4D Hyperlocal: A Cultural Tool Kit for the Open-source City The evolution of digital tools is revolutionising urban design, planning and community engagement. This is enabling a new ‘hyperlocal’ mode of design made possible by geolocation technologies and GPS-enabled mobile devices that support connectivity through open-source applications. Real-time analysis of environments and individuals’ input and feedback bring a new immediacy and responsiveness. Established linear design methods are being replaced by adaptable mapping processes, real-time data streams and experiential means, fostering more dynamic spatial analysis and public feedback. This shifts the emphasis in urban design from the creation of objects and spaces to collaboration with users, and from centralised to distributed participatory systems. Hyperlocal tools foster dynamic relational spatial analysis, making their deployment in urban and rural contexts challenged by transformation particularly significant. How can hyperlocal methods, solutions – including enterprise-driven uses of technology for bioclimatic design – and contexts influence each other and support the evolution of participatory architectural design? What issues, for example, arise from using real-time data to test scenarios and shape environments through 3D digital visualisation and simulation methods? What are the advantages of using GIS – with its integrative and visualising capacities and relational, flexible definition of scale – with GPS for multi-scalar mapping? Contributors: Saskia Beer, Moritz Behrens, John Bingham-Hall, Mark Burry, Will Gowland and Samantha Lee, Adam Greenfield, Usman Haque, Bess Krietemeyer, Laura Kurgan, Lev Manovich and Agustin Indaco, Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, Raffaele Pe, José Luis de Vicente, Martijn de Waal, Michiel de Lange and Matthijs Bouw, Katharine Willis, and Alejandro Zaera-Polo. Featured architects and designers: AZPML, ecoLogicStudio, Foster + Partners, Interactive Design and Visualization Lab/Syracuse University Center of Excellence for Environmental Energy Systems, Software Studies Initiative/City University of New York (CUNY), Spatial Information Design Lab/Columbia University, Umbrellium, and Universal Assembly Unit.

Evoking Through Design: Contemporary Moods in Architecture is visually stunning, featuring built work and speculative projects, which highlight how contemporary practices are using devices such as spatial compositing, surface articulation and novel manipulations of materials in order to constitute spatial conditions radiating in delicate and sophisticated atmospheres. Contributors: Benjamin Bratton, Jeffrey Kipnis, Neil Leach, Silvia Levin, Frederic Migayrou, Juhani Pallasmaa, David Ruy, and Mario Carpo. Architects: Phillip Beesley, Marjan Colletti, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Evan Douglis, Michael Hansmayer, Steven Holl,Ferda Kolatan, Sean Lally, Greg Lynn and Peter Zumthor.

Historically, many architects, planners, and urban designers solicit idealistic depictions of a controllable urban environment made from highly regulated geometrical organizations and systematically defined processes. Rather than working as urban "designers" who set out to control and implant external processes, we shift our approach to that of urban "detectives," who set out to chase the city. Charged with approaching the city more responsively, we investigate what we do not know, allowing the city to direct our work. As urban detectives, we have the ability to interrogate and respond to the elaborate patterns emerging from self-generated, internalized urban interactions. Chasing the City asks what are the current design trends shaping how we, first, understand the cities of today to, then, produce informed decisions on the continuously undefined evolving city of tomorrow. Intentionally, the work here does not adhere to rudimentary notions of supposed singularities or rely upon past generations of idealistic utopian models. Rather, Chasing the City delineates current models of urban investigation that seek to respond to the nature of cities and develop heretofore-urban strategies as concurrently negotiated future urbanism. This edited volume provides a collection of innovative design research projects based on shared notions of Chasing the City through three bodies of strategic frameworks: (1) Mapping, (2) Resource, and (3) Typology. This structure ultimately allows readers, as fellow urban detectives, access to exploratory tools and methods of detection that accumulate from our environs, both practical and projective in our chase of the city.

Even more than authorship, ownership is challenged by the rise of digital and computational methods of design and production. These challenges are simultaneously legal, ethical and economic. How are new methods of fabrication and manufacture going to irreversibly change not only ways of working, but also designers’ ethics and their stance on ownership? In his 2013 second-term State of the Union address, President Obama stated that 3D printing ‘has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything’. Nowhere will the impact of 3D printing be felt greater than in the architectural and design communities. When anyone can print out an object or structure from a digital file, will designers still exert the same creative rights or will they need to develop new practice and payment models? As architecture becomes more collaborative with open-source processes, will the emphasis on signature as the basis of ownership remain relevant? How will wider teams working globally be accredited and compensated? This issue of AD explores this subject; it features the work of designers who are developing wholly new approaches to practice by exploring means of commercialising process-based products rather than objects. Contributors: Phil Bernstein, Mark Garcia, Antoine Picon, Carlo Ratti and David Ruy Featured architects: Francis Bitonti, Marjan Colletti, Wendy W Fok, Panagiotis Michalatos, Jose Sanchez, Thibault Schwartz, Aaron Sprecher, Feng Xu and Philip Yuan

The rural is not what it used to be. No longer simply a site for agricultural production for the city, the relationship between the rural and urban has become much more complex. Established categories such as rural /urban and village/city no longer hold true. Rural and urban conditions have become increasingly blurred, so how can we identify and distinguish their specific characteristics? Where is the rural, and what role does it play in an urbanised world? In developing countries the countryside is a volatile and contradictory landscape: legally designated rural areas look like dense slums; factories intersect fields and farmers no longer farm. In contrast, in developed regions, the rural has become a highly controlled landscape of production and consumption: industrialised agriculture coexists with leisure landscapes for tourism, retirement and recreation. This issue of AD investigates how architects and researchers are critically engaging with the rural as an experimental field of exploration. Contributors: Neil Brenner, Christiane Lange, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Sandra Parvu, Cole Roskam, Grahame Shane, Deane Simpson, and Milica Topalovic and Bas Princen Architects: Anders Abraham, Joshua Bolchover and John Lin (Rural Urban Framework), Ambra Fabi and Giovanni Piovene (Piovenefabi), Rainer Hehl, Stephan Petermann (OMA), Huang Sheng Yuan (FieldOffice), and Sandeep Virmani (Hunnarshala)

Shaping Smart for Better Cities powerfully demonstrates the range of theoretical and practical challenges, opportunities and success factors involved in successfully deploying digital technologies in cities, focusing on the importance of recognizing local context and multi-layered urban relationships in designing successful urban interventions. The first section, ‘Rethinking Smart (in) Places’ interrogates the smart city from a theoretical vantage point. The second part, ‘Shaping Smart Places’ examines various case studies critically. Hence the volume offers an intellectual resource that expands on the current literature, but also provides a pedagogical resource to universities as well as a reflective opportunity for practitioners. The cases allow for an examination of the practical implications of smart interventions in space, whilst the theoretical reflections enable expansion of the literature. Students are encouraged to learn from case studies and apply that learning in design. Academics will gain from the learning embedded in the documentation of the case studies in different geographic contexts, while practitioners can apply their learning to the conceptualisation of new forms of technology use. Demonstrates how to adapt smart urban interventions for hyper-local context in geographic parameters, spatial relationships, and socio-political characteristics Provides a problem-solving approach based on specific smart place examples, applicable to real-life urban management Offers insights from numerous case studies of smart cities interventions in real civic spaces

Something good about the smart city: a human-centered account of why the future of electricity is local. Resilience now matters most, and most resilience is local—even for that most universal, foundational modern resource: the electric power grid. Today that technological marvel is changing more rapidly than it has for a lifetime, and in our new grid awareness, community microgrids have become a fascinating catalyst for cultural value change. In Downtime on the Microgrid, Malcolm McCullough offers a thoughtful counterpoint to the cascade of white papers on smart clean infrastructure. Writing from an experiential perspective, McCullough avoids the usual smart city futurism, technological solutionism, policy acronyms, green idealism, critical theory jargon, and doomsday prepping to provide new cultural context for a subject long a favorite theme in science and technology studies. McCullough describes the three eras of North American electrification: innovation, consolidation, and decentralization. He considers the microgrid boom and its relevance to the built environment as “architecture's grid edge.” Finally, he argues that resilience arises from clusters; although a microgrid is often described as an island, future resilience will require archipelagos—clusters of microgrids, with a two-way, intermittent connectiveness that is very different from the always-on, top-down technofuture we may be expecting. With Downtime on the Microgrid, McCullough rises above techno-hype to find something good about the smart city and reassuring about local resilience.