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 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.
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.
As we write, New York City counts over 62,000 homeless people on the street and in the shelter, a number that may well be short of a more accurate figure. Our city has a right to shelter, but not a right to housing, and there is a critical difference at play between the two: Shelter only removes the visible fact of homelessness from view, while doing little to change the material circumstances.
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.
"Seeing Like a City" is a testament to the evolution of Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift’s urban thinking. This book is about doing urban theory without the safety net of established narratives, in the hopes of grasping new viewpoints from which to see the urban corners, patchworks, and dynamics that are either over-simplified or utterly dismissed by mainstream scholarship.
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.