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Storefront churches tend to have a pervasive presence along streets in central-city neighborhoods of the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast regions of the U.S. However, their place in architecture, urban studies, and other spatially related disciplines has rarely been understood or even acknowledged. This report attempts to bridge this gap through a case study of seven African-American storefront churches in Sherman Park, a neighborhood of central Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Examining both the macro and micro contexts of these storefront churches, the report brings to light the myriad forces that have facilitated their ubiquitous presence in central-city areas, and it examines the ways religious space may be created and experienced in a vacant, often dilapidated storefront. The report concludes by discussing the concept of “makeshifting,” as it seeks to reconsider these spaces as an overlooked place-type that has helped sustain marginalized groups in the face of inequality and adversity.

Traditional towns and villages in China have experienced profound formal transformation in recent years as a result of national political policies promoting rural development. By analyzing how this new production of space reflects efforts to achieve “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” this report seeks to understand its underlying mechanisms and their relation to issues of tradition. Using the region of Huizhou in Anhui province as site for examination, the report examines forces driving change from a number of directions: from the “top-down” by government, by local people from the “bottom-up,” and in terms of design-led interventions from the “middle.” It concludes that the contextual production of space in Huizhou is being compromised, and that Huizhou building traditions are in decline, being inherited only in fragments. And it calls for a more active role by designers to nurture social awareness and raise the profile of design values in rural areas.

This report explores changes in the urban fabric and architectural vocabulary of Shimla, India, as observed through the lens of two important shifts in its demographic profile. The first shift occurred when British colonial authorities took ownership of the area from local hill people in the mid-nineteenth century, the second when the settlement reverted to Indian control after independence in 1947. The report analyzes the sociocultural factors that guided the evolution of Shimla through these two historical transitions to understand the present pattern of unregulated, unchecked development that has allowed its once-pristine ecological setting to be choked out by unmindful construction.

This essay explores the idea of cultural hybridity in the hill town of Cuetzalan, Mexico. It focuses on two entities within the town: the tianguis, or informal Sunday market, and the Santuario de Guadalupe, also known as the Iglesia de los Jarritos, or “Church of the Clay Pots.” Hybridity, the essay shows, is not a facile outcome of the intermingling of different cultures, but the result of historical political struggle — in this case between the indigenous Nahua Indian population and the mestizos who moved to the Sierra Norte de Puebla during the nineteenth century. I conclude that by embodying socio-political and aesthetic oppositions, in tension with one another, hybridity creates stimulating places and facilitates the survival of marginal cultures.

This field report describes the Antipode Cities Project, which aimed to connect Earth's most geographically distant cities with collective cartographies made by local children. For the project, the author and art gallery staff conducted a series of map-making workshops on opposite sides of the world with children ranging from five to eight years old. The children's cartographies showcased a sort of natural urbanism, a trait that could be called “primal urbanism”—an innate perception of the city as a place that could be transformed by projects to alter its shape and form. The Antipode Cities Project, with the aid of different Chinese and Argentinean institutions, organized a research field trip and a series of workshops to compare Qingdao, China and Buenos Aires, Argentina—two cities that are at the exact geographical antipode from each other. This field report describes the conducted activities, perspectives and outcomes along with considerations about the pedagogy behind the concept of antipode cities from children's perspectives.

Around large Japanese cities, such as Tokyo and Yokohama, suburban residential areas were developed during the 1960s and 70s as receptacles for a new urban working population. In recent years, however, the physical deterioration of buildings in these areas has led to their more general decline, and their residents have started to face challenges related to aging. Despite these conditions, many residents resist moving from familiar areas where they have lived for many years. This means that simply redeveloping them with new structures may not offer the best solution. To understand life in these suburbs, this report considers the importance of a “close residential relationship” between family members of different generations. Such an alternative condition represents a change from the big, multigenerational households that formerly pertained in traditional Japanese culture. And this new approach has been promoted recently by local governments and developers as a way to improve the quality of life in suburban regions. The report analyzes how the daily lives of residents of one suburban area have changed as a result of the area’s recent redevelopment, and it documents how maintaining a close residential relationship has proven beneficial during this process.

This report studies debates on modernity and tradition as they have unfolded during the recent experience of economic recession in Iran. To this end, it challenges the conventional meaning of recession as an economic downturn, extending it to encompass an experience that is politically produced and professionally reconstructed. In Iran, the recent recession has created opportunities for experimental architectural practices. It has also generated a new politics of tradition, which has been entangled with an urge to reinvent the local-global dynamic of “Iranian identity.” The report further argues that the dialectic of tradition and modernity has become a tool through which architects are attempting to boost their reputations and garner both local and transnational credibility.

This report examines how Chinese entrepreneurs have reappropiated the forms and meanings of Spanish cafés in Barcelona and Qingtian (China) since the 2009 economic crisis. By looking at these cases, it seeks to understand the aspirations of the entrepreneurs and how they have used their own knowledge of cultures to succeed and adapt similar traditions in two distinct locations. The analysis of the production of these new spaces of consumption reveals the dynamics behind a large-scale transnational flow of capital and its impact on the built environment.

A major cause for the massive destruction brought by the 2005 earthquake in Balakot, Pakistan, was structural collapse. Yet it has been revealed by a local NGO that some local people are still using the same post-and-lintel construction methods that failed in the earthquake. Why do these people continue to use an unsafe technology? What is preventing them from employing traditional practices of timber-based earthquake-resistant construction? Alternatively, why don't they adopt other safe construction practices? Does this represent a simple gap in awareness or affordability, or is it the culmination of a more complex socio-political dynamic? This report investigates the uptake of alternative low-cost technological systems in the wake of efforts by the government and international aid agencies to implement more high-cost solutions in the area. Of particular interest is the case of the award-winning Cal-Earth model. The viability of this building system was demonstrated through the construction of approximately 500 small emergency shelters in 2006, but it has since been unable to capture the interest of local people. A key finding is that the lack of uptake is due to a gap between this model's actual and perceived benefits. The report concludes this gap may be reduced by encouraging meaningful participation by local people in construction-technology decisions. However, a bigger issue in this and similar situations is the social-justice aspect of introducing alternative technologies in disadvantaged communities when such interventions foster dependence instead of independence.

An earthquake measuring 7.7 magnitude on the Richter scale occurred at 04:17am on February 6, 2023 in the Pazarcık district of Kahramanmaraş province Turkey. In the hours following the 7.7 magnitude event in Kahramanmaraş, a second 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck the region and a third 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck Gaziantep, causing extensive damage and death. A total of ten provinces directly experienced the earthquake, including Kahramanmaraş, Hatay, Gaziantep, Osmaniye, Malatya, Adana, Diyarbakır, Şanlıurfa, Adıyaman, and Kilis. The official figures indicate 31,643 people were killed, 80,278 were injured, and 6,444 buildings were destroyed within seven days of the earthquakes (as of 12:00pm/noon on Monday, February 13th). The area affected by the earthquake has been officially declared to be 500km in diameter. This report primarily relies on observations made by pioneer Emergency Physicians (EPs) who went to the disaster areas shortly after the first earthquake (in the early stages of the disaster). According to their observations: (1) Due to winter conditions, there were transportation problems and a shortage of personnel reaching disaster areas on the first day after the disaster; (2) On the second day of the disaster, health equipment was in short supply; (3) As of the third day, health workers were unprepared in terms of knowledge and experience for the disaster; and (4) The subsequent deployment of health personnel to the disaster area was uncoordinated and unplanned on the following days, which resulted in the health personnel working there not being able to meet even their basic needs (such as food, heating, and shelter). During the first week, coordination was most frequently reported as the most significant problem.