Aspects of the urban food truck phenomenon, including community economic development, regulatory issues, and clashes between ethnic authenticity and local sustainability. The food truck on the corner could be a brightly painted old-style lonchera offering tacos or an upscale mobile vendor serving lobster rolls. Customers range from gastro-tourists to construction workers, all eager for food th…
An architect and a photographer explore a community of squatters, artists, snowbirds, migrants, and survivalists inhabiting a former military base in the California desert. Under the unforgiving sun of southern California's Colorado Desert lies Slab City, a community of squatters, artists, snowbirds, migrants, survivalists, and homeless people. Called by some “the last free place” and by…
A call for landscape architects to leave the office and return to the garden. Addressing one of the most repressed subjects in landscape architecture, this book could only have been written by someone who is both an experienced gardener and a landscape architect. With Overgrown, Julian Raxworthy offers a watershed work in the tradition of Ian McHarg, Anne Whiston Spirn, Kevin Lynch, and J. B…
Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the Global North. Grounding Urba…
Tools for navigating today's hyper-connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent white water world. Design Unbound presents a new tool set for having agency in the twenty-first century, in what the authors characterize as a white water world—rapidly changing, hyperconnected, and radically contingent. These are the tools of a new kind of practice that is the offspring of complexity sci…
Anti-racist design interventions can be difficult. Well-intentioned conversations can fuel tensions, activate racialized trauma, and lead to misunderstandings, especially in spaces not typically focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Even when progress is made, white supremacy culture can resurface. We need anti-racist guidelines and approaches that lay bare racialized systems of oppressi…
A cultural history of living in the undersea, both fictional and real, from Jules Verne's Captain Nemo to NASA's ECC02 project. In Memo for Nemo, William Firebrace investigates human inhabitation of the undersea, both fictional and real. Beginning with Jules Verne's Captain Nemo—an undersea Renaissance man with a library of 12,000 volumes on his submarine—and proceeding through aquariums…
A journey through the history, cultures, and societies of Marseille. There are many Marseilles, or at least many versions of Marseille: seaside village, haven of gangsters, gateway to the East, city of immigrants and outcasts. It is by turns the dull bourgeois provincial town where nothing ever happens and the mysterious unknowable city of the Mediterranean. In Marseille Mix, William Firebra…
Zigzagging through six locations on the edges of the German-speaking world, exploring them through politics, architecture, literature, film, art, music, food, and history. “Zickzack” is the German word for “zigzag”: hopping around, moving back and forth, never following a straight line, avoiding the monotony of one thing following another. Zickzack is William Firebrace's zigzagging e…
In this book Peter Lindert evaluates environmental concerns about soil degradation in two very large countries—China and Indonesia—where anecdotal evidence has suggested serious problems. Lindert does what no scholar before him has done: using new archival data sets, he measures changes in soil productivity over long enough periods of time to reveal the influence of human activity. China an…