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Titre:
Matière grise de l'urbain : la vie du ciment en Africa

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Résumé:
L’Afrique connaît aujourd’hui une croissance urbaine rapide qui se traduit par une multiplication des constructions en béton. Le ciment, composant essentiel de ce matériau, est devenu le symbole de cette urbanisation frénétique qui bouleverse le paysage des villes africaines. Plus qu’une simple matière inerte, il se charge d’affect et de valeurs et redéfinit les pratiques et les imaginaires de sociétés en quête d’émergence économique et de réussite sociale, alors même qu’à l’heure du dérèglement climatique des voix s’élèvent pour dénoncer une industrie cimentière aux effets destructeurs sur l’environnement. Pour comprendre la production et la consommation grandissante de cette poudre banale devenue « or gris », Armelle Choplin nous invite à suivre les sacs de ciment sur les routes ouest-africaine, le long du corridor urbain de 500 km qui relie Accra, Lomé, Cotonou et Lagos. Depuis la carrière de calcaire jusqu’à la parcelle en chantier, l’auteure nous amène à la rencontre des géants du secteur, des investisseurs, des acteurs politiques mais aussi des maçons et des habitants qui construisent leur propre maison « en dur ». À travers l’exploration d’une filière au coeur de multiples enjeux politiques, sociaux et économiques, cet ouvrage nous appelle à repenser les rapports étroits qui lient l’urbain, l’humain et le monde.

Titre:
African Fabbers Atlas: Manual of synthetic vernacular architecture

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$48.95
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Résumé:
How to respond to climatic changes reconciling nature with tekné? What is the social role of technology? How architects would reconsider their practices supporting community-oriented projects? The theoretical assumption for this investigation is based on the observation of cause-effect relations, between different urban and architectural configurations and their performances: social, environmental, structural etc. in both pre-colonial and informal cultures around Africa. The diachronic approach intends to generate, after many years of post-colonial studies, an operative agenda of possible strategies, which is in accordance with different conditions starting from the anthropological and the climatic ones. Such an agenda responds to a global cultural need for an ecological shift in the contemporary design and manufacturing processes, which should bridge high and low-tech cultures. Therefore, the book is conceived also as a sort of manual that is articulated around emergent principles inspired by traditional and informal African practices and architectures: self-similarity and diversified typologies, material optimisation and circular economy, self-sufficiency and responsive dwellings.

Titre:
Album Architectures, Abidjan

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Résumé:
Ceci n'est pas un livre d'architecture mais un livre de photographie sur une architecture qui s'exprime par le divers. Il s'agit d'un ouvrage qui entend proposer un regard photographique sur des bâtiments d'Abidjan portant l'empreinte d'un certain « modernisme tropical ». Plus exactement, 'Album Architectures, Abidjan' est le témoignage d'une rencontre entre deux individus qui habitent et partagent un attachement esthétique et émotionnel pour la cité lagunaire. Issa Diabaté, architecte, acteur contemporain du devenir architectural de cette ville qui ne cesse de se réinventer. François-Xavier Gbré, photographe qui a fait de l'architecture son médium privilégié d'appréhension de l'histoire sourde des lieux en envisageant les architectures comme les traces sédimentaires des changements sociaux et politiques d'un pays, la Côte d'Ivoire. Cet ouvrage, et la collection 'Album Architectures' plus largement, souhaite initier une réflexion sur la définition de la notion de patrimoine contemporain à travers la valorisation de paysages architecturaux riches et singuliers, pas toujours identifiés, souvent invisibilisés, de villes en perpétuelle mutation urbaine.

Titre:
Writing the city into being: essays on Johannesburg

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Résumé:
Writing the City into Being is Bremner’s collection of essays, spanning more than a decade of work on Johannesburg. It is both an unflinching analysis of the characteristics of a city and a work of imagination – a bringing of the evasive city into being through writing. Johannesburg has become a touchstone in critical thinking on the development of the twenty-first-century city, attracting scholars from around the world who seek to understand how cities are changing in the face of urban migration in all its myriad forms and the inflow of foreign capital and interest. Writing the City into Being is an important book for those seeking to understand cities in a rapidly changing and fragmenting world. Lindsay Bremner is a guide to the city of Johannesburg, and one of its most incisive commentators.

Titre:
City of extremes: the spatial politics of Johannesburg

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Résumé:
Combining insights from urban studies, cultural geography, and urban sociology with extensive research in South Africa, the author reflects on the implications of Johannesburg’s dual character as a city of fortified enclaves that displays the ostentatious symbols of global integration and the celebrated “enterprise culture” of neoliberal design, and as the “miasmal city” composed of residual, peripheral, and stigmatized zones characterized by signs of a new kind of marginality. He suggests that the “global cities” paradigm is inadequate to understanding the historical specificity of cities in the Global South, including the colonial mining town turned postcolonial megacity of Johannesburg.

Titre:
De la case à la villa

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Résumé:
Ce volume traite du concept d'habiter dans l'architecture africaine, en s'appuyant sur l'exemple du Cameroun en particulier, chez les Barmiléké de l'Ouest et les Duala du Littoral, région dont Épée Ellong est originaire.

Titre:
The school, the book, the town : logbook, Ethiopia in a timeline

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Résumé:
This biography of an experiment takes the reader into another world. As if standing before a Mirror, everything seems familiar but remains unknown. Such ambiguity is at the heart of the story told in The School, the Book, the Town, a story about the unfolding of a research project undertaken in Ethiopia for nearly a decade.

Titre:
Sluminsider: Mathare, Nairobi

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$42.95
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Résumé:
Sluminsider is a choral narrative that attempts to reveal the complexity of the slum of Mathare, one of the biggest shantytowns in Nairobi. The project of expansion of a street school, the Why Not Junior Academy, and the process of environmental improvement of the surrounding area, where a community agriculture initiative has been set up to replace an unauthorized dump, is the starting point from which to combine experiences and identities from very different disciplines, including architecture,design, agriculture, photography and video. This project is one of the case studies used for comparison and dialogue with the city of São Paulo and the São Paulo Calling research project, which examined the informal settlements of Rome, Nairobi, Medellin, Mumbai, Moscow and Baghdad. For six months, an exhibition analyzed the characteristics, differences and causes of informal settlements, developing six workshops in the field in different favelas of São Paulo and organizing size encounters that made São Paulo the world capital of the debate on transformation of contemporary cities.

Titre:
SUDU : the sustainable urban dwelling unit in Ethiopia, 2 volumes

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$67.95
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Résumé:
The Sustainable Urban Dwelling Unit (SUDU), which emerged out of a summer workshop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is a new, sustainable housing alternative that can be self-constructed with minimal technical ability, low start-up costs, and local materials (such as soil). This publication documents the building process in two parts: the first part narratively records the construction process itself while providing historical and technical context. The second part functions as a manual, providing a detailed list of tools, materials, and step-by-step instructions that can be used by readers to carry out their own SUDU project.