Places Journal​ provides a powerful platform for significant impact within the design disciplines and beyond. In my role as dean of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at Penn, it is the wide influence and broad readership that impresses me most about the journal. This certainly is a time that calls out for rigorous public scholarship that provides hope that we can plan, design, and build better places.

Working with Places Journal has been the most personally rewarding and professionally valuable experience of my fifteen-year publishing career. With its interdisciplinary global reach and gorgeously designed platform, Places offers the most meaningful and sustainable model for writing about design and landscape in the public realm.

The international outlook of P​laces’​ academic partner network has been of great importance and inspiration at Aarhus. Being part of P​laces’​ academic partner network has enabled us to learn from other schools, understand different educational contexts, and establish new relationships with institutions from around the world.

Places publishes some of the very best writing and photography, but its almost radical proposition of delivering intelligently edited content is what sets the journal apart. Places is irreplaceable as the accountable, passionate, and contemporary voice driving the debate about our cities and landscapes.

Places builds strong connections between academia, the professions, and the public, and it does so at an international scale. It is a model of what publishing can and should be.

Where else can you get design, anti-design, post-design, no design, design criticism, criticism on criticism, design research, research by design, uber design, infra, ultra, inter and intra design, all in the one place?

Places is much more than a place to go to find out what’s happening at design schools and in the design world. I consider Places Wire an integral part of our school’s communications strategy. Whenever we have new and important news to share, Places Wire and its strong presence on social media helps us get the message out to the right audiences.

At a time when too often we are slow to imagine the change that needs to happen in our world, Places brings forward, from academia to the public, important new ideas about the designed and built environment. Places is a catalyst for critical conversations.

Places not only increases people’s knowledge about the crucial role environments play in our lives; it also exemplifies intelligent web-based debate about a broad spectrum of topics and attitudes in architecture, landscape, and urbanism. And on all these fields it offers far and away the best writing.

Places is essential reading for scholars — for anyone — interested in the world around them. It’s become the New Yorker of the built and natural environment.

Places has created a vibrant forum for authors and readers seeking a fresh, multidisciplinary view of the designed environment.

During my years as a student, Places emerged as my go-to resource for innovative research in landscape architecture — and now, as a practitioner, it remains as vital as ever for my work.