Designing Emerging Markets: A Quantitative History of Architectural Globalisation

This book offers a unique glance into the process of globalisation of the architectural practice during the last three decades through the lenses of innovative methodologies in architectural history based on quantitative data. Focusing on the golden age of globalisation (1990-2019), it investigates the transnational work of more than one thousand architectural firms of different business models from Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific in a broad sample of emerging markets: Mainland China, South-East Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, Sub-Saharan Africa, Russia and Kazakhstan, and Latin America. In the book, different thematic geographies are presented to explore the global scope of the contemporary profession, examine significant projects and the structural conditions behind them, and reveal the debates that such works generated. Understanding the global agency of design firms in emerging markets also becomes a way to study different market conditions, modes of production, and architectural trends comparatively and to highlight the shifts that occurred in the profession over the last few decades. The use of quantitative methodologies produces a novel and updated narrative on contemporary architecture in emerging markets grounded in quantitative data rather than in preassumptions and purely qualitative interpretations. Richly illustrated, this book is further enhanced by an ample set of maps, graphs, and tables to visualise data better.

Giaime Botti, Ph.D. in Architecture from Politecnico di Torino, is an Assistant Professor in Architecture at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China and the BEng Architecture Course Director. He has previously taught at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. His research focuses on the history of twentieth-century architecture and urbanism in Latin America, on contemporary China, and on the global practice of architecture.