For the last 25 years, Rotterdam’s 010 Publishers (Uitgeverij 010) has contributed to the larger debate about design both within and without the Netherlands. There are three books that stand out from the mix of forthcoming titles, to be published this spring and summer:

Vinex: An Atlas of Recent Dutch Suburban Planning
Authors: Jelte Boeijenga, Jeroen Mensink
320 pp / 340 x 240 mm / hardcover / English or Dutch
ISBN 978 90 6450 635 2 / price € 59.50
To be published May 2008

Vinex, an Atlas of Recent Dutch Suburban Planning is a complete documentary overview of the built results of the housing programme drawn up in the government’s Fourth Report (Extra) on Physical Planning in the Netherlands. Besides taking stock of all Vinex districts, it zooms in on about fifty which are exhaustively documented and described, and provided with, among other things, an aerial photograph and an easy-to-read plan. The Vinex Atlas also includes a complete tabular overview of all 120 or so districts and area plans. Area plans are described in index numbers so that they can be compared. This allows us to establish where and in what way the entire output has been realized. An introductory essay describes the background and development of the Vinex project in both policy and practice. The Vinex Atlas gives a complete overview of the Vinex housing output, not just by addressing the districts that have been covered by the professional and national press in recent years, but also by acknowledging the range and diversity within this gigantic programme of more than 600,000 housing units.

The Chinese Dream: A Society Under Construction
Authors: Dynamic City Foundation (DCF),
Neville Mars and Adrian Hornsby
784 pp / 250 x 200 mm / hardcover / English
ISBN 978 90 6450 652 9 / price € 49.50
To be published May 2008

Dreaming is not Chinese. By 2020 four hundred million farmers will be living in new cities. The urban middle-class will have doubled in size. The world’s biggest pool of one-child consumers will be out shopping. To accommodate these shifts the equivalent of a brand new Eurozone, or 400 mega-cities, is mushrooming in the Chinese countryside. There is barely time to sleep, let alone dream about the future. The Chinese Dream maps what urban China will probably be like in the year 2020, and investigates what alternative scenarios are feasible. It presents both the hopes and hazards China faces. Ignoring star-projects and focusing instead on the new forms of urban reality China is fast producing through countless anonymous development projects, it asks what landscape will result from the largest migration in human history? And what kind of society will emerge with such flash-urbanization? At the same time that a global energy crisis looms and China’s wealth gap is rapidly widening, we question whether China is inevitably reconstructing the American Dream. Through diagrams, facts, essays and interviews the Dynamic City Foundation (DCF) has sketched alternative routes, a conceptual leapfrog in urbanization: a new dream which transcends the current market-driven reality and lands in city forms as yet unseen. Combining a conceptual approach with in-depth analyses, the Dynamic City Foundation looks to tackle the big questions facing China’s cities of today, and sketches routes into their futures.

Remote Control City Guide
Author: Alex Lehnerer
208 pp / 240 x 170 mm / hardcover / English
ISBN 978 90 6450 666 6 / price € 29.50
To be published October 2008

The book Remote Control City Guide offers a compilation and discussion of significant rules invented and implemented by European, North American, and Asian cities. The reader does not only get an overview of the functionality and repercussions of these rule sets but also gains insight into the context and situation of the specific city through the lens of rule-based governance: a city’s code as the inverted, abstracted and extracted image of a city’s actual situation. Setting standards is first and foremost a cultural act. We map cities by their rules!

The publication is based on a database of approximately 100 relevant urban rules researched over the past three years at the ETH Zurich. These rules describe built form with regard to physical characteristics, qualities, and consequences as well as the distribution of program, density, urban performance, and aesthetics.