"It is not coincidental that this fascist government sees the warehouse as the perfect detention center. The current acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, made a chilling and explicit comparison: 'We need to get better at treating this like a business. Like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.'"

Huge thanks to @jwlrt.bsky.social for his incredible, creative, brilliant editorial work on this piece.

Really fascinating post from @charmainechua.bsky.social on the history of the warehouse, and what that means as ICE tries to turn warehouses into concentration camps.

Wednesday's Most Read # 2 - The Warehouse, in Plain Sight link.theoverheadwire.com/qb7a3 @placesjournal.bsky.social

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: On the Brinck | Places Prize on the American Southwest. The prize recipient will receive an honorarium of $7,500 to research & write a major work of public scholarship for publication in Places, and present a related public lecture at the SA+P @unm.edu. Submit by July 17, 2026!

"The ships, the trucks, the loading docks: these are containers of immiserated labor, and so they are also containers of revolutionary potential," writes @charmainechua.bsky.social, for "An Unfinished Atlas." Chua's latest is a call to "jam up" and "break apart" the disappearing machine.

“You needn’t know the history of warehouses to oppose their transformation into concentration camps. There are ways to slow down that machine, until we end it. But it is useful to know who owns the buildings for sale, who zones the land, who controls levers of power.” — @charmainechua.bsky.social

That concrete box off the freeway wasn’t designed for storage so much as capture — of markets, workers, and, now, people detained by immigration agents, as the federal government turns warehouses into million-square-foot concentration camps. It is a disappearing machine. We need to see it clearly.

This month on Places, Tiffany Lethabo King considers the “Black maternal art” of dirt eating; Timothy Spears photographs municipal dams managed by the Army Corps; and @drbrandi.bsky.social mourns the Oakland she knew growing up — a city that “used to be Black, and now is not.” Our April newsletter:

Seeing a flood of Claude-generated urban dashboards popping up in #civictech #pitech spaces right now, & in my feeds on X & LinkedIn. I feel inclined to repost @shannonmattern.bsky.social's excellent 2015 essay, "Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard." placesjournal.org/article/miss...

Each month, we send our subscribers a selection of essays from the Places archive, recommended by us, the editors. We share writing that adds depth + dimension to issues of the moment, as well as stories we love to read (+ re-read). Like the journal, it's free! Sign up: placesjournal.org/newsletter

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This month, the Places Editors recommend… • “The Twilight of Autopia,” on the 1973 oil crisis • “The Association of (Gay) Suburban People,” on queer activism in the conservative suburbs of Detroit • “Living Freedom Through the Maroon Landscape,” on coping with climate disruption

"The ghosts of Oakland’s Black past are remembered and mobilized by different constituencies for different political ends, as the vampiric appetites of gentrification feed on the blood and bones of culture and infrastructure." @drbrandi.bsky.social, on the specter of Blackness haunting Oakland, CA:

"It is eerie and jarring to walk around this city and imagine how it used to be Black, and now is not. I never imagined that Oakland would stop being a Black city...would stop feeling like a Black city. How, now, do I deliver the attention this haunted landscape solicits?" — @drbrandi.bsky.social

Brandi T. Summers thinks through “the past, present, and future of the Black city that Oakland was, and in important ways still is and can remain.”

"The logic of urbicide in the continuous rebuilding of cities necessitates the destruction of Black place. I'd add that urbicide presumes as its justification a preexisting placelessness, an expectation that Black and poor people are ontologically predisposed to do without." — @drbrandi.bsky.social

My latest… It was an honor to get to write a bit about my late grandmother and my family’s journey to and through Oakland.

New essay by @drbrandi.bsky.social on the Black ghosts that in their haunting traces define the Oakland we live inside.

Urban renewal and its aftermath in Oakland were neither natural nor inevitable but purposeful intensifications of precarity in Black life — a de facto murder of place. Today, a specter of Blackness haunts the city, lingering in cultural & material landscapes shaped by generations of Oaklanders.

Join Places author @cetracey.bsky.social this Thursday, April 2nd for a special reading from, and conversation about, her debut book, SALT LAKES: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY. This event is free & open to the public @upenn.edu's Fisher Fine Arts Library. Philly folks, don't miss it!

At municipal dams managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a photographer studies zones where federal authority and expertise meet daily life.

"The USACE-operated dams I photographed for this project are all at least 60 years old. Some have weathered historic floods. Yet their significance is most seen and felt in the water that continues to run against, and through, them." Original photography by Timothy Spears:

"Over the past three years, I’ve photographed more than 65 dams in 22 states. My aim has been to capture something of their beauty and history; to show seams where the national intersects with the local, and where federal authority and expertise meet the daily lives of Americans." — Timothy Spears

At municipal dams managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a photographer studies zones where federal authority and expertise meet daily life.

Places is in Cincinnati this week, for the annual conference of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture. The built environment is public. Research about it should be public, too. 🗣️

"The act of dirt eating has long been deemed base, animalistic, nonproductive, and therefore practiced in hush harbors, under the cover of trees or in the dark of night...In this light, it is not surprising that the Black geophagic tradition and its representations have been rooted in the literary."

Drawing on literature and film spanning more than a century, Tiffany Lethabo King writes about the Black diasporan tradition of dirt eating, also known as geophagia: “As unfinished sites, geophagical pits open portals to geological time, offering up, in morsels, millions of years of earth-knowing.”

The Black diasporan tradition of dirt eating, or geophagia, has long been pathologized. Black literary and film artists recover the practice as a birthright — an intimate connection to the earth, passed down by Black women at clay banks. The latest in An Unfinished Atlas, from Tiffany Lethabo King:

In my March edition of Prisons, Prose & Protest, I share an overview of a 1964 pamphlet by Anne Braden that remains relevant today. I recommend a podcast about a project documenting Black girlhood in photography and prose, several good recent articles and essays, and also I am raffling some prints.

"To imagine the abolitionist city, we must understand policing as a joint project of property owners and the state to determine who is imagined to be safe, healthy, of the community, and thus who is allowed to be in public space." On building a queer abolitionist future in Minneapolis:

When the Minneapolis Third Precinct station burned in 2020, it destabilized the naturalness and inevitability of police power. The mutual aid networks actually keeping people safe in Minneapolis have been forged through decades of organizing, uniting activists through new visions of community care.

The Long Fire at Lake and Minnehaha: Sexual Policing, Settler Colonialism, and the Minneapolis Uprising An Arcus/Places Prize Lecture from @myrlbeam.bsky.social, on building a queer abolitionist politics in South Minneapolis. 📅 February 25, 2026 6:00pm PT 📍 Bauer Wurster Hall, UC Berkeley CED

Bay Area folks, join us this evening at UC Berkeley!

The mutual aid networks that keep people safe in South Minneapolis were forged across decades of organizing, uniting activists through expansive visions of community care. This work — of showing up for others, defending neighbors from violence + dispossession — lies at the heart of queer abolition.

Free and open to the public! Join us!

The Long Fire at Lake and Minnehaha: Sexual Policing, Settler Colonialism, and the Minneapolis Uprising An Arcus/Places Prize Lecture from @myrlbeam.bsky.social, on building a queer abolitionist politics in South Minneapolis. 📅 February 25, 2026 6:00pm PT 📍 Bauer Wurster Hall, UC Berkeley CED

Perhaps some of my own work can help reinforce this call :) placesjournal.org/article/extr... placesjournal.org/article/libr... And about 25 years’ worth of other stuff here: wordsinspace.net/work/

Every so often, we send a newsletter with a selection of articles from the Places archive, recommended by us, the editors. We share writing that adds depth to issues of the moment, and stories we find gratifying to read (and re-read). This week: Lead Glasses, Community Plumbing, and Luxury for All

"Societies are defined by their libraries — by what we hold, what we lend, what we borrow and return, the knowledge we create, values we defend. An attack on the library sector is an attack on public knowledge, and it includes the reading public — you, me, all of us." — @shannonmattern.bsky.social

Loved this reflection on the Central Valley's beleaguered chinook and the intensively engineered watershed in which they're enmeshed. Makes me feel like someone should write a popular history of these fish. placesjournal.org/article/salm...

“This is my praise song for Farwell Canyon—that glorious Coyote-blessed and bewitched cathedral of salmon—for my enemy who is also my relative, and for the fish we love and share.” Unmissable Julian Brave Noisecat essay on rivers, memories & imagining otherwise. placesjournal.org/article/farw...

A heartfelt essay on what it means to steward land in community with neighbors who share a vested interest in the health and prosperity of a place.

"I understand 'Ending Well' as a socio-cultural script for the future we hope for: that development on the African continent will be something other than a linear prescription of urbanization, and that Ghana will negotiate on its own terms what growth should look like." —Courage Dzidula Kpodo

In the birthplace of Ghana’s cocoa industry, neighbors negotiate the expansion of a harvest path — and with it, an alternative model for development in the populous West African nation. A new essay in Places by Ghanaian architect and researcher Courage Dzidula Kpodo.

With the Olympics underway, we're rereading this convo w/ @brenttoderian.bsky.social, who helped Vancouver prepare to host the 2010 Games. "We didn’t set out to wow the world with architecture that we may or may not use. We know how our facilities will be used the day after the Olympics are done."

Cities that host the Olympics have to finance + build a range of venues that not only make the two-week event a success but also, once the world has gone home, become enduring parts of the city fabric. Back in 2010, @brenttoderian.bsky.social spoke w/ Nate Berg about how Vancouver met the challenge.

As the Milan Olympics are about the start, I find myself thinking back about our own experiences with the 2010 Vancouver Games. “It can be a challenge to balance between boosterism & cynicism, and how well we’ve achieved our goals around the Olympics & sustainability.” In @placesjournal.bsky.social

"Farwell Canyon: A Praise Song for My Enemy and Our Fish" By Julian Brave NoiseCat

"Farwell Canyon is one the best river fishing spots in the interior of British Columbia. I know that’s a subjective claim, but it’s about as close to an objective statement as a fisherman has ever made about a fishing hole." Listen to Julian Brave NoiseCat read his new essay, "Farwell Canyon."

Listen to Julian Brave NoiseCat read his essay — part of our new audio feature.