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.
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.
I suggest that environmental gentrification also works through the conflation of both pollution and ‘health’ with different kinds of urban bodies and embodied (body-centred) practices. This happens not only via the removal of symbolically ‘dirty’ bodies and their replacement with symbolically ‘clean’ bodies, but also via the ways in which those ‘dirty’ bodies become seen as such by the symbolic displacement of environmental and industrial pollution onto them.
More Than Shelter provides a succinct overview of the history of public housing and privileges the voices of SFHA tenants. Her work provides scholars and public officials with a succinct overview of the history of San Francisco’s public housing, and offers them a number of thoughtful conclusions that might contribute to better initiatives in the future.
The open site is pleased to offer a conversation moderated by Tim Markham of Birkbeck with Scott Rodgers, Clive Barnett, and Allan Cochrane, the authors of “Media practices and urban politics: conceptualizing the powers of the media-urban nexus."
Secchi's death in September marks a great loss for urbanism. This interview is a gesture towards bringing his work to a wider Anglophone audience, reflecting on his legacy by exploring his intellectual production, critical pedagogy and practice, with a special focus on the exploration of his idea of a 'new urban question' and the formation of his reflexive urban research praxis.
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?