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In every city, the urban spaces that form the public realm—ranging from city streets, neighborhood squares, and parks to public facilities such as libraries and markets—account for about one-third of the city’s total land area, on average. Despite this significance, the potential for these public-space assets—typically owned and managed by local governments—to transform urban life and city functioning is often overlooked for many reasons: other pressing city priorities arising from rapid urbanization, poor urban planning, and financial constraints.The resulting degradation of public spaces into congested, vehicle-centric, and polluted places often becomes a liability, creating a do...
The Routledge Handbook on Historic Urban Landscapes in the Asia-Pacific sheds light onto the balancing act of urban heritage management, focusing specifically on the Asia-Pacific regions in which this challenge is imminent and in need of effective solutions. Urban heritage, while being threatened amid myriad forces of global and ecological change, provides a vital social, cultural, and economic asset for regeneration and sustenance of liveability of inhabited urban areas worldwide. This six-part volume takes a critical look at the concept of Historic Urban Landscapes, the approach that UNESCO promotes to achieve holistic management of urban heritage, through the lens of issues, prospects, an...
Building Inclusion: A Practical Guide to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Architecture and the Built Environment is just that – a manual to support and provide essential guidance to the profession on these key issues. Acknowledging that the existence of EDI procedures does not necessarily ensure their use, it focuses on demonstrating behaviours that help create, implement and enforce policies, procedures and practices to deliver inclusion. Written by Marsha Ramroop, former inaugural EDI Director at the RIBA and award-winning EDI strategist, the book targets the pain points of talent attraction and retention, public sector procurement, community engagement and inclusive design. It utilise...
What if architecture were not an instrument of capital? How to imagine and build a non-extractivist and non-exploitative architecture. Capital’s voracious appetite forces architecture into a regime of “never enough.” The current realities of building involve extraction and exploitation, which, in turn, cause climate breakdown, environmental ruin, alienated labor conditions, and the destruction of local construction knowledge. But what if we could do architecture differently? What does non-extractivist architecture look like? In this book, Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny introduce the concept of abundance to call for a paradigm shift in architecture. Using as its example the exceptional w...
In Queer Companions Omar Kasmani theorizes saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important site of Sufi pilgrimage. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, Kasmani outlines the felt and enfleshed ways in which saintly affections bind individuals, society, and the state in Pakistan through a public architecture of intimacy. Islamic saints become lovers and queer companions just as a religious universe is made valuable to critical and queer forms of thinking. Focusing on the lives of ascetics known as fakirs in Pakistan, Kasmani shows how the affective bonds with the place’s patron saint, a thirteenth-century antinomian mystic, foster unstraight modes of living in the present. In a national context where religious shrines are entangled in the state’s infrastructures of governance, coming close to saints further entails a drawing near to more-than-official histories and public forms of affect. Through various fakir life stories, Kasmani contends that this intimacy offers a form of queer world making with saints.
A rich exploration of the extraordinary life and work of celebrated architect Yasmeen Lari, winner of the 2023 RIBA Royal Gold Medal. After more than three decades as a renowned global architect, Yasmeen Lari, the first woman to open her own architecture firm in Pakistan in 1964, developed Zero Carbon Architecture, which unites ecological and social justice. This volume, edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny, and Marvi Mazhar, presents Lari’s trajectory from exemplary modernist to zero carbon revolutionary, with a focus on her remarkable contributions to the global architectural movement to decarbonize and decolonize. The book includes extensive photographs, drawings, and plans from Lari’...