While our era of constant crisis demands stronger social and political engagement, architecture has been largely characterized by a lack of strong positions during the last decades. But more recently, one can again observe attitudes that claim to address architecture and urbanism as more engaged with the social and political effects of global capitalism. Against the liberal 'anything goes' and the revival of architectural autonomy, these attitudes believe less in the possibility for even the most experimental architectural object to have a changing effect on society. Their approaches instead vary from activism to the construction of new critical narratives. But how do these attitudes emancipate themselves from capitalism and to what extent are they able to take into account the complexities of the sociopolitical, economical, ecological, and cultural aspects of the production of space? This book relays a passionate debate between some of the most outstanding theoreticians and eloquent protagonists of this new attitude, leaving us with an overview of such postulated ambitions. A debate with Anne-Julchen Bernhardt, Arno Brandlhuber, Gilles Delalex, Manuel Gausa, Rania Ghosn &vEl Hadi Jazairy, Adrian Lahoud, Bart Lootsma, Markus Miessen, Can Onaner, Laurent Stalder, Peter Swinnen, Pelin Tan, Milica Topalovic, Stephan Truby, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, and Paola Vigano.

How we deal with land has far-reaching implications for architecture and urban development. The last decade has seen a dramatic rise in the privatization of urban land and in speculation. Many European cities that today find themselves under extreme development pressure have virtually no land left to build on. In view of the acute housing shortage, the question of who owns the land is therefore more relevant than ever: To what extent are we able to treat the land as a common good and guard it from the excesses of capitalism? After a number of specialist journals have already addressed the land property issue, this book aims to dig deeper by providing a historical overview spanning an arc from Henry George to the present day. Interviews with stakeholders in global models provide insights into the current handling of the land issue. The book presents outstanding projects based on either a legal or spatial distribution of land and thus makes a valuable contribution to the current discussion on sustainable land policy.