Splintering Volumes: Architecture, Engineering, Finance, and Urban Form

ABSTRACT

This commentary suggests that Splintering Urbanism provided the tools and metaphors for urbanists to understand how architectural, engineering, and financial knowledge has been brought together to remake urban infrastructure. It uses the concept of volumetric urbanism to illustrate how central cities are segregated, diced, and sliced within their internal structures, and discusses how this perspective opens up the materiality of major urban development projects. The commentary explains how Splintering Urbanism shaped the intellectual terrain for framing how these can be understood as volumetric interventions in the city, retheorizing urban spaces as being stacked and sectioned around reorganized public and private spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Architecture
• urbanism
• property finance
• urban form
• urban theory

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donald McNeill

Donald McNeill, is a professor of urbanism at the University of Sydney, with a research interest in how cities are being reconfigured and reshaped by different forms of global built environment expertise.