The Tôkaidô Road offers a comparative study of the Tôkaidô road's representations during the Edo (1600-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) eras. Throughout the Edo era, the Tôkaidô highway was the most important route of Japan and transportation was confined to foot travel. In 1889, the Tôkaidô Railway was established, at first paralleling and eventually almost eliminating the use of the highway. During both periods, the Tôkaidô was a popular topic of representation and was depicted in a ...

Designing the Olympics claims that the Olympic Games provide opportunities to reflect on the relationship between design, national identity, and citizenship. The "Olympic design milieu" fans out from the construction of the Olympic city and the creation of emblems, mascots, and ceremonies, to the consumption, interpretation, and appropriation of Olympic artifacts from their conception to their afterlife. Besides products that try to achieve consensus and induce civic pride, the "O...

The gloomy prospect of climate change and ecosystems' collapse calls for an urgent rethinking of all aspects of our life: how we work, produce, eat, spend, take care of each other, relate to nature, and organize our societies.Prefigurative initiatives are attracting a growing amount of attention from scholars and activists precisely because they are envisioning alternative futures by embodying radically different ways of living in the present.Thanks to the contribution of l...

Design, Displacement, Migration: Spatial and Material Histories gathers a collection of scholarly and creative voices—spanning design, art, and architectural history; design studies; curation; poetry; activism; and social sciences––to interrogate the intersections of design and displacement.The contributors foreground objects, spaces, visual, and material practices and consider design’s role in the empire, the state, and various colonizing regimes in controlling the mass m...

This book examines, through an interdisciplinary lens, the relationship between political dissent and processes of designing.In the past twenty years, theorists of social movements have noted a diversity of visual and performative manifestations taking place in protest, while the fields of design, broadly defined, have been characterized by a growing interest in activism. The book’s premise stems from the recognition that material engagement and artifacts have the capacity to artic...

Travel, Space, Architecture defines a new theoretical territory in architectural and urban scholarship that frames the processes of spatial production through the notion of travel. By aligning architectural thinking with current critical theory debates, this book explores whether dissociating culture from place and identity, and detaching the idea of architecture from both, can reframe our understanding of spatial and architectural practices. The book presents seventeen key case studies fr...