Announcements

Graduate student Sol Kim publishes How to Start Adapting to California’s “Precipitation Whiplash”

November 12, 2019

Graduate student Sol Kim publishes How to Start Adapting to California’s “Precipitation Whiplash”

Much of California enjoys a mild Mediterranean climate where the weather typically swings like a pendulum from warm, dry summers to cool, wet winters. Year-to-year, this pendulum can swing with great variation. If it doesn’t swing toward rain and snow between October and March, it leads to drought; if it does, we might see record-breaking precipitation....

Lecturer Peter Ekman publishes “Radburn Rackets”: Robert D. Kohn and Marjorie Sewell Cautley’s Sketches Against the Speculative Suburb

July 8, 2020

Lecturer Peter Ekman publishes “Radburn Rackets”: Robert D. Kohn and Marjorie Sewell Cautley’s Sketches Against the Speculative Suburb in the journal PLATFORM

The Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) came together in 1923 when a heterodox group of New York–based architects, planners, economists, and other reformers, galled by the footloose patterns of speculative development they saw unfolding...

Professor Brandi Summers publishes "We need action to accompany art" in the Boston Globe

June 16, 2020

Professor Brandi Summers publishes "We need action to accompany art" in the Boston Globe

We need action to accompany art

The 35-foot tall letters were formed in stark marigold paint against the dark gray speckled pavement. Though bold in color, the action itself is not bold.

By Brandi Summers

Updated June 11, 2020, 3:08 a.m.

Professor Brandi Summers publishes "Untimely Futures" in Places Journal

November 10, 2021

Professor Brandi Summers publishes "Untimely Futures" in Places Journal

In the essay, Summers asks, “[H]ow might we consider the relationship between parking lots — as central, even redundant features of the built urban environment — and the politics of Black clearance and containment?” Moreover, she asks, “[W]hat does it mean for Black people, in Oakland and elsewhere, to continue to live the same experience again and again, decade after decade?” Summers also discusses images from the “...

Graduate student Jeff Vance Martin publishes Revisiting and revitalizing political ecology in the American West

November 27, 2019

Graduate student Jeff Vance Martin publishes Revisiting and revitalizing political ecology in the American West

Political ecology, initially conceived to better understand the power relations implicit in management and distribution of natural resources in the developing world, came “home” to the American West in the 1990s and 2000s. This groundswell of research did much to problematize socio-environmental conflicts in the region, long...

Graduate student Erin Torkelson publishes Collateral damages: Cash transfer and debt transfer in South Africa

November 10, 2019

Graduate student Erin Torkelson publishes Collateral damages: Cash transfer and debt transfer in South Africa

Over the past decade, two development programs–cash transfer and financial inclusion–were bundled in global development discourse. Despite differences in their purported objectives, cash transfers are increasingly delivered via financial inclusion infrastructures and technologies. One important yet under...

Lecturer Peter Ekman publishes From prophecy to projection: the New York Metropolitan Region Study and the rescaling of the urban future, 1956–1968

June 24, 2020

Geography alum Peter Ekman (PhD 2016) publishes "From prophecy to projection: the New York Metropolitan Region Study and the rescaling of the urban future, 1956–1968" in the journal Planning Perspectives.

Between 1956 and 1959, amid far-flung residential and industrial suburbanization and with the joint backing of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Twentieth Century Fund, an interdisciplinary coterie of scholars from Harvard partnered with New York’s...

Geography Lecturer Diana Negrín da Silva publishes La miseria de los megaproyectos y las semillas de la esperanza

November 18, 2021

Geography Lecturer Diana Negrín da Silva publishes La miseria de los megaproyectos y las semillas de la esperanza in Nexos

"La miseria de los megaproyectos y las semillas de la esperanza" is a photo essay on the field work Diana Negrín da Silva has been doing this year in the Chihuahuan Desert and Wixarika territory more generally. The photographs by Joaquín Urrutia tell a story of the imposition of large scale (narco) development and the...

Geography alum Jason Strange (PhD 2013) publishes new book Shelter from the Machine

April 12, 2020

Geography alum Jason Strange (PhD 2013) publishes new book Shelter from the Machine

Shelter from the Machine
Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism
Hard work and hard truths inside the back-to-the-land movement

"You’re either buried with your crystals or your shotgun." That laconic comment captures the hippies-versus-hicks conflict that divides, and in some ways defines, modern-day homesteaders. It also reveals that back-to-the-landers, though...

Graduate student Brittany Young publishes Incubated Futures: What is a resilient chicken?

November 12, 2020

Graduate student Brittany Young publishes Incubated Futures: What is a resilient chicken? in n+1 magazine.

Incubated Futures: What is a resilient chicken?

KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN wants to move into Addis Ababa. Among the last of African countries to be colonized by fast food, Ethiopia just received their first multinational fast food chain in 2018, when two Pizza Huts opened in Addis. More international chains want to open in the capital, though their efforts are...