Gardens, shrinking towns, preparedness and reconstruction: design at the scale of the city.
39 books · 39 authors · across 6 lists · 2020–2026
Rosalyn Shieh · Park Books / University of Chicago Press · 2026
Based on the work and vision of their architecture firm Schaum/Shieh, this book shares what is said and what can be heard in a studio. So much of architectural thinking and knowledge is presented, formulated, and traded in spoken words: pinups, meetings, walkthroughs. Those exchanges inform this book, in which ideas and knowledge that are usually only spoken are made accessible to readers.
Miho Mazereeuw · University of Virginia Press · 2026
Few countries have faced as many environmental disasters as Japan, which has endured typhoons, cyclones, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis. Japanese residents have responded to their precarious circumstances by developing a unique culture of disaster preparedness, equipping the island nation to plan for future emergencies and to greatly reduce their impact. Mazereeuw offers a detailed framework to design and prepare for anticipated disasters and describes effective interventions in urban landscape and architecture.
Kate Brown · W.W. Norton · 2026
Nurturing health, hope, and community, gardeners in cities and suburbs are reclaiming lost commons, transforming vacant lots into vibrant plots, turning waste into compost, and recreating what was once the most productive agriculture in recorded human history. In a book with global scope, ranging from Estonia to Amsterdam and Washington, Brown contends that urban gardening has many positive spillover effects, from health and environmental benefits to community-building, apart from periods of pushback when others are trying to eliminate it.
Nasser Rabbat · American University in Cairo Press · 2025
This book delves into the complex interplay of post-conflict reconstruction in Syria, challenging the traditionally held dichotomy between the end of violence and the commencement of rebuilding. The contributors to this volume, architects, urbanists, geographers, and historians, employ critical concepts such as urbicide, domicide, and "civilian crisis architecture" to argue against the conventional theoretical frameworks that support a neat separation of phases.
Brent D. Ryan · Springer Nature · 2025
This book explores the transformative power of digitization in rural regions, where technology isn't just a tool, but a lifeline for local culture, economic resilience, and future development. Born from a unique research collaboration between the MIT and Politecnico di Milano, this book brings together scholarly work on shrinking towns, economic development, and digital innovation. The project tackled some of the most pressing challenges facing rural Italy, from population decline to economic stagnation, through the lens of digital transformation.
Marissa Friedman · Alliance for Jewish Theater · 2025
Produced by the Alliance for Jewish Theatre, this guide was created to help non-Jewish theaters produce Jewish plays with authenticity, cultural awareness, and care. Friedman contributes a chapter on dramaturgy, exploring how the primary role of a dramaturg is to support a playwright and production team in articulating their artistic vision, and setting forth an ideal model for the dramaturgy of a Jewish play, with both a theatrical dramaturg and a Jewish dramaturg.
Samuel Jay Keyser · MIT Press · 2025
Leonard Bernstein, in his famous Norton Lectures, extolled repetition, saying that it gave poetry its musical qualities and that music theorists' refusal to take it seriously did so at their peril. "Play It Again, Sam" takes Bernstein seriously. In this book, Keyser explores why we enjoy works of poetry, music, and painting, and how repetition plays a central part in the pleasure.
Natalie Bell · MIT Press · 2025
Accompanying the related exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center and Buffalo AKG Art Museum, "Steina" brings renewed recognition to Steina (b. 1940, Iceland), tracing her oeuvre from early collaborative works with her partner Woody Vasulka to her independent explorations of optics and a liberated, non-anthropocentric subjectivity.
Peter B. Kaufman · MIT Press · 2025
Video is today's most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world's internet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information more often from screens and speakers than through any other means. "The Moving Image" is the first authoritative account of how we have arrived here, together with the first definitive manual to help writers, educators, and publishers use video more effectively.
Henry Lieberman · Springer · 2025
Lieberman's chapter, "Citizen Centered Cities: User Centered Design for Cooperative Cities," explores user-centered design principles for creating cooperative cities that prioritize citizen needs. The work demonstrates how design-focused approaches can address urban challenges by placing residents at the center of city planning and development processes.
Judith Barry · MIT Press · 2024
This collection of essays reveals the depth and complexity of the sculpture of American modernist Tony Smith, placing his multifaceted practice in dialogue with contemporary voices. Barry's chapter, "New Piece: Elective Geometries," describes the transformation of Smith's sculpture into the form of a flipbook and centerpiece "pop-up."
Raafat Majzoub SM '17 · ArchiTangle · 2024
This book explores the renovation of modern architecture in the Global South as a tool for self-determination and community-building. Focusing on the Oscar Niemeyer Guest House in Tripoli, Lebanon, Majzoub and Fayad examine heritage as a political and material process. Through case studies, visual essays, and conversations with architects, artists, and theorists, the book addresses challenges of preservation, gaps in archiving, and the need for new forms of architectural practice.
Lawrence J. Vale · MIT Press · 2024
Too often the places most vulnerable to climate change are those that are home to people with the fewest economic and political resources. And while some leaders are starting to take action to reduce climate risks, many early adaptation schemes have actually made preexisting inequalities worse. In this book, Vale and Lamb ask how cities can adapt to climate change and other threats while also doing right by disadvantaged residents.
Gearoid Dolan · Ugly Duckling Press · 2023
This "bible of performance art activity" documents performance projects from around the world. Dolan's chapter describes "Protest ReEmbodied," a performance that took place online during Covid-19 lockdown. The performance was a live version of the ongoing "Protest ReEmbodied" project, an app that individuals can download and run on their computer to be able to perform on camera, inserted into protest footage.
Caroline Murphy · Brill · 2023
"Land Air Sea" positions the long Renaissance and 18th century as being vital for understanding how many of the concerns present in contemporary debates on climate change and sustainability originated in earlier centuries. Murphy's chapter examines how Girolamo di Pace da Prato, a state engineer in the Duchy of Florence, understood and sought to mitigate the problems of alluvial flooding in the mid-sixteenth century, an era of exceptional aquatic and environmental volatility.
Laura Anderson Barbata · Routledge · 2023
This book provides an examination of death, dying, and human remains in museums and heritage sites around the world. In her chapter, "Julia Pastrana's Long Journey Home," Barbata describes the case of Julia Pastrana (1834-1860), an indigenous Mexican opera singer who suffered from hypertrichosis terminalis and hyperplasia gingival. Due to her appearance, Pastrana was exploited and exhibited for over 150 years, during her lifetime and after her early death in an embalmed state. Barbata sheds light on the ways in which the systems that justified Pastrana's exploitation continue to operate today.
Mark Jarzombek · Bloomsbury Visual Arts · 2023
This book argues that the architecture/contractor divide is a "construction" with a particular history and theoretical problematic that impacts not just the history of the discipline, but also the history of labor that haunts the very understanding of contemporary architecture. The book looks at issues relating to preservation theory and the Library of Congress ordering systems, as well as to the tragic dualisms of "theory and practice," mind and body, design and craft, and architect and builder that belay any attempt to ever get out from under its particular falsifications.
Rania Ghosn · Actar Publishers · 2023
The speculative design research publication reckons with the complexity of "heritage" and "world" in the Anthropocene. The impacts of climate change on heritage sites - from Venice flooding to extinction in the Galápagos Islands - have garnered empathetic attention in a media landscape that has otherwise mostly failed to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis. In a strategic subversion of the media aura of heritage, World Heritage sites are cast as narrative figures to visualize pervasive climate risks all while situating the present emergency within the wreckages of other ends of worlds, replete with the salvages of extractivism, racism, and settler colonialism. The harms and possibilities of such inheritances are narrated in drawing triptychs and mythologies to bequeath other worlds and values.
Rafi Segal · Columbia University Press · 2023
The authors converse about the transformative potential of mutualism and design with leading thinkers and practitioners. Together, they consider how design inspires, invigorates, and sustains contemporary forms of mutualism - including platform cooperatives, digital-first communities, emerging currencies, mutual aid, care networks, social-change movements, and more. From these dialogues emerge powerful visions of futures guided by communal self-determination and collective well-being.
Franca Alexandra Sonntag · Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Press · 2022
In 2019 two Siamese workshops were organized by Aula Coopera [Spain/in/India], under the same research topic, Urban Condensers. Updating heritage areas, the workshops took place in two different cities: Madrid and Ahmedabad; two countries in two continents. With the participation of 14 professors, eight conferences, previous trips visiting paradigmatic architectures, walking through the intervention sites in contact with their inhabitants; 50 students of various levels and seven nationalities produced different proposals for the re-activation of public space in both cities among 17 working groups. This book describes the workshops, including the immense experiences of participants living in situ together.
Kristel Smentek · Yale University Press · 2022
Are volcanoes punishment from God? During the Enlightenment, questions such as this were brought to life through an astonishing array of prints and drawings, helping shape public opinion and stir political change. This book overturns common assumptions about the Age of Enlightenment, using the era's proliferation of works on paper to tell a more nuanced story. With a multidisciplinary approach, the book probes developments in the natural sciences, technology, economics, and more - all through the lens of the graphic arts.
Gabriella Carolini · Oxford University Press · 2022
In this book, Carolini emphasizes that equitable partnership on the ground delivers the best results in the Global South. In her view, the best development projects involve close cooperation between proximate peers: the sharing of information among partners, a consistent presence on the ground, nonhierarchical governance, and a drive toward "equity," in many forms, as a key project goal.
George Stiny · MIT Press · 2022
In this book, Stiny runs visual calculating in shape grammars through art and design - incorporating Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetic imagination and Oscar Wilde's corollary to see things as they aren't. Many assume that calculating limits art and design to suit computers, but shape grammars rely on seeing to prove otherwise. Rules that change what they see extend calculating to overtake what computers can do, in logic and with data and learning. Shape grammars bridge the divide between seeing and combinatoric play.
Gabriella Y. Carolini · Oxford University Press · 2022
Based on a close examination of international cooperation projects in the water-and-sanitation sector in Maputo, Mozambique, this book describes the factors that shape equity in development practice. It also provides a framework for how project evaluations, as a key narrative instrument, can promote distributive, procedural, and epistemic justice.
Eran Ben-Joseph · Taylor and Francis Group · 2022
This open-access book explores the evolving and future relationships between cities and sites of production, focusing on the spatial implications and physical design of integrating contemporary manufacturing into the city. It provides lessons from cases around the world and calls to reconsider the ways in which industry creates places, sustains jobs, and supports environmental sustainability in our cities.
Miro Kazakoff · MIT Press · 2022
"Persuading with Data" provides a guide to data visualization, strategic communication, and delivery best practices. This is the first book that combines explanatory visualization and communication strategy, showing how to use visuals to create effective communications that convince others to accept and act on data. It explains how our brains make sense of graphs, how to design effective graphs and slides that support ideas, how to create a compelling presentation, and how to deliver and defend data to an audience.
Azra Akšamija · MIT Press · 2021
"Design to Live" shows how refugees use art and design to transform their living environments, restoring humanity within circumstances that seem aimed at depriving them of it. Featuring more than 20 projects created by Syrian refugees at the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan, this bilingual book in English and Arabic offers a new way of understanding design as a subversive worldmaking practice and as a tool for reclaiming agency in conditions of forced displacement.
Jeff Levine · Routledge · 2021
Community organizers like Jane Jacobs rightly blamed city planners for neighborhoods destroyed in the name of "progress," and determined that the field was flawed. Yet in this book, Levine argues that critical societal challenges, such as affordable housing, climate change, and racial disparities, need planners to lead the way more than ever. He presents ideas for how to provide planning leadership inclusively.
Fábio Duarte · MIT Press · 2021
In "Urban Play," Duarte and Álvarez argue that technology is powerful not when it becomes optimally functional, but while it is still playful and open to experimentation. It is through play that we explore new territories, create new devices and languages, and transform ourselves. Only then can innovative spatial design create resonant spaces that go beyond functionalism to evoke an emotional response in those who use them.
Alan Berger · Island Press · 2021
Coastal adaptation is necessary if communities are to adequately protect themselves from increased tidal flooding and sea level rise. Planning is critical to their survival. "A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation" inspires innovative and cross-disciplinary thinking about coastal policy at the state and local levels while providing actionable, realistic policy and planning options for adaptation professionals and policymakers.
Adesola Akinleye · Bloomsbury · 2021
Generated from a year of exchanges of movement ideas in cross-practice conversations and workshops with dancers, musicians, architects, and engineers, Akinleye engages with dance's offer of perspectives on being in place. Themes addressed include how dance and city-making cultures engage with female bodies and non-white bodies in today's era of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.
Justin P. Steil · Temple University Press · 2021
The 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule was repealed by the Trump administration, jeopardizing the most significant federal effort to increase equal access to valuable opportunities such as top-performing schools and good jobs. By placing the history of fair housing in the context of the centuries-long struggle for racial equity, the authors show how the policy can be revived and enhanced to advance racial equity in America's neighborhoods.
Brandon Clifford · ORO Editions · 2021
Bridging the realities of our ancestors and ourselves, this book proposes a series of architectural "recipes" after dining on a body of past expertise. Recipes are deciphered from ancient cyclopean masonry systems, but with a contemporary twist; they cannibalize leftover debris - building rubble that typically stuffs our landfills - to construct new buildings.
Skylar Tibbits · Princeton University Press · 2021
Today's researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. This book describes how these materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethink the way we build and collaborate with our environment.
Azra Aksamija · ArchiTangle · 2020
This book investigates how architecture can shape an open-minded and inclusive society, highlighting three internationally renowned projects: the White Mosque in Visoko, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1980); the Islamic Cemetery in Altach, Austria (2012); and Superkilen park in Copenhagen, Denmark (2011). Essays and interviews provide intriguing insights into architecture's ability to bridge cultural divides.
Sasha Costanza-Chock · MIT Press · 2020
"Design justice" is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. This book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices and connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.
Andres Sevtsuk · University of Pennsylvania Press · 2020
Will e-commerce and big-box stores overtake the smaller-scale stores lining streets accessible on foot or by public transit? Sevtsuk offers a thoughtful analysis of the issues involved in implementing successful street commerce and provides examples from around the world where cities have reinvigorated their street commerce.
Hashim Sarkis · MIT Press · 2020
The world's growing vulnerability to planet-sized risks invites action on a global scale. This book shows how, for more than a century, architects have imagined the future of the planet through world-scale projects. With 50 speculative projects by visionary architects documented in text and images, this ambitious and wide-ranging book is the first compilation of its kind.
Siqi Zheng · SA+P Press, distributed by MIT Press · 2020
This book presents new cities in Asia from the perspective of economic vibrancy, identifying key mechanisms for measuring success. This analytical framework addresses the mechanisms along three dimensions: underlying forces that foster the dense and diverse production and consumption activities; creative financing; and the digitalization of urban systems.