McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention...

With the passage of the Secure Fence Act in 2006, the U.S. Congress authorized funding for what has become the largest domestic construction project in twenty-first century America. The result? Approximately 700 miles of fencing, barricades,

Pamela Woolner, senior lecturer in education at Newcastle University, joins us in this episode to discuss her edited volume, School Design Together (Routledge, 2014). Pam is an expert in understanding and developing learning environments,

Laura Neitzel’s The Life We Longed for: Danchi Housing and the Middle Class Dream in Postwar Japan (MerwinAsia, 2016) is a chronicle of the large, government-sponsored housing projects called danchi that were built during Japan’s high-growth years,

Beginning in the mid-1800s, Paris experienced an unprecedented growth in the development of parks, squares, and gardens. This greenspace was part of Napoleon III’s plan for a new, modern Paris and a France restored to glory on the international stage.

Seoul, as any listener who has visited will recognize, can be a pretty overwhelming place. This is well recognized by Ross King, Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne,

Toufoul Abou-Hodeib‘s A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the urban history of Beirut precisely because it exceeds the disciplinary boundaries of urba...

Folklore scholar Joseph Sciorra is the Director for Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in Queens College which is part of the City University of New York.  He’s also a Brooklyn-born and -raised Italian Ame...

In Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), geographer Caitlin DeSilvey offers a set of alternatives to those who would assign a misplaced solidity to historic buildings and landscapes in order then to “preserve” or ...

The Americans with Disability Act passed in 1990, but it was just one moment in ongoing efforts to craft the meaning and practice of “good design” that put people with disabilities at the center. In their new book,

Lawrence Halprin, one of the central figures in twentieth-century American landscape architecture, is well known to city-watchers for his work on San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square, Seattle’s Freeway Park, downtown Portland’s open-space sequence,

Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments (Raw Vision, 2013) is an audacious tome. A comprehensive survey of 45 art environments on the Spanish mainland, it weighs just over eight and a half pounds and contain...

My students don’t remember Vietnam. That’s hard to believe, for someone born in 1968. But it’s true, nonetheless. High school history courses rarely make it past World War Two. The Cold War and the Berlin Wall are mysteries. And Vietnam,

For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of what we call the Internet and now AI. In her new book,

What do gingerbread houses in Haiti teach us about the construction of identity in the French Caribbean? How do hurricanes and earthquakes reveal the connections between the tangible built environment and intangible notions of identity?

It’s no secret that we continue to live in the midst of digital revolution that continues to unfold in a rapidly accelerating fashion. Digital connectivity and the Internet of Things make possible not only Smart Homes, but Smart Cities.

In 1898, a new metropolis emerged from the consolidation of New York City with East Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the western part of Queens County. In Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (Oxford University Press, 2017),

As Bruce R. Berglund, points out in his terrific book Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague: Longing for the Sacred in a Skeptical Age (CEU Press, 2017), the Czech Republic is an odd place, religion-wise. It’s among the most secular in the world,

The meaning assigned to architecture is complex and varied. Urban architecture is often stripped of meaning when people abandon the neighborhoods or are absent of meaning at the time of their inception. This leaves the people who inhabit the terrain to...

Jamin Creed Rowan is an assistant professor of English and American Studies at Brigham Young University. His book The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) offers a history of how American intellectu...

What comes to mind when you think of Paris in the nineteenth century? For me, its revolutionary politics, the circulation of increasing numbers of people and goods, a range of spectacular cultural displays and amusements,

NB: An earlier version of this podcast has been replaced with a new file in which the the technical problems of the first were corrected. -NBn, 7/11/17 At the end of World War II, Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia lay in ruins.

Sonic Rupture: A Practice-led Approach to Urban Soundscape Design (Bloomsbury 2016) by Jordan Lacey offers a practice-led alternative approach to urban soundscape design. Rather than understanding the functional noises of the city as solely problematic...

For the aristocracy in Britain and Ireland, country house living was dependent upon the labors of men and women who performed innumerable chores involving cooking, cleaning, and the basic operation of the household. In the 18th century, however,

In Working Towards the Monarchy: The Politics of Space in Downtown Bangkok (University of Hawaii Press, 2016), Serhat Unaldi offers a provocative and original interpretation of the relationship between space,