Speculation Design

How should we train? What should we learn? What is our value? Disruptive technologies have increased speculation about what it means to be an architect. Innovations simultaneously offer great promise and potential risk to design practice. This volume identifies the game-changing trends driven by technology, and the opportunities they provide for architecture, urbanism and design. It advocates for an approach of intelligent control that transforms practice with specialist knowledge of technological models and systems.

This book studies both the tangible benefits and substantial barriers to sustainable development in the city of Phoenix, Arizona. Utilizing mixed research methods to probe downtown Phoenix’s political economy of development, this study illustrates how non-local property ownership and land speculation negatively impacted a concerted public-private effort to encourage infill construction on vacant land.