Libero Andreotti is a Professor of Architecture at Georgia Tech, USA. Nadir Lahiji is an Adjunct Faculty at the University of Canberra, Australia.
Andreotti and Lahiji's compendium of reflections on the role of the phantasmagoria - commodity's ghost - on our understanding of city is not a treatise on urbanism. It explores something that today is much less common: a profound update of Walter Benjamin's Arcade Project set in relation to multiple contemporary theorists who offer insightfully apparati for understanding our technically anaestheticized city. Unflinching in its examinations of contemporary theorists who soft-sell the critical of critical theory and miss the Benjaminian insight, they make connections to many others who surprisingly add to and update our reading of Benjamin and Guy Debord. Peggy Deamer, Professor, Yale School of Architecture.