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Behind the eminently democratic image that India projects to the world one also finds heavily militarised regions such as Kashmir. Francesca Recchia set out to uncover the traces of conflict that remain in architecture, bearing witness to centuries of coexistence and resistance

Metrography, Iraq’s first independent photo agency, opens in Sulaymaniyah, in the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan, to report on Iraq’s social and cultural multiplicity

The Iraqi Kurdistan region still shows the indelible marks and scars from decades of Saddam Hussein’s bloody ethnic persecution. Its contradictions are evident in the built environment: from Erbil’s shopping centres and gated communities to the political prisons; from the villages of Ma’asker Salam, Top Khane and Raparin to the settlement of Wlaxlw, built using the debris and rubble left over from the Iran-Iraq War

Reflecting on the 1970s Ba'athist land reform and the 1980s forced displacement of Kurdish people by Saddam Hussein, the paper presents a historical reconstruction of the use of territorial design as a tool for ethnic and urban control in the context of Northern Iraq. In that decade, the Ba'athist regime in Iraq proceeded to a massive displacement of people from the villages on the mountainous areas in the Kurdistan Region down to the valleys. The government specifically designed Collective Towns (mujamma'at) where these people would be relocated. The planning and design of Collective Towns initially responded to a logic of rationalisation and cost-effectiveness, but was successively turned into one of the political tools that Saddam Hussein used to manage the tensions with the Kurdish population of Iraq.The paper reconstructs the historical development of Collective Towns from their original socialist ideal in the 1970s to their use as a territorial device of social, political and ethnic control. After the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, Collective Towns were not dismantled, but were on the contrary fully appropriated by inhabitants and governments to make of them the fully functional urban centres at the core of contemporary urbanisation in Kurdistan.As a way of conclusion, the paper reflects on how Collective Towns "subversively" evolved from spaces of exception and structures of oppression into potentially open nuclei of urban development.

Creativity is one way to survive in a war-torn country. In the hands of artists such as Rahim Walizada and Aman Mojadidi, as well as in the work of cultural centres and local artistic initiatives in Afghanistan, creativity becomes a strategy for political subversion and a means to preserve the past

FabLab, an interesting and controversial humanitarian project born in the Afghan mountains and financed by the American government, raises questions on the exploitation of scientific research