At the turn of this century the Catalan architect and urbanist Manuel de Solà- Morales suggested that urban environments benefit from “small interventions, which create a ripple, not comprehensive development”. Two decades on, cities now house over half the world’s population and their health has never been more precarious.
‘Seeding the Urban’ – a collaboration between the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at University of Edinburgh, UK, and Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University in the US – focuses on socially and ecologically strained urban environments. In particular, the focus falls on the capacity for small-scale tactical urban interventions to generate large scale ripples of positive change.
Through an approach to complex situations that requires tightly framed and considered, small-scale interventions, the work will explore and document case studies to develop new knowledge about the impact of this kind of approach. Despite the scale of national and international investment in the multiple ecological and political crises that play out in urban environments, there is relatively little research so far on how novel synergies might foster reparative knowledge. The collaboration here supports a nascent network of international researchers operating in the shared territories of architecture and urbanism, environmental humanities, and ecologically informed, activist practices.
Seeding Uban Transformation: Tactical Urbanism for Systemic Regeneration is a bold provocation to leverage the agency of small design acts emerging from cracks in the urban realm, exploring how individual tactics incite strategic and systemic change. With this rich global compendium of acupunctural design actions, often emerging from everyday actors, the authors allow us to imagine the tactical possibilities of a truly radical urban ecology: these metaphorical seeds might become networked, rhizomatic, implementing much-needed repair from the ground up.
The book has its origins in the ongoing scholarly exchange anchored of three institutions: The University of Sydney, Australia; Cornell University, US; and the University of Edinburgh, UK, and follows a symposium held at Edinburgh University. The book is published by Palgrave Macmillan and Springer Nature, and is edited by Chris L. Smith, Suzanne Ewing (Edin) and Lily Chi (Cornell).
This project and the collaboration with Cornell AAP and Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture has been made possible through a Partnership Collaboration Award (PCA) from the University of Sydney's Global and Research Engagement (OGRE).
Professor Chris L. Smith, University of Sydney
Dr Sophia Maalsen, University of Sydney
Dr Hannes Frykholm, University of Sydney
Associate Professor Leigh-Anne Hepburn, University of Sydney
Dr Vera Xia, University of Sydney
Professor Suzanne Ewing, University of Edinburgh
Professor Matt-Mouley Bouamrane, University of Edinburgh
Dr Moa Carlsson, University of Edinburgh
Dr Miguel Paredes Maldonado, University of Edinburgh
Dr Aidan Mosselson, University of Edinburgh
Dr Sepideh Karami, University of Edinburgh
Associate Professor Lily Chi, Cornell University
Associate Professor Jesse LeCavalier, Cornell University
Assistant Professor Anne Weber, Cornell University
Assistant Professor Farzin Lofti Jam, Cornell University
Asya Uzmay, Cornell University
