Historically, many architects, planners, and urban designers solicit idealistic depictions of a controllable urban environment made from highly regulated geometrical organizations and systematically defined processes. Rather than working as urban "designers" who set out to control and implant external processes, we shift our approach to that of urban "detectives," who set out to chase the city. Charged with approaching the city more responsively, we investigate what we do not know, allowing the city to direct our work. As urban detectives, we have the ability to interrogate and respond to the elaborate patterns emerging from self-generated, internalized urban interactions. Chasing the City asks what are the current design trends shaping how we, first, understand the cities of today to, then, produce informed decisions on the continuously undefined evolving city of tomorrow. Intentionally, the work here does not adhere to rudimentary notions of supposed singularities or rely upon past generations of idealistic utopian models. Rather, Chasing the City delineates current models of urban investigation that seek to respond to the nature of cities and develop heretofore-urban strategies as concurrently negotiated future urbanism. This edited volume provides a collection of innovative design research projects based on shared notions of Chasing the City through three bodies of strategic frameworks: (1) Mapping, (2) Resource, and (3) Typology. This structure ultimately allows readers, as fellow urban detectives, access to exploratory tools and methods of detection that accumulate from our environs, both practical and projective in our chase of the city.

Historically, many architects, planners, and urban designers solicit idealistic depictions of a controllable urban environment made from highly regulated geometrical organizations and systematically defined processes. Rather than working as urban "designers" who set out to control and implant external processes, we shift our approach to that of urban "detectives," who set out to chase the city. Charged with approaching the city more responsively, we investigate what we do not know, allowing the city to direct our work. As urban detectives, we have the ability to interrogate and respond to the elaborate patterns emerging from self-generated, internalized urban interactions. Chasing the City asks what are the current design trends shaping how we, first, understand the cities of today to, then, produce informed decisions on the continuously undefined evolving city of tomorrow. Intentionally, the work here does not adhere to rudimentary notions of supposed singularities or rely upon past generations of idealistic utopian models. Rather, Chasing the City delineates current models of urban investigation that seek to respond to the nature of cities and develop heretofore-urban strategies as concurrently negotiated future urbanism. This edited volume provides a collection of innovative design research projects based on shared notions of Chasing the City through three bodies of strategic frameworks: (1) Mapping, (2) Resource, and (3) Typology. This structure ultimately allows readers, as fellow urban detectives, access to exploratory tools and methods of detection that accumulate from our environs, both practical and projective in our chase of the city.

Technical lands are spaces united by their "exceptional" status-their remote locations, delimited boundaries, secured accessibility, and vigilant management. Designating land as "technical" is thus a political act. Doing so entails dividing, marginalizing, and rendering portions of the Earth inaccessible and invisible. An anti-visuality of technical lands enables forms of hypervisibility and surveillance through the rhetorical veil of technology. Including the political and physical boundaries, technical lands are used in highly aestheticized geographies to resist debate surrounding production and governance. These critical sites and spaces range from disaster exclusion and demilitarized zones to prison yards, industrial extraction sites, airports, and spaceports. The identification and instrumentalization of technical lands have increased in scale and complexity since the rise of neoliberalization. Yet, the precise theoretical contours that define these geographies remain unclear. Technical Lands: A Critical Primer brings together authors from a diverse array of disciplines, geographies, and epistemologies to interrogate and theorize the meaning and increasing significance of technical lands.