In attacking libraries and museums, Donald Trump is waging a war on public knowledge. Censorship and economic pressures make the core mission of libraries harder, even as their mandate grows. Yet rather than retreat, libraries can push outward, enlarging the commons through new configurations of civic and creative life.
Texas and Lebanon lie at nearly the same latitude; the same constellations travel through their night skies along kindred arcs. In both places, darkness is an ecological commons turned strategic military and scientific asset. To hold these nights together is to see how an ethos of preservation at home aids devastation abroad.
Brief reviews of recent books on fascism at home, revolution in Black bookstores, climate change in augmented reality, gentrification as metaphor, and more.
How did rhubarb, the ancient Chinese drug once worth $100,000 a pound, make its way to kitchen tables in the American Midwest? The story of the pie plant, like that of a Lumbee man who devoted his Iowa backyard to it, must be pieced together, carefully, across time.
Urban renewal and its aftermath in Oakland, California, were neither natural nor inevitable but purposeful intensifications of precarity in Black American life — a de facto murder of place. Today, a specter of Blackness haunts the city, lingering in cultural and material landscapes that have been shaped by generations of Black Oaklanders.
The Chicago Pedway is a question that the city asked and left unanswered about how truly public urban space might be shaped below the streets. Once envisioned as a major meeting place for Chicagoans — the next frontier of the American shopping mall, coupling public infrastructure and private retail — this subterranean network has only ever been a work in progress.
That concrete box off the freeway wasn’t designed for storage so much as capture — of markets, workers, and, now, people detained by immigration agents, as the federal government transforms vacant warehouses into million-square-foot concentration camps. Putting the disappearing machine on the map is a step toward disassembling it.
Benches are microcosms of an expansive debate about who belongs in urban spaces. When they are removed or made uninviting, we lose more than just a place to rest; we forfeit opportunities for civic intimacy and connection. Through sharing the humble bench, a public coheres.
What can plastic fragments found in an animal’s digestive tract tell us about the waters it has traversed? Guts are an accumulation of places, an overlapping geography that stretches across time and paths traveled. A forensics of guts, then, is less about classification than it is learning how to see.
At municipal dams managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a photographer studies zones where federal authority and expertise meet daily life. As climate change makes floods more frequent and severe, these dams, many built more than half a century ago, are becoming increasingly critical — and precarious.
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.
Decades ago James Marston Fitch argued that the reuse of existing buildings should be prioritized over the construction of new ones. His thesis, at once simple and radical, is more relevant than ever.
Public goods underpin democracy. The billionaires and technofascists ruling our new gilded age threaten to rob us of the things we hold in common.
An animal studies scholar talks with an architect and an architecture writer about designing for, and with, nonhuman species.
In New Orleans, locals frustrated by an unaccountable energy utility are building a network of community resilience hubs. At the heart of the project is a question: How do we organize power?
A mapping workshop with refugees from Homs, Syria, asked participants to re-draw their old neighborhoods from memory, bridging gaps between their houses to generate a shared image of a city now destroyed by civil war. To rebuild a just and inclusive Homs, residents will need to understand the city as others have lived within it.
Since 2015, more than one hundred communities across the American South have removed, relocated, or modified Confederate monuments. Some monument sites have been replaced by installations that tell more inclusive histories, but most remain vacant, scars marking the ground where statues once stood. How are these symbolic and material imprints reshaping sites of public memory?
In a place like Guam, one of the oldest colonies in the world, intimacy and empire are always colliding. To be born and raised in this U.S. territory, exposed to unchecked radiation from decades of U.S. military activities, is to know death not as an interruption but a condition of daily life. For Chamorros, everything is political, even cancer.
Evelyn Hofer’s portrait of Gaelic football players says as much about the setting as it does her subjects. The wide-angle lens on Hofer’s 4 x 5 camera captures four athletes in jewel-toned jerseys and an Ireland in slow transition from colony to nation. Is it too much to think that, 60 years later, something of the reticence captured in this magical picture persists?
