Desperate times demand optimistic transdisciplinary measures. This volume unites a select group of thinkers who courageously traverse disciplinary boundaries. What brings them together is the least stratified ‘component’: a shared problem. It is a widely recognised that a problem gets the solution it merits. However, only a few acknowledge that a problem seldom neatly fits within a single discipline, nor does it conform to the principle of general equivalence. Handling its irreducibility and non-entailment is a skill possessed by very few. Even fewer take the quasi-causal capacity of what we term the ‘space of technicity’ seriously.

The space of technicity, the shared problem of this volume, is a consequence of immanence. Each configuration of surfaces comprising the built environment produces an intangible effect, acting as a quasi-cause. It can be referred to as downward causation or the timely rediscovery of (neo)finalism.

In this volume it is approached it from the perspective of axiology. The space of technicity allows us to evade techno-determinism without adopting an anything-goes attitude. That which has become manifest could have individuated differently. However, the potential of a body cannot be discerned before intervening in the causal fabric of agential reality to extract the singular points that make certain outcomes more likely than others, surpassing mere probability.

When operating within the ethico-aesthetic paradigm, where sense becomes intricately dependent on sensibility, and vice versa, the volume’s attitude might be said to approximate the Spinozian third kind of knowledge that intuits design (and its space of technicity) beyond mere imagination or reason.

This edited volume was inspired by a virtual round table that exhibited a high degree of resonance among the participants. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBiBAgxC5FM

The work of Bernard Stiegler (1952–2020) provides invaluable material for rethinking the built environment as a sort of inorganic spatial memory that enables the evolution of life by means other than organic life. Following Stiegler’s theoretical turn toward epiphylogenetic processes, Footprint 30 is devoted to revisiting the built environment as middling between individuating technical ensembles and niche construction processes. It offers a platform to the transdisciplinary field of posthuman scholarship dealing with existential niches from a technological angle and the concomitant architectural thought that advances such speculative recasting.