We hope that you’re enjoying the new Urbanomic site—we are of course happy to receive any feedback. Huge thanks to Leaky Studio for their amazing work on the site (going way beyond the call of duty to please a difficult client!); and to Artur Tixiliski for his photographic work for the book pages—he did a perfect job of visually communicating our belief in and commitment to the book as a material form.

Building the site has meant something of a hiatus in terms of organising events and getting new publications out, but rest assured that will be remedied over the remainder of 2016 (after a brief pause for breath)—starting with the publication next month of François J. Bonnet’s The Order of Sounds. There are several other books, and also a new volume of Collapse on the way, more details to come soon.

It was obviously necessary to replace the old, very much outdated, site; but in doing so we wanted to make something that was more than a shop window, and gradually this developed into a ‘pathologically comprehensive’ approach, realisation of which took a lot longer than expected….

The new site has been carefully engineered and designed to allow readers to explore the rich interconnections between conceptual themes, contributors, publications, and events that Urbanomic has developed since Collapse I was published—almost 10 years ago now (celebrations in September!)

What’s happened since then is that our cohort of contributors has grown, many of them returning and contributing across different publications and events, a new and enthusiastic audience has grown with us, new conceptual spaces have developed, and we’ve continued to try and bring together people and ideas from very different disciplines and points of view.

But what’s always been paramount is that Urbanomic is not interested in stocking a cabinet of curiosities, creating a miscellany or a whimsical collection of eclectic materials; nor are we interested in advocating one single philosophical agenda or point of view. The aim has always been to produce and refine an ‘editorial machine’ that would operate to select heterogeneous materials with a view to operating new syntheses, overlaps, montages, connections that allow passage between these materials, stitching them together in new ways and activating new conceptual circuits—and that’s what we wanted to try and reflect on the site. (Another consequence of the development process has been to lead me to repeatedly return to and recalibrate the statement of what is at the core of Urbanomic’s work).

So, the site offers a comprehensive overview of existing work (complete with the excavation of some archive materials that have been lying dormant in the filing cabinet for years!—more of that to come); but more importantly it provides a platform where readers can navigate this material, creating their own path through it (tracking particular concepts through tags, looking at the work of particular contributors, following links between documents, events, books, and posts, and even chapters—yes, the site contains a page for every chapter of every book we’ve ever published…). And, of course, we’ve also made it easier for ourselves to regularly add new online content, so the site will hopefully become rather more of a live destination than the previous one (which was very much moribund if not entirely defunct). It’s a new way for us to extend further our commitment to transdisciplinary thinking, bringing together theorists and practitioners from many different fields, in search of new conceptual movements and montages.

Once again, we’re really happy to receive feedback and suggestions for the site, format and content-wise.

And I’d like to thank everyone who’s supported us over the years and enabled Urbanomic to survive. The construction of what I hope is a unique space of thinking is in no way separable from the emergence of a new audience, many of whom have in their turn become contributors to new publications and projects. This is what fuels the ‘editorial machine’ and keeps it running (although of course, like any desiring-machine it ‘only works when it breaks down’ 🙂 ). It’s your support that has allowed it to develop into something whose existence, although I did indeed vaguely imagine it back in 2006, is a constant source of amazement.

Finally many thanks to Sequence Press, whose support and collaboration has been absolutely crucial for Urbanomic since we began our partnership in 2011. Look out for announcement of some exciting new Urbanomic/Sequence titles coming up for 2016, too….