ARC003000 Archives

Dwelling on the Future

Dwelling on the Future focuses on the design of dwellings and their varied environments, and questions how an architect responds to the challenge of providing humane places in which to live for a growing, multifarious population in an increasingly divided world. The issue is never just housing. People – individuals, groups and societies – can and do have different goals and aspirations. Is it possible to imagine and implement a world in which a level of comfort and stability is available for even the poorest members of societies?

Pierre d’Avoine covers a wide range of examples, including proposals for luxury housing and designs for low-cost dwellings, which all address the needs and desires of their potential inhabitants. He explores an inclusive approach to the design of settlements – and not just in cities – that recognises difference, an approach that demands a fresh political vision to resolve humanity’s increasing inequality, for the benefit of all. D’Avoine asks if we can respond with optimism to the Kabakovs’ mordantly titled installation ‘Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future (2001)’. While this was perhaps a statement of fact in Russia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it is implicit, and ever more so, in the West today.

New Islamic Urbanism

Since the dawn of the oil era, cities in Saudi Arabia have witnessed rapid growth and profound societal changes. As a response to foreign architectural solutions and the increasing popularity of Western lifestyles, a distinct style of architecture and urban planning has emerged. Characterised by an emphasis on privacy, expressed through high enclosures, gates, blinds, and tinted windows, ‘New Islamic Urbanism’ constitutes for some an important element of piety. For others, it enables alternative ways of life, indulgence in banned social practices, and the formation of both publics and counterpublics.

Tracing the emergence of ‘New Islamic Urbanism’, this book sheds light on the changing conceptions of public and private space, in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in the Saudi city of Jeddah. It challenges the widespread assumption that the public sphere is exclusively male in Muslim contexts such as Saudi Arabia, where women’s public visibility is limited by the veil and strict rules of gender segregation. Showing that the rigid segregation regime for which the country is known serves to constrain the movements of men and women alike, Stefan Maneval provides a nuanced account of the negotiation of public and private spaces in Saudi Arabia.

From Conflict to Inclusion in Housing

Socio-political views on housing have been brought to the fore in recent years by global economic crises, a notable rise of international migration and intensified trans-regional movement phenomena. Adopting this viewpoint, From Conflict to Inclusion in Housing maps the current terrain of political thinking, ethical conversations and community activism that complements the current discourse on new opportunities to access housing. Its carefully selected case studies cover many geographical contexts, including the UK, the US, Brazil, Australia, Asia and Europe.

Importantly, the volume presents the views of stakeholders that are typically left unaccounted for in the process of housing development, and presents them with an interdisciplinary audience of sociologists, planners and architects in mind. Each chapter offers new interpretations of real-world problems, local community initiatives and successful housing projects, and together construct a critique on recent governmental and planning policies globally. Through these studies, the reader will encounter a narrative that encompasses issues of equality for housing, the biopolitics of dwelling and its associated activism, planning initiatives for social sustainability, and the cohabitation of the urban terrain.

Fabricate 2011

FABRICATE is an international peer reviewed conference that takes place every three years with a supporting publication on the theme of Digital Fabrication. Discussing the progressive integration of digital design with manufacturing processes, and its impact on design and making in the 21st century, FABRICATE brings together pioneers in design and making within architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation. Discussion on key themes includes: how digital fabrication technologies are enabling new creative and construction opportunities from component to building scales, the difficult gap that exists between digital modelling and its realisation, material performance and manipulation, off-site and on-site construction, interdisciplinary education, economic and sustainable contexts. FABRICATE features cutting-edge built work from both academia and practice, making it a unique event that attracts delegates from all over the world. FABRICATE 2011, 2014 and 2017 are now all available to download free from UCL Press.

Cities Made of Boundaries

Cities Made of Boundaries presents the theoretical foundation and concepts for a new social scientific urban morphological mapping method, Boundary Line Type (BLT) Mapping. Its vantage is a plea to establish a frame of reference for radically comparative urban studies positioned between geography and archaeology. Based in multidisciplinary social and spatial theory, a critical realist understanding of the boundaries that compose built space is operationalised by a mapping practice utilising Geographical Information Systems (GIS).

Benjamin N. Vis gives a precise account of how BLT Mapping can be applied to detailed historical, reconstructed, contemporary, and archaeological urban plans, exemplified by sixteenth- to twenty-first century Winchester (UK) and Classic Maya Chunchucmil (Mexico). This account demonstrates how the functional and experiential difference between compact western and tropical dispersed cities can be explored.

The methodological development of Cities Made of Boundaries will appeal to readers interested in the comparative social analysis of built environments, and those seeking to expand the evidence-base of design options to structure urban life and development.

Supplementary materials for this book are available to download from [http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10055955/6/Supplement-BLT-table.pdf][1]

An Anthropology of Architectural Transformation

An Anthropology of Architectural Transformation is an ethnographic investigation of everyday life in a Romanian apartment block, from its construction in 1974 to the present day. It provides a unique window into how inhabitants, through everyday creative engagements with their apartments, come to terms with the uncertainties of a rapidly changing society, caught in between the vulnerabilities of both socialism and capitalism. The book attends to the micro, day-to-day transformations of individual apartments and the way in which they cumulatively affect ‘larger’ urban changes in Piatra-Neamț, transforming both the urban fabric and the local sense of what defines a good life. This book also provides social scientists with a novel way of thinking about the fundamental relationship between people and buildings, while inviting architects to consider how buildings are transformed in time by their inhabitants. With minute ethnographic detail, Maria Șalaru demonstrates how social order is created and maintained through the materiality of the building.