The recent work of Robert Beauregard, Laura Lieto and colleagues is at the forefront of attempts at reformulating planning theory around assemblage thinking and the new materialist, post-structuralist and post-humanist thrust it comes with.

‍In August 2016, behind the Maritime Museum in North Jakarta’s kota tua (old town), we walked into the neighborhood of Kampung Akuarium, or rather its ruins. The kampung – a term meaning village that is used in the urban context to describe self-built, semi-formal neighborhoods – and its 500 some residents had been forcibly evicted by the city government four months prior.

‍This text begins from a central question: what is a critical spatial practice in a contemporary moment marked by planetary breakdown, by the increasingly visible presence of climate change across a number of different scales, by the sense of a future and present gone violently awry?

Climate change is reshaping our planet: the spaces we live are becoming hotter, dryer, wetter, stormier than they have ever been before. As atmospheric carbon dioxide saturation exceeds 415 parts per million, the places we live, from rural farmland to coastal villages to sprawling metropolises, are faced with shifts in weather and climate that our built world can no longer accommodate.

As other contributors in this thematic issue discuss, the notion of critical spatial practice springs from Michael de Certeau’s distinction between tactics and strategy. This is often interpreted as implying two scales of action, typically understood as oppositional. For Jane Rendell, credited with coining the academic term “critical spatial practice,” de Certeau’s tactics are closely associated with Henri Lefebvre’s emphasis on the “right to the city,” which frames urban space in general and public space in particular as a terrain of political conflict (Rendell 2008).

AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist whose work explores the spatial and social compositions of urban regions, the production of everyday life for urban majorities, and the lives of Muslim working-class residents.

Images of homeless people—both those captured through cameras and imaginaries that saturated with meaning through popular discourse—have an enormous effect on how cities respond to the ongoing crisis of homelessness.

Asher Ghertner continues his work as a creative and profound scholar with his first monograph, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi. This book is a great read yet also manages to be impressively detailed in its data and textured in its ethnographic feel. Ghertner proves particularly agile in his movement among sites in Delhi as well as among concepts and modes of academic engagement, shifting from exposition and explication to conceptual development and back again.

Published fifteen years after Cities: Reimagining the Urban, Seeing Like a City, is a testament to the evolution of Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift’s urban thinking. The two books are, in a sense, part of the same intellectual project: one that aims for a wholesale reconsideration of how urban scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds approach the city.

The Jersey Barrier is a squat cast concrete traffic control device, among the most commonly used in an evolutionary chain of concrete dividers. The barrier was developed for the New Jersey State Highway Department in the 1950s and bears its name though it is officially known as a Type C barrier in Canada.

As I was preparing myself to write this book review, a new report was published, stating that the Jerusalem Municipality deposited for public review a special plan for the confiscation of land in the Jewish cemetery in the Mount of Olives, attached to the Ras El-Amud mosque. The plan’s main objective is to allow land confiscation, in order to erect a visitors’ center which will be directed by a right-wing Jewish-Settler organization.

What would a Central Park designed by proletarians look like? How would such a subaltern landscape differ from the creatures of nineteenth-century bourgeois pastoral taste that we have come to identify with urban nature? Would Manhattan’s structure and social space have been radically changed by such a historical detour?

Rethinking Life at the Margin:The Assemblage of Contexts, Subjects and Politics argues that “assemblage thinking” is not only useful for studying processes of marginalization but also a profoundly political exercise. The editor, Michele Lancione, states how the minor politics at stake in the books’ contributions are “characterized by [their] capacity to become, to articulate difference, and to be open to new articulations” (11).

It is a strange coincidence that the artist Kenneth Goldsmith should have written his homage to Walter Benjamin, New York: Capital of the 20th Century, at almost exactly the same time as Walter Benjamin’s own manuscripts for The Manhattan Project or New York, Capital of the 20th Century were found in New York’s public library.

When I set out to write my article, "Indignation and Inclusion: Activism, difference, and emergent urban politics in postcrash Madrid," Ahora Madrid was in its infancy. I was fairly skeptical about its chances of actually winning. I was clearly, however, proven incorrect—Manuela Carmena is now the mayor of Madrid.