When Urbanization Comes to Ground

‘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.