Urban Lab Global Cities (ULGC)

My sincere apologies for not having posted anything since 2015. But as I announced 3 years ago, I've been very busy and finally have fallen into certain dose of exhaustion. But I am back on track.
So, Urban Lab Global Cities will no longer be hosted by blogger. This blog is clinically dead! I will keep it open a few while but will let blogger to close it.
I will be launching a new website. For now, I just posted its beta version . Tons of details are slowing me down but the link will provide the information you need to know about this new object of obsession. The blog (via wordpress) is online but, with patience and enthusiasm, the full website will be online very soon (still learning codes).
Farewell Blogger!

My sincere apologies for not having been productive over these months but I was particularly busy.
This following text is notes and ideas for a text that I submitted (finally rejected), days ago, for an American journal of architecture on correlation between side effects of resource territories and the pressing question of climatic changing contexts in the context of architecture. What interested me was not so much the relation of climate and resource extraction. With a strong evidence, this issue of toxic emissions strongly contributes to change the biosphere's climatic and geological conditions. One of the central themes of my text was the emphasis placed on the objects generated by spatial and material destruction for extractive and processing purposes. What type of objects are they? And why do they matter? These objects are derelict, abandoned buildings, crumbling infrastructure, put it simply ruins. These very discrete material traces cannot capture our attention but are as toxic as the emission of contaminants, pollution and toxic waste that extractive and processing activities generate.
An abandoned well tested by researchers of the Princeton University, the Allegheny National Forest. Photo credit The Princeton University. Originally appeared on PhysdotOrg. 
I focused my submission on the transformation of Russian Arctic Circle's space during the Soviet era while I admit that I am not a specialist of this region (even of Russia). I view the Soviet era (in particular the Stalinist era in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s) as a good example of the limit and contradictions of the production of space for economical and technical purposes, in particular in extreme environments. For these notes on this text, however, I'll be expanding on the entire resource territory, at the scale of the planet. Some examples: the Niger Delta, Sumgayit (Azerbaijan), parts of United States (Pennsylvania, for instance), parts of France (mining regions) to name a few. A very vast geography of resource production-related ruins at the scale of the planet.
An abandoned, unplugged well near the Allegheny National Forest | Photo courtesy Scott Detrow/State Impact Pennsylvania. Originally appeared on State Impact, 2012
With regard to resource territories, as a technological space, we usually look at these spatial products, these platforms, tanks, storages, pipelines in activity. This, however, is a mistake to neglect those obsolete, crumbling infrastructures, those broken buildings, abandoned wells, destroyed pipelines due to lack of maintenance, to sabotage or as targets in warzones (we all know pipeline is a favorite target in war zones) since they provide us information of (1) the type, force, time, scale, and rhythm of spatial destruction related to the production of resource territories; (2) the lack of quality or, to put it simply, the obsolescence of many infrastructure as a legacy the 19th and 20th centuries; (3) as a result, they, simply, pollute soils, water and air affecting both environment and population.
Discharge from an abandoned well killed an acre of vegetation in Oneida County. Originally appeared on Tom Wilber's blog
The intention of my submission was not to deliver positive messages in the form of architectural scenarios to remediate these challenging issues. Neither was my intention — in the worse case — to formulate negative messages that would blame architecture for its contribution to the accelerating climate change. This submission situates within the following problematic: What can architecture do with the déjà-là ? Indeed it poses the question of the negative  déjà-là , these ruins that expand their territory into far beyond their location and beyond this, the role and position of design practices in creating these spatial products with lack of quality standards in such particular sites as extreme environments — the desert, the Amazon, the Arctic, the Ocean —, conflict-pattern regions, or primarily sparsely populated regions (villages or small-scaled human settlements) over the late 19th and the 20th centuries.
Abandoned Pipeline, near The Headland, Hartlepool, Great Britain | Photo courtesy Alison Rawson
According to Alison Rawson, "There are several of these rail topped pipelines heading out to sea. Once part of the now abandoned Steetley Magnesite Works."
Originally appeared on Geograph
With evidence these ruins pollute the territory they are shaping, the places where they have been erected in. But they also pollute the scale of the biosphere through the emission of toxic elements or oil and gas leakages. Most of these resource production-related infrastructures were built at a time when companies and governments did not take into consideration quality standards and, worse, side effects on both humans and nonhumans. In surveying these crumbling infrastructures, broken and collapsing buildings and factories, I attempted to look into the (in)direct correlation between the resource territories-related infrastructural space and climate change. It indeed is commonly admitted a direct correlation between resource extraction and climate change throughout emission of greenhouse gas, methane, sulfur dioxide, arsenic, oil leakage, and other negative by-products.
Abandoned pipeline in Tarraleah Power Station, Wellington, Australia | Photo courtesy Simon Cullen/ABC. Originally appeared on ABC
Yet what about those derelict infrastructures and buildings that are abandoned after mining and drilling operation shut down? My research led to state that the very political importance of these ruins has been neglected over decades certainly in order for capitalism not to confess its non-interest in detrimental impacts of this technological zone on space and bodies. Let me borrow this concept from Timothy Morton, wicked problem which strongly illustrates these ruins. A wicked problem , Timothy Morton writes, means "a problem that one can understand perfectly, but for which there is no rational solution. A super wicked problem , he continues, is "a wicked problem for which time is runni

Verkutlag, or the Camp at Verkuta established in 1931 for coal mining
Courtesy Photo: Stanislaw Kialka, Tomasz Kizny
originally appeared on RFE/RL
Arctic Population Map | © Lola Sheppard and Mason White/Lateral Office | New Geographies No. 1, 2009

This recent article written by The Guardian's critic of architecture Oliver Wainwright about Zaha Hadid's Baku Prize winner for the  Heydar Aliyev Center  raises a range of questions and concerns from land acquisition by dispossession for extractive operations, pipeline corridors, urban development, to the ethical stance of architecture. The aim of this text does not concern the Heydar Aliyev Center itself which, in my view, is a beautiful building, very Zaha-Hadid signature. I, however, will retain one but very essential question: land acquisition by dispossession. This issue of land acquisition by dispossession along with displacement and proletarianization of the very population that live in peripheral, remote locations is at core of the formation of frontier zones. Below is some hints, or short reflections on this practice.
Land acquisition by dispossession poses the question of the place and status of the body, those who live in these areas and are, consequently, affected by oil activities. Along with affected local residents is the question of land at issue illustrated by dispute, protests, sabotage or compromises as well as deterritorialization, reterritorialization in these exclusive territories. What I propose below is some glances from my ongoing research on urbanism, infrastructural design related to resource extraction — part of Contingency , the first volume of Uncertain Territories  —, more precisely on operationalized landscapes with this question in mind: what design opportunities for such peripheral regions? What can architecture do to tackle these complexities?
Re-Rigging. 2010 | © Lateral Office/Infranet Lab
Image originally appeared on Fei-Ling Tseng's website
" The government has pursued a programme of illegal expropriation and forced eviction across the city, without proper compensation of its residents ," Oliver Wainwright writes. On May 10, 2013, it has been reported that more than 3.641 apartments and private properties have been demolished in the center of Baku, a zone named as 'zone of illegal demolition .'
Shocking though this can be, land acquisition by dispossession, along with displacement and proletarianization of local populations, is a common practice in extractive regions. Extractive activities demand huge amounts of land for extraction, production and distribution of oil via the pipelines and other transportation networks.
Allow me for engaging in a more technical analysis of land acquisition before going any further. In her recent book  Subtraction ,  Keller Easterling has proposed this term 'subtraction' to explain the act of building removal. Land acquisition by dispossession can be associated with 'subtraction' as shown in regions affected by conflicts as well as in frontier zones. To limit the discussion to the frontier zones of resource extraction, this practice of subtraction consists in scraping buildings in order to acquire lands for, mostly, operationalization and reorganization of landscapes for corporate profits. In our case, this practice of land acquisition by dispossession provides a large amount of lands available for oil activities in which local residents are disallowed to live or cultivate. To facilitate such practice, the 'Resettlement Action Plan' has been implemented in order to compensate to the affected local landowners for the construction of pipeline corridors. If many landowners have received compensation, some complained to have lost their land by force or live near the pipelines.  James Marriott  and  Mika Minio-Paluello  have met many residents who have lost their lands accusing local authorities and multinational operators for having illegally purchased or forced people to sell their lands with no compensation despite the 'Resettlement Action Plan'. In some cases, corruption and lack of transparency can be a deep problem in frontier zones. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline is an example among many others. Its function is to link three countries Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey to allow for the circulation and distribution of oil to terminals. A report notes that the construction of the BTC pipeline has affected about 4,100 households in Azerbaijan, about 1,800 in Georgia. In Turkey, approximately 296 villages and 13,000 parcels have been affected by the pipeline corridor (Starr and Cornell, 2005).
The 'Resettlement Action Plan' has been developed to cope with the population of these three countries affected by the construction of the BTC pipeline. The principle is to purchase or lease parcels of land for the project. In many cases, as have been said, tenants and land users have received a three-year compensation for the loss of their land. Yet, in some cases, local inhabitants living in Baku, Tbilisi, Ceyhan and along the pipeline share with the authors of  The Oil Road  the same statement of having been evicted from their land.
Another but significant factor is these enclaves are marked by poverty and unemployment. In the case of Azerbaijan, 42% of the population is below the poverty line. Moreover, labor protests increased with workers employed at the construction of the BTC pipeline, to continue with this example (but examples of poor labor conditions in oil regions are numerous), who have complained of being mistreated in terms of working conditions, inadequate housing and medical treatment (Mitchell, 2013).
As Marriott  and Minio-Paluello  show, the BTC pipeline is a fascinating example in terms of transparency and corporate social responsibility (CRS) (Barry, 2013, Marriott and Minio-Paluello, 2014). Allow me for a short moment to define this corporate social responsibility so that we will more easily attest its importance in frontier zones. A corporate social responsibility is an interesting tool for oil governance actors and institutions insofar as it allows to compensate and pacify affected communities and to scale up any concerns — environmental, countries, financial — related to oil production (Bridge and Le Billon, 2013). It is broadly employed everywhere a zone is constituted for exclusive operations.
Re-Rigging. 2010 | © Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab
"Project for a multifunctional offshore oil platform in the Caspian Sea. Can we learn from the Caspian Sea's non-human occupants to extend the momentum of oil operations into the post-oil future?"-  Maya Przybylski
Image originally appeared on e-flux
The construction of pipeline corridors should be considered in terms of their environmental and social impacts, more specifically, how these pipeline corridors affect local populations and environment. The small village of Qarabork, 187 kilometers along the pipeline from Sangachal Terminal is an example. Marriott and Minio-Paluello state "along the pipeline's route through Azerbaijan and Georgia, there were only two places w

My apology for this long absence. With these recent busy weeks, I, shamefully, have not been able to find a moment to share my research.
I recently wrote a short piece for the 93rd issue of the excellent little publication Fulcrum edited by the very prolific Jack Self (co-editor of  Real Estates: Life without Debt  with Shumi Bose ). Neither will I discuss this short piece. Nor will I post an abstract as you can download it on Fulcrum . I let you read it and that of Oscar Johanson Battersea Recuperated  that composed this Fulcrum #93 Transformations .
I, however, will merely share the books that helped me write this essay.
I have been engaged for a long while in a very long research on what is related to operational landscapes, precisely negative impacts marked by the extent of the industrialization and the urbanization of the Earth: wasted landscapes, toxic materials, pollution, resource extraction, and so on. There is a long list of books that can help the architect, landscape architect, planner as well as the historian of architecture, the critic, the editor, the curator and the theorist to pave her way for a better understanding of and developing new methods and techniques to apprehend these landscapes .
This shorter essay was an opportunity to explore, albeit rapidly, one of my great interests, namely Levi Bryant 's account of machine. A very complex concept that, in contrast with that of object, allows for more precision to what things are doing and how things interact . Two books, as precious help, are The Democracy of Objects  and Onto-Cartography. I include Levi Bryant 's blog Larval Subjects in which you can find loads of texts that illustrate his research and interests from onto-ecology, science to ethics. Bryant 's account of machine helps me to build an understanding of toxic materials' characteristics, their timescale, how toxic materials, as nonhuman beings, interact with other beings, humans including. Should we learn to live with them? Or would we be able to recalibrate these toxic landscapes? Two questions that will dominate this new era.
With a strong evidence, Timothy Morton 's hyperobject reinforces my study of Levi Bryant' s machine. His three books Ecology without Nature , The Ecological Thought and Hyperobject are three important guidances. Not to mention other books such as Stacy Alaimo 's Bodily Natures , Jane Bennett 's Vibrant Matter , Lateral Office 's Coupling , and The Petropolis of Tomorrow edited by Neeraj Bhatia and Mary Casper . The Petropolis of Tomorrow , for example, includes two series of photographs, namely, on the one hand those of filmmaker Peter Mettler 's Petropolis , or aerial pictures of the Alberta Tar Sands and, and on the other, those of Photographer Garth Lenz 's The True Cost of Oil , again aerial photographs of the Alberta Tar Sands, have guided our steps in our research.
This energy we can find in the field of philosophy, in particular ecological philosophy, ontology or onto-ecology, but also the field of science, provides new trajectories and perspectives for the ecological theory and design. I'm working on two large-scaled research. The first one, as you know, is Uncertain Territories ' first volume titled Contingency programmed for 2015. The second one is a series of events in the form of conversations part of Uncertain Territories that will be exploring consequences of operational landscapes and the role of ecological and infrastructural design in problem-forming these shifting environments. This includes wasted landscapes, resource extractive territories, extreme territories, ocean-turn. Consequently, these authors, mentioned above, are, in my view, of great importance to mobilize the production of knowledge we need to gain in understanding of this ecological turn.
I hope you will like this short piece.

Two weeks ago or so, Matteo Pasquinelli , a theoretician, shared via facebook a video entitled Google and the World Brain . Visiting the website Thought Maybe , for further information, I found another documentary entitled  Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands  produced by filmmaker Peter Mettler :

Canada's tar sands are the largest industrial project ever undertaken-spanning the size of England. Extracting the oil and bitumen from underneath unspoiled wilderness requires a massive industrialized effort with far-reaching impacts on the land, air, water, and climate. It's an extraordinary industrial spectacle, the true scope of which can only be understood from an aerial view. Shot primarily from a helicopter, Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands offers an unparalleled view of the world's largest ever industrial project…

Peter Mettler  has shot  Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands  from a helicopter. The Alberta Tar Sands area is located in the Canadian boreal forest  occupying a large area of 141,000 sq. km (54,000 sq. mi.) . These deposits comprise Athabasca Oil Sands, Peace River and Cold Lake. This area is the primary locus of oil sands extraction in Canada and one of the earth's largest reserves of fossil fuels. A petropolis, then, is defined by a high dependence on natural resources — oil, natural gas, coal — marked by a political-economic system. Other examples of petropolis  are Macaé (Brazil), Baku (Azerbaijan), among others.
What this video shows is nothing less than a pressured environment through surface mining activities. Guilty, toxic landscapes. These images force us to reconsider our position toward resource extraction, and more broadly energy. Guilty or not guilty? Shame or not shame? Consider accountability. As Brendan Cormier rightly puts it in his essay 'Accounting for guilt', the acceleration of environmental issues through industrial activities will contribute to more accountability. Resource extraction is a "strong generator of guilt." These images pose the question of ethics and its relation with industrial activities within the (re)configuring of, and the becoming-unstable of territories for industrial purposes. Allow me for convoking physicist and philosopher Karen Barad for a better understanding of the role of ethics towards these extreme landscapes. As Barad writes:

The point is not merely that there is a web of causal relations that we are implicated in and that there are consequences to our actions. We are a much more intimate part of the universe than any such statement implies. If what is implied by 'consequences' is a chain of events that follow one upon the next, the effects of our actions rippling outward from their point of origin well after a given action is completed, then to say that there are consequences to our actions is to miss the full extent of the interconnectedness of being. Future moments don't follow present ones like beads on a string. Effect does not follow cause hand over fist, transferring the momentum of our actions from one individual to the next like the balls on a billiards table. There is no discrete 'I' that precedes its actions. Our (intra)actions matter — each one reconfigures the world in its becoming — and yet they never leave us; they are sedimented into our becoming, they become us. And yet even in our becoming there is no 'I' separate from the intra-active becoming of the world.

How to measure our responsibility in these shifting landscapes? What is to be done?
Syncrude Upgrader and Tar Sand © Garth Lenz
> "The refining or upgrading of the tarry bitumen which lies under the Tar Sands consumes for more oil and energy than conventional oil production and produces almost twice as much carbon. Each barrel of requires 3-5 barrels of fresh water from the neighboring Athabasca River. About 90% of this is returned as toxic tailing into the vast unlined tailings ponds that dot the landscape. Syncrude alone dumps 500,000 tons of toxic tailings into just one of their tailings ponds everyday." | Garth Lenz
Originally appears on National Geographic I'm reminded of these aerial pictures taken by Garth Lenz  (see the 31st issue of Volume Magazine and  The Petropolis of Tomorrow ). Garth Lenz documents how the boreal landscape has been transformed through resource extraction . The point of view is similar to  Mettler 's video: aerial views providing a panoramic view of the damaging landscape.  Mettler 's video Petropolis  and Lenz 's images do not show the before-and-after but the process, the changing environment of the Boreal Forest.
Tailings Pond in Winter, Alberta Tar Sands | © Garth Lenz
> "Even in the extreme cold of the winter, the toxic tailings ponds do not freeze. On one particularly cold morning, the partially frozen tailings, sand, liquid tailings and oil residue, combined to produce abstractions that reminded me of a Jackson Pollock canvas." | Garth Lenz
Originally appeared on National Geographic The architect Kelly Nelson Doran has made a great contribution to our understanding of these changing landscapes of the Alberta Tar Sands, examining the mechanism of oil sands extraction, the accelerating landscape transformation through this method of extraction. As Kelly Doran argues, the "future of this landscape is the unfortunate byproduct of blame." Indeed, oil sands industries, he continues, "have developed an orchestrated set of landscape behaviors based on emerging hydrological, logistical, technological and legal parameters." Oil sands or tar sands are a mixture of sand, clay, and water, saturated with viscous form of petroleum, also known as bitumen . This is based upon a specific technique of extraction consisting in strip mining :

Initially, while constructing the massive upgrading facilities required to separate bitumen from sand, the boreal forest is gridded off; its land clear-cut; its soil drenched, drained and dried; and its roughly ten-meter-thick layer of overburden (musked, soil, gravels, rock) is removed and stocpiled b

A very intriguing symposium is Post Planetary Capital Symposium . This symposium will be held on March, 24th, 2014 at The Center for Transformative Media , New York. As I couldn't access The Center for Transformative Media's website — certainly a server error —, I merely propose this link . Below the presentation:

As the dull glow of nationalism and cold war politics has faded from governmental space programs it is little surprise that space exploration has undergone widespread privatization.

Yet it is only recently that potentially massive profitability has accelerated off-planet projects, replacing narrower and perhaps unrealistic dreams of space tourism with asteroid mining (purportedly a multi-trillion dollar industry) and long term Mars colonization. Such projects present an odd combination of new technologies (especially advanced robotics) and lower cost older technologies (rocket propulsion) deployed in unfamiliar and lawless territory.

While much has been said regarding the internal limits of capital, much yet remains to be said about how capitalist imperatives can be taken off-world, questioning whether capital[ism] has external limits as it begins to spread across the solar system and out into space. Is the fact that asteroid mining extends an old logic of environmental degradation rendered moot by its non-terrestrial location? Does off-world colonization by non-governmental entities lay troubling ground work for the advent of mega-corporations and unregulatable capitalism?

Furthermore, the complicity between capitalist expansion and space exploration which centers upon large-scale collective action potentially questions stock oppositions between capital and ecological betterment, technological progression and radical politics, as well as space travel and non-national collectivity. This one day symposium aims to address the potential strategies and claims surrounding these issues. 

Post Planetary Capital  is organized by Ben Woodard , and Ed Keller . Ben Woodard is the author of this book I've already mentioned On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy . As for Ed Keller , he is the co-editor of Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium  with Ed Keller , Nicola Masciandaro  and Eugene Thacker . Two years ago, his lecture Massive Addressability and Post-Planetary Design  at  The Bartlett   discussed this notion of addressability: " a defining characteristic of our rapidly accelerating global network of connections, and emerges when cities, buildings, materials, objects, creatures, sites, books, words, molecules, all act as agents in a global, reciprocal ontology of things that can find each other. Across longer timeframes- decades, centuries or millennia- this set of relations inevitably scales up to the post-planetary. We cannot think of design a century from now without taking it off planet. The consequences of this leap are profound. What could be more disruptive to a human-centered model of ecology than this reframing of the agency of things? What new economies, what new modes of individual and collective sovereignty, will emerge as design goes beyond geopolitics and comes to grips with an increasingly urgent cosmopolitics?"
He is also the editor of this tumblr Post-Planetary Design. If you are interested in his research, visit his tumblr.
As for the participants, Benjamin Bratton , Ed Keller , Kai Bosworth , Carla Leitao , Geoff Manaugh  (and Gizmodo ), Rory Rowan , Keith Tilford , Ken Wark , Ben Woodard , and Kazys Varnelis . A very great panel!
I'll be following this conference. I hope to have further information soon including a livestreaming, hashtag…
Post Planetary Capital Symposium  will be held at The Center for Transformative Media , New York, Monday, March 24, 2014 from 9:00 am to 6:30 pm.
In order to patiently wait for this conference, I recommend this round-table  Google/ Arctic/Mars  at Studio-X NYC/ GSAPP Columbia on May 8th 2012. This round-table gathers Ed Keller , Benjamin Bratton and Geoff Manaugh on the emergence of a new geography — from the virtual to the off-world — and speculating a to its future political organization.
Credit video: Google/ Arctic/ Mars Round Table | © GSAPP Columbia

My deepest apology for not having posted for a long while. I'm working on a draft on designing coastal regions in the age of technology, storms, flooding, and sea level rise. It's less a post on the topic of designing water-related regions than a point of view on four design research I found particularly relevant.
I profit to suggest two books that you may already have read. If not yet:
Spoil Island: Reading the Makeshift Archipelago by Charlie Hailey . I don't remember whether mammoth , Free Association Design , Landscape Archipelago , or maybe bldg blog talked about the book. Anyway, I warmly suggest its read. A spoil island is an "overlooked place that combine[s] dirt with paradise, waste-land with 'brave new world,' and wildness with human intervention" as the author describes. I found this book very interesting. In particular this statement: "to examine the marginalized topography of spoil islands  is to understand emergent concerns of twenty-first-century place-making, public space, and natural and artificial infrastructure."  An abstract:

On our passage along the chain of spoil islands, we are able to read the topographic record of their formation. Islands closer to the shore, and consequently in shallower water, are higher because dredging was deeper. Vegetation on the islands diminishes along with contour, and the last is marl and sand. From above, you would see the clarity of the tapering archipelago's plan, with islands larger in area closer to land, and the last seaward mark visible as a spectral bank or reef just below the water's surface. Angled a few degrees south of due wet, the datum that controls this island chain's incipient logic is the channel that also hints at this area's unlikely history as an industrial landscape. The channel is the terminus of the Cross Florida Barge Canal, partially dredged between 1964 and 1971. The consistency of its controlling depth and width yields greater volume of excavated material in she shallower waters closer to shore. History is made legible in topography.

The second suggested book is Out of Mountains. The Coming Age of Urban Guerrilla  by David Kilcullen , an Australian strategist, counterinsurgency expert, and founder of Caerus Associates , a strategy and design consulting firm. If you want a longer review on the book, I suggest to read   Geoff Manaugh 's  article on Gizmodo .
As I wrote on Goodreads , I read Out of Mountains in the light of landscape-architecture-planning. While I admit I have no knowledge on military strategy, this book nonetheless is worth reading. Out of Mountains  is on future conflicts and future (coastal) cities. With a population growth, a littoralization of the world and a displacement of conflicts toward coastal cities, Kilcullen calls for a new approach to designing coastal regions. Rapid urbanization of coastal regions, if not well-planned, well-controlled, could trigger a series of interlinked complexities from urban poverty, floodings, through other anthropogenic and natural pressures. In particular in low-income countries, but not only. A particularity, given these factors I mentioned, lies on the connectivity of these areas: each house is equipped with satellite TV, cell phone and the Internet generating a complex network of coastal cities. As the author argues, these three trends, that is, population growth, littoralization and connectedness, will be making our world more complex as well as more open, more unpredictable as well as likely more violent with an increase in tension at small scale but with a global repercussion. I am certain those with a strong interest in military strategy will appreciate this book.
Needless to say that the active agent/landscape-architect-urban designer-planner-infrastructuralist has a precious role to play in proposing a more holistic, resilient, integrated approach to designing coastal regions. This is one of the messages that the book delivers, at least the message that concerns my interest. An abstract:

Thus, just as climate projections don't say much about tomorrow's weather, projections of current trends say little about future wars. But they do suggest a range of conditions — a set of system parameters, or a 'conflict climate' — within which those wars will arise. This because, as the anthropologist Harry Turney-High suggested more than thirty years ago, social, economic, political, and communications arrangements influence war making so profoundly that "warfare is social organization." Thus, the specifics of a particular war may be impossible to predict, but the parameters within which any future war will occur are entirely knowable, since wars are bounded by conditions that exist now, and are thus eminently observable in today's social, economic, geographic, and demographic climate.

If we accept this idea, along with the fact that war has been endemic to roughly 95 percent of all known human societies throughout history and prehistory, it follows that warfare is a central probably a permanent human social institution, one that tends (by its very nature as a human activity) mainly to occur where the people are. This is especially true of nonstate conflicts (guerrilla, tribal, and civil wars, or armed criminal activity such as banditry and gang warfare), which tend to happen near or within the areas where people live, or on major routes between population centers. And it follows that since the places where people live are getting increasingly crowded, urban, coastal and networked, the wars people fight will take on the same characteristics.

We can summarize the conflict climate in terms of four drivers, sometimes called megatrends, that are shaping and defining it. These are population growth (the continuing rise in the planet's total population), urbanization (the tendency for people to live in larger and larger cities), littoralization (the propensity for these cities to cluster on coastlines), and connectedness (the increasing connectivity among people, wherever they live). None of these trends is new, but their pace is accelerating, they're mutually reinforcing, and their intersection will influence not just conflict but every aspect of future life.

This book could be an interesting subtopic for Conditions Magazine 's discussion on architecture in this new era, as is proposed in its 13th issue ' The End of the Beginning '.
As I announced several months ago, I wrote a piece, an editorial for the 13th issue of this Norwegian magazine. My piece discussed architecture's vulnerability to the techno-culturo-climatic-ecological shift. I will post an abstract of my piece later this week. This issue ' The End of the Beginning " is more like an open issue, a platform to discuss architecture's reaction to future, to uncertainty and, of course, the status of architectural practice today and in the future. I've not read the other contributors' piece yet. Conditions Magazine  has gathered a set of editorials by  Neyran Turan , José Vela Castillo , Rebekah Schaberg , Anna Ulak  (see also her blog The Architecture of Villains ), Rachel Armstrong , dpr-barcelona  (and of course their blog ), Superpool , Marco V

My apology for being very unproductive these last weeks since I am particularly busy with projects in which I'm directly or indirectly involved including the interview with Neeraj Bhatia  ( here and here ) which, as I wrote in a previous post, may go to another platform. Again, when official, I will let you know where and when to read the interview. However, I may post not-selected questions/responses in this blog.
Another project on which I am working is my first guest-posting but again I may content merely with posting abstracts as I'm thinking of publishing them. If so, this will be by 2014.
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Last week-end I was in Lisbon for the triennial whose theme is Close, Closer . This was my first-ever trip to Lisbon, a very beautiful European city with its port, its very lively streets, and colored buildings, and its famous tramway.
The Lisbon Architecture Triennial has been founded in 2007. For this third edition, the committee has elected as Artistic Director a young and notable British curator Beatrice Galilee who has co-curated the Gwangju Design Biennial 2011 with Helen Hejung Choi . For this Triennial, she teamed up with three curators Liam Young , co-founder of Tomorrow Thoughts Today ,  Unknown Fields Division  and Under Tomorrow Sky , Mariana Pestana and José Esparza Chong Cuy , and co-curator  Dani Admiss . The curatorial team's aim was to draw on a political manifesto that claims that a new form, (rather new forms), of architecture practice is emerging out. Of what? The 21st century? Multifaceted crises? As the curatorial team states, Close, Closer tackles "the political, technological, emotional, institutional, and critical forms of global spatial practice." At issue is new forms of practice. New forms of practice, still stammering but seething, still fragile but resolute  (see here  and  here ).
Close, Closer  is presented as "an intense and multiple debate network on 'what architecture can be,'" says José Mateus , Chairman, also founding Director of José Mateus Arquitecto at a moment when Portugal, but many European countries a well, is struggling against a profound economic and identity crisis. Seven months or so ago, I interviewed the curatorial team  for a first look at the curatorial content, strategies — even at a primary stage — and goals behind Close, Closer . Remember the website. The curatorial team regularly posted new questions about what architecture could be: What else can architecture do? When does produce architecture? What answers should architecture be giving today?, and so forth. This website, particularly dynamic since based on a participative mode, invited us to reply to these questions, be you architect or not. Beatrice Galilee  said that:

The premise of this event is not to give answers, but to position questions about the condition of architectural practice today. These questions — pregnant with meaning or innocent in their simplicity — contain both a statement and a call to action. They resonate on a public stage beyond traditional discourse in order to find their way to a conversation between disciplines of culture and structures of real power.

The theme — a generation of young architects in the face of an ever-changing world— reveals architecture's position today.

This, the third Lisbon Architecture Triennale, has been commissioned and procured in the midst of the yo-yoing economic fortunes of a faltering Eurozone country where, currently, unemployment for graduates stands at 40%. This is the generation of young architects who may ask themselves if they should be designing the architecture of networks and systems, of societies or conversations, rather than buildings.

What interested me in this third edition is the curatorial function of architecture, how architecture can tackle these complex, multi-faceted issues within curating, or what position, role or function curating can play within the architectural apparatus. At stake is the potentiality  that curating can offer to architecture in going out of its ivory tower, just as some of the participants of Close, Closer  said, to push the architectural practice to be more engaged with the world from the smallest scale to the extra-largest scale. For that matter, I decided to focus on one of the exhibitions programmed there, namely Future Perfect . I will profit from this occasion to discuss the contingent trait of architecture.
As an evidence what is at issue, albeit partly, in this third edition, at least in accordance with my interest, is the relationship of the architect and his discipline, and, beyond this, the world. A unquestionable fact: The architect cannot content merely with the scale of building, or, to push further, the very act of building. On one hand, the architect is now extending his skillness in operating at a larger system — not necessarily the scale of the city, but that of the regional, the territory, the planetary — I'm speaking of infrastructure. On the other hand, the architect, more politically -engaged, uses other forms of practice, that is to say, curating, writing and publishing. Although many of them do not build, their influence on architecture is strong. Other build but use these  extra  activities as a means of leveraging their built projects. But what is common is that they aim to repurpose the architectural practice.
An example, present in Close, Closer :  Andrés Jaque and his firm the Office for Political Innovation , for instance, examines "the potential of post-foundational politics and symmetrical approaches to the sociology of technology to rethink architectural practices," as he states in his website. He participated in a three-day event 'Super Power of Ten' at the Triennial including two talks 'Radical Pedagogies: A conversation', and 'Phaidon Atlas Talks'. He also took part in 'Definition Series/OLD: from elderly to lateness' at Storefront IS Lisbon , a project curated by New York-Based Storefront for Art and Architecture , which was also part of Close, Closer . The list of the participants is long. And you should have been there at the opening days to profit from the program: exhibitions, talks, performances, etc.
For those who couldn't be present, other events were scheduled within these four months including Spatial Agency composed of Jeremy Till , Tatjana Schneider , and Nishat Awan , who curated a two-day event (17-20 October), The Institute for Radical Spatial Education , an event part of the Institute Effect . The event's ambition was to re-imagine professional and pedagogical agendas for architecture through a series of 'actions' that will alter the space within the gallery and beyond, the curators said. If you have read Jeremy Till 's

First, my apology for being less productive these last weeks. The reasons? A huge volume of works and… a leg in a cast due to a severe injury.
And I'll be again less productive the following months given that I'm working on projects I've already discussed here: Dziga Press ,   including  Uncertain Territories's first volume .
I'll be visiting Close, Closer ( Lisbon Architecture Triennale ) early December (note that the event will close its doors December 12, or I may be wrong). I hope my left leg will recover before December. My apology for this aparté  (private information).
There is also this interview with InfraNet Lab 's co-director  Neeraj Bhatia , and also director of The Open Workshop . The interview, I announced in previous posts, may go to another platform. Whether it goes to another platform or not, I'll let you know as soon as it will be clear and official.
And again I present my apology as I will merely propose for today another announcement. Yet, along with a previous post on  Think Space 's call for competition for this new edition  Money , this announcement seems particularly interesting.
The 36th issue of Volume , Ways to be Critical , examined two important points in the age of social networks: 1) the value of criticism; 2) the crisis of publishing. The question this  36th issue poses is how these crises impact the discipline of architecture from practice to writing.
Critic|all will pursuing the theme with the 1st International Conference on Architectural Design & Criticism . I'm reminded of a series of conferences on the same theme but in the field of art. It was in the 1990s. Over the past two decades, a group of critics, theorists, curators and artists has examined the transformation of criticism from the scale of writing to that of the exhibition in the age of globalization, and then the Internet. To a large extent, The Exhibitionist , this excellent little journal devoted to contemporary curatorial practices and exhibition making, constitutes a very good example among others. The journal, founded in 2010, continues the discussion producing a critical platform to polemically discuss, evaluate debates , research, exhibitions and books on the topics of curating.
For those interested in this subject, I suggest to read (again) Nicolas Bourriaud 's Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction , Liam Gillick: Proxemics Selected Essays, 1988-2006 , Maria Lind: Selected Writing , Daniel Birnbaum 's Chronology , The power of Judgement: A Debate on Aesthetic Critique co-edited by Christoph Menke ,  Daniel Loick , Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw , of course Hans Ulrich Obrist 's essays and interviews, the unfortunately hard-to-find In the Place of the Public Sphere? edited by Simon Sheikh … The list is long. Note that these books are published by independent publishers, many of them from Germany such as (my favorite) Sternberg Press . I will include (two other favorite) American Dexter Sinister , and French Les Presses du Réel and Paraguay Press .
Back to our field. Architecture is taking the same road with a real enthusiasm as it has been unfolded in the  Volume 's latest issue . Below a short presentation of Critic|all :

Trying to go beyond debates between pragmatism and utopia, the conference calls for criticism and reflects on the ambiguous area where the concepts of utopian pragmatism and pragmatic utopianism cross. To do so, three main topics have been defined: what position can today' architect adopt and how have others done it before? What are their methods? What are the new formats in architecture?