In Silent Witnesses: Modernity, Colonialism, and Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier's Unfinished Plans for Havana, Joseph R. Hartman examines Havana's urbanization under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (in power 1925–33), focusing on the largely unrealized plans of French urbanist Forestier and his Franco-Cuban team of architects and planners. Scholars until now have focused on cataloguing the regime's extant monuments, while giving far less attention to Forestier's unbuilt urban works. The Machado regime's building campaign spoke to modern aspirations of Cuban independence and nationhood, but also to enduring colonial paradigms of race, power, and urban space. Interpreting the history of Havana's urbanization requires taking a critical view of Cuba's colonial heritage and the survival into modern times of local and imported colonialist practices. Revisiting this history lends new insights into the cultural stakes of urban restoration efforts ongoing in Havana today.

How does one begin to decipher an urban landscape if it is constantly changing? Four thousand years ago the land on which Shanghai is located was submerged beneath the sea. Today it is one of the most rapidly globalizing cities in the world. In looking for ways to approach the architectural and urban history of Shanghai, it may be useful to focus on the moments of change, acculturation, tension, and dilemma. It is such encounters or intersections that redefine and establish anew the very reality and imagination of the city’s timescape. In general, a city can be viewed through its overall layout, planning, policies, changing environmental conditions, and interactions between different social and cultural groups. In Encountering the Dilemma of Change in the Architectural and Urban History of Shanghai, Cary Y. Liu argues that the goal should not be to establish an immutable chronology of facts and events but to better comprehend the complex tensions and issues defining each encounter.

Andrea Palladio’s Venetian churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore overlook the Bay of San Marco and its tributaries, the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal. In Palladio and the Water-oriented Scenography of Venice, Daniel Savoy examines the churches from their surrounding waterways, explaining them as centerpieces in an elaborate program of urban scenography that must be seen as a work of collective civic authorship. Through close topographical and contextual analysis, he shows that Palladio and his patrons oriented the churches to be seen from the perspective of the waterways approaching and transversing the city while evoking the visual experience and cosmological associations of theater. The scheme accords with Palladio’s theoretical project but also builds on Venetian conventions of aquatic urbanism and symbolic geography, implicating the architect in a centuries-old tradition in which the mythical image of Venice was projected through the city’s spectacular waterfront architecture.