ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is concerned with issues of privacy, publicness, and security. It investigates how the changing notions of privacy and domesticity have cast an impress on residential design in the United States, examines designs that tackle efforts by queer and unconventional clients to resist public voyeurism. The book analyzes design strategies that attempt to mitigate “risk” in school building design in the face of gun violence. It explains the creative capacity of cities if they can be reimagined and reconceptualized. The book offers strategies of redescription, bringing attention to processes that remain opaque to planners and urbanists. It also explains the problem from the perspective of global real-estate investment in which the fiction of design follows financial speculation. The book discusses the promise of intelligent infrastructure of cities and what constitutes networked urbanism as spaces of contestation and creativity.
