Today I talked to Gabriel Schwake about his book Dwelling on the Green Line (Cambridge UP, 2022).
Concealed within the walls of settlements along the Green-Line, the border between Israel and the occupied West-Bank, is a complex history of territoriality, privatisation and multifaceted class dynamics. Since the late 1970s, the state aimed to expand the heavily populated coastal area eastwards into the occupied Palestinian territories, granting favoured groups of individuals, developers and entrepreneurs the ability to influence the formation of built space as a means to continuously develop and settle national frontiers. As these settlements developed, they became a physical manifestation of the relationship between the political interest to control space and the ability to form it. 
Telling a socio-political and economic story from an architectural and urban history perspective, Gabriel Schwake shows how this production of space can be seen not only as a cultural phenomenon, but also as one that is deeply entangled with geopolitical agendas.
Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Gabriel Schwake, "Dwelling on the Green Line" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Interviews with Scholars of Architecture about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Arts

Literature

Performing Arts

Design

Food

Fashion & Beauty

Visual Arts

The 2020 toppling of slave-trader Edward Colston's statue by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol was a dramatic reminder of Britain's role in trans-Atlantic slavery, too often overlooked. Yet the legacy of that predatory economy reaches far beyond bronze memorials; it continues to shape the entire visual fabric of the country.
Architect Victoria Perry explores the relationship between the wealth of slave-owning elites and the architecture and landscapes of Georgian Britain. She reveals how profits from Caribbean sugar plantations fed the opulence of stately homes and landscape gardens. Trade in slaves and slave-grown products also boosted the prosperity of ports like Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, shifting cultural influence towards the Atlantic west. New artistic centers like Bath emerged, while investment in poor, remote areas of Wales, Cumbria and Scotland led to their "reimagining" as tourist destinations: Snowdonia, the Lakes and the Highlands. The patronage of absentee planters popularized British ideas of "natural scenery"--viewing mountains, rivers and rocks as landscape art--and then exported the concept of "sublime and picturesque" landscapes across the Atlantic.
A Bittersweet Heritage: Slavery, Architecture and the British Landscape (Hurst, 2022) unearths the slavery-tainted history of Britain's manors, ports, roads and countryside, and powerfully explains what this legacy means today.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Victoria Perry, "A Bittersweet Heritage: Slavery, Architecture and the British Landscape" (Hurst, 2022)

This instalment of the Object Lessons series focuses on the Swimming Pool (Bloomsbury, 2024). The book explores the pool as a place where humans seek to attain the unique union between mind and body.
As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalisation and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking a closer look at artists, architects, writers, and others who have helped to cement the swimming pool's prominent and iconic role in our society and culture.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Piotr Florczyk, "Swimming Pool" (Bloombury, 2024)

Air conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people's daily lives, thermoception-or the sensory perception of temperature-is being carefully studied and exploited as a tool of marketing, social control, and labour management.
Yet air conditioning isn't for everybody: its reliance on carbon fuels divides the world into habitable, climate-controlled bubbles and increasingly uninhabitable environments where AC is unavailable. Hsuan Hsu's Air Conditioning (Bloomsbury, 2024) explores questions about culture, ethics, ecology, and social justice raised by the history and uneven distribution of climate controlling technologies.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Hsuan L. Hsu, "Air Conditioning" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

In Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul (Duke UP, 2023), Sarah El-Kazaz takes readers into the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo. In this transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing contested rapid transformations, she reveals how the battle for housing has shifted away from traditional political arenas onto private crevices of the city. She outlines how multiple actors—from highly capitalized international NGOs and corporations to city dwellers, bureaucrats, and planning experts—use careful urban design to empower conflicting agendas, whether manipulating property markets to protect affordable housing or corner luxury real estate. El-Kazaz shows that such contemporary politicizations of urban design stem from unresolved struggles at the heart of messy transitions from the welfare state to neoliberalism, which have shifted the politics of redistribution from contested political arenas to design practices operating within market logics, ultimately relocating political struggles onto the city’s most intimate crevices. In so doing, she raises critical questions about the role of market reforms in redistributing resources and challenges readers to rethink neoliberalism and the fundamental ways it shapes cities and polities.
Sarah El-Kazaz is Associate Professor in the politics department at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests include: critical political economy, urbanism, infrastructure and digital politics, and her new book project investigates the politics of digital infrastructures by following “Cloud” technologies across the Global South. Her work appears in peer-reviewed journals including: Comparative Studies in Society and History, and City and Society. She previously taught at Oberlin College, and completed a PhD at Princeton University.
Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Sarah El-Kazaz, "Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul" (Duke UP, 2023)

In her new book Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway (Princeton University Press, 2020), Despina Stratigakos investigates the Nazi occupation of Norway. Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Circle and turn the Scandinavian country into a racial utopia. From ideal new cities to a scenic superhighway stretching from Berlin to northern Norway, plans to remake the country into a model “Aryan” society fired the imaginations of Hitler, his architect Albert Speer, and other Nazi leaders. In Hitler’s Northern Utopia, Despina Stratigakos provides the first major history of Nazi efforts to build a Nordic empire—one that they believed would improve their genetic stock and confirm their destiny as a new order of Vikings.
Drawing on extraordinary unpublished diaries, photographs, and maps, as well as newspapers from the period, Hitler’s Northern Utopia tells the story of a broad range of completed and unrealized architectural and infrastructure projects far beyond the well-known German military defenses built on Norway’s Atlantic coast. These ventures included maternity centers, cultural and recreational facilities for German soldiers, and a plan to create quintessential National Socialist communities out of twenty-three towns damaged in the German invasion, an overhaul Norwegian architects were expected to lead. The most ambitious scheme—a German cultural capital and naval base—remained a closely guarded secret for fear of provoking Norwegian resistance.
A gripping account of the rise of a Nazi landscape in occupied Norway, Hitler’s Northern Utopia reveals a haunting vision of what might have been—a world colonized under the swastika.
Despina Stratigakos is vice provost and professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.
 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Gabriel Schwake, "Dwelling on the Green Line" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Download our free app to listen on your phone