The Green New Deal Superstudio is a joint initiative of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) in association with the Weitzman School of Design McHarg Center, the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA). The year-long open call was designed to give form to policy ideas by translating the core goals of decarbonization, justice, and jobs into place-specific design and planning projects. It attracted the participation of 3,000 designers and students from over 90 universities across 10 countries, including the Daniels Faculty at the University of Toronto.  

The projects ranged from pragmatic to speculative and covered a wide variety of issues, innovation, scales, and geographic regions. A curated set of 55 projects were selected to illustrate the breadth of work submitted and are organized into six categories: Adapt, Empower, Energize, Remediate, Retrofit and Cultivate. 

Out of 670 submissions, two Daniels Faculty Masters of Landscape Architecture projects from last year’s Integrated Urbanism Studio (Design Studio 3) were selected: Re:charge by Joey Chiu, Agata Mrozowski, Tina Cui, and Nadia Chan; and Welcome To Black Creek: Re-Imagining Water as Life by Alex Sheinbaum, Agata Molendowski, Evelyn Babalis, and Natasha Raseta. Alongside, three projects were selected from Architectural Design Studio 4  (ARC2014): East Harlem: The Bank by Natalia Enriquez Goyes and Clara Ziada; Buildings within Buildings by Lucy Yang, Jeff Jang; and Overlapping Celebration by Zak Jacobi, Evan Webber.

Design Studio 3 is an integrated urbanism studio led by studio coordinators Fadi Masoud, Michael Piper, and Mason White, in which students from all three of the Daniels Faculty's design disciplines — architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design — collaborate on shared projects. In the fall 2020 semester, student groups investigated and reimagined Toronto's postwar neighbourhoods, taking into consideration social inequality and the environmental imperatives of the Green New Deal.   

Assistant Professor Fadi Masoud shares: “As evident by many of the projects from the Green New Deal Superstudio, landscape architecture strategies, tools, and methods will be central to the retrofit and adaption of cities to climate change. The Daniels Faculty student projects foreground key relationships between design and social, environmental, and policy opportunities." 

Design Studio 4, also known as comprehensive design studio led by studio coordinator Sam Dufaux, is where Master of Architecture students create detailed whole-building designs.  The Studio explores both the conceptual and technical dimensions of post-carbon thinking at the building scale. It asked the students to re-think and reimagine the social and material dimensions of buildings to create a Net Zero Center for Activism in East Harlem. 

Studio Coordinator Sam Dufaux shares "The work by the students for the Green New Deal Superstudio demonstrates a new attitude toward the climate and social crises. The projects not only imagine a new type of civic institution but also demonstrate how it can be built around the principles of circularity, energy efficiency and low carbon construction. Training our students with this focus is essential given that buildings generate nearly 40% of annual CO2 emissions and that we have less than 9 years to decarbonize our industry."

The full set of submissions are catalogued and freely accessible as part of the Green New Deal Superstudio archive in the JSTOR digital library. Each submission includes three image boards and descriptive text. The curators included Barbara Deutsch (LAF), Kate Orff (SCAPE; Columbia University), Kofi Boone (North Carolina State University), Kristina Hill (University of California, Berkeley), Michael Johnson (SmithGroup), and Roberto Rovira (Florida International University). 
 
Learn more about the Green New Deal Superstudio curated projects through its website.  

Re:charge - Joey Chiu, Agata Mrozowski, Tina Cui, and Nadia Chan 

Joey, Agata, Tina, and Nadia write: "Our project is called Re:charge. It looks at redefining the existing technology, industry, and open spaces of West Rexdale through the lens of the Green New Deal. Most of the site is currently occupied by the Woodbine Racetrack and Casino, with plans for a mega entertainment complex. However, we envision a different development approach that prioritizes community investment and climate change adaptation and mitigation. Our proposals centre around investing in local renewable energy production to power community infrastructure and empower the community. There are three main programmatic areas. 

The Efficiency Commons takes the existing warehouse and manufacturing district and retools it for new green energy generation and green manufacturing jobs. It will house new high-tech industries and the Sleepless Circuit, a new entertainment destination. The Common Sink is a large central green space on the defunct Woodbine Racetrack. This new park will include a horse sanctuary, a large wetland green space, a successional forest that connects the two ravines, and a land-art sculpture park that takes into consideration hydrology and habitat connectivity. The Verve is a long north-south mixed-use residential, manufacturing, and employment corridor that has a unique typology of warehouse co-op housing and civic amenities that do not currently exist. It includes artist-run galleries, and the Knowledge is Power Community Center. The corridor creates connections between residential areas within West Rexdale and provides connection to a new GO transit hub near Pearson." 

Website 
 
Instructors: Fadi Masoud and Megan Esponeko 

Welcome To Black Creek: Re-Imagining Water as Life - Alex Sheinbaum, Agata Molendowski, Evelyn Babalis, Natasha Raseta 
 

Alex, Agata, Evelyn, and Natasha write: "The reality is that WE ARE IN A CLIMATE CRISIS. While we understand the normalcy of a fluctuating landscape, our urban systems and regions are built with static, unchanging infrastructure that can rarely withstand modern ecological disasters. 

In identifying Rockcliffe-Smythe and the Black Creek as a significant design action zone in Toronto, this project strives to gain a better understanding of the relationship between water as infrastructure and water as life, since both the natural and built systems exist symbiotically within our urban environment. 

Though there is no perfect solution to the growing ecological crises faced by Toronto's vulnerable communities, the project's thoughtful design integrates and innovates socio-ecological resiliency strategies tailored to the Rockcliffe-Smythe neighbourhood, including new housing programs, research facilities, floodable programming, and spaces for engagement. These interventions desegregate human and natural communities and reconnect people to their environments within newly designed spaces full of life, all grounded by the Black Creek." 

Website 

Instructors: Fadi Masoud and Megan Esponeko 

East Harlem: The Bank - Natalia Enriquez Goyes and Clara Ziada

Clara and Natalia write: "Our project exploits the opportunity in embracing 'waste' as a valuable resource that is being discarded. By designing within the principles of a circular consumption model, we treat the building as a new home for materials within a continuous recovery and reutilization process. This narrative lends itself to a focus on embodied energy where the material choices, their lifecycle considerations, and design for (dis)assembly become main strategies. The dynamics between physical durability and functional obsolescence underline the need to accommodate adaptability and flexibility to maximize the life cycle and minimize the ecological footprint of building components. The Bank stands as an intermediary between multiple iterations in a cycle of disassembly and new assembly."

"Through continuous chains of supply and demand, The Bank connects donors to builders, users, and consumers. The centre acts as a physical and social infrastructure mediating between people and materials. It provides a space of education, information sharing, and material distribution. Besides serving as a storage facility, it lends the community a toolkit for constructing change."

Website

Instructor: Sam Dufaux
Studio Coordinator: Sam Dufaux

Buildings within Buildings - Lucy Yang, Jeff Jang

Lucy and Jeff write: "This proposal provides a platform for social and environmental activism. It announces the urgency of social and environmental reform through relinquishing ownership of the ground plane, offering an open courtyard for the community in East Harlem."

"The courtyard is a public and flexible space where social movements and voices are amplified, but also hidden processes of building construction and demolition waste are brought to the foreground. The proposed building not only serves as a storage area for salvaged building elements, but it is also comprised of reclaimed elements itself. Reclaimed windows and bricks from the local contexts become critical components that give the project its architectural identity and reduce embodied energy."

"The concept of nested thermal buffer zones, inspired by the flimsy facade of reclaimed windows, also bolsters the building performance. The temperature gradient blurs the distinction between outside and inside, creating a composition of buildings within buildings that is composed of found objects."

Website

Instructor: Carol Moukheiber
Studio Coordinator: Sam Dufaux

Overlapping Celebration - Zak Jacobi, Evan Webber

Zak and Evan write: "Harlem as a community has a rich heritage tied to celebration. Celebration plays an active role in encouraging social gathering and empowering community members through the sharing of experiences, stories, and talents. This project looks to create spaces of celebration through diverse and dynamic programs that overlap and blend into one another, augmented and emphasized by floods of colour, prompting informal interactions between community members. This is done in consideration of the site's connection with environmental and ecological systems and how this enhances and engages with acts of celebration."

Website

Instructor: Sam Dufaux
Studio Coordinator: Sam Dufaux

“Places of Production: Forest and Factory” is a new publication from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, in collaboration with the Canadian Wood Council and the woodSMART Program.

The title comes from the research studio of the same name, led by Professor Robert Wright and Professor Brigitte Shim, that explored the intersection between the disciplines of forestry, architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism.

The studio was an opportunity for Daniels students to explore the critical and relatively untapped relationship between forestry and design. Working with Element5, and using their factory expansion plans as impetus, students reimagined the traditionally insular factory building and explored how it could be combined with new and innovative programs to ensure a vital future for places of production in the life of local communities.

“The forest and the factory are both examples of the continuum from nature to constructed landscapes that speak to our contemporary attitudes towards environmental conservation and production," share Wright and Shim in their introduction. "Each studio group provided an integrated design response to the studio brief, considering the role of the landscape and built form to develop a bold design solution that explored the role of forestry and design simultaneously.” 

Now the publication — available for free through the Canadian Wood Council’s woodSMART Program — provides a platform for further knowledge with accompanying essays from academic and industry experts, as well as the output of the student’s collaborative semester-long research.

Image caption: BC Passive House Factory by Hemsworth Architecture; Forwarder and crane cutting and harvesting logs in Haliburton Forest.

“’Places of Production: Forest to Factory’ presented a valuable opportunity to engage the future architects of our built environment,” said Kevin McKinley, president and CEO of the Canada Wood Council, in his introduction to the publication. “The studio challenged students to harness the strength and sustainability of wood to reimagine what a factory could be in a low-carbon future."

"The five schemes developed in it exemplify CWC’s vision to be a passionate champion of wood construction for an advanced and sustainable wood culture. We applaud the incredible efforts of the studio and encourage these emerging and innovative designers to be our future voices and advocates of wood construction across Canada, and around the world.”

Visit the woodSMART website to download "Places of Production: Forest and Factory."

Image caption: Model of adaptive wetland and ecosystem and services structural model by a student team including Dylan Johnston, Caroline Kasiuk, Michael MacNeill, and Niko McGlashan.

Header image by Craig Heinrich: White River Forest Products is a community-operated sawmill in White River, Ontario. The local forest pictured is processed into lumber, some of which is transported to Element5's CLT factory in St. Thomas, Ontario.
 

Assistant professor Fadi Masoud has recently published two pieces of writing on a topic that is central to his research: zoning for climate adaptation and resilience.

The first of the two, which Masoud co-authored with David Vega-Barachowitz, director of urban design at WXY, is a book chapter titled "Flux Zoning: From End-State Planning to Zoning for Uncertainty." It appears in A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation, from Island Press*. The chapter details ways cities and regions might adapt zoning into a tool for long-term coastal and environmental adaptation.

Find out more about the book

Masoud's writing also appears in the latest issue of Landscapes | Paysages, the official magazine of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects. In an article he co-wrote with research associate Isaac Seah, he argues that municipal zoning would be better able to respond to changing climate conditions if urban planners were empowered to take into account data on environmental factors that affect urban land, including topology, geology, and water permeability. As a case study, the article presents some of Masoud's efforts, with the Platform for Resilient Urbanism at the Daniels Faculty's Centre for Landscape Research, to use new technologies to model geophysical and environmental risk factors in flood-prone Broward County, Florida.

Masoud and Seah write:

In many places, these normative zoning codes have rendered themselves extraneous in truly dealing with the impacts of climate change. For example, some regions continue to be zoned for typical future residential land use, knowing they are under severe risk of future flooding. We simply ask: why does land use zoning continue to remain static when we know that landscapes are dynamic?

Read the full article in Landscapes | Paysages

*(Use the code ADAPT at checkout for a 20 per cent discount on the book.)

Top image: Generative codes for an expanded littoral gradient. Image from the Centre for Landscape Research.

Architectural mock-ups are usually not given much, if any, thought. They're full-scale replicas of building elements, constructed for the purpose of letting everyone involved in a project get a sense of how different wall or window systems will look when completed. They're usually erected in out-of-the-way locations on construction sites and later demolished when they outlive their usefulness, or when a building is nearing completion.

But, for David Ross (MArch 2003), a Daniels Faculty alumnus who is now a visual artist, these mock-ups are more than mere throwaways. When he looks at them, he sees fascinating sculptural artifacts of the complex social and economic dynamics that underlie every architectural project.

That's why he devoted nearly five years to the creation of his newly released book, Archetypes, in which he uses photography to (literally) cast architectural mock-ups in an entirely different light. In addition to David's photographs, the book contains four essays on architectural mock-ups, two of which were written by Daniels Faculty professors: one by assistant professor Peter Sealy and another by professor Ted Kesik.

The cover of David Ross's book, Archetypes.

"Mock-ups are the engagement ring of the architecture world," Ross says. "They're a physical representation of the relationship between the designer, the client, and the contractor. They're acts of insurance and assurance. Insurance because they provide a way for all the parties involved in a project to feel comfortable with the materials, the construction, and the methods by which a project is going to be executed. Assurance, because mock-ups are the first things that are made. They act almost as a kind of prenup for the relationship going forward."

The book, edited by Reto Geiser and published by Standpunkte and Park Books, collects 39 colour photos Ross took at construction sites throughout North America and Europe, with funding from the Graham Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Ross made arrangements with builders — many of them, he says, bemused by the idea that any artist would want anything to do with mock-ups — to visit construction sites at night. Using a flash and a special camera rig adapted for use on ladders, he photographed each mock-up in isolation from the typical construction site clutter, with only darkness in the background.

Left: Swiss Life Arena, Zurich. Caruso St. John Architects. Right: Andreasturm, Zurich. Gigon/Guyer.

The consistent nature of the photographic style makes it easy for a viewer to start imagining mock-ups as an architectural type, rather than as one-off misfits. "I photographed them all from the midpoint of the mock-up," Ross says. "There are funny things that happened with the scale. Because they're all framed in a similar way, it makes it difficult to tell not only where they are, but how big they are."

The essays from Sealy and Kesik, which appear at the back of the book, help contextualize the photography. Kesik's essay argues that mock-ups are (or at any rate should be) an essential step in the creation of any architecturally ambitious building. "Innovation in architecture that moves away from tried-and-true tectonic precedents necessarily relies on engineering and building science to fulfill its promise and performance," Kesik writes. "This is why the mock-up is an essential part of any robust design process that seeks innovative and original outcomes that do not just offer comparable quality to conventional approaches, but aspire to exceed all aspects of aesthetic delight and technical performance."

Left: Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts. NADAA. Right: John P. Robarts Library, University of Toronto. Mathers & Haldenby.

Sealy's essay draws parallels between Ross's work documenting architectural mock-ups and the 19th-century practice of photographing plaster casts of decorative architectural elements. Sealy recounts the way French architect Hector Lefuel used plaster-model photography to aid the process of carving ornamental details for the mid-19th-century expansion of the Louvre. "The twenty-first-century mock-ups photographed by Ross occupy a similar quasi-contractual status," Sealy writes, "one that is recorded in endless smartphone photographs sent back and forth between architects', clients', and builders' offices."

The book isn't the only place Ross is showcasing his mock-up photos. Over the next few months he'll be exhibiting his work at BALTSprojects in Zurich (starting May 29), Architekturgalerie in Munich (starting in July), and the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel (starting August 27).

Archetypes can be purchased on Bookdepository.com, and will soon also be available at Indigo and Amazon.

Visiting lecturer Kelly Alvarez Doran spent the fall semester leading a research studio in which he and his students investigated the environmental impact of "embodied carbon" — the energy used to create building materials. Embodied carbon ratchets up a building project's greenhouse gas emissions before shovels so much as pierce the ground, and those emission levels are permanent. They can't later be mitigated through retrofits.

Now, Doran has written an open letter to Canada's municipalities, architects, engineers, and planners, in which he summarizes his studio's findings and pleads for limits on embodied carbon in buildings. The letter appears in the April 2021 issue of Canadian Architect, and it can be read on the magazine's website. In the letter, Doran writes:

Canada, as well as a growing number of its jurisdictions, has set necessarily ambitious carbon reduction targets as part of an increasingly urgent global bid to achieve climate stability. While the spotlight often falls on the transportation and energy production sectors, 40 percent of global carbon emissions comes from the construction and operation of buildings. We are becoming increasingly aware that a big part of the issue — 11 percent of global emissions — comes from the embodied carbon of the materials that go into the new buildings constructed each year.

The AED sector is just starting to understand the immense carbon impact of building materials. To drastically reduce this impact, greater knowledge, and firm embodied carbon benchmarks and targets, must become part of building standards and planning policies that govern construction across Canada.

Read the full letter at Canadian Architect

Image: Sectional diagrams indicate the percentage of project embodied carbon emissions below grade, showing the embodied carbon impact of foundations and underground parking.

Mass timber, a category of engineered wood-based structural building materials suitable for large-scale infrastructure projects, promises to change the way buildings are designed. But, to many practitioners in the design and construction industries, mass timber is still a little mysterious. Architects and builders may have seen headlines about tall wooden buildings shooting up in Canada and around the world, but they may not know the details.

The Daniels Faculty's Mass Timber Institute is helping to fill that knowledge gap with the release of the Mass Timber Building Science Primer, a 70-page guide with over nine gigabytes of downloadable supplementary materials. The primer concisely describes the science of mass timber, the properties of different mass timber building materials, the workings of mass timber construction technologies, and the state of the mass timber industry.

The primer was written by professor Ted Kesik, with assistance from building science researcher Rosemary Martin and industry partner RDH Building Science.

The publication's target audience is design and construction professionals with little or no previous knowledge of mass timber. It's written in accessible language and requires no academic background to read and understand. Its release marks a milestone in the Mass Timber Institute's efforts to advance mass-timber science and drive adoption of timber construction in Canada.

"One of the most important reasons this publication was developed was to identify gaps in building science knowledge related to mass timber buildings so that industry, government, and academia can work together to address these gaps with relevant research, development and demonstration programs," the Mass Timber Institute writes in its statement about the primer. "The mass timber building industry in Canada is still a collection of seedlings that continue to grow and as such they deserve the stewardship of the best available building science knowledge to sustain them until such time as they become a forest that can fend for itself."

Download the Mass Timber Building Science Primer

For more information about the primer, contact the Mass Timber Institute.

Jason Nguyen, an assistant professor at the Daniels Faculty who specializes in architectural history, has published an essay in the fall 2020 edition of Journal 18, a journal of 18th-century art and culture. Nguyen's topic is the surprisingly numerous connections between early modern British cartography, colonialism, and the emergence of the British commercial class.

Early in his essay, Nguyen identifies a particular object that, he argues, embodies these intersecting trends: a "pocket globe," produced by the British cartographer Herman Moll in 1719. The papier-mâché and plaster globe, seven centimetres in diameter, depicts the world as Britons understood it at the time — complete with inaccuracies (California is drawn as an island, and half of Australia is missing) and a bright red line that charts the travels of William Dampier, an English explorer and pirate who was famous for having circumnavigated the world three times.

Nguyen writes:

The cost of an average pocket globe placed it out of reach for the everyday laborer but within the budgets of London’s emergent middling classes. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, England witnessed extraordinary growth in luxury consumption by individuals from different social and economic backgrounds. The amount and variety of goods found in the average home increased dramatically, specifically in the case of small decorative objects. The composition and compactness of Moll’s pocket globes speak to the profound transformations in global finance and domestic consumerism at the turn of the eighteenth century. As miniaturizations of the world, replete with Dampier’s nautical journeys, they depicted the maritime infrastructure that generated European wealth. At the same time, their size presumed a portability and conspicuousness that catered to a population fascinated by the novelty of small decorative commodities. As such, they are unique lenses through which to examine the relationship between cartography, consumerism, and the burgeoning structures of global capitalism — along with their attendant connections to colonialism, the stock exchange, and slavery.

Journal 18 is open access, meaning the full text of Nguyen's essay is free to read online.

Take me to Journal 18

Top image: A map from Herman Moll's The World Described. Image from the British Museum.

Professor Richard Sommer, who was dean of the Daniels Faculty before the conclusion of his term last summer, has co-authored a story for the latest issue of Cabinet, a Brooklyn-based arts and culture magazine.

The piece, which Sommer wrote in collaboration with Natalie Fizer, of Pillow Culture, is titled Glossary of Dream Architecture. It consists of a series of capsule essays about words and concepts that guided the creation of New Circadia, the immersive, cavelike installation that Sommer and Pillow Culture staged in the Daniels Building's Architecture and Design Gallery in late 2019.

New Circadia consisted of a dimly lit, felt-lined space suffused with soft, calming sound. Visitors were invited to linger, rest, and lose track of time.

Sommer and Fizer write:

The glossary gathers buildings, landscapes, events, films, stories, drawings, and other projects that can also be understood to constitute a makeshift history of dream design. Its contents are organized under the following headings: Air, Bricolage, Cave, Cloister, Glass, Grotto, Model, Mountain Aerie, Phantasmagoria, Stone, Temple, Test Bed, Vehicle, and Water. The history the glossary imputes is provisional to our own purposes and guides our ideas about how architecture models time to shape a space of dreams through the measuring, marking, and bounding of various human practices. The dream-inducing architecture of New Circadia begins with a search for tempos within the various and overlapping versions of time we inhabit. These include, but are not limited to: geological/deep time, mechanical/industrial time, wasted/idling time, broken/discontinuous time, organic/biological time, and mythical/story time.

Read the full glossary on the Cabinet website.

Take me to Cabinet magazine

Top image: Inside New Circadia. Photograph by Bob Gundu.

In 2017, associate professor Georges Farhat co-organized a symposium with the Garden and Landscape Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington D.C. Now, three years later, he has finished editing a book that expands on the presentations delivered during that event.

The book, titled Landscpaes of Preindustrial Urbanism, consists of ten copiously illustrated essays by a group of multidisciplinary contributors. It can be ordered from its publisher, Harvard University Press.

The book's chapters are organized according to three technical themes — "Earthworks", "Waterscapes," and "Forestry" — which cover different types of intersections between landscapes and urbanism. Temporalities and materialities foreign to Western modernity require specific methods of analysis on each of the sites studied. To do this, the authors combine remote sensing and geoarchaeology with historical geography, ethnohistory, and ecological anthropology. The result is an open and pluralistic approach to the history of urban landscapes.

In his introductory essay, Farhat writes:

Environmental conditions, under which regional types of preindustrial urbanism formed, developed, and declined, have been lately reframed by geoarchaeology. The latter, which integrates a host of earth sciences, now benefits from larger, more reliable, or previously unavailable sets of data (from ice cores and speleothems to DNA and tree rings). It enables researchers to more accurately reconstruct paleoenvironments as well as long-term climate dynamics; to correlate environments and societies; and to retrace land cover, land use, and associated foodways.

Better understood, monsoon variability, droughts, floods, and warming cycles are now identified among factors that contributed to the collapse of urban systems under constant climatic stress. Owing to urban population growth and agricultural needs, ensuing deforestation, soil exhaustion, and erosion would combine with siltation of hydraulic infrastructure while overflows interacted with earthworks (terraces, bunds, mounds, causeways). In cases as diverse as Cahokia (United States), Caracol, Angkor, and Anuradhapura (Sri Lanka), climate variation and ecological instability conflicted with economic constraint and rigid management patterns. The result was failure of complex, large-scale infrastructure networks and urban collapse or, alternatively, peripheral dispersal and reconfiguration of settlements.

Pre-Columbian earthworks and geometric geoglyphs, Bastião da Mata, Amazon, Acre, Brazil. Photograph by Diego Lourenço Gurgel.

Obviously, scholars’ interests in such phenomena are driven by a quest for solutions to current environmental crises, for which they hope to learn from the past. However, more significant for our present consideration is the fact that preindustrial urban settlements are now holistically studied as environments that can no longer be dissociated into built and unbuilt or core and hinterland areas. More important still is a rethink of human and nonhuman agencies based on archaeological finds. This has enabled historical ecology to frame a more integrative matrix accounting for the dynamics of long-term, human-environmental interactions — rather than a deterministic one-way adaptation as in cultural ecology. Entwined in such a matrix, one finds material practices of design and ecological processes. Two opposite cases, one of sterile terrain formation and the other of organic soil creation (pedogenesis), should suffice to illustrate this interaction. Semiarid plains across the world are scattered with mounds and hills (“tells”), measuring up to one kilometer across and forty meters in elevation, that once were urban settlement mounds in wetter climates. Now an integral part of their regional landscapes, these reliefs have emerged through subsequent phases of collapse, reconstruction, and abandonment. Returning to clay after melting, mud bricks formed hills that, in turn, were subject to ecological cycles. Under completely different conditions, across the Amazon, raised fields and anthropic “dark earths” accompany extensive precontact settlement earthworks and artificial islands. Vast swaths of the oft-fantasized pristine wilderness and biosphere turn out to have been human-managed forests. Their fauna and flora were domesticated, selected, and reshaped for more than two millennia into what could ultimately be described as descendants of urban landscapes.

Find out more about Landscpaes of Preindustrial Urbanism

As the world's political scene grows more and more volatile, architects are increasingly considering ways of using their work to lend support to activist movements. Bracket [Takes Action], a new book co-edited by Mason White, a Daniels Faculty professor, and Neeraj Bhatia, an associate professor of architecture at the California College of the Arts, aims to introduce readers to new ways of making change in the world through design.

"The interest was in understanding architecture and design's activist agency today," White says. "We wanted to compile writing on how architects and the impacts of design in the public realm foster or interact with modes of activism. This could be through the act of design, the design process, or through thematic investigations."

[Takes Action] — the fourth in a series of publications in the Bracket series, which White co-founded in 2008 — consists of 43 different essays and design projects. The contents are split into six different thematic groups: ReAction, CounterAction, InterAction, FAction, InAction, and RetroAction. Each theme highlights a different way designers are responding to the socio-political moment.

The book's segmented structure enables it to include submissions on a variety of topics, from many different sources. Its contributors include Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, from Atelier Bow-Wow; Mariam Kamara, of the Niger-based firm Atelier Masōmī; and Matthew Mazzotta, an American artist who frequently incorporates activism into his work. Another contributor is Azadeh Zaferani, a graduate of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Urban Design program, who wrote about the transformation of public space in Tehran.

"The contributors are looking at anything from housing rights, to social media's impact on public space, to squatting," White says. "And some contributors are looking at refugee camps, or contested access to energy. And sometimes they're just asking what role technology plays, looking at how the internet gets used in public space to advocate for overlooked voices or oppressed peoples."

Bracket [Takes Action] is now available for purchase on Amazon, or from the publisher at a 30 per cent discount — but buying the book isn't the only way to engage with its contributors' ideas. Throughout the fall, the Daniels Faculty and the California College of the Arts will be co-hosting a series of online talks with Bracket's writers and editors. The first one, on ReAction and CounterAction, took place on September 16. Two more are planned: InterAction and FAction, on October 7, and InAction and RetroAction, on November 11. These events will be free of charge and open to the public.