My Bookmarks
Prince & Place
Places Journal
Listening to Prince, we are immersed in the soundscape of Minneapolis — a musical geography shaped by racism, class inequality, sexuality, migration, habitation, and displacement.
How to Map Nothing
Places Journal
Many pandemic maps depict the macro-scale forces that produced the “Great Pause.” What’s harder to show is all the something enabling that nothing, the pulsing activity powering the pause.
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.
Our Unwitting Autobiography
Places Journal
A geographer puts on her social-scientist bifocals to photograph the signs of public yearning macro and micro, near and far, in a summer of protest in Washington, D.C.
Almost Home
Places Journal
The compelling part of the multiplayer survival game Fallout 76 was exploring a fantasy version of hardscrabble West Virginia, a digital recreation of places where the author grew up.
Landscape Will Thank You to Remember That
Places Journal
Public art is a growth sector for architects. But when it comes to objects in landscape, our experience is altered by who builds what and how we know the difference.
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?
Tree Thinking
Places Journal
Trees have served as models of intellectual inquiry and as sites of religious and civic deliberation. Now they are inspiring deeper forms of ecological investigation.
Maintenance and Care
Places Journal
A working guide to the repair of rust, dust, cracks, and corrupted code in our cities, our homes, and our social relations.
Reading Detroit in a Season of Mourning
Places Journal
The grassy mounds that dot Detroit might be scrap heaps, or dumping grounds, or piles of ash and brick. But they are also unintentional artifacts in a tradition of monumentality and commemoration.
Accelerated and Decelerated Landscapes
Places Journal
People who study, design, or care for landscapes need to become experts at the techniques, knowledges, and ethics of bending time.
Water Is Wealth
Places Journal
In Honolulu, environmental activists are seeking to remake their city according to Indigenous design knowledge. What is happening in Waikīkī might be a model for a new watershed urbanism.
The Ecology of Unpredictability
Places Journal
Birch trees clumped in thickets are usually found at derelict and disturbed sites. When landscape architects use this type of planting, are their designs truly ecological? Does it matter?
The Green Fuse in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn
Places Journal
I did not expect to be transported by a plant growing in a diesely tree-bed, a few feet from a dreary phone store and our steamy local laundromat.
Taking the Measure of a Forest
Places Journal
Maple Grove is so small you could learn its trees in an afternoon. But run a transect through the site, and you’ll find a forest preserve shaped by millennia of human settlement and plant evolution.
Walking the Darkness Home
Places Journal
A journey to the bottom of the Grand Canyon defies the expectations (and clichés) of the famous landscape.
A Home Before the End of the World
Places Journal
What does it mean when a famous novelist makes careless errors in his depiction of nature? Is our ignorance of natural ecosystems making it easier for us to destroy them?
Zombies and Ghosts
Places Journal
In 21st-century finance capitalism, residential buildings are valued less as homes than as investments. The unsettling results are underpopulated cities and bleak unfinished suburbs.
The "Indianized" Landscape of Massachusetts
Places Journal
The inclusion of Native American names and sites in civic geography near Boston has obscured the violence of dispossession.
Elegy in Three Plagues
Places Journal
Viral spread, racist prejudice, and a presidency premised on lies and violence: The antithesis to these plagues is the backyard as birding preserve.
The Problem with Solutions
Places Journal
We need to engage troubled landscapes without presuming to fix them. Notes toward a history of non-solutionist design.
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.
Who’s Your Data?
Places Journal
A city is not a BMW. You can’t drive it without knowing how it works.
A Concatenation of Sprawls
Places Journal
How, in 21st-century Los Angeles, can we continue to nurture the hardy roots of rasquachismo, to yield new and more inclusive Latinx-urbanist aesthetics?
Above Grade: On the High Line
Places Journal
A native New Yorker traces the pre-history of the High Line, and ponders whether the celebrated park will be a victim of its success.
These Studies Led to Further Studies
Places Journal
A journey along the abandoned Karachi Circular Railway.
Field Notes on Pandemic Teaching: 1
Places Journal
The first installment of a narrative survey focusing on the massive move to emergency online instruction.
An Air of Permanent Mourning
Places Journal
The polarization between city and country is an old story. Now it is entrenched in the upstate communities that were sacrificed to provide water to the downstate metropolis.
Why A Marsh
Places Journal
A writer and a scientist trace the deep history of a marsh on the Hudson River, from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age and from the industrial era to our problematic present.
American Barn
Places Journal
The traditional wooden barn persists as a symbol of prosperity, rectitude, and connection to the land even as family farms have been almost entirely replaced by multinational agribusiness.
Nightrise
Places Journal
A month-long journey, on foot, across southern Lebanon reveals complex nocturnal cultures, from farmers watering crops by moonlight to refugees scanning the skies for surveillance planes.
Living Freedom Through the Maroon Landscape
Places Journal
A vital chapter in the protohistory of American landscape design, the swampland communities established by self-liberated slaves are a powerful model for coping with climate disruption.
Poems as Maps: An Introduction
Places Journal
We use maps to find our way in the world, to locate ourselves in relation to others, to measure distance and record change.
“As if they had always been there”
Places Journal
After the family homesteads have been seized, the villages disassembled, and the valleys drowned — decades after the reservoirs have all been built — what do the landscapes look like?
Overture: Watermelon City
Places Journal
Hello, holy rollers who plug in their amps, blow out the power in the building, preach to the street from the stoop.
The Six Cities
Places Journal
Yesterday, I woke and believed I was a city, a green one. You look at me to name the place we become.
where’s carolina?
Places Journal
East of childhood, north of capitol offenses, just west of a big blue treasure chest : wet coffin of neglected bones.
Compassing
Places Journal
Limitless is a faraway place way beyond the rock-strewn ridge named possibility. Find yourself there.
The City's Beach, Run by the People
Places Journal
Lincoln Beach once provided the only waterfront access for Black residents of New Orleans. Despite decades of city neglect, it remains a joyful, if contested, haven for ritual and play.
Place of Refuge
Places Journal
For years Puʻuhonua O Waiʻanae has been a sanctuary for islanders unable to access conventional shelter. It also belongs to a deep Hawaiian history of resistance, inclusion, and care.
Memories of Water
Places Journal
In the small towns of West Bengal and Bangladesh, every pond has stories to tell — of waterbirds and wetland plants, of family memory, colonialist history, and climate change.
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.
“The poorest details of the world resurfaced”
Places Journal
Using a drone-mounted camera, in his latest book Stephen Shore continues his photographic survey of the everyday American landscape.
New (and Old) Topographics
Places Journal
Archival photographs complement the restaging of the groundbreaking 1975 show New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.
Apocalypse-Proof
Places Journal
A windowless telecommunications hub, 33 Thomas Street in New York City embodies an architecture of surveillance and paranoia. That makes it an ideal set for conspiracy thrillers.
Lost Water
Places Journal
The desert city of Amman is running out of water. Meanwhile, officials fixate on gleaming visions of growth, perpetuating the fantasy that urban dysfunction can be escaped rather than addressed.
Signal Noise
Places Journal
Photographing nature through acts of erasure, obliteration, amplification, and reversal.
Views Across Time
Places Journal
Over three decades, Mark Klett has pioneered and refined the art of rephotography — of making new views of earlier and sometimes iconic vantage points.
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.
Material World
Places Journal
Tweeting from the parking lot. Routing a phone call through a fake boulder. In these photos, we see the mundane landscapes where humans meet digital infrastructures.
Paradise Redux
Places Journal
Five years after the deadliest wildfire in California history, what lessons can be learned from how the town of Paradise is recovering — and how it’s preparing for the next blaze?
The Sunk Country
Places Journal
There are many terms for the transformations that the Arkansas Delta has undergone over more than a century: settlement, reclamation, improvement. Here’s another: trauma.
The Middle of Everywhere
Places Journal
In the Flint Hills of Kansas there are cattle ranches and art galleries, old barns and new architecture, ghost towns and growing cities. And there is the last stand of tallgrass prairie in America.