Colourful blobs emerge from the rooftops of Ron Herron’s “Tuned City ”. The collage from 1969 shows a futuristic vision of densification along urban peripheries, and in many ways it anticipates the situation faced by cities today. Since Archigram, the need for densification has grown dramatically. Existing buildings are gaining extra floors, gaps are being filled, parking lots are becoming building plots and vacant spaces converted and repurposed.

DETAIL magazine's April issue on densification shows current projects in Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg as well as in London, Amsterdam and Bahrain, which are successfully creating more space for education, living and working in densely populated city centres. In each case they have successfully confronted difficult conditions, i.e. infill development of building gaps or scraps of land that are dark and hard to access. Meanwhile, former industrial buildings are being converted into microlofts or family apartments. Now as then, existing stock offers enormous potential for densification. The documentations are supplemented with interviews and information on the building process, which replace our Technology section in this issue.

Colourful blobs emerge from the rooftops of Ron Herron’s “Tuned City ”. The collage from 1969 shows a futuristic vision of densification along urban peripheries, and in many ways it anticipates the situation faced by cities today. Since Archigram, the need for densification has grown dramatically. Existing buildings are gaining extra floors, gaps are being filled, parking lots are becoming building plots and vacant spaces converted and repurposed.

DETAIL magazine's April issue on densification shows current projects in Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg as well as in London, Amsterdam and Bahrain, which are successfully creating more space for education, living and working in densely populated city centres. In each case they have successfully confronted difficult conditions, i.e. infill development of building gaps or scraps of land that are dark and hard to access. Meanwhile, former industrial buildings are being converted into microlofts or family apartments. Now as then, existing stock offers enormous potential for densification. The documentations are supplemented with interviews and information on the building process, which replace our Technology section in this issue.