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

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]

Gathering into lively conversation scholars in medieval, early modern and object studies, Inhuman Nature explores the activity of the things, forces, and relations that enable, sustain and operate indifferently to us. Enamored by fictions of environmental sovereignty, we too often imagine “human” to be a solitary category of being. This col…[Read more]

In the context of the global water crisis, we seek an understanding of the histories of water management, their fashioning, and their legacy today. We juxtapose temporally diverse narratives to explore the premodern imaginings that have shaped our inheritance of hydrological thought. Rather than conceptualize their historical influence as a linear…[Read more]

Recent years have seen an infusion of new ideas into material philosophy through the work of the so-called ‘new materialists’. Poignant examples appear within two recent books: the first, Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett (2010), sets out to “enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us” (2010: 4). The second, Element…[Read more]

Mat-building is a low-rise, high-density construction which characterizes European architecture of the 1960s and 1970s. The term is coined by Alison Smithson and its paradigm is the Free University in Berlin by Candilis, Josic, and Woods. Based on a strong internal order and indeterminacy in form, mat-buildings’ design is a combinatory method. I…[Read more]

THE URBAN WORLD: A CASE STUDY IN SLUM RELOCATION (40 minute documentary) A film by Warren Bass Howard Spodek, executive producer and subject specialist Illustrated Essay by Howard Spodek “The Urban World” documents the relocation of a family at the crossroads of two of the most important urban developments in India today: the revitalization of cit…[Read more]

This PhD thesis has used building recording techniques, documentary research and oral history testimonies to explore how concepts of the modern and new between the 1870s and 1930s shaped the urban built environment, through the study of a particular kind of infrastructure that was developed to meet the needs of expanding cities at this time – s…[Read more]

La enorme complejidad de jurisdicciones medievales determina la existencia de una diversidad de diferentes modalidades de nominación de los escribanos públicos. Nuestro objetivo es analizar el caso concreto del notariado de Langreo, núcleo urbano asturiano que en el periodo bajomedieval perteneció a la jurisdicción compartida entre dos inst…[Read more]

This essay develops interrelations and mutual implications foremost among Bernie Sanders’ book Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home, and David Fideler’s Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence. It proposes that the evolution of contempla…[Read more]

Studies of ethnic minority peoples in Asia have long focussed on the relations between ethnic minority communities and the modern state and on the role of development in shaping these relations. This paper is concerned with how ethnic minorities respond to the state-led development. While there are numerous studies focussing on the collective…[Read more]

Bans on coal mining have been implemented in two tribal majority states in India’s north-east frontier; Nagaland and Meghalaya. In Nagaland the state government imposed the ban in an attempt to capture control of coal extraction and trade, while in Meghalaya India’s National Green Commission imposed the ban over concern for the environment and…[Read more]

Im Œuvre des Architekten Hans Scharoun lässt sich ab den 1930er-Jahren eine besondere und spezifische Art der Fotografie ausmachen. Hinter diesen Fotografien liegt dabei weit mehr – zum Teil Brisantes – verborgen als ihnen beim ersten Anblick anzusehen wäre. Anhand der Häuser Mattern und Moll werden diese Fotografien im vorliegenden Text untersu…[Read more]

This paper examines two documentary essays focusing on landmark architecture in the transnational Øresund region comprising Copenhagen and Malmö. I argue that the motif of construction and deconstruction is congruous to our understanding of the ways identities are negotiated vis-à-vis spatial experience. In the lms, the multiple trajectories of…[Read more]

The use of colour as a spatial metaphor is a familiar part of the language of urbanism: green, grey, brown and blue spaces abound in the literature, from Jane Jacobs’ attacks on the over-planning of American cities to Peter Borsay’s recent exploration of the place of nature in the history of English towns. This latter responds to a wider turn tow…[Read more]

The article deals with the tumba (or tomba) and with the diffusion of this building type in the medieval rural territory of Rimini. By tumba we normally mean a fortified settling of modest dimensions, built on high ground in order to protect cultivated areas: its characteristics are well described into the De Agricoltura, a treatise written by…[Read more]

Conference paper on Loos