When Urbanization Comes To Ground is a collaborative research project
between the Brooklyn-based architecture studio, CAZA, and think tank,
SURBA, an urban research collective spearheaded by Carlos Arnaiz and
Peter Rowe. Drawing upon case studies including projects in China,
Colombia, and the Philippines, this book works across place, time, and
culture to offer an allegorical journey into urbanization at large. When
Urbanization Comes To Ground is a loosely congregated collection of
essays that reflect an aggregation of encounters with urban
circumstances - physical and immaterial, and structural and affective.
From Robots, Utilidors, and a Brave New World to A Third Way Towards
Metropolitanism and Tagging Thingness and Scale, this publication
questions the role of architecture and its related disciplines in the
wake of the master plan. It searches for a field guide to everyday urban
life by offering palpable views into the network of relations that
characterize this evolving social ecosystem. Through their collective
global research projects CAZA and SURBA frame, abstract, poeticize, and
render the city as a historical process, a future destination, a
production cycle, and a layered landscape of overlapping phenomena. When
Urbanization Comes To Ground does not attempt to cast the city in any
one particular ideology, nor does it aim to essentialize or distill
urban experience. Instead, this book oscillates from one rendering of
urbanization to another, alternating scales and media in order to
present the topic of the city and its encapsulated processes through the
same phenomena that inform it.
