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’

Publications

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.

Trans 18: Politics

‘Trans-Borderlands: Activating the Plasticity of Urban Border Space’

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’

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.

Title	MAS Context 10: Conflict
Authors	Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner
Release	June 2011
Editor	Iker Gil
Publisher	MAS Context
Pages	140

‘Build Simply: South of the Border’

MAS Context 10: Conflict