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, but now it is entrenched in the upstate New York 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.