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Title:
On architecture and work; The political economy of space Vol. 03

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Why is architecture so remote from labor struggles, with poorly negotiated labor contracts and barely any self-management models? What possibilities emerge when we acknowledge the glaring class divide between the architectural firm and the construction site? What insights do the stories of workers provide about the construction industry? How do different design practices emerge if designers and construction workers unite? On ''Architecture and Work'' is a collection of essays on the relationship between construction, architecture, work, and labor. From complaints over grueling working conditions on construction sites to demands for better benefits in design offices, asking candidly "who can afford to be radical?", this is the third publication in the series ''The Political Economy of Space'', after ''On Architecture and the Greenfield'' (2024) and ''On Architecture and Greenwashing'' (2024).

Title:
Climate changed : Models and the built world

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"Climate changed" examines models and their imperfect yet central role in understanding the relationship between global climate dynamics and the human-built environment. It compares and synthesizes the methods and function of models in disciplines ranging from architecture and planning to climate science and natural hazards research. This book considers how disparate models are woven together to understand the climate crisis, underscoring the necessity of combining locally situated and transdisciplinary knowledge with climate science to navigate current and future cataclysmic changes. It highlights the challenges and consequences of disciplinary boundaries, siloed scientific knowledge, and uneven data and develops ways to overcome these limitations.

Title:
Architecture is climate

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Rejecting outdated paradigms of endless linear growth, technocratic fixes, and the separation of humans from nature, '‘Architecture Is Climate’' argues that architecture must be fundamentally rethought – not as the design of objects, but as a practice entangled with climate, politics, history, and social justice. Through eight key themes (knowledge, economy, land, resources, infrastructure, work, policy, and culture) it explores how climate breakdown reshapes every aspect of architectural thinking and doing. Drawing on diverse voices and grounded examples from around the world, it offers a critique but also a vision of other possible architectures already in the making.

Title:
Architecture as environmental media: Rendering the planetary

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$85.95
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To confront the Anthropocene, designers must increasingly move between scales and across disciplines to develop new structures of knowledge and tools of representation: from the embodied to the technical, the investigative to the projective. Ultimately, this volume asks: What stakes are embedded in contemporary architectural environmental media, and how are designers re-imagining this media landscape today? Chapters in the book explore counter-cartographies of migration and materials, forest ecologies and theories of abundance, hyperreal visualization and environmental simulation, architecture’s extractive and colonial systems, and pedagogies and practices for environmental futures. This book organizes these efforts into three threads of media practice: rendering visible, rendering sensible, and rendering actionable. While these categories are inextricably intertwined, they represent distinct tactical approaches to media production, each exploring possible methods to develop new knowledge systems, shift aesthetic regimes, and transform collective politics.

Title:
Toxicité coloniale : documenter le paysage radioactif dans le Sahara

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« Toxicité coloniale » revient sur les programmes d’essais nucléaires français menés entre 1960 et 1966 dans le Sahara algérien. Ce programme secret, qui s’est déroulé pendant et après la guerre d’indépendance algérienne (1954-1962), a permis au régime colonial français de mettre à feu quatre bombes atomiques atmosphériques, treize souterraines et mené d’autres expériences nucléaires dans le désert. Alors que la grande majorité des documents d’archives sont toujours classés secret aujourd’hui, « Toxicité coloniale » rassemble une variété de sources permettant de documenter l’histoire violente des activités de la France en Algérie. Le livre constitue un corpus de choix à l’intersection de la justice spatiale, sociale et environnementale pour ceux et celles qui s’intéressent à l’architecture, au paysage et aux pratiques d’archivage dans une démarche postcoloniale.

Title:
New York geologics: Representations of Manhattan from the anthropocene

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Conventional representations reinforce its reading as an urban condition resulting from neoliberal capitalism. These forces have expanded the city grid and extruded its architectures as a laboratory of urban ideas. Yet, like many other coastal and insular conditions, twenty-first century Manhattan faces adverse Anthropogenic climate change. Stronger storm surges and sea level rise now demand that the island recalibrates its social and environmental positions. The city needs to consider once again its fluid archipelagic conditions inherited from glacial dynamics. With a focus on iconic city representations, the book examines distinct logics that try to make capitalist progress compatible with its territorial conditions. Even though these logics of land, water and ground – here called geologics – are perhaps less dominant than the dense urban culture and, therefore, less predominant in the representation of the city, they are still important to explain why Manhattan evolved to its current condition.

Title:
Proxemics and the architecture of social interaction

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Architecture is a constant presence in the study of human interaction- acting as both the ground on which human social behavior is performed and a means of shaping subjectivity itself. ''Proxemics'' was an attempt to visualize and instrumentalize these dynamics, appealing to both the social sciences and the emerging field of environmental design. Founded by anthropologist Edward T. Hall and taking shape between the departments of architecture and anthropology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, proxemics developed amidst cold war political tensions and intense social and civil unrest. ''Proxemics and the Architecture of Social Interaction'' presents selections from Hall’s extensive archive of visual materials alongside a critical analysis that traces transformations in the fields of design and science. Together these materials illuminate a moment in American history when new spatial practices arose to challenge the environmental conditions of cultural, political, and racial identity.

Title:
Radical futurisms: Ecologies of collapse/chronopolitics/justice to come

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There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end—of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a healthy planet, of the Holocene, of civilization as we know it. In this book, drawing on radical futurisms and visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed—Indigenous, African-American, multispecies, anti-capitalist—as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements, T. J. Demos poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives. He argues that it's as vital to defeat fatalistic nihilism as it is to defeat the false solutions of green capitalism and algorithmic governance. How might we decolonize the future, and cultivate an emancipated chronopolitics in relation to an undetermined not-yet? If we are to avoid climate emergency's cooptation by technofixes, and the defuturing of multitudes by xenophobic eco-fascism, Demos argues, we must cultivate visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.

Title:
Slow disturbance: infrastructural mediation on the settler colonial resource frontier

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From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheries off Labrador's coast. In 'Slow Disturbance' Rafico Ruiz engages with the Grenfell Mission to theorize how settler colonialism establishes itself through what he calls infrastructural mediation—the ways in which colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the creation and maintenance of infrastructures. Drawing on archival documents, maps, interviews with municipal officials, teachers, and residents, as well as his field photography, Ruiz shows how the mission's infrastructural mediation—from its attempts to restructure the local economy to the aerial surveying and mapping of the coastline—responded to the colony's environmental conditions in ways that expanded the bounds of the settler frontier. By tracing the mission's history and the mechanisms that enabled its functioning, Ruiz complicates understandings of mediation and infrastructure while expanding current debates surrounding settler colonialism and extractive capitalism.

Title:
Colonial lives of property: law, land, and racial regimes of ownership

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In this book, Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.