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.
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.