The Urbanism of Metabolism: Visions, Scenarios and Models for the Mutant City of Tomorrow

This edited book explores and promotes reflection on how the lessons of Metabolism experience can inform current debate on city making and future practice in architectural design and urban planning. More than sixty years after the Metabolist manifesto was published, the author’s original contributions highlight the persistent links between present and past that can help to re-imagine new urban futures as well as the design of innovative intra-urban relationships and spaces.

The essays are written by experienced scholars and renowned academics from Japan, Australia, Europe, South Korea and the United States and expose Metabolism’s special merits in promoting new urban models and evaluate the current legacy of its architectural projects and urban design lessons. They offer a critical, intellectual, and up-to-date account of the Metabolism projects and ideas with regard to the current evolution of architectural and urbanism discourse in a global context.

The collection of cross-disciplinary contributions in this volume will be of great interest to architects, architectural and urban historians, as well as academics, scholars and students in built environment disciplines and Japanese cultural studies.

Raffaele Pernice is an Italian architect and Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Urbanism at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He received a PhD in Architecture from Waseda University in Tokyo and a M.Arch from the University IUAV of Venice in Italy. Dr. Pernice has extensive research and teaching experience in Australia, East Asia and the Middle East, and his interests and activities lay at the nexus of architecture and urbanism, ranging from design practice through to the theory and history of architecture and city planning, with a focus on the evolution of the cities of Japan and the Asia-Pacific region. He has been recipient of scholarships and grants from universities and national and international institutions, such as the MEXT (the Japanese Ministry of Education), the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Japan Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), among others.