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.
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 perceptual shift —understanding garbage collectors as caretakers—was not only happening because I was suddenly going to Parque do Flamengo everyday, but also because at this moment we are experiencing a heightened awareness of what it means 'to take care' of our bodies and of each other."
In the papers that follow, we focus on the temporal dimensions of urban planning. We are particularly interested in the uneven ways in which urban spaces in the present – as (always incomplete) materializations of modernist plans past – present new predicaments not just for social life, but for the craft of planning itself.
In this article, I consider the relationship between urban planning and context by investigating the planning practices associated with a land-use plan in Bordeaux described as “adapted to context.”
Homing in on the protracted landscape of construction, I am concerned with how urban experts in Taksim 360, who do not entirely concur with the seemingly determined trajectory of urban transformation in Tarlabaşı, put inevitability to work. I ask: what makes urban experts stay with a project that might not materialize?
Has modernism evolved from a means to create a utopian future to an architectural discontent co-opted for racist purposes? The planners who built mid-20th century Scandinavian, modernist suburbs conceived of them as places of innovation, possibility, and visionary thinking.
In this article, I describe Mumbai’s sea as an “anthroposea” – a sea made with ongoing anthropogenic processes across landwaters – to draw attention to the ways in which it troubles both urban planning and the making of environmental futures.