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Title:
Participate! Portraits of cities and citizens in action

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$61.00
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This publication offers an introduction to the complex world of urban development, identity and participation. It explains how the self-understanding of cities is mirrored in their approach to urban development. The basis of the book is formed by portraits of six European cities: Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, Lyon, Amsterdam and Groningen. The book fills a gap as it provides general introductions to cities, a brief outline of the city’s planning system, a short historic introduction to the city’s planning culture. With telling and outstanding examples of citizen participation this book offers important insights in both the intrinsic logic of the cities and the mechanisms – sometimes more inclusive, sometimes more exclusive- of participation.

Title:
Meeting grounds

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$24.50
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The Meeting Grounds programme of online, participatory events that took place from March to June 2020, at the height of the first wave of the pandemic, sought to examine this limited access, whilst simultaneously exploring the new spaces of community we have produced in response. This resulting publication features the work of 35 selected artists, researchers, designers and writers who took part in the programme. The Meeting Grounds publication therefore acts as a continuation of the ideas and conversations exchanged during this time period as well as an exploration into the social, political and cultural changes that have occurred since the beginning of 2020. In doing so, it hopes to unravel our evolving relationships with space and place, the effects these changes have had on our bodily behaviours, habitual practices and movements and the ways in which we recognise, form and maintain locality, community, connection and care.

Title:
Designing peace: Building a better future now

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Offering perspectives on peace through essays, interviews, critical maps, project profiles, data visualizations, and art, this book conveys the momentum that design can gain in effecting a peace-filled future. From activists, scholars, and architects to policymakers and graphic, game, and landscape designers, the publication flips the conversation: peace is not simply a passive state signifying the absence of war, it is a dynamic concept that requires effort, expertise, and multidimensional solutions to address its complexity. This publication aims to expand the discourse on what is possible if society were to design for peace. It accompanies the exhibition Designing Peace, presented at Cooper Hewitt.

Title:
Dream, play, build: Hands-on community engagement for enduring spaces and places

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$30.95
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For twenty years, James Rojas and John Kamp have been looking to art, creative expression, and storytelling to shake up the classic community meeting. In this book, they share their insights into building common ground and inviting active participation among diverse groups. Their approach, “Place It!,” draws on three methods: the interactive model-building workshop, the pop-up, and site exploration using our senses. Using our hands to build and create is central to what makes us human, helping spark ideas without relying on words to communicate. Deceptively playful, this method is remarkably effective at teasing out community dreams and desires from hands-on activities. The book offers wisdom distilled from workshops held around the world, and a deep dive into the transformational approach and results from the South Colton community in southern California.

Title:
(How) do we (want to) work (together) (as (socially engaged) designers (students and neighbours)) (in neoliberal times)?

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$35.00
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Since 2011, the Studio Experimentelles Design at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg has experimented with local design support as a contemporary practice. The student-led program advocates a community-based, cooperative approach to design. In the summer of 2020, the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin Design Lab #6 hosted Studio Experimentelles Design's eponymous online research festival.” Divided into two parts, this compendium chronicles the studio’s politically and socially committed approach through lectures, research, conversations, and project documentation from the online festival and five years of studio work. Both the festival's debate about working conditions and the studio's practice critically examine the imperative of committed designers today to radically reorient their approach, the content of their work, and their relationship with the actors for whom they design.

Title:
Design for good: a new era of architecture for everyone

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$34.95
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“That’s what we do really: we do miracles,” said Anne-Marie Nyiranshimiyimana, who learned masonry in helping to build the Butaro Hospital, a project designed for and with the people of Rwanda using local materials. This, and other projects designed with dignity, show the power of good design. Almost nothing influences the quality of our lives more than the design of our homes, our schools, our workplaces, and our public spaces. Yet, design is often taken for granted and people don’t realize that they deserve better, or that better is even possible. In Design for Good, John Cary offers character-driven, real-world stories about projects around the globe that offer more—buildings that are designed and created with and for the people who will use them. The book reveals a new understanding of the ways that design shapes our lives and gives professionals and interested citizens the tools to seek out and demand designs that dignify.

Title:
Design to live: Everyday inventions from a refugee camp

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This book shows how, even in the most difficult conditions–forced displacement, trauma, and struggle–design can help create a life worth living. ''Design to live'' documents designs, inventions, and artworks created by Syrian refugees living in the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan. Through these ingenious and creative innovations–including the vertical garden, an arrangement necessitated by regulations that forbid planting in the ground; a front hall, fashioned to protect privacy; a baby swing made from recycled desks; and a chess set carved from a broomstick–refugees defy the material scarcity, unforgiving desert climate, and cultural isolation of the camp. Written in close collaboration with the residents of the camp, with text in both English and Arabic, ''Design to live,'' reflects two perspectives on the camp: people living and working in Azraq and designers reflecting on humanitarian architecture within the broader field of socially engaged art and design. Architectural drawings, illustrations, photographs, narratives, and stories offer vivid testimony to the imaginative and artful ways that residents alter and reconstruct the standardized humanitarian design of the camp–and provide models that can be replicated elsewhere. The book is the product of a three-year project undertaken by MIT Future Heritage Lab, researchers and students with Syrian refugees at the Azraq Refugee Camp, CARE, Jordan, and the German-Jordanian University.

Title:
Toward the not yet: art as public practice

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$25.95
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This volume from BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, combines handbook, dictionary, and anthology to investigate artistic practice aimed at achieving social change. With text and visual essays, definitions, exercises, interviews, and images, the contributors envision a praxis that is committed to experimenting with aesthetics and politics in ways that go beyond the conventions of Western modernity. These are practices that are interdisciplinary, theoretically informed, and politically driven, offering ways of "being together otherwise." Catalyzed by the work of artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, which focuses on radicalizing civic processes, ''Toward the not-yet' imagines and enacts alternative ways of conceiving the present and future. Contributors, among them notable artists, scholars, activists, and writers consider ways of participating in civic life, including "dreamscaping" and "radical listening"; the creation of safer spaces for humans and nonhumans; ways of radically shifting laws and policies; and tactics and methods of collective sanctuary. ''Toward the not-yet'' is part of BAK's series of BASICS readers, debuting a SUPERBASICS variation that is larger, with more visual content.

Title:
Collective processes: counterpractices in european architecture

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$58.95
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What does a collective process in architecture entail and how does it influence the planning of our built environment? Although the hierarchically organized office with its claim to individual authorship is still the dominant form of architecture firm, more and more horizontally organized collectives with alternative approaches to architectural planning are emerging. In this insightful survey of renowned European collectives, Natalie Donat-Cattin offers an overview of their working methods, organizational forms, goals, and projects. The book includes statements and projects by: A-A Collective, (ab)Normal, Assemble, baukuh, CNCRT, Colectivo Warehouse, Collectif Etc, constructLab, false mirror office, Fosbury Architecture, la–clique, Lacol, n’UNDO, orizzontale, raumlabor, X=(T=E=N), and Zuloark.

Title:
Terrain critique

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$41.95
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Summary:
L’enquête qui fait l’objet de cet ouvrage dresse le récit d’une intégration progressive de l’action culturelle et artistique en urbanisme. Face à un contexte de défiance à son égard, elle décrit un urbanisme qui s’ouvre à des compétences en matière de médiation, d’animation et de communication. Et dépeint, à l’inverse, un monde de l’art impatient d’investir cette nouvelle niche de la commande publique urbaine. L’intrigue qui s’y joue laisse percevoir l’émergence d’un nouvel esprit de l’urbanisme.