The Chinese metropolis has developed into the world's most successful urban scheme. Combining bottom-up energy with top-down force, it pushes cities and their inhabitants towards progress, fast-forward.China's megacities are efficient, with well-functioning infrastructures, top-notch public transport, proper housing, steady economic growth, a low crime rate, an attractive climate for foreign investors, and a glitzy skyline to boot.Can this metropolis be the blueprint for cities worldwide?With...

- English -

With (w)EGO: Tailor-Made Housing, The Why Factory investigates participatory processes applied to housing design. These processes establish a negotiation among the desires of each of the residents of a housing slab and help determine the design of their apartments. To achieve this, Wegocity manifests a particular interest in the development of a gaming process. This game leverages the specificities of each resident and transforms them into spatial needs. This way, unexpected hous...

Japan: Nation Building Nature is the first book to map out the views of nature that have shaped the widely acclaimed but often misunderstood modern architecture of Japan.

By connecting the dots between philosophy, design, geopolitics, and an earnest quest for a greener tomorrow, this book explains how Japanese culture can shed new light on our understanding of ecology, and vice-versa.

Using a distinctive blend of academic research and personal experience, Joachim Nijs draws on architectural h...

For English see below

Participate! Portraits of Cities and Citizens in Action is een inleiding tot de complexe wereld van de stadsontwikkeling, identiteit en participatie. In het boek wordt uitgelegd hoe in het zelfbeeld van steden resoneert in hun benadering van de stadsontwikkeling. De basis van het boek bestaat uit zes portretten van Europese steden: Berlijn, Hamburg, Parijs, Lyon, Amsterdam en Groningen.

Het boek voorziet in een behoefte door een algemene inleiding tot de genoemde steden,...

From nomadic labour to online services and from street food kitchens to pop-up shops, informality is on the rise as never before. Its transformative power can be seen in the new ways we produce, consume and live, with commerce playing a crucial role in these changes. The resulting tension between the formal and the informal is nowhere more evident than in the struggles over contested marketplaces.

This book provides a deeper understanding of the formal-informal linkages that have given shape ...

Thomas Karsten (1884 - 1945) was one of a small group of modern Dutch architects that included men like Henri Maclaine Pont and C.P. Wolf Schoemaker who developed their careers in the Dutch East Indies in the first half of the twentieth century. Karsten laid the foundations of modern urban Indonesia with work represented in Semarang, Solo, Padang, Palembang and Medan.

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of modernist architects. Brokers of Modernity reveals how East Central Europe turned into one of the pre-eminent testing grounds of the new belief system of modernism. By combining the internationalism of the CIAM organization and the modernising aspirations of the new states built after 1918, the reach of modernist architects extended far beyond their established fields. Yet, these architects paid a price when Europe’s age of extre...

Climate change in the Andes is affecting the relation between urban development and the landscape. Design-led explorations are reframing landscape logics and urbanisation patterns within the Cachi River Basin of Ayacucho, Peru. A co-production of students, researchers and designers, the book suggests alternative futures, crossing scales of landscape systems to new settlement typologies.

Urban Andes marks the start of the new series LAP on innovative design research in architecture, urbanism, ...

In Nigeria, housing units are not adequate for the entire population, especially in cities (Anosike et al. 2011, Makinde 2014). For instance, the deficit grows at an alarming rate, from about 8 million in 1991 to over 16 million in 2000s (Aribigbola, 2000; Aribigbola and Ayeniyo 2012). The challenges of housing provision are not only quantitative but also qualitative and have to be dealt with in a dual institutional perspective: the formal and the informal sector (Makinde, 2014; National Popu...