In light of the increasing disengagement between urban and rural areas, this book address the interdependency of cities with ecological and technological processes outside the purview of traditional urban planning. It compiles a huge amount of essays in regards to the most important topics that cities must address today, such as their connection with global data networks, ecological cycles of resources which supersede the traditional boundaries of urbanism. For this reason, it frames investigation of contemporary urbanism on nine imminent commons grouping the urban commons into resources and technologies lead us to the arcane classification of natural resources: air, water, fire, and earth, the four elements of ancient cosmologies; and five basic technological commons based on expanded human capacities: sensing, communicating, moving, making, and recycling.
Alejandro Zaera-Polo is an award-winning architect and a tenured professor at Princeton University. His career has consistently merged the practice of architecture with continued theoretical and academic engagement. He was trained at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (Hons), and holds a Master in Architecture from the Harvard GSD (with Distinction). He work...