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

Publications

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 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

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.

Release	September 2013
Directors	Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner
Guest Editor	Lukas Feireiss
Design	Floyd E. Schulze (W–THM)
Production	Rixt Woudstra, Alice Hertzog
Sponsors	ETH Zürich D-ARCH, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Pages	162

SLUM Lab 8: Social Design Public Action