There's a new generation in the streets throwing bricks.

Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles. McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists’ unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group’s development from the bohemian Paris of the ’50s to the explosive days of May ’68, Wark’s take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement – including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong – Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions. Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group’s history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can.

In the summer of 2008, exactly forty years after French student activists took to the streets with their rallying cry of "Under the pavement, the beach!" a new vision of liberation took shape in the courtyard of MoMA's P.S.1. Designed and built by WORK Architecture Company in 2008 for the museum's Young Architects Program, the installation Public Farm 1 (PF1) consisted of a large cluster of cardboard tubes topped with more than four dozen species of plants and vegetables. Conceived as a medium for educating citizens about sustainable urban farming techniques, the fully functioning, produce-growing design emphasized local intervention over mass production and pointed the way toward a more holistic, integrated approach to urban life. Leaving behind the urban beach, the updated slogan "Abovethe Pavement, the Farm!" embodies the current generation of young architects preoccupations and hopes for the city of the future. Using the PF1 installation as an ideal model for a new breed of architectural experimentation, Above the Pavementthe Farm! is an urban manifesto designed to reinvent our cities as much-needed laboratories of experimentation and learning. Keeping in mind our society's gradual shift from being industrial to postindustrial, Above the Pavementthe Farm! proposes an agriculture-based approach to city planning, envisioning fully functioning farms located atop roofs and situated within city blocks as a means for providing new sources of locally grown food to urbanites. Through visually dynamic narratives documenting the development of the project from conceptualization to on-site building, Above the Pavementthe Farm! provides ahow-to guide, including do-it-yourself plans and diagrams, for implementing urban farms on lots and rooftops in metropolitan regions across the country. Inspired by the highly visual mass-market paperback "idea books" popularized by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, Above the Pavementthe Farm! is a critical yet playful look forward into the future of our cities.

Focusing on the liberating promise of public space, The Beach Beneath the Streets examines the activist struggles of communities in New York City—queer youth of color, gardeners, cyclists, and anti-gentrification activists—as they transform streets, piers, and vacant lots into everyday sites for autonomy, imagination, identity formation, creativity, problem solving, and even democratic renewal. Through ethnographic accounts of contests over New York City's public spaces that highlight the tension between resistance and repression, Shepard and Smithsimon identify how changes in the control of public spaces—parks, street corners, and plazas—have reliably foreshadowed elites' shifting designs on the city at large. With an innovative taxonomy of public space, the authors frame the ways spaces as diverse as gated enclaves, luxury shopping malls, collapsing piers and street protests can be understood in relation to one another. Synthesizing the fifty-year history of New York's neoliberal transformation and the social movements which have opposed the process, The Beach Beneath the Streets captures the dynamics at work in the ongoing shaping of urban spaces into places of repression, expression, control, and creativity.

Pavements are the most ubiquitous of all man-made structures, and they have an enormous impact on environmental quality. They are responsible for hydrocarbon pollutants, excess runoff, groundwater decline and the resulting local water shortages, temperature increases in the urban "heat island," and for the ability of trees to extend their roots in