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"This volume offers a cutting-edge, valuable, and critical perspectives on how power – in its different forms and scales – shapes architecture and urban space. Importantly this unique book presents a wide and rich collection of chapters and case studies that support an important intellectual agenda, arguing that the built landscape itself should be understood as a political force, rather than a background to power and politics, especially in the current global human-made crises. Critical discussion around borders and bordering, state violence, coloniality and political ecology in both Global South and Global North are critically theoretically debated throughout this must-read collection. The multidisciplinary approach of this book will attract scholars and students from different fields including architecture, urbanism, political science, sociology, and political philosophy."

Prof Haim Yacobi, The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London, UK

"With amazing erudition this comprehensive volume provides a state of the art treatment of the complex connections between architecture, violence and the politics of urban space. Theoretically incisive and empirically wide-ranging it will be essential reading for scholars and activist seeking to come to terms with all aspects of the politicisation of urban space in the contemporary world."

Prof Stephen Graham, Professor of Cities and Society, Newcastle University, UK

"We learn through these contributions that architecture and the management of space are implicated in segregation, inequity and authoritarianism. The volume is an urgent call to think of architectural planning as an instrument of economic, political and structural violence. While this is not the only volume to tackle this point, it is definitely the first interdisciplinary work to cover a wide range of themes, theories, methods, geographies of space as politics and for it is a trailblazer."

Prof Aomar Boum, UCLA Department of Anthropology, US

"It is commendable that architecture as a profession should strive to offer viable solutions to the problems of reliability, affordability, and sustainability. Yet it also requires that architecture as a discipline is not only solution-oriented. The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume I: Violence, Spectacle and Data offers a necessary departure from the proverbial architectural complacency with politics by posing new problems politically, i.e., through maximum inclusion and minimal identification. The contributors differ in the degree of their allegiance to the concepts of responsibility and response-ability, respectively. While the former appeals to the moral sense of duty, the latter is attuned to ethics as a mode of existence. Framed this way, ethology becomes a problem of power and not of a priori rights and messianism."

Andrej Radman, Assistant Professor of Architecture Philosophy and Theory, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

"Bobic and Haghighi have provided us with a handbook that grapples incisively with the relationship between architecture, urbanism and politics. Its multi-disciplinary array of contributors offer up a comprehensive range of insights and analysis essential to our age of borders and barricades. Landscapes of big data are mapped, questions of race and identity are reckoned with, and security is scrutinized. The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics is a vital tool in coming to terms with how the power and violence of resurgent nationalisms, proliferating wars, ubiquitous surveillance and social struggle are made manifest in architecture and urbanism."

Douglas C Spencer, Director of Graduate Education, Pickard Chilton Professor in Architecture, Department of Architecture, Iowa State University, US

“This is an exciting and diverse set of reflections on the politics of urban space. It breaks new ground in outlining novel perspectives on the way war, borders, race, identity, representation, and data shape urban spaces. This handbook will shape future conversations on the way architecture is both target and tool of violence as well as the oppressive spatialities of planetary urbanisation.”

Dr Martin Coward, Reader in International Politics, Lead Editor, Review of International Studies, The University of Manchester, UK

“The volume of Bobic and Haghighi presents a timely and rich overview of contemporary treatments of the multidimensional nexus between politics and architecture. It offers a much-needed rethinking of the political dimensions of architectural and urban process as they relate to the topical issues of climate change, racism, inequality, the refugee crises, colonization and surveillance. As an insightful treatment of the ability of spatial practices to inform, retain or sustain agency, the book can be a useful addition to courses in urban studies, architecture, urban design and geography.”

Prof Albena Yaneva, University of Manchester, UK

“This book has brought together an impressive and welcome collection of critical contributions by major researchers from around the world, examining the interface between power and space, as played out in the politics of architecture in war and violence, security and borders, race and identity, spectacle and the screen, and big data.”

Prof Ali Madanipour, Newcastle University, UK

“This impressive and informative collection of essays brings together the voices of many leading and emerging researchers in architecture and urbanism to shed light on some of today’s most urgent debates on the politics of the built environment. An essential and informative read, this handbook not only brings to light lesser-known case studies from around the globe, but also affords much-needed theoretical frameworks for analysing other similar accounts.”

Prof Pamela Karimi, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, US

“The investigation of how practices of politics and power play out through the shaping of architecture and urban space is one of the most complex and pressing issues of our time. This book brings a broad range of research approaches and critiques to issues such as urban conflict, incarceration, border politics, ethnic segregation and street protest; it will be a crucial resource for academics and students in architecture, planning and urban studies.“

Prof Kim Dovey, Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, University of Melbourne, Australia

"Nikolina Bobic and Farzanah Haghighi, have assembled a stellar multidisciplinary cast whose original thinking on the politics of citizenship, violence, and right to urban space shines through the pages of the volume. Ambitious in terms of method as well as geographical scope, it helps us recalibrate the “urban” in the twenty-first century."

Prof Swati Chattoapdhyay, Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara, US

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