Interstitial

At a time when resources are under great pressure, waste is one of the few resources that is growing rather than shrinking. Kate O’Neill inventories the different forms and surprising itineraries of waste, and explains how this challenges our understanding of global governance.

Border walls always create differences, but not necessarily the ones that were intended. Architecture critic and journalist Ian Volner recounts his experience along some of history’s most significant boundaries.

In contemporary capitalism, moving is inseparable from making. Dara Orenstein traces the development of logistics infrastructure—from the emergence of the warehouse in the nineteenth century to the boom in foreign-trade zones in the twentieth—to reveal how they stretch borders, circumnavigate regulation, and reconfigure our sense of time and space.

From its earliest use in the mandatory Jewish quarter of sixteenth century Venice to its association with Black segregated areas in postwar America, the term “ghetto” has held a variety of meanings and invoked myriad feelings. Daniel Schwartz traces the history of this controversial word.

Washington D.C.’s H Street corridor, a majority-Black neighborhood shaped by segregation and disinvestment, is now marketed as welcoming and diverse. Analyzing the role of blackness in contemporary urbanization, Brandi Thompson Summers explains why aesthetics is essential to thinking about gentrification and displacement.

The full complexity of urbanization cannot be understood just by looking at cities. What happens if we embed the urban within a broader hierarchy of interconnected scales? asks urban theorist Neil Brenner.

Reflecting on recent struggles—from Standing Rock and Flint to mobilizations in California’s Central Valley and in New Orleans and Puerto Rico following Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Maria—Julie Sze explores how organizers and movements fight and create in the face of environmental and social violence. What can they teach us?

How did we come to think of limits as something to overcome? Political ecologist, ecological economist, and degrowth advocate Giorgos Kallis traces environmentalism’s scarcity mentality back to Malthus and explains why we need understand limits as a choice.

Solar geoengineering and soil carbon sequestration could help avert a climate catastrophe. But what’s the end goal of these technologies? Writer and geographer Holly Jean Buck speculates on their potential for social and economic transformation.

In the summer of 1975, NASA recruited architects, artists, and urban designers to envision, alongside engineers and physicists, large-scale cities in space. Designer Fred Scharmen revisits the imagery of this older future.