Urban Liquefaction: Rethinking the Relationship between Land and Sea

FORTHCOMING Spring 2025

From classical times until today, cities have been conceived in the western imagination as ideally confined to the fixities of the land, a space defined in opposition to the fluxes of the sea. Whereas solid land afforded a durable platform for the establishment of property and citizenship, the fluid sea allowed markets – isolated within[…]

The Mediterranean Question

FORTHCOMING Spring 2025

Whose Mediterranean are we talking about? What languages are most appropriate to its reception and understanding? With two-thirds constituted by the histories and cultures of its African and Asian shorelines and hinterlands, and its principal spoken language – in all its variants and dialects – being Arabic, then the Mediterranean clearly exceeds the Western frame[…]

Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency

Published: 02/09/2024

Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twenty-seven[…]

Analogical City

Published: 01/18/2024

In Analogical City, Cameron McEwan argues for architecture’s status as a critical project. McEwan revisits architect Aldo Rossi as a paradigmatic figure of the critical rational tradition, studying a neglected aspect of his thought — the analogical city — to excavate its potential. McEwan develops a grammar of the analogical city under the headings of[…]

The Social Properties of Concrete

FORTHCOMING Autumn 2024

Concrete is a ubiquitous part of our world. It composes our dwellings and shapes our infrastructures. It unites and divides urban space and is used to wage both war and peace. Concrete is simultaneously an indicator of freedom and development and is an essential part of the carceral apparatus. The Social Properties of Concrete begins[…]

Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions

Published: 11/22/2023

Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions is a transdiciplinary essay collection that explores the physical, conceptual, and political possibilities materialized by “solarity”— a form of relation to the sun and its elemental force upon planetary life. The authors propose that a different set of questions becomes possible when the material specificities of solar become the compass[…]

Speaking for the Social: A Catalogue of Methods

Imprint:

Published: 09/15/2022

What does it mean to “speak for the social” in projects of technical and infrastructural change? This is the problem that the contributors to Speaking for the Social: A Catalogue of Methods set out to explore through a series of creative interventions that reimagine the role for qualitative social science in understanding and shaping design[…]