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A selection of papers from the proceedings of the Third OIKONET Conference is contained in this book. OIKONET is a European project co-funded by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) with the purpose of studying contemporary housing from a multidisciplinary and global perspective by encompassing the multiple dimensions which condition the forms of dwelling in today’s societies: architectural, urban, environmental, economic, cultural and social. Following on from the first two OIKONET conferences held respectively in Barcelona, Spain in 2014 and Bratislava, Slovakia in 2015, the third conference took place in Manchester, the UK in 2016. Providing a valuable resource for students, lecturers, researchers and others with an interest in housing studies, the papers included in this book cover three themes, namely sustainability of housing environments, innovation in housing design and planning, and participation in housing design and construction.

Studying the relation of architecture to society, this book explains the manner in which the discipline of architecture adjusted itself in order to satisfy new pressures by society. Consequently, it offers an understanding of contemporary conditions and phenomena, ranging from the ubiquity of landmark buildings to the celebrity status of architects. It concerns the period spanning from 1966 to the first years of the current century – a period which saw radical change in economy, politics, and culture and a period in which architecture radically transformed, substituting the alleged dreariness of modernism with spectacle.

This open access book provides insights into challenges, threats and opportunities of urban development in Africa. It discusses how and why African cities need localised urban planning concepts and theories to deal with challenges and threats of rapid urbanisation and climate change. The book delivers an in-depth view of the nature and gaps of the framework on which current planning practice and education in Africa are based. With that, it discusses the potentials of African cities to mobilise local knowledge, resources and capacity building for sustained and resilient urban growth. This work is addressed to educationists and practitioners in the field of urban development management, climate change adaptation and urban resilience. Specifically, such audiences include researchers, spatial planners, graduate students and member of civil societies working on urban development management.

This book argues that understanding global urbanism in the twenty-first century requires us to cast our gaze upon vast city-regions without an urban core.

The rules for color are not black and white. Color Inspirations contains some of the very best color palettes from the popular website COLOURlovers.com, organized by color family in a logical, easy-to-use format. In this complete reference, you'll discover 3,286 fresh, inspiring color palettes—ready to be applied to your latest design or project and complete with accurate CMYK, RGB and HEX values. This comprehensive book also includes a brief primer on color theory and an inspiration section that will help you discover new color combinations in the world around you. It contains everything you need to find the best color palettes for your project in a snap. From the Introduction: "We all have some common connections and associations to color based on cultural influences and popular theories, but color is ultimately a unique experience for all of us. And because of that, there is not just one set of rules for how to think about and use color. We live in a global community with tools that allow us to create something independently and share it with the masses. This interconnected environment generates a much wider spectrum of color ideas and color applications."

Re-framing Urban Space: Urban Design for Emerging Hybrid and High-Density Conditions rethinks the role and meaning of urban spaces through current trends and challenges in urban development. In emerging dense, hybrid, complex and dynamic urban conditions, public urban space is not only a precious and contested commodity, but also one of the key vehicles for achieving socially, environmentally and economically sustainable urban living. Past research has been predominantly focused on familiar models of urban space, such as squares, plazas, streets, parks and arcades, without consistent and clear rules on what constitutes good urban space, let alone what constitutes good urban space in ‘high-density context’. Through an innovative and integrative research framework, Re-Framing Urban Space guides the assessment, planning, design and re-design of urban spaces at various stages of the decision-making process, facilitating an understanding of how enduring qualities are expressed and negotiated through design measures in high-density urban environments. This book explores over 50 best practice case studies of recent urban design projects in high-density contexts, including Singapore, Beijing, Tokyo, New York, and Rotterdam. Visually compelling and insightful, Re-Framing Urban Space provides a comprehensive and accessible means to understand the critical properties that shape new urban spaces, illustrating key design components and principles. An invaluable guide to the stages of urban design, planning, policy and decision making, this book is essential reading for urban design and planning professionals, academics and students interested in public spaces within high-density urban development.

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices explores how the changing modes of representation in architecture and urbanism relate to the transformation of how the addressees of architecture and urbanism are conceived. The book diagnoses the dominant epistemological debates in architecture and urbanism during the 20th and 21st centuries. It traces their transformations, paying special attention to Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s preference for perspective representation, to the diagrams of Team 10 architects, to the critiques of functionalism, and the upgrade of the artefactual value of architectural drawings in Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Oswald Mathias Ungers, and, finally, to the reinvention of architectural programme through the event in Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Particular emphasis is placed on the spirit of truth and clarity in modernist architecture, the relationship between the individual and the community in post-war era architecture, the decodification of design process as syntactic analogy and the paradigm of autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s architecture, the concern about the dynamic character of urban conditions and the potentialities hidden in architectural programme in the post-autonomy era. This book is based on extensive archival research in Canada, the USA and Europe, and will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics.

Lara Schrijver examines the work of Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas as intellectual legacy of the 1970s for architecture today. Particularly in the United States, this period focused on the autonomy of architecture as a correction to the social orientation of the 1960s. Yet, these two architects pioneered a more situated autonomy, initiating an intellectual discourse on architecture that was inherently design-based. Their work provides room for interpreting social conditions and disciplinary formal developments, thus constructing a `plausible' relationship between the two that allows the life within to flourish and adapt. In doing so, they provide a foundation for recalibrating architecture today.