Architecture for the Commons dives into an analysis of how the tectonics of a building is fundamentally linked to the economic organizations that allow them to exist. By tracing the origins and promises of current technological practices in design, the book provides an alternative path, one that reconsiders the means of achieving complexity through combinatorial strategies. This move requires reconsidering serial production with crowdsourcing and user content in mind. The ideas presented will be explored through the design research developed within Plethora Project, a design practice that explores the use of video game interfaces as a mechanism for participation and user design. The research work presented throughout the book seeks to align with a larger project that is currently taking place in many different fields: The Construction of the Commons. By developing both the ideological and physical infrastructure, the project of the Commons has become an antidote to current economic practices that perpetuate inequality. The mechanisms of the production and governance of the Commons are discussed, inviting the reader to get involved and participate in the discussion. The current political and economic landscape calls for a reformulation of our current economic practices and alternative value systems that challenge the current market monopolies. This book will be of great interest not only to architects and designers studying the impact of digital technologies in the field of design but also to researchers studying novel techniques for social participation and cooperating of communities through digital networks. The book connects principles of architecture, economics and social sciences to provide alternatives to the current production trends.

On 9 December 2016 the Architectural Association in London hosted The Bedford Tapes, an event that brought together architects and experts from all over Europe. New Commons for Europe captures the vitality and the doubts of a new generation of architects living at a key moment in the history of the European Union and questioning the role of the profession and the architect's ability to produce projects and spaces for the common good with an alternative set of resources and profit structure. After the conference a series of interviews were conducted with participants in London, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Lisbon and Bucharest. The book chronicles both the event and the interviews, which have developed into an ongoing European conversation between architectural figures that takes a new reading of the boundaries of the discipline and its interactions with political, economic and social factors.

Space is both a product and a prerequisite of social relations, it has the potential to block and encourage certain forms of encounter. In Common Space, activist and architect Stavros Stavrides calls for us to conceive of space-as-commons – first, to think beyond the notions of public and private space, and then to understand common space not only as space that is governed by all and remains open to all, but that explicitly expresses, encourages and exemplifies new forms of social relations and of life in common. Through a fascinating, global examination of social housing, self-built urban settlements, street trade and art, occupied space, liberated space and graffiti, Stavrides carefully shows how spaces for commoning are created. Moreover, he explores the connections between processes of spatial transformation and the formation of politicised subjects to reveal the hidden emancipatory potential of contemporary, metropolitan life.

One of the nation’s chief architecture critics reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being, and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experience Taking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world’s best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people’s experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs. By 2050 America’s population is projected to increase by nearly seventy million people. This will necessitate a vast amount of new construction—almost all in urban areas—that will dramatically transform our existing landscapes, infrastructure, and urban areas. Going forward, we must do everything we can to prevent the construction of exhausting, overstimulating environments and enervating, understimulating ones. Buildings, landscapes, and cities must both contain and spark associations of natural light, greenery, and other ways of being in landscapes that humans have evolved to need and expect. Fancy exteriors and dramatic forms are never enough, and may not even be necessary; authentic textures and surfaces, and careful, well-executed construction details are just as important. Erudite, wise, lucidly written, and beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred color photographs, Welcome to Your World is a vital, eye-opening guide to the spaces we inhabit, physically and mentally, and a clarion call to design for human experience.

On rediscovering surroundings when information goes everywhere. The world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts and formats. Glowing rectangles have become part of the scene; screens, large and small, appear everywhere. Physical locations are increasingly tagged and digitally augmented. Amid this flood, your attention practices matter more than ever. You might not be able to tune this world out. So it is worth remembering that underneath all these augmentations and data flows, fixed forms persist, and that to notice them can improve other sensibilities. In Ambient Commons, Malcolm McCullough explores the workings of attention through a rediscovery of surroundings. McCullough describes what he calls the Ambient: an increasing tendency to perceive information superabundance whole, where individual signals matter less and at least some mediation assumes inhabitable form. He explores how the fixed forms of architecture and the city play a cognitive role in the flow of ambient information. As a persistently inhabited world, can the Ambient be understood as a shared cultural resource, to be socially curated, voluntarily limited, and self-governed as if a commons? Ambient Commons invites you to look past current obsessions with smart phones to rethink attention itself, to care for more situated, often inescapable forms of information.

After two decades of experimentation with the digital, the prevalent paradigm of formal continuity is being revised and questioned by an emerging generation of architects and theorists. While the world struggles with a global housing crisis and the impact of accelerated automation on labour, digital designers’ narrow focus on mere style and continuous differentiation seems increasingly out of touch. This issue charts an emerging body of work that is based on a computational understanding of the discrete part or building block – elements that are as scalable, accessible and versatile as digital data. The discrete proposes that a new, digital understanding of assembly, based on parts, contains the greatest promise for a complex, open-ended, adaptable architecture. This approach capitalises on the digital economy and automation, with the potential of the digital to democratise production and increase access. The digital not only has deep implications for how we design and produce architecture; it is first and foremost a new system of production with economic, social and political consequences that need to be taken into account. This issue presents a diverse body of work focused on the notion of the discrete: from design experiments and aesthetics, to urban models, tectonics, distributed robots, new material organisations and post-capitalist scenarios engaging with automation. Contributors: Viola Ago, Mario Carpo, Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, Mollie Claypool, Manuel Jimenez García, Daniel Koehler and Rasa Navasaityte, Immanuel Koh, Neil Leach, Ryan Manning, Philippe Morel, M Casey Rehm, Jose Sanchez, Marrikka Trotter, Manja van de Worp, Maria Yablonina and Lei Zheng. Featured Architects: Kengo Kuma, Lab-eds, Plethora Project, MadM, EZCT, Eragatory and Studio Kinch.

Urban space is a commons: simultaneously a sphere of human cooperation and negotiation and its product. Understanding urban space as a commons means that the much sought-after productivity of the city precedes rather than results from strategies of the state and capital. This approach challenges assumptions of urbanization as capital-driven, an idea which resonates with a range of recent urban social movements, from the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement to the “Right to the City” alliance. However commons exist in a tense relationship with state and market, both of which continually seek to exploit and control them. Initiatives to create “commons” are welcomed and even facilitated by governments in order to (re-)valorize urban space and lessen the impacts of economic restructuring, while, at the same time, the creative and reproductive potential of the urban commons is undermined by continuing attempts to commodify them. This volume examines these topics theoretically and empirically through a wide spectrum of international case studies providing perspectives from a variety of cities as diverse as Berlin, Hyderabad and Seoul. A wider discussion of commons in current scientific and activist literature from housing, public space, to urban infrastructure, is explored through the lens of the urban condition.

The Social (Re)Production of Architecture brings the debates of the ‘right to the city’ into today’s context of ecological, economic and social crises. Building on the 1970s’ discussions about the ‘production of space’, which French sociologist Henri Lefebvre considered a civic right, the authors question who has the right to make space, and explore the kinds of relations that are produced in the process. In the emerging post-capitalist era, this book addresses urgent social and ecological imperatives for change and opens up questions around architecture’s engagement with new forms of organization and practice. The book asks what (new) kinds of ‘social’ can architecture (re)produce, and what kinds of politics, values and actions are needed. The book features 24 interdisciplinary essays written by leading theorists and practitioners including social thinkers, economic theorists, architects, educators, urban curators, feminists, artists and activists from different generations and global contexts. The essays discuss the diverse, global locations with work taking different and specific forms in these different contexts. A cutting-edge, critical text which rethinks both practice and theory in the light of recent crises, making it key reading for students, academics and practitioners.

Experiences of the struggle for housing, ignited by the lack of social and affordable housing, have led to the establishing of shared and self-managed housing areas. In such a context, it becomes crucially important to re-think the need to define common urban worlds “from below". Here, Penny Travlou and Stavros Stavridis trace contemporary practices of urban commoning through which people re-define housing economies. Connecting to a rich literature on the importance of commons and of practices of commoning for the creation of emancipated societies, the authors discuss whether housing struggles and co-habitation experiences may contribute in crucial ways to the development of a commoning culture. The authors explore a variety of urban contexts through global case studies from across the Global North and South, in search of concrete examples that illustrate the potentialities of urban commoning.

This book directly links the notion of the commons with different design praxes, and explores their social, cultural, and ecological ramifications. It draws out material conditions in four areas of design interest: social design, commons and culture, ecology and transdisciplinary design. As a collection of positions, the diversity of arguments advances the understanding of the commons as both concepts and modes of thinking, and their material translation when contextualised in the domain of design questions. In other words, it moves abstract social science concepts towards concrete design debates. This text appeals to students, researchers and practitioners working on design in architecture, architecture theory, urbanism, and ecology.