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Community Vitality in a Valley of Environmental Justice: Urban Landscape Architecture in a Brazilian Grota BY SAM VALENTINE June 11, 2020 This article was originally published on the website of Topos Magazine. You can find it here. Maybe it overshot the runway. As I walked the narrow cobblestone street of this low-lying village in northeastern Brazil, [...]

Views of 14th St. on Thu., October 4, 2019, the day that the 14th Street Busway went into effect, speeding trips for customers aboard the M14-SBS bus route. Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit A Green New Deal for Transportation BY EMILY KENNEDY June 15, 2021 The transportation sector is the [...]

Image by Julián Huertas The Case of the Incomprehensible Stadium BY JULIÁN HUERTAS June 15, 2021 This graphic novel manifesto is the result of a Summer 2020 independent study with Dr. Ann Forsyth. I broadly studied and researched the complexities of land use regulation, economic development, public-private development, and models of social, racial, and gender equity [...]

Artwork BY KAY LEE June 15, 2021 cuckooland (small), acrylic on canvas, 36x48 wissahickon, 2020, gouache on paper, 11_x14_ wetland, graphite on panel, 20_x16_ (1) Kay Lee is a second-year MFA student at the University of Pennsylvania. Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, Kay explores her identity, discomforts, and traumas as a young, non-binary Asian in [...]

Photo by Mingjia Chen & Diana Guo Floating Between Borders BY DIANA GUO AND MINGJIA CHEN June 15, 2021 Cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove treats the modern airport as a poetic metaphor exemplifying the modern world’s unboundedness, flexibility, and mobility. For him, the constant flow of travelers represents a modern global interchange that cuts across both [...]

Illustration by Thomas J Gamble American Warehouse: DIY Undergrounds and Urban Displacement BY SEAN J PATRICK CARNEY June 15, 2021 Empty Warehouses  Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, experimental venues proliferated in cavernous, disused factories and warehouses from Providence to Oakland, Chicago to New Orleans, and Baltimore to Seattle. These collectively organized DIY (do-it-yourself) spaces furnished non-professional [...]

Photo by Jarrodd Davis The Comorbidities of Urban Space: The Price is Right BY JARRODD DAVIS June 11, 2021 Over/Under Philadelphia’s Grays Ferry neighborhood and scores of similar neighborhoods – formerly overlooked, underinvested, oversaturated with poverty, and underestimated – have long been forced to react to the mechanisms of racial capitalism. The systematic undervaluing of [...]

A piece of a tree that was demolished during the 'Deprimido Mixcoac' construction. Photo by Irma Olivo. The Desnivel Insurgentes-Mixcoac Protests: Clean Air, Citizenship, and Middle-Class Participation in a Mexico City Urban Planning Project BY ARON LESSER June 20, 2021 In June of 2015, a group of retired women tied themselves to their neighborhoods’ largest [...]

Poisoned Prisons BY DIANA DROGARIS June 20, 2021 Since its heyday of the early-to-mid 20th century, Appalachia’s coal economy has all but evaporated. A combination of advances in coal extraction technologies, the fall of natural gas prices, and imperfect but efficiaous environmental regulations have led to a steep decline in coal-related employment and investment; remote [...]

Image by Akana Jayewardene Our Sick Homes BY RU'A AL-ABWEH, CASSIE HOEPRICH, AND AKANA JAYEWARDENE June 15, 2021 In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic imposed a new reality upon us. For several months, we were in lockdown. We were forced to become intimate in whatever setting we found ourselves, and across the globe, millions became [...]

New Garki 'Ultramodern' Market, Abuja, Nigeria, taken in June 2020. Image by Stephen Ajadi & Seun Taiwo. “You Are Sick”, “No, We Are Not”: Africa, the Pandemic, and the Convolution of Denial. BY STEPHEN AJADI June 11, 2020   Invocations: Diagnosia I: 1995 “It is nothing”. The words come out very slowly and disconnected — [...]

Catfish Capital BY SAMUEL MADDOX, WHITNEY JOHNSON, AND ZAC GAUDET June 15, 2021 It doesn’t matter out of which window you look while driving down Route 25 through the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt, a nickname given to the region in the early 19th century due to its rich, dark topsoil. Either way you look, [...]

Ecology of Uncertainty: A Spatial Meditation on Emptiness BY YESENIA PEREZ & YENI YI June 28, 2021    1 What grows beneath a freeway? Mildew, moss, mold, lichen and fungi. Creeping vines and invasive species. Spontaneous subterranean vegetal life emerges from total communion with an environment marked by highway traffic induced vibrations, pollution, and relative [...]