Henri Lefebvre’s “Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis” is noteworthy because it rearticulates various problems Lefebvre tackled in the decades before 1989. One of his last texts, the article certainly does, as David Wachsmuth and Neil Brenner point out, serve as an intriguing link to current debates on comparative urbanization. However, the article also reminds us how Lefebvre’s work is punctuated with missed opportunities.

More than anything, what this brief article makes clear is the vagueness with which Lefebvre had always understood the notions of the city and the urban as well as the urgent need we have today to clarify the latter.

In the secular spaces of the city’s art museums the last judgment has receded, replaced by the permanent judgment of the present — there is only a future of more crisis and more actions on that crisis. Catastrophe is everywhere and ever-present.

To interrogate the relation between governmental practices and the slew of recent technologies developed and deployed in the name of sustainability—whether ‘green’, ‘resilient’, ‘ecological’ or otherwise—is of course to interrogate the political status of such technology itself.

A frequently referenced forerunner of the smart city is this proposal by the British architectural collective, Archigram, for a “Plug-In City,” which supplanted fixed buildings with a moveable network of spaces and interchangeable “programs” for urban inhabitations. 

Jennifer Atchison and Lesley Head’s article “Eradicating bodies in invasive plant management” appears in issue 6 of the 2013 volume of Society and Space. As an accompaniment to the article, this photo gallery follows the practice and politics of invasive plant management through photographs taken by Atchison and Head as part of Head’s Australian Laureate fellowship project ‘The Social Life of Invasive Plants’.

Paradigms in Cartography is a philosophical book that examines cartography through the lens of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm theory. The central question around which this text revolves is whether over the past century cartography has gone through a paradigm shift, or indeed through multiple paradigm shifts.

It is a series of monologues and scenes developed verbatim from interview transcripts, which are performed in different spaces throughout the theatre for small audiences of fifteen to thirty. Shown here is one scene from the Manila production, the monologue of a child who tells of being left with her father in the Philippines and then rejoining her mother in Vancouver after a long period of separation while her mother fulfilled the requirements of Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program.

Woods provided the following text and photos as a complement to the article in order to bring some of its ideas and arguments to life, and to give the reader an idea of what it is like to practise Christianity in a Sri Lankan house church. 

Despite the lack of clear intervention by Western governments in the Egyptian crisis and the Syrian conflict, recent weeks have witnessed noticeable steps from some international actors towards Lebanon—a country that the UK government, among others, thinks is dangerously about to be engulfed by the ongoing conflict in Syria.