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Sam Clapp
Urban planners are encouraged to make interventions that only raise land and property values—even when they’re trying to do something entirely different. This contradiction is at the heart of what author Samuel Stein calls the real estate state.
Lina Bo Bardi pursued formal ideas, and she drew looking for them. But that’s not where architecture stopped for her. Zeuler Lima walks us through her work on paper.
After development of Masdar was halted in 2011, the world’s first zero-carbon city was prounounced a failure by the media—as the first green ghost town. Anthropologist Gökçe Günel wanted to understand what else was happening there.
Nineteenth century reformers had very positive ideas about corridor spaces as fundamentally changing people. When did that change? cultural historian Roger Luckhurst asks.
Why do we design our landscapes to inflict particular kinds of coercive activities on other people? Geographer and filmmaker Brett Story invites us to see, and unsee, the spaces of carceral power.
Ildefons Cerdà coined the term “urbanization” in the 1860s. Architect and historian Ross Exo Adams takes the Spanish engineer’s writings as a starting point to tell a much longer story of the relationship between circulation and power.
If modernity was driven by illness, then modern architecture presented itself as the perfect cure. Architectural historian Beatriz Colomina traces the relationship between a new kind of medical image and a new kind of space.
Social media has penetrated every aspect of our lives, yet no amount swiping or liking seems to satisfy us. Media theorist and internet critic Geert Lovink tries to overcome the deadlock of platform capitalism.
If water is a human right, what does that mean for a capitalist society? Anthropologist Andrea Ballestero considers change within systems that are supposed to be stuck.
Why does it matter that a building looks one way and not another way? Architectural historian Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgments in shaping the way that society acts.
Author and activist Andrew Ross surveys the contributions of Palestinian labor to the building of Israel.
Interstitial EP012: The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness by Emanuele Lugli
Interstitial
Tracing the change in scope of political responsibility in Botswana amidst unchecked development, anthropologist Julie Livingston offers an urgent parable for understanding the world as a web of relationships that condense past, present, and future.
Tracing the change in scope of political responsibility in Botswana amidst unchecked development, anthropologist Julie Livingston offers an urgent parable for understanding the world as a web of relationships that condense past, present, and future.
In the nineteenth century, under the influence of scientific-rationalism, the concept of the body was transformed into a political tool for representing national identity. Architectural historian Charles Davis reveals the parallels between race and style in modern architecture.
Novelist and critic Jess Row traces, through postwar American fiction, the movement of the white imagination away from urban spaces and into empty, isolated landscapes.
In the summer of 1975, NASA recruited architects, artists, and urban designers to envision, alongside engineers and physicists, large-scale cities in space. Fred Scharmen revisits the imagery of this older future.
Solar geoengineering and soil carbon sequestration could help avert a climate catastrophe. But what’s the end goal of these technologies? Writer and geographer Holly Jean Buck speculates on their potential for social and economic transformation.
How did we come to think of limits as something to overcome? Political ecologist, ecological economist, and degrowth advocate Giorgos Kallis traces environmentalism’s scarcity mentality back to Malthus and explains why we need understand limits as a choice.
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