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.
The global pandemic has occasioned an impulse to think in monumental terms – totality, catastrophe, portal. This essay commits to a different reading that stops the rush of planning and forecasting, projecting and forecasting. It offers collective life as an analytic that keeps the focus on the ways in which the urban majority is trying to survive and cope within structures of inequality that now bear both the new imprint of COVID-19 while equally holding the continuities of older forms of distancing and exclusion.
Simone argues that the practices for living with instability will be found in those places with an infrastructure for moving forward despite sustained marginalization. It is in these places that we can see the infrastructure for making livable spaces out of unideal and less privileged circumstances.
Being public is essential to social and political life. Political counterpublics, including the growing “climate public” and “mutual aid public,” will be part of any just post-Coronavirus future. As the crisis continues, they are building themselves through various spaces and spatialities of publicness.
If there is something to be cared for in this renewed space of emergency, that thing is not just at the level of individual practice or help the ‘collective,’ but concerns imagining an undisciplined politics of inhabitation, that is, a politics that finds in limited control and circulations ways to counter-do austere fixtures.
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.
With an eye toward contemporary techno-utopian schemes and city-building initiatives, I argue that the basis of technological approaches to urban rule today—a conception of cities as complex socio-economic systems amenable to market-driven optimization—was forged by postwar administrators and technicians in response to the vicissitudes of uneven development.
Taking the case of Calaveras County, California, Michael Polson's article shows how medical cannabis activists reimagined the urban and rural in capacious ways, thus catalyzing a local transformation that mirrored national trends around drugs, penality and Rightist politics.
This essay by Samantha M Fox show how, during the socialist era, street lamps were an essential instrument in the construction and conceptualization of socialist urban space. Since privatization, they have come to signify the fractured and radically individualized nature of capitalist urban space.
This paper by Martin Müller and Elena Trubina discusses improvisation as a liminal practice of inhabiting the in-between that marks urban spaces from squats and brownfields to communal gardens, from infrastructural maintenance and urban living labs to political protest and solidarity in times of crisis.
Building upon notions of extended urbanization, the essay reflects on the sensory implications of what it means when urbanization becomes extensive, i.e. when decision-making is subject to a multiplicity of forces that make coherent narratives about what is taking place problematic, while “extending” an enlarged field of opportunities as well as constraints for individual livelihoods.