Interstitial

Black Towns, Black Futures by Karla Slocum

Karla Slocum is Thomas Willis Lambeth Chair of Public Policy, professor of anthropology, and director of the Institute of African American Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Free Trade and Freedom: Neoliberalism, Place, and Nation in the Caribbean (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West (The University of North Carolina Press, 2019). More about the b...

Modern Architecture and Climate by Daniel Barber

Daniel A. Barber is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Chair of the PhD Program in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. His books—Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning and A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War—examine historical relationships between architecture and global environmental culture, reframing the means and ends of architectural expertise to frame a more robust engagement with the climate cr...

Feminist City by Leslie Kern

Leslie Kern is the author of two books on gender and cities, including Feminist City: Claiming Space in Man-Made World (Verso). She holds a PhD in women’s studies from York University and is currently an associate professor of geography and environment and director of women’s and gender studies at Mount Allison University, in Sackville, New Brunswick. Leslie writes about gender, gentrification, and feminism and teaches urban, social, and feminist geography. She runs an academic care...

The Metabolist Imagination by William Gardner

William O. Gardner is Professor of Japanese language, literature, and film at Swarthmore College. His most recent work explores the intersection of architecture and science fiction in postwar Japan, which builds upon his earlier research on intermedial relationships in Japanese prewar modernism as well as postwar science fiction. His previous publications include Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920’s, and “The Cyber Sublime and the Virtual Mirror: Informa...

Urban Horror by Erin Y. Huang

Erin Y. Huang is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her work often explores the interdisciplinary dialogue among Marxist geography, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, cinema and media studies, and Sinophone Asia. She is the cofounder of Asia Theory Visuality—an intellectual platform that harbors collaborative thinking on experimental and theoretical approaches to Asian Studies. More about the book: https://www.dukeupress...

Free the Land by Edward Onaci

Edward Onaci is an Associate Professor of History and African American & Africana Studies at Ursinus College. His first book, Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), explores the history of the New Afrikan Independence Movement and the lived experience of revolutionary activism. Also known as Brotha Onaci, Edward is a DJ-producer and activist who co-founded the People’s DJs Collective and Sonic Dia...

Who Killed Berta Cáceres? by Nina Lakhani

Nina Lakhani is the environmental justice reporter for the Guardian US. Previously she was a freelance journalist covering Central America and Mexico for the Guardian, BBC, Al Jazeera, Global Post, the Daily Beast, and elsewhere. More about the book: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3180-who-killed-berta-caceres

Prison Land by Brett Story [rebroadcast]

Why do we design our landscapes to inflict particular kinds of coercive activities on other people? In these week's episode, a rebroadcast of Interstitial EP005 from September 2019, geographer and filmmaker Brett Story invites us to see, and unsee, the spaces of carceral power.

Digital Monuments by Simone Brott

Digital images of iconic architecture have become more valuable and more real than the completed building—if it ever gets built at all. Simone Brott reveals how the superficiality of the image is a technique of neoliberal globalization and an instrument of ideology.

Border Land, Border Water by C.J. Alvarez

C.J. Alvarez is an assistant professor in the department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at The University of Texas Austin and a Mellon Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is the author of Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the U.S.-Mexico Divide and is working on a book about the history of the Chihuahuan Desert. More about the book: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/alvarez-border-land-border-water

Sinews of War and Trade by Laleh Khalili

Laleh Khalili is a Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies, and Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. More about the book: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3172-sinews-of-war-and-trade

How the Suburbs Were Segregated by Paige Glotzer

The Roland Park Company, which developed Baltimore’s wealthiest, whitest neighborhoods starting in the 1890s, had by the middle of the twentieth century an outsize influence on real estate professionals and on local and federal housing policy. Historian Paige Glotzer examines how racial exclusion structured the U.S. housing market—and the ways this segregation persists.

Solar Power by Dustin Mulvaney

How do we transition to solar power while avoiding the disproportionate impacts we see with our energy systems today? Dustin Mulvaney highlights some of the social and environmental consequences of scaling up the solar industry.

Lurking by Joanne McNeil

What would an ideal internet experience be like? Joanne McNeil explores the 30-year history of online life—the communities and identities and hazards—and imagines how we, the users, might recover some of the potential of our technologies.

Digitize and Punish by Brian Jefferson

Digital technologies have transformed the geography of carceral space, augmenting older forms of racial criminalization via software and dispersed sensors. Brian Jefferson tracks the history of computing in the American criminal justice system.

Improvised Cities by Helen Gyger

Tracing the evolution of aided self-help housing in Peru over three decades beginning in the 1950s, Helen Gyger, a historian of the built environment, contemplates how this hands-on model for improving squatter settlements persisted under different political regimes, competing ideological agendas, and strained expert-resident relations.

Planetary Mine by Martín Arboleda

Reciprocal Landscapes by Jane Hutton

Urban environments are built with materials that come from particular places and have a multitude of other relationships. What kinds of stories can their movement tell us? Landscape architect Jane Hutton follows five materials used in New York City landscapes over the last 150 years back to their source.

Architecture in Global Socialism by Łukasz Stanek

Architects, planners, and construction firms from socialist Eastern Europe shaped the urbanization of West Africa and the Middle East during the Cold War in ways we had not, until now, considered. Łukasz Stanek examines the strategic ambitions and sometimes contradictory motivations behind this global cooperation.

The Participant by Christopher Kelty

Why do we participate, and what is that experience really like? Anthropologist Christopher Kelty traces different ways that participation has been formatted across the twentieth century, and, as new technologies obscure the meaning of concept, considers its potential.

Waste by Kate O'Neill

At a time when resources are under great pressure, waste is one of the few resources that is growing rather than shrinking. Kate O’Neill inventories the different forms and surprising itineraries of waste, and explains how this challenges our understanding of global governance.

The Great Great Wall by Ian Volner

Border walls always create differences, but not necessarily the ones that were intended. Architecture critic and journalist Ian Volner recounts his experience along some of history’s most significant boundaries.

Out of Stock by Dara Orenstein

In contemporary capitalism, moving is inseparable from making. Dara Orenstein traces the development of logistics infrastructure—from the emergence of the warehouse in the nineteenth century to the boom in foreign-trade zones in the twentieth—to reveal how they stretch borders, circumnavigate regulation, and reconfigure our sense of time and space.

Ghetto by Daniel Schwartz

From its earliest use in the mandatory Jewish quarter of sixteenth century Venice to its association with Black segregated areas in postwar America, the term “ghetto” has held a variety of meanings and invoked myriad feelings. Daniel Schwartz traces the history of this controversial word.

Black in Place by Brandi Thompson Summers

Washington D.C.’s H Street corridor, a majority-Black neighborhood shaped by segregation and disinvestment, is now marketed as welcoming and diverse. Analyzing the role of blackness in contemporary urbanization, Brandi Thompson Summers explains why aesthetics is essential to thinking about gentrification and displacement.

New Urban Spaces by Neil Brenner

The full complexity of urbanization cannot be understood just by looking at cities. What happens if we embed the urban within a broader hierarchy of interconnected scales? asks urban theorist Neil Brenner.

Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger by Julie Sze

Reflecting on recent struggles—from Standing Rock and Flint to mobilizations in California’s Central Valley and in New Orleans and Puerto Rico following Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Maria—Julie Sze explores how organizers and movements fight and create in the face of environmental and social violence. What can they teach us?

Limits by Giorgos Kallis

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.

After Geoengineering by Holly Jean Buck

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.

Space Settlements by Fred Scharmen

In the summer of 1975, NASA recruited architects, artists, and urban designers to envision, alongside engineers and physicists, large-scale cities in space. Designer Fred Scharmen revisits the imagery of this older future.

White Flights by Jess Row

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.

Building Character by Charles Davis

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.

Self-Devouring Growth by Julie Livingston

Economic growth is a tantalizing promise and formidable environmental threat. 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.

The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness by Emanuele Lugli

Measurement standards shape space, enforce power, and mold elaborate fantasies. Art historian Emanuele Lugli traces our preoccupation with exactitude back to the Middle Ages

Stone Men by Andrew Ross

Author and activist Andrew Ross surveys the contributions of Palestinian labor to the building of Israel.

Ugliness and Judgment by Timothy Hyde

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.

A Future History of Water by Andrea Ballestero

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.

Sad by Design by Geert Lovink

Social media has penetrated every aspect of our lives, yet no amount swiping or liking ever seems to satisfy us. Media theorist and internet critic Geert Lovink tries to overcome the deadlock of platform capitalism.

X-Ray Architecture by Beatriz Colomina

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.

Circulation & Urbanization by Ross Exo Adams

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.

Prison Land by Brett Story

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.

Corridors by Roger Luckhurst

Nineteenth century reformers had very positive ideas about corridor spaces as fundamentally changing people. When did that change? cultural historian Roger Luckhurst asks.

Spaceship in the Desert by Gökçe Günel

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.

Lina Bo Bardi, Drawings by Zeuler Lima

Lina Bo Bardi pursued formal ideas, and she drew looking for them. But that’s not where architecture stopped for her. Zeuler Lima—architect, artist, curator, and Bo Bardi biographer—walks us through her work on paper.

Capital City by Samuel Stein

Urban planners are encouraged to make interventions that only raise land and property values—even when they’re trying to do something entirely different. The contradiction is at the heart of what author Samuel Stein calls the real estate state.