The book Regeneration [and its discontents] explores the concept of ‘regeneration’ that became a tool to explore multifaceted interaction between city, culture, art and politics. Resisting the temptation to reduce the city’s complexity into the binary opposition of ‘us’ vs ‘them’, specialists from different disciplines introduced strategies for activating positive urban and architectural development through art, aesthetics and sound. Dislodged from its predominantly urbanist implications, ‘regeneration’ escapes boundaries of one discipline and is a promising lens to think about different urban futures.

Inspired and guided by these efforts, the book Regeneration [and its Discontents] expanded some of the key ideas of the talk series and looked towards the potential futures of speculative and real urban environments. The image of weeds breaking through concrete articulates the physicalisation of the will to transform in alien environments; to become new, to regenerate. Regeneration [and its discontents] are all the collections of the intricate root systems that permeate the modern city, interacting with the material and immaterial (infa)structures. On different scales and from different angles, 6 authors embark on their own journeys through the city.