The Terraforming is the comprehensive project to fundamentally transform Earth's cities, technologies, and ecosystems to ensure that the planet will be capable of supporting Earth-like life. Artificiality, astronomy, and automation form the basis of that alternative planetarity. This short book was written in July 2019. It is is an opening brief and manifesto for The Terraforming urban design research programme at the Strelka Institute in Moscow. It is a narrowly targeted polemic against dominant modes of planetarity and a rejoinder to inadequacies seen in how critical philosophy and design seeks to confront them. The title refers both to the terraforming that has taken place in recent centuries in the form of urbanisation, and to the terraforming that must now be planned and conducted as the planetary design initiative of the next centuries if true catastrophes are to be prevented. The term 'terraforming' usually refers to transforming the ecosystems of other planets or moons to make them capable of supporting Earth-like life, but the looming ecological consequences of what is called the Anthropocene suggest that in the decades to come, we will need to terraform Earth if it is to remain a viable host for Earth-like life. Planetarity itself comes into focus through orbiting imagining and terrestrial modeling technologies (satellites, sensors, servers in sync) that have made it possible to measure climate change with any confidence. We will explore a renewed Copernican turn, and how the technologically mediated shift away from anthropocentric perspectives is crucially necessary in both theory and practice. The Copernican turn is also a trauma, as Freud once suggested, but this is one that demands more agency, not less. The implications of the shift are perhaps counterintuitive. Instead of reviving ideas of 'nature,' we will reclaim 'the artificial'—not as in 'fake,' but rather 'designed'—as a foundation which links the mitigation of anthropogenic climate change to the geopolitics of automation. For this, urban-scale automation is seen as part of an expanded landscape of information, agency, labor, and energy that is part of a living ecology, not a substitute for one. As such, the focus of urban design research shifts toward the governance of infrastructures that operate on much longer timescales than our cultural narratives.

Introduction to Comparative Planetology presents an intertwined analysis of visual cultures of imagining the Earth and geopolitics of climate emergency. It compares different "figures" of the planet – the Planetary, the Globe, the Terrestrial, Earth-without-us and Spectral Earth – in order to assess their geopolitical implications. These implications are then mapped on respective prospects of these figures in developing an infrastructural space for planetary coordination of our design interventions against runaway global heating, and ultimately against mass species extinction.

AI plays a crucial role in the global cultural ecosystem. It recommends what we should see, listen to, read, and buy. It determines how many people will see our shared content. It helps us make aesthetic decisions when we create media. In professional cultural production, AI has already been adapted to produce movie trailers, music albums, fashion items, product and web designs, architecture, etc. In this short book, Lev Manovich offers a systematic framework to help us think about cultural uses of AI today and in the future. He challenges existing ideas and gives us new concepts for understanding media, design, and aesthetics in the AI era.

Switzerland is a conceptual dream that has been realized in part due to geographical and historical circumstances, but first and foremost by conscious and robust design efforts. The country's journey in search of identity unfolds in this essay as a consistent quest for reconciliation of traditional dichotomies between rural and urban, state and community, culture and nature. In this context, an argument is developed for a multi-dimensional approach to design called "deep urbanism." Swiss architect and urbanist Markus Schaefer believes that Switzerland, in its current state of resilient and complex equilibrium, could provide inspiration on productive urban environments of the future and the practices that will be needed to operate within them effectively.

Preservation is ordinarily reserved for architecture that is unique. So how would we go about preserving buildings that are utterly generic? Such is the case with Belyayevo, an ordinary residential district in Moscow. Belyayevo is a classic microrayon, the standardised neighbourhood system that successive Soviet regimes laid out across the USSR in what was the most expansive programme of industrialised construction the world has ever seen. Belyayevo's buildings, and the desolate spaces between them, are identical to thousands of others, but is it different? Kuba Snopek argues that is. Home to many of the artists of the Moscow Conceptualism school, the place was written into the character of their art. Snopek argues that this intangible heritage is the key to saving a neighbourhood many feel has had its day. But as Russia comes to terms with its Soviet legacy, will such arguments fall on deaf ears?

The New Normal think-tank student, activist, and philosopher Joy Zhu reinterprets the concept of affordance in terms of the Chinese concept of yuanfen, which contains critical moments that turn two mutual but mismatched needs into one that is matching, creating an immanent, productive relation of cooperative subsistence. Based on this interpretation, Joy reveals a new concept of efficiency, different from the naturalistic one, demonstrating it through the preservation of outdated technologies in Siberia.

Город полезно уметь видеть и понимать, без этого от него трудно получать удовольствие. Иногда это касается даже родного города. Из чего состоит город? Что такое улица, переулок, площадь, бульвар, сквер, что такое зелень и вода в городе, как живут в городе власть, бизнес, культура, производство, торговля, как возникли кварталы и микрорайоны? Ответы на эти вопросы — в новой книге Григория Ревзина.