Seeding Urban Transformation

Seeding Urban Transformation is a bold provocation to leverage the agency of small design acts emerging from cracks in the urban realm, insisting we move beyond a collection of individual tactics toward strategic and systemic change. With this rich global compendium of acupunctural design actions, often emerging from everyday actors, the authors allow us to imagine the tactical possibilities of a truly radical urban ecology: these metaphorical seeds might become networked, rhizomatic actors, implementing much-needed repair from the ground up.

— Professor Catherine Seavitt, Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism, Chair, Department of Landscape Architecture, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, USA.

How do we go about designing and performing better urban futures? This collection transcends disciplinary boundaries, telling a powerful story of how minor interventions in heterogeneous urban spaces can seed transformative futures. Essential reading for anyone seeking alternatives to large-scale development thinking, offering a roadmap for reimagining processes and spaces of urban life, from modes of organising and everyday infrastructures to markets and community networks.

— Teea Palo, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, University of Edinburgh Business School, Scotland, UK.

In the decade and a half since the once peripheral interest in ‘urban acupuncture’ and ‘weak architecture’ rose to disciplinary prominence in the aftermath of the financial crisis, we’ve seen numerous anthologies of ‘tactical’, ‘insurgent’, and ‘meanwhile’ projects published, as well as critical articles and books interrogating this loose movement. At this moment in time, a volume such as this has the advantage of hindsight, and functions, to a degree, as a stocktaking of those types of approaches and projects which have flourished rather than withered under the scrutiny of the intense critique of recent years. The volume’s ‘big tent’ expands the discussion beyond ‘the usual suspects’ and typical projects, retrieving something of lost spirit of the early 2010s by incorporating tech and Global-South-based endeavours. It is a key contribution to any architect, artist, planner, or activist interested in social transformation through small-scale urban change.

— Professor Tahl Kaminer, Professor of Architectural History and Theory, Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, Wales, UK.

Bringing a minor view on the urban through its politics and environmental concerns, Seeding Urban Transformations is full of interesting insights into how tactical urbanism might become something more than the sum of its parts. Urging us to start in the middle, this edited collection works with rather than against the tensions and politics urban life while not forgetting the importance of viewing technology not as panacea but as hack or glitch in the system.

— Professor Nishat Awan, Professor of Architecture and Visual Culture, UCL Urban Laboratory, University College London, UK.

Seeding Urban Transformation explores opportunities to produce urban life afresh in the fraught presents of ecological fragility, social strain and financial inequity. A collection of case studies across disciplines and geographies, the book focuses on critical and creative provocations that negotiate between the tactical and the systemic, for positive change and urban liveability.

Urban intervention is seen as a story that wavers between the material detail of cities and the dynamics of urban lives. Chapters explore urban analysis and action that push against property and real-estate pre-figurations, explore technologies that coax, co-opt and disrupt, expose overlooked infrastructures. Heterogeneity may resist wholescale development, propagating large scale ripples of positive change that reorient the way the urban is conceived. The authors aim to offer a coherent conversation around precise and punctual urban regeneration undertaken in small-scale and politically astute manners, building knowledge for agents of intervention, such as architects, planners, urbanists and community builders.

Chris L. Smith is Professor of Architectural Theory in the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the The University of Sydney, Australia.

Suzanne Ewing is Professor of Architectural Criticism in the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA) at The University of Edinburgh, UK.

Lily Chi is Associate Professor of Architecture in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP) at Cornell University, USA.