The Pasupati flyover (Pasteur-Surapati) connecting Bandung to Jakarta has become a new symbol for the city. Recent policy has made the space located under the bridge, transformed from ‘dead space’ into a socially-significant urban space for marginal people governed by many stakeholders and consequently a contestation of multiple and con…[Read more]

Traditional society cosmology is an instrument of territorial, space and buildings order as a whole language.Megalithic Nias was found with its organizational and architectural concept arranged with its cosmology.The belief of three worlds/cosmos: upper world or ancestor’s world, human world, and underworld, is local cult approved as local…[Read more]

Traditional society cosmology is an instrument of territorial, space and buildings order as a whole language.Megalithic Nias was found with its organizational and architectural concept arranged with its cosmology.The belief of three worlds/cosmos: upper world or ancestor’s world, human world, and underworld, is local cult approved as local…[Read more]

Local wisdom producing genius loci is a conceptual idea that lives, grows and develops in the society. It develops continually and in relation with society awareness, organizing sacral and profane parts of their lives. Genius loci in traditional settlements can be found in the different pattern and order corresponding to traditional values of the…[Read more]

Local wisdom producing genius loci is a conceptual idea that lives, grows and develops in the society. It develops continually and in relation with society awareness, organizing sacral and profane parts of their lives. Genius loci in traditional settlements can be found in the different pattern and order corresponding to traditional values of the…[Read more]

How built environment plays role in social transformation?This question is one concern of social-constructivism approach in study of place. Place construction studies focus on space that socially constructed and social that spatially constructed. This article explores place construction on urban social transformation in creative-kampung phenomena…[Read more]

In the twenty-first century, the majority of people are living in cities—at least this is the credo communicated frequently. This statement has been strengthened by the “urban renaissance” that dawned at the beginning of the twenty-first century and by a globally evident increase in capital investment in urban-development projects. Such plann…[Read more]

Appeals to a cosmic ecological democracy are common in environmentally engaged scholarship, and especially in ecological theology. This essay takes up the thought of Sylvia Wynter, Delores Williams, and Saidiya Hartman to argue for a different horizon for ecological politics.

In this class, students will engage in a critical examination of environmental transformations that arise from the complex interactions between natural systems and human activities. The pursuit of knowledge about natural resources and ecological systems is a scientific enterprise, yet addressing questions about the production, consumption,…[Read more]

In this class, students will engage in a critical examination of environmental transformations that arise from the complex interactions between natural systems and human activities. The pursuit of knowledge about natural resources and ecological systems is a scientific enterprise, yet addressing questions about the production, consumption,…[Read more]

Over the past two decades or so we have witnessed the transition of the web from novelty to ubiquity. The web has become pervasive in our work environments, a necessity we can no longer do without. The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies brought “read/write” access to the web for the masses and thus caused (r)evolutions in fields relying on eco…[Read more]

Susan Fenimore Cooper’s slow-moving nature journal, Rural Hours (1850), is an education of the senses in which both author and reader learn where to look and how to look. Her creative decision represent herself as a “gleaner” and to both use and subtly subvert the seasonal cycle (so that we may see more deeply, more intimately, more truth…[Read more]

In July 2013, the recently elected Pope Francis chose Lampedusa for his fist pastoral visit. A tiny island, part of the Sicilian region yet closer to Tunisia than to Italy, Lampedusa has at times become hyper-visible in the media and national discourses surrounding immigration while at other times it is ignored — part of Italy’s geographic and soc…[Read more]

In studies of immigration, generation is typically considered a static categorical system. I argue, however, that generation is a fluid construct and must be understood as place-based. Drawing on fieldwork conducted among Latino/as along the Texas–Mexico border, I seek to explore what current framings of generation leave out. Many in Laredo, T…[Read more]

Review of American Road Narratives: Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film by Ann Brigham (University of Virginia Press, 2015)

Traces the history of municipal solid-waste disposal at Bakersfield California from 1872-1992

In the documentary, Comic Book City, Portland, Oregon USA, I construct a representation of the city as a place for comics creation. In this paper, I distill key insights from my interviews with writers, artists, and publishers regarding the decision to live and work in Portland. My documentary research suggests that creators are attracted by…[Read more]

This paper proposes that we can reimagine insular literatures and medieval islescapes as commodious seas of cultural and intellectual loci that span time, culture, and text alike. By moving beyond the rhetoric of insular separation or connectivity, we can see that islands connect even when medieval minds saw separation. The essay focuses on the…[Read more]

This article is a discussion of the “discourse on the unthinkable” surrounding potential future democratic engagements with rivers as non-human persons or natural objects. In the context of the Asia–Pacific region, this article suggests that the developments in material philosophy entitled “new materialism” are essential tools in the reconcept…[Read more]

This article explores the diagram found on the recto side of Pierpont Morgan, M. 982, a single leaf from a twelfth-century manuscript held by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, and believed to originate in the scriptorium of Saint Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, Austria. The diagram represents knowledge as an ‘ecodiagrammatic’ pattern, depic…[Read more]