“If you are a car owner, you are red meat for whoever wants to prey upon you, whether it is police, auto lenders, or state agencies.”
Tag: Infrastructure
Riding with Du Bois
Railroads—in the Jim Crow South just as in today’s Ukraine—employ physical infrastructure to create racial divisions.
Succeeding through Failure: Andrew Lakoff on Preparing for Emergencies
“What is the range of available measures to address our catastrophic future?”
Criminalized Borders and US Health-Care Profits
The pandemic took the health inequalities generated by US imperialism, and made them worse.
Episode 4: Data & Infrastructure
Whose values get embedded into the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives? How are these data infrastructures complicating what it means to be human?
Water as Right, Water as Future
Declaring water a human right is easy. But to actually secure that right, the best method—surprisingly—is bureaucratic sleights of hand.
Can Smart Cities Be Equitable Cities?
Tech does not arrive in a city to save it. Instead, tech’s financial success depends on dismissing and exploiting existing disparities.
Counterhistories of the Sport Stadium
As large spaces where different sectors of the city converge, stadiums are sites of social and political struggle.
Counter-histories of the Internet
What could the internet have been? We’ve grown so used to our digital networks that they can seem like a force of nature, with laws as immutable as the laws of physics ...
A City Plans for War
What if war was waged not with bombs but with blueprints? Urban planning’s promise of an improved city of the future is especially bright in postconflict cities, where planning is expected to bring ...
What Was Public Housing?
Any debate about American public housing will eventually have to reckon with Chicago. More specifically, it will have to reckon with that city’s wrecked projects. Those closest to the issue have ...
Why the Lights Went Out in Puerto Rico
There is nothing like a prolonged blackout to drive home for American observers the unequal distribution of fortune. We know that no matter what kind of natural ...
Global Water Wars and the Public Good
Future global water wars are now widely predicted. In 1995, Ismail Seragaldin, vice president of the World Bank (1993–2000), first raised the specter of crisis with the ...
The Big Picture: Working-Class Environmentalism
Trump can’t make sunlight expensive or slow the wind. He can’t make walking more polluting than driving, or energy efficiency more expensive than waste. For all the damage that Scott Pruitt and ...
The Big Picture: Coalthink
If we trust the president, we believe that he is, if nothing else, a businessman. Towers glittering across real estates seem to proclaim the truth of this; but when it comes to coal, both business ...
Failed Infrastructure Is Failed Politics
In February 2017, California state authorities ordered more than 180,000 residents near Oroville Dam, the tallest in the United States, to evacuate. After ...
Choosing Growth
Recently, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt defended the withdrawal of the United States from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord by alleging that the agreement had placed “constraints on the economy.” Rather ...
The Art of Subways
On January 1, 2017, after nearly a century of anticipation and setbacks, the Second Avenue subway opened for its inaugural ride. Riders flooded the three new stations of the East Side Q extension and ...