Places Journal
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Places Journal is an essential and trusted resource on the future of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. We harness the power of public scholarship to promote equitable cities and resilient landscapes.
In these pages you will find writers, designers, and artists who are responding to the profound challenges of our time: environmental health and social inequity, climate change, resource scarcity, human migration, rapid technological innovation, and the erosion of the public sphere.
These challenges demand that we rethink how we plan, design, construct, and maintain the built environment. They also demand that ambitious design research and practice move from the margins to the center of cultural discussion.
Founded at MIT and Berkeley in 1983, Places has been online and free since 2009. We have deep associations with leading design faculties around the world. Bridging from the university to the profession to the public, our articles combine the scope and immediacy of serious journalism with the precision and depth of scholarship. Source
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| Scope | Local |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Country | United States of America |
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The dream of alienation inspires landscape modification in which only one stand-alone asset matters; everything else becomes weeds or waste. — Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015 The screenshots came from my friend Vera. Dozens of perfect rows of trees, arrayed as tiny, Braille-like dots on Google Maps. “Look at the plot numbers too,” she texted, sending another image, even more zoomed in. Superimposed on this strange forest were abstract digits representing street addresses for houses that no longer exist.
The Big Deal Breaks Down
Ten days after the November 2024 election, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg went on television to claim a “decade of infrastructure” as the Democrats’ consolation prize. They had fumbled the presidency and control of Congress, but their great works would survive. It was not an easy story to spin: “Think of the Interstate Highway program under Eisenhower,” he said. “A massive achievement, but it was one thing. The transcontinental railroad, under Lincoln.
Life and Death at San Francisco's Ambassador Hotel
On March 28, 1994, a new documentary aired on KRON TV, San Francisco’s public access television network. Directed by Ken Swartz, the film followed the day-to-day lives of several people with HIV and AIDS who lived in a downtown residential hotel, the Ambassador. The camera captured everyday interactions among nurses, social workers, staff, and volunteers as they tended to the quotidian needs of resident AIDS patients — delivering meals, helping with laundry, repairing furniture, sweeping floors.
Salmonscape
A salmon’s lifecycle is often described as heroic — their youthful adventure to the sea followed by a fateful return to spawn, and then die, at their place of birth. But this epic journey is complicated for most salmon today, and especially for California’s Central Valley Chinook, who travel through the nation’s largest water delivery system.
Bookshelf: Fall 2024
The Great River, by Boyce Upholt Home, Heat, Money, God, by Kathryn O’Rourke and Ben Koush Fluid Geographies, by K. Maria D.
In the Wake of the Water
At dawn the ducks come in with the tide to feed on bivalves in the inlet beside Armand Deluise’s house. Their squawking is his alarm clock. “Being on the water is in our DNA,” he says. His grandfather emigrated from a small island off the coast of Naples, and since 1925 the family has lived in Conimicut, a fishing village in Rhode Island, where the Providence River opens onto Narragansett Bay. In these hundred years, they’ve seen high water.
Field Notes on Repair: 8
History and Decarbonization Carbonization is an historical process, still ongoing in the built environment, the techno-sphere, and the atmosphere. Architecture, buildings, design; plumbing, structure, finishes; supply chains, energy networks, infrastructure: buildings are, as material systems, media for the throughput of processed fuel resources, their distribution, their becoming social.
Field Notes on Repair: 6
An anti-caste ethos of repair I spotted him across my balcony on a mid-July afternoon in post-Covid Delhi. He dangled precariously from a bosun’s chair, trying to reach the condenser unit of an air-conditioner in the darkest corner of the building, tucked away with the electric cables, and the sewage and wastewater pipes.
On Migrant Mother's Land
Santa Maria, the place where I was born, isn’t known for much. White settlers whose pots and pans clanged in covered wagons founded the city in 1874, a fact I found disappointing. I loved old things, the older the better, and a town born in 1874 didn’t seem old at all. My father was born in 1947 and though I was bad at math, I was good enough to calculate: Santa Maria was only 73 years old at the time of my father’s birth. This seemed unserious.
An Eroding Architectural History
The chipped concrete exposes heaps of shells — white, grey, tan, pink, smooth and rough, whole and broken, a textured relief of hills and valleys. For people living in the Southeastern United States, it is a familiar picture. Seashells were mixed into most concrete structures built along the coast before the mid-19th century. Over time, the outer layer of plaster protecting the buildings has fallen away, revealing a rich material history.