Tacit Urbanism

Hawkers and The Production of Space in Everyday Kolkata

Christopher Dell

A much-overlooked aspect of urbanism is the complex tapestry of how public spaces are appropriated by micro-businesses, and the ways this affects city life. In this engrossing little paperback, Hamburg-based architectural theorist Christopher Dell looks at the vibrant community of hawkers on the streets of Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta). “Modernism has passed the concept of determined planning, and postmodernism has passed the concept of chaotic fragmentation down to us,” writes Dell. “Can’t we try to learn from hawking how to enable the urban to perform better?” Charming color photos feature food vendors, open-air restaurants and enterprises like laundries and hairdressers, and the temporary and permanent sidewalk structures that house them.

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Tham & Videgård Arkitekter

The first monograph by Tham & Videgård Arkitekter, an architectural duo that has become leaders of a new generation of Swedish architects in a mere ten years of working together. Though the pair nods to vernacular Nordic tradition with the use of wood, painted floors and decorative tile, their look is lucid, international and playfully geometric. This volume documents residences, offices, university buildings and schools with dynamic photography, renderings, schematics and models. As Hans Ibelings notes in one of the book’s essays, the team is neither stuck in the functionalist past nor preoccupied with a conceptual image. Printed on special lightweight paper. In English and Swedish.

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