Thesis Readings
Gordon Matta-Clark and the Politics of Shared Space
Places Journal
An artist in the era of urban renewal thinks through what it might mean to fully collaborate with local communities.
Fugitive Libraries
Places Journal
In what ways do libraries act as ‘instruments of social control,’ and how could they be made into instruments of restoration, reparation, or transformation?
A City Is Not a Computer
Places Journal
This seems an obvious truth, but we need to say it loud and clear. Urban intelligence is more than information processing.
Interfacing Urban Intelligence
Places Journal
As we build so-called “smart” cities, we need to consider the point of engagement where citizens interface with the city’s operating system.
Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards
Places Journal
The world’s most ambitious “smart city” project is here. Should we worry that New York City is becoming an experimental lab?
Infrastructural Tourism
Places Journal
For decades tourists have marveled at monumental dams of the American West. These days they trace infrastructures like satellite communications and nuclear waste transport.
Occupying Wall Street: Spaces of Political Action
Places Journal
A survey of the physical places and virtual spaces of Occupy Wall Street, the hypercity built of granite and asphalt, algorithms and information.
The Interventionist’s Toolkit: 4
Places Journal
What happens when the grassroots tactics of activist designers collide with the top-down strategies of urban institutions?
The Interventionist’s Toolkit: 3
Places Journal
How do we judge the success of DIY tactics — of ephemeral works that skirt the edges of activist art and community organizing?
The Interventionist’s Toolkit: 2
Places Journal
DIY urbanists are making ingenious use of print media to spur urban activism — and sometimes revolution.
Public and Common(s)
Places Journal
A philosophical view of the terms public and commons, from the 20th-century treatises of Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas to recent books by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
Little Libraries in the Urban Margins
Places Journal
One of the most promising dimensions of tactical urbanism is the rise of pop-up, guerrilla, and ad-hoc libraries.
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.
Who’s Your Data?
Places Journal
A city is not a BMW. You can’t drive it without knowing how it works.
Databodies in Codespace
Places Journal
As the bioengineering of people and cities converges, where do we locate the public sphere?
Methodolatry and the Art of Measure
Places Journal
The new wave of urban data science (and solutionism) is trending toward an obsession with data-for-data’s-sake and an idolization of method.
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.
Post-It Note City
Places Journal
A visit to the smart-city-in-progress at Sidewalk Toronto prompts questions about what it means to “participate” in civic design.
Mapping’s Intelligent Agents
Places Journal
How do machine intelligences read and write the world? And what Other intelligences deserve our attention?