Interstitial

Anthropologist Karla Slocum considers the under-recognized contemporary currency of historic Black towns in Oklahoma. Why, despite their small size and uncertain economies, do these places remain attractive?

Managing adverse climatic conditions was a significant part of the project of architectural modernism before the proliferation of air conditioning. Daniel Barber traces the conceptualization of the normative thermal interior space—and highlights the rich history of alternative models.

Women have been drawn to city life for centuries, despite the persistent tensions, freedom and fear, empowerment and struggle. Geographer Leslie Kern takes an intersectional approach to urban inequality and urges us to change the perspective from which our spaces are designed and built.

By conceiving of urban design as constantly changing, the Metabolists opened architecture up to a narrative dimension. William Gardner details the rich exchanges between visionary architects and science fiction authors in postwar Japan.

Horror arises when external reality exceeds our internal comprehension. Could it also provoke feelings of resistance we didn’t know we had? Erin Y. Huang deciphers the affective dimension of zones of exception in neoliberal post-socialist Asia.

Among its demands for reparations, the New Afrikan Independence Movement sought to create a sovereign nation-state encompassing a large portion of the U.S. South. Historian Edward Onaci contextualizes this radically imaginative movement within past and present struggles for Black liberation.

The murder of Honduran indigenous leader Berta Cáceres was the grand finale of years of terror by the company building the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam—enabled and supported by state forces and security forces, by prosecutors, judges, and politicians. For journalist Nina Lakhani, Cáceres’s life and death is an emblematic story of what is happening all across Central America.

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 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.

The landscape along the US-Mexico border has been manipulated and altered over the past 150 years in an effort to control not only people but also animals, goods, and water. C.J. Alvarez details the history of construction along the international divide.