Chasing the City

Neeraj Bhatia has published the article “Rewiring Territories” in the edited volume Chasing the City, by Jeffrey Nesbit and Joshua Nason. Published by Routledge, the publication examines models for Extra-Urban Investigations. 

Charged with approaching the city more responsively, the book investigates what we do not know, allowing the city to direct our work. As urban detectives, we have the ability to interrogate and respond to the elaborate patterns emerging from self-generated, internalized urban interactions. Chasing the City asks what are the current design trends shaping how we, first, understand the cities of today to, then, produce informed decisions on the continuously undefined evolving city of tomorrow. Intentionally, the work here does not adhere to rudimentary notions of supposed singularities or rely upon past generations of idealistic utopian models. Rather, Chasing the City delineates current models of urban investigation that seek to respond to the nature of cities and develop heretofore-urban strategies as concurrently negotiated future urbanism.

This edited volume provides a collection of innovative design research projects based on shared notions of Chasing the City through three bodies of strategic frameworks: (1) Mapping, (2) Resource, and (3) Typology. This structure ultimately allows readers, as fellow urban detectives, access to exploratory tools and methods of detection that accumulate from our environs, both practical and projective in our chase of the city.

The book features student design-research from the Rewiring Territories Studio taught at CCA in 2014. Blake Stevenson and Lujac Desautel’s project on Hydroscaping examines water infrastructure and rebalancing hydrology in the South American Hinterland. Enrique Justicia and Jill Chao’s project on Rewiring Ecology examines the ramification of new food webs produced by the construction of territorial pipelines and their associated easement.