘Gran Horizonte: Curriculum For a New City’

Countless institutions all around the world refer to the more than a billion people who live in informal settlements on the fringes of the world’s megacities. But the approach is often characterized by distance to a deeply challenging yet fascinating environment. Time to wake up, to employ new methods and tactics. Traditionally, architecture has mostly been defined by a lateral exchange within the Northern Hemisphere. Europe, the United States, and possibly Japan formed a lateral ring of mutual exchange and stimulation. This was nowhere more apparent than within universities and their architecture departments. Today, countries like China, Korea, Taiwan, and the UAE form new nodes on that ring and have started to distort the geography of architectural education and provision of spaces for production.

Archithese: Space and Pedagogy

‘Southern Exposures: Towards a Social Responsibility in Architecture and Architectural Education’

Can architecture and design respond to cities under stress? Capital flight, debt, and social crisis have left visible scars in urban environments worldwide. Buffeted by powerful forces, the endemic vacancy and deteriorating buildings that confront a visitor to Athens today are only the most immediate symptoms of longer-term decline. With its roots in a research and design initiative led by Urban-Think Tank, this book presents a collection of 101 spatial ideas that map a post-crisis vision for the city. Focusing on small and large-scale interventions alike, the authors identify and mobilize the latent potential found in the Greek capital by demonstrating how what already exists can be used in creative and unexpected ways. Targeting a range of challenges, from the economy and public space, to immigration, health, mobility, and poverty, Reactivate Athens: 101 Ideas can be read simultaneously as a both an in-depth toolkit and call to action. Alongside material produced by Urban-Think Tank, the book, which is written in Greek and English, includes contributions from Maria Kaltsa, Thomas Maloutas, and Panayotis Tournikiotis.

Reactivate Athens: 101 Ideas

The seventh issue of SLUM Lab presents a cross-section of contemporary practice in the Asian region. The title refers to the modus operandi, moods, modes, and modalities of researchers in different urban conditions, who are deliberately moving their focus away from the generic, tabula rasa view of development that dominated publications about Asia in the past decade. Rural and urban, mobility and migration, density and sprawl, openness and exclusion, prosperity and disparity, and water and waste all reappear in different perspectives within the publication, which includes contributions from Iwan Baan, Winy Maas, Marc Angélil, Rahul Mehrotra, Sheela Patel, So Young Park, Saskia Sassen, and Eyal Weizman.

SLUM Lab 7: Asian Mode

The center of gravity is shifting to the cities of the South, moving definitively below the equator. This shift is creating a new political and social equator – a messy, snaking line defined not by latitude, but by the global distribution of wealth. It skirts around neighborhoods, creating pockets of unimaginable affluence in Rio de Janeiro and zones of unexpected deprivation in Athens. South of this equator, urban communities are growing faster than ever anticipated, in the process posing challenges we are struggling to comprehend and address.

Now Urbanism: The Future City Is Here

‘Forget About Utopia’

Scaling Infrastructure presents the proceedings of the second and final conference of MIT’s Center for Advanced Urbanism biennial theme of infrastructure. The conference brought together political leaders, engineers, designers, and academics to investigate how critical the issues of appropriate infrastructural investments and scales have become to the future of urbanized territories when faced with new economic, political, and environmental challenges. This companion volume to Infrastructural Monument explores the phenomenon of growing and shrinking cites in response to population shifts. How do we deal with cities like Detroit, whose once thriving population and economy have been drastically reduced, leaving a city built for a large capacity to adjust to this decline? Or how do cities grow quickly in response to greater demands for housing and transportation?

Scaling Infrastructure

‘Resilient Infrastructure’

The third issue of SLUM Lab focuses on human and capital flows between the Netherlands and Morocco to explore how urban ‘islands’ or ghettos can be conceived as laboratories of resource management and sustainable practices with the potential to reduce poverty and address marginalization through spatial tactics. Supported by Utrecht Manifest, and produced as part of the ‘Hoograven Invites You!’ project presented at the 3rd Biennal for Social Design in October 2009, the publication includes contributions from Pieter Hooimeijer, Henk Ovink, Wim Marseille, Simone Rots, Ghita Skalli, Henk Oosterling, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Bureau E.A.S.T., as well as students from Columbia University GSAPP and Utrecht University.

SLUM Lab 3: Hoograven

Nonformal urbanization will be the dominant mode of urban growth in the coming decades. The results of this growth go by many well-known names, including: slums, favelas, and shantytowns. The precarious conditions of these settlements, excluded from formal legal, social, and infrastructural systems, present a central challenge—and opportunity—in our current and future cities. In this volume, short texts explain a range of projects and initiatives, complimented by photographs and personal insights, to present a diversity of responses to the global phenomenon known here as “Metropolis Nonformal”.

Metropolis Nonformal

‘Constructing Cities’

Urban-Think Tank’s Fall 2016 ‘Port of Havana’ design studio at ETH Zürich aimed to propose sustainable architectural solutions for the transformation of the city’s recently decommissioned harbor. Currently lacking a comprehensive development plan, the port and its surrounds provided an ideal ‘classroom’ to practice the Chair’s alternative research and design methodology. Amidst the vast and varied layers of a diverse and rapidly changing city, our on-the-ground process was simple: look, observe, listen, ask, absorb, and understand. Together with local architecture students from the Instituto Superior Politécnico José Antonio Echeverría (CUJAE), we conducted a series of mapping and fieldwork exercises around the port, exploring disconnected neighborhoods and empty industrial sites. Along the way, we met locals and were often invited into their homes, cataloging personal histories and visions for the future of their city. From our vantage point in the present, we analyzed the historic context, and developed a contemporary urban design to positively affect the lives of the city’s inhabitants.

Of Process (Ground Up 6)

‘Teaching the City: Port of Havana’

The most prevalent contemporary model of social housing – government-owned and constructed spaces that are rented to the public at affordable, subsidized rates – is only one of many possible approaches to providing dwellings for those members of society excluded from traditional property markets. In the vein of alternative social housing, we see the possibility for government to help establish conditions for the construction of homes without actually providing the home itself. We feel the key is balancing self-determination with top-down planning.

Real Estates: Life Without Debt

‘Capitalism and Freedom’

The ninth issue of SLUM Lab explores the diverse and dynamic new urban systems evolving across the African continent, though with a special focus on the important social, political, and economic challenges of settlement upgrading in the contemporary townships of South Africa. Including contributions from Edgar Pieterse, J. M. Legard, Kéré Architecture, Dirk Hebel, Peter Rich, Charlotte Lemanski, Kilian Doherty, Michael Subotzky, Patrick Waterhouse, and Beyond Entropy, this edition also functions as a catalogue accompanying the Empower Shack exhibition held in February 2014 at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich, and as documentation of the 2013 Swisspearl Summer School, which developed the initial Empower Shack prototype in partnership with Ikhayalami.

SLUM Lab 9: Made In Africa

This special themed issue of the Journal of Visual Culture has two aims. First, to present a collection of essays and shorter provocations about the failure of contemporary architecture to address the full complex of issues engaged by visual culture studies. Second, these lines of inquiry are meant not merely to critique architecture and its discursive conceits, but rather any critique is only valid to the degree that it identifies what is significant and vital about architecture for visual culture. This is a critical examination of architecture (as both object and discourse) in contemporary visual culture: its failures, blind spots, refusals, and symptoms, yes, but also its successes, minor discourses, and alternative models of practice. In short, the contributors to this issue are invested in discovering an ‘outside’. A passage beyond ‘starchitect’ vanity/ideological projects in favor of a critical—vital—interest in architecture as a socio-cultural and historical means of transmitting unforeseen aesthetic possibilities and modes of knowledge.

Architecture! (Journal of Visual Culture 15:3)

‘Architecture in the Age of Digital Reproduction’

The work of Urban-Think Tank has centered on the dynamic cities of the Sur Global. These are spaces of ordered delirium and yawning inequality, defined by a fluid mode of development and a population that grows with every driving impulse. If cities are simultaneously lived and dreamed, then our task in imagining the teeming metropolises of 2050 is to envisage how social needs can best be translated into physical form.

2050: Designing Our Tomorrow

‘El Sur Global: Future Resilient City’

To be a radical is to inspire both admiration and contempt. Radical change is by definition far-reaching and fundamental. In other words, it offers a prospect equally liberating or terrifying depending on your vantage point and stake in the prevailing system. In the expanded field of architecture, the radical repertoire – provocation, agitation, infiltration, subversion, emancipation – is a cyclically recurring phenomenon. Urbanization generates a shifting landscape of winners and losers, and this dichotomy inevitably gives birth to alternative modes of practice, thought, and action.

UABB 2015 Volume II: Radical Urbanism

‘Free Radicals’

Architecture has always been intimately intertwined with its social, political, and economic contexts; major events in world history have had correspondingly dramatic effects on the discipline. The Great Depression, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Hurricane Katrina, for example, were all catalysts for architectural response and resulted in a diversification of the architect’s portfolio. Yet far too often, architects simply react to changes in the world, rather than serving as agents of change themselves. This issue takes a broader view, using the concept of agency to explore the future of architecture. The retreat from liability, the barricade of theory, and the silos of specialization have generated a field that is risk-averse and reactive, rather than bold and active. Instead of assuming that architects can only throw up their hands in despair, the editors invite them to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

Perspecta 45: Agency

‘A Conversation South of the Border’

While many of its traditional elements, such as roads and utilities, do not change, urban infrastructure is undergoing a fascinating and necessary transformation in the wake of new information and communication technologies. This volume brings together many of the most important new voices in the fields impacting modern urban infrastructure to explore this revolutionary change. Increasingly, it is connective systems rather than built forms that bind a city together. Intelligent infrastructure confers upon a city previously unimagined levels of adaptability. Beginning with a consideration of invisible networks—the sociohistorical systems that contribute to and constitute urbanity—the essays collected here examine a variety of actual tools, from handheld devices to autonomous vehicles, within a fully networked built environment: the smart city. Intelligent Infrastructure argues that knowledge of both the visible and invisible components—information, energy, sustainability, transportation, housing, and social practices—are critical to understanding the urban environment.

Intelligent Infrastructure: Zip Cars, Invisible Networks, and Urban Transformation

‘Urban Mobility in the Informal City’

Caracas is located some 1,000 meters above sea level, in a 20 kilometre wide valley. It is a megalopolis of 800 square kilometers, home to nearly six million people. To the extent that the rest of the world knows Caracas, they associate it with Venezuela’s staggering economic growth, its membership in OPEC, and the machinations and manipulations of its leadership. This is one Caracas. But Caracas is two cities: the formal city of tall buildings, gated homes, enormous wealth, and private transportation, and the informal city. The latter, sprawling to the east, covers an area four times larger than the 1950s-era metropolitan boundaries and is home to almost one million families.

Urban Transformation

‘Caracas Metro Cable: Bridging the Formal/Informal City’

This edited volume presents contributions from a variety of disciplines, including architecture, engineering, and related fields. Due to the ever-increasing focus on sustainable technologies, alternative energy sources, and global social and urban issues, interest in the energy systems for cities of the future has grown in a wealth of disciplines. The book includes new findings on the city of the future from the macro to the micro level, ranging from urban sustainability to indoor urbanism, and from strategies for cities and global climate change to material properties.

Cities for Smart Environmental and Energy Futures

‘Urban Parangolé’

As Robin Evans observed in his seminal 1986 essay, ‘Translations from Drawing to Building’, architects don’t make buildings they make drawings. Although much has changed since he made this observation, particularly with respect to disciplinary representational practices, drawings and constructed images remain primary media of architectural design. Discursive images are loaded – they are full of information, replete with spatial articulation, jam-packed with representational conceits and conventions, and overflowing with interpretive possibilities – while simultaneously concise in their delivery, refined in their graphic language, minimal in their aesthetic, and pithy in their communicative potential. Within their fulsome compositions, they retain both clues and tools for their own unpacking.

Design as Scholarship (Journal of Architectural Education 70:1)

‘Drawing on the Public Good’

In the 1990s, the military began to use the acronym V.U.C.A. (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) to describe the dynamic and incredibly complex nature of modern warfare. Since then, the only constant has been an ever-increasing degree of complexity. Complex Buildings, the new series of a+t magazine, identifies different conditions of complexity within architecture. Through classic and contemporary projects grouped into four blocks—Generators, Linkers, Mixers and Storytellers—a+t positions complexity as a positive concept in the design process. The buildings selected are not evidently complex but essentially complex. For Urban-Think Tank’s contribution, we explored the idea of designing for complexity through a focus on our two ‘Fábrica de Cultura’ projects in Barranquilla, Colombia, and São Paulo, Brazil.

Complex Buildings: Generators, Linkers, Mixers & Storytellers (a+t 48)

‘A Building is Not a Butterfly: Culture and Complexity’

Up Up—Stories of Johannesburg’s Highrises presents a selection of buildings in the inner city of Johannesburg. The focus lies on tall modernist towers that stood out at the time they were constructed. Witnesses to profound shifts in the political history of the metropolis, the buildings have gone through immense changes. They are documented in two distinct sections: on the one hand the formal architecture is presented with facts, floor plans, archival discoveries, and contemporary images of the interior and the exterior. On the other hand each building is accompanied by a reportage or subjective essay on the inner workings of the building. Interviews with residents, research based texts on contemporary issues, and independent contributions from invited writers, artists, and photographers allow brief insights into the old and new lives of these towers.

Up Up: Stories of Johannesburg's Highrises

‘On Delvers Street’

The fifth issue of SLUM Lab is dedicated to research, mapping, infrastructural analysis, participatory planning, stakeholder outreach, and integrated design of youth facilities in a dense, low-income edge city east of Amman, Jordan. Produced as a free newspaper to coincide with and document the Spring 2010 Columbia University GSAPP design studio that took place in Amman and Rusaifah in collaboration with Columbia University’s Middle East Research Center and the Amman Institute for Urban Development, the publication includes contributions from Lucas Oesch and Sandra Hiari, as well as a selection of student work.

SLUM Lab 5: Amman Rusaifah

The eighth issue of SLUM Lab, which is also the first to be published in a new extended magazine format, explores the emerging cross-disciplinary discourse that emphasizes the sociopolitical dimension and responsibility of design within a collective coexistence. Produced to accompany the international ‘Social Design Public Action’ symposium held at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in September 2013, the magazine is presented as a reader containing critical essays, stories, interviews, and practical case studies intended to spur action, and includes contributions from Anton Falkeis, Oliver Perchovich, Philip Ursprung, Marjetica Potrč, Andres Lepik, Thorsten Deckler, Giancarlo Mazzanti, and AbdouMaliq Simone.

SLUM Lab 8: Social Design Public Action

The inaugural issue of SLUM Lab explores the urban cultural context of Latin America as a means to reimagine the nature of cities in the Global South and the potential of design as a tool to support sustainable development outcomes in informal settlements. Produced as a free newspaper to coincide with and document the Spring 2008 Columbia University GSAPP design studio that took place in São Paulo, Brazil, the publication includes contributions from Christian Werthmann, Elito Arquitectos, Robert Neuwirth, Reinhold Martin, and the São Paulo State Housing Secretariat (SEHAB), as well as a selection of student work.

SLUM Lab 1: Paraisópolis

This compact volume presents the curatorial visions behind the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture (UABB 2015), and an overview of its various components. Each of the curators has charted a different approach to the theme of ‘Re-Living the City’. Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner call attention to the contributions of ordinary citizens in reshaping the urban fabric to their needs. They trace a brief history of radical urbanism, a concept that asks professional architects and planners to learn from ad hoc practices. The etymology of radical refers to roots, and indeed radical urbanism seeks the roots of urbanism in bottom-up innovations.

UABB 2015 Volume 1: Re-Living the City

‘The Evolution of Radical Urbanism’

Spanning projects in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela, Building Optimism: Public Space in South America investigates ways that emerging architects and designers instigate change through design in public space. As cities around the world develop and evolve, planners and designers pay particular renewed attention to the fabric of neighborhoods—how people live and interact. The projects in Building Optimism pay as much attention to creating spaces for participation as they do architectural objects and structures. These architects are opportunistic, spotting possibilities within existing sites and tweaking them, often mixing old and new. What can the rest of the world learn from South America’s optimistic approach to public space?

Building Optimism: Public Space in South America

More than half the world population today lives in cities. In India alone, it is estimated that within the next two decades 380 million people will migrate from rural areas into metropolises. That is equal to 20 new cities the size of Mumbai or São Paulo. In this context, it is somewhat ironic that Western real estate firms are promoting sprawl in Indian cities as the norm. As demographic and geographic developments in Asia, Africa, and South America will inevitably lead to increased urbanization, one might think that cities in these regions should prepare for the numerous ‘consequences’ that come with dramatic population shifts to urban zones. Surprisingly few politicians, bankers, and urban planners, however, have thought it necessary to take action.

MAS Context 10: Conflict

‘Build Simply: South of the Border’

Informal Toolbox: SLUM Lab Paraisópolis documents part of an evolving conversation between SLUM Lab researchers from Columbia University GSAPP, governmental organizations engaged in informal settlement upgrading, human rights activists, and partner academic institutions, all of whom share a belief that architecture has the potential to act transformatively in critical urban areas. This bilingual publication was produced as a collaboration between the São Paulo State Housing Secretariat (SEHAB) and Urban-Think Tank, and presents a catalogue of projects that work as a toolbox of ideas, with the aim of integrating precarious communities and the formal city through urban and land regulation, access to infrastructure, and improvement in environmental, habitability, and health conditions. It originated out of extended and ongoing research around São Paulo, and specifically within the Paraísopolis favela.

Informal Toolbox: SLUM Lab Paraisópolis

This publication seeks to enlarge the conventional definition of ‘social design’ by introducing a series of practices, tactics, and speculations presented by international experts in the field. The book reviews the contributions to the ‘Social Design: Public Action’ international symposium held at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 2013, which questioned the transformational power of new forms of the social, political, and cultural within the urban realm. The editors aim to connect artistic research and scientific knowledge with hands-on spatial production, interweaving the discourse into the very fabric of society.

Social Design - Public Action: Arts as Urban Innovation

‘Smart Options for the Informal City’

Torre David, a 45-story skyscraper in Caracas, has remained uncompleted since the Venezuelan economy collapsed in 1994. Today, it is the improvised home to more than 750 families living in an extra-legal and tenuous squat, that some have called a ‘vertical slum’. Urban-Think Tank spent a year studying the physical and social organization of this ruin-become home. Richly illustrated with photographs by Iwan Baan, Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities documents the residents’ occupation of the tower and how, in the absence of formal infrastructure, they organize themselves to provide for daily needs, with a hair salon, a gym, grocery shops, and more. Including contributions from Andres Lepik, André Kitagawa, Arno Schlueter, and Christian Schmid, this thought-provoking work not only investigates informal vertical communities and the architecture that supports them, but also issues a call for action: to see in informal settlements a potential for innovation and experimentation, with the goal of putting design in service to a more equitable and sustainable future.

Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities

Globalization promised an interconnected world, yet our cities are increasingly divided. In the past decade, for example, thousands of miles of new border walls have been constructed, many in urban contexts. People embrace the idea of walls out of fear, and leaders make promises that only reinforce divisions. Boundaries, of course, are not a new phenomenon. They have historically defined communities for cultural, political, and economic purposes. As urbanization increases and economic inequality reaches record levels, however, urban divides are becoming more pervasive. This volume of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America—investigates divides as a mechanism of urbanism, both spatially and socially complex.

Urban Divides

‘Separation Anxiety: Inequality and Exclusion in Athens and Cape Town’

Produced as a special anniversary edition to mark ten issues of SLUM Lab, this volume of the magazine also functions as a catalogue accompanying the retrospective exhibition Si/No: The Architecture of Urban-Think Tank that opened in the Hauptgebäude at ETH Zürich in October 2015, and will be on view at the Architekturmuseum der TU München in der Pinakothek der Moderne from November 2015 to February 2016. Presented as a curated anthology of Urban‑Think Tank’s published work dating back to 2002, the magazine includes essays, articles, book extracts, excerpts from out-of-print back issues, archival and documentary photo essays, as well as new contributions from Andres Lepik and Justin McGuirk.

SLUM Lab 10: Si/No

The second issue of SLUM Lab critically examines prominent examples of slum upgrading projects while exploring the integration of low-resource engineering and innovative design in informal urban contexts. Produced as a free newspaper to coincide with the ‘Urban Age South America’ conference convened in São Paulo, Brazil, by the LSE Cities program, the publication includes contributions from Richard Burdett, Mark Collins, Frederic Levrat, Denise Hoffman Brandt, Christian Werthmann, Robert Neuwirth, and Mitchell Joachim, as well as a selection of student work from the Fall 2008 Columbia University GSAPP design studio focused on boundary negotiation in Grotão, Brazil.

SLUM Lab 2: Grotão

The Korean artists MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho create works that address elemental questions concerning contemporary civilization in light of political, socioeconomic, and ecological changes. The exhibition project News From Nowhere, which they jointly initiated in 2012, is premised on a post-apocalyptic scenario: humanity has been wiped out almost entirely and is forced to reconsider long-held convictions that may no longer be tenable. The project is designed as a steadily evolving ensemble; earlier iterations were presented in Kassel (documenta 13) and Chicago. For their exhibition News From Nowhere: Zürich Laboratory, MOON & JEON collaborated with Urban-Think Tank in developing the idea of a mobile agora that also underlies the exhibition architecture.

News From Nowhere: Zürich Laboratory

‘Breaking the Binaries’

Within the contemporary city and contemporary global context (more specifically in what we have termed the Global South) there exists a network of restrictive borders, a network of limiting mechanisms generated by physical, geographical, political, social, cultural, and economic difference. These apparatus manifest themselves in various ways to inhibit essential forms of interaction and communication within the urban context by generating privative difference. But this milieu of restrictive edges also presents a valuable opportunity, one in which new forms of social design and communication are made possible. These borderlands introduce the possibility of manipulating their inherent, yet conventionally ignored, flexibility into new spaces of interaction. Social design can be strengthened through this critical engagement with the plasticity of the edge – by unearthing the territory of Border-Space.