A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Considers the spatial form and social processes of cities and urbanization with particular attention to the geographies and politics of building theories of the urban.
Citizen Designs is a careful depiction of what democracy feels like, with all its discomforts, disagreements, and unresolved tensions. Elinoff manages to present a picture of the struggle for equal citizenship that is at once optimistic and unromantic. In this, the book makes a timely and important contribution to understandings of the relationship between politics and design
The essay captures some aspects of urban violence in Lebanon and constructs their spatialities. Stories of struggle and creative coping strategies amidst the multiple crises in Lebanon constitute ‘living archives’. They expand the meaning and imaginaries of everyday life, link between a shared past and present reality, and transform the urban space.
We open the histories and contemporary terrors of war dust, its afterlives in motion, hyperactivities, and indestructible forms in cities to scrutiny. In its destructive potential, invisibility and durability dust haunts cities, their pasts and presents, erasing and generating urban subjects and subjectivities.
The stadium is indispensable to the management of urban life on an increasingly volatile planet. The material conditions that produced the stadium lay the groundwork for which it becomes ready-at-hand to contain, discipline, and house bodies that have become otherwise unmanageable.
This paper analyzes the intersection between waste, value, and the right to the city within the context of the Municipal Recycling Collection Program in Salvador, Brazil. It shows how the legal recognition of recyclable-waste collectors as legitimate workers and their integration into municipal practices of waste management has not materialized into improved working conditions and has done nothing to advance their struggle for the right to the city.
Drawing on research in neighborhoods near Mumbai’s largest garbage ground, Deonar, we seek to advance a growing body of work on urban atmosphere. We examine how atmosphere operates materially and affectively through different and changing relations between air, waste, work, environment, and social conditions.
This article discusses the ways that Lefebvrian thinking on urbanization has found a purchase in Indian urban and anti-caste scholarship, and conversely, how compelling new figures of the urban have emerged from Indian scholarship that productively enliven Lefebvrian categories, refusing any separation between the experimentalism of everyday life and the political economy of space.
Media representations such as the documentary ‘Undercover Mosque’ that aired on a British television channel in 2007 is a poignant example of how the banal, everyday life of religious spaces can be folded into – while also give succour to – such narratives.
In this article, I analyze the emergence of New York City’s infrastructure of homeless shelters dialectically, relationally, and historically.