Critical Imagination

Article: Critical Imagination

The Racism Onion

The racism onion has discrimination at its core.  You do not need to be American to be moved by the seismic events that shook cities and mobilized people around the world in response to police brutality against Black people in the US in the summer of 2020. However, if you have ever been subjected to […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Bottom-up Turned Inside Out

Decision-making in urban development today isn’t defined by the needs of empowered citizens but by two mutually supporting mechanisms: big corporate interests and retreating governments. Rather than a political vision of how life in cities ought to be organized, contemporary planning resembles a managerial task that coordinates flows of money, materials, people, and information. Paradoxically, […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Military check point in the street, Kimihurura Neighborhood, Kigali, 2017.

Contemporary Urban Paranoia

Why We Should Look into the Surveillance Camera The permanent spatial state of exception in the urban environment is a much-discussed topic in postmodern discourse, yet a critical re-assessment of the contemporary situation is needed. The global proliferation of urban enclaves, and in consequence their ghettoization, indicates an urgent need for social sustainability.1 There is […]
Article: Critical Imagination

From Exclusion to Autonomy: Publishing as a Spatializing Act

Why we should publish even more. The current and potential role of publishingPublishing, understood as a process of ‘making a public’1 that informs a ‘capacity to act’,2 has the potential to develop as an institutionalizing means, an interface for connecting people with different backgrounds, and as a way to relate with each other. It can […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Bersih 4: Street Protests as a Form of City Making

Cities and architecture are not devoid of politics. Produced and governed through political processes, they often become the canvas upon which power is mapped. But this can also backfire. A square, designed to provide the setting for showing off the architectural grandeur of an institution, often becomes the very place where the populace gathers to […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Call to Action – On How the Political Potential of Architecture can Give Power to a Marginalized Community

With the unstable political ground in recent years, the subject of architecture in the political setting has suddenly gained new interest worldwide. As a response to the post-2008 financial recession and its inevitable repercussions within the built environment, the prevailing doctrine of corporate ‘iconic’ architectural production is now being greatly challenged by the daring alternatives […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Urban Branding and the Violent Ghosts of the Politics of Representation

City branding is a relevant issue among urban policy makers. In a nutshell, it refers to the promotion of the image of a city, mostly in order to attract tourists, investments, mega-events, such as the Olympic games, and new wealthy residents, such as the members of the so-called ‘creative class’.1 This commentary will summarize some […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Feature Image: Jon Rawlinson, Coffee Bay, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa.

Bringing the Jungle to the City

Brett Scott writes about the city — its dynamics full of ambiguity and interfaces that connect and disconnect us from the larger context and from each other. I once lived in Coffee Bay, a 260 person village on the rural Wild Coast of South Africa. It had a horizon so vast you could almost glimpse the curvature of the […]
Article: Critical Imagination
De Ceuvel - Hack the City - Amateur Cities

Hack the City!

In the developed world the ‘city of the future’ is no longer a dream that lingers just beyond the horizon, it is the city that is already here. It is the city where we live, where we work and will grow old. Perhaps retrofitted with the latest technological innovation, but the patina of history determines […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Superstudio - Continuous Monument

Continuous Monuments and Imaginable Alternatives

In 1969, Superstudio, a radical Italian design group, made a proposal for what they called the ‘Continuous Monument’. It was a homogenous block of architecture that would encircle the earth depicting the global and total dimension of design and architecture of that time. We currently live in the time of a similar monument that harvests […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance

Amateur Cities and the Institute of Network Cultures are proud to present a feminist finance zine titled ‘Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance’. It is a cooperative future-thinking effort from the MoneyLab network, a collective of artists, designers, researchers, geeks and activists dedicated to the task of experimenting with more equitable, diverse, and sustainable futures for […]
Article: Critical Imagination

The City as Advertising

Anyone interested in getting a first-hand experience of the dynamics behind the transformation of global cities, should pay a visit to one of the biggest real estate exhibitions in the world – the MIPIM in Cannes. Every year, this event gathers ‘the most influential international property players’ for four days of ‘networking, learning and transaction’, […]
Article: Critical Imagination

The Other City Map

Urban spaces are usually identified through the borders and boundaries drawn on a geographical map. City lines, streets and corridors are often worked out in great detail. Today, however, another city has emerged, which cannot be detected directly from physical characteristics, with borders that are no longer easy to identify – a computational city. Cities […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Barbican on Solitude: a Story of Walking

‘You and one companion areaudience enough for each other,so are you for yourself.For you, let the crowd be one,and one be a crowd.’ Michel de Montaigne, On Solitude Walking is a verb that describes the body’s movement traversing a specific surface.1 It is a link between two points, a path related to a beginning and […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Seizing the means of rendering

There is a history of the future written in renderings; images of fantasy assembled as marketing, escapism and policy toolkits. Images of ‘the’ future hold a powerful grasp over the things we orient towards as we innovate and disrupt our way to a receding hyper-real horizon.1 For example, the relationship between science fiction and technological […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Lost Cities and Losing oneself in the City

What if we gave up the wish to contain cities and citizenships? The ambition to welcome newcomers within spaces of hos(ti)pitality1 such as camps, asylum and detention centres is not only an assured formula for segregation, but it fuels fear amongst localities and (trans)national imaginaries.2 It fundamentally conditions citizenship, (urban) identity and human relationship to […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Feature Image: Kevin Dooley, Paper Money, Extreme Macro, CC BY 2.0

The Four Faces of Financialization: Cities as a Site of Struggle

In spite of describing an important set of social and economic transformations, the word financialization has become used so frequently and in so many contradictory ways, that it risks becoming as fragile and confusing as other recent buzz-words like globalization, neoliberalism and gentrification. Yet the forces at work behind the term are real and have […]
Article: Critical Imagination
James Brown - Cage Free

Cage Free?

I live in Westmont, New Jersey, a small town in South Jersey just outside of Camden and not far from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Westmont and its neighbouring town of Collingswood boast an urban lifestyle without the expense of Philadelphia; and the main thoroughfare of Haddon Avenue that runs through both of these towns has shops, cafes […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Alberto Vanolo - Amateur Cities- All Cities are Beautiful

Smart City or The serial reproduction of an urban vision

A couple of months ago I bought a brand new video game console, Sony’s well known PS4. Despite being almost 40, I enjoy video games very much, and I also think that they are relevant cultural products to be carefully considered in the social sciences (I often use such an argument in order to justify […]
Article: Critical Imagination

An Old Way of Living, Yet Innovative

The Statement on the International Co-operative Identity ratified by the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) in 1995 voices that ‘Co-operatives are based on the values of self-sufficiency, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity’. Nearly 20 years later terms such as ‘self-sufficiency’ have acquired an extensive array of meanings, ranging from energy and food production to the advent […]