After the Mexican Revolution, statesmen and educators envisioned a new urban complex for the National Autonomous University of Mexico to expand public higher education and support the consolidation of the postrevolutionary state. Although construction of Ciudad Universitaria (CU), or University City, would not begin until 1950 due to political upheaval and university-state conflicts, this article examines unbuilt plans and sketches of the project that circulated in the interim decades to trace the urban planning models that shaped it, including other Ibero-American ciudades universitarias , Beaux-Arts architecture, and the Garden City Movement. Despite state rhetoric insisting that the project reflect a Mexican national character, this article shows that early plans drafted between 1928 and 1942 primarily reflected international models because the aesthetics of Mexican revolutionary nationalism were still in development. Although the early plans were never realized, they served as crucial antecedents against which planners eventually imagined a Ciudad Universitaria imbued with Mexicanidad .

The spatial segregation of populations is a common theme in assessing the assimilation of an ethnic minority. The Russian minority in nineteenth-century Finland is an interesting case, in part because Russians were a minority in Finland but a majority in the whole empire, and in part because the minority contained a range of social strata. The 1880-1917 study period was chosen because of the political relevance of the issue at this time. The evolution of spatial segregation in Vyborg is studied using accurate tax documents geolocated using contemporaneous cadastral maps. Segregation decreased from 1880 to 1900 and increased from 1900 to 1917. The results suggest changes in the built environment played a role in the change of spatial segregation. The intermarriage rate between Russians and other groups also decreased during the period. It is likely that increasing segregation was related to the political tensions between Finland and Russia.

The drainage infrastructure of Kolkata is more than 160 years old at present. Its establishment was a project of European modernity to make the town habitable and serve as an economic enterprise. In what follows, I trace its inception since the nineteenth century as a spectacle that continues to survive to this day. I employ Benjamin’s idea of spectacle to explore the infrastructural polity of the city’s chthonic network. By contextualizing the wish image and dream image notions of the infrastructure, the study maps Calcutta’s drainage infrastructure in the broader discourse of modernity beyond its Enlightenment project. Its phantasmagoric character emerged out of social forces that shaped governmental politics, epistemological entanglements and became a site of asserting right and citizenship. I analyze its nature as an unstable spectacle through notions of governmentality, materiality, and resistance in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century by referring to archives. Through an ethnography of the archives, the essay brings to fore the social, politico-legal narratives that make the drainage infrastructure of Calcutta one of the oldest and most turbulent underground infrastructures in India’s historical encounter with modernity. By reading the past into the present, I argue that the infrastructure of drainage in Kolkata, today, is a spectacle still fulfilling a project of modernity.

The Black Metropolis existed at least since the Middle Ages, and through the Middle Passage shaped Black cities in the Americas from Salvador and Havana, to Miami and New York. It a place, a space and a state of mind animated by Black life, Black culture and Black history. As a place, its architecture and architects, shape and are shaped by built environments, creating a refuge that is more than “a city within a city.” As a space, the Black Metropolis is marked by class, gender, sexuality, work and time. It holds contested meanings, reflecting those who make it and how they navigate it. As a state of mind, the Black City is world building and placemaking evidenced in literature, art, culture, virtual spaces and being – in Blackness itself. The so-called “reckoning” of 2020 is at root, Black world making, a mass Blackening that shaped cities globally. If only fleetingly. The Black Metropolis, and Black scholarship about it, is oriented to a future that foregrounds Black thought and Black thinkers; demands accountability; and both is and about Black worldmaking. Black queer urbanism and Black memory work calls for scholarship rooted in Black knowledge production, in healing, reckoning, helping, restoring, honoring Black life.

Recent scholarship illuminates the many ways that Black people have shaped the built environment of American cities, while also double taxing their labor to build institutional infrastructure to serve their own class and racially segregated communities. Yet, the notion of a “Black City” is the subject of significant debate, partly because people of African descent have never fully controlled the cities in which they lived, worked, and helped to create from the trans-Atlantic slave trade through present times. Hence, in addition to the injustice of land dispossession, enslaved labor, and discriminatory low-wage free labor, this special forum provides an opportunity for scholars, students, and the broader public to consider the vibrant city-building activities of Black people as a vital part of the case for reparatory justice and reparations.

By adopting Western historiographical methods, Orientalists applied a linear system of periodization to the study of Islamic architecture and urbanism. This approach segmented Islamic history according to ruling dynasties (Rashidun Caliphate, Umayyad, Abbasid, and so forth) rendering it fragmented and disjointed, despite its coherence within the broader unifying framework of Islam. Emphasizing the physical architectural end products over the underlying mechanisms that shaped them, each dynastic period was associated with a distinct architectural style. Yet, does this mode of periodization align with the actual history of Islamic architecture? This paper seeks to move beyond the Orientalist approach of dynastic-based periodization by proposing an alternative framework grounded in the actual mechanisms of built environment production across Islamic history. It examines how transformations in political power, jurisprudence, and knowledge intersected to shape built environments across Islamic history. The paper adopts Ibn Khaldun’s perspective on political modes and the cyclical rise and fall of states as its theoretical framework. It argues that the transition toward political royal modes and the emergence of rational political practices progressively shifted the mechanisms of built environment production from ones rooted in Sharīʿa rights-based mechanisms to those driven by political power and rationalized statecraft. This shift gave rise to authoritarian built environments. As the dominant discourse remains centered on these politicized built environments, the paper reveals the misconceptions embedded in the prevailing periodization framework, ultimately challenging the validity of its orientalist bases.