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.
Cities of Tomorrow: Planning, Justice and Sustainability Today is an important and most welcome addition to the limited texts available in Hebrew in the field of urban planning. The central question underpinning the different contributions is: how to plan the cities of tomorrow and to what extent and under what circumstances could they become more just and sustainable?
Daniel Campo’s The Accidental Playground is the result of an ethnographic action-oriented analysis focussed on the life course of a waterfront at Williamsburg’s Northside (also known as the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal, BEDT). The context of the study is related with the redevelopment of its neighbourhood during the New York’s revitalization programme launched in the early 1990s.
In my article ‘The right to infrastructure’ that appears in Society and Space 32(2), I report on fieldwork I have been carrying out with grassroots and guerrilla architectural collectives (Basurama, Zuloark) in Madrid over the past four years. These collectives have developed some original technical and auto-constructive practices that, I suggest, may be thought of as prototypes for a type of open-source urbanism.
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?