What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city? In RADICAL CITIES, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the [More]

What is do-it-yourself architecture? Self-building is a challenge not only in terms of material, economic, regulatory and bureaucratic difficulties, it is a challenge to oneself. It requires the desire and the ability to recognize one’s own limits, to overcome one’s own prejudices, to put aside one’s own ego in favour of the ability to listen [More]

Torre David is an incomplete skyscraper in the center of the Venezuelan capital Caracas that has been occupied and reconstructed by local residents. Work on the building, named after the financial investor David Brillembourg, who died in 1993, was suspended during the Venezuelan financial crisis of 1994. After the office tower– the third highest in [More]

Second and revised edition of this fascinating project that documents Hong Kongs legacy of rooftop communities as a highly unique form of architecture that has informally evolved. The project offers a comprehensive survey of five rooftop settlements in the city, while also revealing the creative cultural energy of these rooftop communities and their inextricable links [More]

In this new era of disorientation and social hardship it isn’t pure formalism to rethink at utopia as a form of search, anticipation and projection in the realm of possibilities. Utopia: no place, good place, beautiful or unattainable place. The utopias are even more important in times of crisis because of their “unattainability”, because them [More]

This book offers the first comprehensive overview of alternative approaches to architectural practice. At a time when many commentators are noting that alternative and richer approaches to architectural practice are required if the profession is to flourish, this book provides multiple examples from across the globe of how this has been achieved and how it might be [More]

Many believe that the moral mission of architecture has been in serious decline for the last 25 years. In this important new book, Tom Spector points out the dilemmas of architectural practice and offers a theoretical and practical basis for an examination and transformation of the quandaries the profession now faces. What makes a good [More]

In a world of growing and multiplying cities, suburbanization is the most visible and pervasive phenomenon. While the single-family home subdivisions of North America continue to proliferate, many other forms of suburbanization are now emerging around the globe. The highrise housing estates around many European and Canadian cities; the belts and wedges of squatter settlements [More]

Make_Shift City looks at urban design strategies that renegotiate and emancipate shared spaces and resources within the city, showing how the increasing scarcity of resources and commons–particularly in Western cities–have far-reaching consequences for the everyday urban experience.

For Colombian architect Simon Vélez (born 1949), botany has been inextricable from architecture. His work has been significantly determined by his country’s tropical resources, in particular its lush vegetation and abundance of guadua bamboo–a common species throughout the valleys of Colombia. Working in close collaboration with the engineer-constructor Marcello Villegas, Vélez has devised bamboo buildings [More]