Letter from the Editor

This is turning out to be a significant year for Azure. The beginning of 2018 saw the launch of a redesigned print edition. A dynamic reimagining of the Azure website is in the works. And this issue marks my first as editor-in-chief, making me only the third person to hold that role in Azure’s 33-year history. Needless to say, I am honoured and thrilled to be shepherding this valuable resource at a time when architecture and design are more important than ever to the well-being of our communities and especially our cities, the main focus of this issue. As more and more people make their homes in dense urban clusters, seemingly intractable problems such as exorbitant housing costs and disappearing public spaces are making many metropolises forbidding to a growing number of groups, from the young to immigrants. For architects and designers, such drawbacks constitute tremendous opportunities as well as challenges, a fact that became increasingly clear (and heartening) as we assembled the content in these pages. Over the years, Azure has consistently provided design professionals with the information and tools they’ve needed to navigate their fastchanging industries. As its new editor, I intend to double down on that approach, creating content that speaks directly to working architects and designers in ways that are both practical and aspirational, making editorial decisions through the prism of what it takes to thrive in today’s creative marketplace. And that, for me, starts with discourse. What better way to understand how to reclaim those vanishing public spaces, for instance, than to tap one of North America’s foremost experts on the subject: Claire Weisz, who sat down with executive editor Elizabeth Pagliacolo in New York not long ago to discuss Weisz’s wide-ranging efforts to improve public infrastructure in America’s biggest city and beyond. To shed light on what communities around the world are doing to ensure more affordable housing, we likewise enlisted writer John Lorinc to consult with some of the architects and builders achieving remarkable results through new residential models, innovative design ideas and more. And Linda Besner, in an effort to draw lessons from Germany’s recent attempts to house and integrate a flood of refugees, spoke to those who had a direct hand in doing so to report on what worked well and what didn’t. As Weisz suggests in her conversation with us, architects and designers wield tremendous city-enhancing powers “because they’re the ones holding the pencil.” Without a doubt, the problems currently facing the world’s urban centres are numerous, but so too are the potential design solutions. That makes this a particularly exciting time for the architecture and design professions – and an equally exciting time to be covering them.