This volume investigates urbanity as a cultural form. The essays illustrate the real and imaginary ways that we interact with the cities through the portal of the arts.

The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism explores the possible and potential relevance of Giorgio Agamben’s political thoughts and writings for the theory and the practice of architecture and urban design. It sketches out the potentiality of Agamben’s politics, which can affect change in current architectural and design discourses. The book investigates the possibility of an inoperative architecture, as an ethical shift for a different practice, just a little bit different, but able to deactivate the sociospatial dispositive and mobilize a new theory and a new project for the urban now to come. This particular reading from Agamben’s oeuvre suggests a destituent mode of both thinking and practicing of architecture and urbanism that could possibly redeem them from their social emptiness, cultural irrelevance, economic reductionism and proto-avant-garde extravagance, contributing to a renewed critical ‘encounter’ with architecture’s aesthetic-political function.

The publication presents the first historical analysis of the tension between the city and architectural form. It introduces 20th century theories to construct a historical context from which a new architecture-city relationship emerged. The book provides a conceptual framework to understand this relationship and comes to the conclusion that urbanization may be filled with potential, i.e. be a Good Metropolis.

This book argues that architecture and the city and their processes can be better understood by drawing categories from disciplines that exceed the architectural and urban cultural context. It performs an open intellectual reading that traverses architecture and architectural theory, but also art theory and history, cartography, philosophy, literature and cultural studies, to unfold a series of ‘figures’ that are ambiguously placed between the representation and the construction of space in architecture and the city. The paradigm and philosophy, the island and the city, the map and representation, the model and making and the questioning of form performed by dust, are explored beyond their definition, as processes that differently make space between architecture and the city and are proposed as unorthodox analytic techniques to decipher contemporary spatial complexity. The book analyses how these ‘figures’ have been employed at different times and in different creative disciplines, beyond architecture and in relation to changing notions of space, and traces the role that they have played in the shift towards the dynamic that has taken place in contemporary theory and design research. What emerges is the idea of an ‘architecture of the city’ that is not only physical but is largely defined by the way in which its physical spaces are regulated, lived and perceived, but also imagined and projected.

Today, the majority of people worldwide live in cities or metropolitan areas. This volume responds with a transdisciplinary approach to growing urbanisation and globalisation - climate change, energy change, secure jobs, affordable living, sustainable mobility, migration or demographic change. It brings together recent research in the areas of Urban and Media Studies, 19th- and 20th-century urban fiction and Victorian and neo-Victorian Studies. The contributors endeavor to compare various discourses of urban transformation - expansion, corruption, renewal, dereliction, adaptation - that have emerged in situations of rapid, uncontrolled change. Fields covered include the London Green Belt and ecocritical flanerie in New York, neo-Victorian streetwalking in novels by Peter Ackroyd and Michel Faber, the global impact of urban transformations on Dublin or Hong Kong, 'slumming' in the TV series 'Maison Close', 'Ripper Street' and 'Penny Dreadful' as well as Amsterdam's Red Light District and urban geographies of entertainment in London, from the Crystal Palace to the Millennium Dome.

War and Architecture is a timely and moving response by architect Lebbeus Woods to the bombing of Sarajevo. With text in both English and Croatian, accompanied by the author's exquisitely drawn, hauntingly beautiful proposals, the book is both dedicated and addressed to the citizens of this ravaged city. Lebbeus Woods has long been fascinated by the intimate ties between architecture and violence. He identifies the two predominant patterns for rebuilding cities following catastrophic destruction: restoring the city exactly to its previous, "historical" state; or "erasing" the remains of the city to construct a new utopia. These, he argues, are twin forms of denial. Woods draws an analogy to the process of biological and emotional healing, presenting architectural forms that act as "injections," "scabs," "scars," and "new tissue," within the complex organism of a city. "Only by facing the insanity of willful destruction," he argues, "can reason begin to believe again in itself."

This vivid book is an inquiry into the stagnation between the development of architectural practice and the progress in urban modernization. It is about islands as territories of resistance. It is about dense places where multitudes dwell in perennial contestations with the city on every front. It is about the histories, tactics and spaces of everyday survival within the hegemonic sway of global capital and unstoppable development. It is preoccupied with making visible the culture of resistance and architecture's entanglement with it. It is about urban resilience. It is about Hong Kong, where uncertainty is status quo.This interdisciplinary volume explores real and invented places and identities that are created in tandem with Hong Kong's urban development. Mapping contested spaces in the territory, it visualizes the energies and tenacity of the people as manifest in their daily life, social and professional networks and the urban spaces in which they inhabit. Embodying the multifaceted nature of the Asian metropolis, the book utilizes a combination of archival materials, public data sources, field observations and documentation, analytical drawings, models, and maps.Related Link(s)