A library can serve as a record of a city, itself a book inside a vast room. With these online repositories, we aim to provide a brief snapshot of a multiplicity of voices – distant and near – serving as beacons for our thinking around ecological, relational and post-extractivist desires for more just and sound planetary futures.

We are a product of our era and our approach to these questions is inevitably a result of contemporary conversations around what seems important and relevant now: the dialectic between Western and subaltern narratives, the imperative of climate change and environmental degradation, deep time, changes in systems of production. The compilation of books we offer here is a window on the world that we each experience – but there are other windows, other ways of thinking, organizing, and inhabiting this Earth. Our work here can serve as both a resource for now and an archival record of this point in time, and one that exists within a vast library of possibilities.

Catherine Bennett – Venice, a city begun

There is a new island in the Venetian lagoon.
After the city installed and began to use the MOSE tidal gates that stop Venice from flooding, a tiny sandbar started to form, just off the margins of the island Sant’Erasmo.

Sediment fused together like mitochondri, mud and sand compacting and drawing together. You can go to it by boat, take off your shoes and roll up your trousers and wade through the murky lagoon water to examine the halophytes–plants that thrive in salt marshes–already growing there, in its shifting foundations.The lagoon is changing. Centuries of human intervention, both deliberate and unconscious, have transformed not only the geography of Venice’s salt marshes but also their ecosystem. The MOSE barrier is only the most recent intrusion. Designed to protect the urban geography of Venice and its citizens, it adjusts the tides, changing the way that water transports sediment through the lagoon shallows and, eventually, altering nature itself. All this, then, to say that this is what it means to live in the Anthropocene. It is not just the spewing of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the forever chemicals decimating insect species, the failure to lower global temperatures, the melting ice caps, old people dying in their top-floor apartments as a heatwave scorches through France’s capital. It is the new islets quietly forming, unbeknownst to us, the ecosystems we didn’t know we were disrupting. It is a small pile of mud and sand where samphire has started to grow.

The God effect
The human need to control and modulate and interfere is a recurrent theme throughout this book list. InPlaces of Abandonment, the writer Cal Flyn travels to Tanzania, to the closed ecosystem of Ambara, where foreign scientists installed a herbarium. But when the scientists deserted their work there, they left behind the non-indigenous plants they had introduced. As the years went by, these new citizens escaped their confines and, science fiction-like, ravenously crawled through the jungle, stifling or poisoning native species. There is no metaphor so far; the real, hopeful, message comes at the end. Flyn tells us that years after the herbarium fell into disuse and its inmates went on the run, the local ecosystem has unexpectedly started to adapt to its new residents.

Flyn asks, “In so many places, we are so busy playing at being stewards of the Earth, deciding who gets to live and who gets to die. Once we have left our mark on an ecosystem, we show no hesitation in throwing open the bonnet again later to fiddle with its workings.[…] At what point must we learn to let go, and watch the repercussions of our past actions spin out into the void, and give the Earth its head to respond and adapt in the ways only it knows how?”

Throughout Flyn’s book, she surprises us with stories of wondrous environmental regeneration in the face of devastating human harm. Can we approach our urban spaces in the same way? Stepping back and letting go, in order to allow for regeneration and renovation? Let’s see how a city’s buildings are actually used by its citizens in practice.

To use Venice again as an example: it is a finite city, bound by its island contours. It is a city already built. Stewart Brand said, “A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.” Venice is full of buildings begun. If we see the city as a living, adaptive organism, we can re-imagine architecture in an evolutive way, rather than by playing God and scrapping something and starting again. We need to give the city its head–to allow it to adapt, even to decay.

There are two modes of action that these books explore. One is active: to rebel against the systems of extractive consumption that underpin our modern cities. In Venice, we can see that playing out through the gradual takeover of places that once belonged to residents, the predatory sprawl of the Biennale (only one third of the garden space used for the Biennale is open to the public all year round–the rest fenced off, under surveillance, a no-go zone for Venetians), the injunctions against sitting down in squares, the lack of public toilets, of benches, of free use of public space.

Another is (more) passive: to revert to an approach that Caitlin DeSilvey and other heritage researchers call ‘adaptive release and reuse’. To curate and care for the architecture that makes up cities, without forcing it–and wider urban management in general–into a model of relentless growth at all costs.

The invisible city
A lot of the books in this list may be about Venice, but their lessons–or variations of them–can apply to other cities. Venice is the archetypal urban palimpsest. It has been a maritime empire and Disneyland, it has been both conqueror and conquered, a trading crossroads and an end in itself. In Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, the explorer Marco Polo has returned from his travels, and describes all of the wonderful, fantastical cities he has seen. His interlocutor, the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, says:

“There is still one of which you never speak.”
Marco Polo bowed his head.
“Venice,” the Khan said.Marco smiled.
“What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?”
The emperor did not turn a hair. “And yet I have never heard you mention that name.”
And Polo said: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”

Just as Polo describes a multiplicity of different cities while all the while really speaking about Venice, so too do the books in this list speak about more than just Venice. Venice is a laboratory, a way of looking at how we can (re)construct a living city in a way that responds to the needs of its citizens. The city can be the subject of academic study, certainly, but it is also thrumming with grassroots resistance groups and the potential for citizen-led change. How can we reverse the mechanisms that have encouraged and facilitated plastic production and endless consumption? How can we change from a zealously growth-first mindset to a slower model, one of degrowth?

These books are the start of the process of answering that question. Lessons learnt from Venice can be used in other contexts, in other cities, in other futures–futures that will only be possible if we effect radical change in the way that we live now.

Margarida Waco – Fusings and Epistemic Flirtations

Now, I won’t be speaking about form and aesthetics. Here, I offer a humble meditation that rests upon snippets of reflections and questions that I have yet to find answers to in my crossings.

In myriad ways, I speak from the subjective I. And my site(s) of knowledge neatly nests within Afro-diasporic thought, shaped by a personal tale that echoes one among many stories of separation and loss – loss of the lands and waters that hold my language, heart, and memory of those who came before me.  And yet, it is also one of love, a story of return.

To think through the concept of a library, a repository of knowledge, I am called toward revisiting how I might conceive of my practice in its duality: a lexical inasmuch a spatial rehearsal.

Herein, I am compelled toward expanded vocabularies and lexical episodes, assembled as fragments of material ontologies, politics of relation, and ecologies, interwoven with threads of philosophy, Black feminism, and critical geography. Invariably, transdisciplinarity, radical thought and politics thus become the lens through which I approach the contemporary production of space. In doing so, I extend an invitation to thoughtfully broaden our inquiries beyond the singular ways of seeing, sensing, and knowing that historically have governed the discipline of architecture. These tellings I offer are legible to those of us who are willing to complicate preconceived notions that isolate architecture from the wider infrastructures that regulate, condition and shape our existence as we move through and across.

Lexical Rehearsals and Refusals
If architecture historically has been governed by a set of choreographed lexical systems and epistemes, the questions that haunt me as an architect, educator, and most importantly, a constituent on this Earth, take up the key question of how we might create the world anew after the undoing? If the world we have inherited, the world we know today, is bifurcated along two divergent systems of reciprocity and separation, what are the languages that might allow us to refuse its categorical destructions? And if the grammar we invoke to imagine, mold, and build our lifeworlds and surrounds is seeded in separation and suffering, what is the listening we must possibly undertake from within the confines of architecture?

Allow me to specify:
In ways, the discipline of architecture offers a lens to read the various modes of governance that operate in space—political, financial, social, racial, or otherwise. Beyond matter, form, and aesthetics, the materialities of our societies, often masked as monuments to various regimes of oppression, evidence the continued annexation of life flows. If we dare listen to the material wisdoms of the Earth, we are taught about the intricate tapestry of life on Earth as conditioned and regulated by the extractive and expropriate infrastructures of global capitalism. The trembling whispers of the Earth seem to speak of a multitude of stories: Of separation, of chaos and catastrophe, upon catastrophe. The fruits she bears are harvested to quench our insatiable thirst. Her body and repositories are depleted and cast aside as vast absorptive emptiness to build our surrounds. These markings and infrastructures, visible and invisible, lay bare the masked intentions, violence, exploitation, and subjugation that since Modernity have organized the world and peoples along a racial axis. They too, allow us to understand our position within these obscured networks of planetary circulations. In this saying, some bodies are left to languish, sacrificed at the altar of ‘progress’ and ‘development’, while others thrive, and therewith, concepts of racial differences collide with how we act upon the primordial body of our origins.

The tellings I offer, though non-exhaustive, might call some of us to explore alternate pathways for existing in relation, not separation. And perhaps within them lies possibility-making and transformation that extend beyond the limitations of the singular story we have been told far too often. In all humbleness, it is my hope that the tellings herein might amount to opening a horizon through which we might articulate a position from which we can act collectively to refuse the ripples of the long durée.

Amid these different and bolder tellings that might guide us in our quest to reconsider the principles by which we cast the world is an entrancing channeling of energy calling us toward other sets of politics of inhabiting, repairing, sharing, and existing in relation – as we move through and across.

For this year’s edition of the LINA Library 2024, the selected curators are Margarida Waco and Catherine Bennett.

Margarida Waco (Cabinda/Denmark) is an architect whose practice mobilizes architecture, ecology, and politics through design, research, and pedagogy. She is an Associate Lecturer and MA Studio Lead at the Royal College of Art and an editorial advisor to The Funambulist, where she served as Head of Strategic Outreach and Contributing Editor between 2018-2021. Her work has been exhibited and presented at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Architekturmuseum der TUM, Palais de Tokyo, Malmö Art Museum, Nyansapo Afrofeminist Festival, and the Royal Danish Academy. Moreover, she has published in Afterall, Ellipses Journal of Creative Research, Archive of Forgetfulness, and arcspace.com, among others. She is the co-author of Informal Horizons – Land Rights and Urban Development in East Africa (2019), co-editor of The Funambulist Issue 32 ‘Pan-Africanism’ (2020), and co-editor of Homeplace – A Love Letter (2023).

Catherine Bennett is a French-British writer based between Paris and Venice. She writes about technology, cities, culture, the environment and travel, and has reported for The Washington Post, MIT Technology Review, WIRED, Bloomberg and the Guardian. She is an editor at Le Monde and presents a weekly news show for the French-German TV channel Arte. She’s interested in how tourism transforms cities, urban adaptation to the climate crisis, ownership of public space and housing rights.