New department

Architecture.

Buildings, cities and the politics of space: who gets to build, who has to move, and what the skyline says about power. First essays now publishing.

Housing

The Right to Remain

Council estates, managed decline, and the art of staying put when the masterplan says you should go.

In commission from the editorial team

photo: council estate, east london
(to commission)

The word the developers use is ‘decant’. Residents are decanted, as if a building were a bottle and the people in it something to be poured out and, in principle, poured back. In practice the pouring goes one way. This essay follows one estate through consultation, ballot and hoarding, and asks what a right to the city means when the city is a spreadsheet.

Publishing soon

The Zodiac Overhead a crossover with the department upstairs

Read in The Zodiac →

Grand Central’s Backwards Sky

Paul Helleu’s 1913 ceiling paints the zodiac in reverse across the concourse. The official story: this is the sky as seen from above, by someone who is not us. The likelier story involves a working drawing, face down.

Iconography · Forthcoming

Adjacent Reading

space and power, elsewhere in the magazine

Back to the front page →

Self & Society

The Changing Cultural Paradigm

Ancoats, once Manchester’s industrial heartland, is now a test case for urban renewal where cultural planning, artist-led change, and gentrification collide.

Daisy Kidd

Politics

‘no Justice, no Peace’ in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy

Benjamin Eli Levine traces 'no justice, no peace' from Rodney King to Mike Brown through bell hooks' white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

Benjamin Eli Levine

Arts

From the Depths of a Melting Pot into the Circles of a Neoliberal Inferno: Part I

Benjamin Eli Levine maps how neoliberal ideology and identity politics atomise us into cells of a panopticon while claiming to set us free.

Benjamin Eli Levine