Submissions to Places

Editorial Guidelines

FOR ARTICLES: We seek lively and original writing that explores contemporary architecture, landscape and urbanism. We define these areas broadly, and our approach is expansive, extending to allied fields including geography, planning, policy, history, ecology, media and technology. We publish peer-reviewed scholarship, essays and observations that blend research-based rigor with personal experience and journalistic edge, interviews and practitioner profiles, and reviews of books, exhibitions, events and projects. We are open to other formats and genres, too. We will occasionally publish fiction — fiction in which cities and landscapes are central to meaning, mood and narrative, as in the stories of, say, Calvino, Borges and W.G. Sebald. We seek writing that probes hard questions and innovative ideas, and that balances the high-altitude concept with a sharp focus on the messy, complicated details of lived experience, of real places and politics. We like idiosyncratic, hard-to-categorize work. Whatever the form, we value clear, supple prose, accessible to a sophisticated public as well as professional and academic peers.

FOR PEER REVIEW: We are committed to the tradition of refereed scholarship and seek strong, well-argued work that offers new ways of understanding contemporary environmental, building and urban design. We send articles submitted for review to a minimum of two readers, usually scholars or professionals with relevant expertise. Please read our peer review guidelines.

FOR SOUND AND IMAGES: We are interested in a range of media — photography, video, sound, animation, maps and more — that illuminates the experience of contemporary cities, buildings and landscapes. We especially like work with a strong point of view, a critical stance. Visual work should be accompanied with explanatory texts and captions.

SPECIAL TOPICS: Please see our ongoing calls for articles on the following topics: Public and Private, Design and Research in Response to Climate Change.

Submission Guidelines

Send manuscripts, proposals or queries electronically, to editors [at] placesjournal.org. Put “Places submission” and the title in the subject line. Include detailed contact information. It will expedite the process if we can reach you via phone.

Submit texts as attachments, preferably in Microsoft Word or a compatible program. Submit images or media files under separate attachment in standard formats (jpeg, tiff) that ease transmission. Please do not embed images in Word files.

Indicate whether you are submitting an article for peer review. Manuscripts for review should include an abstract of up to 250 words.

If you are submitting work to another publication, please let us know. We will reprint work under certain circumstances, for instance, if it has never been published in English, or if it has appeared only in a small-circulation print publication with a limited readership. Let us know if your submission is part of a larger project, e.g., a chapter of a book in progress.

We aim to respond to queries and proposals within 2 to 4 weeks and to manuscripts within 4 to 12 weeks, although sometimes we may take longer. Please wait until this time has passed before writing to check on the status of your submission.

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