Submission Guidelines
We seek lively and original writing on contemporary architecture, landscape, and urbanism. We define these areas broadly, to include allied fields such as planning, geography, history, sociology, ecology, politics, media, and technology. We publish interdisciplinary scholarship as well as essays, criticism, narrative journalism, photography, and multimedia work. We occasionally publish work in other genres that illuminates the experience of cities, buildings, and landscapes.
We seek writing that probes hard questions and that balances the high-altitude concept with a sharp focus on the messy, complicated details of lived experience, of real places and politics. Whatever the form, we value prose that is both rigorous and accessible.
To learn more about our 2020 Writers Fund, which is dedicated to supporting the work of BIPOC authors, read our news post on anti-racism in design.
To learn more about our commitment to public scholarship, read our statement.
As an independent, free-access, non-profit journal, our pay scale ranges from modest honoraria for scholarly articles to more substantial fees for grant-supported projects. We do not pay for articles drawn from books in press, or for participation in published surveys or roundtables, or conversations conducted by Places editors.
Calls for Articles
Please see our ongoing calls in areas of particular interest:
Criteria, Process and Format
Send manuscripts, proposals, or queries to [email protected], with “Places submission” and the title in the subject line.
If you would like your article to be considered for our 2020 Writers Fund, please indicate this in your submission.
As part of the submission process, we recommend that you read several Places articles. In general, the most successful submissions come from authors who are familiar with the journal.
Please note that we very rarely publish articles in which designers or artists are writing about their own work. The exceptions would be expansive review-essays in which the work is considered in some larger critical or disciplinary context, and interviews or conversations.
We occasionally publish excerpts from books in progress or else in close coordination with the date of publication. As a policy we do not feature texts from volumes that have already been published.
We prefer to receive manuscripts as Microsoft Word attachments. Most articles range from 1,000 to 6,000 words, but we are not prescriptive about length. Please do not send manuscripts with parenthetical citations; citations should be formatted as endnotes.
Submit image files as email attachments or via a file-sharing service such as Dropbox. Do not embed images in Word or PDF documents. If you are proposing a visual gallery, we like to see a wide selection of work, at least 20 images. Send captions or titles, if any, in a Word document.
Please inform us if you are submitting simultaneously to another publication. We will republish work under certain circumstances: for instance, if it has never been published in English, or has appeared only in a print publication with a limited readership. Let us know if your submission is part of a larger project, e.g., a chapter of a book in progress.
Response
We aim to respond to queries and proposals within 2 to 4 weeks and to manuscripts within 4 to 12 weeks, although we may take longer. Please wait until this time has passed before writing to check on the status of your submission.
Our selection process is highly competitive, and we accept only a small fraction of all submissions. Because our resources are limited, we are not able to offer detailed responses to articles that we do not accept for publication.
Editorial Independence
Please read our statement of statement of editorial independence.
A Note on Usage
Please read our statement regarding the capitalization of racial identities.