The Interstates created a national polity defined by auto-centric consumerism and typified by corporations from GM to Tesla. Can the United States rethink the governing logic of our vast highway network — the largest public works in the nation’s history — for a century in which decarbonization and democratization are defining social and political goals?
The signature project of Biden’s “Reconnecting Communities” grant program envisioned a freeway cap over Interstate 5 in Portland, Oregon. Transportation planners are using this investment to justify freeway expansion, while Black community leaders are seeking to rebuild a neighborhood that was displaced decades ago. Both goals are threatened by Trump’s budget cuts.
California has long allowed an ambiguous boundary between public and private land along its extensive coast. Climate change is testing the limits of this fragile compromise.
As part of our series of conversations, two scholars — a geographer and African American Studies scholar, and a public historian and archivist — discuss activism in Oakland, California, from the era of the Model Cities Program to the present, and consider the preservation of “illegitimate” histories for future use.
In the Czech Republic, calls to memorialize a concentration camp — where Romani people were imprisoned during World War II — faced decades of resistance. What happens when we choose to forget histories that are essential to remember?
California’s Central Valley Chinook migrate through state and federal water projects. As they map the sprawling isoscape, tracking the atomic signature of this industrialized watershed, they also change it. They are landscape makers in every sense.
For three weeks in January, the Eaton Fire raced through the small community of Altadena, California, destroying more than 9,000 buildings and killing eighteen people. Afterward, we invited four writers, all longtime local residents, to share memories, and photographs, of what burned, and what didn’t.
In the Tidewater region of Virginia, history is slipping beneath the waves. In the Anthropocene, a complicated past is vanishing.
After a fraudulent election in Belarus, protestors flooded the streets of Minsk, reclaiming spaces and symbols the authoritarian government had long controlled.
In the depths of the AIDS epidemic, San Francisco activists transformed a downtown SRO into a center for health care and community life. The residential hotel became a model of queer kinship.
Ambitious literature and public policy each seek to shape reality. Few places embody the power of artists and policymakers to arrange space and time more persuasively than Washington D.C.
What can you do with a closet-sized plot of overgrown land you didn’t know you’d inherited? In Hawai‘i, the 19th-century laws that imposed private property continue to produce frictions and fictions of ownership and belonging.
The loss of biodiversity, the greed of the animal agriculture industry, the current assault on our public health infrastructure — all are making the next pandemic likelier than ever.
