An understanding of cities as open systems whose agents act on them simultaneously from below and above, influencing urban processes by their interaction with them and with each other, is replacing the simplistic debate on urban participation which asks whether cities should be organized bottom-up or top-down. This conceptualization of cities as complex systems calls for new collaborative city-making methods: a combination of collaborative planning (which already embraces various agencies and...

Rapid and deep changes in society, the economy and policy over the last decades 
are having an increasing impact on the delivery of social housing in North Western Europe. These changes are transforming the way in which social housing providers perform their task and are reshaping their relationships with the State, communities and with other market actors. The combination of continued State withdrawal from service provision, the deep and persistent effects of the global financial crisis th...

The traditional thematic realms of urban design, such as liveability, social interaction, and quality of urban life, considered to be closely related to urban form and specifically to public space, have long since been recognised as important, and have given the discipline a certain identity. The book Realms of Urban Design: Mapping Sustainability is certainly rooted in this fundamental urban design thinking, but its main contribution belongs to the second part of the book’s title – disco...

The purpose of this book is to present ongoing research from the universities involved in the project Creating the Network of Knowledge Labs for Sustainable and Resilient Environments (KLABS). The papers published in this book show that the recent and current research in those institutions focuses on the directions of development of IUP, the processes that support sustainable use of natural resources and their application in the Western Balkan and some other European countries. Each essay aim...

The Parana River is the third largest river in the American continent, after the Mississippi and the Amazon. Instead of flowing directly to the sea, it flows to the Rio de la Plata (located between Argentina and Uruguay) through a complex delta system.

Although this delta can be considered an extreme and particular case, many of the conflicts that can be found in this area replicate in other deltas around the world. Urbanizing deltas are subjected to pressures related to urban growth and clim...

Apparatus and apparatisation, the focus of the Cyber-Physical Architecture (CpA) issue #2 of SPOOL, refer to an assemblage of various components, tools, and instruments that in combination produce an exponential surplus beyond the linear sum of parts.

The CpA #2 samples various interests afforded by the apparatus and apparatisation in and of architecture and how they open up new potentials and opportunities. The first article, Building as Apparatus? (by Leach) addresses the theme of “buildi...

Over the last decades, the perception of glass in the engineering world has changed from that of a brittle, fragile material to a reliable structural component of high compressive load-bearing capacity. Although the structural applications of glass in architecture are continuously increasing, they are dominated by a considerable geometrical limitation: the 2-dimensionality imposed by the prevailing float glass industry. Cast glass can overcome this limitation: solid 3-dimensional glass compon...

Who were Le Corbusier’s photographers? The question is seldom asked yet is germane to under­standing the architect’s work. Le Corbusier used photography to promote modern architecture in ways no others did. He directed the photography of his buildings, selected the images that he liked, cropped them, abstracted them, and placed them on the pages of his many books. He mediated the medium of photography mani­pulating visual facts in an era when “the camera never lied”. Yet always ...