Desks
Urbanities
The city in the hinterland and vice versa. Assemblages of steel and soil and flesh. The place where buildings become screens. Where the air = politics.
Notes on Turbidity (The Bay as It Is)
I. The Turbidity of Classification Turbid. Latin turbidus confused, turbid, from turba, confusion, crowd, probably from Greek tyrbē, confusion. Measuring turbidity, defined as the cloudiness or haziness of a liquid, is relatively straightforward. Submerge a Secchi […]
The Other Colombia and the Urban Form
One of the principles that has from the beginning guided the “Urbanities” corner of Feedback is that the urban form is today found everywhere. This postulate seems relatively uncontroversial. Writing in 2013, […]
The Industrial Fire of American Democracy
Today, the morning after the election of Donald Trump, the massive and abandoned Bethlehem Steel plant in Lackawanna, NY (just south of Buffalo) became engulfed in fire. I live in close proximity, in another […]
The Ferguson/Ayotzinapa Dictionary (Encyclopedia of Oppression)
NOTE I started writing the attached FERGUSON AYOTZINAPA DICTIONARY while on de facto paternity leave, in lieu of being able to work on larger projects, often writing with my right hand while holding […]
Life on Solaris
As a personal rule, I detest autobiography. Especially it’s debased, watered-down manifestation, the memoir, a form that proves that the personal is political, so long as that politics is bourgeois capitalism. And […]
Space to Rent
Craig Epplin’s last post to Urbanities questions whether the relation of producer-consumer and planner-occupant has really been altered by the advent of “participatory” modes of technology. More specifically, new forms of cartography […]
Cartography and Participation
The pleasure of data, the seduction of statistics: Paul Kamàck first became interested in Mexico when, still a student, he visited the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. What caught his attention […]
Literary maps: México, DF
I’m preparing for a research trip to Mexico City. As always when I travel, I’ve been looking at maps—maps of the metro, maps of neighborhoods, maps of the whole city and the […]
Notes on Maps and War
I recently came across footage of the first twenty-four hours of CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War. It was an accident but no coincidence—I’ve lately been trying to understand the relationship between […]
Lexus and the Automotive State of Exception
As Roland Barthes famously put it in Mythologies, the 1955 Citroën DS 19 was a “superlative object,” that is, an object that exuded perfection while hinting that its origins were somehow mysterious, […]
Sleep and technology
I want to follow up on Justin’s last post and, in the process, talk about a book that I just recently finished reading. It’s a great insight to note that, if we […]
Soft architecture, etc. III
A follow-up to our epistolary discussion of “soft architecture” with Léopold Lambert of the Funambulist. Link here to Part I and Part II. Dear Léopold, I’ve read your response with great interest, […]
Soft architecture, etc. II
The following continues the conversation begun previously about softness, hardness, and architecture. Below is the response from Léopold Lambert of the Funambulist… Craig, I enjoyed reading your parallel between the soft surfaces […]
Soft architecture, etc.
The following is the first installment of an exchange between Léopold Lambert, Justin Read, and Craig Epplin. Dear Léopold and Justin, I’m writing with some thoughts occasioned by some recent readings, most […]
Glosses on Termites and the City
The first time I arrived in Caracas, I remember being struck by the lights of the shantytowns spreading out all over the hills. You could see them from the plane, and later […]
Grids: Rows and Curves
The short poem “Cuadrados y ángulos” (“Squares and Angles”), by early-twentieth-century poet Alfonsina Storni, begins simply, equating houses in a row with their abstract, geometric shape, the square: Casas enfiladas. Casas enfiladas. […]
Marvelous City Air Security
Apropos of our love of the air, I’ve been following the redevelopment of Rio de Janeiro’s main port, which lies near the center of the city on Guanabara Bay near the vicinity […]
Writing in The Air
The title of this thread does not reference César Vallejo. Or rather, to the extent the Vallejo should inform everything that we think generally, I had something else in mind, in particular. […]
Wilderness after the Wild
Urbanities unfold new stretches of wilderness. They are home to the weedy species of the world—“plants, animals, and other organisms that thrive in continually disturbed, human-dominated environments.” These species proliferate today, after […]
Call/Appel/征集/Ruf—for Submissions
Feedback is a weblog publication of Open Humanities Press, a community of critics dedicated to writing at the generative interfaces between established disciplinary, institutional, and social territories and protocols. The […]
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