In Weak and Widespread, modernity stands as a contrasting operative practice when compared to that of the 20th century, which was based on finding definitive solutions to old and new problems of industrial society. Today's architecture and urban planning tends to operate through reversible solutions, taking their references from models that are incomplete, imperfect and elastic. Precisely for this reason they are capable of withstanding the continuous processes of innovation. In this book Branzi examines how transformations in the concept of modernity have changed project strategy following new territorial and social developments. He puts this into relation to his own projects and research from the mid-1960's with the radical experience of the Archizoom group until the present.

This is a manual investigating the subject of urban ecology and systemic development from the perspective of architectural design. It sets out to explore two main goals: to discuss the contemporary relevance of a systemic practice to architectural design, and to share a toolbox of informational design protocols developed to describe the city as a territory of self-organization. Collecting together nearly a decade of design experiments by the authors and their practice, ecoLogicStudio, the book discusses key disciplinary definitions such as ecologic urbanism, algorithmic architecture, bottom-up or tactical design, behavioural space and the boundary of the natural and the artificial realms within the city and architecture. A new kind of "real-time world-city" is illustrated in the form of an operational design manual for the assemblage of proto-architectures, the incubation of proto-gardens and the coding of proto-interfaces. These prototypes of machinic architecture materialize as synthetic hybrids embedded with biological life (proto-gardens), computational power, behavioural responsiveness (cyber-gardens), spatial articulation (coMachines and fibrous structures), remote sensing (FUNclouds), and communication capabilities (Ecological Footprint Grotto). Supporting the authors’ own essays and projects are contributions from key innovators in contemporary architecture and urban design: Michael Batty, Andrew Hudson-Smith, Michael Weinstock and Patrik Schumacher.

This wide-ranging and accessible contribution to the study of risk, ecology and environment helps us to understand the politics of ecology and the place of social theory in making sense of environmental issues. The book provides insights into the complex dynamics of change in `risk societies′.

In Analogical City, Cameron McEwan argues for architecture’s status as a critical project. McEwan revisits architect Aldo Rossi as a paradigmatic figure of the critical rational tradition, studying a neglected aspect of his thought — the analogical city — to excavate its potential. McEwan develops a grammar of the analogical city under the headings of Imagination, Transformation, City, Multitude, and Project. McEwan argues that the analogical city is critical, collective, and emancipatory. Analogical thought and understanding cities as analogical might open the conditions of possibility for rethinking the critical project in architecture. At a time when the humanities and the sciences are threatened by irrational thought, from climate denial to post-truth narratives, and when architecture has seemingly disavowed its critical capacity and political possibility through its commodification as an instrument of the neoliberal city, McEwan offers critical strategies, conceptual tools, figures of thought, and knowledge practices to articulate modes of thinking and acting differently within architectural criticism and practice. Today, knowledge is a common terrain of struggle and thought requires constant reinvention. The task of architecture, and critique more broadly, must be to interpret the world in order to change it. Consequently Analogical City proposes modes for imagining the city, the subject, and the world otherwise — towards a more egalitarian and critical architecture of the city. Ultimately, the analogical city is not a fully developed theory, nor is it only an intuitive, poetic, or purely formal practice, as some critics propose. McEwan argues that the analogical city is poetic and political: it always refers beyond itself towards a collective and critical project of the city, and yet it invites a series of formal, spatial, and graphic operations comprising erasure and negativity followed by substitution and remontage.

Steven B. Smith examines the concept of modernity, not as the end product of historical developments but as a state of mind. He explores modernism as a source of both pride and anxiety, suggesting that its most distinctive characteristics are the self-criticisms and doubts that accompany social and political progress. Providing profiles of the modern project’s most powerful defenders and critics—from Machiavelli and Spinoza to Saul Bellow and Isaiah Berlin—this provocative work of philosophy and political science offers a novel perspective on what it means to be modern and why discontent and sometimes radical rejection are its inevitable by-products.

Seeking new voices and design talent, the new Bracket book series is structured around an open call for entries. Conceived as an almanac, the series looks at emerging thematics in our global age that are shaping the built environment in radically significant, yet often unexpected ways. Bracket 1: On Farming looks at the capacity for architecture to address ideas and issues of productive landscapes and urbanisms. Entries were selected by an international jury including Nathalie de Vries, Charles Waldheim and Michael Speaks. Once merely understood in terms of agriculture, today information, energy, labour, and landscape, among others, can be farmed. Farming harnesses the efficiency of collectivity and community. Whether cultivating land, harvesting resources, extracting energy or delegating labor, farming reveals the interdependencies of our globalized world. Simultaneously, farming represents the local gesture, the productive landscape, and the alternative economy. The processes of farming are mutable, parametric, and efficient. Farming is the modification of infrastructure, urbanisms, architectures, and landscapes toward a privileging of production.

In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning. Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.