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’

Publications

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’

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’

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?

Title	Building Optimism: Public Space in South
Authors	Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner & Alexis Kalagas
Release	September 2016
Editor	Raymund Ryan
Publisher	Carnegie Museum of Art
Pages	50

‘The Evolution of Radical Urbanism’

Building Optimism: Public Space in South America