Some time ago, Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis used the term "porosity" with reference to Naples’ urban characteristics – spaces merging into each other and providing the backdrop for the unforeseen – improvisation as a way of life. Today, the term "porosity" in this context is increasingly used conceptually. Well-known authors from the worlds of architecture, town planning, and landscape design embark on a search for new concepts for a life-enhancing, user-friendly city – with reference to this enigmatic term. The term refers to the overlaying and interweaving of spaces and structures, to urban textures and their architectural properties and qualities – to cities with radically mixed urban functions.

A timely and original cultural history of Rio de Janeiro.

Architecture creates complex spatial situations that are the subject of urban design. Design uses a repertoire of specific architectural means in a creative way, resulting in cities that can be lived in and perceived in their three-dimensional experience. The current book, an extended new edition of Architecture of the City (2016), describes the repertoire with which architecture and design regain an entry to urbanistics. It pleads for an "architectonic turn" in urbanistics – a demand to finally comprehend the city architecturally: the issue is not just about buildings in the city, but about architecture of the city as a whole, as is clearly expressed in the new title of City as Architecture.

Within the most recent discussion on smart cities and the way this vision is affecting urban changes and dynamics, this book explores the interplay between planning and design both at the level of the design and planning domains’ theories and practices. Urban transformation is widely recognized as a complex phenomenon, rich in uncertainty. It is the unpredictable consequence of complex interplay between urban forces (both top-down or bottom-up), urban resources (spatial, social, economic and infrastructural as well as political or cognitive) and transformation opportunities (endogenous or exogenous). The recent attention to Urban Living Lab and Smart City initiatives is disclosinga promising bridge between the micro-scale environments, with the dynamics of such forces and resources, and the urban governance mechanisms. This bridge is represented by those urban collaborative environments, where processes of smart service co-design take place through dialogic interaction with and among citizens within a situated and cultural-specific frame.

This book discusses several topics regarding different vocabularies, such as sacred architecture, heritage buildings, open spaces, landmarks, and street escapes, all of which have a direct influence on the city form. The city form is also affected by the indirect impact of the citizens themselves, for example their culture, which in turn depends on the arts, as can be seen and embodied in morals, paintings, media, digital art, and sculpture. The book also examines the fundamental elements that are responsible for the identity of the city. Presenting case studies that demonstrate the how implementing the concept of the responsibility of architecture and arts affects the development of our cities, the book offers a new approach that is based on the available features of a city and explores how planners and decision-makers can use these features to address the myriad problems that our cities are facing.

This book introduces findings from an international, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary study of children’s everyday experiences of growing up and going to school in the context of the three global cities of Hong Kong, Singapore and Melbourne. It takes the premise that children’s learning and orientations to educational success are shaped by everyday cultural practices at home and at school, by policy contexts that both produce and respond to educational and cultural norms, and by individual and familial desires and aspirations. Drawing on research conducted with primary school-aged children in Year 4, the book considers how day-to-day routines such as going to school, engaging in extra-curricular activities outside of school, and spending time at home with family intersect with the broader milieus of education policy ideals in a changing and interconnected world. Through a combination of visual methodologies, surveys, ethnographic observations in schools, classrooms and cityscapes, re-enactments of everyday activities with children at home, and sociological education policy analysis, this book shows both the richness of children’s everyday lives and learning in global cities, as well as exploring questions that pose challenges to educational and social norms.

In this Urban Corporis volume, ?The city and the skin?, we asked the authors to read, define and interpret the role of the skin as a facade, as a protection, as a compositional image of urban revelation. Without formal restrictions, without ethical preconceptions: the skin as part of the building designed to mediate the relationship. The architectural skin, understood as the technological system of delimitation between architectural space and unbuilt environment, can be analyzed as a boundary system between interior and exterior, the most evident expression of the identity of an artifact. In this dual role of border and interface, receptive as active, the skin of an architecture (seen also through art) is charged with a double value: an element of covering and protection and, at the same time, a tool of relationship and interface, in fact, towards the external world.