Nikolina Bobic is an academic and an architect. After completing her PhD in Architecture at the University of Sydney (Australia), she moved to the UK and is now based at the University of Plymouth. Apart from her extensive experience in teaching in Australia, Hong Kong and the UK, Bobic has also given lectures in the Netherlands and New Zealand. Engaging with the two disciplines in which she is trained, architecture and sociology, her research addresses the intersections of power, politics, and space in their oppressive and liberatory mechanisms. Bobic is the author of Balkanization and Global Politics: Remaking Cities and Architecture (Routledge, 2019), and in 2020 she coedited Interstices: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts thematic issue 20 'Political Matters'.

Farzaneh Haghighi is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the School of Architecture and Planning, The University of Auckland, New Zealand. She holds a PhD in Architecture from The University of Sydney, Australia. Her research is concerned with the intersection of political philosophy, architecture and urbanism, and her first book, Is the Tehran Bazaar Dead? Foucault, Politics, and Architecture, was published in 2018. Her research seeks new avenues to enrich our creative analysis of complex built environments through investigating the implications of critical and cultural theory for architectural knowledge.

PART I: Introduction

1. Spatialization of oppression: Contemporary politics of architecture and the urban

NIKOLINA BOBIC & FARZANEH HAGHIGHI

PART II: Violence and War Machines

2. Introduction to violence and war machines

WILLIAM M. TAYLOR

3. The rise of zoöpolitics: On urbanism and warfare

LIEVEN DE CAUTER

4. 2015 Paris Terrorist Attack: A threat to urban life and territorial integrity

JOHN HANNA

5. Whose vision, which city? Planning and unseeing in urban Asia

REDENTO B. RECIO, ISHITA CHATTERJEE, LUFTUN NAHAR LATA & NEERAJ DANGOL

6. Architecture as Infrastructure: The spatial politics of extractivism

HÉLÈNE FRICHOT & SEPIDEH KARAMI

7. Manus prison: The brutality of offshore detention

DANIEL GRINCERI

PART III: Security and Borders

8. Introduction to security and borders

ANOMA PIERIS

9. Dialogic dilemmas: Citizen participation in built environment alterations in Malmö, Sweden

GUNNAR SANDIN

10. Regenerating Shanghai through urban spatial design? The limits to experimentalism and participation

YUNPENG ZHANG & WEILUN ZHANG

11. The city and the camp: Destabilizing a spatial-political dichotomy

IRIT KATZ

12. Architectures of motion at the US Mexico border

THOMAS NAIL

13. Belfast's 'peace walls': How the politics and policy of 1969-1971 shaped the city's contemporary 'interface areas'

JAMES O'LEARY

PART IV: Race, Identity and Ideology

14. Introduction to race, identity and ideology

STEPHEN F. GRAY & ANNE LIN

15. The Space of Labor - Racialization and ethnicization of Port Kembla, Australia

MIRJANA LOZANOVSKA

16. The Audit: Perils and possibilities for contesting oppression in the heritage landscape

CATHERINE D'IGNAZIO, WONYOUNG SO & NICOLE NTIM-ADDAE

17. The Persistent design-politics of race: Power and ideology in American public housing redevelopment

LAWRENCE VALE

18. The Socialist past is a foreign country: Mass housing and uses of heritage in contemporary Eastern Europe

MAROŠ KRIVÝ

19. Collectivity and privacy in housing: Path dependencies and limited choices

TAHL KAMINER

PART V: Spectacle and the Screen

20. Introduction to spectacle and the screen

FRANCESCO PROTO

21. A 'Crisis' of indeterminacy in the architectural photograph: Architectural spectacle and everyday life in the photography of Lacaton & Vassal's Coutras House

ROBIN WILSON

22. Mediated spectacles: Urban representation and far-right propaganda in crisis Athens

AIKATERINI ANTONOPOULOU

23. Street protest and its representations: Urban dissidence in Iran

FARZANEH HAGHIGHI

24. Western fantasy and tropical nightmare: Spectacular architecture and urban warfare in Rio

PEDRO FIORI ARANTES & CLÁUDIO REZENDE RIBEIRO

25. The political construction of Medellín's global image: Strategies of replacement, erasure and disconnection via urban and architectural interventions

CHRISTINA DELUCHI

PART VI: Mapping Landscapes and Big Data

26. Introduction to mapping landscapes and big data

ATE POORTHUIS

27. The socio-cultural construction of urban wasteland: Mapping of the Antwerp Southside

CECILIA FURLAN & MANOLA COLABIANCHI

28. Brownfields as climate colonialism: Land reuse and development divides

SHILOH KRUPAR

29. The bomb, the circle and the drawing undone

ENDRIANA AUDISHO & FRANCESCA HUGHES

30. Infrastructures of urban simulation: Digital twins, virtual humans and synthetic populations

FARZIN LOTFI-JAM

31. Posthuman urbanism: datafication, algorithmic governance, and Covid-19

IGNAS KALPOKAS

PART VII: CONCLUSION

32. Intermission: Critical mapping of spatial politics and aesthetics

STEPHEN WALKER