Title Details

Jon Goodbun is a writer, architectural/urban/design practitioner and academic. He is based at the School of Architecture and the Built Environment at the University of Westminster, where he teaches design, theory and is engaged in research. He is also a regular visiting tutor/critic at other schools, recently including the AA, RCA, Greenwich, UCA Canterbury, Brighton and the Bartlett.

Jeremy Till is Dean of the School of Architecture and the Built Environment at the the University of Westminster and Professor of Architecture and Head of the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. He is also well-known for his work as an architect with his partner Sarah Wigglesworth with whom he designed the `seminal house and office, 9 Stock Orchard Street, (The Straw House and Quilted Office) which has received extensive international attention and received numerous awards, including the prestigious RIBA Sustainability Prize.

Deljana Iossifova is an architect at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and holds a PhD in Social Engineering (Public Policy Design) from Tokyo Institute of Technology. She is currently an Our Common Future Fellow (Volkswagen Foundation) and Postdoctoral Fellow (Sustainable Urban Futures) at UNU-IAS.

6 About the Guest Editors
Jon Goodbun with Jeremy Till and Deljana Iossifova

8 Introduction
Themes of Scarcity
Jon Goodbun, Jeremy Till and Deljana Iossifova

16 Scarcity and Abundance: Urban Agriculture in Cuba and the US
André Viljoen and Katrin Bohn

22 Cities, Natures and the Political Imaginary
Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw

28 Architecture and Relational Resources: Towards a New Materialist Practice
Jon Goodbun and Karin Jaschke

34 Visualising Ecological Literacy
Jody Boehnert

38 Invisible Agency
Jeremy Till and Tatjana Schneider

44 Systemic Diagramming: An Approach to Decoding Urban Ecologies
Ulysses Sengupta and Deljana Iossifova

52 Flexibility and Ecological Planning: Gregory Bateson on Urbanism
Jon Goodbun

56 Error-Friendliness: How to Deal with the Future Scarcest Resource: The Environmental, Social, Economic Security. That is, How to Design Resilient Socio-Technical Systems
Ezio Manzini

66 Anthropocene Nights
Benedict Singleton

72 Peak Oil and Transition Towns
Rob Hopkins

78 Everything We Need: Scarcity, Scale, Hyperobjects
Timothy Morton

82 Investing in the Ground: Reflections on Scarcity, Remediation and Obdurate Form
Douglas Spencer

88 Almost All Right: Vienna’s Social Housing Provision
Andreas Rumpfhuber, Michael Klein and Georg Kolmayr

94 Icelandic Initiatives
Arna Mathiesen

100 Beyond the Scarcities of Affluence: An ‘Alternative Hedonist’ Approach
Kate Soper

102 New York City (Steady) State
Michael Sorkin

110 No Frills and Bare Life: Cheapness and Democracy
Alejandro Zaera-Polo

114 Austeria: City of Minimum Consumption
Daliana Suryawinata and Winy Maas

118 Mapping in Hackney Wick and Fish Island: Observation is Proposition
Liza Fior

122 Norway Was Never So Poor!
Edward Robbins, Christian Hermansen Cordua and Barbara E Ascher

130 The Collision of Scarcity and Expendability in Architectural Culture of the 1960s and 1970s
Steve Parnell

136 counterpoint Is Sustainability Just Another ‘Ism’?
Hattie Hartman

141 Contributors