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 Spring 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[…]

Building Black: Towards Antiracist Architecture

Published: 05/19/2022

Building Black: Towards Antiracist Architecture brings together the forefronts of Black Studies and architectural theory. Only recently, architecture and urban planning have started to confront their constitution of race as a social referent, and their part in the establishment of racist logics. This confrontation usually results in projects that respond to their surroundings, that merge into[…]