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).
 

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.

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 space of the North Sea is almost fully planned and it has been loaded with the task of increasing economic production from both new and traditional maritime sectors. At the same time, it has been emptied of cultural significance.
Through different projects from academia, art, literature and practice, from analysis to design, The Urbanisation of the Sea explores synergies for designing this new spatial realm.

Arcadia is one of the most enduring utopias of the western mind, originating in the pastoral scenery of Roman poets Ovid and Virgil, spreading throughout western painting and literature and remaining one of the most powerful constructions of the idyllic countryside. Located on the mountainous core of Peloponnese, it is one of the oldest inhabited territories in Europe; a quiet, remote territory with low population density, and low accessibility, but very different to its pastoral ideal. Sites of cultural heritage, agriculture, ‘energy landscapes’ and tourism are radically transforming this territory, formulating new ways of living and producing. Our investigation focused on the character and potentials of the Arcadian countryside, positioning it as an important and typical case in the framework we defined as European Countryside.

Territory brings together the results of the ETH Studio Basel research investigating the process of urbanisation taking place outside cities in six significant locations: the Nile Valley; Rome-Adria, Italy; the Florida hinterlands; the Red River Delta in Vietnam; northern Oman, and Belo Horizonte and Minas Gerais in Brazil.
To describe the space surrounding cities, previously considered landscape, the authors use the term territory to denote both the surroundings that a city subsumes into its own structure and the core city itself, which is the center of this urbanisation process. For each of the territories featured in the book, such key aspects of urbanisation as water management, networks and infrastructure, agriculture, the role of mining and industrial production, and settlements, are investigated.

The Architecture of Territory project aims to restate what is now a largely forgotten concept: city and territory seen and represented in unity, as the two inseparable faces of the same phenomenon of the urban—the positive and the negative, the figure and the ground.
Today our culture, including research, is undeniably focused on cities, neglecting the importance of wider productive territories. But what if we reverse this perspective: What if we adopt a territorial approach instead of the city-centric view? If cities cover only 2 percent of the world’s surface, what if we focus attention also on the remaining 98 percent? If cities are growing and transforming, territories are undeniably pulled into the same vortex of urbanization. In this perspective, it is clear that the problematic of the relationship of cities with wider urbanising territories needs to be revisited, and that the dynamic of territories—of productive landscapes, nature areas, countrysides, or hinterlands—is central to understanding cities and urban sustainability.

Urban areas, despite facing strong forces of homogenization on a global scale, tend to produce and reproduce their own specificity, their own structures and patterns that are evolving through the uneven process of urbanization. With this book ETH Studio Basel documents its long-standing research on cities and urban regions, highlighting key aspects of specificity in the age of global urbanization.
The publication presents case studies on Naples, the Nile Valley, Belgrade, Nairobi, Hong Kong, the Canary Islands, Beirut, and Casablanca that are distilling their specificities through careful descriptions, and analyzing their processes of urban transformation through the analytical lenses of three vectors: territory, power, and difference.

Throughout history, cities have functioned as centres of political and economic power, from which the agricultural and resource-rich hinterlands were controlled. From the nineteenth century onward, new technologies, transportation modes and the opening of trade have introduced a remarkable complexity to the relationship between cities and territories. Today, it is often thought that cities rely decreasingly on surrounding territories for supply and subsistence. Instead, they seem emancipated from the constraints of geography, operating in a global web of dependencies. By contrast, the research presented in this book is based on a hypothesis that an understanding of the city-territory relationship, the ability to conceptualize it in qualitative terms, and to influence it by means of planning and design strategies, is central in addressing urban sustainability.

Belgrade. Formal Informal presents the findings of ETH Studio Basel’s research in the former Yugoslavian and now Serbian capital, investigating in particular the city’s development from the international embargo against the Milosevic regime after the Yugoslavian wars of separation in the 1990s until the present day. This richly illustrated book explores in depth how Belgrade has changed throughout years of upheaval and economic hardship. It shows the result of the interplay between t shows the result
of the interplay between formal and informal forces in urban development
and the varied architecture that has emerged from this. Belgrade is presented not as an extreme, isolated case of urban transformation, but as an example that sheds
light on processes shaping contemporary European cities.