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Blackfeet American Indian Women: Builders of the Tribe
Places Journal
Minding the Store in Eden: Gardens and Houses in The Color Purple
Places Journal
Skill, Love, Struggle, and Good Dirt
Places Journal
A Situation: A Tree in Palestine
Places Journal
A story about reckoning with a public secret that doesn’t want to be kept anymore.
Fugitive Libraries
Places Journal
In what ways do libraries act as ‘instruments of social control,’ and how could they be made into instruments of restoration, reparation, or transformation?
Dwelling as Resistance
Places Journal
Resistance against the expansion of Heathrow Airport has been led largely by an off-grid, eco-utopian community. Against the odds, it has used the art of dwelling to genuinely radical effects.
Shade
Places Journal
It’s a civic resource, an index of inequality, and a requirement for public health. Shade should be a mandate for urban designers.
Gordon Matta-Clark and the Politics of Shared Space
Places Journal
An artist in the era of urban renewal thinks through what it might mean to fully collaborate with local communities.
Imagining a Past Future
Places Journal
City planner John B. Williams — and the photographic archive he commissioned — give us the opportunity to complicate received stories of failed urban renewal.
Unbuilding Gender
Places Journal
What might the abstract and architectural offer in terms of transgender representation? We can start by looking at the art of Gordon Matta-Clark.
All Eyes on the Border
Places Journal
Materialized in steel and concrete, patrolled and “performed” by state apparatuses and sensing technologies, the border is charged by the politics of recognition.
The Association of (Gay) Suburban People
Places Journal
From the late ’70s to mid ’80s, in an era of entrenched homophobia, a group of gay suburbanites formed an organization that mixed pride and defiance, political rallies and Tupperware parties.
The Occupation of 123 Delancey Street
Places Journal
How a band of “dirty little artists” liberated a vacant public building on the front lines of urban renewal, on the Lower East Side of New York City.
Notes Toward a History of Non-Planning
Places Journal
The argument about the strength of government and the freedom of the marketplace has been boiling for decades. It is more relevant than ever.
Geographies of Detention
Places Journal
An exhibition of art and documentary work that investigates prison landscapes.
Housing and Hope
Places Journal
The global struggle for housing as a human right emphasizes the relationship of secure housing to personal dignity and full citizenship.
Shelter
Places Journal
Photographs of transient camps set up all across Europe by undocumented workers from Africa and Asia.
20 Years Later: Legacies of the Los Angeles Riots
Places Journal
An historian assesses the dynamic changes in South Los Angeles in the two decades since the 1992 riots.
South Africa after Apartheid: From Township to Town
Places Journal
Apartheid may have ended, but spatial segregation remains.
The Roma of Rome: Heirs to the Ghetto System
Places Journal
A photo essay on the state-sponsored enclaves — a.k.a. ghettos — that house the Roma, or Gypsies, of Rome.
A Method of Living
Places Journal
A photo essay on the dramatic transformations of public housing in Chicago.
Designing Indian Country
Places Journal
Suppose Native America is not over, that there is no “after colonialism.” How do we create public spaces that enable true contact between cultures?
The City’s End
Places Journal
A review of The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction, by architectural historian Max Page.
Still Life with Cone, Standpipe, Caution Tape
Places Journal
A collection of photographs illustrating the art and architecture of the temporary barricade.
Unfinished New York
Places Journal
Preservation has evolved from a rarified special interest to an institution — an ethos — entrenched in our culture. But has it become too conservative, elitist and even racist?
Queer Beacon
Places Journal
In contemporary New York, LGBT activism confronts hyper-gentrification.
Directions
Places Journal
Giving and getting directions is an unsung ritual of civic life, a measure of local knowledge and belonging. But what happens when your neighborhood, your city, seem to have lost their way?
Design with the Other 90%: Cities
Places Journal
A Cooper-Hewitt curator surveys socially responsive urban design in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Skywatching
Places Journal
Two artists explore spy satellite calibration markers in the desert — and trace the satellites in the sky today.
On the Road Home
Places Journal
What is the meaning of home? An anthropologist searches for answers from Aaron Spelling’s mansion in Beverly Hills to the Kalahari windbreaks erected by the !Kung San.
Water in the West
Places Journal
A collaborative photography project focuses on the natural element that has defined the American West.
Image, Object, Experience
Places Journal
How can a photograph convey the physical sensations of being present in a place?
The Pink and Gold Jungle: Iquitos
Places Journal
In the remote city of Iquitos, Peru, photos of young gay men portray (and problematize) the desire to escape the everyday world in search of freedom and bodily expression.
Signal Noise
Places Journal
Photographing nature through acts of erasure, obliteration, amplification, and reversal.
The Edge of Light: Wendover
Places Journal
The nighttime mysteries of Wendover, where military history, land-speed racing, and casino dreams make for strange juxtapositions.
Cisco Trash Map
Places Journal
On railroads, oil rigs, uranium mines, 7-11 pizzas, Thelma and Louise, ruination, salvage, and the limits of the garbage gaze.
Field Notes on Pandemic Teaching: 6
Places Journal
The sixth and final installment of a narrative survey focusing on the massive move to emergency online instruction.
The Westward-Moving House
Places Journal
Now online, a classic essay on the American homestead.
Urbanizing the Mojave
Places Journal
America’s greatest boomtown went bust. An examination of the troubled history of mining, militarization, tourism, and water politics in Las Vegas.
Cloud and Field
Places Journal
On the resurgence of “field guides” in a networked age. We’ve moved from birding to dronewatching, from natural history to dark ecology. But are we still looking through colonialist binoculars?
Walking the Darkness Home
Places Journal
A journey to the bottom of the Grand Canyon defies the expectations (and clichés) of the famous landscape.
We Are in a Western Town
Places Journal
The enduring power of the photographs of Robert Adams, and what they reveal about the paradoxical landscapes of the American West.
Revolution of the Thirsty
Places Journal
The ongoing Egyptian Revolution is about not only political freedom but also the right to water.
Writing on the Wall
Places Journal
A local photographer records hand-painted signs and murals in Detroit.
Viral Cities
Places Journal
How can cities prepare for a viral pandemic? An architect traces the links between urban design and public health, from the plagues of medieval Europe to the H1N1 outbreak.
Willful Waters
Places Journal
Los Angeles and its river have long been enmeshed in an epic struggle for control.
No More Play
Places Journal
Los Angeles is on the brink of a crucial transformation — and at a point where the very word city no longer applies.
Surface to Unlimited: A Visit to Spaceport America
Places Journal
Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, has long depended on tourism. Now spaceflight has been folded into its mythos, at the dawn of the Second Space Age.
People’s Way: Urban Mobility in Ahmedabad
Places Journal
The new bus rapid transit in Ahmedabad mixes transit innovation and traditional culture — and even offers yoga classes for drivers.
The Anti-Monograph
Places Journal
The new monograph on Studio Gang is an effort to feed the star machinery and resist it at the same time.
Monkey King
Places Journal
A Monkey King born from a stone can transform into 72 other things: bug, bird, beast of prey, tree and so forth.
Imperial Traces
Places Journal
The record of the former French colonies is controversial. But it is also rich with narratives, and with built relics — villas, hotels, prisons, slaughterhouses, orphaned by history.
Listening There: Scenes from Ghana
Places Journal
A photo essay on the legacy of tropical modernism in western Africa.
A Short History of American Urban Exceptionalism
Places Journal
American urban development has long pursued its own distinctive course — an urbanism without fixed limits, with endlessly extendable boundaries.