| Space and Place: A Research Activity Book A small but potent set of ideas, exercises, and resources that might be used as a starting point for thinking more about space and place. It is for anyone interested in learning more about the places where people live, work,
play, or otherwise spend time; for people who want to learn and make knowledge about, and perhaps participate in shaping, spaces and places, whomever and wherever they are, according to their own interests. Maybe you are just a curious person. Maybe you are part of a community or advocacy group or an organization trying to think about issues in a neighborhood, a city, or another kind of locale or setting. Maybe you want to learn more about the history of a specific area, building, or piece of land; think more deeply about what goes on in a certain place; or study patterns that offer clues about the order of things, connections between certain spaces and other locations and patterns, and/or why things are the way they are. |
| The mixed potential of salvage commoning: Crisis and commoning practices in Washington, DC and New York City This paper considers how and to what ends commoning practices can take shape in direct response to the spectres and/or realities of eroding resources (we focus especially on public resources) within iterations of what we term “salvage commoning”. We show how, in such contexts, commoning practices may potentially alleviate but also potentially (re)produce inequities, exclusions, and resource retractions. To illustrate, we draw upon two examples: parent‐teacher organisations in Washington, DC, and block associations in New York City. In both instances, people have cooperatively built new relations, coordinated voluntary labour, and stewarded resources in connection with specific commons (public schools and urban spaces) threatened by disinvestment and crisis. We show how troubling alignments and exclusions can emerge under these conditions, suggesting critical questions about the starkly mixed … |
| Urbanism without Guarantees: The Everyday Life of a Gentrifying West Side Neighborhood Focusing very tightly on just four blocks of a single street in Manhattan (New York City), the book shows how formations of gentrification and policing are connected to forms of common sense and everyday practice which, I argue, are informed by people’s ordinary sensibilities as situated/embedded in urban space and place. I show how consequential connections between everyday experience, sense making, routine practice, and spatial labor are mediated by what I think of as “performative infrastructures,” all coming together in contingent ways which can buoy deeply inequitable processes but might also—if subjected to deliberative critical praxis, concerted organizing, and so forth—be transformed toward different socialities and outcomes. This is the fifth book in the Diverse Economies and Liveable Worlds Series (published by University of Minnesota Press), and has featured in Community Economies News. 
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| Extending the conversation on socially engaged geographic visualization: representing spatial inequality in Buffalo, New York This paper is situated at the intersections among GIS and geovisualization, critical social theory, and urban studies. It presents an analysis of housing segregation and unequal food and transportation access in Buffalo, New York. We demonstrate how the representation and examination of this socially complex multi-scalar issue benefits from deliberate, reflexive conversation between different critical social-spatial epistemologies. We begin with a relatively simple GIS analysis of spatial segregation and arrive through critical iteration at a more qualitatively nuanced cartogram which moves beyond representations of fixed space to reveal a much more relational situation—a case of “time-space expansion” in which the travel time needed to meet a basic daily need is much greater for the poor and people of color than it is for whiter, more affluent populations. We conclude by infusing this narrative with additional considerations from social theory to show how even a limited visualization such as ours might better critically engage broader social and discursive processes in and across urban space. |
