The conditions of contemporary society are in a constant flux of supply and demand: a ubiquitous supply of digitally created media content and a demand for regular consumption. This is one of many conditions of late-stage capitalism, where new modes of interaction between material and data are created. In the presence of late-stage capitalism and this constant flux of digital content, a new spatial territory is forming, where subjective experiences are met with new occupations. This territory is composed as a fusion of digital media, technology, material objects, subjectivities and physical space. It is in constant evolution, undefined by boundary and temporally unstable, and integrating itself with the constant consumption of digital media content. In this spatial territory, there are seemingly places that appear unfazed by the effects of the digital content economy. However, a focused view begins to shine a light on the far reach of the conditions of late-stage capitalism. Within this context, the setting of the National Radio Quiet Zone, a geopolitical radio quiet boundary housing the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope technology located within the rural eastern United States, serves as the physical instantiation for exploration of this territory. The conditions of late-stage capitalism in this setting offer a unique vantage point from which to think about the architectural, urbanistic, cultural and sociological questions offered by this new spatial territory and the subjective experiences, where at the surface, content consumption appears restricted by radio quiet policies but a deeper view opens opportunities for unique design occupation.

The Battle of Gettysburg, fought between 1 and 3 July 1863, occupies a significant place in United States history and memory. Beginning within six weeks after the battle’s conclusion, much of the former battlefield landscape has been, and continues to be, preserved through careful deliberation. This article argues that those preservation efforts have simultaneously frozen the landscape in time while changing it as part of an industry of memory. However, the intentionality of those efforts has, until very recently, removed the presence and stories of African Americans from the landscape, despite the historical reality that African Americans are central to why there was an American Civil War and a battle at Gettysburg. This article concludes by describing incipient efforts, and some challenges to those efforts, to include those stories on the landscape.

In the decades that followed the Second World War, as suburban residential developments expanded and city centres became less desirable areas, these spaces entered periods of decline. While for many in the emerging middle class a single-family home was seen as desirable, the city centre remained a destination for artists and then societally repressed LGBTQ communities, populations unable or willing to take part in the twentieth-century exodus to the suburbs. This article explores an example of a red-light district that emerged during this time in the city of Toronto. Campaigns to clean up vice districts began as early as the late 1970s. Toronto is a noteworthy example, both for the swift eradication of adult entertainment businesses (massage parlours and adult film theatres) in 1977 and for the upstanding reputation the city cultivated in the twentieth century. LGBTQ communities became an adjacent target as part of this campaign in Toronto. Beyond the city’s swift urban sanitisation efforts in 1977, larger-scale urban gentrification processes have continued since that time. Assimilation into dominant North American societal norms is arguably impossible – and perhaps undesirable – for many artists and nightlife participants. With the gentrification and subsequent continued eradication processes of urban non-mainstream cultural spaces underway, artists and marginalised communities are inevitably less able to gather or intermingle, coexist and co-create in nocturnal venues when there is less physical space to do so. Furthermore, I argue that cultural creative potential was lost for marginalised artistic and LGBTQ communities with the eradication of Toronto’s red-light district and rampant gentrification of the city.

During the Jim Crow era and its aftermath, the routes depicted on typical interstate highway maps took on an alternative meaning for African American travellers. Unlike the Green Book, an essential travel glossary for Black travellers in 1930s–1960s USA, maps systematically ignored one crucial layer: where Black people could safely or legally drive, sleep or fill up with petrol. The network of roads designed to represent an infrastructure of ‘American freedom’ became effective dead ends for Black travellers. In this article (and accompanying collage series using original 1958 ESSO road maps), I argue that the invisibility of racialised transportation routes on government and commercial travel maps allowed American policymakers, urban planners and transportation engineers to escape culpability for their participation in financing an inherently racist world-building project. Victor H. Green’s Negro Motorist Green Book (1936–66) is an essential primary source to dispute this. However, the Negro Motorist Green Book was only optionally accompanied by maps (often provided by ‘benevolent’ corporate partners, like the ESSO petrol company) and these failed to visualise the safe travel routes and racialised infrastructure gaps that the business listings in the Green Book itself exposed. Representational cartography is one of the most potent tools for fomenting a common understanding of cultural and economic histories. Unlike the visual archive of housing discrimination provided by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s ‘redlining’ maps, historians and geographers lack similar cartographic proof that transportation infrastructure equally circumscribed African Americans’ social and physical mobility. This article illustrates how a lack of representational maps have allowed the USA to cement these stratified networks into its landscapes for nearly a century thus far.

Historically, death was an intrinsic part of daily life, but the growth and modernisation of cities prompted the relocation of most cemeteries to urban outskirts owing to population expansion, rising mortality rates and fear of disease. Today, only a few cemeteries remain inside, yet they exist as often ignored ‘negative spaces’, invisible to most people’s eyes. Starting with the argument that these places provide us (individuals or collective) with an unexpected possibility – of preparing for a transition from the mundane to the sacred – we raise timely questions about their sustained presence in the contemporary city. We examine eight burial sites (of various scales, typologies and histories) found in Istanbul and New York City. These sites range from well-preserved to semi-obliterated; some are active and others closed, often physically bounded with understated gates or walls, sometimes disguised as neighbourhood parks or largely overlooked, wild remnants. We map the anatomy of each cemetery visit, gathered cumulatively via several journeys from the street, and then into, around and through, to expose the most fundamental spatial elements, characteristics, qualities and conditions of these ‘rites of passage’. Our framework is composed of four observational themes that we call markers (linguistic, temporal, experiential and contextual) to pinpoint the complexities we encountered during our study. We align our approach and findings with the growing field of urban interiority, not currently part of ‘deathscape’ studies. Thus, we expand both of these domains with our methodology that combines sensibilities drawn from gathering, walking, sensing, visualising and heuristics. Purposefully dialogic, we alternate between the perspectives of two authors/professors and two global cities, prioritising an interplay between text and image. Ultimately, presented in the form of an archetypal journey structured around nine zones of experience, our insights frame the urban cemetery not only as a liminal site constituting an urban interior but also as a site fostering the establishment of a complex relationship between a visitor’s physical being and layers of interiority.

Under 45 years of neoliberal housing policy, the populations of the world have experienced an appreciably increased housing crisis. This is, first and foremost, a crisis of affordability but it is also a crisis of access, of supply and of quality. The fact these housing crises are occurring in Hong Kong as much as in London, in Vancouver as well as in Beijing – cities that have radically different urban topographies, economies and housing policies – strongly suggests that the usual excuses of insufficient housing densities, lack of access to land, an excess of regulation or an influx of immigrants cannot explain what is a global phenomenon, in both cause and effect. Comparing the regeneration of the UK’s council housing estates with that of a uniquely Chinese type of public housing called the danwei dayuan (work-unit compound), this article outlines some of the key similarities and differences, both economic and social, between policies and practices of public housing and renewal in the UK and China over the last 45 years. Informed by the research and design proposals of Architects for Social Housing CIC, which has pursued research into housing practices and policies for over a decade, this article will propose opportunities for alternative regeneration strategies derived from the respective conditions in the UK and China. To do so, it explores what lessons can be learned from this comparison with a view to increasing the provision, improvement and maintenance of public housing estates and their communities, and – by default – the liveability of our cities.

This article discusses the impact of building and planning codes on the improvement of affordable housing settlements. It is part of a larger research project that proposes a framework for the planning of affordable housing, based on the model of a type of informal Brazilian settlement, the favela. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the literature that reveals how planning and building codes relate to opportunities for the improvement of affordable housing settlements. The article also demonstrates how alternative assessment tools can provide a more holistic evaluation for a housing settlement, offering suggestions for the general improvement of the neighbourhood. This article considers affordable housing that is produced specifically for low-income families. Its production is subsidised by the Brazilian government and the monthly payment of the loan (or rent, in some rarer cases) cannot be more than 30 per cent of the family’s income. Despite the government’s efforts, the estimated housing shortage in Brazil in 2024 totals 6 million residences. Throughout the twentieth century in Brazil there were numerous efforts by the federal and local governments to address the problem of housing shortage. There were also many attempts to eradicate favelas, which were always seen by the public as places of poverty, misery and criminality. This article analyses how a case study, the Santa Marta favela in Rio de Janeiro, complies with local and building codes. It also uses a qualitative tool for assessing housing quality to evaluate the same case.

The estate became the model for public housing development in England and Wales from the late nineteenth century as a response to poor living conditions and housing shortages. To match the scale of the problem, solutions generally involved comprehensive construction or reconstruction (in the case of slum clearance) in the form of physically distinct developments with social and community provision. While estates were often built within or on the periphery of urban areas, they were typically laid out as discrete, somewhat self-contained entities, separated from their surrounding context. Council housing estates still form a significant body of the UK housing stock and are typically managed as distinct concerns by local government or social housing providers. This research examines the history of the estate as a genealogy, drawing connections between the publicly owned municipal housing estate that emerged in the late nineteenth century and earlier models of estate ownership developed by the landed gentry. Landed estates were conceived as territorialised landscapes, and the estate map became the means to display its wealth. The study investigates how established surveying and cartographic practices involved in estate layout and management shaped the genesis of municipal housing as a new form of estate. The work also explores how this new conception of estate drew on visions of village life to embody ideas of self-contained community. The research is informed by the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on practice theory, as well as concepts of emptiness and the geo-body from the field of cartography.