Make City

Contemporary cities are in thrall to rocketing real estate prices, climate change, and relentless growth. Make City brings together highly diverse positions on urban change: architects, urban planners, municipal decision-makers, landscape designers, makers, and civic entrepreneurs. Key juxtapositions shed new light on the strategies and coalitions needed for city making: new social contracts are forged at every level of urban life.

The circular economy begins in cities. Local production - of food, materials, and spaces - is at the heart of urban life cycles, overcoming the current patterns of planned obsolescence that govern our linear economic system. Make City lays out urban alternatives for new architecture, typologies, material flows, and integrative and community-based planning, all grounded in the notions of reusing, densifying, and optimising existing structures. By exploring projects and propositions for making city differently, the what if gives way to the how.

Contributors include AFF Architects, Anupama Kundoo, Michel Bouwens/P2P Foundation, Francesca Bria SESC, Tessy Britton, Bureau SLA, Frauke Burgdorff, Marco Casagrande, Deadline, Eva de Klerk, De Urbanisten, FAR frohn&rojas, Kraftwerk 1, Wolf Lotter, PPAG, Refunc, Eike Roswag-Klinge, Tina Saaby, Florian Schmidt, Topotek 1, Jean Philipp Vassal, Vestas, Zanderroth Architekten.

Text in English and German.

Book Feature:

• Make City brings together highly diverse positions on urban change: architects, urban planners, municipal decision-makers, landscape designers, makers, and civic entrepreneurs

350 colour, 50 b/w images

About the Author

Francesca Ferguson (Urban Drift Projects) is a curator of architecture and urban issues, who has developed exhibitions, new formats for dialogue between architects and the public, trans-disciplinary projects and events. She curated the German Pavilion at the Architecture Biennial in Venice, 2004, and directed the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel.