An-other City   Henrik Valeur

 

The modern city is the most significant expression of modern (Western) culture, which has its roots in the sedentary’s ideals of material prosperity and private property rights. And in the notion that nature can be controlled. It is this culture that engenders the extreme global inequality and the catastrophic destruction of nature. Does the culture that creates the problems also have the answers? The architect is the sedentary’s invention. Do architects have any credible answers?

 

The book is a combined, edited, and slightly rewritten English-language version of two small Danish debate books: En anden by (2021) and En anden by 2 (2023). It is published on the occasion of the UIA World Congress of Architects in Copenhagen in 2023 and the city being named the World Capital of Architecture the same year. The first book followed from a course on ‘An-other City’ (En anden by) at the People’s University – an initiative for critical, creative reflection and action among activists and anarchists, dissidents and dreamers. The intention of the course was to strengthen the resistance against the developer-driven and technocratically managed urban development, and to develop alternatives to it, by exploring possibilities for a more spontaneous and self-organized form of urban development, based on the theory of ‘development urbanism’.