Architecturewriter

Cyclone Alfred made landfall in Queensland and New South Wales yesterday as a tropical low with heavy rainfall prompting warnings and evacuations. We researched how this played out during the 2011 Brisbane floods for a 2018 issue of Disasters Journal: Risk communication and risk perception are critical factors in disaster management. Governments at all levels play a part in communicating risk, whereas the perception of risk entails active roles by community participants, including potential and actual victims of disasters. This paper discusses these matters in relation to the floods in Brisbane, Australia, in 2011. The findings are based on interviews with representatives of households whose dwellings or business premises were fully or partially inundated by the waters. The research shows how important it is to recognise the problems of institutional fragmentation in terms of communication and the active engagement of recipients in understanding and interpreting flood risk...

Wildfires in California, again. Posting my 2020 article for TOPOS on conflicting issues of urban development and disaster management and how to live with "mutating" disasters for your perusal here.

This is a political post. To my fellow Americans in my Facebook and Linkedin bubbles, recent events motivate me to comment on political affairs related to my current home country, Germany. As most of you know, I am a dual German-American citizen. I received US citizenship by birth and German citizenship by kinship. When it comes to ethnicity, my parents come from very different spheres within the German-speaking cultural domain, Bavaria on the one hand and the Rhineland on the other. So, what is ethnicity anyway? You decide. Which leads me to current global affairs. Perhaps the most prominent advisor of the US President-elect advocates for the party called AfD, most notably in the German news outlet "WELT". Let us be clear: The aim of the AfD is the abolishment of German basic constitutional law, the Grundgesetz, in order to establish a two-class system rooted in the assumption that a clearly defined German ethnicity or "blood" actually exists that should receive pr...

Sometimes you get invited to contribute research and then it nevers gets printed. However, this blog is the proper place to present such examples. Here is a text about interrelations between music and cities from an urbanistic viewpoint, with Los Angeles and Slayer as examples.  Lost Angeles: Slayer's Hell Urbanism Author: Mark Kammerbauer Publication details: unpublished manuscript, 2024 1. Introduction: The city as mirage of counter-culture The music, lyrics and visuals created by bands can be indicative of the urban life their members experience. Their work can be seen as a form of dialogue between the music cultures they participate in and the urban spaces they inhabit. This dialogue establishes an interrelation between the musician's city of reality and the music's city of imagination. Perceived this way, music becomes a medium of alternative visions of the city or audible utopias and dystopias. The question this perception raises is: What kind of imaginary city do mus...

About one third of the texts featured in my book "Bavarität – Krisenbewältigung im baukulturellen Raum" are based on previously published contributions of different kinds. When I began working on the book concept, I had a much larger selection of published and unpublished texts that I considered including in the book. This was also the case for a group of texts that dealt with the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on the way we inhabit the built environment of Bavaria (and elsewhere). They are good, but they didn't fit into the book. And a blog is a great place to make them available. So I begin today with a brief series of outtakes. The first one is in English and essentially a photo report: De­ser­ted Ci­ti­es of the Heart For a long time, world city with a heart – “Weltstadt mit Herz” – was the official marketing slogan of the city of Munich. Nowadays, like any city subject to a stay-at-home-order aimed at mitigating the impact of the Corona pandemic, it is more akin...

Time flies when you're having an insightful and fun discussion with colleagues on issues you care about. This was the case at the 8th University Day for National Urban Development Policy on „Shaping the Future in Uncertain Times - Paving the Way for a New Planning Culture“, 2nd and 3rd June 2023. Hosted by János Brenner, Detlef Kurth and Silke Weidner, Bohdan Cherkes, Stefan Greiving and I had the opportunity to propose a number of talking points for discussion with the audience, under the watchful eye of the witty Julian Wékel. Our forum topic was "Rethinking Resilience – Security and Critical Infrastructure as Planning Tasks." A key takeaway was that it is entirely justified to talk about destruction to cultural landscapes and cities due to either war, environmental disaster, or both in a joint manner – since the impact of each of them has become ubiquitous due to rapid changes to political and natural contexts. Posting the four related pages from the pdf documentation ...