The LINA Library is a transnational virtual space dedicated to publishing and divulgation of architecture and its intersection with politics, technology, economy, and social issues. It gathers together the editorial production of LINA members paired with a community of international independent publishers in order to create connections and intellectual exchange with the readings that have been fundamental for a couple of fellows selected as custodians and curators.

We deeply believe in open access and eschew the notion of appropriation of knowledge by a few ones, making profit based on the intellectual efforts of a whole community. That’s why we also believe in the power of the network to re-invent the ways we all can share, and discuss the knowledge in books, and analogous form of building common knowledge in cities.

The custodians, understood as the ones who care and share knowledge, is an initiative that started as a support to SciHub and Library Genesis, two activist libraries supporting open access publications confronting fire-walled academic publishers. For the LINA Library 2024 we selected two fellows to curate a series of books reflecting on Books as spaces for critcal practices in cities, and establish dialogues with the editorial production of LINA members and fellows, and the topics they address.

The curators of the book fair were selected from the LINA Open Call and had the mission to choose and classify a collection of books that promote and disseminate works and ideas in the field of architecture and beyond that responds to the yearly LINA main theme: Custodians: Books as critical spaces in cities.

LINA Fellows as curators. Selection process

The curators of the LINA Library were selected among 19 applicants that responded to LINA Open Call specifically interested in the project. dpr-barcelona evaluated the entries and selected two winners. The applicants evaluated by dpr-barcelona are shown in the Table 2 below. For the selection there were considered the following aspects:

- Alignment of the proposal to LINA categories.

- Interest in books as critical tools for architecture thinking

- Potential to engage LINA platform members and publisher abroad.

The selected fellows were Catherine Bennett (Epilogue for Venice) and Margarida

Waco (Cosmic Undergrounds)

Curators’ statement – Catherine Bennett

Venice, a city begun

Introduction

There is a new island in the Venetian lagoon.

After the city installed and began to use the MOSE tidal gates that stop Venice from flooding, a tiny sandbar started to form, just off the margins of the island Sant'Erasmo. Sediment fused together like mitochondri, mud and sand compacting and drawing together. You can go to it by boat, take off your shoes and roll up your trousers and wade through the murky lagoon water to examine the halophytes – plants that thrive in salt marshes – already growing there, in its shifting foundations.

The lagoon is changing. Centuries of human intervention, both deliberate and unconscious, have transformed not only the geography of Venice's salt marshes but also their ecosystem. The MOSE barrier is only the most recent intrusion. Designed to protect the urban geography of Venice and its citizens, it adjusts the tides, changing the way that water transports sediment through the lagoon shallows and, eventually, altering nature itself.

All this, then, to say that this is what it means to live in the Anthropocene. It is not just the spewing of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the forever chemicals decimating insect species, the failure to lower global temperatures, the melting ice caps, old people dying in their top-floor apartments as a heatwave scorches through France's capital. It is the new islets quietly forming, unbeknownst to us, the ecosystems we didn't know we were disrupting. It is a small pile of mud and sand where samphire has started to grow.

The God effect

The human need to control and modulate and interfere is a recurrent theme throughout this book list. In Places of Abandonment, the writer Cal Flyn travels to Tanzania, to the closed ecosystem of Ambara, where foreign scientists installed a herbarium. But when the scientists deserted their work there, they left behind the non-indigenous plants they had introduced. As the years went by, these new citizens escaped their confines and, science fiction-like, ravenously crawled through the jungle, stifling or poisoning native species. There is no metaphor so far; the real, hopeful, message comes at the end. Flyn tells us that years after the herbarium fell into disuse and its inmates went on the run, the local ecosystem has unexpectedly started to adapt to its new residents.

Flyn asks, "In so many places, we are so busy playing at being stewards of the Earth, deciding who gets to live and who gets to die. Once we have left our mark on an ecosystem, we show no hesitation in throwing open the bonnet again later to fiddle with its workings. […] At what point must we learn to let go, and watch the repercussions of our past actions spin out into the void, and give the Earth its head to respond and adapt in the ways only it knows how?"

Throughout Flyn's book, she surprises us with stories of wondrous environmental regeneration in the face of devastating human harm. Can we approach our urban spaces in the same way? Stepping back and letting go, in order to allow for regeneration and renovation? Let's see how a city's buildings are actually used by its citizens in practice.

To use Venice again as an example: it is a finite city, bound by its island contours. It is a city already built. Stewart Brand said, "A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start." Venice is full of buildings begun. If we see the city as a living, adaptive organism, we can re-imagine architecture in an evolutive way, rather than by playing God and scrapping something and starting again. We need to give the city its head – to allow it to adapt, even to decay.

There are two modes of action that these books explore. One is active: to rebel against the systems of extractive consumption that underpin our modern cities. In Venice, we can see that playing out through the gradual takeover of places that once belonged to residents, the predatory sprawl of the Biennale (only one third of the garden space used for the Biennale is open to the public all year round – the rest fenced off, under surveillance, a no-go zone for Venetians), the injunctions against sitting down in squares, the lack of public toilets, of benches, of free use of public space.

Another is (more) passive: to revert to an approach that Caitlin DeSilvey and other heritage researchers call 'adaptive release and reuse'. To curate and care for the architecture that makes up cities, without forcing it – and wider urban management in general – into a model of relentless growth at all costs.

The invisible city

A lot of the books in this list may be about Venice, but their lessons – or variations of them – can apply to other cities. Venice is the archetypal urban palimpsest. It has been a maritime empire and Disneyland, it has been both conqueror and conquered, a trading crossroads and an end in itself. In Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities, the explorer Marco Polo has returned from his travels, and describes all of the wonderful, fantastical cities he has seen. His interlocutor, the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, says:

"There is still one of which you never speak." Marco Polo bowed his head. "Venice," the Khan said. Marco smiled. "What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?" The emperor did not turn a hair. "And yet I have never heard you mention that name." And Polo said: "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."

Just as Polo describes a multiplicity of different cities while all the while really speaking about Venice, so too do the books in this list speak about more than just Venice. Venice is a laboratory, a way of looking at how we can (re)construct a living city in a way that responds to the needs of its citizens. The city can be the subject of academic study, certainly, but it is also thrumming with grassroots resistance groups and the potential for citizen-led change. How can we reverse the mechanisms that have encouraged and facilitated plastic production and endless consumption? How can we change from a zealously growth-first mindset to a slower model, one of degrowth?

These books are the start of the process of answering that question. Lessons learnt from Venice can be used in other contexts, in other cities, in other futures – futures that will only be possible if we effect radical change in the way that we live now.

Selection

LINA Library Curatorial Books Selection. Catherine Bennett

A Month in Siena – Hisham Matar Penguin, ISBN – 978-0-241-98705-6

The Italian city of Siena is the book's main character, pushing and molding the narrative. Matar writes about the dialogue between the city's private and public spaces – the "magnificent interiors" and "frescoed ceilings" in opposition with the "understated exteriors" and "twisting lanes" of the town. Matar meditates, "We think of buildings not as spaces where human life takes shape, but rather as sites for certain functions and activities." He is concerned with the living that takes place inside architecture; he asks, "What is it like to be born here, and what is it like to die here?", adding that those "twin questions have followed me into every city." The reader understands that this is how he engages with a place, how the paintings that he analyses and examines are another way of experiencing the city in which they are kept. There is little dialogue in the book in the traditional sense; Matar initially is travelling with his wife Diane, but after she leaves, he is predominantly alone in Siena. He meets an immigrant woman and a Sienese family, but the narrative is actually a pas-à-deux is between him and the city. He muses, and Siena speaks back to him: "I was not so much inside a city as inside an idea, an allegory that was lending itself to my needs."

Islands of Abandonment – Cal Flyn William Collins, ISBN – 978-0-00-832980-8

Cal Flyn's rich, poetic prose takes us into the world's wastelands, places that have been abandoned, whether because of nuclear disaster, human conflict or economic decay. Flyn travels to the irradiated nuclear sector surrounding Chernobyl, the strip of no man's land that makes up Cyprus's buffer zone, former mining towns and islands once filled with people and domesticated animals that have now turned feral, and in every one she explores how nature not only has reclaimed these spaces but has in fact thrived in the hulking ruins that still bear a fading trace of human's impact. It is a lesson in humility and even faith: human interference in nature, such as landscaping, cultivating and carefully planning gardens like New York's High Line can stifle ecological diversity and create a sterile green environment. Nature works before and around human intervention; it comes back once we are gone. We can trust that the smouldering carcasses of human-built structures will make homes for the nature that comes to reinhabit it, for the species that grow wild and liberally between its limbs and in its open spaces. Flyn's premise is that abandonment can lead to rewilding. Not just rewilding, but healing: the Earth is indulgent, gracious with us, despite our ongoing destructiveness. After nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean in the 1940s and 1950s, coral reefs grew back more ecologically diverse than before. In some cases, destruction has led to a richer renaissance. This is a manifesto for seeing our abandoned spaces differently, helping them become part of the landscape, allowing for possibility where before we may have thought there is none.

Land Sickness – Nikolaj Schultz Polity, ISBN – 9781509556137

Land Sickness is a book about climate change. It's both a novel – the autobiographical story follows the narrator as he leaves a Paris burning under unnaturally high temperatures and travels to the island of Porquerolles in the south of France – and a philosophical essay. Climate change moves with Schultz: he describes the Paris apartments that are poorly adapted to high temperatures, scalding under grey slate rooves; as he's packing his bag, he writes about his awareness of the quantities of water needed to make his jeans, his t-shirts; when he arrives in Porquerolles, he bears witness to an island being socially eroded by the rapacious business of tourism as well as environmentally eroded, as the island's coastline dissolves away, its waters are polluted by ship oil and litter, and fresh water habitually runs out. But the book is not a litany of disasters: it's a diary of sorts, a reminder of how climate change is omnipresent in our daily lives. This book is a response and an antidote to Amitav Ghosh's assertion that the lack of writing about climate change in Western literature is an "imaginative and cultural failure". It mixes prosaic realisations ("The Anthropocene is not a nice place to sleep") with literary sociology, introducing the reader to ecological theory and the human cost of climate change over the course of a slim 100 pages.

L'arcipelago delle api – Chiara Spadano Wetlands, ISBN 979-12-80930-04-0

Most people wouldn't associate the Venice region with apiculture. But the lagoon has actually been a haven for beekeeping for hundreds of years – and more than that, it's home to "a community of pollinators": the people who keep the tradition alive, in spite of environmental decline and transformation. The barene (the marshland and sandbars that are a vital component of the lagoon ecosystem) are a landscape in the process of extinction. That turns the honey produced from the plants on the barene into something rare and precious. Nowadays, Venetian apiculture take place in a context of scarcity, lack and gradual loss: the loss of beekeepers in Venice's dwindling population, of consumers, and also of land suitable for beekeeping. Spadano's exploration of this clandestine world – astonishingly a central part of the agricultural and productive fabric of Venice and yet utterly hidden – reveals how bees are key to understanding the landscape's state of health. They are the canary in the coal mine, the "ecological sentinels" as Spadano puts it, who have been sending us signals for years, sounding the alarm about the transformations taking place in the extremely ecologically valuable salt marshes. Spadano meets different beekeepers operating across the lagoon, follows them as they try to find a suitable place to set up the hives, and introduces the reader to a pace of life dictated by the rhythms and signals of the hive – warnings that we would do well to heed.

If Venice Dies – Salvatore Settis New Vessel Press, ISBN – 9781939931375

If only Settis could write this book every 15 years. Written in 2014, it provides a snapshot of Venice's crumbling social structure at that point in time. Ten years later, the conversation about Venice has barely moved an inch. Settis has a chapter about Venice as an open-air theme park, about how the city is being sold off to the highest bidder, about the city's depopulation. The numbers have changed – have got worse – but the story is the same. Settis issues harsh judgement on Italy's mayors and urbanists who would add towers to historical cities in a vain grab at modernity and economic value; he highlights the extractive capitalism now rotted into the very foundations of Venice after years of short-sighted, profit-seeking leadership. He has an interesting metaphor – that of the city being transformed into a fast-food joint, with all of its citizens waiters. "Making tourism the last reason for protecting cultural heritage and the environment is forgetting the crucial part: The landscape and the heritage in question doesn't belong to tourists, but to citizens." Venice can be used as a model and as an example of how to bring together symbolic capital and civic capital in one, restoring the 'right to the city' and making it truly a city for its citizens.

Curated Decay – Caitlin DeSilvey University of Minnesota Press, ISBN - 978-0-8166-9438-9

Reading DeSilvey and other heritage researchers working on this topic was the first time I had considered an alternative approach to care of urban or natural sites, one of "postpreservation." She draws attentions to the imbalance in our attention, how only some historical objects are deserving of curation and conservation while others are allowed to rot. In the case of Venice, sites that draw tourists – and their cash – like the Basilica di San Marco are endowed with conservation programmes, while, ironically, the authorities are doing nothing to protect the city's very foundations from erosion caused by the waves from the public transport system of vaporetti and made worse by tourist flows. It is this kind of illogic that DeSilvey highlights in her book as she seeks to tear down our current paradigm of heritage conservation. She asks whether we can see opportunity and, even, the possibility of new life and new functions for places that are in a process of erosion or decomposition, and whether some monuments should be allowed to reach the end of a life cycle and be permitted to turn into ruins. It is a beautiful, lyrical, personal book that presents a new way of looking at what we do with old stone, and provides arguments for how to care for or treat historical cities.

Reprendre place: Contre l'architecture du mépris – Mickaël Labbé Payot & Rivages, ISBN – 9782228924542

The city tells us who is desirable or not. The city tells us who it wants to be used by. That's the key message at the heart of Labbé's book, which is part of a lineage of socialist urban thinking in the same vein as Henri Lefebvre's concept of "right to the city". L'architecture du mépris – which could best be translated as contemptuous architecture or the architecture of disregard – is a term for urban furniture like anti-homeless spikes, benches that are designed to dissuade lying on them and water jets installed at the entrance to city car parks to stop homeless people sleeping in them overnight. "The city is speaking to us, but we don't notice," Labbé tells us. Urban design is not innocent; a message is always being sent. The book invites us to notice what is around us, the small transformations of a street, a neighbourhood, an entire district, that can have major repercussions on its inhabitants. Labbé makes an argument for resisting this new language of hostility in architecture, and calls on citizens everywhere to reassert their right to public space.

Rebel Cities – David Harvey Verso Books, ISBN – 978-1-78873-492-9

Harvey's work of political theory delves into how cities are used as battle grounds by capital – but his reading offers hope, drawing on historical examples of urban rebellion from the Paris Commune, Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War, the 1968 uprisings, Occupy Wall Street to the Brixton riots. He elucidates how it is possible to rebel against the constrictive structure of neoliberal capitalism through a series of historical essays couched in Marxist theory. He responds to Lefebvre with his own definition: "The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city." Even in compact, historical cities such as Venice which are not being rebuilt in the sense of significant urban demolition and redevelopment, they are still being altered in a painstakingly gradual and insidious way. Harvey says that citizens should have a "radical" power to shape "the ways our cities are made and remade" and they must claim that power through anti-capitalist struggle. Later on in the book, he presents the idea of the "urban commons" and how urban commonalities are being threatened by cultural commodification by property developers, the tourist trade and politicians themselves in their quest for city branding. Urbanism is political and cannot be detached from class struggle. Building a truly socialist city, in which every citizen has an equal right to the city, must happen through the overthrow of extractive capitalism – "That is the city air that can make people truly free."