At the end of 2018, the ETH Studio Basel Contemporary City Institute closed its doors. Still, the work created in the framework of this unique constellation continues to hold great relevance for architects and urban researchers. 
planetaryurbanisation.ethz.ch hosts the (re)launched ETH Studio Basel’s website with the Studio`s main publications as open access, making them available to a broad public.

ETH STUDIO BASEL — Open Access Publications

www.studiobasel.ethz
 

The speed, scale and scope of urbanisation have increased dramatically in recent decades. To decipher the rapidly changing urban territories across the planet, we need a radical shift in the analytical perspective on urbanisation.

In this book, a transdisciplinary international research team presents an expanded vocabulary of urbanisation processes through a comparison of Tokyo, Hong Kong – Shenzhen – Dongguan, Kolkata, Istanbul, Lagos, Paris, Mexico City and Los Angeles.

Based on a novel cartography and on detailed ethnographic and historical explorations, this book systematically analyses the diversity of responses to urgent contemporary urban challenges. It proposes a series of new concepts that allow us to assess the practical consequences of different urban strategies in everyday life.

Urbanisation processes are unfolding far beyond the realm of agglomerations, profoundly transforming agrarian areas, rain forests, deserts and oceans. Enmeshed in the metabolic flows and ecologies of life, they are producing manifold planetary crises and demand urgent attention.

Through detailed analysis and fieldwork captured in text, photographs and maps, this book reveals the processes of extended urbanisation and traces struggles against their effects in eight world regions. It offers new concepts and cartographies of urbanisation processes beyond-the-city and proposes agendas for action to address planetary challenges.

Resulting form a collective research effort, the book decenters the perspective on the urban, foregrounds practice and action, and transcends rural-urban and North-South divides. It includes an introduction by Christian Schmid and Milica Topalović, a framework for analysis by Christian Schmid, a coda by AbdouMaliq Simone, and chapters on Eastern Amazonia (Rodrigo Castriota), the US Corn & Soy Belt (Nikos Katsikis), the North Sea (Nancy Couling), Arcadia, Greece (Metxia Markaki), the Lagos-Abidjan Corridor (Alice Hertzog), West Bengal (Elisa T. Bertuzzo), Dongguan, China (Kit Ping Wong), and Delhi, India (Nitin Bathla).