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.
One might assume that the book would proceed to discuss the evolution of geographic information systems, which has grown in sophistication in recent years, both in the quality of its analytical capabilities, as well as in its representational qualities. The book’s focus is not this, however, instead focusing on a small group of design professionals who have worked with new capabilities in information graphics to experiment with ways of interpreting the complexities of contemporary landscapes.
Urban exploration certainly does, at times, display a public image of apolitical benignity, aligned with notions of “leaving no trace” that conform with contemporary eco-tourism practices in order to garner public support, but Bennett never attempts to unravel that smoke screen to see what lies behind it.
Bradley Garrett offers an alternative reading of ‘urban exploration’. He contrasts my “virtual” study with the extended period of participant observation entailed in his three year study of urban exploration, and its “diverse and multifaceted community”. Garrett implies that only such long term immersion can reveal the full colour and polyphony of this community.
This article is an attempt at reading the city through what gets extended and/or suspended in it in a time of an interruption, or a glitch. It does this while thinking about Cairo's curfew during the summer of 2020.
Turning to the case of Newark, NJ, this article shows how teachers have embraced a strategy not of bypassing or abolishing the institutions most hollowed out by neoliberal market rule but of taking these institutions over and imagining them anew.
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.
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.
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?