The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion Hardcover – November 15, 2017

Some four and a half decades ago, a MIT professor named Robert Goodman declared in his book After the Planners, “We architects and urban planners aren’t the visible symbols of oppression, like the military and the police. We’re more sophisticated, more educated, and more socially conscious. We’re the soft cops . . . . ”Surprisingly unbeknownst to many is the fact that the neighborhoods we live in, the buildings we work in, the districts we shop in and the public space we occupy are formed not by accident or by mysterious, invisible, metaphysical forces, but by the “weapons of exclusion and inclusion” (as the authors put it), used by various players, including city planners, politicians, bankers, lawyers and governmental officials.The inequalities that have been created over time are enormous and the costs to society are, tragically, immeasurable.Learning and understanding how these practices create what is deemed “bad” or inequitable can help us create new methods and techniques to erase years of discriminatory practices.Looks can be deceiving. This is not a coffee table book. While the cover suggests that it is some sort of bizarre, Trotskyesque, neo-rationalist manifesto, it isn’t. The book is accessible and filled with useful, practical information for practicing design professionals and lay people as well.Part encyclopedia, part compendium, part history book, part glossary, part gentle polemic, The Arsenal of Inclusion represents, in the authors’ words, an “effort to identify, understand and critically reflect on some of the forces that condition our professional work as planners and designers of the public realm”.There’s tons of fascinating stuff and stories to devour. Lots and lots of facts. Photographs. Charts. Timelines. Maps. Even a fold out poster is included in the back!To a certain degree, the book tries a little too hard to be too many things; however, just the right balance is struck.The graphic design and layout of the book is very engaging and contributes immensely to its appeal.This publication has been put together by Interboro Partners, an award-winning, Brooklyn based design firm established in this century. They are part of a new generation of cutting edge planning/design firms in New York City that strive to challenge old, outdated theories/assumptions and use research, experimentation as well as community engagement as the underpinnings of their work. Led by Harvard-trained partners Tobias Armborst, Daniel D’Oca and Georgeen Theodore, they’re avant-garde, imaginative, and, most importantly, they’re “woke”.Also featured are contributions from a number of luminaries such as Nicholas Korody of Adjustments Agency, Robert Beauregard of Columbia University’s GSAPP and Susan Sloan of Slo.Vis representing a sort of “state-of-the-art” of the architecture, city planning and design professions today.Order this book, read it, and help to create a more just and inclusive world!

This book has interesting and valuable content. Unfortunately, the format of the book makes that content difficult to appreciate, and exhausts the reader's attention very quickly. First of all, there is zero white space in the book, and I am not exaggerating. Every millimeter is filed with images and text, resulting in page after page crammed to the point where it all just becomes a visual blur (see photo of a typical page) and it becomes exhausting to look at more than a few pages at a time--as well as rendering the thought of actually reading the book impossible.But what's noxious about the book is that every aspect of it, from the size to the language to the type face, is suffused with a preciousness and self-referentiality that can best be summarized as "hipsterism." You feel like if you were to question any aspect of it, you would be met with a dissertation about how some 23-year-old "reimagined" what a book could be and "reinvented" how we should process information (if we were only as intellectually savvy as they are!) and, speaking for myself, the response is "That's so great, thanks... now could you just go away?" The point of the book, about urban inclusion and exclusion, is lost in the larger goal of Interboro congratulating itself for being so incredible and insightful as to produce this book.Every entry in the book is accompanied by a little note ABOUT that entry. The book regularly references itself not as "this book" but as "The Arsenal." Entries are accompanied by "Bonus Material" (which may be poems, interviews, lists, mini op-eds) as well as full-spread photos (a curtain in a lower-class neighborhood hangs outside its window... feel the urban decay!), short quotes, period maps and documents... oh, and don't forget the fold-out poster glued into the back cover.The irony is, all of it just makes the book unusable and impossible to read. Each entry has a highlighted section, which will be the only part of each entry that you read, because it is the only thing that stands out among the clutter of the page. Eventually you realize that this is just a high-end coffee table book for savvy architects and those who want to pretend to be them, and it is actually not intended to be read, it is meant to be paged through. And then you wish you had a book on this topic, because it would be very interesting! But this is a "book object" meant to be seen on design-forward bookshelves, not meant to convey any information or insight. If anyone involved in this book actually wanted to convey information about urban planning, they really out-clevered themselves.

Colorful and fun to read, serious and important issues brought in a different way.