Places Journal

Balancing business demands and the desire to bolster African American communities, Black-owned insurance companies of the 20th century were caught in an actuarial double bind.

https://placesjournal.org/article/placesjournal-org-article-black-capitalism-insurance-and-the-city/

Visual surveys of built sites in Ghana, Pakistan, and the U.S. exemplify the relations that emerge when one government or organization presents another with the opportunity to build.

https://placesjournal.org/article/the-architectural-gift-kumasi-islamabad-detroit/

Gifted buildings are potent mechanisms of geopolitical reshuffling, premised on an uneven power relation between giver and receiver. How do such exchanges shape cities in transition?

https://placesjournal.org/article/the-architectural-gift/

For decades, Norway and Sweden forcibly displaced the Indigenous Northern Sámi from their ancestral lands. The ensuing migrations have torn Sámi society apart from within.

https://placesjournal.org/article/the-displaced-forced-migration-indigenous-sami/

Five years after the deadliest wildfire in California history, what lessons can be learned from how the town of Paradise is recovering — and how it’s preparing for the next blaze?

https://placesjournal.org/article/paradise-redux-five-years-after-camp-fire/

Architecture education has long upheld the ideal that to be an architect is “to build.” Now we need a new paradigm focused on preservation, on repair. In short, we need a pedagogical revoluti...

https://placesjournal.org/article/repairing-architecture-schools/

Gabrielle Bruney is the third recipient of the award for ambitious urban journalism, a collaboration between Places and Columbia Journalism School.

https://placesjournal.org/news/gabrielle-bruney-chosen-for-writing-the-city-2024/

The best repair manuals present a vision of repair that is social, embodied, intuitive, and accessible. What if we extend these principles beyond material objects, to the scale of civic systems a...

https://placesjournal.org/article/step-by-step-repair-manuals-political-ecology/

In the Netherlands, water management is stubbornly technocratic, driven more by metrics than people. As climate change upends calculations, can planners find new modes of ecological repair?

https://placesjournal.org/article/this-river-is-a-model/

To tend a building requires us to direct our attention away from cultural expectations of the “new,” and to design in consonance with inevitable change.

https://placesjournal.org/article/tending-building-an-ethic-of-repair-in-architecture/

In the Anthropocene, innovative architecture will rely less on formal or material invention and more on repair, retrofit, renovation — on the collective pursuit of decarbonization.

https://placesjournal.org/article/drawing-the-line-architecture-in-the-anthropocene/

Dhaka is a paradigmatic South Asian megalopolis. It is also a model for what a city can be, where optimism and pessimism, adaptation and dysfunction, affluence and poverty flourish without bounds...

https://placesjournal.org/article/history-of-the-present-dhaka/