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        Contesting the Christmas Tree    Re-Presenting  the Representational Tree       Samuel Maddox (MDes ULE ’19)       

  

    

       

         

           
               
             

             
             

           

         

        
         
           

            
                https://patch.com/img/cdn/users/2262937/2012/11/T800x600/580a73b08c13b4f18c22acb1d4339e87.jpg?width=720 .     
            

            
               If you plan on buying a Christmas tree this year, you should probably consider lowering your expectations and raising your budget. Just last year, Christmas trees were not only harder to find, they were also the most expensive that they had been in a decade. The average price of these trees has more than doubled since 2008. This precipitous rise in the market value of the Christmas tree was—and continues this year to be—a lingering effect of the Great Recession.1 After 2008, tree sales were so bad that Oregon, the largest supplier of Christmas trees in the US, saw over one third of its growers leave the business between 2010 and 2015, resulting in a decrease in newly planted trees from 6.4 to 4.7 million, a loss of more than 26%.2 Even though national economic tides have seemingly now turned, Christmas consumers are only just now feeling the effects of this almost decade-old economic decline due to the eight-to-twelve-year growth cycle of the tree.3 The delayed market impact of this seasonal commodity’s scarcity reveals the oft-taken-for-granted Christmas tree as more than mere decoration but as a contemporary representation of the socioecological dynamics that lie at the very origin of western holiday practices, ideas like when to sow, when to harvest, and when to save.  This urban metabolic reading of the Christmas tree serves as an entrée to problematizing the seasonally ubiquitous tree as a multivalent symbol not only subject to the fluctuations of markets but also with more discreet, hegemonic cultural constructs. Through a historical semiotic analysis of the Christmas tree (hereafter, “the Tree”), interrogating it as Saussurean signifier, the tree can be broken down and understand afresh as not just a holiday decoration but as a tool, designed and redesigned for control.4 The Tree exists at different periods in time as index, symbol, and icon. In its earliest iterations, the Tree was perhaps not even yet a true tree but instead the mere presence of evergreen plant matter at the Roman feasts of Saturnalia and Kalends as well as the Germanic festival of Yule. In these earliest of instances, the presence of the proto-Tree as evergreen in midst of deep, dark winter was an indexical signification that Spring would return.5 After the advance of Christianity in Europe and the widescale cooptation of pagan ritual, the Tree began to become a symbol by signifying religious, national, and familial ideologies.6 From its modern origins as the centerpiece in the Christian “mystery plays” of medieval Germany, the Tree eventually made its way into Victorian England in 1848 through the British royal family. Introduced by Prince Albert, a German himself, the image of the family gathered about the tree was published and widely disseminated throughout Britain.7 This domestic identity of the Tree was of particular importance in the early to mid-1800’s when the effects of the fully-matured English Industrial Revolution were finally being widely felt, resulting in economic instability from labor strikes on the one hand and the simultaneous emergence of a consumer-based, middleclass economy on the other.8 The Tree, therefore, was an important symbol, not only of family, but of a bygone era of handcraftsmanship, childish folklore, and darkness enshrouded mystery typical of the heavily-forested and fairytale-rich land of Germany, a region that wouldn’t see its own industrial wave for another twenty years.9  Of course, the Tree in the context of the US has been no less an instrument of capitalist ideology than its European predecessors. The last form of signification—and one we are all too familiar with—is the icon, the image of the thing as itself.10 The Tree as icon is perhaps best observed today in advertising. One need only think of the seasonal aisle lined with sugary, prepackaged snacks emblazoned with the Tree or even manufactured (usually very poorly) in its shape. The iconographic nature of the Tree is the cheaper, simpler employment of the Tree as signifier to boost sales through a basely nostalgic appeal.  The Tree not only means a change of season is coming when it makes its appearance each year at Christmas tree stands and in homes, malls, and plazas almost indexically, but it marks time on a grander scale representing where we’ve been societally, how we’ve changed, and where were going. The Tree is a canary in a coalmine as it is constantly reconstructed and made in the image of the moment through the lens of the past. Think of the almost space-age silver trees of the middle of the 20th century or the presumably ecologically-friendly rentable potted Trees of today. There is constraint in the form and image of the tree, but there is also immense creativity and thus invention and agency. The tree comes to represent the underlying consciousness of the maker—as a symbol of not only the collective but the individual, the tree has become a conduit of identity and consensus.11 It is all of these identities, fluctuating and changing as a sign of time passing. The Tree does work. It is a kind of infrastructure that embodies, microcosmically, the environments we create and those we contend with and symbolizes the ideals we value. The question going forward is how to move beyond reading the Christmas tree as it exists now—as a simulacral representation—and deploy it, hack it, or even re-represent it to facilitate the futures we most need.   
            

            

           
         
        

       

    

  


      Bibliography:     Hsu, Tiffany. “Why You’ll Probably Pay More for Your Christmas Tree this Year.”  New York Times,  Nov. 30, 2017. Accessed 05/12/2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/business/christmas-tree-shortage-recession.html?_r=0.    “GWD: US to Face Major Christmas Tree Shortages Until ‘At Least 2025’ | Canadian Growers Set to Fill the Gap."  GWD Forestry . Accessed 05/10/2018. https://gwdforestry.com/news/2017/07/31/us-to-face-major-christmas-tree-shortages-until-at-least-2025-canadian-growers-set-to-fill-the-gap/.    Limbach, Elizabeth. “The Christmas-Tree Shortage Could Last for Years.”  The Atlantic,  Dec 12, 2017. Accessed 05/10/2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/christmas-trees-more-expensive-shortage/548153/.    Saussure, Ferdinand de, et al., 2011.  Course in General Linguistics ., S.l. pp 66-70.    Forbes, Bruce David. 2015.  America's Favorite Holidays: Candid Histories . Oakland, California: University of California Press, pp 14-17.    Peirce, Charles S. & Buchler, Justus, 1955.  Philosophical writings of Peirce , New York: Dover Publications, pp 104-15.    Forbes, Bruce David. 2015.  America's Favorite Holidays: Candid Histories . Oakland, California: University of California Press, pp 32-34.    Whiteley, Sheila, 2008.  Christmas, Ideology and Popular Culture . Edinburgh University Press, pp 98-99.    Veblen, Thorstein. 1915.  Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution . Harvard Social History/business Preservation Microfilm Project. Project 2a; 22050. New York, London, Macmillan & Co., Ltd.: Macmillan Company. Web. Accessed 05/09/2018. http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/feier37.htm, pp 168-80.    Peirce, Charles S. & Buchler, Justus, 1955.  Philosophical writings of Peirce , New York: Dover Publications, pp 104-07.    Levere, Jane. 2013. “Wisconsin Museum Exhibits Space-Age Aluminum Christmas Trees.”  Lifestyle . Accessed 05/10/2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/janelevere/2013/12/30/wisconsin-museum-exhibits-space-age-aluminum-christmas-trees/#63ab394848e4.; Platt, John. “A new holiday trend: Renting Christmas trees.”  Mother Nature Network . Accessed 05/13/2018. https://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/a-new-holiday-trend-renting-christmas-trees.                    

Contesting the Christmas Tree

Samuel Maddox (MDes ULE ’19)

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UD IDJanuary 15, 2019Comment
         You, Me, and  the NSA    Mark D. Heller (MLA I-MUP ‘19)     

  

    

       

         

           
               
             

             
             

           

         

        
         
           

            
               Paglen, T. (2010). They watch the moon.     
            

            
               The NSA is listening. To you, to me,  to entire countries at a time . Through its tapping, intercepting, recording, and querying, the NSA is eroding our capacity to freely search, communicate, and even move throughout space. It is through these mediums we signal our curiosities, fears, hopes, and passions – the very sentiments that make us human. At risk, under a government with limitless power to surveil, is our humanity.  Recent revelations regarding illegal, warrantless NSA spying programs such as ECHELON, PRISM, and BOUNDLESSINFORMANT have made unambiguous this bleak phenomenon. And while the ubiquity and omniscience of the United States’ surveillance state is indisputable, disconnected to our understanding are the built infrastructures enabling these programs, and how our physical and digital trails relate spatially to these satellites, listening stations, switch operators, and fiberoptic cables. To effectively protest or disrupt the NSA’s capabilities, and to protect ourselves from a government body whose stated mission is to “collect it all,” we must first deconstruct and draw these networks. A shadow organization’s undoing is illumination.  Enter the designer. We wait not for irresolute legislative nudges, but instead weaponize our knowledge of multispectral sensors, satellite orbit paths, and radio wave attenuation through vegetative and building materials to confound these infrastructures of mass surveillance. The systems-oriented representational agenda of landscape architects and urban designers positions us to disentangle the NSA’s highly secretive and convoluted networks, and in doing so exploit technological gaps so as to proffer moments of anonymity and reprieve.  Despite the U.S. government’s prowess in tapping fiberoptic cables, intercepting satellite transmissions, and imaging the Earth at sub-one-meter resolution, our ability to protect ourselves nevertheless returns to factors within designers’ purview, such as radio wave transmission and imaging techniques. To the former, before our data is transmitted to compromised fiberoptic cables, it takes the forms of radio waves, which can be attenuated via specific building materials, such as metal, concrete, and ceramic, as well as water. Certain vegetative species carry more water, which combined with high canopy density, can serve to sufficiently weaken radio signals. GPS is a product of 24 roving U.S. Air Force satellites, and direct access to four at any given moment is required to locate one’s position. Targeted landforming and the aforementioned use of materials can strategically shelter our location from these satellites. With respect to imaging, we are well-versed in the knowledge the Earth is not being photographed, but rather sensed along particular wavelengths with multispectral sensors and then processed and composited computationally. We can thus employ highly specific forms of camouflage given the understanding that heat and other refractive elements can be crucial in obfuscating our form and activities.  In the pursuit for privacy, we need not construct a Faraday cage to encompass the whole earth or hide away in the farthest reaches of the civilization. We can, however, deconstruct the very methods being used against us in service of what designers have always done: amplify the elements of a societal or administrative failure and ameliorate through grounded intervention. Relying on this process is the key to protecting our civil liberties and, ultimately, maintaining our humanity.   
            

            

           
         
        

       

    

  


      Bibliography:      Bamford, J. (2008).  The shadow factory: The ultra-secret NSA from 9/11 to the eavesdropping on America . New York, NY: Doubleday.    Devereaux, R., Greenwald, G., & Poitras, L. (2014, May 19). Data pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA is recording every cell phone call in the Bahamas.  The Intercept . Retrieved from https://theintercept.com/2014/05/19/data-pirates-caribbean-nsa-recording-every-cell-phone-call-bahamas/     Gallagher, R., & Moltke, H. (2018, June 25). The wiretap rooms: The NSA’s hidden spy hubs in eight U.S. cities.  The Intercept . Retrieved from https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hubs/    Greenwald, G. (2013, July 15). The crux of the NSA story in one phrase: 'collect it all'.  The Guardian . Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/15/crux-nsa-collect-it-all    Kurgan, L. (2013).  Close up at a distance: Mapping, technology & politics . New York, NY: Zone Books.    Poitras, L. (2016).  Astro noise: A survival guide for living under total surveillance . New Haven, NY: Yale University Press.                    

You, Me, and the NSA

Mark D. Heller (MLA I-MUP ‘19)

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UD IDJanuary 15, 2019Comment
        Is the Planner a Tastemaker?  The hypocrisy of planning: planners currently ‘envision’ speculative physical environments while hiding behind their profession’s perceived technocracy  Radu-Remus Macovei (MArch I And MUP ’20)     

  

    

       

         

           
               
             

             
             

           

         

        
         
           

            
                Richard Weinstein, Director of the Office of Planning and Development for Lower Manhattan within New York City’s Department of City Planning, presenting a new development project in Manhattan, 1972;      
            

            
               “The planner is not a tastemaker,” asserted Sara Myerson, Boston’s Director of Planning, in a roundtable discussion at the GSD’s Big City Planners program this past October 2018. In one concise and precise statement, Myerson diplomatically, yet vehemently rebutted the planner’s interference with the sensitive question of what the city ‘should’ physically look like.  In an interview in 2012, Amanda Burden, then Director of New York City’s Department of City Planning, was asked about the inclusion of the syntagm ‘superior design’ in its East Midtown Study, (wording discretely removed since the interview). She denied the use of the term ‘design’ in the Study and retorted: “It really can’t be subjective according to somebody’s taste or whim. This is too important to the city’s future, too important to the skyline.” [1]  In the context, developments deemed of a ‘superior design’ would have been rewarded with an FAR bonus.  Implicit in Burden’s and Myerson’s blunt statements are a total renunciation of any possible association with the values and beliefs of the  City Beautiful  movement that transformed America’s urban skylines and physical plans over the turn of the nineteenth century. In the name of ‘urban beautification,’ architect-planners, organized in private associations, proposed and implemented visions for the city which bore distinctively European-inspired architectural styles, notably of the Italian Renaissance and Greco-Roman Antiquity, in size, form and ornament for modern America’s civic centers.  While it is understandable why a disassociation with the  City Beautiful  movement and its undemocratic planning and stylistic preference is necessary, it is also difficult for zoning codes and resolutions to escape  prescribing  what the physical environment they are supposed to  plan  should look like.  The glossary of planning terms used by New York City’s Department of City Planning includes definitions that govern super-specific aspects of the city, including  street wall, street line, building height, parapet, sky exposure plane, building bulk, building envelope.    [2]     In this sense, while the glossary of terms presents a seemingly ‘neutral’, ‘objective’ and ‘technical’ position vis-à-vis urban design, many assumptions about what the city should look-like are implicit and by no means absolute. For example, New York City’s planning concept of the  street wall  as a continuous surface aligned with avenues and streets has produced an urban environment with accentuated deep perspectives. But who took ownership of this particular physical vision of the city? What if the assumption were of a setback in the street wall, not every 200- or 600-feet respectively (the dimensions of a standard Manhattan block), but, say, every 25-feet (the dimension of a standard Manhattan lot)? What if the deep perspectives of street  walls  were replaced by crenelated surfaces of street  curtains ? Would they constitute an equally valid assumption?  Another example is that of  building height  restrictions, often in the name of “character preservation,” an undefined term in the planning department’s glossary. In the Department of City Planning’s 2010 rezoning of Manhattan’s West and East Villages, building heights of 8- and 12-stories respectively were put in place. Burden stated that the rezoning would “ensure that the historic building stock along these streets is protected and that the residential community is no longer threatened by  out-of- character  commercial development.” [3]  However, building height is not a universal feature of neighborhood character and oftentimes parameters such as building materiality, the way a building meets the ground or its architectural style may be more defining of character.  A more extreme, yet illustrative example is New York City’s City Planning Commission’s evaluation of Jean Nouvel’s Tower Verre in 2009:  “[…] the Commission believes that the applicant has not made a convincing argument that the design of the tower’s top, with the uppermost 200 feet of the building, merits being in the zone of the Empire State Building’s iconic spire, making the building the second tallest building in New York City.  […] It appears that less attention has been paid to this portion of the building. In particular the commission is not satisfied with attempts at incorporating mechanical equipment into the tower top, which results in a tower top with a highly visible mechanical equipment.” [4]   This evaluation was followed by a building height limit that reduced Nouvel’s tower by 200 feet, a direct design restriction by the City’s planning bodies that would control the form of New York City’s skyline.  In this context, planning is inherently  visionary , but without claiming authorship of this vision. Perhaps, authorship is impossible in the greater administration of urban governance in the US, which fashions planners into public functionaries.  However,  given the profession’s nature to  prescribe  formal aspects of cities, planners are, even without necessarily wanting to be,  tastemakers.  In this sense, planners must take a position. They must either take ownership of their  tastemaking  powers or concede to ‘professional’ design bodies. The middle-ground planners currently occupy, forced to regulate physical environments, yet hesitant to admit to it, reflects the inherent hypocrisy of the profession while doing it disservice altogether. Therefore, I end with a crucial question facing the profession today: in accepting their inherent tastemaking powers, should planning departments be democratized to more publicly and wilfully  plan  for ‘superior design’ in cities?   
            

            

           
         
        

       

    

  


      Bibliography:       Quoted in: Jacobs, Karrie. “Uttering the D-Word.”  Metropolismag.com. (10.01.2012).  https://www.metropolismag.com/uncategorized/uttering-the-d-word/ (accessed  November 22, 2018).      New  York City Department of City Planning. “Glossary of Planning Terms.”  Nyc.gov/site/planning. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/zoning/glossary.page  (accessed November 22, 2018).      Quoted in: Hedlund, Patrick. “City Planning Approves  Building Height Limits in the East and West Villages.” Dnainfo.com.  (09.29.2010).  https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20100929/manhattan/city-planning-approves-building-height-limits-east-west-villages/  (accessed November 22, 2018).      Quoted in: Brown, Eliot. “Amanda Burden to Chop 200 Feet  Off Nouvel’s MoMA Tower.” observer.com. (09.08.2009). https://observer.com/2009/09/amanda-burden-to-chop-200-feet-off-nouvels-moma-tower/  (accessed November 22, 2018).                

Is the Planner a Tastemaker?
Radu-Remus Macovei (MArch I And MUP ’20)

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UD IDJanuary 15, 2019Comment
         Aspiration and Isolation   Redding California’s attempt at a Bilbao Effect  Christopher Nelson (MAUD ‘20)         

  

    

       

         

           
               
             

             
             

           

         

        
         
           

            

            
               About 200 miles northeast of San Francisco, Redding, California is a small, relatively unknown city nestled away in the rural, conservative hills of Shasta County. It has always been ideologically and geographically separate from the rest of the state, content in its isolation. For decades it has been reliant upon its logging industry to carry the economy. However, as the industry began to decline in the 1970’s and the city’s unemployment rate soared to over 20 percent, Redding has had to diversify its economic base, opening it up to the rest of the state in order to attract tourism and commerce¹.  Over the past few decades, Redding has seen a drastic increase in population, rising from under 17,000 in 1970 to nearly 90,000 in 2010. This influx of people has coincided with a series of public projects mostly in the 90’s and early 2000’s, ranging from parks to a new city hall and library. Among this string of structures was the Sundial Bridge. Built in 2004, the bridge spans the Sacramento River, which bisects the city, to connect two disparate parts of a large city park. This link could have easily been provided by a modest footbridge designed by a local architect, but the city alongside the McConnell Foundation, a very wealthy independent foundation that funds local nonprofits and public projects, used the opportunity to brand the city, with the foundation offering to cover the majority of the cost in order to create a signature bridge¹.  After being “impressed by designs he saw in a book,”² the Vice President of the McConnell Foundation called Santiago Calatrava’s office and asked him to design the bridge. $23.5 million later and two years behind schedule¹, the Sundial opened in July of 2004 to become the architect’s only bridge in North America. The vast majority of the residents in Redding had no idea who Calatrava was and were both perplexed and excited by the giant white structure. In a city whose only escalator arrived in 2001, a 216-foot long spire sticking up at a 42 degree angle could be perceived as somewhat alien.  Over the past 14 years however, the bridge has largely been embraced by the population who regularly uses it for both its intended recreational purposes and as a backdrop for family and prom pictures. The Sundial has become an icon for Redding, quite literally as it has been incorporated into the city’s official symbol, but also in a more figurative way— demonstrated by the heavy presence of the bridge in a quick google image search of “Redding, CA.”  Redding has now become inextricably linked with the image of the Sundial Bridge, yet an image of the Sundial certainly doesn’t automatically signify Redding. The sort of symbiosis that would usually happen between iconic structure and geographic place is stunted here by the presence of “starchitecture”. The initial, seemingly rash choice of the architect in many ways countered the city’s aspirations for a signature bridge because of Calatrava’s repetition of his signature design form onto yet another locale. Redding (and the McConnell Foundation) wanted a standout bridge that was unlike any other, which they got to an extent, but they also got what is essentially just another Calatrava bridge, easily replaceable with his designs for Sevilla and Manchester amongst many others.  Apart from the generic-ness of the bridge as an image, the bridge’s omnipresence within the city’s symbology washes away a huge part of the underlying identity of the place. Redding has always prided itself as being an isolated, mostly rural community, purposefully different than the hundred or so other cities in California of a similar size. The bridge has taken on a role of both reflecting and guiding an attitudinal shift away from this isolationism, which is subjectively good, but not reflective of the desires of many in the community. Regardless of Redding’s choice in building the bridge, their decision to use it as the defining marker of the city is definitely contentious.   
            

            

           
         
        

       

    

  


      Bibliography:     1.Mort, RE. "A Critical Analysis of Santiago Calatrava's Turtle Bay Sundial Bridge." April 2009. Accessed November 2018. http://www.bath.ac.uk/ace/uploads/StudentProjects/Bridgeconference2009/Papers/MORT.pdf.    "The McConnell Foundation 25 Years of Impact." October 2014. Accessed November 2018.   https://www.mcconnellfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/giving.pdf  .          

Aspiration and Isolation
Christopher Nelson (MAUD ‘20)

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UD IDJanuary 15, 2019Comment
        On Balkrishna Doshi's recent award  Pritzker Prize and Urban Consciousness  Maxime Faure (MAUD '18)     

  

    

       

         

           
               
             

             
             

           

         

        
         
           

            

            
               About ten days ago, for our studio, we were driving toward MassMoca. With research focused on museum campuses, the purpose of the trip was to visit this one-of-a-kind museum typology. While on the drive up, we were playing the very timely Pritzker Game where we rated Pritzker’s recipients from A to C (let's see where we are in sixty years) and speculating on the imminent question: which architect would receive the honorary 2018 crown?  A few days later, on Wednesday March 7th, Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi was bestowed the laureate of architecture’s highest honor. None of us in the car had brought up his candidacy as a possibility to the discussion.  Upon hearing the news, both his proponents and critics have proliferated all forms of media, from the most general to the most specific. It is particularly relevant to examine this year’s announcement through the lens of our field, urban design. In the past ten years, we have seen the word « urban » only once in a Pritzker announcement: in 2011, when Eduardo Souto de Moura received the award. We read that the Burgo Tower was creating a dialogue with « the urban landscape. » Before that, the word urban appeared in 2007 for Richard Rogers’ announcement. With this year’s award, many declensions are aligned in Doshi’s announcement: urban planner, urbanization and urban design. Should we understand here a shift in the role and discourse of the prize? Are we witnessing the rise of a celebrated urban consciousness?  We will be able to answer those questions more clearly in the coming years, but it is evident that through Doshi’s projects, such as the Co-Operative Middle Income Housing in Ahmedabad (1982) or the Aranya Low-Cost Housing (1989), a few kilometers away from Indore, that we see a pressing interest towards issues of the contemporary metropolis. Selecting Balkrishna Doshi as recipient of the Pritzker Prize not only recognizes an accomplished figure of both the 20th and 21th centuries in the field of architecture (and honors the legacy of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn), but it also showcases to the public sphere design solutions which address critical concerns of affordability, culture, and integrity, all of which promote the universal right to public enjoyment of a place.  When Alejandro Aravena received the Hyatt Foundation’s prestigious medal, there was already speculation on the Pritzker’s ideological agenda at the time. In 2016, with the awarding of the work of his firm ELEMENTAL, the Pritzker highlighted the pressing challenges of the 21st century city: resilience, sustainability and collective space as a key element of the built environment. Therefore, the move to give exposure to those questions today with Doshi seems to confirm an objective for the Pritzker Prize, that being to reveal the role design has in serving the city and its larger society.   
            

            

           
         
        

       

    

  


     Image Bibliography (Courtesy of VSF)    https://archpaper.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Balkrishna-Doshi-2_-courtesy-of-VSF-1024x0-c-default.jpg          

On Balkrishna Doshi's recent award

Maxime Faure (MAUD '18)

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urban designUD IDJanuary 15, 2019Pritzker Prize, Urban Design, Urban Consciousness, Doshi, Aravena, Souto de Moura, City Challenges, CommunicationComment
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