Interesting Reads
Detroit Borderama: Part 1
Places Journal
Detroit looks just like a city, except it’s not one any more. The first installment in a three-part essay.
Detroit Borderama: Part 2
Places Journal
Henry Ford retooled the city on the hill for a new mobility. The cars he built, and the roads created to serve them, radically remapped our cities.
Detroit Borderama: Part 3
Places Journal
The genius of Eminem: He reclaims the space of borderama spectacle — the space of Detroit — for the purpose of personal testimony.
Infrastructure as Landscape
Places Journal
Landscape Migration
Places Journal
We are now well into a geologic era — the Anthropocene — characterized by the acceleration of environmental change. This is the landscape medium in which we design.
Thirsty City
Places Journal
An environmental historian assesses the massive infrastructure that brings water to the American West — and makes it possible to take a shower in Los Angeles.
The Gray Scale
Places Journal
The Boundary Monuments along the U.S.-Mexico border were erected back in an era content to mark the border with dignified stone sentinels.
Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft
Places Journal
The phenomenal rise of the free zone, an opportunistic urban hybrid that has powered the rise of glittering world cities like Singapore and Dubai.
Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit
Places Journal
Whatever happens next will be without precedent because the context of city no longer applies in this place where history has finally run out.
Living with Mies: The Towers at Lafayette Park
Places Journal
A glimpse of life at Lafayette Park, one of the most racially integrated and economically stable neighborhoods in Detroit.
Backwater: Landscapes of the Mississippi Delta
Places Journal
Resuscitating the Mississippi Delta with river diversions and sediment siphons would be the world’s largest coastal restoration project. But it could happen.
Turning on the Fantasy Fountain
Places Journal
As water became abstracted from the landscape, so did the imagination. How the Los Angeles Aqueduct made Hollywood.
Turning on the Fantasy Fountain
Places Journal
As water became abstracted from the landscape, so did the imagination. How the Los Angeles Aqueduct made Hollywood.