The hyperconnected world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has revealed that effortless mobility, wealth, and access for some has been attained at the cost of immobility, inequity, and displacement for others. We have entered a phase of critical backlash against globalization, which is for some a critique of international integration, for others a critique of global capitalism, and for most, a shared global concern over climate crisis. The contradictions propel us to ask: What is today’s “global”?
Harvard Design Magazine’s 50th issue (Spring/Summer 2022) is edited by Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, and Rahul Mehrotra, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Its theme, “Today’s Global,” aims to avoid a simple and ineffective return to a mere celebration of the local or the regional. This is a moment instead to foster a nuanced understanding of where design sits vis-à-vis our planet and to advance a more productive discourse on globalization. The issue relies on novel examples of design—and even the design of writing—to further today’s global from multiple vantage points.
What, for example, are the new rubrics by which we organize, understand, and situate our agency as designers and planners in the world, beyond imagining it in terms of binaries? How might we slow the current pace of consumption and production, set by capitalism’s ever-accelerating metronome? What might define the global design imaginary in the throes of a planetary climate crisis? How might we instigate new forms of collaboration that transcend national boundaries, and new forms of knowledge production that transcend our current notions of interdisciplinarity? Could design foster a planetary civil society? How might designers situate or align themselves with these new forms of patronage? And what role might schools have in articulating and advancing a contemporary understanding of the global?
Whiting and Mehrotra invite an international group of public intellectuals, critics, scholars, and practitioners in architecture, urban planning, landscape design, and the social sciences and humanities to offer an in-depth analysis of the political, social, and economic forces that have shaped global architecture and design in the past 25 years.
“Today’s Global” features conversations between the editors and distinguished guests, including Arjun Appadurai, François Jullien, Lesley Lokko, Bruno Stagno, Rem Koolhaas, and Kate Orff. The issue also includes several essays and dialogues that address the challenges and opportunities facing design thinking in a time of expanding globalization and shifting localities and regionalism; contributors include Diana Eck, Nicolai Ouroussoff, and Sumayya Vally. “Today’s Global” concludes with a call-and-response segment, in which architects, students, activists, and designers respond to the provocative prompt: “What does it mean to be a global practitioner today?”
Harvard Design Magazine is an architecture and design magazine that probes at the reaches of design and its reciprocal influence on contemporary culture and life. Published twice a year and helmed by editorial director Julie Cirelli at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the magazine invites guest editors to consider design through an interdisciplinary lens, resulting in unique perspectives by an international group of architects, designers, students, academics, and artists. For current and back issues, as well as subscription information, visit the Harvard Design Magazine website.
For inquiries: Joshua Machat, Assistant Director, Communications and Public Affairs, jmachat [at] gsd.harvard.edu
