Summer Writing + Editorial Workshop Essays

In line with our commitment to public scholarship in architecture, landscape, and urbanism, this year we inaugurated the Places Journal Summer Writing + Editorial Workshop.

Offered as a benefit to all our academic partners, the Workshop consisted of four small-group, week-long sessions, led by Places editors and conducted via Zoom. Each immersive session consisted of lectures, group discussions, one-on-one coaching, and peer-to-peer exchange. Nominated by their respective faculties, and coming from schools on five continents, the participating students worked closely with the editors to hone their critical thinking and writing skills and to produce an essay on the theme of “Architecture, Urbanism, Pandemics.”

The resulting essays are presented in our new Summer Workshops section. Interpreting this prompt expansively, the workshop participants write about climate crisis and urban equity, digitized isolation and improvised zones of refuge, domesticity and access to public space, preservation and community, logistics and land use. As editors and workshop leaders, we have been impressed by the passion and ambition of these emerging critics of architecture and design. And they have felt the same; as one student wrote to us recently, “It is super exciting to find the tools for reaching a public with my writing and research. The workshop experience only reiterated for me that this is the kind of work I want to pursue.”