Key Notes on the Unruly City. Social, Material, and Spatial Transgressions

239 x 169 mm. 189 + 144 pages on fold-out posters in various dimensions.

This book unfolds an assemblage of social processes, tools, and terrains, that together make up the unruly city. The modern cityscape, released from the limits of its real estate, becomes a bricolage of real actions, a space rich with imaginative possibilities and narratives that have multiple access points.

Three movements of fugitivity explore the potential of the city—hidden behind its façades, beneath its surfaces, and beyond its skyline. Tracing the concealed layers of the unruly city, these lines of flight invite readers to venture into uncharted territories along three intersecting axes: the transversal axis cuts across the city’s fabric into a sprouting wilderness, permeating the tapestry with points of access. The perpendicular axis delves into the city’s verticality, connecting underground tunnels with the buildings rising up above. The horizontal axis spans urbanity’s planetary vastness, stretching from the city’s centre to the the end of the line, north of the Arctic Circle. When viewed collectively, these axes coalesce into an intricate ecological framework, one that is built with anarchic praxis, boundless imagination, and a series of trapdoors, dug-out tunnels, manufactured keys, informal disseminations, makeshift furniture, shacks, ladders, hatches... The projects compiled, presented, and captured in the 37 posters of this book provide details on collaborative processes that assure the is-possible.

Adam Kraft is a maker and researcher. The tools and refuges he constructs are integrated with and inspired by the transgressive flux of the city: where possibilities intersect and intertwine, where façades crumble and radical collective imaginaries take root and flight.