Suhrkamp Insel

Friedrich von Borries

Climate Capsules

Until now, we have chosen to ignore the consequences of global warming in the blind hope that our politicians and engineers will come up with solutions once the problems have become sufficiently pressing. A more realistic response would be to pose, as Friedrich von Borries does, the following question: How will we adapt when climate change has become an irreversible reality?

Friedrich von Borries, Jens-Uwe Fischer

Home from Home

Berlin, in the late 1920s. The Hirsch Kupfer und Messingwerke designed a prefabricated house – made of the weather-resistant copper from their own factory. Walter Gropius was commissioned to refine the designs, the houses were called things like 'Copper Castle' and 'Spring Dream'.

Katja Kullmann

Raging Ruins

In fall 2011, Katja Kullmann visited Detroit and talked to a variety of its inhabitants: homeless people, city planners, academics, young creative artists and students, single mothers, musicians such as Mike Banks or voluntary service and welfare workers.

Martina Löw

Sociology of Cities

Never before have so many people lived in cities, and a global architecture appears to ensure that metropolises become ever more similar.

Walter Siebel

The Culture of the City

In his historically and theoretically comprehensive monograph, Siebel conceives a detailed image of this culture of the city, traces its ambivalent developments and from that establishes the renaissance of the city and its cultural productivity.

Silke Steets

The Logical Structure of the Constructed World

According to Émile Durkheim, the most important rule of sociological thinking is to regard social phenomena like objects, that is, to ascribe them the same degree of reality that we do the things we can touch. But what happens when we reverse this rule and regard material items – for example those that architecture brings forth – as social facts?