Sustainist Design Guide: How sharing, localism, connectedness, and proportionality are creating a new agenda for social design.
Michiel Schwarz, Diana Krabbendam
The Beach Network, BIS Publishers, 2013 |
"The Sustainist Design Guide presents an agenda for social innovation, based on values such as sharing, connectedness, localism and proportionality, as well as sustainability. It challenges us to transform these and other sustainist qualities into design criteria and include them in our design briefs."
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Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises
Edited by Architecture for Humanity
Metropolis Books, 2006 |
"... a compendium of innovative projects from around the world that demonstrate the power of design to improve lives... it offers a history of the movement toward socially conscious design, and showcases more than 80 contemporary solutions to such urgent needs as basic shelter, healthcare, education and access to clean water, energy and sanitation."
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Design Like You Give a Damn (2): Building Change from the Ground Up
Edited by Architecture for Humanity
Metropolis Books, 2006 |
"One-on-one interviews and provocative case studies demonstrate how innovative design is reimagining community and uplifting lives. From building-material innovations such as smog-eating concrete to innovative public policy that is repainting Brazil's urban slums, [it] serves as a how-to guide for anyone seeking to build change from the ground up."
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Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
E.F. Schumacher
Harper Perennial, HarperCollins Publishers 1989 |
"A landmark statement against “bigger is better” industrialism, Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful paved the way for twenty-first century books on environmentalism and economics, like Jeffrey Sachs’sThe End of Poverty, Paul Hawken’s Natural Capitalism, Mohammad Yunis’s Banker to the Poor, and Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy."
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Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
David Harvey
Verso Books, 2013 |
"Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, from New York City to São Paulo. Drawing on the Paris Commune as well as Occupy Wall Street and the London Riots, Harvey asks how cities might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sane ways—and how they can become the focus for anti-capitalist resistance."
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Visionary Power: Producing the Contemporary City
Berlage Institute
International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam 2007 |
"The book draws together research about the foundations of the contemporary city, discusses forces that have a bearing on its development, formulates the task for architects and urban planners, and presents strategies with which they can operate in the midst of this interplay of forces, on the basis of topical, coherent visions for the 21st-century city."
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Ecological Urbanism
Mohsen Mostafavi, Gareth Doherty
Harvard University Graduate School of Design Lars Müller Publishers, 2010 |
"Ecological Urbanism considers the city with multiple instruments and with a worldview that is fluid in scale and disciplinary focus. Design provides the synthetic key to connect ecology with an urbanism that is not in contradiction with its environment. The promise is nothing short of a new ethics and aesthetics of the urban."
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Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism
Bryan Bell, Katie Wakeford
2008 |
"...presents a new generation of creative design carried out in the service of the greater public and the greater good. Questioning how design can improve daily lives, editors Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford map an emerging geography of architectural activism-or "public-interest architecture"-that might function akin to public-interest law or medicine by expanding architecture's all too often elite client base."
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Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture
Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, Jeremy Till
Routledge, New York, 2011 |
"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 achieved in the future."
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Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America
Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, Javier Auyero
Duke University Press, Durham and London 2014 |
This book "challenges long-entrenched ideas about the history, nature, and significance of the informal neighborhoods that house the vast majority of Latin America's urban poor. Until recently, scholars have mainly viewed these settlements through the prisms of crime and drug-related violence, modernization and development theories, populist or revolutionary politics, or debates about the cultures of poverty. Yet shantytowns have proven both more durable and more multifaceted than any of these perspectives foresaw."
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The Invisible Houses: re-thinking and designing low-cost housing in developing countries
Gonzalo Lizarralde
Routledge, New York, 2015 |
"There is an increased interest among architects, urban specialists and design professionals to contribute to solve ‘the housing problem’ in developing countries. The Invisible Houses takes us on a journey through the slums and informal settlements of South Africa, India, Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba, Haiti and many other countries of the global south, revealing the challenges of, and opportunities for, improving the fate of millions of poor families."
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Instant Cities
Herbert Wright
Black Dog Publishing, London, 2008 |
"Instant Cities looks ahead to creative, forward-thinking and possibly fanciful notions of the city such as biospheres, space stations and virtual realities. it focuses on the development of the concept of the city and how it has been expanded to include sites from shopping malls to prisons, as well as various 'micro' communities within society."
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Handmade Urbanism: From Community Initiatives to Participatory Models
Marcos L. Rosa, Ute E. Wailand
Deutsche National Bibliothek |
"Handmade Urbanism showcases 15 projects realized mostly in less favored areas of five major cities in emerging countries, examining the potential of urban transformation embedded in community initiatives. What is the basis for such initiatives? Which are the instruments and tools they use?"
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs
Vintage, 1992 |
"Jane Jacobs argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable."
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Sustainism is the New Modernism: A Cultural Manifesto for the Sustainist Era
Michiel Schwarz and Joost Elffers
D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2010. |
Michiel Schwarz and Joost Elffers declare the dawn of a new cultural era, as we transition from modernity to sustainity--towards a world that is more connected, more localist, more digital and more sustainable."
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Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement
Andres Lepik
The Museum of Modern Art, NY, 2010 |
"The role of the global architect in society is changing. Instead of waiting for commissions to come their way, architects are initiating and developing practical solutions in response to dramatically changing living conditions in many parts of the world today. Small Scale, Big Change focuses on a central chapter of this shift, presenting recently built or under-construction works in underserved communities around the globe..."
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Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn’t Worked
Peter Blake
Little Brown and Company, Boston, 1978 |
"Blake calmly explodes the fantasies of modern dogma that most architects once accepted. Such truisms as 'form follows function', 'the open plan,' and 'purity of design' are exposed as volatile ideas."
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Pragmatic Sustainability: Theoretical and Practical Tools
Edited by Steven A. Moore
Routledge, 2010 |
"Though many disciplines have been advocating the need to create a world which is sustainable, too often the theories and ideas are discipline specific and too narrow for comprehensive adoption. The authors of this book – all leading thinkers in their fields – instead propose a more general way of thinking, a pragmatic and pluralistic approach."
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Sorry, Out of Gas: Architecture's Response to the 1973 Oil Crisis
Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi.
Canadian Center for Architecture |
"The year 1973 marks one of the most important turning points in the history of the twentieth century. Prior to that year, the world had become accustomed to a plentiful supply of inexpensive fossil fuels--especially oil. During this first major international oil crisis, however, the western world's dependency on unstable eastern energy resources became dramatically clear."
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Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture
Justin McGuirk
Verso Books, June 2014 |
"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 way cities are evolving."
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Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space
Jan Gehl
Arkitektens Forlag/ Island Press 1971. |
"Jan Gehl’s classic text on the importance of designing urban public space with the fundamental desires of people as guiding principles. The book describes essential elements that contribute to people’s enjoyment of spaces in the public realm. These elements remain remarkably constant even as architectural styles go in and out of fashion and the character of the ‘life between buildings’ changes."
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Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities
Timothy Beatley
Island Press, Washington, DC 2000 |
"The book draws from the extensive European experience, examining the progress and policies of twenty-five of the most innovative cities in eleven European countries, which Beatley researched and observed in depth during a year-long stay in the Netherlands." Yet, are those lessons applicable to cities in the Global South?
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Climate Change and Sustainable Urban Development in Africa and Asia
Editors: Yuen, Belinda, Kumssa, Asfaw
Springer Netherlands, 201 |
"Illustrated through selected case cities, the book brings together a rich collection of papers by leading scholars and practitioners in Africa and Asia to offer empirical analysis and up-to-date discussions and assessments of the urban challenges and solutions for their cities."
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Building Brazil! The Proactive Urban Renewal of Informal Settlements
Editors: Marc Angélil & Rainer Hehl
Ruby Press, Berlin, 2011 |
"Against the backdrop of recent and exemplary developments in Brazilian public policy and slum-upgrading practices, Building Brazil! suggests a proactive approach to the favela that opens up the existing urban fabric to architectural and urban interventions."
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The Extended Self: Architecture, Memes, and Minds
Chris Abel
Manchester University Press, Great Britain 2015 |
"In this wide-ranging study of architecture and cultural evolution, the author argues that underlying the global environmental crisis is a general resistance to changing personal and social identities shaped by a technology-based culture and its energy-hungry products."
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Planet of Slums
Mike Davis
Verso Books, 2006 |
"According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world."
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Transgression: Towards an Expanded Field of Architecture
David Louis Rice Littlefield Routledge 2014 |
"...this volume presents contributions from academics, practicing architects and artists/activists from around the world to provide perspectives on emerging and transgressive architecture. Divided into four key themes – boundaries, violations, place and art practice - it explores global processes, transformative praxis and emerging trends in architectural production, examining alternative and radical ways of practicing architecture and reimagining the profession."
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Compact Cities: Sustainable Urban Forms for Developing Countries
Michael Jenks, Rod Burgess Taylor & Francis 2000 |
"This collection of edited papers extends the debate to developing countries. This book examines and evaluates the merits and defects of compact city approaches in the context of developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Issues of theory, policy and practice relating to sustainability of urban form are examined by a wide range of international academics and practitioners."
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