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.
Like "The Arcades Project", both Goldsmith’s and Benjamin’s New York texts are made up of vast accumulations of fragmentary quotes and citations that cumulatively enact a physiognomy of the city. In this sense, they are citational in both form and content: not only does their content consist almost solely of quotation, but this form is itself a citation of Benjamin’s book on Paris.
When I set out to write my article, "Indignation and Inclusion: Activism, difference, and emergent urban politics in postcrash Madrid," Ahora Madrid was in its infancy. As an addendum to this piece, I want to emphasize two ideas. One is contextual and historical, while the other is perhaps an orientation for future research and the role of scholars in articulating the horizons of possibility for radical democratic praxis.
This book is not simply about “squatting” in Berlin. Rather, it is a masterful exercise in geography: the careful tracing and detailed writing of histories, events, bodies, materialities and atmospheres and of their nuanced capacities, debris, and paths.
By couching human shielding, IHL effectively does two things: on the one hand, it prohibits the transformation of civilians into human shields, while, on the other, it allows military forces to attack targets that are protected by human shields (provided they abide by the principle of proportionality), thus combining the prohibition of using human shields with the legality of killing them.
Oxford Street is based on more than a decade of research in the field, during which Quayson studied the histories of colonial and postcolonial town planning and the marks of transnationalism. These include sights, sounds, and spatial interactions in Accra’s urban street life. As the reader is taken on a compelling journey through tro-tro slogans, billboard advertisements, salsa scenes, and gym culture, s/he is invited to go beyond the superficial spatial cues of this seemingly typical African urban street.
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.