Submission Guidelines

We seek lively and original writing on architecture, landscape, and urbanism. We define these areas broadly to include allied fields such as planning, geography, history, ecology, politics, media, and technology. We publish academic research written for a wide audience, 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 have a longstanding commitment to public things, public space, and public knowledge.

We seek contributions that balance the high concept with a sharp focus on the messy, complicated details of lived experience, of real places and politics — soulful, distinctive writing, original reporting, personal observation, deep archival research, and the surfacing of offline texts and images. Whatever the form, we value prose that is both rigorous and accessible.

Please do not send proposals or manuscripts containing text generated by LLMs, agents, or other forms of artificial intelligence. We do not want to read smooth-yet-inhuman sentences, and we cannot tolerate plagiarism.

To strengthen our mission of public scholarship, we no longer maintain a peer review track. We welcome submissions from established and emerging writers in any profession, inside or outside academia, in any part of the world. Our selection process is highly competitive, and we provide close attention and care throughout an intensive editorial process.

How to Submit

We recommend that you read several Places articles and sign up for our newsletter. While we welcome unsolicited submissions, the most successful come from authors who are familiar with the journal.

Most articles are around 5,000 words, though some are much shorter and others much longer.

Please send a complete draft unless you have comparable clips (in which case, include the clips with your pitch). Send your manuscript to [email protected], with “Places submission” and the draft title in the subject line. Attachments should be formatted as a Word doc or PDF, with citations formatted as endnotes.

If you are proposing a visual gallery, send a wide selection of work, about 20 images, as jpegs, PDF, or a web link. Do not send password-protected files unless they will be accessible to all editors on our team.

We welcome pitches from critics, authors, and publishers for our Bookshelf series, which features brief reviews (400 words) of recent titles in architecture, landscape, urban design and planning, and related topics. We do not review firm monographs, coffee-table books, fiction, or poetry.

We do not publish studio reports, or any article in which designers or architects promote their own work. We do publish interviews, conversations, and expansive review-essays in which practitioners consider their work in some larger critical or disciplinary context.

Please let us know if you are submitting simultaneously to another publication, or if the work is part of a larger project, e.g., a chapter of a book in progress. We republish work only 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.

We occasionally excerpt new books in advance of their publication. Please pitch us at least three months before the date of publication; include e-galleys or a manuscript if available.

All articles undergo a thorough editing process that sometimes extends several months. Payment is made to authors at the end of this process, upon acceptance of a final draft.

Response

We read every submission, but due to high volume we regret we are not able to respond to every one. If we are interested in your work, we will respond within two to eight weeks.

We are unable to offer feedback on articles we do not accept for publication.

Payment

As an independent, free-access, non-profit journal, our pay scale ranges from modest honoraria for scholarly articles and book reviews to more substantial fees for grant-supported articles or series.

We do not pay for some types of work: for example, book excerpts, Field Notes, and conversations that include a Places editor.

Policies

Please read our statement of editorial independence and our statement on the capitalization of racial identities.