"Benches are where optimistic visions of civic life meet reality. To remove them, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it."
NEW: Why benches are slowly disappearing from public spaces — and why we need them back:
Benches are microcosms of an expansive debate about who belongs in urban public spaces. When they are removed or made uninviting, we lose more than just a place to rest.
From journalist Gabrielle Bruney: "The Disappearance of the Public Bench"
The On the Brinck | Places Prize supports ambitious public scholarship on the American Southwest.
We've just released a Call for Proposals for the 2nd round of the prize, in collaboration with the School of Architecture + Planning @unm.edu. Recipient receives a $7,500 honorarium.
Apply by July 17!
Read more from @charmainechua.bsky.social about the DHS warehouse as disappearing machine — and how we can "slow it down, jam it up, break it apart, until we end it."
This pattern now repeats in the spec warehouse market. The Trump regime casts people who came to the U.S. seeking work or asylum as 'enemy aliens' and 'criminals' who must be removed, which justifies the reformatting of surplus commercial space for mass detention."
It took several years, but eventually they found tenants, including the U.S. Marshals Service, ICE, and the California Corrections Department. Last year, the site was reactivated as the largest immigrant detention center in California.
So we get places like California City. Here, a discarded military site became, in the 1960s, a failed real estate development, where a few thousand people settled in a city designed for half a million. In 1998, developers built a 2,500-bed private prison there on spec — without prisoners to fill it.
...Governments that lost their mandate with the sunsetting of the welfare state formulated new political problems, so they could promote new technical solutions, requiring new markets. Most notably, they manufactured a fear of crime so they could justify a prison boom.
From @charmainechua.bsky.social, a 🧵 on why ICE began buying empty warehouses at a premium:
"We can understand ICE's absorption of warehouse surpluses through the lens of carceral geographies. Surplus is the logic of containment, as [theorized by] abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore...(1/6)
"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.