Caza + Surba: When Urbanization Comes to Ground

CAZA + SURBA: When Urbanization Comes to Ground is a collaborative research project between the Brooklyn-based architecture studio, CAZA, and think tank, SURBA, an urban research collective spearheaded by Carlos Arnaiz and Peter G Rowe. Drawing upon case studies including projects in China, Colombia and the Philippines, this book works across place, time, and culture to offer an allegorical journey into urbanisation at large. CAZA + SURBA is a loosely congregated collection of essays that reflect an aggregation of encounters with urban circumstances, both physical and immaterial, structural and affective. From Robots, Utilidors, and a Brave New World to A Third Way Towards Metropolitanism and Tagging Thingness and Scale , this publication questions the role of architecture and its related disciplines in the wake of the masterplan. It searches for a field guide to everyday urban life by offering palpable views into the network of relations that characterise this evolving social ecosystem.
Through their collective global research projects, CAZA and SURBA frame, abstract, poeticise and render the city as a historical process, a future destination, a production cycle and a layered landscape of overlapping phenomena. CAZA + SURBA does not attempt to cast the city in any one particular ideology, nor does it aim to essentialise or distill urban experience. Instead, this book oscillates from one rendering of urbanisation to another, alternating scales and media in order to present the topic of the city and its encapsulated processes through the same phenomena that inform it.