Nick Dunn

Where now for the secret, the contemplative, the quiet and subterranean in our cities? The question may no longer be what spaces we wish to engage with but when are they?

A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City

Dark Matters

Tim Edensor

This book examines the concept of darkness through a range of cultures, histories, practices and experiences. It engages with darkness beyond its binary positioning against light to advance a critical understanding of the ways in which darkness can be experienced, practised and conceptualised. Humans have fundamental relationships with light and dark that shape their regular social patterns and rhythms, enabling them to make sense of the world. This book ‘throws light’ on the neglect of these social patterns to emphasize how the diverse values, meanings and influences of darkness have been rarely considered. It also examines the history of our relationship with the dark and highlights how normative attitudes towards it have emerged, while also emphasising its cultural complexity by considering a contemporary range of alternative experiences and practices. Challenging notions of darkness as negative, as the antithesis of illumination and enlightenment, this book explores the rich potential of darkness to stimulate our senses and deepen our understandings of different spaces, cultural experiences and creative engagements. Offering a rich exploration of an emergent field of study across the social sciences and humanities, this book will be useful for academics and students of cultural and media studies, design, geography, history, sociology and theatre who seek to investigate the creative, cultural and social dimensions of darkness.

Cultures, Histories, Practices

Rethinking Darkness

Leon Cruickshank

Gemma Coupe

Flourish by Design brings together a range of established and emerging voices in design research for a collection that provides original provocations on topics of global significance. It is an insightful guide to original theory and practice concerning how we can design for a better tomorrow. Featuring contributors from a diverse array of backgrounds and professions, this edited book explores the difference that design and design research can make for people, organisations, and the planet to prosper now and in the future. It offers a range of ideas and techniques through practical examples and ongoing projects showing how applied design research can respond to global challenges. Covering topics as diverse as artificial intelligence, bio-inspired materials, more-than-human design, sustainability, and urban acupuncture, it shares interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary design research not just to demonstrate what could be plausible in the near future but also to explain why it might be preferable. By sharing these despatches, this collection represents the very best of what design research can do, explaining how and why. This book is intended for a wide audience of professionals, scholars, and students in design, architecture, and public policy, as well as anyone who has an interest in how we design the world and, in turn, it designs us.

Flourish by Design

The Brutal True Story of a Chennai Six Prisoner

Surviving Hell

Paul Cureton

What might our cities look like in ten, twenty or fifty years? How may future cities face global challenges? Imagining the city of the future has long been an inspiration for many architects, artists and designers. This book examines how cities of the future have been visualised, what these projects sought to communicate and what the implications may be for us now. It provides a visual history of the future and explores the relationships between different visualisation techniques and ideologies for cities. Thinking about what futures are, who they are for, why they are desirable, and how and when they are to be brought into being is central to this book. Through visualisation we are able to experiment in ways that would be impractical and potentially hazardous in the real world, and this book, therefore, aims to contribute toward a better understanding of the power and agency of visualisations for future cities. In this lavishly illustrated text, the authors apply several critical lenses to consider the subject in different ways: technological futures, social futures, and global futures, providing a comprehensive survey and analysis of visions for future cities, and engaging creatively with how we perceive tomorrow's world and future studies more widely.

A Visual Guide

Future Cities

Dark Matters explores the city at night as a place and time within which escape from the confines of the daytime is possible. More specifically, it is a state of being. There is a long history of nightwalking, often integral to shady worlds of miscreants, shift workers and transgressors. Yet the night offers much to be enjoyed beyond vice. Night by definition contrasts day, summoning notions of darkness and fear. But another night exists out there. Liberation and exhilaration in the urban landscape is increasingly rare when so much of our attention and actions are controlled. Rather than consider darkness as negative, opposed to illumination and enlightenment, this book explores the rich potential of the dark for our senses. The question may no longer be about what spaces we wish to engage with but when we do?

Nick Dunn

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