Urban Research Book Series Launch by @TerreformUR

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UR is a book series that aims to promote the urban discourse in the broadest sense, ranging from the social to the environmental to the theoretical to the speculative to the formal – including comprehensive publications of “real” projects. Our ambition is to produce volumes on the basis of their intrinsic interest and at the level of visual quality they demand. Many more exciting, deep, and visionary, titles are in store and we are committed to expanding this project to embrace a very wide range of topics and contributors.

 

UR01:
Gowntown: A 197X Plan for Upper Manhattan

By Terreform 
Based on Terreform’s multi-year urban design study on the impact of Columbia University’s expansion into Upper Manhattan, Gowntown combines specific physical planning proposals, historical research and provocations written and designed Michael Sorkin and the research and design team at Terreform. Addressed to all the people of the neighborhoods uptown, our aim was to radically bridge the traditional – and too often hostile – divide between town and gown.
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UR02:
Waterproofing New York

Denise Hoffman Brandt and Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, Editors
This vital compendium is a collection of research and essays from today’s most influential leaders, urban planners, engineers, designers, and social scientists who are exploring the necessary evolution of the urban landscape of New York City. Their proposed solutions address climate change and the urban impacts of increasingly routine catastrophic weather events.
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UR03:
2100: A Dystopian Utopia / The City After Climate Change

By Vanessa Keith/StudioTEKA
A brilliant combination of radical pessimism with utopian architectural and urban invention, 2100 starts from the premise that dramatic climate change is inevitable and imagines a planet radically reconfigured to cope with it. Noted sociologist, Saskia Sassen, describes Keith’s work as a form of “delegating back to the biosphere” as a route to a new kind of “intermediate space” that can heal the dangerous rupture between the urban and the biosphere we increasingly confront.
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UR04:
Adventures in Modernism: Thinking with Marshall Berman

Jennifer Corby, Editor
A tribute to the Bronx-native writer, political theorist and educator “whose aesthetic was wild, whose ideas were exciting, whose enthusiasm was contagious, and whose emotions were always on his sleeve”, this book begins with Marshall’s unpublished essay, Emerging from the Ruins and includes contributions from top theorists, architects, media critics, urbanists, and historians from around the world.
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UR05:
Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings

Deen Sharp and Claire Panetta, Editors
Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings focuses on the urban spatial dynamics of the mass protest movements that have convulsed the Arab region since December 2010. The volume shifts attention away from public squares — such as Tahrir Square — to consider the broader urban context in which the uprisings unfolded. This breadth of perspective highlights the centrality of space and spatial concerns to the ongoing political transformations in the region. In this way, the book provides a distinctive analysis of one of the most significant political events of our time.
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UR06:
Mahometan & Celestial’s Encyclopaedic Guide to Modernity
By Steven Flusty with Pauline C. Yu

Proceeding from the certainty that the early 21st Century is the new late 19th, the lavishly illustrated contents of this tricephalic by-blow of a funhouse mirror, a wunderkammer and a war-crimes tribunal will ensure you, dear reader, metropolises and entrepôts relieved of such troublesome nuisances as foreign evangelists, carpetbaggers, expeditionary forces, &c. Do not be caught with your panung open or your sarouel down, let this Encyclopædic Guide put a bowler on your head and a box cannon in your hand!
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Forthcoming titles include Occupy All Streets: The Rio de Janeiro Olympics and the Competition Over Urban Futures, edited by Bruno Carvalho, Mariana Cavalcanti, and Vyjayanthi Rao Venuturupalli; The Helsinki Effect: A Public Alternative to Culture Driven Development, edited by Terike Haapoja, Andrew Ross, and Michael Sorkin; Zoned Out: Race, Displacement and City Planning in New York City, edited by Tom Angotti and Sylvia Morse; An Atlas of Extraordinary Rendition: Space, Sovereignty and Torture in the Global War on Terror by Jordan H. Carver; Kongjian Yu: Letters to the Mayors of China, edited by Terreform; Why Yachay? Cities, Knowledge, and Development, edited by Terreform; New York City (Steady) State: Home Grown by Terreform; and Gregory Ain: Low-Cost Modern Housing and the Construction of the Social Landscape by Anthony Fontenot.
URPUB.ORG
Terreform|UR is grateful for the support from institutions (Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Holcim Foundation, The City College of New York—The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, Southern California Institute of Architecture, and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy) from individuals (including Richard Menaker, Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown, George Sorkin and a generous anonymous donor) and from architectural offices (Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, Rockwell Group, TEN Arquitectos, Turenscape and Michael Sorkin Studio).