For decades, South Asian architecture was impelled by the promise of a new society after empire. Now, such buildings are being demolished.
Tag: Urbanism
Public Thinker: Sophie Gonick on Housing Justice and Mass Movements
“As often the most vulnerable in our cities, immigrants face struggles that reflect the wider landscape of housing precarity.”
“Streets Like Rivers”: Talking New York City with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
"Often, the question of which place-names stick is about which ones hit our ears right."
Skateboarding, We Hardly Knew You
Since its beginnings, skateboarding has always been multicultural—and always provided ways to resist rigid US norms and borders.
Laboratory of Conversations: The 15M Movement
Ten years ago today, Spain’s “15M” movement burst on the scene. In short order, everything changed. Or has it?
Spatial Abolition and Disability Justice
Revealing the multiple histories of disability justice can expand how we think of and design the places we build.
Urban Democracy’s Documentarian
How to explain the miracle of an institution as gargantuan, complex, and pivotal to society as “government”? Watch Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall.
On Baltimore: Narratives and City Making
All cities tell a story. But who decides what Baltimore’s next story will be?
Emergency Urbanism
Housing-justice movements ask: How can unhoused people be considered trespassers on state-owned land?
The Violence of Urban Vacancy
Houses without people, people without homes: New York has invested in empty storefronts and empty districts, even as most New Yorkers suffer.
The Vulnerable Foundations of India’s Urbanism
In Delhi—a city of 17 million people—7.2 million residents already qualified for food aid before the pandemic. After, the numbers skyrocketed.
Preexisting Conditions: What 2020 Reveals about Our Urban Future
Crisis Cities brings together some of the world’s leading social scientists and humanists to grapple with the 2020 crises of our cities.
Against Walled Worlds: Remembering Michael Sorkin, 1948–2020
Could architecture and design transform a place like Gaza, and do so with justice? One of Sorkin’s last projects tackled exactly those questions.
The Police: Gentrification’s Shock Troops
In Detroit today, politicians promise that real estate development—coupled with police violence—will guarantee the city’s spiritual redemption.
Public Housing and the Right to the City
Not simply a roof over one’s head, public housing nurtures its inhabitants’ demands for an even greater stake in the life of the metropolis.
The Criminal’s City
In a recent French novel, an ordinary woman inadvertently becomes a drug kingpin—and does so by learning to see anew Paris’s urban landscape.
How to House America
Fixing the American housing crisis will require constructing more houses, but also increasing subsidies and protections for existing tenants.
Shanghai’s Past, Hong Kong’s Future
What does it mean for a city to be free? What happens when a free city loses its freedom? And when does that occur?
The False Hopes of Homeownership
The American Dream of private home ownership has fueled a system that preys on Black people for profit.
Public Thinker: Jenny Price on Refusing to Save the Planet
“First: Why are we not making more progress? Second: Why do so many people hate environmentalists?”