Inhabitable Infrastructures

Inhabitable Infrastructures PDF Author: CJ Lim
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317312368
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
Inhabitable Infrastructures: Science fiction or urban future?, the follow up to Food City and Smartcities and Eco-Warriors, from one of the world’s leading urban design and architectural thinkers, explores the potential of climate change-related multi-use infrastructures that address the fundamental human requirements to protect, to provide and to participate. The stimulus for the infrastructures derives from postulated scenarios and processes gleaned from science fiction and futurology as well as the current body of scientific knowledge regarding changing environmental impacts on cities. Science fiction is interdisciplinary by nature, aggregates the past and present, and evaluates both lay opinions and professional strategies in an attempt to develop foresight and to map possible futures. The research culminates in the creation of innovative multi-use infrastructures and integrated self-sustaining support systems that meet the challenges posed through climate change and overpopulation, and the reciprocal benefits of simultaneously addressing the threat and the shaping of cities. J. G. Ballard has written that the psychological realm of science fiction is most valuable in its predictive function, and in projecting emotions into the future. The knowledge from the book is widely transferable, constituting both solutions and speculative visions of future urban environments. The book is indispensable reading for professionals and students in the fields of urban design, architecture, engineering and environmental socio-politics.

The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth PDF Author: David Wallace-Wells
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books
ISBN: 052557672X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books

Landscape Infrastructure

Landscape Infrastructure PDF Author: Ying-Yu Hung
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3034611544
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
Infrastructure is a much discussed topic within the field of landscape architecture. It regards the entire urban and rural space as a network that calls for an integrated planning and urban design approach. Natural and man-made infrastructures are viewed as forming a single, overarching whole. The book examines this robust and ecologically sustainable approach with essays by well-known experts in the field. It also documents 14 international case studies by SWA landscape architects and urban designers, among them the technologically innovative roof domes for Renzo Piano’s California Academy of Science in San Francisco, the restoration of the Buffalo Bayou in Houston, and several master plans for ecological corridors in China and Korea. Other projects develop smart re-use concepts for railroad tracks that no longer serve their original purpose, such as Kyung-Chun railway in Seoul or Katy Trail in Dallas. All projects are described extensively with technical diagrams and plans. The publication offers ideas for reinventing, repurposing, and repositioning infrastructure as a viable medium for addressing issues of ecology, transit, urbanism, and habitat.

Infrastructures and Social Complexity

Infrastructures and Social Complexity PDF Author: Penelope Harvey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317224345
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 517

Book Description
Contemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility, and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand more clearly. Offering a rich set of empirically detailed and conceptually sophisticated studies of infrastructural systems and experiments, present and past, contributors to this volume address both the transformative potential of infrastructural systems and their stasis. Covering infrastructural figures; their ontologies, epistemologies, classifications and politics, and spanning development, urban, energy, environmental and information infrastructures, the chapters explore both the promises and failures of infrastructure. Tracing the experimental histories of a wide range of infrastructures and documenting their variable outcomes, the volume offers a unique set of analytical perspectives on contemporary infrastructural complications. These studies bring a systematic empirical and analytical attention to human worlds as they intersect with more-than-human worlds, whether technological or biological.

Urbanizing the Alps

Urbanizing the Alps PDF Author: Fiona Pia
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 3035617333
Category : Architecture
Languages : de
Pages : 242

Book Description
For plenty years, many popular mountain resorts have seen largely uncontrolled development consisting of the multiplication of archetypal chalet-style houses. This is usually accompanied by roadbuilding for private cars. In order to protect these tourist destinations and their natural environs from further uncontrolled development, the author investigates different settlement structures such as Andermatt, Avoriaz, Verbier, Zermatt,and Whistler-Blackcomb. On the basis of detailed graphical analyses, she develops groundbreaking strategies for urban densification and suitable mobility management, which can also be transferred to other tourist areas.

Smartcities and Eco-Warriors

Smartcities and Eco-Warriors PDF Author: CJ Lim
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136961550
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
Modern methods of agriculture have led to cities growing out of control and reducing the available agricultural land, threatening the sustainability of our food system. The previous mutually sustaining relationships of animals, humans and the land have been lost with the progress of industry. The Smartcity – an ecological symbiosis between nature, society and the built form – is the innovative response to contemporary problems from one of the world’s leading urban design and architectural thinkers. Addressing the problems of unchecked city growth, the idea of the Smartcity questions whether we could begin to live once again from first principles, focusing in on the inhabitants of the city. The holistic construct of the Smartcity is developed through a series of international case studies, some commissioned by government organisations, others speculative and polemic. Reframing the way people think about urban green space and the evolution of cities, CJ Lim and Ed Liu explore how the reintegration of agriculture in urban environments can cultivate new spatial practices and social cohesion in addition to food for our tables. Representing an emerging architectural voice in matters of environmental and social sustainability, Smartcities and Eco-warriors is a long overdue treatment of the subject from a designer’s perspective, and is essential reading for practitioners and students in the fields of architecture, urban planning, environmental engineering, landscape design, agriculture and sociology. An inspiration to government agencies and NGOs dealing with climate change, it also resonates with anyone concerned about cities, energy conservation and the future of food

Once Upon a China

Once Upon a China PDF Author: CJ Lim
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315402521
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
Once Upon a China is an unconventional architectural story of great beauty, empathy, honour and sadness. The chapters are ingenious reimaginations of ‘Dream of the Red Mansion’, ‘Journey to the West ’, ‘The Water Margin’, and ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’, and are conceived as specific themes of Chinese identity: domesticity, consumerism, democracy and adaptability. These four seminal pre-modern fictions contain diverse voices and philosophical perspectives on history as well as satires that have defined past developments of Chinese societies, politics and the built environment. Comics is an unorthodox but extraordinary medium for architectural speculations. The eccentric characteristics of comic-inspired drawings in this book enrich the processes of conception and conceptualisation of design – their fragmented yet sequential nature proves versatile in the imagination of spatial experiences, enabling the complex stories of place, brief and building to materialise. At the same time, the politicisation of architecture through comics engenders a sense of optimism to reappraise Chinese design futures and critical thinking beyond the exuberance of non-contextual Western capitalist models.

Countering the Cloud

Countering the Cloud PDF Author: Luke Munn
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000833976
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 99

Book Description
How do cables and data centers think? This book investigates how information infrastructures enact particular forms of knowledge. It juxtaposes the pervasive logics of speed, efficiency, and resilience with more communal and ecological ways of thinking and being, turning technical “solutions” back into open questions about what society wants and what infrastructures should do. Moving from data centers in Hong Kong to undersea cables in Singapore and server clusters in China, Munn combines rich empirical material with insights drawn from media and cultural studies, sociology, and philosophy. This critical analysis stresses that infrastructures are not just technical but deeply epistemological, privileging some actions and actors while sidelining others. This innovative exploration of the values and visions at the heart of our technologies will interest students, scholars, and researchers in the areas of communication studies, digital media, technology studies, sociology, philosophy of technology, information studies, and geography.

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Sustainability

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Sustainability PDF Author: Robert Brinkmann
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031019490
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 2585

Book Description
The field of sustainability continues to evolve as a discipline. The world is facing multiple sustainability challenges such as climate change, water depletion, ecosystem loss, and environmental racism. The Handbook of Sustainability will provide a comprehensive reference for the field that examines in depth the major themes within what are known as the three E’s of sustainability: environment, equity, and economics. These three themes will serve as the main organizing body of the work. In addition, the work will include sections on history and sustainability, major figures in the development of sustainability as a discipline, and important organizations that contributed or that continue to contribute to sustainability as a field. The work is explicitly global in scope as it considers the very different issues associated with sustainability in the global north and south

Food City

Food City PDF Author: CJ Lim
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317919076
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
In Food City, a companion piece to Smartcities and Eco-Warriors, innovative architect and urban designer CJ Lim explores the issue of urban transformation and how the creation, storage and distribution of food has been and can again become a construct for the practice of everyday life. Food City investigates the reinstatement of food at the core of national and local governance -- how it can be a driver to restructure employment, education, transport, tax, health, culture, communities, and the justice system, re-evaluating how the city functions as a spatial and political entity. Global in scope, Food City first addresses the frameworks of over 25 international cities through the medium of food and how the city is governed. It then provides a case study through drawings, models, and text, exploring how a secondary infrastructure could function as a living environmental and food system operating as a sustainable stratum over the city of London. This case study raises serious questions about the priorities of our governing bodies, using architectural relationships to reframe the spaces of food consumption and production, analyzed through historical precedent, function and form. This study of the integration of food, architecture, and the development of future cities will both inspire and stimulate professionals and students in the fields of urban design and architecture.
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