The Case for Giving

With an engaged and extensive international readership, Places Journal is widely recognized as an essential and trusted resource on the future of architecture, landscape, and urbanism.

Our mission is to harness the moral and investigative power of public scholarship and public-interest journalism to promote equitable cities and resilient landscapes.

Cities that are growing and cities that are shrinking, environmental health and racial equity, climate change, resource scarcity, technological innovation — all demand that we rethink how we plan, design, construct, and maintain the built environment. These challenges also demand that serious design thinking and practice move from the margins to the center of the larger cultural discussion.

Places Journal is sustained by the generosity of an international network of academic partners, by foundations and philanthropic gifts, and by committed readers like you. Visit this page to see our community of donors.

Please donate as generously as you can.

Why donate to Places?

We publish extraordinary journalism on the built environment.

As many periodicals move to short formats and fast cycles, we remain committed to rich and substantial writing on architecture, landscape, and urbanism.

We provide an essential resource.

Our deep and growing archive of more than 2,000 articles influences practice and shapes policy. We are galvanizing an informed public and equipping them with the desire and vocabulary to create social and environmental change.

We are free and easily accessible.

To ensure the greatest impact, we are dedicated to keeping all our articles free and online, with no paywall and no advertising. We meet our readers where they are — in the classroom, at the studio, on screens of all types. Our articles are shared widely on social media and linked in major publications worldwide.

We need you.

Good journalism is expensive. In-depth research, trustworthy reporting, compelling narrative, provocative critique, groundbreaking photography — all require significant resources to create and to publish. Matching reader support with institutional funding, Places is building a new model of independent journalism.

Our Readers

Engaged

65,000
Unique Monthly Visitors
82,000
Followers on Social Media
12,500
Email Subscribers

Informed

1,000,000
Article Views Annually
4,000 *
Hours Read Monthly

* Active reading, directly measured by scroll behavior

Global

60%
North America
20%
Europe
12%
Asia
8%
Australia,
South America, and Africa

* Active reading, directly measured by scroll behavior

Recent Highlights

The Inequality Chronicles

Our series on urban inequality in American cities has resonated from public radio to legislative halls.

Future Archive

Our series on significant works of 19th- and 20th-century criticism or history brings significant writings to a new generation of readers.

History of the Present

Our series on global cities in transition, which began with articles on Yangon and Havana, has continued with major features on Belgrade, Mexico City, and Manchester.

Places Books

Our collaborative series with Princeton University Press now includes Where Are the Women Architects? and A City Is Not a Computer.

Field Notes: Design Activism

For this narrative survey, scholars and practitioners share perspectives on the issues they consider most urgent, and offer ideas for specific actions and practical interventions.

Writing the City

Our collaboration with Columbia Journalism School gives early-career journalists the opportunity to pursue an ambitious story that might otherwise receive scant attention,

Our Donors Provide Crucial Support for Independent Journalism That...

Advances core professional values
Reaches a diverse and sophisticated international readership
Promotes deeper public understanding of the value of design thinking and practice
Builds new constituencies concerned about the future of the built environment
Bridges across the design disciplines from architecture to landscape to urban design and planning

Reflects an exceptionally rigorous editorial process which results in outstanding design journalism you can trust
Cultivates a new generation of design scholars, journalists, and critics
Matches donor contributions with university and foundation funding, all of which ensures our sustainability and growth
Features work that informs, surprises, and provokes.

What Are People Saying About Places?

Places publishes some of the very best writing and photography, but its almost radical proposition of delivering intelligently edited content is what sets the journal apart. Places is irreplaceable as the accountable, passionate, and contemporary voice driving the debate about our cities and landscapes.

Michael Maltzan, architect
Places builds strong connections between academia, the professions, and the public, and it does so at an international scale. It is a model of what publishing can and should be.

Justine Clark, Parlour: Women, Equity, Architecture
Working with Places Journal has been the most personally rewarding and professionally valuable experience of my fifteen-year publishing career. With its interdisciplinary global reach and gorgeously designed platform, Places offers the most meaningful and sustainable model for writing about design and landscape in the public realm.

Shannon Mattern, The New School
Where else can you get design, anti-design, post-design, no design, design criticism, criticism on criticism, design research, research by design, uber design, infra, ultra, inter and intra design, all in the one place?

Rod Barnett, Washington University
Places not only increases people’s knowledge about the crucial role environments play in our lives; it also exemplifies intelligent web-based debate about a broad spectrum of topics and attitudes in architecture, landscape, and urbanism. And on all these fields it offers far and away the best writing.

Gwendolyn Wright, Columbia University
Places is essential reading for scholars — for anyone — interested in the world around them. It’s become the New Yorker of the built and natural environment.

Margaret Crawford, UC Berkeley
Places has created a vibrant forum for authors and readers seeking a fresh, multidisciplinary view of the designed environment.

Despina Stratigakos, SUNY Buffalo
During my years as a student, Places emerged as my go-to resource for innovative research in landscape architecture — and now, as a practitioner, it remains as vital as ever for my work.

Michael Ezban, Vandergoot Ezban Studio