Interstitial

Modern maritime transportation and the movement of cargo has transformed harbors, ports, and cityscapes, but also social and political relations. Laleh Khalili discusses what it means to tell the story of shipping and capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula without neglecting the people that make it possible.

The Roland Park Company, which developed Baltimore’s wealthiest, whitest neighborhoods starting in the 1890s, had by the middle of the twentieth century an outsize influence on real estate professionals and on local and federal housing policy. Historian Paige Glotzer examines how racial exclusion structured the U.S. housing market—and the ways this segregation persists.

How do we transition to solar power while avoiding the disproportionate impacts we see with our energy systems today? Dustin Mulvaney highlights some of the social and environmental consequences of scaling up the solar industry.

What would an ideal internet experience be like? Joanne McNeil explores the 30-year history of online life—the communities and identities and hazards—and imagines how we, the users, might recover some of the potential of our technologies.

Digital technologies have transformed the geography of carceral space, augmenting older forms of racial criminalization via software and dispersed sensors. Brian Jefferson tracks the history of computing in the American criminal justice system.

Tracing the evolution of aided self-help housing in Peru over three decades beginning in the 1950s, Helen Gyger, a historian of the built environment, contemplates how this hands-on model for improving squatter settlements persisted under different political regimes, competing ideological agendas, and strained expert-resident relations.

Urban environments are built with materials that come from particular places and have a multitude of other relationships. What kinds of stories can their movement tell us? Landscape architect Jane Hutton follows five materials used in New York City landscapes over the last 150 years back to their source.

Architects, planners, and construction firms from socialist Eastern Europe shaped the urbanization of West Africa and the Middle East during the Cold War in ways we had not, until now, considered. Łukasz Stanek examines the strategic ambitions and sometimes contradictory motivations behind this global cooperation.

Why do we participate, and what is that experience really like? Anthropologist Christopher Kelty traces different ways that participation has been formatted across the twentieth century, and, as new technologies obscure the meaning of concept, considers its potential.