cities -- urbanity -- design
Reading Urban Landscapes
What do we see when we look closely at the cities that surround us? One of the most important tools in the urbanist’s tool kit is close observation—the ability to “read” the landscape, morphology, architecture, and social life of the city. This is not simply a matter of “intuition”; unless you know a place intimately, it requires a lot of work, patience, and practice. And it is not just “looking around”; rather, we build up our understanding of urban landscapes through a range of documentary, interpretive, and analytical methods, such as fieldwork, photography, site studies, archival research, visual analysis, mapping, drawing, and deep listening.
"How to Spatialize Crisis: A Tour of Long Island City." Tour organized for students and faculty from the University of Vienna, Apr 2023.
"A Walk through the Pedregal de Santo Domingo." Virtual tour and talk for the Princeton University Program in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, Jan 2021.
"After the Fire, Roses." Photograph for juried group show, Core Art Space, Denver, CO, May-June 2018.
"Sensing and the Sensorium." Chair and discussant for panel at the Second International Conference on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban Infrastructure, Venice, Italy, Jun 2018.
"Angels of Memory in the City." Presidential Address for the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, delivered at the Sixteenth Biennial Planning History Conference, Los Angeles, Nov 2015.
"Urban Margins: Borders, Boundaries, and Lines on the Land." Lecture delivered for the City of New York's Department of Design and Construction Monthly Speaker Series, Mar 2015.
"Official, Informal, Insurgent: Creative Approaches to Public Space." Lecture at the University of Vienna, Jul 2014.
Revised, expanded, and published as "The Historic Urban Landscape of the Swahili Coast: New Frameworks for Conservation." In World Heritage Papers Series No. 36: Swahili Historic Urban Landscapes (Paris: UNESCO World Heritage Center, 2013).
"Place specificity in the emergence of urban cultural phenomena: The case of Hip-Hop and the South Bronx." Lecture, University of Amsterdam, Sept 2012.
"One Night in Belleville, Paris, 2011." Photographic essay for XCP Streetnotes 19, 1 special issue on 'The New Europe" (June 2011).
"Surface Moments, Marrakech." Photographic essay for Camera Obscura 18 (March 2011).
"One New Year's Eve in a Dying City." Antioch Review 69, 2 (Spring 2011).
Post-Acropolis: Five photographers document the Midwest metropolitan landscape, with work by Michael Allen, Toby Weiss, Robert Powers, Clare Boyd, and John Montre. Curator.
"Is There a Queens Urbanism? Hyperdiversity and City Form in New York's Enigmatic Borough." Inaugural lecture for the Columbia University American Studies Lecture Series on "NYC in American Studies / American Studies in NYC." Sept 2009.
"The Street as a Transnational Space." On Site Review: Journal of Architecture and Culture 19, special issue on "Streets," Summer 2008.