As financial capital progressively invents new forms of value to mine as exhaustively as the last, there is need, once again, to attend to the particularities and irregularities of place. For it is the unthought, overlooked, and discarded that can be captured without alarm; forgotten without notice. The Urban Village represents a tipping point with the past. Yet if we have learned anything from the present about the forces that engender such visions of a future, we should know that its very difference is in risk of sliding into the same. The Urban Village is a petri dish of criticality; a laboratory of flight. Being left alone has never been an option. New mechanisms of relation, new protocols of exchange, new conditions of belonging are needed for living, and growing, together.
Editors
Nick Axel
Hou Hanru
Nikolaus Hirsch
Anton Vidokle
Liu Xiaodu
Meng Yan
Urban Village is collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the 7th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB) within the context of its theme, "Cities, Grow in Difference."
Joshua Bolchover is currently an Associate Professor at The University of Hong Kong. He set up Rural Urban Framework with John Lin in 2005 with the remit to create a not-for-profit agency as a platform for design and research.
M. Christine Boyer is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor, at the School of Architecture, Princeton University. She is the author numerous books on the history of the city, city planning, preservation planning, and computer science. Her most recent book is Not Quite Architecture: writings around Alison and Peter Smithson (MIT Press, 2017).
Juan Du is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Associate Dean (International) at the University of Hong Kong, and Director of IDU_architecture. She has been conducting research and design in Shenzhen and its urban villages since 2005, with an upcoming book entitled The Shenzhen Experiment.
Hou Hanru is the artistic director of the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI) in Rome.
Michiel Hulshof is a journalist and partner at Tertium, a strategic communications bureau based in Amsterdam.
Nikos Papastergiadis is Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures and Professor at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, co-chair of the Greek Centre for Contemporary Culture, and chair of the International Advisory Committee for the Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore.
Stephan Petermann is an associate at AMO. He is currently working on two research projects: one about the metabolism of workspaces with the Ohio State University, the other on the future of the countryside in collaboration with Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Chinese Academy for Fine Arts.
Liu Qingyuan is and artist and associate professor at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.
Daan Roggeveen is an architect and co-founder of MORE Architecture, a studio for architecture and research based in Shanghai.
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University. Her latest book, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press 2014), is now out in eighteen languages.
AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist and research professor at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and visiting professor of sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, visiting professor at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, research associate with the Rujak Center for Urban Studies in Jakarta, and research fellow at the University of Tarumanagara.
Feng Yuan is a scholar, cultural critic, spatial designer, image planner, and art curator. He is a member of the Academic Board of Humanities & Social Sciences of Sun Yat-sen University, professor in the School of Communication and Design at Sun Yat-sen University, and adviser in the Experimental Art Department of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.
