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.

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.

Cohousing and shared living environments have been gaining increasing attention worldwide, as they offer significant social, ecological and economic benefits. Many Indigenous communities across the world had historically lived in collective housing with deep connections to nature, multigenerational relationships and the sharing of resources. However, many of these populations have been displaced from land and currently live in homes that are not aligned with their values and traditions. In recent decades, there have been growing efforts to recover these original values and translate them into contemporary housing through participatory design processes. This article presents findings from interviews with designers working on collective housing projects in two countries across the Pacific where Indigenous values have been integrated into architecture through co-design. This study, conducted in Aotearoa New Zealand and Chile, discusses differences and similarities in approaches, and provides insights into the future of housing. The findings reveal the residents’ unique contributions to the design of these housing projects to create a sense of community. The methods and participatory practices shared can be valuable in helping to design socially connected and regenerative collective housing in other contexts and countries.

The destruction of the West Flemish city of Ypres, Belgium, caused by the violent battles of the First World War, sparked an intense debate on urban reconstruction strategies. The disruptive consequences forced the government to provide a rapid, large-scale response while choosing between preserving the past or ambitiously embracing the future, thus following the main discourses among urban planners of that time. Beyond this emergency phase, however, more in-depth questioning about national identity and people’s sense of place arose, which translated into embraced or rejected architectural styles and urban planning proposals. The interplay between remembering and forgetting exhibited divergent urban planning proposals, which made the decision on how to rebuild the city difficult, delaying the reconstruction process. Since opinions on what to remember rely on people’s personal sense of remembrance, the spatial translation of how to remember requires a multi-layered approach where spaces for memory, such as memorials, cemeteries and monuments, and memories of places that relate to experiences in the everyday life of the residents, intertwine. When the spatial translation of these spaces for memory and places to which individual memories are attached is unbalanced, it might counteract the residents’ recovery while hindering the restoration of their broken journeys. This article elaborates on how this spatial translation proceeded within the reconstruction of Ypres, known as ‘the city of peace’, where the war memory became part of the identity of the place, which up until today attracts many international war tourists.

The architectural history of healthcare in South Africa remains greatly understudied, as do the consequences of the 1918–19 Spanish Flu, which ravaged its population. Yet that pandemic had great consequences for South African society, spatial planning and the development of healthcare, of which the latter two were still in their infancy at the time. This article explores the link between disease and design in South Africa through the presentation of the histories of selected hospitals, maternity homes, orphanages and a special care school designed by émigré Dutch architects from the 1920s to the 1970s. It is the product of desktop and archival research, site visits and interviews undertaken in both South Africa and the Netherlands. It outlines the disparity of care that was provided for different groups and is a first attempt to identify healthcare ideas transposed into the subcontinent fuelled by the tragic experiences of the Spanish Flu pandemic. Due to this health crisis, communities – structured in terms of language, faith and race – attempted to develop their own facilities for the care of their own. Where communities had no means of their own, charitable organisations tried to fill the void. Over the course of the twentieth century, public healthcare was centralised, but many of the community and charitable institutions persist. By chance or choice, émigré Dutch architects made a disproportionately large contribution to the development of healthcare facilities in South Africa, not only in the number and range of facilities they designed, but also by introducing contemporary ideas into South African healthcare design.

Most people in the United States began to alter their decisions and actions beginning in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, when the closures and ‘pause’ on most work were established. Studying the transforming urban conditions in New York City specifically presents a lens through which to understand how we quickly adapted to new spatial conditions as measures were put in place for keeping people healthy and encouraging businesses to stay open and approachable. Immediately, the need for social distancing asked us to consider how to navigate exposure as we moved beyond the home. Necessities for businesses to survive became a priority for the city and coalesced with people’s desire for seeking ways to do things outdoors. A focus on using city streets as urban public spaces resulted. Policies such as Open Restaurants and Open Streets were developed by the Department of Transportation to mitigate pandemic circumstances and to stir dynamic and optimistic possibilities for street use. Open Restaurants called for food/drink establishments to quickly reimagine their adjacent pavement or available street space. Open Streets initiated new ways for creating pedestrian zones in previously trafficked areas. This article highlights fieldwork documentation comparing a Cluster and Line of food/drink establishments with a newly pedestrian Avenue, in connected Brooklyn neighbourhoods. Diagrams, photographs and maps document the ingenious street constructions and the observed and felt psychological or phenomenal transformations taking place. An urban interiorism grew out of the imposed formalisation of rules for movement patterns and compact constructions, while the ad hoc or serendipitous conditions allowed for other intimate conditions. Notions of ‘village cafés’ or ‘urban beaches’ evolved through myriad forms and materials inviting unusual seating configurations and interactions. Speculations on what these internal/external spatial experiences, changing identities and continued urban freedoms are teaching us are also explored through a multidisciplinary set of voices.

This article presents an approach to improve urban resilience by examining crisis dynamics through a role-playing game. The set of exploratory exercises extend the Archaria 2035 scenario and geographic information system model, which was developed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to advance concepts that support military operations. Participants (graduate students) worked in teams to identify and map critical relationships related to health, safety and welfare through a modified version of the Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure, Information (PMESII) framework. Next, each participant was given a one-page stakeholder profile that specified motives, kinds and degrees of influence, and connections to other stakeholders. This information was used to create maps that showed how each character understood the city. Crisis event details were revealed a day-and-a-half before the game. NATO staff contributed to the event by presenting courses of action to restore security and order. Participants gave opinions on how their characters might act during the event and react to the proposed military operations. Conversations created temporary collaborations among some stakeholders but also conflicts among others that could create additional problems. A post-game assignment asked participants to write memos on specific policies and plans that would reduce vulnerability to the crisis. As a matter of pedagogy, results the demonstrate the value of role-playing to consider multiple perspectives and second- and third-order effects of a crisis. Specifically, connecting gameplay conversations and results back to initial ideas about health, safety and welfare contributed to reconsiderations of assumptions about contingent relationships.

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In the face of rapid urbanisation, increasing diversity of the human condition, ageing populations, failing infrastructure, and mounting evidence that the built environment affects health and well-being, the existing built environment still fails to meet the needs of people with disability. Nevertheless, in something of a parallel universe, improving built environment ‘sustainability’ performance, via measurement, receives much contemporary attention, and analysing the built environment at micro-scale (buildings), meso-scale (neighbourhood) and macro-scale (city-wide) is undertaken from various multidisciplinary perspectives. But, although built environment performance is already measured in many ways, and community inclusion is considered essential for health and well-being, accessibility performance for people with disability, at neighbourhood scale, is rarely considered. The institutional and medical models of disability help explain the inaccessibility of the existing built environment. On the other hand, the social and human rights models of disability offer insight into improving the accessibility of the existing built environment for people with disability. However, ‘disability’ and ‘built environment’ tend not to mix. People with disability continue to experience lack of meaningful involvement in research, participation in decision-making, partnership equality, and direct influence over policy, with the built environment arena increasingly becoming a private-sector activity. The actors involved, however, have little understanding of either the accessibility needs of people with disability, or the inaccessibility, particularly at neighbourhood scale, of the existing built environment. It is in this context that this paper explores the design, planning and politics of an inaccessible built environment, concluding that assessing the built environment accessibility performance for people with disability, at neighbourhood scale, is an essential component in the process of built environment accessibility improvement. Requiring collaboration between the built environment and disability knowledge domains, a new tool measuring neighbourhood accessibility, the Universal Mobility Index (UMI), has emerged and is undergoing further development.

Drawing on cultural geography, visual cultural studies and theories of media ecology, this essay lays out a framework for collaboration between media scholars, architects and critics, positioning photographic social media such as Instagram as a means for pursuing questions about the changing role of landscape in the visual mediation of urban social life and public culture. While buildings and urban infrastructure also have mediating functions, I focus on designed landscapes such as public parks because they mediate visual perception in a manner that is historically intertwined with that of photography. Responding to existing interest in the critical reading of landscape values as well as research on new photographic forms and practices arising from social media use, I suggest that we take seriously the idea that landscape is itself a form of media. Attending to its ongoing interactions with other media will enable us both to specify the nature of its intermediality in a given time and place, and open a new space for reflexivity and critique. Beginning with an account of what is at stake in the visual mediation accomplished through urban landscapes on the one hand, and in the study of social media use on the other, I make a case for a critical, qualitative analysis of photographic content as opposed to quantitative analytics of the data associated with it. I then present an example of the kind of analysis I have in mind, drawing from an exploratory case study of photographs from Grand Park in Los Angeles (Rios Clementi Hale). In the process, I flesh out the concept of intermediality as it pertains to designed landscapes and demonstrate the kinds of questions and pedagogical opportunities such an approach may open.