Essay Archive

On the Viral Politics of Wastewater Epidemiology

The matter, politics, spatial and labor dynamics of global waste plays a crucial, albeit frequently erased, role in our pandemic now. The understories of pandemic waste impacts are vast, and often framed in terms of loss: from grappling with food system and supply chain losses, to techniques for avoiding spoilage; from popular narratives of lock-down effects on single-use plastics, to PPE and hospital refuse management. Wastewater tracing, however, has gained particular interest and praise as a tactic of revaluing waste amidst outbreak. I examine the viral politics of sewer-shed epidemiological tracing trends as a complex tool for SARS-CoV-2 public health management and increased surveillance.

By

Rachel Vaughn

Copulating giants or concrete cathedrals? A short history of the Four-level Stack

A short visual history of the Four-level Stack interchange, considering its early presentation as an engineering marvel, its symbolic role in film and TV, how it has come to signify urban complexity and machine intelligence as well as being a contested site of exclusion.

By

Peter Merrington, Ilana Mitchell

The Constrictions of Machinic Escape: Carl Craig and Detroit Techno’s Dislocation into Museum-Space

Techno’s extra-diegetic improvisations are linked architecturally to Detroit’s landscape of industrial modernism, in all of modernism’s productivist, futuristic, environmentally toxic, and racially exploitative dimensions.

By

Alex Liebman

Cities and the Dust of Destruction

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. 

By

Ute Eickelkamp and Malini Sur

The Stadium and Crises of Social Reproduction

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.

By

Morgan Adamson

Publicly Owned Private Spaces

New York City’s Open Restaurants program and similar programs around the world enclose public space, creating new spaces for policing.

By

Joshua Mullenite

Space of feminist hope: Notes from two acts

In this essay, I invite everyone to consider how every day, community-based pedagogies reinvent and practice new kinds of spatial relationality for feminist futures.

By

Ian Liujia Tian

(Post)Pandemic Urban Futures and Their Contradictions

The futures of cities worldwide are currently being contested, and calls to “imagine urban futures” have come to mean reimagining life in relation to a range of ongoing and anticipated crises including COVID-19.

By

Hiba Bou Akar

Following the Footsteps of Caretakers: Parque do Flamengo

"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."

By

Ana Corrêa do Lago

Wolves, ecologies of fear, and the affective challenges of coexistence

Wolves and other large predators make their presence felt in the wider landscape. We investigate how to grasp this affective challenge to living in a multispecies world where coexistence never comes in ‘neutral’.

By

Thorsten Gieser & Erica von Essen

R.I.P.