Pro qm is a thematic bookstore in Berlin-Mitte, founded in 1999. The emphasis is on the urban and its links to politics, pop culture, economic critique, architecture, design, art, and related issues. The bookshop holds frequent events at its location and contributes to exhibitions and conferences. Since its foundation Pro qm has established itself internationally as a specialised bookstore and venue for interdisciplinary debates concerning the city, architectural theory and artistic practice.
If You Lived Here.
The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism.
A Project by Martha Rosler.
Edited by Brian Wallis.
Paperback, 312 pp., 22.2 x 15 cm
ISBN-10: 1565844988
New Press, 1998
In the second of our occasional series of guest book reviews, the specialists at Berlin bookstore Pro qm have opened up their treasure chest of all-time favourites. Unsurprisingly for a store loaded with historical and theoretical tomes on urbanism, their selection includes some must-reads in politically aware planning theory, yet they’ve also included a website – hey, the internet is no threat to paper: just a means to print your own books!
If You Lived Here is a publication that accompanied a series of events and exhibitions in New York organised by Martha Rosler in 1989. It brought together artists, activists, planners, scientists, residents and neighbours, documenting the crisis in New York’s housing market in the late 1980s, while also presenting a broad range of analysis and strategies to counteract the situation. Dealing with town planning, gentrification, housing and homelessness, this a surefire classic on how artists engage in social urban topics, including the ambivalent relationship between art, artists, and processes of gentrification – and a history of homelessness in the US to boot.
Let’s Re-make! : Access to Tools
(formerly known as The Library of Radiant Optimism)
by Bonnie Fortune and Brett Bloom
Let’s Re-make! is a website run by Bonnie Fortune and Brett Bloom that serves as an archive for countercultural books from the late 60s and early 70s. You’ll find seminal publications like How To Build Your Own Living Structures (1974), Garbage Housing (1975) by Martin Pawley, and Nomadic Furniture (1973) by Victor Papanek. As they explain, all the publications “shared the aesthetic and ethics of self-publication and self-education” and document everything from “communal living spaces and growing your own organic garden to early sustainable design initiatives and home-birthing... [paving] the way for today’s environmental movement and sustainable design culture.” There’s nothing to add… let’s re-make!
After the Planners
by Robert Goodman
Paperback, 272pp., 19.6 x 12.8 cm
ISBN-10: 0140215689
Penguin Books, New York, 1972
When he wrote After the Planners, advocacy planner Robert Goodman had spent years fighting official plans to revitalise the city of Boston via eight-lane highways cutting through existing neighbourhoods, which would cause thousands to lose their homes. Goodman, working with the independent Urban Planning Aid group, helped develop alternative planning methods that would let concerned people participate. Goodman believed planners needed to fundamentally change the way they understood their profession, comparing their current role to that of the police or military. The strategy of “guerilla architecture” that he proposed in this book was intended to sharpen people’s consciousness of their own power to deal with their (urban) surroundings, and makes this book useful and surprisingly contemporary.
Lucius Burckhardt Writings
Rethinking Man-made Environments: Politics, Landscape & Design
Edited by Jesko Fezer and Marin Schmitz
Birkhauser/Springer, 2012
Paperback, 288 pages, 19 x 13.2 cm
ISBN-10: 3709112567
This first English translation of Lucius Burckhardt’s key essays provides an introduction to the timeless thinking of the Swiss political economist, sociologist, art historian, planning theorist — and founding father of the science of strollology (strolling)! Burckhardt (1925–2003) was a pioneer of interdisciplinary analysis of the human-made environment. He was bold: claiming design should be invisible; exasperating: asking why landscape is beautiful; egalitarian: addressing the “livability” of everyday life; provocative: focusing on concepts like “the night” and “dirt”; rebellious: making a science out of taking a stroll; and far-sighted: claiming that care and maintenance are destructive.
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