In line with our commitment to public scholarship in architecture, landscape, and urbanism, we inaugurated the Places Journal Summer Writing + Editorial Workshop in 2020.
Offered as a benefit to all our academic partners, the Workshop consists of four small-group, week-long sessions, led by Places editors and writers, and conducted via Zoom. Each immersive session consists of lectures, group discussions, one-on-one coaching, and peer-to-peer exchange. Nominated by their respective faculties, and coming from schools on five continents, the Summer Fellows work closely with the Places team to hone their critical thinking and writing skills and to produce an essay for publication in this special section of the journal. The theme for 2020 was “Architecture, Urbanism, Pandemics.” In 2021, the theme was “Responsibilities.”
Interpreting these prompts expansively, workshop participants have written about climate crisis and urban equity, digitized isolation and improvised zones of refuge, borderlands and informal architectures, housing and preservation, logistics and land use. As editors and instructors, we have been impressed by the passion and ambition of these emerging critics of architecture and design. And they have felt the same; as one student wrote to us recently, “It is super exciting to find the tools for reaching a public with my writing and research. The workshop experience only reiterated for me that this is the kind of work I want to pursue.”
