Blog

Kowloon Walled City as de jure retrospective: digitising and mythologising statelessness

Posted by Majorca Bateman-Coe on 2026-03-04

Firstly, to make a critical Marxist position clear: it is undeniably a defining feature of the contemporary commodity form and the popular bourgeois ideology and epistemological framework to systematically break and fragment the totality of urban experiences into disconnected and ‘unhistorical’ or even ‘ahistorical’ pieces. Therefore, the Kowloon Walled City (1898-1994) was not a cyberpunk [...]

Short Notes on Architecture and Late-Stage Capitalism

Posted by Michael Frush on 2026-01-22

Architecture no longer exists as an autonomous discipline concerned only with buildings. Frankly, it hasn’t for some time. Architecture is deeply entangled with politics, economics, media, and technology, all of which shape how we experience the world today. In the 21st century, architecture becomes less about built objects and more about how the built environment helps us read contemporary [...]

Cities Remember What We Try to Forget

Posted by Santosh Kumar Ketham on 2025-12-04

There’s a sound beneath every city, a kind of heartbeat we pretend not to hear. It hums through pavement cracks and lingers in dust swept from demolished doorways. We call it progress when the skyline rises. But I keep wondering: progress for whom, and at what cost? While editing this special issue of Socio-Cultural Theory, I wasn’t just reviewing articles. I was walking through a chorus of [...]

Getting Black Back into the Story: Why Black People Mattered at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Posted by Scott Hancock on 2025-12-03

Most Sundays, especially when the weather is pleasant, I go for long walks on a bucolic, peaceful landscape, whose gently rolling hills and farms are marked off by wood split-rail fences. The landscape looks like it could have been pulled straight out of mid-nineteenth century rural United States. And that’s because in many respects it was: the nearly 2500 hectares surrounding the small town of [...]

Reading Cemeteries as Urban Interiors: New York City and Istanbul in Dialogue

Posted by Alison B. Snyder and V. Şafak Uysal on 2025-10-14

What happens when two urban walkers (and interior design professors) – one in Istanbul, one in New York City – start visiting cemeteries, not to mourn but simply to walk, observe, and listen? Our awareness and approaches began to shift as we studied our interests. As designers, we pushed ourselves to consider the subject of death and burial well beyond typical aspects of mourning or visiting the [...]

The housing estate: novel solution or part of a longer history?

Posted by Julian Williams on 2025-08-07

The 2025 Netflix mini-series Too Much sees Jessica, played by Morgan Slater, relocate to London. To her surprise, the salubrious-sounding ‘Hoxton Grove Estate’ with hoped-for ‘estate grounds, verdant gardens, archways, some real Merchant Ivory-type shit’ turns out to be (irl) the St Peter’s Estate, Hackney Road, London, commissioned in 1962 and completed in 1967 for Tower Hamlets Borough Council. [...]

A Return to Connected Living: Lessons from Collective Housing co-designed with Indigenous Communities in Aotearoa New Zealand and Chile

Posted by Priscila Besen on 2025-07-18

It is said that “it takes a village to raise a child.” But in today’s world, that village is increasingly hard to find. A bird’s-eye view of our modern suburbs reveals a landscape of isolated nuclear families, each tucked away in their own box. Inside these homes are children growing up alone, backyards with trampolines and pools that rarely see shared laughter, dogs longing for companionship, [...]

What Makes a City Liveable? Rethinking Housing around the world

Posted by Robert Amato Lastman and Jonas E Andersson on 2025-07-18

Housing is fundamental for being and living, but is restrained by availability and usefulness, and ultimately a product of demand and supply. So, what does living well in today’s cities entail? That’s the fundamental question at the centre of this special edition for liveable cities, where the phenomenon of housing is explored not just as a structure, but as a habitat resulting from social, [...]

How building and planning codes may be corroborating with the affordable housing crisis

Posted by Debora Verniz, José P. Duarte, Mário Márcio Queiroz on 2025-07-16

Affordable housing is one of the most pressing challenges in cities worldwide, and Brazil is no exception. In our paper, we explore how planning and building codes impact the improvement of informal housing settlements, focusing on a Brazilian example, the Santa Marta favela in Rio de Janeiro. Favelas are self-constructed neighbourhoods that developed in response to Brazil’s housing shortage. [...]

Nostalgia through Cinematic Space: The case of Kung fu Hustle

Posted by Xiaoyu Chen on 2025-04-02

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, a Hong Kong film released last year, achieved extraordinary popularity and box-office success. This action film, which revolves around gang conflicts in the Kowloon Walled City—a lower-class enclave in 1980s Hong Kong—prompts us to recognize that cultural nostalgia for Hong Kong’s past persists as an undiminished collective sentiment within Sinophone [...]

The convergence of tradition and contemporary

Posted by Xiaoli Liu on 2025-03-07

Source: drawing by author For many non-Western countries, it is crucial to consider how to preserve their traditional culture while embracing globalization. However, the integration of the two should not be a simple matter of pasting each other together, but should connect tradition to the everyday lives of contemporary people. The traditional Chinese concept of space emphasizes the individual’s [...]

Trade, Tension, and Transformation: A Century of Change in Xiamen Bund

Posted by Ruoqi Yu on 2025-02-04

Today, many former treaty ports have repurposed their historical waterfronts to project a modern, globally connected image. But how did foreign intervention and commercial expansion shape the modernization of the Bund in these port cities? In the Chinese context, major cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai often take centre stage. In contrast, Xiamen—a key maritime hub in southeast China and one of [...]

Co-Sharing a Heritage Site as a Living Memorial – the story of Tyneham in Dorset

Posted by Milena Metalkova-Markova on 2024-12-03

My paper depicts the story of Tyneham village in Dorset, UK, whose population was displaced to other areas nearby before WWII, as the site was selected to become an active tank shooting ground by the UK Ministry of Defence. Intended as a temporary relocation of the residents, in reality they were never allowed to return to their village and nowadays village settlement’ ruins, a school and a [...]

The facts on the ground: Why we should be talking about Austria’s Stolpersteine

Posted by Carina Siegl on 2024-11-06

Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) are small, inconspicuous stones inserted into the ground, yet they belong to the largest and best-known memorial project worldwide: to this day, there are more than 100,000 ‘stumbling stones’ in 31 countries. Each stone is dedicated to an individual victim of the Holocaust, carrying their name, date and place of death or arrest by National Socialist perpetrators, [...]

Architecture_MPS – Now indexed in SCOPUS

Posted by Architecture_MPS Editorial Office on 2024-10-02

Following a rigorous evaluation process, Architecture_MPS is pleased to announce it has been accepted for indexing in SCOPUS. Researchers publishing in the journal will now be indexed automatically in SCOPUS, in addition to the list of other indexers, including the Web of Science. The official journal of the international research organization, Architecture, Media, Politics, Society (AMPS), [...]