editing

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

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: Wishful Thinking

Social media faces

Today there is a social network for everything. There is one for sharing lol cat memes, another for checking out your friends’ party photos and one for posting latest CV updates. Sometimes, we put on our serious face for a skype interview and other times we publicly rant about a delayed flight using an angry […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
The White House by Ryan Mendoza

The White House

Ten years after the onset of the housing crisis, Detroit is still afflicted with emptiness and blight that it left behind. Ryan Mendoza preserved this part of American history by bringing an abandoned single family house around the world. What if we could make places so telling about the inglorious urban histories more prominent? Should […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Microbial Money – Stock Analysis

The current finance and banking system is often considered unchangeable and uncontrollable. It is often mystified and presented as having a life on its own. Could other ways of looking at finance help us see the flaws that rule it, independently of the form it takes? What if we imagined money as living organisms? What […]
Research
Letters to the Mayor Rotterdam. Photo: Petra van der Ree. Courtesy of Nieuwe Instituut.

Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam

Our Letter to the Mayor of Rotterdam. The exhibition ‘Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam’ is a result of a collaboration on the theme of ‘City Forces’ between Het Nieuwe Instituut and Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. As a part of this project, 66 architects and urbanists wrote 46 letters to the Mayor […]
Article: The Unmasters

Is Fair Building Possible?

During the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, entitled ‘Reporting from the Front’, Dominika Janicka in cooperation with Martyna Janicka and Michal Gdak curated the exhibition ‘Fair Building’ at the Polish Pavilion, taking a close look at the ways in which architecture is made and the rather questionable conditions in which the construction industry operates. – Read our […]
Article: The Unmasters

No happy endings

Lea Schönfelder designs what she calls games for adults. They are meant to motivate her players to reflect on the paradoxes of contemporary life, their ethical choices and politics of the everyday life. CA: You have an artistic background but you are currently involved in diverse activities around games; can you briefly explain your work? […]
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 […]
Publication
Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam cover.

Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam

Five manifestos by Rotterdam’s architects. Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam publication emerged as a follow-up to the exhibition under the same title organized by Het Nieuwe Instituut in collaboration with the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. The publication includes five short manifestos on the most pressing issues for the city accompanied by […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Public Anagrams

Public Anagrams is based on the manipulation and subversion of mainstream slogans describing well-known public art and urban development paradigms and strategies, such as “smart cities” or “urban regeneration”. By mixing up letters and by turning upside-down the slogans, the artist aims at raising critical awareness about the hidden outcomes of urban development strategies. Slogans […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

The Monument

Modes of urban authority traditionally seen to be wielded by the State, such as the production of public realms, provision of security, and administration of infrastructure, are now shifting into the hands of private corporations. In line with such erosion of state sovereignty is the emergence of a specific type of capsular urbanism – the […]
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

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

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 […]
Publication
Book cover Kto Odzyska Plac Defilad?

Kto Odzyska Plac Defilad?

In this book, published by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw on the occasion of the 9th edition of the Warsaw Under Construction Festival of Architecture Tomasz Fudala, Werner Huber, Grzegorz Mika, Michał Murawski, Ania Molenda and Cristina Ampatzidou, Artur Jerzy Filip, Marlena Happach, Magda Grabowska, Aleksandra Litorowicz, Bogna Świątkowska, and Tim Tompkins write and discuss how to turn a parking lot into an urban square, the shadow of Stalin and the Palace complex.
Article: Wishful Thinking

Active Public Space, Plaça de les Glòries

Our relationship with machines in the digitized space is usually rather inconspicuous. All sorts of devices surround and track us without us knowing that they are there. Active Public Space is a project that imagines transformation of underutilised public spaces, in this case Plaça de les Glòries in Barcelona, and speculating on its future use […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Housing is a Human Right

Following this year’s Habitat III, it is worth remembering that “Adequate shelter for all” was one of the two key issues of the previous Habitat conference in Istanbul. Ten years later we are looking at an even deeper housing crisis that does not only embrace homelessness and growing population of urban slums, but also growing […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Friction Atlas

Everyday, citizens perform, on public surfaces, synchronised routines of elaborate moves. As we move across the city, laws define movements and gestures, unconscious reactions, behaviours and anticipations. They are sets of instructions, conditional statements, ultimately incorporating power; a structural force that plays into everyday life. What happens when we redefine the rules as the visible […]