How are the far-away, invisible landscapes where materials come from related to the highly visible, urban landscapes where those same materials are installed? Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements traces five everyday landscape construction materials – fertilizer, stone, steel, trees, and wood – from seminal public landscapes in New York City, back to where they came from. Drawing from archival documents, photographs, and field trips, the author brings these two separate landscapes – the material’s source and the urban site where the material ended up – together, exploring themes of unequal ecological exchange, labor, and material flows. Each chapter follows a single material’s movement: guano from Peru that landed in Central Park in the 1860s, granite from Maine that paved Broadway in the 1890s, structural steel from Pittsburgh that restructured Riverside Park in the 1930s, London plane street trees grown on Rikers Island by incarcerated workers that were planted on Seventh Avenue north of Central Park in the 1950s, and the popular tropical hardwood, ipe, from northern Brazil installed in the High Line in the 2000s. Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements considers the social, political, and ecological entanglements of material practice, challenging readers to think of materials not as inert products but as continuous with land and the people that shape them, and to reimagine forms of construction in solidarity with people, other species, and landscapes elsewhere.

In response to both policy and conceptual debates, alternative narratives have begun to emerge about territorial governance and policymaking. As local and regional policy actors strive to respond to the geographically uneven effects of the economic crises of the early twenty-first century, a crucial question emerges: what are the opportunities and challenges presented by alternative forms of territorially based governance and policy? The aim of this edited volume, therefore, is critically to explore the opportunities and challenges presented by different forms of territorial policy and governance. Drawing on conceptual debates and empirical research from the United Kingdom and other international contexts, the contributors engage with issues around the politics and governance of territorial development, economic development, planning and regeneration and the environment. Territorial Policy and Governance addresses the question of how alternative forms of territorial governance and policy can help to shape patterns of urban and regional development, highlighting the related opportunities, constraints and challenges that confront their operationalisation. This book will be essential reading for international audiences with an interest in territorial development, governance, politics, human geography and planning and regeneration.

The central hypothesis behind the book concerns the capacity of urban as well as territorial design, of the "project" in the sense of design activity on multiple scales, to produce knowledge. The volume discusses research conducted with design tools and operations, crossing physical and conceptual territories, related to a set of direct design explorations, and to the concept of "research by design." This idea of the project contains, manipulates and produces concepts and forms of concrete action in space, involving interpretation, abstraction and - at times - generalization. It describes and reveals processes of individualization, recognizes situations and allows possibilities to emerge. The project images the future and takes its impact on thinking about the city as the basis for the production of an original form of knowledge. Reflection on the epistemological statutes of the design project, in the wake of the crisis of expert knowledge and in a period of progressive marginalization and simplification of the practice of the architect and of the urban designer, is now fundamental for the rethinking of design's social role, and to formulate a fresh, new, critical vision of the world. progressive marginalization and simplification of the practice of the architect and of the urban designer, is now fundamental for the rethinking of design's social role, and to formulate a fresh, new, critical vision of the world.

Maybe the Global Village metaphor has never been more accurate than it is today, where societies join forces in the fight against the COVID 19 pandemic, in a global coordinated effort, possibly never tested before in the known history of Humankind. Although we are sure that in the past some other shared demands have united the different peoples of the world, this has never been so strongly necessary, mainly in what the global scientific community is concerned. This is a fight for the survival of a society. However, we should not lose sight of what we are fighting for. We fight together for people. Not just for the abstract value of Human life, but for life in society as a whole, including its moral and ethical aspects. The topics of this book are based on this claim, on what makes it possible. We do not build our lives in a vacuum, or in distant Invisible Cities, but through a higher value, which represents physical life in society: the City, built by the discipline of Urbanism. This book is a spin-off of the International Research Seminar on Urbanism_SIIU2020. Inspired by the contents of twelve research seminars, a group of researchers from the universities of Barcelona, Lisbon and São Paulo discuss the contemporary agenda of research in Urbanism. Following the conference, a selection of 35 original double-blind peer-reviewed research papers were brought together with different perspectives about such an agenda.

Most African cities are human settlements that lack the systems needed for effective land use planning. In fact, the disorganization that prevails has become so complex that the concept of urbanism itself has been called into question. This book highlights the need to restore urban planning in African cities through sustainable development and interculturality. Furthermore, it addresses the balance of power between urban planning and sustainable development and explores the historical and postcolonial aspects of urban planning in African cities. A case study focusing on the development of sustainable cities and neighborhoods in the M'Zab Valley is also included, as well as topics such as urban greening, climatic threats and the problem of state agro-industrial land transactions, which compete with sustainable urban planning. Sustainable Intercultural Urbanism at the Service of the African City of Tomorrow is a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners interested in urban issues in African cities. These cities, in particular sub Saharan cities, have long been excluded from any discourse on sustainable cities and urban planning; this book places the focus on these cities and acknowledges their varied urban realities. The intention is to spark a new debate on sustainable urban planning in African cities based on intercultural sustainable urbanism, which is key to thinking about and building ecological, intercultural, compact, intelligent and postcolonial cities.

This new international Handbook provides the reader with the most up-to-date and original viewpoints on critical debates relating to the rapidly transforming geographies of regions and territories, as well as related key concepts such as place, scale, networks and regionalism. Bringing together renowned specialists who have extensively theorized these spatial concepts and contributed to rich empirical research in disciplines such as geography, sociology, political science and IR studies, this interdisciplinary collection offers fresh, cutting-edge, and contextual insights on the significance of regions and territories in today’s dynamic world.

The writers and designers in this collection are among the most thoughtful architects, artists, landscape architects, and theorists working today. The editors organized these essays and works of art and design around three territories: the atmospheric, the biologic, and the geologic. Each cluster of essays is further framed by forewords and afterwords, which draw individual points of view into a larger articulation of what an ambiguous territory might be and how it operates. Ambiguous Territory emerged from a symposium and exhibition held at the University of Michigan in the fall of 2017, and exhibitions at the University of Virginia and Pratt Manhattan Gallery in 2018, and at Ithaca College in 2019. The conversations that arise in this book are inquisitive and critically engaged. They pressure assumptions we routinely make about what constitutes meaningful and principled perspectives in architecture, landscape architecture, and art. Both the texts and the work take on some of the trickiest issues of our time. -- Excerpt from a foreword to the book by Catherine Ingraham Professor, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, Pratt Institute The works in Ambiguous Territory exist in a creative space, in the moody realm of possibilities. It’s a sphere of design in which solutions (or lack thereof) have yet to settle. That should be a familiar feeling for all creative people, whose daily life may include exploring a way out of a problem without being able to nail down an exact answer. This volume belongs in that territory of ambiguity and curiosity, a place where there is room for musings, laughter, and despair. The projects convey, in different ways, a hope for a better future, but also a sense of not knowing if that future is at all possible. -- Excerpt from an afterword to the book by Peder Anker Professor, the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University With Contributions of Ellie Abrons, Paula Gaetano Adi, amid.cero9, Amy Balkin, Philip Beesley, Ursula Biemann, The Bittertang Farm, Edward Burtynsky, Bradley Cantrell, Gustavo Crembil, Brian Davis, Design Earth, Mark Dion, Formlessfinder, Lindsey french, Adam Fure, Futureforms, Michael Geffel, Rania Ghosn, David Gissen, El Hadi Jazairy, Harrison Atelier, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, Lisa Hirmer, Catherine Ingraham, Lydia Kallipoliti, Perry Kulper, Sean Lally, Landing Studio, Lateral Office, LCLA, Mark Lindquist, LiquidFactory, Ariane Lourie-Harrison, Meredith Miller, Thom Moran, Ricardo de Ostos, NaJa & deOstos, Nemestudio, Mark Nystrom, OMG / O’Donnell Miller Group, The Open Workshop, Ricardo de Ostos, oOR / Office of Outdoor Research, Jennifer Peeples, pneumastudio, Alessandra Ponte, Office for Political Innovation, Rachele Riley, RVTR, Smout Allen, smudge studio, Neil Spiller, Terreform ONE, Andreas Theodoridis, Unknown Fields, Liam Young, Marina Zurkow