Brief reviews of recent books on architecture, landscape, and cities

December 2025

• Landscape Fieldwork, by Gareth Doherty
• Budget Justice, by Celina Su
• Here Comes the Sun, by Bill McKibben
• Overshoot, by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton
• Albert Kahn Inc., by Claire Zimmerman
• A Moratorium on New Construction, by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
• The House Archives Built, by Dorothy Berry
• Building the Black City, by Joe William Trotter, Jr.
• Weeds, by Kwan Queenie Li
• Anti-Atlas, edited by Tim Beasley-Murray, Wendy Bracewell, Michał Murawski

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Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design

Gareth Doherty (University of Virginia Press, 2025) Reviewed by Liska Chan

I often tell students that the most important tool in fieldwork is time. Not the measuring tape, camera, or even sketchbook, but the willingness to stay put: to sit on a curb or lean against a fence long enough for the landscape to start talking back. Gareth Doherty’s Landscape Fieldwork builds on the same premise, treating fieldwork not as a preliminary stage but as the very ground of design practice.

Drawing on his ethnographic research in Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State, Doherty elevates the small acts that shape design: scribbling marginal notes, making hurried sketches, listening for birdsong or traffic hum. These, he argues, are not incidental but methodological, cultivating attention to the entanglements of bodies, materials, and environments. Fieldwork, in his framing, is plural and provisional — encompassing surveys and maps, but also walking, noticing, and lingering. His examples move fluidly from classrooms to global sites, reminding readers that fieldwork is at once everyday and expansive, rooted in habit but also in improvisation.

Sketch of a proposal for the village center of the author’s hometown in Ireland, created as part of a design school project. Drawing by Gareth Doherty, reproduced in Landscape Fieldwork.Aerial view of the roof garden of Safra Bank, São Paulo, designed in 1938 by Roberto Burle Marx. Photo by Leonardo Finotti, from Landscape Fieldwork.

I often tell students that the most important tool in fieldwork is time. Not the measuring tape, camera, or sketchbook, but the willingness to stay put.

From a feminist perspective, this emphasis on situated and embodied methods resonates with longstanding calls to rethink how knowledge is produced. Donna Haraway has reminded us (beginning, in 1988, with Situated Knowledges) that there is no view from nowhere, and Doherty’s account echoes that insight. Gillian Rose’s critiques of visuality (e.g. in Feminism and Geography, from 1993) similarly describe observation as always partial, shaped by the position of the observer. Yet at times, Doherty smooths over difference. No field is neutral: who observes, and under what conditions, matters as much as what is observed. More engagement on Doherty’s part with feminist traditions that foreground reciprocity, vulnerability, and positionality could have deepened this claim. Readers might also look to contemporary practitioners such as Present Practice (Katherine Jenkins and Parker Sutton), Michael Geffel, and the Curious Methods project by Sean Burkholder and Karen Lutsky, whose inventive approaches to drawing, mapping, and site-based research model fieldwork as both critically attuned and experimentally open.

Still, Landscape Fieldwork makes a timely contribution. In an era of climate crisis and civic unraveling, Doherty’s invitation to linger feels urgent. To linger in the field is not an indulgence but a politics: what we choose to notice — weeds, rust, butterflies, bottles — shapes the worlds we imagine into being, and the futures we are willing to fight for.

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Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities

Celina Su (Princeton University Press, 2025) Reviewed by Aaron Cayer

Have you ever tried to make sense of a city’s budget documents? Take New York City’s “Expense Revenue Contract”: 530 pages that look as if they were printed on a dot-matrix machine. Your eyes cross and, if you persevere, new questions arise: Where does the money come from? Why don’t the expenses match the allocations? Why are we spending more on policing than on housing, health, and community development combined?

Why do we spend more on policing than on housing, health, and community development combined?

In Budget Justice, political scientist Celina Su explores these questions on our behalf, offering a toolkit for everyday citizens and marginalized communities seeking to understand and engage with budgeting as a means to promote accountability, care, and democracy. Drawing on years of fieldwork examining “participatory budgeting” processes in New York, along with international cases — from Spain to Brazil — for comparison, she argues that public budgets are instruments that can actually make or break cities. Budgets, she writes, construct moral arguments about us as a society. Urban inequities, in turn, are produced through decisions about who gets what, where, and why, and the policymakers making those decisions are often deliberately obscuring or disguising the numbers we are told to accept as “neutral” or objective facts. Tracing how fiscal decisions lead to urban inequities and carcerality, she makes a case for budgeting as democratic practice: citizens learning together to understand, contest, and redirect the allocation of collective resources.

Rally in Cape Town, South Africa, on behalf of budget justice, co-organized by the Social Justice Coalition and Ndifuna Ukwazi. [International Budget Partnership]

For scholars and practitioners of architecture and urban design, many of Su’s insights will be familiar, since much of the built environment is, today, treated as a commodity. Public subsidies and tax reductions, for instance, often underwrite luxury housing or sports arenas — projects that deepen, rather than resolve, the inequities they may claim to address. Still, the brilliance of Su’s book lies in its ability to make participation seem less daunting, more necessary, and absolutely possible.

Organized in three parts, the book begins with top-down politics and ends with bottom-up action. In between is direct democracy. Part I exposes how austerity politics are naturalized through bureaucratic opacity. Part II positions participatory budgeting as a fragile but hopeful form of deliberation that can replace efficiency as a civic value. Part III expands to mutual aid and solidarity economies, showing how “insurgent” civic practices can reimagine urban life from below.

Our disillusionment and disempowerment, Su writes, are being intentionally engineered by those who invest in and govern our cities and institutions. Their perpetual claims of austerity and crises of affordability have become tools through which they seek greater power over those of us who live and work in cities. Su’s Budget Justice reminds us that we do not need to navigate those crises — or democracy itself — alone.

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Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization

Bill McKibben (W.W. Norton & Co., 2025) Reviewed by Timothy A. Schuler

A few years ago, I wrote about an informal community on Oʻahu, established by a group of Indigenous women as a refuge for unhoused Hawaiians and their neighbors. An image from that time has stuck with me: a single solar panel set out on the rocky shoreline, a cord running back to one of the village’s homesteads. How the array had been acquired I have no idea, but at least one villager had figured out that, on the island’s sun-drenched leeward coast, solar energy can mean free and practically unlimited power.

This scene came to mind as I read Bill McKibben’s Here Comes the Sun, in which he documents the solar industry’s now seemingly unstoppable momentum — writing, for instance, about the mass numbers of Berliners who have been mounting lightweight photovoltaic panels on their apartment balconies. Within a year of passing new laws making solar panels easier to install in Germany, more than 1.5 million households were generating a full third of their energy with small, plug-in arrays. “You don’t need to drill or hammer anything,” a 77-year-old woman told the New York Times. “You just hang them from the balcony like wet laundry in Italy.”

In Germany, more than a million households are generating a full third of their energy with small, plug-in arrays.

For McKibben, Germans’ exuberant embrace of solar power exemplifies the technology’s maturation. In 2024, solar power accounted for 80 percent of new generating capacity installed in the U.S.; globally, we erect a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels every 18 hours. Solar power has (finally) reached a “breakout moment,” McKibben writes. While fossil fuel companies mount well-funded campaigns to stall any mass transition, corporate interests primarily concerned with profit have largely been persuaded. A 2024 report from a consortium of American tech companies, for example, found that solar energy was the fastest and cheapest way to power new data centers.

Dense with histories, this slender book is leavened with colorful dispatches from around the globe, all supporting a twofold argument: first, that the climate crisis demands rapid recalibration of how we power human civilization, and second, that solar power — and attendant gadgets like electric cars and bikes — make it possible to recalibrate without drastic changes to current patterns of consumption.

Photovoltaic solar power plant at Nellis Air Force Base in southern Nevada. [USAF via Wikimedia, public domain]Solar panels on an apartment building in Tauberbischofsheim, southeast of Frankfurt, May 2023. [Triplec85 via Wikimedia under License CC 4.0]

McKibben is skilled at dispelling common myths associated with a planetary renewable energy buildout: e.g. that in the extraction of minerals and the conversion of millions of acres of land to wind and solar farms, we will create harm commensurate with that caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Yet in regard to definitions of a just transition, the book may leave some wanting. Describing a 3.5-gigawatt solar farm in Xinjiang, for instance, the author notes that the long-persecuted Uyghur population views this clean-energy development as an extractive, colonialist project inseparable from human-rights abuses it has suffered at the hands of the Chinese government.

One wishes that this influential public thinker might follow the lead of Indigenous activists who have made the case for environmental justice.

McKibben sees this objection as inconsequential in the face of climate change. Citing the nine million people killed each year by particulate matter from fossil fuels, he opts to pull the lever of the proverbial trolley, killing one to save ten. “There’s real harm that will come to real places and real people as we build out this new energy future,” he writes. “And so for me the question becomes how that harm compares with the ongoing harm of our present system.” The veteran climate journalist clearly revels in sharing some good news for once. Yet one wishes that this influential public thinker might follow the lead of Indigenous activists who have made the case for environmental justice as a means of addressing climate breakdown. Instead, McKibben offers the platitude that “we don’t live in a fair world.” To his credit, he also questions this position, admitting that his fear of climate chaos may be causing him to “bend too far.” In a book characterized by confidence, it’s his one moment of doubt.

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Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown

Andreas Malm and Wim Carton (Verso, 2024) Reviewed by Hugh Campbell

The ideology of “overshoot,” as explained by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton in their recent book, is premised on the argument that, because the transition away from fossil fuels cannot happen fast enough to prevent global warming beyond 1.5, 2, or even 3 degrees Celsius, we will need to rely, in the future, on technologies of carbon capture to correct the overheating of the planet. We will eventually get back to 1.5 degrees C, but we will certainly breach all safe limits first.

Climate protest, Washington, D.C., October 2021. [Victoria Pickering via Flickr under License CC 2.0]

This model is the basis of the many Integrated Assessment Models, or IAMs, which have been used since the second decade of this century to project the rate of climate change relative to human activity. The overshoot scenario baked into these IAMs was basic to the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. At that COP meeting, an agreed limit of 1.5 degrees seemed, on the face of it, a victory for those nations whose futures were imperilled by the previously ratified limit of 2 degrees. But, according to the newly adopted logic of overshoot, the benchmark of 1.5 degrees was only ever going to be reached by first exceeding it. The plan is “addition undone by subtraction,” as Malm and Carton succinctly put it.

As the authors set out in detail, the capacity to switch, on a global scale, to renewable energy in fact already exists.

Importantly, as the authors set out in detail, the capacity to switch, on a global scale, to renewable energy in fact already exists. That is not what is preventing the transition. Instead, it is the interests of capital — the investments tied up directly and indirectly in fossil fuel activity — which determine that no sudden rupture is viable. In his 2016 book Fossil Capital, Malm had set out the way in which, in early 19th-century Britain, what he terms the stock (fossil fuel: first coal then oil) supplanted what he calls the flow (wind and water). Where simple logic might have dictated otherwise, the logic of capital determined that the stock, which could be owned, transported, and exchanged, would prevail. Hence, the course of planetary history changed.

In Overshoot, the same historical materialist analysis is turned on the present. The stock and the flow reappear, with fossil capital now so firmly imbricated in the workings of the world that to move decisively away from it — to strand its assets and relinquish their direct and indirect value — has come to seem unthinkable. A set of untested or as yet non-existent technologies for carbon capture seem a safer bet for markets and governments than the already proven options of solar, tidal, and wind energy. Malm and Carton draw upon a vast array of evidence in setting out how the logic of overshoot is substantiated within the fossil fuel industry, in politics and, through the IAMs, in science itself. This, as their subtitle has it, is “how the world surrendered to climate breakdown.” They quote an editorial in The Economist: “Overshooting does not doom the planet. But it is a death sentence for some people, ways of life, ecosystems, even countries.”

Street mural in Brooklyn, New York, ca. 2019. [Janine and Jim Eden, via Flickr under License CC 2.0]

This seems to be the acceptable collateral damage for a formulation that allows us to keep going as we are, or at least to manage any transition at a rate that the privileged nations of the global north can absorb. The prevailing approach, as Malm and Carton describe it, demands “practical loyalty to business as usual and nominal fealty to temperature targets.”

Although it is grounded in facts and figures, Overshoot is ultimately about a feeling — about the psychic dimensions of our collective response to looming catastrophe. It is certainly uncomfortable to be confronted with the full extent of this global acquiescence dressed up as global action. Malm and Carton can offer no easy ways out: their whole point is that we are refusing to face the fact that there are none. But there is still something positive, indeed energizing, about their clear-eyed presentation of the full, dispiriting picture.

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Albert Kahn Inc.: Architecture, Labor, Industry, 1905–1961

Claire Zimmerman (MIT Press, 2024) Reviewed by Sandy Isenstadt

Claire Zimmerman’s Albert Kahn Inc. is more than an addition to the growing literature on architecture’s imbrication with economic and social forces; this book attains a new level of depth and sophistication. On one level, it traces the formation, growth, methods, and output of Albert Kahn Inc., the Detroit firm that would produce, as Zimmerman writes, “a vast amount of building during a period of intensive North American industrialization.” Zimmerman’s research is exhaustive, working through family, corporate, institutional, municipal, and national archives to create detailed building histories that cover client ambitions, formal analyses, construction processes, occupation, and subsequent programmatic change. She foregrounds the firm’s evolving methods, which made it a leader in the design of industrial architecture by continually adjusting plans, materials, and systems to maximize efficiency, both for the client and for Kahn’s office itself.

Buildings and grounds diagram, River Rouge plant, Fort Motor Company, 1936; reproduced in Albert Kahn Inc. [Hartley W. Barclay and Ford Motor Company’Chicago Dodge plant, 1943; reproduced in Albert Kahn Inc. [Bentley Historical Library and Albert Kahn Associates]Dodge plant, ca. 1942, designed by Albert Kahn, reproduced in Albert Kahn Inc. [Albert Kahn Associates Records, Bentley Historical Library and Albert Kahn Associates.] Ford Motor Company Old Shop Extension, Highland Park, Michigan, photographed in 2023; from Albert Kahn Inc. Photo by Michael Wells.

On another level, Zimmerman shows how the firm’s buildings — including factories for Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Fisher Body, and Packard, to name just a few of their auto industry clients — were fundamental to the rise of the United States as a global economic power founded on industrial and technical expertise. She argues that American political influence abroad is not simply a backdrop for the firm’s work — it was partly a product of that work. Still, she is quick to note that global expansion was fitful, stymied as much by political headwinds abroad as by labor unrest at home.

The firm’s buildings were fundamental to the rise of the United States as a global economic power founded on industrial and technical expertise.

At yet another level, the book turns a critical eye on architectural historiography. By focusing so heavily on concrete-frame modernism, historians long ignored Kahn’s specialty: vast, single-story, adaptable buildings suited to ever-changing manufacturing needs. This focus also marginalized social factors. Architecture is both potent and limited, Zimmerman argues, in mediating relations between actors such as wage laborers and corporate executives. It can mitigate tedious or even hazardous working conditions, or exacerbate them; it can encourage innovations, or forestall them. A sharp comparison of automobile companies shows that unrest, in the decades covered by this study, often stemmed less from a lack of architectural amenities than from how production was organized within a building. Contending that nearly all advanced building construction operates within a logic of capitalism, Zimmerman offers historians a model for gauging the friction between economic imperatives and humanitarian ideals, in order to better understand the ways that architecture bears on social, political, and economic relationships.

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A Moratorium on New Construction: Critical Spatial Practice

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (Sternberg Press, 2025) Reviewed by Hélène Frichot

This fiery book is structured as a list of nine imperatives, from “Stop Building!” to “Take Care!” And yes, we had better! The imperative mode is crucial; we will all have to shout it out loudly. Our edu-factories are lethargic. Risk-averse, industry addled.

I have found that when I shout too loudly, I end up having my wrists slapped and my mouth gagged. Shut up now, you old hag, you are causing too much fuss, and the bros don’t like it. Yet there is a great deal of fuss that must be made if we want to establish ways of coping in this discipline and practice we call architecture, where the status quo holds strong — though our status (such as it is) has sunk low in the hierarchies of world-making, well below that of the construction sector with its avaricious developers and their power-broker pals. Perhaps, meanwhile, we are acting like village idiots? Speaking our own rarefied idiom while the world burns? Though I’m at a loss about what to say to our graduates.

In architecture, the status quo holds strong even as our status has sunk low in the hierarchies of world-making.

For too long we have alienated ourselves from the materials we take up, shape, neglect to maintain, and then recklessly trash. Dig and dump. We are closing in on 40 percent of CO2 emissions being tied to the construction industry, while our stock exchanges dabble in material and social irresponsibility — exactly because, as Malterre-Barthes asserts, “architecture traffics in shared narratives of progress and enhancement.” We need new mantras to guide us in managing our materials, handling them responsibly; thinking with them, rather than over and above them. We need imperatives like these nine points so that we can be supportive educators in architectural repair.

From the series “The Rubble Mountain, Sint-Truiden, Belgium, 2005,” by photographer Lara Amarcegui, featured in* A Moratorium on New Construction. From the series “The Rubble Mountain, Sint-Truiden, Belgium, 2005,” by photographer Lara Amarcegui, featured in A Moratorium on New Construction. *

Malterre-Barthes helps us to ask: how do we navigate between calls for a moratorium on new construction and a moratorium on demolition? Do we want to be destroyers of worlds or menders of worlds? In a stunning survey in the chapter “Halt Extraction!,” she breaks apart the material components of a basic home to tell a story of mass environmental destruction and the toxicities that devastate vulnerable communities. But she also reassures us with examples of reworlding by architects and activists. (It’s worth noting the important early contribution made by Malterre-Barthes herself, during her time at ETH Zürich, to the Parity Group, which seeks improved representation and participation of women and minorities in architecture, along with her collaborative fostering of a repair ethos in ecofeminist pedagogies.)

Do we want to be destroyers of worlds or menders of worlds?

We need such shimmers of possibility to share with our students, so that they can believe in this world, as hard as that is to do today. We need what A Moratorium on New Construction is offering, which is a lexicon, a repair manual for imagining the task of constructing — no, working collaboratively with environments — by manufacturing less demolition dust and demanding less extraction (“shutting down the plantation and the mine”). Resocialize housing, erase property lines, challenge capitalist accumulation, work with existing building stock, reorganize the wasteful alienating suburbs, redistribute wealth, decolonize, discard extractive value systems, hug trees. This book is an urgent call to care!

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The House Archives Built & Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities

Dorothy Berry (We Here Press, 2025) Reviewed by Brandi T. Summers

What is an archive? For some, the answer to this question might appear clear. But as we learn from The House Archives Built & Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities, the meanings of archives are contested, sometimes contradictory, and certainly not simple. Dorothy Berry’s sharp and confident voice pairs well with the collection of visual, literary, and typographic elements that comprise her archival testimony. Berry is a Black archivist and artist who is also a digital curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her new book features material that she has previously published, including in an online project from 2023 titled “The Dorothy Berry Collection of What are Black Archives” (“Linear Feet: Infinite; Containers: Innumerable; Folders: Keep Going”) and the 2021 essay “The House Archives Built.” Here she revisits these pieces, incorporating additional interviews, images, memories, and reflections about the work of Black history and the Black archival tradition.

Not only are Black archives marginalized. So too are Black archivists.

The title of the book is a clever reference, both to a line often repeated by her late father (“I grew up in the house my great-grandparents built in 1873”), who curated a Black community archive in Ash Grove, Missouri, and to Berry’s critique of the contemporary urge to recast any mode of memory-making as an archive. Berry makes a clear distinction between archives and memory. Memory, she argues, has come to stand in for the material, labor, expertise, and time associated with archivists and archival practice. Neither a toolkit nor a treatise, this collection highlights the paucity of accessible Black knowledge as held in official collections, and invites us to dive into the material held within archives and acknowledge the effort of those highly trained and underpaid individuals who organize and read archives.

Left: Moses Berry, ca. 1955, with his grandmother Mamie and brothers Gary and Charles, on the porch of the house his grandparents built in 1873. Right: Moses’s grandfather, William Berry, ca. 1880, on the porch of the house he built in 1873. From *The House That Archives Built. *

Rather than re-designating what the term archive means, Berry is interested in acknowledging the expertise of Black archivists who are dedicated to making Black life and history visible and legible. She takes issue with academics who take for granted the institutional labor and intellectual contributions of archivists, especially Black archivists. Not only are Black archives marginalized, but in conversations about these limited Black archives, so too are Black archivists. What’s more, what Berry identifies as a postmodern model of the archives refers to basically anything that accumulates and stores sources of the past. Her lamentation about the conditions of overtired, overworked, and underpaid Black archivists echoes the intensifying crisis of Trump’s war on public institutions — including and especially libraries and other broadly accessible repositories of knowledge.

Berry acknowledges the desire to embrace a more expansive definition of archives, especially from the perspective of people whose lives and histories have been relegated to the margins or footnotes. She also recognizes the impulse to designate memory and imagination as central to this more porous definition of archives. Ultimately, the reader is invited to engage Berry’s biographical sketching and assemblage of documents to imagine Black archival possibility – in an increasingly impossible world.

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Building the Black City: The Transformation of American Life

by Joe William Trotter, Jr. (University of California Press, 2024) Reviewed by Fallon Samuels Aidoo

The hardcover book jacket for Building the Black City is misleading. Joe William Trotter, Jr.’s “sweeping look at how American cities developed” highlights much more than the “vision, aspirations, and actions of the Black poor.” From cover to cover, Trotter attributes the complexity, vitality, and durability of American urbanism to diverse Black people who have been committed, since the start of transatlantic slave trades, to inhabiting cities of the continental United States. Tailor-made for novice readers of both urban history and Black history, each chapter introduces cities transformed by Black institutions and individuals during a particular period (e.g. Reconstruction). This tour de force of chronological, geographical, and thematic historical writing makes Building the Black City foundational for anyone planning and designing changes to American cityscapes. The book also shows established and emergent scholars that thick descriptions of and scholarly arguments about placemaking need not revolve around White male urbanists.

Building the Black City explores the role of churches as political as well as spiritual centers of Black urban life. The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama, was a key site in the 20th-century civil rights movement. [Library of Congress]

Building the Black City’s time-traveling, region-spanning investigations exhibit Trotter’s extensive knowledge of community settlements, political and social institutions, national movements, and international ideas. Black New Orleans and Charleston show up early in the volume, as differences in personhood and citizenship status amongst enslaved, free, and foreign-born Black people shaped property classifications (of real estate and of human beings) across 18th- and 19th-century cityscapes. Subsequently, Trotter teases apart city-building tactics in multi-ethnic Houston and Miami, showing how political, social, commercial, and cultural institutions built by Black immigrants and migrants clashed with each other, as well as with White supremacists denying these Black urbanites their right to the city. Part 1 of Building the Black City thus prepares readers to learn how urban Black life mirrors, intersects, and conflicts with that of additional “othered” urban populations.

Scholarship about placemaking need not revolve around White male urbanists.

In the second part of the book, Trotter’s examination of 20th-century African American urban history grows less spatial and diverse — an unfortunate turn, given the subjects covered. This section focuses on the nation’s biggest industrialized cities, up north and out west, with particular attention to subdivisions occupied by the Black middle class; labor organizations and sites that Black workers integrated; business sectors and districts occupied by Black entrepreneurs; and interfaith centers of civil rights activism. These surveys of life in the postindustrial city miss opportunities to place Black people in urban spaces of their own making, not only eliding Black designers, builders, and real estate developers, but also the accessibility of their architectural production. Instead, Trotter concludes with a less coherent assembly of Black places and people tied to urban change in recent decades (e.g. Hope VI housing constructions, Black suburbs, and Barack Obama).* Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life*, the recent book by Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson, more aptly covers this period by profiling inner-city birthplaces of hip-hop, landmarks of queer resistance, and sites of protest against police violence, to name a few.

All of which is to say, Building the Black City is one node in a network of new writing on American urbanism that centers Black lives and livability in ways that critique and complement each other.

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Weeds: A Germinating Theory

Kwan Queenie Li (Mack Books, 2025) Reviewed by Gavin Van Horn

If one purpose of a book is to draw attention to worlds that are ignored or unconsidered, then Weeds: A Germinating Theory is a successful book. Author and visual artist Kwan Queenie Li turns our awareness toward forgotten and disregarded green microcosms. More than mere biological persistence — there are plants in the cracks of the concrete — Li pursues a larger philosophical theme: to transgress, to be “matter out of place” (to use anthropologist Mary Douglas’s famous phrase), is a weed’s role. Weeds mark the edges of order and help us to consider how comfortable, or uncomfortable, we are with porosity.

Photograph by Kwan Queenie Li, from* Weeds: A Germinating Theory*.Photograph by Kwan Queenie Li, from Weeds: A Germinating Theory.Photograph by Kwan Queenie Li, from Weeds: A Germinating Theory.

“Weeds are storytellers,” Li avers, “whispering countless tales of a city’s development.” The brevity of the book belies its scope, for Li’s reflections span the globe, from Shanghai to Cairo to major metropolises in between. In these various contexts, weeds track larger entwinements between cultural impositions and nature’s improvisations.

The author pursues a philosophical theme: to transgress, to be ‘matter out of place,’ is a weed’s role.

Some compelling choices are made in Weeds. Li does not offer her personal qualifications or backstory until near the conclusion of the book. This serves, by default, to foreground the reader’s experiences and impressions. Li acts as an unobtrusive guide to tendrilling vines, hardy ferns, and creeping mosses, scrappy city creatures otherwise at risk of being ignored or missed. Text and image are comparably intertwined, with more than 150 photographs scattered through the volume, so that readers may pause and let their eyes search not just left to right but over, across, and around each page, much as one might scan the cityscape when traversing a sidewalk. The images do their own work — convincing, provoking, encouraging one to comb the cracks for tenacious green.

Capital and its movement typically dominate in urban areas, reducing resistance and paving over the inconvenient. Weeds, in this context, become a silent form of protest. These plants, Li writes, “encourage us to see the city not merely as a functional space, but as a set of unplanned opportunities,” and she allows readers to form their own impressions about what these opportunities might be. As lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle has written, nothing “is less vacant than a vacant lot.” This book amplifies that perspective and fittingly concludes not with a statement but with a comparable question: “Is this a weed?”

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Anti-Atlas: Critical Area Studies from the East of the West

Edited by Tim Beasley-Murray, Wendy Bracewell, Michał Murawski (University College London Press, 2025) Reviewed by Alexander Bala

Relative to contemporary debates on expanding the canon of global (particularly modern) architectural history, I can’t imagine a timelier intervention than Anti-Atlas. The book offers short essays from a diverse range of scholars (including architectural historians Daria Bocharnikova, Jelena Prokopljević, and Łukasz Stanek), who ground representations of “the Global East” in the inherent hybridity of its possible “areas.”

Co-editors Tim Beasley-Murray, Wendy Bracewell, and Michał Murawski, affiliated with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London, proclaim in their introduction that “Efficiency excludes!” The division of the world into simplistic binaries — “Global North” and “Global South,” “Europe” and “the Americas” — keeps intact the “Othering” mechanism that Edward Said critiqued in his now almost half-a-century-old Orientalism.

The ‘Global East’ is an idea about everyone, everywhere, being hybrid.

Americentric scholars tend to translate into architectural historiography the thesis from Edmundo O’Gorman that modernity and the post-1492 occupation of the Americas are inseparable. In fact, this occupation was effected not by some monolithic “European” enterprise, as many suggest, but by select monarchies. And so such scholars find themselves caught in a neo-orientalizing, neocolonial operation. Reversing the mechanism that Said critiqued, they cast “Europe” as a generalized “Other” on which their own self-definition “nests” at the top of a new hierarchy (as Milica Bakić-Hayden puts it).

Patterns of the geographic deployment of members of the Association of Polish Architects during the Cold War. Drawing by Łukasz Stanek, reproduced in Anti-Atlas.Political map of the USSR showing national costumes and flags of Soviet republics. From the geographic atlas Mir i Chelovek, created by Inna Zhdanova and Tat’jana Aleksandrovich, 1988; reproduced in Anti-Atlas.

In the historicization of global (but really Atlanticist) architectural canons, mapped onto the ostensibly mutually exclusive categories of “colonized” and “colonizer,” former socialist-bloc countries in Eastern Europe disappear. Yet the co-editors of Anti-Atlas remind us that these countries are

simultaneously “North” … and Other: never fully or unproblematically European … simultaneously colonized and colonizer; both racializing and racialized … economically backwards but culturally and politically developed; either doubly peripheral to both West and East or a so-called “imperial subaltern” in the case of Russia.

It would then appear that the most fertile ground for hybridity, in the sense put forward by Homi K. Bhabha — in which “colonized” and “colonizer” identities fuse into new cultural forms — is precisely Eastern Europe, and by extension, “the Global East.” But “the Global East” isn’t just another manifestation of “omphalos syndrome” — the tendency for any society to imagine itself as the center of the world. It’s rather an idea about everyone, everywhere, being hybrid. In mapping a genuine pluriverse, “critical area studies” from “the Global East” can, as Beasley-Murray, Bracewell, and Murawski propose, “play the role of the intellectual vanguard.”

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Liska Chan, Aaron Cayer, Timothy A. Schuler, Hugh Campbell, Sandy Isenstadt, Hélène Frichot, Brandi T. Summers, Fallon Samuels Aidoo, Gavin Van Horn, Alexander Bala, “Bookshelf: Fall 2025,” Places Journal, December 2025. Accessed 09 Dec 2025. <https://placesjournal.org/article/bookshelf-fall-2025/>

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