Paul Dobraszczyk

Though reaching ever further toward the skies, today’s cities are overshadowed by multiple threats: climate change, overpopulation, social division, and urban warfare all endanger our metropolitan way of life. The fundamental tool we use to make sense of these uncertain city futures is the imagination. Architects, artists, filmmakers, and fiction writers have long been inspired to imagine cities of the future, but their speculative visions tend to be seen very differently from scientific predictions: flights of fancy on the one hand versus practical reasoning on the other. In a digital age when the real and the fantastic coexist as near equals, it is especially important to know how these two forces are entangled, and how together they may help us best conceive of cities yet to come. Exploring a breathtaking range of imagined cities—submerged, floating, flying, vertical, underground, ruined, and salvaged—Future Cities teases out the links between speculation and reality, arguing that there is no clear separation between the two. In the Netherlands, prototype floating cities are already being built; Dubai’s recent skyscrapers resemble those of science-fiction cities of the past; while makeshift settlements built by the urban poor in the developing world are already like the dystopian cities of cyberpunk. Bringing together architecture, fiction, film, and visual art, Paul Dobraszczyk reconnects the imaginary city with the real, proposing a future for humanity that is firmly grounded in the present and in the diverse creative practices already at our fingertips.

Architecture and the Imagination

Future Cities

A groundbreaking look at sixty works of anarchist architecture. This book documents and illustrates sixty projects, past and present, that key into a libertarian ethos and desire for diverse self-organized ways of building. They are what this book calls "anarchist" architecture, that is, forms of design and building that embrace the core values of traditional anarchist political theory since its divergence from the mainstream of socialist politics in the nineteenth century. As Architecture and Anarchism shows, a vast range of architectural projects reflect some or all of these values, whether they are acknowledged as specifically anarchist or not. From junk playgrounds to Freetown Christiania, Slab City to the Calais Jungle, isolated cabins to intentional communities--all are motivated by core values of autonomy, voluntary association, mutual aid, and self-organization. Taken as a whole, they are meant as an inspiration to build less uniformly, more inclusively, and more freely. This book broadens existing ideas about what constitutes anarchism in architecture and argues for its nurturing in the built environment. Understood in this way, anarchism offers a powerful way of reconceptualizing architecture as an emancipatory, inclusive, ecological, and egalitarian practice.

Building Without Authority

Architecture and Anarchism

Bradley L. Garrett

Carlos López Galviz

Rest your eyes long enough on the skylines of Delhi, Guangzhou, Jakarta—even Chicago or London—and you will see the same remarkable transformation, building after building going up with the breakneck speed of twenty-first-century urbanization. But there is something else just as transformative that you won’t see: sprawling networks of tunnels rooting these cities into the earth. Global Undergrounds offers a richly illustrated exploration of these subterranean spaces, charting their global reach and the profound—but often unseen—effects they have on human life. The authors shine their headlamps into an astonishing diversity of manmade underground environments, including subway systems, sewers, communications pipelines, storage facilities, and even shelters. There they find not only an extraordinary range of architectural approaches to underground construction but also a host of different cultural meanings. Underground places can evoke fear or hope; they can serve as sites of memory, places of work, or the hidden headquarters of resistance movements. They are places that can tell a city’s oldest stories or foresee its most distant futures. They are places—ultimately—of both incredible depth and breadth, crucial to all of us topside who work as urban planners, geographers, architects, engineers, or any of us who take subway trains or enjoy fresh water from a faucet. Indeed, as the authors demonstrate, the constant flux within urban undergrounds—the nonstop circulation of people, substances, and energy—serves all city dwellers in myriad ways, not just with the logistics of day-to-day life but as a crucial part of a city’s mythology.

Exploring Cities Within

Global Undergrounds

In this fascinating and innovative look at the underbelly of Victorian London, Paul Dobraszczyk offers a new account of how the citys sanitation was revolutionised in the 1850s and 1860s by means of gigantic new sewers and magnificent pumping stations. He focuses on the question of how these new spaces were understood and represented by both those who planned and promoted them (reformers and engineers) and also by those whom they impacted, namely Londons populace. Richly illustrated with maps, engineering drawings, newspaper engravings, and architectural photographs, this book suggests new ways of understanding Londons sewers and makes visible these vital, yet hidden spaces of the city.

Exploring London's Victorian Sewers

Into the Belly of the Beast

Vilified by leading architectural modernists and Victorian critics alike, mass-produced architectural ornament in iron has received little sustained study since the 1960s; yet it proliferated in Britain in the half century after the building of the Crystal Palace in 1851 - a time when some architects, engineers, manufacturers, and theorists believed that the fusion of iron and ornament would reconcile art and technology and create a new, modern architectural language. Comprehensively illustrated and richly researched, Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain presents the most sustained study to date of the development of mechanised architectural ornament in iron in nineteenth-century architecture, its reception and theorisation by architects, critics and engineers, and the contexts in which it flourished, including industrial buildings, retail and seaside architecture, railway stations, buildings for export and exhibition, and street furniture. Appealing to architects, conservationists, historians and students of nineteenth-century visual culture and the built environment, this book offers new ways of understanding the notion of modernity in Victorian architecture by questioning and re-evaluating both Victorian and modernist understandings of the ideological split between historicism and functionalism, and ornament and structure.

"Myth and Modernity, Excess and Enchantment "

"Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain "

Peter Sealy

The introduction of iron – and later steel – construction and decoration transformed architecture in the nineteenth century. While the structural employment of iron has been a frequent subject of study, this book re-directs scholarly scrutiny on its place in the aesthetics of architecture in the long nineteenth century. Together, its eleven unique and original chapters chart – for the first time – the global reach of iron’s architectural reception, from the first debates on how iron could be incorporated into architecture’s traditional aesthetics to the modernist cleaving of its structural and ornamental roles. The book is divided into three sections. Formations considers the rising tension between the desire to translate traditional architectural motifs into iron and the nascent feeling that iron buildings were themselves creating an entirely new field of aesthetic expression. Exchanges charts the commercial and cultural interactions that took place between British iron foundries and clients in far-flung locations such as Argentina, Jamaica, Nigeria and Australia. Expressing colonial control as well as local agency, iron buildings struck a balance between pre-fabricated functionalism and a desire to convey beauty, value and often exoticism through ornament. Transformations looks at the place of the aesthetics of iron architecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which iron ornament sought to harmonize wide social ambitions while offering the tantalizing possibility that iron architecture as a whole could transform the fundamental meanings of ornament. Taken together, these chapters call for a re-evaluation of modernism’s supposedly rationalist interest in nineteenth-century iron structures, one that has potentially radical implications for the recent ornamental turn in contemporary architecture.

Function and Fantasy: Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century

Sarah Butler

What is Manchester? Moving far from the glitzy shopping districts and architectural showpieces, away from cool city-centre living and modish cultural centres, this book shows us the unheralded, under-appreciated and overlooked parts of Greater Manchester in which the majority of Mancunians live, work and play. It tells the story of the city thematically, using concepts such a ‘material’, ‘atmosphere’, ‘waste’, ‘movement’ and ‘underworld’ to challenge our understanding of the quintessential post-industrial metropolis. Bringing together contributions from twenty-five poets, academics, writers, novelists, historians, architects and artists from across the region alongside a range of captivating photographs, this book explores the history of Manchester through its chimneys, cobblestones, ginnels and graves. This wide-ranging and inclusive approach reveals a host of idiosyncrasies, hidden spaces and stories that have until now been neglected.

Something rich and strange

Manchester

The Dead City unearths meanings from such depictions of ruination and decay, looking at representations of both thriving cities and ones which are struggling, abandoned or simply in transition. It reveals that ruination presents a complex opportunity to envision new futures for a city, whether that is by rewriting its past or throwing off old assumptions and proposing radical change. Seen in a certain light, for example, urban ruin and decay are a challenge to capitalist narratives of unbounded progress. They can equally imply that power structures thought to be deeply ingrained are temporary, contingent and even fragile. Examining ruins in Chernobyl, Detroit, London, Manchester and Varosha, this book demonstrates that how we discuss and depict urban decline is intimately connected to the histories, economic forces, power structures and communities of a given city, as well as to conflicting visions for its future.

Paul Dobraszczyk

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