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Community


02.20.12: Lawrence Vale

Housing Chicago: Cabrini-Green to Parkside of Old Town
On Places, Lawrence Vale recounts the troubled saga of Chicago's now-demolished Cabrini-Green, and the mixed-income new-urbanist style communities that are replacing the old public housing.
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12.15.11: Kathleen Robbins & Mary Carol Miller

Cotton Farmers
On Places, photographer Kathleen Robbins and writer Mary Carol Miller focus on the cotton farms of their native Mississippi — a changing landscape and vanishing livelihood.
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10.17.11: Cynthia E. Smith

Design with the Other 90%: Cities
On Places, Cynthia Smith, curator of the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition "Design with the Other 90%: CITIES," offers an in-depth look at her research into socially responsive urban design in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
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10.13.11: Denis Wood

Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas
On Places, geographer Denis Wood and his landscape architecture students map the ordinary, everyday things of a residential neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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09.12.11: Mimi Zeiger

The Interventionist’s Toolkit, Part 3: Our Cities, Ourselves
On Places, the latest installment of Mimi Zeiger's ongoing series The Interventionist's Toolkit, which explores diverse tactics and projects in DIY urbanism.
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08.15.11: Anthony Doerr

Village 113
On Places, a short story by Anthony Doerr set in a Chinese village soon to be drowned by the Three Gorges Dam.
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07.07.11: David Heymann

The Eastward-Moving House
On Places, David Heymann's "The Eastward-Moving House" — a continuation of the imaginative history of American home-building begun in J.B. Jackson's "The Westward-Moving House."
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07.05.11: J.B. Jackson

The Westward-Moving House: Three American Houses and the People Who Lived in Them
On Places, a republication of J.B. Jackson's classic essay "The Westward-Moving House," which traces the evolution of the American house — the American dream — over three centuries and across the continent.
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06.23.11: Kian Goh

Queer Beacon
On Places, architect Kian Goh explores LGBT public spaces in contemporary New York, where activism confronts gentrification.
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04.27.11: Timothy Mennel

Jane Jacobs, Andy Warhol, and the Kind of Problem a Community Is
On Places, Tim Mennel compares the radically different New York worlds of Andy Warhol's Factory and Jane Jacobs's Village — and comes to some provocative conclusions.
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04.14.11: Stephen Luoni, UACDC

Venture Design
On Places, a profile of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, which has turned Northwest Arkansas into a laboratory for the creative retrofitting of postwar suburbia.
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04.11.11: Robert Dawson & Josh Wallaert

Public Library: An American Commons
On Places, photographer Robert Dawson documents public libraries across the United States, emphasizing their vital  — and now threatened — role as an American commons.
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03.23.11: Anne Pierson Wiese

Sutliff Bridge
On Places, a poem by Anne Pierson Wiese, Sutliff Bridge, inspired by the dramatic destruction of an historic Iowa bridge in the floods of 2008.
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03.14.11: Mimi Zeiger

The Interventionist's Toolkit, Part 2: Posters, Pamphlets and Guides
On Places, in the second of her series on The Interventionist's Toolkit, Mimi Zeiger reports on the ingenious use of print media to spur urban activism — and even revolution.
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03.03.11: Justin Partyka

Black Fen
On Places, a portfolio by photographer Justin Partyka focusing on the fenlands of eastern England and a vanishing way of life.
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02.14.11: Wes Janz

This Is Flint, Michigan
On Places, Wes Janz probes the ongoing decline of Flint, Michigan, and wonders about the role of the architect in a city where there's more demolition than design.
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01.31.11: Mimi Zeiger

The Interventionist's Toolkit, Part 1
On Places, Mimi Zeiger reports on what she calls "the interventionist's toolkit" — architects' and urbanists' creative responses to the economic slump.
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01.10.11: Nate Berg

Burning Man and the Metropolis
On Places, Nate Berg looks at Burning Man, and how a beach party in San Francisco mushroomed into a week-long temporary city of 50,000 out in the Nevada desert.
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01.04.11: Jim Williamson

What Passes for Beauty: A Death in Texas
On Places, architect Jim Williamson recollects the aesthetic frustration and unexpected epiphany of his first project as an architect in Midland, Texas, the commission for the gravesite of the wife of an oil millionaire.
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12.20.10: Mark Lamster and Alexandra Lange

Lunch with the Critics: Northwest Corner Building, Columbia University
For this installment of Lunch with the Critics, Mark Lamster and Alexandra Lange visit the Northwest Corner Building, Columbia University.
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08.25.10: Center for Urban Pedagogy

The Good, the Bad, and the Empty
On Places, watch The Good, the Bad, and the Empty, the latest video from the Brooklyn-based Center for Urban Pedagogy, which explores the community politics of vacant lots.
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06.09.10: Mitchell Schwarzer

A Sense of Place, A World of Augmented Reality: Part 2
On Places, in the second installment of his two-part essay, architectural historian Mitchell Schwarzer argues that augmented reality, combined with social networking, is bringing about "nothing less than a new epoch of social relations."
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06.08.10: Mitchell Schwarzer

A Sense of Place, A World of Augmented Reality: Part 1
On Places, in the first of two-part essay, architectural historian Mitchell Schwarzer argues that digital technology, especially the real-time, mediating imageries of augmented reality, are revolutionizing how we perceive and inhabit place.
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05.26.10: MOCAD

Too Much of a Good Thing
Working on a model of discursive community engagement, Design 99 will develop a new project entitled Too Much of A Good Thing. The installation, called The Neighborhood Machine, will collect, analyze and distribute materials and information in a literal sense, but also non-literally.
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04.05.10: Denise Hoffman Brandt

The View to America Street from Mrs. Fair’s Front Door, July 21, 2009
On Places, landscape architect Denise Hoffman Brandt offers a vivid portrait of the ongoing post-Katrina struggles of one neighborhood, and one household, in New Orleans.  
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12.18.09: Center for Urban Pedagogy

Bodega Down Bronx
Why is it easier to get fresh produce in Park Slope than in the South Bronx? Places presents Bodega Down Bronx, a video from the Center for Urban Pedagogy, that examines where and why New York's bodegas get their food.
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11.19.09: Dk Osseo-Asare, Quilian Riano

A City in Search of Good Fortune
Architects Quilian Riano and Dk Osseo-Asare report on the profitable but notorious port of Buenaventura, Colombia, as the city battles drug traffickers and paramilitary gangs, poverty and corruption; and they fear that the proposed solutions might be part of the problem.
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10.10.09: Timothy Beatley

The 100-Mile Thanksgiving
Timothy Beatley describes a new tradition in the planning department at the University of Virginia: the 100-Mile Thanksgiving, for which students prepare the annual feast, trying to use food produced within 100 miles of the Charlottesville campus.
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09.27.09: Paho Mann & Nancy Levinson

Re-Inhabited Circle Ks
Photographer Paho Mann focuses his camera on the "reinhabited" Circle Ks of Phoenix and Albuquerque — and finds a welcome dose of local commitment on the commercial strip.
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09.18.09: Kees Christiaanse

Curating the Open City
Kees Christiaanse, curator of the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale, outlines a compelling vision of the open city of the 21st century.
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09.07.09: Tobias Armborst, Daniel D'Oca, Georgeen Theodore

Community: The American Way of Living
Think American suburbia is a sprawl of homogeneous privatopias? The U.S. curators of the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale argue that you haven't been paying attention.
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05.19.09: Sergio Figueiredo

Branding Catastrophe

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12.15.06: Allan Jacobs

The State of City Planning Today
A veteran city planner and educator analyzes the anemia of U.S. planning, and detects signs of life in neighborhood activism.
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01.15.03: Cervin Robinson

Portfolio: Timothy Hursley
Tim Hursley photographs the pro-bono buildings of the Rural Studio and the legal brothels of Nye County, Nevada.
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