This month’s AR explores architectural intensity in all its forms, from the density and energy of the city to fleeting spectacle and cycles of transient inhabitation. As the Venice Biennale repopulates the Arsenale and Giardini for another year, we examine the temporary city of Burning Man and the jaw-dropping influx of pilgrims to the sacred Islamic site of Makkah.

Catherine Slessor mourns the death of the pleasure garden and the ‘typology of intensity’ – fairgrounds, markets, pilgrimage sites, carnivals, nightclubs, sports stadiums and places of frenetic but transient inhabitation – while Rahul Mehrotra and Felipe Vera examine the kinetic cities of India, re-envisaging urban environments as ‘ephemeral landscapes’ shaped by temporal patterns and cycles of change.

Revisiting Moshe Safdie’s 1967 model for urban density at Habitat 67 in Montreal reveals that it has stood the test of time, while the most recent housing prototypes by Urban-Think Tank challenge the standard housing model across Khayelitsha, the second biggest township in South Africa. And this month’s Reputations lifts the shimmering, mutating lid on Frank Gehry whose iconic architecture is ‘in your face evidence’ of the world we live in.