FAST FORWARD // THE BOOK

cityLAB is editing a volume of essays and design projects titled Fast Forward >> Toward a Design and Politics for Metroburbia, inspired by the Fast Forward Symposium held at UCLA in May, 2007. Edited by Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman, the book puts forward a collection of essays, opinions, and design projects that together lay the groundwork for a new urban theory called fast forward urbanism. Significant changes in the contemporary condition frame this new theory. Be it Los Angeles’s Grand Avenue, Biloxi, or Lower Manhattan, the city appears as a stop-action frame: nothing happens for interminable periods, when suddenly we arrive at built results seemingly by fast-forward, with no clear grasp of how we got there. Like a series of discontinuous jump-cuts, the landscape transforms without a progression in a sequence of disorienting new frames where the destabilization is never complete, since some things have stayed the same. Today, the indifferent backdrop of the city evolves organically, taking the small steps that everyday urbanism endorses. Urban theory has a harder time absorbing the more radical jump-cuts, where architecture tends to thrive. Only in retrospect, when pieced together into a legible, historical narrative, does urbanism account for the eruptions that punctuate a city’s transformation. By contrast, fast forward urbanism is projective; it grapples with the big leaps, seeking to explain them, design them, and launch them.

Contributors include: Stan Allen, Keller Easterling, Robert Somol, Albert Pope, Penelope Dean, Mario Gandelsonas, Dana Cuff, Lars Lerup, Michael Dear, and Roger Sherman.

>> Download Book Prospectus [pdf]