Seeding Urban Transformation

Seeding Urban Transformation explores opportunities to produce urban life afresh in the fraught presents of ecological fragility, social strain and financial inequity. A collection of case studies across disciplines and geographies; critical and creative provocations between the tactical and the systemic, for positive change and urban liveability.

Chris L. Smith is Professor of Architectural Theory in the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning at The University of Sydney, Australia. Suzanne Ewing is Professor of Architectural Criticism in the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA) at The University of Edinburgh, UK. Lily Chi is Associate Professor of Architecture in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP) at Cornell University, USA.

Part 1: Tactical Engagements.- Chapter 1: Architectural Silence in a 'Vibrant' City: The Garage as a Clearing.- Chapter 2: "It's not sexy stuff": Incremental urban improvement in central Johannesburg.- Chapter 3: Fluid Commons: Towards Infrastructures of Production and Care in the.- Chapter 4: On Ditching: Towards Tactical Grounding in the Black Dirt.- Part 2: Seminal Technologies.- Chapter 5: Harnessing New Frameworks for Spatial Equity and New Spatial Assets: A Harlem Study.- Chapter 6: The Hack: Disrupting and Seeding Change.- Chapter 7: The Violence of the Off-scenes: The Gap Between the Petroleum Production and Consumption.- Part 3: Strategic Events.- Chapter 8: Urban Seeding as Multispecies Politics: Louis Le Roy's Ecocathedral.- Chapter 9: A Design Perspective of Participatory Placemaking With(in) Publics and Places.- Chapter 10: Planting Communities: Small Urban Green Spaces as a Socio-Spatial Infrastructural Strategy in Taipei City.- Chapter 11: Conversation with Natura Futura.- Part 4: Systemic change.- Chapter 12: Encounters in the Urban Mesocosm: Charting entanglements between humans and nonhumans in Berlin-Wilmersdorf.- Chapter 13: Minor Infrastructuralism.- Chapter 14: The Logistic Time of Unsettlement.- Chapter 15: Public Spaces Reimagined: The Influence of Minor Urbanism.