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.