I recently attended the annual American Association of Geographers (AAG) in San Francisco. It’s primarily an academic conference, but there are practitioners here and there. I gave a version of the talk I did at the Digital Geography conference in Lisbon in a session on political geography.

AAG started in 1904 as the Association of American Geographers, and as a former AAG treasurer commented in one session, it was mostly attended by white males up and through to the 1990s. In 2016 the name changed to American Association of Geographers “in an effort to re-think our systems of representation to acknowledge our growing internationalism.” I can report that every session I attended was diversely represented.

Attending a geography conference amidst geopolitical upheaval was enlightening. Global disruptions stem from various geographical disciplines, such as fossil fuel physical geography, state power political geography, shifting economic geographies, and GIScience quantifying, measuring, and predicting events, especially with an insurgent AI.

I thought I’d offer my takeaways from the many papers session I attended over the course of six days!

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THE STRUCTURE OF CONJUNCTURE

The first adjustment required at an academic conference is to the language. Territoriality is a term I heard a lot down there but doesn’t exactly pop up in conversation back home. There’s a kind of in-group signaling that comes with the use of these terms. It’s almost as aesthetic as it is useful. I don’t think it’s pure posturing because specialized vocabulary can indeed improve precision, reduce ambiguity, and allow efficient communication among experts. Sometimes these words do seep into everyday use. I used to think the word discourse sounded kind of academic but then I heard Alyssa Liu use it in multiple interviews!

Conjuncture is another word I heard a lot. It’s not a word yet used in everyday language but was widely used there…and for good reason. It means a critical combination of events or circumstances. This term represented what I sensed was an overall impatience with describing something that never quite reaches explanation.

But these are some that tried tried to reach like disorder, fragmentation, transition, platformization, crisis, and uneven development. But across several sessions I attended, the pressing question was what, exactly, is driving these changes, through what mechanisms, and at what scales?

That mood could be found in a session called “Explaining Capitalism in Motion.” The organizers pushed back against a habit that has become familiar across the humanities and social sciences of multiplying terms, like perhaps conjuncture, without always clarifying the material dynamics beneath them.

Their counterproposal was to start with capitalism’s internal drivers like competition, profitability, crisis management, state intervention, labor reorganization, and the fight over ownership and control amidst global green energy transitions. In their framing, the task is not to name ever more varieties of capitalism, but to clarify the one we actually inhabit. That struck me as a useful correction. Rhetoric may scratch an intellectual itch, but attempts at explanation tells us where power sits and how it moves.

I found a similar thread organized by Pete Kedron at UCSB’s Center for Spatial Science. His session, “Causal Analysis in Geography,” aimed to make a case for causal description and explanation as foundational to geography inquiry. Geographers must understand underlying mechanisms to explain spatial patterns and persist. These mechanisms should support intervention, not just interpretation. The goal should be better explanations that produce actionable knowledge and outcomes to spatial problems, not methodological purism.

That concern expanded to globalization and geopolitics in a session titled “Shifting Globalization?” This examined today’s world economy as a messy condition of disrupted connectivity, not as a neatly integrated whole or a clean story of “deglobalization.” Global networks of trade, investment, talent, and knowledge are strained by inequality, tariffs, geopolitical tension, climate pressures, and pandemic aftershocks. The session emphasized the need for both large datasets to identify broad shifts in flows and networks, and detailed local narratives to understand how firms, communities, and regions experience disruptions.

This theme also emerged in a session titled “Hegemony and War.” Instead of envisioning a seamless transition from US dominance to Chinese dominance, as we imagine the transition from Great Britain’s dominance to US dominance, the session highlighted instability and shallow regional and corporate alignments. One paper used another popular academic term these days, interregnum, to describe our current situation — a period in between. I imagine it as a slack-tide.

Another paper described the erosion of long-standing US-centered trade relations without a corresponding consolidation around China. Instead, many states practice polyalignment, maintaining ties with both China and others. This image is useful for the present. We’re accustomed to orderly succession, but we’re now in the midst of overlapping dependencies in a globally fragmented system.

It was Adam Tooze who introduced polycrisis. But he also recently highlighted an example of polyalignment in the Cambodian economy. In Cambodia consumer goods are priced in US dollar, but the payment infrastructure is Bakong, a blockchain run by the National Bank of Cambodia and co‑developed with Soramitsu, a Japanese/Swiss fintech firm. To pay, you pull out your phone and use the Chinese Alipay+ app that utilizes and optimizes cross-border QR links. The relationship on the merchant side is handled through ABA Bank which is a Cambodian company owned by a Canadian parent company. Take the US dollar out of this scenario and the US is absent.

Together, these sessions seemed to be looking at not just what is changing, but why this way. They called for deeper scrutiny of which infrastructures, institutions, and incentives, and with what uneven spatial effects. My admittedly biased sampling suggested that the strongest work was not shrinking from complexity but striving to specify it.

SHAPES OF SUBJUGATION

Many of the most interesting sessions I attended didn’t just focus on how things get accumulated, who’s in charge, or how things are built. They wanted to show how those things are actually lived, why people believe in them, how they become normal, and how people resist them. In the end, they gave us a better understanding of power as something that’s built into places, property rights, infrastructure, emergency talk, and the ways in which whole groups of people are made to follow certain rules.

That was especially clear in “Spaces, patterns, and path dependencies of colonial capitalist development.” It insisted that capitalist landscapes are layered spatial records of racialization, territorial dislocation, and domination, not just economic outcomes. The built environment is one of the means through which capital accumulation has been organized and reproduced, through plantations, ports, rail, pipelines, grids, jurisdiction, and property. Colonial and racial orders persist in the infrastructural and legal imprints that shape who benefits, who is exposed, and whose claims count, even when new development models arrive.

“Beyond the State: Property, Territory, and Relational Geographies” pushed that critique further by questioning some of geography’s own inherited vocabulary. Territory is often assumed to belong to the language of sovereignty, bounded control, and state space. But this session opened territory back up by asking what it looks like when understood through Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, and other relational geographies that exceed liberal property regimes and state recognition. That is a meaningful shift. It moves critique beyond saying existing arrangements are unjust and toward asking whether some of the conceptual tools used to describe land, governance, and belonging are themselves part of the problem.

The Geographers for Justice in Palestine session shifted the discussion from abstract institutional complicity to the destruction of knowledge production conditions. The panel’s force came from its call for boycott and divestment within the AAG, emphasizing the demand against the systematic dismantling of Palestinian academic life. Organizers described the destruction of Gaza’s universities, the killing and displacement of teachers and students, and the obliteration of educational infrastructure, including whole geography departments, as what the UN has termed “scholasticide.”

This is not confined to Gaza; in the West Bank, military infrastructures, arrests, and interruptions make attending classes difficult, yet universities remain spaces of hope and persistence. The session linked these conditions to retribution faced by scholars abroad, reminding attendees that academic freedom is not protected by relocation to North American institutions. The panel widened the critique beyond unjust land arrangements to include attacks on institutions, movements, and intellectual practices that enable people to know and contest those arrangements.

Palestinian-American UC Berkeley scholar Hatem Bazian, a longtime analyst of Islamophobia, settler colonialism, and U.S.–Middle East politics, provided a broader historical and conceptual framework for discussions of colonialism, territory, and power in his plenary talk. He rejected the tragic “conflict” framing. He views Palestine as an ongoing settler-colonial project shaped by British imperialism, territorial transformations, and a political vocabulary that treats the colonized as the problem while preserving colonial structure.

Bazian emphasized that even the familiar “peace process” frame obscures reality by normalizing settler claims and depoliticizing indigenous dispossession. His framing pushed critique beyond moral outrage, asking what becomes visible when Palestine is named as a colonial formation that the geography discipline must describe honestly.

A complementary provocation from “Beyond Liberal Emergencies” explained how colonial violence is often managed politically and rhetorically. The session argued that “emergency” is a governing frame that authorizes exceptional measures, narrows political imagination, and sorts whose suffering counts as urgent. Liberal governance relies on legal, technical, and administrative means to identify and contain crisis, but current events reflect this mutation. In a more authoritarian-leaning environment, emergency language is used by competing projects to generate fear and justify intervention in hopes of securing legitimacy.

These sessions suggested that geography’s critique is strongest when it does two things at once: it shows how domination is sedimented in space, and it spots the seeds of different spatial futures already being sown.

PATHS TO POSSIBILITY

If geography is good at explaining structural problems and critiquing the power behind them, where, exactly, are the openings for intervention? There were definitely a lot of papers calling for new ways to imagine future possibilities — a term commonly used is imaginaries. These kinds of sessions and papers help summon a kind of optimism in these bewildering times. After all, while utopias may not be attainable, steps toward them are. But if there’s one thing we’re learning, faith in more and better data, or even policy, won’t save us. We need to find actual openings for positive change.

One session on anticipatory AI governance in public administrations focused on making public institutions more capable rather than just efficient. It aimed for foresight, digital inclusion, territorial innovation, public value, and data sovereignty, rather than automation for automation’s sake. This contrasts with the usual story of governments lagging behind technology and reacting to damage. Public institutions, especially regional and local ones, might build capacity to govern AI before platform logics become entrenched. These efforts may not address power asymmetries, but suggest that administration can still be a site of democratic invention.

One such opening came from the Australian geographer Sarah Barns and her work at Civic Interplay. She frames a shift from platform urbanism to civic AI capabilities. National or regional AI sovereignty can become an elite project, measured by compute, data centers, and industrial policy. Civic AI asks what digital citizenship, public infrastructure, and collective accountability are built into these systems and for whom. In Barns’s version, that question includes Indigenous sovereignty, planetary limits, and digital system materialities. It repositions the public as not just a user base and citizenship as not just access.

Another opening came from less overtly political but consequential sessions. I attended one session organized by Geoff Boeing at USC. Geoff built and maintains a street science Python package leveraging OpenStreetMap I used for my capstone: OSMnx. His work focuses on urban spatial analytics for benchmarking health and sustainability goals using open, comparable neighborhood-scale indicators. Metrics are never neutral, but many cities lack the capacity to measure if their built environments align with their stated goals.

Geoff’s session paired measurement with policy analysis, emphasizing how making frameworks open for under-resourced places can offer hope. Better tools tied to public goals can widen participation rather than concentrating expertise to planners, who are often guided by leaders easily swayed by powerful actors, especially in resource-strapped communities.

Yet another opening came from an unexpected inquiry organized by the Director of the Spatial Conservation and Landscape Ecology (SCALE) Lab at UCSB, Amy Frazier — also part of the Center for Spatial Science. She organized a conservation session featuring a paper she co-authored with a student on 3D landscape connectivity. Despite abundant citizen data scientists documenting squirrel behavior in Central Park, analysis has only considered 2D spatial behavior. This paper highlighted geography’s role in refining our perception of complex environments, making interventions more ecologically appropriate. Since species move in three dimensions, our models should too. This seemingly obvious yet challenging concept is exemplified by the few examples that incorporate 3D spatial data. Amy’s destined to change that.

Given that so many of us gathered under the shadow of war, dispossession, and attempted genocide, I left with a more grounded sense of possibility than I expected. Not optimism in any easy sense, and certainly not comfort. The most meaningful work I encountered did not retreat into techno-solutionism, nor did it stop at critique, however necessary critique remains. It asked harder things of geography and of geographers. It tried to build concepts, institutions, and methods sturdy enough to act in a damaged world without mistaking that world for all that is possible.

In that setting, even modest openings felt consequential. They suggested that scholarship can still help protect what is being destroyed, clarify what power works to conceal, and keep alive forms of public reasoning and collective action that refuse to accept the present order as inevitable. That, to me, was the conference’s most poignant lesson. It’s not that a better world is close at hand, but that amid inequities, injustices, ruin, repression, and organized forgetting, there are still people doing the patient work of making new possibilities thinkable.

This one attempts to balance the privilege of cold analytical escapism with the gruesome rehumanization of past, present, and future atrocities. I end up trying to make sense of the political psychology that leads to such jubilant violence. While it can be understood, its the very intelligibility that makes it so intolerable.

PRESSURE, POWER, IMPUNITY

In 1965, as my umbilical cord was being severed in Iowa, U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were cutting the ears off innocent dead Vietnamese children. And their parents. The shriveling cartilage served as “proof” they were killed. They’d string them into necklaces or hoard them in “ear bags” as trophies. Their commanders demanded a tally. This morbid ritual, born from the military’s obsession with numeric “success” metrics amid “search and destroy” orders, exposed not just individual moral depravity but a systemic disregard for human life.

Such barbarity serves as just another example of America’s enduring pattern of defying Geneva Conventions on civilian protections, proportionality, and prohibited weapons. These atrocities are wrapped in bureaucratic euphemisms like “collateral damage”; all to evade accountability and perpetuate unchecked imperial violence.

When barbarity returned like a boomerang to hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, the term “collateral damage” was absent. But “search and destroy” came back. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force authorizes the president

“to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”1

These expanded interpretations of and the idea of a “continuing, imminent threat” led to doctrines that allowed drones and bombs to be used as sanctioned forms of force across borders.2 Targeted killings are domestic justifications that override attempts at global legal constraints.

As my own kids were being born in 2004, U.S. drones were flying across the skies over Afghanistan, Yemen, and beyond, vaporizing wedding parties, schools, and outdoor markets, shredding innocent men, women, and children into mangled flesh mixed with bone fragments. These ‘Hellfire missiles’ were sold to the public as possessing surgical precision. These “precision” killings, justified as “targeted” under the euphemism of “signature strikes,” leave behind charred craters, orphaned survivors screaming amid the rubble, and “double taps” that slaughter first responders rushing to the scene. And here again the body-count calculus of modern warfare dehumanizes the dead as mere “collateral” in an endless cycle of remote-control atrocity.

However, unlike in Vietnam, groups controlling casualty numbers and combatant definitions created incentives to undercount civilian deaths to bolster the claims of legal precision. Because such reasoning was long classified, external scrutiny relied on leaks and sporadic court‑ordered disclosures.3

Obama deployed 10 times more drones than Bush. They all occurred in legal grey zones. They were justified through broad claims of self‑defense against “imminent threats” from non‑state actors operating in countries not formally at war with the United States. Legal assessments have found that many attacks did not meet the threshold of an “armed conflict” — meaning strikes there should have been constrained by international human‑rights law — thus violating requirements of necessity, last resort, and proportionality.4

Recent incidents, like the Iranian Khamenei killing, further expose gaps between law and practice. In the case of the 2020 killing of Iranian General Soleimani, scholars argue that the official rationale failed to meet the UN Charter’s Article 51 requirement of an actual armed attack.5 Since then, the U.S. and its allies have instead advanced an even more squishy view of “imminence” to justify anticipatory defense against imagined potential threats. Critics say these interpretations transform what was intended to be a narrow exception into a license for routine, preemptive killing.6

The U.S. government is seemingly unequaled in its interpretive flexibility of law. Rather than submitting to adjudication, they practice “norm‑shaping” noncompliance. This involves acting first, then using rhetoric and diplomatic influence to normalize or justify those actions. Research on the UN Security Council demonstrates how veto rights, opaque bargaining, and diluted resolutions enable permanent members to escape condemnation while weaker states are disciplined.7 In effect, international law becomes a language powerful states can manage, not a rulebook to obey.

U.S. operations in Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and elsewhere are often positioned as short-term “strikes” meant to sustain “rules-based order.” But the U.S. doesn’t have to behave orderly. Moreover, these actions show a longstanding system where the law on force sustains hegemony. Though the justifications shift — from humanitarian intervention in Kosovo and WMD prevention in Iraq to “responsibility to protect” in Libya or preemption against terrorists or nuclear programs in Iran — the underlying logic is the same. You can see why the U.S. systemically refuses to ratify the 1998 Rome Statute.

This treaty established the International Criminal Court (ICC) and grants it jurisdiction over the most serious international crimes — genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression — committed by nationals of states parties or on their territory. It was created after ad hoc tribunals like as those in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda to ensure accountability. But by remaining outside the Rome Statute (while accepting some of its principles in domestic law), the United States — along with Israel, Russia, and Sudan — avoids the ICC’s adjudicative authority over its own personnel and operations. The U.S. (and three other states) has essentially insulated its use of force from external legal accountability.

This suggests a deeper political culture where U.S. force is assumed to be protective and exceptional. When national security conflicts with legal limits, they are negotiable, and most Americans accept this as normal.

The stability of these justifications over time suggests a shared worldview and America’s place in it. It’s a settler-imperial, racialized imagination of place that makes some regions dangerous and disorderly, while viewing U.S. power as the necessary instrument for security and progress.

STRUCTURES OF SPATIAL SUPPRESSION

To get a better grasp of how legal gray areas become permanent features of the geopolitical landscape, we need to look beyond the law and explore the spatial imaginaries that come before it. The “lawless power” I describe is not merely a failure of international oversight; it is the modern expression of a settler-imperial logic that has long used the map as a weapon. This logic functions through what historian Patrick Wolfe termed a “logic of elimination”: a systemic drive to clear space for a dominant order by rendering the original inhabitants of that space invisible, irrelevant, or “out of place”.8

The bridge between the “body-count calculus” of Vietnam and the “Hellfire missiles” of today lies in the historical practice of declaring territory terra nullius — land belonging to no one. By portraying Indigenous lands as “empty” or “underused,” settler-colonial legal fictions justified removal and massacre as “regrettable but necessary” steps toward progress. This spatial erasure serves as the architectural blueprint for modern drone warfare. Just as 19th-century maps rendered Native peoples “spatially absent” to normalize dominion, modern military doctrines use “bureaucratic euphemisms” to turn vibrant communities into “trouble spots” and “problem-spaces” for management.

When a “signature strike” occurs, the target is not a legal subject but a “pattern of life”. This is the ultimate form of algorithmic governance, where the individual is erased by the data-point before the missile is even fired. By defining specific regions as inherently “disorderly,” the U.S. creates domestic justifications that override attempts at global legal constraints. In this framework, regions treated as a modern “frontier” — a zone where ordinary rules of necessity and proportionality are “negotiable”.9

This “geometry of dominion” is not exclusive to foreign policy; it is mirrored in the way U.S. power organizes its own domestic heartland. George Lipsitz’s concept of the “white spatial imaginary” explains how space is arranged to prioritize the exclusion and property rights of the affluent while subjecting communities of color to displacement and surveillance.10

We see this in the physical “concrete” of urban planning:

• Highway Infrastructure: Interstate routes were systematically redirected to demolish poor white, Black, and brown communities, ensuring affluent white residents could “get home faster”.

• Nuisance Abatement: In cities like Los Angeles, nuisance laws are used to “preemptively reclaim” areas through speculative policing and banishment, enacting a fantasy of dominion over racialized bodies.

• Racialized Sorting: The world is sorted into “secure cores” and “unruly peripheries,” a dynamic that scales from the “redlined” neighborhood to the “sanctioned zone” or “reservation”.

In both the urban grid and the global borderland, the goal is this: to produce order for some while underwriting “legally malleable violence” on “others”.11 The “collateral damage” of an Afghan, Palestinian, or Iranian village is the international equivalent of the “nuisance” of a demolished neighborhood. Both are viewed through an imperial lens that deems certain lives “disposable” for the sake of a broader, racialized security.12

This spatial sorting creates the infrastructure of impunity. When a region is mapped as a “zone of exception,” the violence committed there ceases to feel like a violation; it feels like “maintenance” of a “rules-based order”. This explains why the U.S. can “practice ‘norm-shaping’ noncompliance,” acting first and using diplomatic influence to “normalize” the act afterward.13

The settler-imperial imagination flattens distant worlds into “mappable, legally alienable parcels” of land management. Whether it is the “search and destroy” missions of the 1960s or the “precision” killings of the 2020s, the underlying logic is to secure the “place” of the empire, the “place” of the other must be erased.

Once the world is spatially divided into “ordered property” and “disorderly wards,” it becomes easy for the citizens of the empire to grow comfortable with the authoritarian’s embrace. Dispossessions become necessary to sustain a system where the “other” is already spatially and legally absent. Their suffering barely registers as a tragedy. It’s just the cost of a “righteous” mission.

PROPHETS OF POLITICAL POWER

Spatial erasures don’t just reorganize the land; they reorganize the human psyche. When a society “sees like an empire,” it adopts a specific cognitive map that determines who belongs and whose lives are disposable. This “architecture of absence” is maintained by a set of psychological formations that transform the fear of a “disorderly” world into a mandate for righteous violence.

Political psychology shows how when people experience the world as dangerous and uncertain, they become more attracted to strong leaders, rigid hierarchies, and harsh treatment of “threatening” others. This cluster of attitudes is the essence of authoritarianism. It is not just a set of ideas but a way of managing fear and uncertainty.14

Authoritarianism is especially potent when it fuses with nationalism and religion. Then it becomes “messianic authoritarianism”: the sense that “our” nation or faith community has a special mission in history, is under constant attack, and must therefore be defended at all costs, even by breaking ordinary rules. In this mindset, law and institutions are not neutral constraints; they are either tools for the mission or obstacles to be overridden.

Research on authoritarianism finds a common psychological “core” across left and right: a desire for enforced conformity, punishment of deviants, and centralized control, particularly when people believe they live in a dangerous world.(14) When this core is wrapped in national or religious stories of chosen-ness and persecution, it becomes a powerful justification for violence and impunity. Leaders who promise order, purity, and redemption can present extreme measures as necessary acts of protection.

Over time it builds a collective narcissism: the belief that “our” group is great but unfairly unrecognized and disrespected by others. This is different from healthy hometown pride. It is fragile, defensive, and quick to see insults everywhere. Studies show that collective narcissism predicts hostility toward out‑groups, support for aggressive policies, conspiratorial thinking, and backing for populist and authoritarian leaders.15 People who feel their group’s greatness is denied are more willing to tolerate or endorse harm, so long as it is framed as restoring respect and status.

In religious Zionism, White Christian nationalism, and Khomeinist Shi‘ism, these dynamics are visible through different meanings. Religious Zionist currents interpret control of the land as a non‑negotiable step in a divine redemption process, making territorial compromise feel like a betrayal of a given god’s plan, not just a political choice.16 Christian Zionist and White Christian nationalist discourses in the United States have portrayed the nation as founded by a Christian god, under siege by secular and racial “others,” and uniquely tasked with defending Israel and Christian civilization. Leaders like Donald Trump have been cast as “instruments of god” because of specific policies (for example, on Israel or Iran), even when their personal conduct contradicts ordinary religious standards. The mission outweighs the man.17 Khomeini’s project in 1979 Iran framed the revolution as rescuing Islam from corruption at home and humiliation abroad, casting the new state as the vanguard of an oppressed community engaged in permanent struggle. Even as his regime oppressed…and still does.(16)

Across these cases, the same psychological building blocks appear:

A world narrated as dangerous and full of enemies.

A group identity that is both superior and victimized (“we are great, but unrecognized and under attack”).

A leader who claims to embody the group and its destiny.

A willingness to override normal legal and moral limits in the name of survival and redemption.

Political psychology also clarifies how these movements treat opponents. When group identity becomes sacred and narcissistic, critics inside the group are labeled traitors, and external critics are portrayed as existential threats. Research shows that collective narcissism and authoritarianism are linked to dehumanization of out‑groups and even justification of political violence; seeing others as less than fully human makes it easier to ignore or excuse their suffering.(15) This helps sustain the kinds of selective empathy and invisible harms I’ve described. Some deaths are tragedies, others are regrettable but necessary, and others barely register at all.

These patterns are not confined to a few extremists. Everyday citizens can be drawn in because messianic authoritarianism offers psychological rewards. In times of rapid change, economic insecurity, or cultural displacement, people often experience self‑uncertainty: a shaky sense of who they are and where they belong. Joining a tightly defined, morally exalted group — with clear enemies and a clear mission — can resolve that uncertainty. Research on uncertainty and extremism shows that people in this state are especially attracted to groups and leaders that provide simple, absolutist answers and sharply draw the line between “us” and “them”.(14) Messianic narratives deliver exactly that.

Once in place, these psychological formations feed directly into infrastructures of impunity. If one believes the nation is uniquely chosen yet unfairly treated, international law and human rights norms can be reimagined as biased constraints imposed by hostile outsiders, rather than shared rules. If one experiences politics as a siege, then surveillance, occupation, or lethal force are not lawless; they are “defensive” acts that outsiders cannot judge. Authoritarian dispositions, collective narcissism, and uncertainty‑driven group identification supply the emotional energy that keeps unequal legal arrangements and racialized security practices politically acceptable.

We’re living in a world now where legal impunity and structural violence are not sustained only by special interests and institutions. They are also held up by recurring psychological patterns rooted in fear of danger, longing for certainty, wounded pride, and the seductions of belonging to a “chosen” community. Messianic authoritarian projects in Israel, the United States, and Iran differ in theology and history, but they draw on similar psychological wells to make extraordinary violence feel not just permissible, but righteous.

Throughout history those claiming victory have found that while they may be able to occupy a territory, they cannot “win” against a people who remain connected to it. The presence of 575 Indigenous nations (and 1200 tribes and villages) with government-to-government relations with the U.S. is testimony. Topophilia is a heavy weight. Those killed aren’t coming back, but those who remain or have been displaced do. In the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, “No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.”

Watching all the transnational love at the Olympics has been inspiring. We’re all forced to think about nationalities, borders, ethnicities, and all the flavors of behavioral geography it entails. After all, these athletes are all there representing their so-called “homeland.” And in the case of Alysa Liu, her father’s escape from his. Between the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the fall of the Berlin wall, “homeland” took on new meaning for many immigrants. This all took me back to that time and the start of my own journey at Microsoft at the dawn of a new global reality.

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HOMELAND HATCHED HERE

With all the focus on Olympics and immigration recently, I’ve found myself reflecting on my days at Microsoft in the 90s. As the company was growing (really fast), teams were filling up with people recruited from around the world. There were new accents in meetings, new holidays to celebrate, and yummy new foods and funny new words being introduced. This thickening of transnational ties made Redmond feel as connected the rest of the world as the globalized software we were building. By 2000 users around the world could switch between over 60 languages in Windows and Office. In behavioral geography terms, working on the product and using the product made “here” feel more connected to “elsewhere.”

This influx of new talent was all enabled by the Immigration Act of 1990. Signed by George H. W. Bush, it increased and stabilized legal pathways for highly skilled immigrants. This continued with Clinton era decisions to expand H-1B visa allocations that fed the tech hiring boom. I took full advantage of this allotment recruiting and hiring interaction designers and user researchers from around the world.1

In the same decade the federal government expanded access to the United States, it also tightened security. Terrorism threats, especially after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, spooked everyone. Despite this threat, there was more domestic initiated terrorism than outside foreign attacks. The decade saw deadly incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 by radicalized by white supremacist anti-government terrorists, which killed 168 and injured hundreds, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history before 9/11.

A year later, the Atlanta Olympic bombing and related bombings by anti-government Christian extremists caused multiple deaths and injuries. Clinic bombings and shootings by anti-abortion extremists began in 1994 with the Brookline clinic shootings and continued through the 1998 Birmingham clinic bombing. These inspired more arsons, bombings, and shootings tied to white supremacist, anti-abortion, and other extreme ideologies.

Still, haven been shocked by Islamist extremists in 1993 (and growing Islamic jihadist plots outside the U.S.) the federal government adopted new security language centered on protecting the “homeland” from outside incursions. In 1998, Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 62, titled “Protection Against Unconventional Threats to the Homeland and Americans Overseas,” a serious counterterrorism document whose title quietly normalized the term homeland inside executive governance.

But there was at least one critical voice. Steven Simon, Clinton’s senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, didn’t think “Defense of the Homeland” belonged in a presidential directive.2

Simon’s retrospective argument is that “homeland” did more than name a policy, it brought a territorial logic of legitimacy that the American constitution had historically resisted. He recalls the phrase “Defense of the Homeland” felt “faintly illiberal, even un-American.” The United States historically grounded constitutional legitimacy in civic and legal abstractions (people, union, republic, human rights) rather than blood rights or rights to soil. Membership was to be mediated by institutions, employment, and law rather than ancestry.

“Homeland” serves as a powerful cue that suggests a mental model of ‘home’ and expands it to encompass a nation. This model is accompanied by a set of spatial inferences that evoke familiarity, appeal, and even an intuitive sense. However, it also creates a sense of a confined interior that can be breached by someone from outside.

This is rooted in place attachment that can be defined as an affective bond between people and places — an emotional tie that can anchor identity and responsibility. But attachment is not the same thing as ownership. Research on collective psychological ownership shows how groups can come to experience a territory as “ours.” This creates a sense of ownership that can be linked to a perceived determination right.

Here, the ingroup is entitled to decide what happens in that place while sometimes feeding a desire to exclude outsiders.3 When the word “homeland” was placed at the center of statecraft it primed public reasoning from attachment of place through care, stewardship, and shared fate toward property ownership through control, gatekeeping, and exclusion. It turns belonging into something closer to a property claim.

What makes the 1990s especially instructive from a geography perspective is that “access” itself was being administered through institutions that are intensely spatial: consulates, ports of entry, employer locations, housing markets, and the micro-geographies of office life. The H-1B expansions was not simply generosity, but a form of managed throughput in a system designed to meet labor demand. And it was paired with political assurances about enforcement and domestic worker protections.

Mid-decade legal reforms strengthened enforcement by authorities in significant ways. Mechanisms for faster removals and stricter interior enforcement reinforced the idea that the state could act more decisively within the national space.4 The federal government found ways to expand legal channels that served economic objectives while also building a governance style increasingly comfortable with interior control. “Homeland” helped supply the conceptual bridge that made that socioeconomic coexistence feel coherent.

It continues to encourage a politics of boundary maintenance that determines who counts as inside, what kinds of movement are legible as normal, and which bodies are perpetually “out of place.” If the defended object is a republic, the default language justification is legal and civic. If the defended object is a homeland, the language jurisdiction becomes territorial and affective. That shift changes what restrictions, surveillance practices, and membership tests become thinkable and tolerable over time.

HOMELAND’S HOHFELDIAN HARNESS

If “homeland” structures a place of belonging, then “rights” are the legal grammar that tells us what may be done in that place. The trouble is that “rights” are often treated as moral abstract objects floating above context. Legally, they are structured relations among people, institutions, and things. But “rights” can take on a variety of meanings.

Wesley Hohfeld, the Yale law professor who pioneered analytical jurisprudence in the early 20th century, argued that many legal disputes persist because the word “right” is used ambiguously.

He distinguished four basic “incidents” for rights: claim, privilege (liberty), power, and immunity. Each is paired with a position correlating to another party: duty, no-claim (no-right), liability, and disability. When the police pull you over for speeding you hold a privilege to drive at or below the speed limit (say, 40 mph). The state has no-right to demand you stop for going exactly 40 mph. But if you’re clocked at 50 mph, the officer enforces your no-right to exceed the limit which correlates to the state’s claim-right. You have a duty to comply by pulling over. If the officer then has power to issue a ticket, you face a liability to have your driving privilege altered (e.g., fined). But you also enjoy an immunity from arbitrary arrest without probable cause.

Let’s apply that to “homeland” security.

If a politician says we must “defend the homeland,” it can mean at least four different things legally:

1. Claim-Rights: Citizens can demand that the government protect them (e.g., from attacks). Officials have the duty to act — think TSA screening or border patrol.​

2. Privileges: Federal Agents get freedoms to act without legal blocks, such as stopping and questioning people in so-called high-risk zones, while bystanders have no-right to interfere.​

3. Powers: Federal Agencies hold authority to change your legal status. For example, they can label you a watchlist risk (e.g., you become a liability). This can then lead to loss of liberties like travel bans, detentions, or asset freezes.​

4. Immunities: Federal Officials or programs shield themselves from lawsuits (via qualified immunity or classified data rules), effectively blocking citizens’ ability to sue.

Forget whether these are legitimate or illegitimate, Hohfeld’s point is they are different forms of rights — and each has distinct costs. Once “homeland” is the object, the system tends to grow powers and privileges (capacity for overt or covert operations), and to seek immunities (resistance to challenge), often at the expense of others’ claim-rights and liberties.

Rights are not only relational, but they are also often spatially conditional. The same person can move through zones of legality experiencing different practical rights. Consider border checkpoints, airports, perimeters of government buildings, protest cites, or regions declared “emergency” zones. Government institutions operationalize these spaces as “behavioral geographies” which determines who gets stopped, where scrutiny concentrates, and which movements count as suspicious.

The state looks past the abstract bearer of unalienable liberties and due process to see only a physical entity whose movements through space dissolve their Constitutional immunities into a series of observable, trackable traces. Those traces become inputs to enforcement. This is what makes surveillance so powerful. “Homeland” governance is especially trace-hungry because it imagines safety as a property of space that must be continuously maintained.

But these traces are behavioral cues and human behavior is never neutral. They are interpreted through normalized cultural and institutional schemas about who “belongs” in which places. Place attachment and territorial belonging can become gatekeeping mechanisms. Empirical work on homeland/place attachment links it to identity processes and self-categorization.5 Related work suggests that collective psychological ownership — “this place is ours” — can predict exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants and outsiders.6 In legal terms, those social attitudes can translate into pressure to expand state powers and narrow outsiders’ claim-rights.

A vocabulary rooted in a ‘republic’ tends to emphasize rights as universal claims against the state. This is where we get due process, equal protection, and rights to speech and assembly. A homeland vocabulary tends to emphasize rights as statused permissions tied to membership and territory. Here we find rights of citizens, rights at the border, rights in “emergencies”, and rights conditioned on “lawful presence.” The shift makes some restrictions feel like a kind of protecting of the home. Hence the unaffable phrase, “Get off my lawn.”

HOMELAND HIERARCHIES HUMBLED

If the “homeland” is framed as a place-of-belonging and rights are the grammar of that place, then the current crisis of American democracy boils down to a dispute over the nature of equality. This tension is best understood through the long-standing constitutional debate between anticlassification and antisubordination, which dates back to the Reconstruction era.7

Anticlassification, often called the “colorblind” or “status-blind” approach, holds that the state’s duty is simply to avoid explicit categories in its laws. Antisubordination, by contrast, insists that the law must actively dismantle structured group hierarchies and the “caste-like” systems they produce. When the state embraces a “homeland” logic, it leans heavily on anticlassification to mask a deeper reality of spatial subordination.

In what we might call the “Theater of Defense,” agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) increasingly rely on anticlassification principles to justify aggressive interior crackdowns. They frame enforcement as a territorial necessity by protecting the sanctity of the soil itself. A workplace raid or roving patrol, in this view, does not target any specific group. Instead, it simply maintains the “integrity” of the homeland. This reflects what law professor Bradley Areheart and others have described as the “anticlassification turn,” where formal attempts to embody equality end up legitimizing structural inequality.8

Put differently, the state exercises a Hohfeldian Power to alter individuals’ legal status based on their geographic location or “lawful presence.” At the same time, it shields itself from legal challenge by insisting that the law applies equally to everyone who is “out of place.” This claim of territorial neutrality is a dangerous legal fiction. As scholars Solon Barocas and Andrew Selbst have shown in their work on algorithmic systems, attempts at neutral criteria often replicate entrenched biases.9

Triggers like “proximity to a border” or “behavioral traces” in a transit hub do not produce blind justice. They enable targeted scrutiny and the erosion of immunity for those whose identities fail to match the “belonging” model of the “homeland.” The state circumvents its Hohfeldian Disability, avoiding the creation of second-class statuses, by pretending to manage space rather than discriminate against persons.

This shift from a civic Republic to a territorial “homeland” is the primary driver of democratic backsliding. Political scientist Jacob Grumbach captured this dynamic in his 2022 paper, Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding.10 Analyzing 51 indicators of electoral democracy across U.S. states from 2000 to 2018, Grumbach developed the State Democracy Index. His findings reveal how American federalism has morphed from “laboratories of democracy” into sites of subnational authoritarianism.

States with low scores on the index — often under unified Republican control — have pioneered police powers that insulate partisan dominance. We see this in the rise of state-level immigration enforcement units, the criminalization of movement for marginalized groups, and the expansion of a “right to exclude.”

These states are not just enforcing the law. They are forging what Yale legal scholar Owen Fiss would recognize as a new caste system.11 By fixating on “defending” state soil against “infiltrators,” legislatures dismantle the public rights of the Reconstruction era — the right to participate in community life without indignity. Today’s backsliding policies transform the nation’s interior into a permanent enforcement zone. They reject the Enlightenment ideals of America, rooted in beliefs like liberty, equality, democracy, individual rights, and the rule of law.

To fully understand Constitutional history, we best acknowledge that America’s universalist creedal definition wasn’t solely European. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything shows how Enlightenment values of liberty and equality arose from intellectual exchanges with Indigenous North American thinkers.12 Kandiaronk, a Huron statesman, traveled to Europe in the late 17th century and debated French aristocrats. His critiques were published and circulated widely among European intellectuals, including Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau.

Graeber and Wengrow point out that before the widely popular publication of these dialogues in 1703, the concept of "Equality" as a primary political value was almost entirely absent from European philosophy. By the time Rousseau wrote his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men in 1754, it was the central question of the age.

Kandiaronk criticized European society’s subservience to kings and obsession with property. He contrasted it with the consensual governance and individual agency of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy embodied in their Great Law of Peace — a political order prioritizing the public right to exist without state-sanctioned indignity.

The writers of the U.S. Constitution codified a Republic of “unalienable rights,” synthesizing Indigenous/European-inspired liberty with Hohfeldian Disabilities that legally restrained the state from territorial monarchy. Backsliding erases this profound philosophical endeavor. Reclaiming the Republic means honoring the Indigenous critique that a nation’s legitimacy rests on its people’s freedom, not its fences.

We seem to be moving from governance by the governed to protecting an ingroup. In Hohfeldian terms, the state expands its privileges while shrinking the claim-rights of the vulnerable to move and exist safely. This leads to “spatial subordination,” managed through adiaphorization — a concept from social theorist Zygmunt Bauman’s 1989 Modernity and the Holocaust.

Bauman, a Polish-Jewish survivor who escaped the Nazis’ grip on his early life, drew “adiaphora” from the Greek for matters outside moral evaluation. Modern bureaucracies make horrific actions morally neutral by framing them as technical duties, enabling atrocities like the Holocaust without personal ethical torment.

As territorial belonging takes precedence, non-belongers are excluded from moral and legal obligations. They become “non-spaces” or “human waste” in the eyes of ICE and DHS. This betrays antisubordination, the “core and conscience” of America’s civil rights tradition, as Yale constitutional scholars Jack Balkin and Reva Siegel called it.13 A democracy can’t endure if it permanently relegates any group to legal impossibility.

In the “homeland”, immigrants may live, work, and raise families for decades, yet remain mere “traces” to expunge. Weaponized place attachment turns affective bonds into property claims. This empowers the state to “cleanse” those deemed to be “out of place.” Rights become statused permissions, not universal ideals. If immunity from search depends on territorial status, the Republic of laws has yielded to a Heimat — a term the Nazis’ usurped for their blood-and-soil homeland…that they then bloodied and soiled.

Reversing this demands confronting the linguistic and legal architecture that rendered it conceivable. It’s time to rethink the “homeland” frame and its anticlassification crutch. A truer and fairer Republic would commit to antisubordination and the state would be disabled from wielding space for hierarchy. A person’s immunity from arbitrary power should be closer to an inalienable right to be “secure in one’s person” that holds firm beyond checkpoints or workplace doors…or your front door.

Steven Simon was right to feel uneasy with Clinton’s wording. “Homeland” planted a seed that sprouted into hedgerows of exceptional powers and curtailed liberties. Are we going to cling to a “homeland” secured by fear and exclusion, forever unstable, or finally become a Republic revered for securing universal law and rights? As long as our rights remain geographically conditional, we all dwell in liability. Reclaiming the Republic, and our freedoms within it, may require transforming the Constitution from a Hohfeldian map of perimeters into a boundless plane of human dignity it aspires to be.

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Minnesota has seen federal incursion and overreach before. And not just in 2020. These removal tests we’re witnessing are rooted in the premise of US ‘manifest destiny’ and how quickly the notion of ‘home’ can be made fungible by a violent state.

But likeminded bodies always resist being bullied.

SCAFFOLD, SOVEREIGNTY, AND SEIZURE

On December 26, 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln authorized the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota. The execution, staged as public theater, was not a solemn judicial act. A special scaffold was built, martial law was declared, and an estimated 4,000 spectators witnessed the largest mass execution in U.S. history.1

The spectacle mattered because it carried meaning beyond Mankato. The hanging marked the end of the six-week U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. This brutal conflict devastated the Minnesota River Valley and left deep trauma in Dakota communities. It also conveyed that the state could swiftly and effectively attempt control of contested land by violent force.

Mankato was the visible climax, but Fort Snelling was the quieter cruelty that continued. After the war, Dakota families — women, children, elders — were confined in harsh conditions near the fort during the winter of 1862–63. Disease and exposure killed between 130 and 300 Dakota people. Execution and exile worked together. One provided public power, the other attempted to ensure territorial outcomes.

Here’s what Dakota Chief Wabasha’s son-in-law, Hdainyanka, wrote to him shortly before his execution:

“You have deceived me. You told me that if we followed the advice of General Sibley, and gave ourselves up to the whites, all would be well; no innocent man would be injured. I have not killed, wounded or injured a white man, or any white persons. I have not participated in the plunder of their property; and yet to-day I am set apart for execution, and must die in a few days, while men who are guilty will remain in prison. My wife is your daughter, my children are your grandchildren. I leave them all in your care and under your protection. Do not let them suffer; and when my children are grown up, let them know that their father died because he followed the advice of his chief, and without having the blood of a white man to answer for to the Great Spirit.”2

This moral failing was part of a larger burgeoning political economy. In 1862, the Twin Cities were still emerging, with mills, river commerce, and infrastructure. Yet the region’s future as an urban, financial, and political center depended on converting Dakota and Ojibwe homelands into transferable property. The spring prior to the massacre, in May 1862, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, handing out 160-acre chunks of stolen land labeled now as “public.” Colonizers and immigrants could occupy this land, and be defended by the US government, if they showed they could “improve” it through five years of occupation.

This act negated all Dakota treaties, seized 24 million acres of Minnesota lands, and mandated removal of what were now called Dakota “outlaws.” This converted communal Indigenous homelands into surveyed “public domain” eligible for homesteading, auctions, and rail grants, directly feeding wheat production for Minneapolis mills. Speculators and railroads exploited the act via proxy filings, reselling “cleared” parcels at profit to European immigrants.3

By 1870, non-Native population surged from 172,000 to over 439,000. The “clearing” of land was not metaphorical. It was the prerequisite for surveying, fencing, settlement, rail corridors, and the wider commodity circuits that would bind the Upper Midwest to national and global markets.

That is what Harvard historian Sven Beckert calls war capitalism. He argues that global capitalism’s ascent was not a clean evolution toward free exchange. It relied on coercion, conquest, and violence. As his book on the history of Capitalism lays out, state funded war capitalism fundamentally relied on slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed commerce, and the imposition of sovereignty over both people and territory.4

In this framing, the Dakota and Ojibwe were obstacles to industrialization and commodification. The frontier needed to be safe for settlement and investment of Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians, as well as railroads and industry. This included these two flour mills, the world’s largest by 1880: General Mills and Pillsbury.

The gallows in Mankato were the blunt instrument that made the state-capital alliance credible. The point was not only to punish alleged crimes, but to demonstrate a capacity and will to kill. The American state needed to show it could override Indigenous sovereignty and reorder space. The subsequent removals and confinement at Fort Snelling completed the transformation. “Home” was recoded from relationship into asset. This land was no longer lived geography but extractable territory, from stewarding real soil to the selling of real estate.

TOPHOPHILIA, TIES, AND TENSIONS

War capitalism is not merely to punish resistance, but to convert a lived place into a fungible asset. But violence plays a deeper role than just legal rearrangement. It has to break this constant of human life: our attachment to place.

Behavioral geographer Yi-Fu Tuan borrowed the term topophilia to describe this attachment — the “affective bond between people and place or setting.”5 The phrase can sound soft and sentimental but it can also cause friction in projects of political economy.6

The state may be able to abolish or rewrite a treaty, redraw a border, rename a river, and issue new deeds, but it still confronts bodies that have been oriented by firm ground. It’s on these grounds that paths are walked, food gathered, relatives buried, stories anchored to landmarks, and seasonal rhythms internalized as a habit of life. The obstacle is embedded and embodied in the physiology, including cognitive, and grounds to location.

Modern neuroscience gives a concrete account of how place becomes part of a person. The hippocampus plays a central role in spatial memory and navigation, and research on place cells shows that hippocampal neurons fire in relation to specific locations in an environment.7 Familiar surroundings are not only around us they are within us. The brain builds spatial scaffolding that links location to memory, routine, prediction, and emotional regulation.

When cognition is tied to the specificity of place, it becomes hard for a parcel to be made equivalent to another. Commodification demands interchangeability. A home cannot easily be made equivalent to another home when it’s part of the nervous system — not quickly, not cleanly, and often not at all. When the state-capital alliance imagines territory as a grid of extractable value, it is implicitly trying to override how humans experience territory.

That is why “simple” displacement so often produces disproportionate harm. Psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove coined the term root shock to describe the traumatic stress that follows the destruction of one’s “emotional ecosystem.”8 Root shock is not only grief or nostalgia. It is a stress response to the sudden loss of the social and spatial cues that stabilize daily life. The shredding of a mesh of relationships, routines, and meanings embedded in a neighborhood or homeland.

The root shock of the state violence of 1862 was not just incidental to the project of transformation. It was structurally necessary. If topophilia is a biological and psychological anchor, then a purely legal or economic strategy (bureaucratic coercion) will often be insufficient because the anchor of topophilia holds. To clear land at speed and scale, the state reaches for tools that can sever attachment abruptly. Public executions, mass incarceration, forced marches, and exile doesn’t just relocate people. They’re violent attempts to scramble the conditions under which people can remain attached at all. It transforms topophilia into vulnerability.

Work on social exclusion and “social pain” helps explain why. In a widely cited fMRI study, Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues found increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex during experiences of exclusion. This parallels patterns seen in physical pain studies where distress is tracked with painful activities.9 The point is not that social threat is “just like” physical injury, but that the brain treats social severing as a serious alarm condition. It’s something that demands attention, vigilance, and behavioral change to overcome.

ROOTS, RESISTANCE, AND REPAIR

Topophilia doesn’t end with the so-called frontier or attempts at ‘removing’ its inhabitants. It reappears wherever people form durable bonds. That includes the streets and schools, churches and parks, language, kin, and the local economies and cultures war capitalism eventually built. The Dakota and Ojibwe were never “removed” in any final sense. Many live and organize in and around the Twin Cities today.

In South Minneapolis, the Indigenous Protector Movement, a biproduct of the American Indian Movement, works out of the American Indian Cultural Corridor along Franklin Avenue — an immediate target for ICE. The protectors made their presence known as a form of ongoing place-based care and defense.

It is a living archive of tactics for defending attachment under pressure through direct action, community building, patrols, and the mundane discipline of showing up. What it offers is not merely a critique of state violence, but vigilance without spectacle, care without permission, and solidarity as a daily habit rather than a momentary sentiment.

Other areas of Minneapolis show how when federal enforcement turns public space into a zone of uncertainty, topophilic neighbors often respond by adopting exactly those same “weapons” of persistence — care, documentation, rapid communication, mutual aid — that have long characterized Indigenous resistance and slavery abolitionist networks.

Standing Rock, where the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and allies gathered in 2016 to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline, demonstrated how quickly infrastructure can scale when a place becomes a shared object of defense.

The #NoDAPL movement assembled a broad coalition of Indigenous nations and allies, over 200 tribes, alongside legal support, medical care, and communications systems designed to withstand state patience.10

The 2020 George Floyd uprising in Minneapolis also revealed how love of place can become a platform for organized care rather than retreat. Alongside protest, residents built mutual-aid channels, street-medic networks, food distribution, and neighborhood defense efforts that treated the city as an emotional ecosystem worth repairing. What looked to outsiders like spontaneous eruption was, on the ground, a rapid layering of roles that included medics, legal observers, supply runners, translators, and de-escalators. This ecology of participation made it possible for large numbers of people to act without centralized command.

Social psychology helps explain why these movements generate allies rather than only sympathizers. One key concept is collective efficacy — the combination of social cohesion and a shared willingness to intervene for the common good.11 It blossoms when people repeatedly see each other act, learn local norms of mutual obligation, and build trust that intervention will be supported rather than punished. All rooted in topophilia.

Place attachment can bridge boundaries that would otherwise keep people separate. Work in community psychology and planning shows that place attachment and meaning can support participation and collective engagement, especially when development or coercion threatens everyday life.12 In other words, topophilia is not just private feeling. When it’s under threat it can become public motive and an engine for coalition.

The coalition in Minneapolis is being characterized by the federal government as terrorists. This borrows from a long history of resistance to violence because war capitalism has never been only domestic. The United States and its allies refined coercive governance overseas through night raids and “capture-or-kill” operations in Afghanistan, midnight house raids in Iraq, and broader militarized campaigns that treat homes as “searchable terrain” and communities as “intelligence environments.”

Many of the officials, contractors, and voters who authorized or normalized these methods rarely imagined the same atmosphere of violent seizure in their neighborhood. As unimaginable as it may be watching unmarked vehicles, sudden detentions, and public uncertainty coming to American streets — used against the very citizens and taxpayers who fund such operations — it’s not to those victims overseas in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, or even inner city America.

That return is what the poet and politician Aimé Césaire called the “imperial boomerang” effect, the idea that techniques tolerated in peripheral countries can come home to roost. In the U.S., the boomerang has long “landed” first on people of color. It emerges through surveillance and disruption campaigns like the two decades of the covert and illegal COINTELPRO program where the FBI targeted counterculture groups of the so-called New Left.

Or the “Palmer Raids” of 1919 and 1920 targeting largely Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their left-leaning politics. These led to riots in 30 US cities and culminated in the bombing of the home of A. Mitchell Palmer, the US attorney general. These programs all reflect the notion that war can come home — just look at the increased militarizing of policing complete with SWAT tactics.

And the same history that produced the scaffold of war capitalism of the past also produced reservoirs of resistance we see here and now. When neighbors anywhere respond to incursions not only with fear but with organized vigilance and material support, they are adapting older strategies of care found in Indigenous, abolitionist, and other movement-based defenses of people and places against infiltration, intimidation, and attempted violent removal.

We can see how war capitalism endures. Mankato’s 1862 gallows aimed to clear Dakota homelands of their people for homesteading, rails, and mills. Meanwhile, today’s Operation Metro Surge includes thousands of federal agents raiding Minneapolis homes and streets, attempting to sever immigrant attachments to allegedly enforce labor control and national security. These militarized spectacles of warrantless entries, tear gas, and shootings echo what Beckert has uncovered. They treat people and place as obstacles to commodification rather than roots of stewardship.

Yet topophilia also persists. These cross cultural rapid-response networks are not new to these lands, even though the US government tried to erase them centuries ago. The inspiring actions we see in Minneapolis reflect the values of compassion, positiveness, and respect for all relatives with neighborly solidarity that the first occupants of that land embraced. They’re now woven with their allied 21st century neighbors in common and shared resistance. As best expressed here by Indigenous studies and political ecology scholar Melanie Yazzie. (and the longer version here)

Minneapolis, like those acts of resistance in the nearby Dakotas, enacts and rehearses an alternative form of civil governance that centers mutual obligation over coercion and extraction. It shows how cities can survive the strain and stay alive — not through fear and gain, but through care that grounds and sustains.

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Red Power Hour…

It’s winter. So, as the sun tilts toward the sun (up north) my writing tilts toward the brain. It’s when I put on my behavioral geography glasses and try to see the world as a set of loops between bodies and places, perception and movement, constraint and choice. It’s hard to do that right now without running into AI. And one thing that keeps nagging at me is how AI is usually described as this super-brain perched in the cloud, or in a machine nearby, thinking on our behalf.

That framing inherits an old habit of mind. Since Descartes, we’ve been tempted by the idea that the “real” mind sits apart from the messy body, steering it from some inner control room. Computer metaphors reinforced the same split by calling the CPU the “brain” of the machine. And now we’re extending the metaphor again with AI as the brain of the internet, hovering overhead, crunching data, issuing guidance. An intelligence box directing action at a distance is a tidy picture but it risks making us miss what’s actually doing the work.

Let’s dig into how the brain leverages the loops of people, places, and interfaces we all move through to extend it’s richness and reach.

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GRADIENTS GUIDE WHILE BODIES BALANCE

Have you ever hiked or skied in snow or fog and seen the middle distance just in front of you disappear? It takes the world you thought you knew, like ridge lines, tree lines, and the comforting predictable geometry of “just ahead” and reduces it to panic stricken near-field fragments. I’ve sensed once familiar ski runs become suddenly unfamiliar not because it changed, but because it was no longer accessible to my brain.

In these moments, we’re all forced to reckon, recalibrate, and (usually) slow down as our senses sharpen. We take note of the slope under our feet and the way the ground shifts. We listen for clues our eyes can’t see and notice which direction the wind is blowing, how the light is changing, and how our own heartbeat and breath changes with each calculated risk. We know where we are, but the picture is fuzzy. Our memory only gets us so far. Everything around us becomes this multi-faceted relationship between our body making sense of it all while our brain updates its status moment by moment. The last thing a brain wants is to have its co-dependent limbs fail and risk falling.

That experience demonstrates how the world is coupled with us. In world-involving coupling a living system survives through ongoing coordination with the affordances and constraints of its surroundings. In behavioral geography this frames spatial behavior as dynamic, reciprocal coordination between individuals and their environments, rather than just isolated internal cognition.

Places actively shape decisions through the physics of the world and all its constraints. Actions, in turn, then reshape those surroundings in ongoing loops. This approach to cognition shifts focus from isolated mental maps to lived, constitutive engagements. It treats the world as a partner in our own competence.

Before brains, gradients existed. Living systems navigated heat, cold, salt, sugar, thirst, dark, and light to persist. The first cognitive problems were biophysical. Surviving in a world that constantly disrupted viability relied on basic mechanisms like membrane flows, chemical reactions, and feedback. These primordial loops coupled an organism to a given environment directly. There were not yet any neural intermediaries. These were protozoa drifting toward nutrients or recoiling from toxins. It is in this raw attunement that world-involving coupling emerges.

In 1932, physiologist Walter Cannon coined the term “homeostasis” to describe the body’s active pursuit of stability amidst environmental pressures. Living systems, whether single-celled or more complex, maintain survival variables within narrow bands. Cells detect changes in these variables, which affect molecular states. Temperature, acidity, pressure, osmosis, and metabolic concentrations all influence reaction rates. Feedback loops alter cell-environment interactions through heat transfer, ion flux, water movement, and gas exchange, ultimately restoring the system to a viable band. Organisms are not passive vessels but actively engage with these detection loops, triggering adjustments like a wilting plant drawing water. Sensing and action are fused operations for persistence.

About 600 million years ago, cells in an ancient sea sensed electrical fields or chemical plumes on microbial mats. These pioneering cells formed diffuse nerve nets, evolving into jellyfish and anemones. Simple meshes firing to contract thin membranes in bell-shaped forms, they lacked a brain but coordinated propulsive pulses to keep the organism in bounds or sting prey. Within 10s of millions of years, bilateral animals evolved. Flatworms like planaria emerged with nerve cords laddered along their undersides, thickening toward their tips. These proto-brains sped signal spread across their elongated forms.

As vertebrates appear, control becomes more layered. Circuits in the brainstem evolve to coordinate breathing, heart rate, posture, and basic orienting reflexes. The cerebellum emerges to sharpen timing and coordination. Competing actions, drives, and habits become sorted with the help of the basal ganglia. With mammals — and especially primates — the cortex expands. Perception and action become more flexible across situational contexts and with it comes longer-horizon learning, social inference, and planning.

But at every milestone, bodies are still constrained and governed by gradients and fields related to gravity, friction, heat, oxygen, hydration, predators, prey, and terrain. The cortex sits on top of these older loops, stretching them in time and recombining them in new ways. Even the most “abstract” human cognition still rides on the same foundation of reflexes and sensorimotor sampling. This is what keeps an organism in operable biochemical ranges while it propels itself through an environment that perpetually pushes and pulls.

BOXED BRAINS BEGET BIG BELIEFS

The field of physiology deepened this bio-chemical inquiry through the early 20th century. Physiologist and neurologist Ivan Pavlov revealed how sensory cues could chain to responses through neural rerouting creating conditioned ‘Pavlovian’ reflexes. Neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington coined the term “synapse” as he dissected and described them as switches in these loops coupled to the world. Through this inquiry, the autonomic nervous system emerged as a kind of homeostatic controller. Sympathetic surges in the system were found to create fight or flight reactions as our parasympathetic system kicks in to dial us back. This can be seen as a more complex version of the same push-pull of Cannon’s original homeostasis.

By the mid-20th century, mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener, working closely with physiologists and engineers, compared the nervous system to a servomechanism — a self-correcting governor found in engines. He coined the term cybernetics in his 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine where he treated animals and machines as systems that regulate themselves through feedback.1

He and his collaborators argued this was a form of “purposeful behavior” or goal-directed action — a kind of negative feedback loop that reduces the difference between a current state and a target state.2 These ideas hardened in engineering fields during wartime as they were used in weapon systems for prediction and control of trajectories by compensating for delay and uncertainty. Cybernetics helped make the physiological regulation of Cannon’s biological homeostasis structurally analogous to engineering.

This mechanical metaphor sparked a long-standing debate, dating back to Descartes’ 17th-century mind-body split. Dualism posited an immaterial mind as a rule-following pilot controlling mechanical flesh. Alan Turing’s 1936 paper had already formalized this possibility, presenting a “machine” capable of computing any algorithm.3

Two decades later, the Dartmouth summer workshop coined “artificial intelligence” and encouraged the idea of engineering minds as programs.4 Around the same time, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell built early “logic theorist” programs that proved theorems, making intelligence seem like a boxed process involving symbols and reasoning.5

That lineage hasn’t disappeared. This is largely the default engineering posture of AI. Even when the machinery shifts from hand-coded rules to learned statistical patterns, we still talk as if intelligence lives inside a system. AI models claim to “form representations,” “build a world model,” “store knowledge,” “plan,” and “reason.” Contemporary training methods reward this language because they really do produce rich internal states that can be probed, steered, and reused across tasks.

Less discussed is the metaphysical shift from “the system has internal structure supporting performance” to “the system contains an inner arena where meaning emerges and is inspected before action.” Daniel Dennett, a philosopher who dismantled this intuition in theories of mind and consciousness, called this picture the “Cartesian theater.”6

He noticed that scientific explanations often subtly reintroduce the central place where “it all comes together” for an internal witness. Dennett believes this inner stage is a comforting fiction derived from Descartes’ split between observer and world. Brain imaging reveals coordinated network activity, but not a literal inner ‘screen’ presenting a unified world-model. Many neuroscientists describe cognition as emerging from distributed, parallel, and recurrent processes, sometimes with large-scale integration.7 Dennett’s point is not that internal processing is unreal, but that our language tempts us toward a surreal Cartesian picture in a central place we can’t empirically reveal.

RESAMPLE, RESTABILIZE, AND RESHAPE

Neuroscience reveals that perception differs from a camera feeding a private theater. Our eyes rapidly sample information based on our actions, and the brain stabilizes perception during movement. Much visual processing is organized in the service of action, with partially distinct but interacting pathways supporting perceptual report and real-time visuomotor control.8 This suggests that the brain resembles a system for maintaining a relationship with the world through continuous sampling, correction, and skilled engagement, rather than a world-reconstruction engine.

James J. Gibson, the founder of ecological psychology, arrived at a similar conclusion earlier from behavioral and perceptual evidence. He argues that the world provides lawful patterns, regularities constrained by physics and geometry, that guide behavior because they remain stable across changing viewpoints. These patterns are not complete. Organisms make them available by moving, shifting gaze, turning the head, walking, or touching. Perception is an active process of sampling the world.

If perception is about staying attuned to lawful structures in the environment, the evolutionary consequence is organisms don’t just read the world, they also write it. As organisms became more complex and mobile, they gained the power to reshape the very patterns they depend on. They start cutting paths (pathways worn into grass, game trails beaten into forests), building shelters (bird nests, termite mounds, human dwellings), altering flows of water and heat (beaver dams, termite mounds), and laying chemical trails (ants depositing pheromones).

Evolutionary biologists call this niche construction. Organisms modify their environments, which then feed back into selection pressures and development, creating a dynamic cycle where the environment becomes a product of life and a force that shapes it further.9 As the world guides behavior, behavior reshapes the world, and the remade world trains bodies and brains into new skills and expectations. Over time, these modifications become external organs of coordination, storing information, reducing uncertainty, and channeling action.

A worn trail is navigational memory made durable, a nest or mound is a climate-control device that stabilizes temperature and airflow, and a pheromone path is a distributed signal that recruits other ants into collective action and direction. Complexity scientist David Krakauer calls this broader idea of “mind outsourced into engineered matter” exbodiment — where artifacts actively constrain and channel cogntion.10 In this view, cognitive work is no longer confined to nervous tissue but accomplished through bodies working with worlds they’ve built.

Humans take this to an extreme. Clothing and shelter externalize thermoregulation, fire externalizes digestion and protection, tools externalize force and precision, drugs alter chemistry, writing and calendars externalize memory and timing, and institutions externalize norms and coordination. Much of what we call “human intelligence” is not only in our brains but also distributed across artifacts and practices that have accumulated over generations.

Cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins made the point vivid by studying navigation. On a ship, “knowing where you are” is not privately derived nor sealed in a captain’s skull. It is a collective achievement through a system of charts, maps, instruments, procedures, language, coordinated roles — an entire ecology of cognition comprised of tools and social organization.11 Here geography and cognition merge. Orientation is not just mental but enacted in relation to representations that are anchored and socially maintained in our material reality.

When I was at Microsoft, I followed the work of sociologist Lucy Suchman who studied human-machine interaction. She arrived at a similar conclusion criticizing the fantasy that action is simply “execution of an internal plan.” Real action, she argues, is situated. It’s responsive to unfolding circumstances — often improvisational — and is shaped by context in ways that cannot be fully specified in advance.12 In other words, if we look for intelligence as a prewritten script inside the head, we will miss how intelligence is often produced when enacted in a world that refuses to hold still.

Large language models, at first glance, seem to embody the “internal plan” fantasy. They’re sealed systems containing competence in weights and parameters, ready for queries. However, they’re closer to Suchman’s warning. Trained on vast archives of human writing, LLMs learn statistical regularities in vast continuations of text. When used, they produce a new continuation conditioned on prompts and context.13 Prompts aren’t mere inputs. They’re situated actions in human-computer interactions. They set frames, narrow affordances, cue roles, establish constraints, and often iterate in a back-and-forth that resembles Suchman’s improvisation with a powerful partner who is also techy and textual.

Philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, in their extended mind thesis, claim under certain conditions, external tools can become constitutive parts of cognition when they are reliably integrated into the organism’s routines.14 As we’ve learned, the boundary of cognition is not always the boundary of skin or skull, it’s the boundary of a stable loop.

When the fog rolls in and visibility gets low, the boundary of this loop becomes quickly apparent. “The mind’s eye” is not that helpful…practically or metaphorically. If anything, the brain wants nothing more than for the body to widen contact with the world. It slows us down, sharpens listening, and increases tactile attention. It calculates different gradient thresholds to measure risk…it might even glance at an external sensing device that is prompting some intervention or improvisation! We are not watching a movie in our head to get through the fog. We are trying to stay oriented in a world that refuses to be fully represented.

This is the reframing of intelligence — artificial and otherwise — I wish for. I’d like to see more talk of intelligence being less a coveted individualistic thing hidden inside us and more an achievement of coordinated biophysical, social, infrastructural loops across time. When we mistake a metaphor (“there’s a theater in there”) for an ontology (“that’s where cognition lives”), we get misled about minds and we get misled about AI. The alternative is not anti-technology. It’s conceptual hygiene. Let’s start asking where cognition actually happens, what it is made of, and how places — natural and built — participate in making it possible. You know, Interplace — the interaction of people and place.

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Who wants or needs another year-end wrap up? You do, of course!

I looked at the top four essays you opened most this year and see what amounts to one argument told three ways.

1. Our “shared reality” is getting fuzzier. This is less because of any single lie and more because how we decide what’s true together is weakening.

2. When reality becomes contestable, power swoops in…fast. It can arrive through seemingly mundane zoning or “innovation zones” — privatization that doesn’t advertise themselves as governance.

3. All of it shows up through interactions on the street. It comes in the form of a city that increasingly works better for packages than for people.

Let me take you through the top four as a kind of three-part overlapping translucent arc blending sensemaking with sovereignty and street life.

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SENSEMAKING: SHARED STANDARDS AND SOFTENED SIGNAL

I’ve stopped thinking of misinformation as a content problem alone. The top essay’s recurring question wasn’t “how do we debunk some claim?” but “what happens when the shared machinery of shared knowledge breaks down?”

It seems,

“Digital platforms don’t just spread misinformation; they shape belief systems, reinforcing global echo chambers.”1

If that’s true, then the crisis isn’t just that falsehoods circulate. It’s that belief formation itself becomes it’s own environment. It becomes something you breathe, not something you choose in discrete moments. And once belief formation becomes this ambient, “fact-checking” starts to resemble pest control. You can swat at annoying individual examples but the conditions that generate them remain intact.

To find my own grounding I turned to pragmatism and 19th-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. This was not so much just an academic flag to wave, but as a usable framing.

“Peirce didn’t see truth as something fixed or final but as a process.”2

This shifts the goal of myth busting from winning to learning. It treats truth as something we approach through inquiry, self-correction, and a willingness to revise…together. I came to view fallibilism, the idea that human knowledge and beliefs are inherently uncertain and open to error no matter how strong the evidence, not as weakness, but as civic muscle to train.

I ended up thinking less about the lone “critical thinker” and more about the social production of belief. Like social psychologist Brian Lowery’s point that identity is “socially constructed — shaped by interactions, cultural narratives, and institutions” helped me see post-truth the same way. Belief systems live between us, not just inside us. That’s why debunking so often misfires. It treats belief like a detachable error instead of part of a relational interaction.

Peirce’s approach is procedural. Truth comes from “consensus reached by a community of inquirers,” strengthened through collective reasoning and self-correction. In this version of shared realty truth isn’t merely a set of facts. It’s a public utility. But when platforms “shape belief systems, reinforcing global echo chambers,” the shared sensemaking commons becomes easier to game. When a sensemaking pubic utility becomes privatized, gamed, or degraded, every opportunity downstream becomes easier to capture and/or exploit.

SOVEREIGNTY: SCARE STORIES AND SHADOW GOVERNANCE

When sensemaking frays, people search for certainty. That’s not a moral failing but a human response to drift. And drift is where opportunists do their best work. Back in the day, when sailboats lost wind, they’d bob and drift like a cork. This was called ‘being in irons’ because enemy ships would take advantage of the situation and fire cannonballs at the hull, filling it with iron.

The political equivalent of being “in irons” is a stalled public, luffing in confusion. We collectively become easy targets for anyone who can find and seize the wind by naming the threat and steering the story.

“By defining threats and controlling the narrative, leaders turn uncertainty into urgency, making repression feel not only justified but necessary.”

This is the part of politics that isn’t really about left or right. It’s about the choreography of fear. It’s about manufacturing the emergency, positioning yourself as the only credible antidote, and then treat dissent as recklessness.

“The state stands as fear’s fierce enforcer, embedding oppression in order and power in place.”

The story becomes spatial. Narrative doesn’t just persuade. It can reorganize where people can go, how they’re policed, and which communities get turned into symbols of danger…or opportunity.

But fear doesn’t only justify the barricade. It also produces permission for “exceptions,” carve-outs, and special arrangements that don’t look like crackdowns at all. Sometimes sovereignty doesn’t arrive with riot gear. Sometimes it arrives as a “housing deal,” a fast-tracked zoning change, a development district with deferred taxes, or a campus that runs on private shuttles and subsidized utilities.

A more extreme example can be found in South Texas and Musk’s Starbase. This is not like Vandenberg, where regulation still exists, but “Starbase, Texas, where the law doesn’t resist — it assists.” What looks like a town is, in practice, “a launchpad…for a new form of privatized sovereignty.”

“SpaceX controls the housing, the workforce, and now, the electorate.” Add zoning powers and taxing authority, and you end up with tools usually reserved for public government. It’s modern day secession.

Once you see it that way, the word “secession” stops sounding dramatic and starts sounding descriptive:

“They don’t announce themselves as secessions — but they function that way.”3

I think about Starbase whenever I hear a project pitched as “just development.” Sometimes it is. And sometimes it’s a jurisdictional carve-out dressed up as progress. The company builds the roads, controls the data, sets the rules, and then we act surprised when the “town” behaves like a private regime. Your own town may more like this than you know.

What makes this kind of capture durable is that it can hide inside normal administrative nouns like incorporation, annexation, zoning, or special ‘improvement’ districts. It doesn’t always resemble typical government, which is precisely why it works. Creating economic uncertainty within municipalities puts them ‘in irons’ and that’s when power swoops in…fast.

When reality is unstable, power gains permission — sometimes by force, sometimes by paperwork. Either way, a new kind of soft sovereignty emerges. And not just on paper. It shows up as everyday interfaces like badge-entry gates, private roads, controlled “public” space, and logistics corridors. These are places that appear public and open right up until you try to use them.

STREET LIFE: PLACE AS INTERFACE

Changes in sovereignty mostly happen one block at a time.

Not just in the headline-grabbing way but in the everyday way the platform economy remakes the city’s priorities. The same techno-libertarian impulse that treats Texas regulation as friction and jurisdiction as an engineering constraint shows up at street level as consolidation. Corporate actors elbow into vulnerable communities making bigger decisions, faster, and farther from the people who live with the consequences.

It changes what gets built, what gets removed, what gets subsidized, and what gets quietly reclassified as “infrastructure” rather than “community.” And once those decisions route through logistics timelines and platform incentives, the city’s purpose starts to tilt from being a place you inhabit to a system that serves you at a distance.

“From a lived city to a delivered one.”4

Yes, there’s a scale-and-efficiency case to be made for certain kinds of infrastructure. But then it leads to a reality planners, mayors, and residents all need to consider:

“You can optimize flow — and still degrade life.”5

You see this when a logistics-first city produces companion forms. Not only warehouses and data centers, but neighborhoods that “synchronize” with platform life — key-fob lobbies, amenity decks, app-mediated access, and ground floors that often feel like decorative promises with Amazon lockers. Interaction with people isn’t the goal, efficiency is.

What makes this moment feel so disorienting is that the city isn’t being rebuilt from scratch. It’s being re-scripted in place. The inherited order still sits there in concrete and code — street grids, zoning categories, frontage rules, parking minimums, financing templates — while the stories that once justified them are thinning out.

The forms remain legible, even familiar, but they no longer reliably tell you what kind of life they’re organizing. You can feel the mismatch between yesterday’s spatial grammar trying to host today’s platform logics, climate stresses, and institutional exhaustion. The result is a kind of regime lag where we get structure without consensus and continuity without clarity.

“Spatial logic lingers physically but loses meaning conceptually.”6

This is when street life loops back to sensemaking. The city is an interface — shaped by algorithms and optimized for throughput. Everyday experience becomes a kind of feedback signal about who holds power and what’s being valued. The built environment teaches, subtly, what’s normal, what’s public, what’s permitted, and what might be inevitable.

We began with a question about how we know what’s true and end with a reminder that we learn truth, together, from what surrounds us. Rebuilding shared reality, then, isn’t only an argument we have online. It also means reshaping the places we live to be more legible and conducive to shared sensemaking, one block at a time.

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It’s Christmas Eve, and it’s time for me to be the Debbie Downer. Actually (see, here I go), according to this telling of history, Christmas as we know it came about to squelch riotous buzzkillers. But I like to think I’m bringing “emodiversity” to the conversation. Merry Christmas!

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CLOTHES WERE ALL TARNISHED WITH ASHES AND SOOT

By now most American’s are familiar with this line from the popular Christmas eve story, Twas the Night Before Christmas: “He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot, / And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.” That detail only works in a world where the home has become the stage for Christmas, and a fireplace has become the holiday’s boundary line. The soot is a tell. Someone crossed from “outside” to “inside” through the chimney. A home invasion but in a way that leaves the household intact, even charmed. That is not what Christmas looked like to many urban elites at the opening of the 19th century.

In the early 1800s, Christmas was not yet the big, shared civic and commercial event it would become. One reason it can feel “absent” in the record is that newspapers and polite society often treated it as a non-holiday. In that gap, the season was still shaped by older, rougher customs that included street noise, lots of drinking, and the annual testing of who had to give charitably and who could demand charity.

Urbanization sharpened those dynamics. In rural settings, winter misrule could be contained within face-to-face hierarchies. A landowner might tolerate (even theatrically join) a brief inversion of class rank by wassailing — a form of ritualized begging that was part party and part pressure valve. But in a fast-growing city, the relationship between “master” and “laborer” was increasingly anonymous, wage-based, and spatially segregated. When winter shut down water-powered industry and froze transport, the season could deliver sudden idle time and unemployment. These conditions made street customs louder, more mobile, and more threatening to property owners.

Wassailing and related practices operated like a seasonal toll. Visitors arrived uninvited, sang or jeered, and expected food, drink, or money. Refusal could invite ridicule, harassment, or worse…violence. In effect, it was a customary, once-a-year confrontation over surplus negotiating who had it, and who was obliged to share. In cities, with crowded streets and fragile policing, the same pattern could look less like tradition and more like extortion, or proto-riot.

So, the working class kept venting, but the rules of engagement changed. The urban elite did not generally “play along” with inversion the way a rural squire might. Instead, they built distance that was spatial (better doors, better neighborhoods), institutional (watchmen, courts), and moral (reform societies framing the poor as a disorder problem rather than a customary counterpart). What had been faint mockery — tinged with “you know what happens if you don’t pay” — could tip into confrontational street politics as the 1800s progressed.

In New York, John Pintard — a prominent civic organizer at the intersection of nostalgia, institution-building, and fear of the crowd — viewed the season as an intrusion. Pintard helped found the New-York Historical Society in 1804 — an explicit project of memory-making in a city whose demography and political power were changing fast.

In one widely discussed episode (December 1820), Pintard wrote of a stranger entering his house by mistake, and then described the street below — bands of celebrants “roaring” through Wall Street, shouting “No quarter!” and “Clubs! Clubs!” The point isn’t whether every shout was a literal threat; it’s that he heard it as one. For him, Christmas street sound became a class signal. The city had grown large enough that the “outside” could press against the parlor.

That fear sits next to his politics. New York’s 1821 constitutional changes broadened white male suffrage by removing (or reducing) property requirements for many voters—while simultaneously imposing tighter restrictions on Black voters. Elites like Pintard read this as the empowerment of a propertyless urban mass. In an 1822 letter to his daughter, he lamented “universal suffrage” and warned that New York would be “governed by rank democracy,” imagining the state “engulfed in the abyss of ruin.”

This is where “pauperism prevention” enters. Pintard helped launch the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism (founded in 1817), part of a broader early-19th-century push to reorganize charity and discipline the public presence of poverty. These groups tended to argue that indiscriminate giving encouraged begging, idleness, and drinking. They favored “rational” relief mechanisms that also functioned as behavioral control. They also tended to blame the poor rather than addressing structural issues like low wages and unemployment.

And the language of disorder was already racialized long before the 1820s. A New York newspaper complaint from 1772 (often re-quoted because it is so blunt and awkwardly familiar even today) grumbled about “the assembling of Negroes, servants, boys and other disorderly persons” in noisy street companies — gaming, drunkenness, quarrelling — disturbing the neighborhood. Whether in 1772 or 1822, this rhetoric does political work: it merges servants with Black people with “boys,” collapses leisure into vice, and turns street sociability into a public threat that justifies surveillance and control. (The Battle for Christmas)

Pintard’s nostalgia, then, wasn’t simply for “merrier” Christmases. It was for a social architecture in which elites could allow brief misrule without feeling that misrule might become rule. That is why memory projects and holiday-making mattered: if you can redefine what the season is, you can redefine who belongs in it — and where.

He did exactly that with St. Nicholas. For the New-York Historical Society’s St. Nicholas Day dinner in 1810, Pintard commissioned a broadside engraving (by Alexander Anderson) that visualized “Sinterklaus” (Saint Nicholas) as a Dutch-inflected moral judge: St. Nicholas holds both a purse (reward) and a birch rod (punishment), and the Dutch hearth scene includes one stocking filled with treats and another with the rod alone. The rod in the boy’s coat served as a reminder for the boy to behave. This is not yet the consumer version of jolly ol’ Santa. He’s a solemn saint, meant to domesticate behavior and tie New York identity to a selectively remembered “Dutch” past in a time when protestants were reluctant to give into festive celebrations.

WHAT TO MY WONDERING EYES SHOULD APPEAR

Into this mix of street disorder, elite fear, and civic nostalgia drops the poem that re-coded Christmas for the household: “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” What has since become known as The Night Before Christmas or Twas the Night Before Christmas. Traditionally dated to 1822 and first published anonymously in the Troy Sentinel in December 1823, it wasn’t until 1837 that real estate developer and bible scholar, Clement Clarke Moore, claimed authorship. The family of poet Henry Livingston Jr. claimed in 1900 that he authored the poem. By then, several sources claimed Moore as the author and it remains debated. Either way, the poem became a template not just for Santa’s look, but for Christmas’s social geometry that indeed reflected Moore’s own beliefs, and those in his social circle.

The poem’s genius is that it keeps the thrill of intrusion while neutralizing the threat. Something does arrive “on the lawn” with a “clatter.” (an image Moore lifted from his friend and Dutch revivalist Washington Irving — of Rip Van Winkle fame — in his book A History of New York.) A stranger does enter at night, but he is rendered as a manageable figure — “a right jolly old elf” — whose labor arrives as gifts, not demands. The earlier season’s confrontational exchange (give us drink, or we’ll make trouble) is displaced by an internal, child-centered economy. Children expect gifts because a benevolent visitor hands them out, and adults perform generosity by purchasing, stocking, and staging that gift. In other words, the social pressure of the street is replaced by the emotional pressure within the family.

Moore also takes the older St. Nicholas from Pintard material and sands off its sharp edges. The 1810 broadside’s rod, discipline, and judgmental ledger — good child/bad child — are central to the earlier imagery. But Moore’s St. Nicholas is “merry,” “droll,” “rosy,” “plump”: a pleasure-giver rather than a behavioral auditor. Even the class-coded “peddler” image is made safe — commerce without confrontation, work without resentment.

This mattered because New York itself was being remade — politically, spatially, and economically. And it was occurring at a pace that made old forms of deference unstable. The Commissioners’ Plan (authorized in 1807; published in 1811) imposed the rectilinear grid that would turn uneven land into legible lots, and future streets into future real estate. Simeon De Witt, the state surveyor general, was one of the appointed commissioners. The grid was not merely road geometry but a machine for converting terrain into property, and property into a mass market.

Moore’s own life sits inside that conversion. He was a landholder in Chelsea, tied to the Episcopal establishment, and later a professor at the General Theological Seminary, which came to occupy land he donated. He also publicly protested aspects of the city’s street-making regime (not because he hated profit — he developed and sold lots — but because he hated what the regime empowered. A city pushing a democratic, laboring future pushing north and west).

And all of it unfolded in a city whose scale was changing the meaning of “the people.” New York City’s population rose from about 33,000 in 1790 to more than 120,000 by 1820. This growth intensified crowd politics, amplified street sound, and made class encounter harder to contain inside older rituals of patronage.

What also cuts against the poem’s soft focus is the fact New York was still entangled with slavery. The state’s gradual emancipation laws, which started in 1799, culminated in final abolition taking effect in 1827. So the “domestic” Christmas being invented for respectable households sat alongside domestic labor practices — some waged, some unfree — whose inequities were not resolved by sentiment. Moore owned five slaves when he wrote his poem and was a fierce anti-abolitionist until he died in 1863.

Read this way, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” isn’t just a charming poem. It’s a settlement proposal. It tells the anxious propertied class they can stop answering the door to the seasonal banditti. You can stop treating the street as an annual moral debt. You’re your generosity inside and angled toward your children. Doing so will give you a Christmas that feels safe, private, and orderly. The soot stays on Santa’s clothes, not on your doorstep.

Two centuries later, we live inside the perfected version of that bargain. The threshold has multiplied into locked lobbies, gate codes, door cameras, cars, and two-factor authenticated login screens. Winter can be navigated from indoors with home deliveries, streaming, and remote work. The chimney may still work, but it sits alongside social systems that let comfort flow inward while the outside world stays outside.

Staying inside correlates with warmth, space, stability, and safety. For some, “cozy” is an aesthetic, but for others, home is overcrowded, unheated, temporary, or absent. The same season that promises private comfort produces public hardship. In the 1800s it may have led to street parties or near rioting, but now people are forced to sleep outdoors, ride buses for heat, and cycling through overcrowded shelters. The old drama of threshold returns. Some disappear deeper indoors while others are forced outward into exposure.

The demand persists, but it arrives differently. Where a crowd once sang at the door, the ask is quieter and easier to ignore or satisfy at a distance. A donation can be made without contact, without the discomfort that once made inequality undeniable. Meanwhile, the “friendly plebeian” returns as labor in the form of delivery at night, laboring in warehouses under quotas, or care worker moving between apartments. It’s the work that keeps the household cozy and warm and the property safe and sealed.

Fear has modernized too. Cameras, gates, hardened lobbies, private security, hostile architecture, and routine policing repeat an old logic. Keep disturbance away and keep need out of sight — especially when commerce depends on the appearance of abundance.

This is why the winter solstice matters as more than a quaint counter-holiday. Solstice is not a celebration of hardship but a reminder of shared constraint. Moore, Irving, Pintard, and their circle proved that “tradition” is not simply inherited — it can be authored. They selected what to remember, softened what to fear, and rearranged the season’s meanings until a new version of winter felt natural.

If they could rewrite the story in the image they preferred — quiet, orderly, domestic — then the story can be rewritten again, without so much nostalgia or spectacle. Not by romanticizing suffering, and not by outsourcing care to private sentiment, but by building ordinary kindness into public life. Can we envision warmer thresholds instead of hardened perimeters, tolerance for presence instead of reflexive removal, spaces where people can exist without buying something, and systems that reduce winter harm as a matter of course?

The point is not to recreate an older communal world. It’s to choose, deliberately, a winter ethic equal to the world we actually have. The night before Christmas should be one that makes warmth and belonging less conditional, and generosity less performative. Less a gift for you and me under the tree and more gifts for ye and thee as need be.

References

The Battle for Christmas. A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday. Stephen Nissenbaum. 1997

John Pintard. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Pintard

Clement Clarke Moore. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Clarke_Moore

Here is the APA reference for that article:

LA Review of Books. (n.d.). Poems think they know ’Twas the night before Christmas. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/poems-think-know-twas-night-christmas/

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Spain’s high-speed trains feels like a totally different trajectory of modernity. America prides itself on being the tech innovator, but nowhere can we blast 180 MPH between city centers with seamless transfers to metros and buses…and no TSA drudgery.

But look closer and the familiar comes into view — rising car ownership, rush-hour congestion (except in Valencia!), and growth patterns that echo America.

I wanted to follow these parallel tracks back to the nineteenth-century U.S. rail boom and forward to Spain’s high-spe ed era. Turns out it’s not just about who gets faster rail or faster freeways, but what kind of growth they lock in once they arrive.

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TRAINS, CITIES, AND CONTRADICTIONS

My wife and I took high-speed rail (HSR) on our recent trip to Spain. My first thought was, “Why can’t we have nice things?”

They’re everywhere.

Madrid to Barcelona in two and a half hours. Barcelona to Valencia, Valencia back to Madrid. Later, Porto to Lisbon. Even Portugal is in on it. We glided out of city-center stations, slipped past housing blocks and industrial belts, then settled into the familiar grain of Mediterranean countryside at 300 kilometers an hour. The Wi-Fi (mostly) worked. The seats were comfortable. No annoying TSA.

Where HSR did not exist or didn’t quite fit our schedule, we filled gaps with EasyJet flights. We did rent a car to seek the 100-foot waves at Nazaré, Portugal, only to be punished by the crawl of Porto’s rush-hour traffic in a downpour. Within cities, we took metros, commuter trains, trams, buses, bike share, and walked…a lot.

From the perspective of a sustainable transportation advocate, we were treated to the complete “nice things” package: fast trains between cities, frequent rail and bus service inside them, and streets catering to human bodies more than SUVs. What surprised me, though, was the way these nice things coexist with growth patterns that look — in structural terms — uncomfortably familiar.

In this video 👆 from our high-speed rail into Madrid, you see familiar freeway traffic but also a local rail running alongside. This site may be more common in NYC, DC, Boston, and even Chicago but less so in the Western US.

Spain now operates one of the world’s largest high-speed networks. Spaniards reside inside a country roughly the size of Texas and enjoy about 4,000 kilometers of dedicated lines. This is Europe’s largest HSR system and one of only a handful of “comprehensive national networks” worldwide (Campos & de Rus, 2009; Perl & Goetz, 2015; UIC, 2024). Yet, like most of Europe, it has also seen a steady rise in car ownership. Across the EU, the average number of passenger cars per capita increased from 0.53 to 0.57 between 2011 and 2021, with Spain tracking that upward trend (Eurostat, 2023). Inland passenger-kilometers remain dominated by private cars, with rail — high-speed and conventional combined — taking a modest minority share (European Commission, 2021).

Spain, in other words, has both extensive HSR and rising car ownership. The tension between the pleasant micro-geographies of rail stations, sidewalks, and metro lines and the macro-geography of an ever-familiar car-dependent growth regime makes it interesting from an economic geography standpoint. HSR in Spain is not so much an alternative to growth but a particular way of organizing it.

America was once organized around rail. But our own car-dependent growth regime pushed it away. In the late nineteenth century, the United States was the HSR superpower of its time.

From the 1830s through the early twentieth century, a dense mesh of rail lines shortened distances across the continent. By 1916, the U.S. rail network peaked at roughly 254,000 route miles — enough track to circle the globe multiple times. It then went into steep decline under competition from cars and trucks (Stover, 1997; The RAND Corporation, 2008). Rail was not merely a mode of transport. It was the primary infrastructure for integrating an entire continent’s economy.

Chicago was the canonical beneficiary. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis makes the case that rail-driven “time–space compression” did as much as natural endowments to elevate Chicago from muddy frontier town to the pivot of a continental system of grain, lumber, and meat (Cronon, 1991). Rail lines did not simply connect places that already mattered; they reorganized what mattered by funneling resources, capital, and people through specific nodes. Economic geography here is not just about location, but about which locations are made central by network design.

This “time–space compression” traces back to Karl Marx’s 1857–58 Grundrisse, where he described the “annihilation of space by time” as capitalism’s drive to overcome spatial barriers through faster transport like railroads to enable quicker turnover of capital. Geographer David Harvey formalized the term “time–space compression” in his 1989 The Condition of Postmodernity, building on Marx to analyze how nineteenth-century rail networks (alongside telegraphs) shrank perceived distances during the first major wave of compression from the mid-1800s to World War I.

At the metropolitan scale, those same rail technologies produced an earlier generation of “nice things” that sustainable transportation advocates now associate with Europe. Horsecar, cable car, and later electric streetcar networks radiated from downtowns into the countryside, creating early “rail suburbs” connected by frequent service and walkable main streets (Jackson, 1985; Fishman, 1987). Streetcar suburbs offered middle-class households a promise of a commuter train to a walkable compact neighborhood with quiet residential streets, relatively clean air, and quick access back to the city.

But these “nice things” were never neutral amenities. Rail suburbs became instruments of class and, in the U.S. context, racial segregation. (Jackson, 1985; Fishman, 1987) Access to frequent rail service and detached houses on leafy streets was tightly bound to property ownership and exclusionary practices. Chicago’s rail-driven boom reshaped hinterlands into “commodity frontiers.” It, like many other cities later, externalized environmental costs onto landscapes far from the city’s sidewalks, station concourses, and less than desirable living conditions.

RAILS, ROADS, AND REGIMES

The core paradox of economic growth is already visible here. Rail dramatically reduced transport costs and enabled agglomeration economies — thick labor markets, specialized firms, information spillovers — that enriched certain cities and classes. At the same time, those very efficiencies intensified resource extraction, spatial inequality, and political conflicts. Capital and power decided who could benefit and who would be pushed to the margins.

America once ran on rails — dense, local, and linked — its own version of the “nice things” seen in Spain. But they carried with them the costs of congestion and expansion, sending us on a different path for mobility.

The transition from rail to road in the twentieth-century United States is not just a story of transportation technology. It’s a story of how a country decided to scale itself.

As motor vehicles diffused in the early 1900s, they interacted with existing urban and regional patterns largely established by rail networks. Postwar sprawl is largely a confluence of car-based living. Rising incomes, coupled with finance institutions rewarding new developments and cheaply manufactured cars, led households and corporate firms to trade close proximity for space (Glaeser & Kahn, 2004). Cars did not invent the desire for separation from industrial cities, but they multiplied the potential configurations.

Federal policy amplified that shift. The 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act created a 41,000-mile limited-access network funded primarily by federal fuel taxes. This embedded a new high-speed system on top of the pre-existing rail grid (National Archives, 2022; Weingroff, 1996). While railroads remained vital for freight, the intercity passenger market was increasingly organized around airports and interstates.

Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier documents how federal mortgage guarantees, tax incentives, and highway construction converged to make owner-occupied suburban homes the normative “good life” for white middle-class Americans (Jackson, 1985). Robert Fishman’s Bourgeois Utopias similarly traces how suburban landscapes became aspirational geographies of domestic desire separated from the din and drive of the urban mire, rising from London to Los Angeles (Fishman, 1987).

From an economic geography perspective, the postwar highway and aviation regime did not end agglomeration; it reconfigured it. Metropolitan regions sprawled outward along radial freeways and beltways. Airports became new nodes of connectivity, often surrounded by logistics parks and office clusters. The benefits of scale — large labor markets, diversified industries, hordes of consumers — remained, but the physical form of cities stretched into low-density, car-centric webs of cul-de-sacs.

This system has its own “nice things” that I enjoy every day: door-to-door convenience on your own schedule, cheap flights between distant cities, and a logistic network that will deliver almost anything in two days…or even the next hour. But it also hardened a built environment that is difficult to retrofit for different “nice things” like rail. The very success of car-based ascendence created a geography whose path dependence only leaves alternatives of prohibitive transcendence.

HSR projects worldwide tend to cluster where dense city pairs sit 300–800 km apart, with strong pre-existing travel demand and robust local transit systems (Campos and de Rus, 2009). National HSR strategies lead to “exclusive corridors,” “hybrid networks,” and “comprehensive national networks,” placing Spain firmly in the last camp (Perl and Goetz, 2015). It’s a country that is clearly attempting to knit together most major regional centers through high-speed lines.

Spain’s choice of a comprehensive network is legible on the ground. High-speed services plug directly into metropolitan rail systems like metros, trams, and intercity bus terminals. Stations are embedded in walkable fabrics rather than isolated off highway interchanges (or distant airports EasyJet often targets). That integration creates what Robert Cervero calls a “transit metropolis”: a region where a workable fit exists between transit services and urban form, so that high-capacity lines feed and are fed by dense, mixed-use neighborhoods (Cervero, 1998).

The economic geography of such a system is subtle. Spain’s HSR lines certainly reduce travel times between Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, and other hubs. But the benefits do not simply diffuse evenly along the tracks. Research reviewing European cases shows that HSR is rarely “transformative” by itself. It mostly reinforces existing centers that can already capture agglomeration effects, especially when combined with supportive policies around land use and local transit. (Vickerman, 2018)

In practice, that means Madrid and Barcelona feel closer together in time and opportunity space, while smaller intermediate cities may or may not see proportional gains. Agglomeration economies intensify in the big nodes. Firms can draw on larger markets, workers can access more jobs, and weekend tourism can boom. At the same time, the network expands the radius within which people can consider “everyday” trips. Like a business meeting in Barcelona, or a spontaneous weekend in Valencia to attend the opera inside Calatrava’s futuristic Opera House.

This is where the growth paradox reappears. EU transport statistics show that, despite decades of rail investment, private cars still account for the majority of inland passenger-kilometers, with rail’s share modest but slowly increasing (European Commission, 2021). HSR does not eliminate car dependence so much as layer another growth-enabling system on top of it. The same reduction in time–space frictions that makes HSR delightful to ride also facilitates more and longer trips overall, even if some of them substitute for flights.

From the traveler’s perspective, a seamless itinerary from Barcelona to Valencia to Madrid feels like a triumph of infrastructure. From an economic geography lens, it is a particular resolution of the trade-off between agglomeration and externalities: more connectivity, more opportunity, more consumption, and more pressure on housing, landscapes, and local services.

If Spain’s network represents one way of managing the growth paradox, what would it take for the United States to “have nice things” again in the form of HSR?

At first glance, the answer seems straightforward: build lines between the major city pairs where distances are right and air travel is heavy — the Northeast Corridor, California’s Los Angeles–San Francisco line, maybe a Chicago-centered Midwest hub. The HSR literature broadly supports this corridor logic. Successful lines typically connect large, dense cities with strong existing flows, while weaker corridors struggle to generate enough ridership to justify their capital costs (Campos and de Rus, 2009; Perl and Goetz, 2015).

But those studies also assume something the United States often lacks: the local transit and land-use framework that lets HSR actually function as part of everyday mobility.

Hong Kong’s “Rail + Property” model is instructive here (Cervero and Murakami’s, 2009). By combining transit infrastructure with dense, mixed-use property development around stations — and capturing a share of the resulting land value increases — Hong Kong has been able to finance much of its rail network while creating environments where rail is the default option for many trips. The value capture mechanisms and zoning regimes are context-specific, but the broader lesson travels: HSR works best when station areas are intense agglomeration zones, not park-and-ride lots surrounded by arterials.

In much of the United States, however, rail stations — where they exist at all — sit in landscapes optimized for cars. Many potential HSR terminal sites are currently flanked by freeways, surface parking, and single-use zoning. Introducing high-speed service into such environments without altering their land-use and transit logics risks reproducing the patterns the research warns against: an expensive, symbolic infrastructure with limited transformative impact.

There is also the matter of scale. Low-density sprawl is, in part, the spatial expression of a car-and-highway technological regime. HSR requires a different spatial regime: one where trip volumes are high between specific nodes and where a substantial share of people and jobs cluster within catchments of good local transit. Without that, high-speed lines struggle to fill trains. Even worse, the per-passenger carbon and financial math becomes far less compelling.

None of this makes HSR impossible in the U.S. It just means that “nice things” are not only about technology or even capital. They are about the entire bundle of institutions, regulations, and growth patterns that give that technology something to plug into. The United States did this once with rail, then again with highways and aviation. Each time, the network we built reorganized economic geography in its own image.

HAVING NICE THINGS, ON PURPOSE

What I learned riding Spanish high-speed trains is not that the United States should abandon its HSR ambitions. Nor did the experience confirm a simple morality tale where Europe has virtuous trains and America has sinful freeways.

Instead, it underscored how transportation technologies are always embedded in larger growth regimes, and how those regimes come with paradoxes baked in. Rail made Chicago while it also helped empty hinterlands and deepen urban inequalities. Highways and airports made postwar American suburbs. They also locked in carbon-intensive sprawl and hollowed out many urban cores. Spain’s HSR enables low-carbon intercity travel and multiplies the number of places you can reasonably visit for a weekend, while car ownership quietly continues to rise.

While economic geography gives us a language of agglomeration economies, time–space compression, and path dependence, this question remains: “why can’t we have nice things?” It becomes less about copying Spanish trains and more about asking what kind of growth we are willing to organize ourselves around.

If the United States wants HSR to be one of its “nice things” again, it will have to be done on purpose and in sequence. Yes it requires corridors where the numbers pencil out, but also land-use reform around stations, reinvestment in local transit, and governance mechanisms. We’ll need structures that not only capture some of the value that rail can generate but also be used to perpetually fund the system.

It will mean recognizing that the very digital tools we already rely on — route planners, booking apps, algorithmic pricing — can either deepen our commitment to car-and-flight geographies or be leveraged to make multi-modal rail the path of least resistance. And in a country where residents in every metropolitan area reject attempts at building new airports, HSR is the only viable alternative. SeaTac’s former operations director once told me (over dinner on a train!) the he believes Denver’s 1995 airport may be America’s last new greenfield airport.

What’s frustrating is America knows how to do big transportation projects. We’ve done it before at different times, with different technologies, and with different winners. Spain was a reminder that “nice things” are possible and they’re never just amenities. They are big decisions about how to grow big. They’re also about who benefits from proximity and what kinds of landscapes we are willing to live with — even if and when the trains do arrive.

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References

Campos, J., & de Rus, G. (2009). Some stylized facts about HSR: A review of HSR experiences around the world. Transport Policy.

Cervero, R. (1998). The transit metropolis: A global inquiry. Island Press.

Cervero, R., & Murakami, J. (2009). Rail and property development in Hong Kong: Experiences and extensions. Urban Studies.

Cronon, W. (1991). Nature’s metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. W. W. Norton.

European Commission. (2021). EU transport in figures: Statistical pocketbook 2021. Publications Office of the European Union.

Eurostat. (2023, May 30). Number of cars per inhabitant increased in 2021. Eurostat News.

Fishman, R. (1987). Bourgeois utopias: The rise and fall of suburbia. Basic Books.(Internet Archive)

Glaeser, E. L., & Kahn, M. E. (2004). Sprawl and urban growth. In J. V. Henderson & J. F. Thisse (Eds.), Handbook of regional and urban economics (Vol. 4, pp. 2481–2527). Elsevier.

Jackson, K. T. (1985). Crabgrass frontier: The suburbanization of the United States. Oxford University Press.(Internet Archive)

National Archives. (2022). National Interstate and Defense Highways Act (1956). U.S. National Archives.(National Archives)

Perl, A. D., & Goetz, A. R. (2015). Corridors, hybrids and networks: Three global development strategies for high speed rail. Journal of Transport Geography.

Stover, J. F. (1997). American railroads (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.(Internet Archive)

The RAND Corporation. (2008). The state of U.S. railroads: A review of capacity and performance. RAND.

UIC (International Union of Railways). (2024). HSR atlas 2024 edition. UIC.Vickerman, R. (2018). Can HSR have a transformative effect on the economy? Transport Policy, 62, 31–37.

Weingroff, R. F. (1996). Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956: Creating the Interstate System. Public Roads.

I’m back! After a bit of a hiatus traveling Southern Europe, where my wife had meetings in Northern Italy and I gave a talk in Lisbon. We visited a couple spots in Spain in between. Now it’s time to dive back into our exploration of economic geography.

My time navigating those historic cities — while grappling with the apps on my phone — turned out to be the perfect, if slightly frustrating, introduction to the subject of the conference, Digital Geography.

The presentation I prepared for the Lisbon conference, and which I hint at here, traces how the technical optimism of early desktop software evolved into the all-encompassing power of Platform Capital. We explore how digital systems like Airbnb and Google Maps have become more than just convenient tools. They are the primary architects of urban value.

They don’t just reflect economic patterns. They mandate them. They reorganize rent extraction by dictating interactions with commerce and concentrating control. This is the new financialized city, and the uncomfortable question we must face is this: Are we leveraging these tools toward a new beneficial height, or are the tools exploiting us in ways that transcends oversight?

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CARTOGRAPHY’S COMPUTATIONAL CONVERGENCE

I was sweating five minutes in when I realized we were headed to the wrong place. We picked up the pace, up steep grades, glissading down narrow sidewalks avoiding trolley cars and private cars inching pinched hairpins with seven point turns. I was looking at my phone with one eye and the cobbled streets with the other.

Apple Maps had led us astray. But there we were, my wife and I, having emerged from the metro stop at Lisbon’s shoreline with a massive cruise ship looming over us like a misplaced high-rise. We needed to be somewhere up those notorious steep streets behind us in 10 minutes. So up we went, winding through narrow streets and passages. Lisbon is hilly. We past the clusters of tourists rolling luggage, around locals lugging groceries.

I had come to present at the 4th Digital Geographies Conference, and the organizers had scheduled a walking tour of Lisbon. Yet here I was, performing the very platform-mediated tourism that the attendees came to interrogate. My own phone was likely using the same mapping API I used to book my AirBnB. These platforms were actively reshaping the Lisbon around us. The irony wasn’t lost on me. We had gathered to critically examine digital geography while simultaneously embodying its contradictions.

That became even more apparent as we gathered for our walking tour. We met in a square these platform algorithms don’t push. It’s not “liked”, “starred”, nor “Instagrammed.” But it was populated nonetheless…with locals not tourists. Mostly immigrants. The virtual was met with reality.

What exactly were we examining as we stood there, phones in hand, embodying the very contradictions we’d gathered to critique?

Three decades ago, as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, I would have understood this moment differently. The UCSB geography department was riding the crest of the GIS revolution then. Apple and Google Maps didn’t exist, and we spent our days digitizing boundaries from paper maps, overlaying data layers, building spatial databases that would make geographic information searchable, analyzable, computable. We were told we were democratizing cartography, making it a technical craft anyone could master with the right tools.

But the questions that haunt me now — who decides what gets mapped? whose reality does the map represent? what work does the map do in the world? — remained largely unasked in those heady days of digital optimism.

Digital geography, or ‘computer cartography’ as we understood it then, was about bringing computational precision to spatial problems. We were building tools that would move maps from the drafting tables of trained cartographers to the screens of any researcher with data to visualize. Marveling at what technology might do for us has a way of stunting the urge to question what it might be doing to us.

The field of digital geography has since undergone a transformation. It’s one that mirrors my own trajectory from building tools and platforms at Microsoft to interrogating their societal effects. Today’s digital geography emerges from the collision of two geography traditions: the quantitative, GIS-focused approach I learned at UCSB, and critical human geography’s interrogation of power, representation, and spatial justice. This convergence became necessary as digital technologies escaped the desktop and embedded themselves in everyday urban life. We no longer simply make digital maps of cities and countrysides. Digital platforms are actively remaking cities themselves…and those who live in them.

Contemporary digital geography, as examined at this conference, looks at how computational systems reorganize spatial relations, urban governance, and the production of place itself. When Airbnb’s algorithm determines neighborhood property values, when Google Maps’ routing creates and destroys retail corridors, when Uber’s surge pricing redraws the geography of urban mobility — these platforms don’t describe cities so much as actively reconstruct them. The representation has become more influential or ‘real’ than the reality itself.

This is much like the hyperreality famously described by the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard — a condition where the simulation or sign (like app interfaces) replaces and precedes reality. In this way, the digital map (visually and virtually) has overtaken the actual territory in importance and impact, actively shaping how we perceive and interact with the real world.

As digital platforms become embedded in everyday life, we are increasingly living in a simulation. The more digital services infiltrate and reconstitute urban systems the more they evade traditional governance. Algorithmic mediation through code written to influence the rhythm of daily life and human behavior increasingly determines who we interact with and which spaces we see, access, and value. Some describe this as a form of data colonialism — extending the logic of resource extraction into everyday movements and behaviors. This turns citizens into data subjects. Our patterns feed predictive models that further shape people, place…and profits. These aren’t simple pipes piped in, or one-way street lights, but dynamic architectures that reorganize society’s rights.

LISBON LURED, LOST, AND LIVED

The scholars gathered in Lisbon trace precisely how digital platforms restructure housing markets, remake retail ecologies, and reformulate the rights of humans and non-humans. Their work, from analyzing platform control over cattle herds in Brazil1 to tracking urban displacement, exemplifies the conference’s focus: making visible the often-obscured mechanisms through which platforms reshape space.

Two attendees I met included Jelke Bosma (University of Amsterdam), who researches Airbnb’s transformation of housing into asset classes, and Pedro Guimarães (University of Lisbon), who documents how platform-mediated tourism hollows out local retail. At the end of the tour, when a group of us were looking to chat over drinks, Pedro remarked, “If you want a recommendation for an authentic Lisbon bar experience, it no longer exists!”

Yet, even as I navigated Lisbon using the very interfaces these scholars’ critique, I was reminded of this central truth: we study these systems from within them. There is no outside position from which to observe platform urbanism. We are all, to varying degrees, complicit subjects. This reflection has become central to digital geography’s method. It’s impossible to claim critical distance from systems that mediate our own spatial practices. So, instead, a kind of intrinsic critique is developed by understanding platform effects through our own entanglements.

Lisbon has become an inadvertent laboratory for this critique. Jelke Bosma’s analysis of AirBnB reveals how the platform has facilitated a shift from informal “home sharing” to professionalized asset management, where multi-property hosts control an increasing share of urban housing stock. His research shows “professionally managed apartments do not only generate the largest individual revenues, they also account for a disproportionate segment of the total revenues accumulated on the platform”.2

This professionalization is driven by AirBnB’s business model and its investment in platform supporting “asset-based professionalization,” which primarily benefits multi-listing commercial hosts. He further explains that AirBnB’s algorithm “rewards properties with high availability rates,” creating what he calls “evolutionary pressures” on hosts to maximize their listings’ availability. This incentivizes them to become full-time tourist accommodations, reducing the competitiveness of long-term residential renting.3

The complexity of this ecosystem was also apparent during our Barcelona stop. What I booked as an “Airbnb” was a Sweett property — a competitor platform that operates through AirBnb’s APIs. This apartment featured Bluetooth-enabled locks and smart home controls inserted into an 1800s building. Sweett’s model demonstrates how platform infrastructure not only becomes an industry standard but is leveraged and replicated by competitors in a kind of coopetition based on the pricing algorithms AirBnB normalized.

In Lisbon, my rental sat in a building where every door was marked with AL (Alojamento Local), the legal framework for short-term rentals. No permanent residents remained; the architecture itself had been reshaped to platform specifications: fire escape signage next to framed photos, fire extinguishers mounted to the wall, and minimized common spaces upon entry. It’s more like a hotel disaggregated into independent units.

Pedro Guimarães’s work provides the commercial counterpart to Jelke’s residential analysis, focusing on how platforms reshape urban consumption. His longitudinal study demonstrates that the “advent of mass tourism” has triggered a fundamental “adjustment in the commercial fabric” of Lisbon’s city center.4

This platform-mediated transformation involves a significant shift from services catering to locals to spaces optimized for leisure and consumption. Pedro’s data confirms a clear decline and “absence of Food retail” and convenience shops. These essential services are replaced by a “new commercial landscape” dominated by HORECA (hotels, restaurants, and cafes), which consolidates the area’s function as a tourist destination.(3)

Crucially, the new businesses achieve algorithmic visibility by manufacturing “authenticity”. They leverage local culture and history, sometimes even appropriating the decor of previous, traditional establishments, as part of “routine business practices as a way of maximizing profit”. The result is the “broader construction of a new commercial ambiance” where local food and goods are standardized and adapted to meet international tourist expectations.(3)

My own searches validated these findings. Searching for restaurants on Google Maps throughout Southern Europe produced a bubble of highly-rated establishments near tourist sites, many featuring nearly identical, tourist-friendly menus. The platforms had learned and enforced preferences, creating a Lisbon curated only for visitors. Furthermore, data exhaust from tourist movements becomes a resource for further optimization. Google’s Popular Times feature creates feedback loops where visibility generates visits, which reinforce visibility. The city becomes legible to itself through platform data, then reshapes itself to optimize what platforms measure.

The Lisbon government, while complicit, also shows resistance. Both scholars highlighted municipal attempts to regulate platform effects, including issuing licensing requirements for AirBnB, zoning restrictions, and promoting local commerce apps that compete with global platforms (e.g., Cabify vs. Uber). These interventions reveal platform urbanism can be contested. However, as Jelke noted, platforms evolve faster than regulation, finding workarounds that maintain extraction while performing compliance.

All through the trip, I felt my own quiet sense of complicity. Every ride we called, every Google search we ran, every Trainline ticket I purchased, fueled the very datasets everyone was dissecting. It’s an uneasy position for a critical digital geographer — studying problematic systems we help sustain. We are forced to understand these infrastructures by seeing. Can that inside view start seeking a new urban being?

CODE CRACKED CITIES. GOVERNANCE GONE

My conference presentation leveraged my insider vantage from three decades at Microsoft. I traced how these digital infrastructures have sunk into everyday life by reshaping labor, space, and governance. From early desktop software I helped to build to today’s platform urbanism, I showed how productivity tools became cloud platforms that now coordinate work, logistics, and mobility across cities.

My framing used a notion of embeddedness through the lens of three key figures in the literature: Karl Polanyi, a political economist who argued that markets are always “embedded” in social and political institutions rather than operating on their own; Mark Granovetter, a sociologist who showed that economic action is structured by concrete social networks and relationships; and Joseph Schumpeter, an economist who described capitalism as driven by “creative destruction,” the continual remaking of industries through innovation and destruction. Platforms help mediate mobility, labor, commerce, and governance, even as they position themselves at arm’s length from the regulatory and civic structures that historically governed urban infrastructures.

This evolution is paradoxical. As platforms weave themselves into the operational fabric of urban life, they also recast the division of responsibilities between state, market, and infrastructure provider. Their ability to sit slightly outside traditional regimes of oversight allows them to appear as ready-made “fixes” for governments and consumers at multiple scales. Yet each fix comes with systemic costs, deepening dependencies on opaque, tightly coupled infrastructures and amplifying the vulnerabilities of urban systems when those infrastructures fail.

This progression reveals distinct phases of infrastructural transformation. It began in the Desktop Era (1980s-1990s) when I started at Microsoft and software was fixed to devices, localizing information work on individual desktops. Updates arrived episodically on physical media like floppy disks — users controlled when to install them. The shift to local area networks gave IT departments a hand in that control. Soon the Internet was commercialized which fundamentally altered not just how software circulated but how it was installed and updated. How it was governed. What once required user consent — inserting a disk, clicking “install” — became silent, automatic, and infrastructural. Today’s cloud services and IoT extend this transformation, embedding computational governance into vehicles, supply chains, and bodies themselves.

This progression reveals distinct phases of infrastructural transformation. The Desktop Era (1980s-1990s) embedded information work in individual devices — the fix was productivity, the limit was scalability. The Network Era (1990s-2000s) transformed software into continuous services — the fix promised seamless coordination, the exposure was infrastructural dependency. The Platform Era (2000s-2010s) decoupled software from devices entirely through APIs and cloud computing — the fix was coordination at scale, the cost was asymmetric control. The current IoT and Surveillance Era embeds platform logic in everyday urban environments — the fix is pervasive coordination. This creates a total dependency on opaque infrastructures provided primarily by three companies: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. This chokepoint is what contributes to global vulnerability and cascading failures.

Recent large-scale cloud incidents, such as the latest AWS outage in Virginia in October — a week before the conference — make this evident. When a single region fails, payment systems, logistics platforms, and mobility services stall simultaneously. This pattern echoes an earlier cloud-network outage in 2021, in the same Virginia region, that effectively took much of Lisbon offline for hours, disrupting everything from transit information to local commerce. In both cases, what looks like flexible, placeless digital infrastructure turns out to be highly geographically concentrated and deeply embedded in local urban systems.

And yet, in nearly every case, these platforms really do operate as fixes at many different geographical scales. For capital, they open new rent-extraction terrains. For workers, they provide precarious income patches through part-time gig work. For users, they deliver connectivity and convenience. But a paradox emerges. Those same apps include affective hooks: user interfaces offering intermittent rewards — dopamine hits stemming from posts, likes, and ratings — embedded within endless, ad-riddled feeds. For cities, they promise smooth, efficient solutions to chronic problems. Yet as my presentation argued, these fixes are mutually reinforcing, binding participants into infrastructures of dependency that appear empowering while deepening exposure to systemic risk.

The paradox is clearest in places like the Sweett apartment in Barcelona. For users, it’s frictionless: Bluetooth locks, smart controls, and seamless check-in. For Sweett it’s all running on AirBnB’s own APIs even as they compete with AirBnB. For locals, the same infrastructure can help homeowners supplement income by renting a room, but it mostly converts affordable real estate into a short-term rental market. This drives up values, rents, and displacement. Platform standards like this spread until they feel inevitable. The logic embeds so deeply in the housing system that not optimizing for transient guests starts to seem irrational. Eventually, alternative futures for the neighborhood become hard to imagine and politically unviable.

What distinguishes digital platforms from earlier infrastructural transformations is their selective embeddedness. At the micro scale, interfaces shape conduct through programmable boundaries. At the meso scale, standards lock institutions into ecosystems. At the macro scale, chokepoints concentrate control in firms whose decisions cascade globally. Across all scales, platforms govern without being governed. They embed coordination while evading accountability.

The conference made clear that digital geography has fully evolved from my days studying ‘computer cartography’ in the 80s. It’s scaled to meet a world organized by the infrastructures I went on to help build. We are no longer observing digital representations of space. We’re mapping out the origins of a new way of thinking about space using algorithms. My tenure at Microsoft, spent building tools that would transform into embedded, governing platforms, was a preview of the world we now inhabit. This is a world where continuous deployment has become continuous urban reorganization. The silence of the automatic software update metastasized into the silent, pervasive governance of the city itself.

Lisbon, then, is not merely a case study but a dramatic staging of hyperreality. The Alojamento Local (AL) sign outside our Lisbon apartment door is not a description of a short-term rental; it is a code enforced reality optimized for a tourist’s online profile. The digital map, our simplified version of reality, has not just overtaken the actual territory; it now precedes it, dictating its function and challenging its original meaning.

This convergence leaves the critical digital geographer in an inherently unstable ethical position. Studying problematic systems while structurally forced to sustain them requires critiquing the data exhaust our own movements and decisions generate.

This deep understanding of digital platforms effects, gained from the trenches, is an asset. How else would this complex entanglement get revealed? It begs to move beyond just observing platform effects to articulating a collective response to this fundamental question: How do we encode accountability back into these infrastructures and rebuild a foundation for civic life that is not merely an optimization of its own surveillance?

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Fall is in full swing here in the northern hemisphere, which means it’s time to turn our attention to economics and economic geography. Triggered by a recent podcast on the origins of capitalism, I thought I’d kick off by exploring this from a geography perspective.

I trace how violence, dispossession, and racial hierarchy aren’t simple externalities or accidents. They emerge out of a system that organized itself and then spread. Capitalism grew out of dispossession of land and human autonomy and became a dominant social and economic structure. It’s rooted in violence that became virtuous and centuries later is locked-in. Or is it?

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EMERGING ENGLISH ENCLOSURES

The dominant and particular brand of capitalism in force today originates in England. Before English landlords and the state violently seized common lands back in the 1300s, economic life was embedded in what historian E.P. Thompson called “moral economies”.(1) These were systems of survival where collective responsibility was managed through custom, obligation, and shared access to resources. Similar systems existed elsewhere.

Long before Europeans arrived at the shores of what is now called North America, Haudenosaunee longhouse economies were sophisticatedly organized around economies of reciprocity. Further south, Andean ayllu communities negotiated labor obligations and access to land was shared. West African systems featured land that belonged to communities and ancestors, not individuals.

Back in medieval English villages, commons weren’t charity, they were infrastructure. Anyone could graze animals or gather firewood. When harvests failed, there were fallbacks like hunting and gathering rights, seasonal labor sharing, and kin networks. As anthropologist Stephen Gudeman shows, these practices reflected cultures of mutual insurance aimed at collective resilience, not individual accumulation.(2)

Then landlords, backed by state violence, destroyed this system to enrich themselves.

From 1348-1349, the bubonic plague killed perhaps half of England’s population. This created a labor shortage that gave surviving so-called peasants leverage. For the first time they could demand higher wages, refuse exploitative landlords, or move to find better conditions.

The elite mobilized state violence to reverse this. In 1351 the state passed The Statute of Labourers — an attempt to freeze wages and restrict worker movement. This serves as an early signal that reverberates today. When property and people come in conflict, the state sides with property. Over the next two centuries, landlords steadily enclosed common lands, claiming shared space as private property. Peasants who resisted were evicted, sometimes killed.

Initial conditions mattered enormously. England had a relatively weak monarchy that couldn’t check landlord aggression like stronger European states did. It also had growing urban markets creating demand for food and wool and post-plague labor dynamics that made controlling land more profitable than extracting rents from secure peasants.

As historian J.M. Neeson details, enclosure — fencing in private land — destroyed social infrastructure.(3) When access to common resources disappeared, so did the safety nets that enabled survival outside of market and labor competition. People simply lost the ability to graze a cow, gather fuel, glean grain, or even rely on neighbors’ obligation to help.

This created a feedback loop:

Each turn made the pattern stronger. Understanding how this happens requires grasping how these complex systems shaped the very people who reproduced them.

The landlords driving enclosure weren’t simply greedy villains. Their sense of self, their understanding of what was right and proper, was constituted through relationships to other people like them, to their own opportunities, and to authorities who validated their actions. A landlord enclosing commons likely experienced this as “improvement”. They believed they were making the land productive while exercising newly issued property rights. Other landlords were doing it, parliament legalized it, and the economics of the time justified it. The very capacity to see alternatives was constrained by relational personal and social positions within an emerging capitalistic society.

This doesn’t excuse the violence or diminish responsibility. But it does reveal how systems reproduce themselves. This happens not primarily through individual evil but through relationships and feedback loops that constitute people’s identities and sense of what’s possible. The moral judgment remains stark. These were choices that enriched someone by destroying someone else’s means of survival. But the choices were made by people whose very selfhood was being constructed by the system they were creating.

Similarly, displaced peasants resisted in ways their social positions made possible. They rioted, appealed to historical customary rights, attempted to maintain the commons they relied on for centuries. Each turn of the spiral didn’t just move resources, it remade people. Peasants’ children, born into a world without commons, developed identities shaped by market dependence — renting their labor in exchange for money. What had been theft became, over generations, simply “how things are.”

By the mid-16th century, England had something new. They’d created a system where most people owned no land, had no customary rights to subsistence, and had to compete in labor markets to survive. This was the essence of capitalism’s emergence. It wasn’t born out of markets (they existed everywhere for millennia) but as market dependence enforced through dispossession. Out of this emerged accumulated actions of actors whose awareness and available alternatives were themselves being shaped by the very system they were simultaneously shaping and sustaining.

REPLICATING PATTERNS OF PLANTATIONS

Once capitalism emerged in England through violent enclosure, its spread wasn’t automatic. Understanding how it became global requires distinguishing between wealth extraction (which existed under many systems) and capitalist social relations (which require specific conditions).

Spain conquered vast American territories, devastating indigenous populations through disease, warfare, and forced labor. Spanish extraction from mines in the 16^th century — like Potosí in today’s Bolivia — were worked by enslaved indigenous and African peoples under conditions that killed them in staggering numbers. Meanwhile, Portugal developed Atlantic island sugar plantations using enslaved African labor.

This expansion of Portuguese agriculture on Atlantic islands like Madeira and São Tomé became a blueprint for plantation economies in the Americas, particularly Brazil. The brutally efficient system perfected there for sugar production — relying on the forced labor of enslaved Africans — was directly transplanted across the ocean, leading to a massive increase in the scale and violence of the transatlantic slave trade.

Both empires generated massive wealth from these practices. If colonial plunder caused capitalism, Spain and Portugal should have industrialized first. Instead, they stagnated. The wealth flowed to feudal monarchies who spent it on palaces, armies, and wars, not productive reinvestment. Both societies remained fundamentally feudal.

England, with virtually no empire during its initial capitalist transformation, developed differently because it had undergone a different structural violence — enclosure of common land that created landless workers, wage dependence, and market competition spiraling into self-reinforcing patterns.

But once those capitalist social relations existed, they became patterns that spread through violent imposition. These patterns destroyed existing economic systems and murdered millions.

English expansion first began close to home. Ireland and Scotland experienced forced enclosures as English landlords exported the template — seize land, displace people, create private regimes, and force the suffering to work for you. This internal colonialism served as testing ground for techniques later deployed around the world.

When English capitalism encountered the Caribbean — lands where indigenous peoples had developed complex agricultural systems and trade networks — the Spanish conquest had already devastated these populations. English merchants and settlers completed the destruction, seizing lands indigenous peoples had managed for millennia while expanding the brutal, enslaved-based labor models pioneered by the Spanish and Portuguese for mining and sugar production.

The plantations English capitalists built operated differently than earlier Portuguese and Spanish systems. English plantation owners were capitalists, not feudal lords. But this was also not simply individual choice or moral character. They were operating within and being shaped by an emerging system of capitalist social relations. Here too they faced competitive pressures to increase output, reduce costs, and compete with other plantation owners. The system’s logic — accumulate to accumulate more — emerged from relational dynamics between competing capitalists. The individual identities as successful plantation owners was constituted through their position within the competitive networks in which they coexisted.

New location, same story. Even here this systemic shaping doesn’t absolve individual responsibility for the horrors they perpetrated. Enslaved people were still kidnapped, brutalized, and worked to death. Indigenous peoples were still murdered and their lands still stolen. But understanding how the system shaped what seemed necessary or moral to those positioned to benefit helps explain how such horror could be so widespread and normalized.

This normalization created new spirals:

This pattern then replicated across even more geographies — Jamaica, Barbados, eventually the American South — each iteration destroying existing ways of life. As anthropologist Sidney Mintz showed, this created the first truly global capitalist commodity chain.(4) Sugar produced by enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples — on their stolen land — sweetened the tea for those English emerging factory workers — themselves recently dispossessed through enclosure.

At the same time, it’s worth calling attention, as Historians Walter Rodney, Guyanese, and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Malawian, have point out, that African societies weren’t passive.(5,6) Some kingdoms initially engaged strategically by trading captives from rival groups and acquiring weapons. These choices are often judged harshly, but they were made by people facing threats to their very existence. They were working with frameworks developed over centuries that suddenly confronted an unprecedented system of extractive violence.

Historians Linda Heywood and John Thornton show that African economic strength and political organization meant Africans often “forced Europeans to deal with them on their own terms” for centuries, even as the terms of engagement became increasingly constrained.(7) This moral complexity matters. These were real choices with devastating consequences, made by people whose capacity to perceive alternatives was constrained by their eventual oppressors amidst escalating violence by Europeans.

Native American scholars have documented similar patterns of constrained agency in indigenous contexts. Historian Ned Blackhawk, Western Shoshone, shows how Native nations across North America made strategic choices — like forming alliances, adapting governance structures, and engaging in trade — all while navigating impossible pressures from colonial expansion.(8)

Historian Jean O’Brien, White Earth Ojibwe, demonstrates how New England indigenous communities persisted and adapted even as settler narratives and violence worked to wipe them out of existence.(9) They were forced to make choices about land, identity, and survival within systems designed to eliminate them. These weren’t failures of resistance but strategic adaptations made by people whose frameworks for understanding and practicing sovereignty, kinship, and territorial rights were being violently overwritten and overtaken by colonial capitalism.

Europeans increasingly controlled these systems through superior military technology making resistance futile. Only when late 19th century industrial weapons were widely wielded — machine guns, munitions, and mechanisms manufactured through capitalism’s own machinations — could Europeans decisively overwhelm resistance and complete the colonial carving of Africa, the Americas, and beyond.

LOCKING-IN LASTING LOOPS

Once patterns spread and stabilize, they become increasingly difficult to change. Not because they’re natural, but because they’re actively maintained by those who benefit.

Capitalism’s expansion created geographic hierarchies that persist today: core regions that accumulate wealth and peripheral regions that get extracted from. England industrialized first through wealth stolen from colonies and labor dispossessed through enclosure. This gave English manufacturers advantages. Namely, they could sell finished goods globally while importing cheap raw materials. Colonies were forced at gunpoint to specialize in export commodities, making them dependent on manufactured imports. That dependence made it harder to develop their own industries. Once the loop closed it became enforced — to this day through institutions like the IMF and World Bank.

Sociologists Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy show how these hierarchies get naturalized through moral categories that shape how people — including those benefiting from and those harmed by the system — come to understand themselves and others.(10) Core regions are portrayed as “developed,” “modern,” “efficient.” Peripheral regions are called “backward,” “corrupt,” “informal.” These aren’t just ideological justifications imposed from above but categories that constitute people’s identities. They shape how investors see opportunities, how policy makers perceive problems, and how individuals understand their own worth.

Meanwhile, property rights established through colonial theft get treated as legitimate. They are backed by international law and written by representatives of colonial powers as Indigenous land claims continue to get dismissed as economically backward. This doesn’t happen through conscious conspiracies. It’s because the frameworks through which “economic rationality” itself is understood and practiced were constructed through and for capitalist social relations. People socialized into these frameworks genuinely perceive capitalist property relations as more efficient, more rational. Their (our?) very capacity to see alternatives is constrained by identities formed within the system in which they (we?) exist.

These patterns persist because they’re profitable for those with power and because people with power were shaped by the very system that gives them power. Each advantage reinforces others. It then gets defended, often by people who genuinely believe they’re defending rationality and efficiency. They (we?) fail to fathom how their (our?) frameworks for understanding economy were forged through forceful and violent subjugation.

INTERRUPTING INTENSIFICATION

Viewing capitalism’s complex geographies shows its evolution is not natural or even inevitable. It emerged, and continues to evolve, as a result of shifting relationships and feedbacks at multiple scales. Recognizing this eventuality creates space for imagining and building more ethical derivatives or alternatives.

If capitalism emerged from particular violent interactions between people in specific places, then different interactions could produce different systems. If patterns locked in through feedback loops that benefit some at others’ expense, then interrupting those loops becomes possible.

Even within capitalist nations, alternative arrangements have persisted or been fought for. Nordic countries and Scotland maintain “Everyman’s Right” or “Freedom to Roam” laws. These are legal traditions allowing public access to private land for recreation, foraging, and camping. These represent partial commons that survived enclosure or were restored through political struggle, showing that private property needn’t mean total exclusion. Even in countries that participate in capitalist economies.

In late 19th century America, Henry George became one of the nation’s most widely read public intellectuals. More people attended his funeral than Abraham Lincoln’s. He argued that land value increases resulting from community development should be captured through land value taxes rather than enriching individual owners. His ideas inspired single-tax colonies, urban reform movements, and influenced progressive era policies.

Farmers organized cooperatives and mutual aid societies, pooling resources and labor outside pure market competition. Urban communities established settlement houses, cooperative housing, and neighborhood commons. These weren’t marginal experiments, they were popular movements showing that even within capitalism’s heartland, people continuously organized alternatives based on shared access, collective benefit, and relationships of reciprocity rather than pure commodity exchange.

Or, consider these current examples operating at different scales and locations:

Community land trusts in cities like Burlington, Vermont remove properties from speculative markets. These trusts separate ownership of the land from the buildings on it, allowing the nonprofit land trust to retain ownership of the land while selling homes at affordable prices with resale restrictions. While they’re trying to break the feedback loop where rising prices displace residents, gentrification and displacement continue in surrounding market-rate housing. This shows how alternatives require scale and time to fully interrupt established feedback loops.

Zapatista autonomous municipalities in Chiapas, Mexico governed 300,000 people through indigenous forms of collective decision-making, refusing both state control and capitalist markets — surviving decades of Mexican government counterinsurgency backed by US military support. In 2023, after three decades of autonomy, the Zapatistas restructured into thousands of hyperlocal governments, characterizing the shift as deepening rather than retreating from their fundamental rejection of capitalist control.

Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement has won land titles for 350,000 families through occupations of unused land. These are legally expropriated under Brazil’s constitutional requirement that land fulfill a social function. Organizing 2,000 cooperative settlements across 7.5 million hectares, this movement has become Latin America’s largest social movement and Brazil’s leading producer of organic food. They’re building schools, health clinics, and cooperative enterprises based on agroecology and direct democracy.(11) Still, titled arable farmland in Brazil is highly concentrated into a minuscule percent of the overall population. Meanwhile, capitalist state structures continue favoring agribusiness and large landowners despite the movement’s successes with organic food production.

Indigenous land back movements across North America demand return of stolen territories as restoration of indigenous governance systems organized around relationships to land and other beings rather than ownership. Through the InterTribal Buffalo Council, 82 tribes are restoring buffalo herds. The Blackfeet Nation is establishing a 30,000-acre buffalo reserve that reconnects fragmented prairie ecosystems and restores buffalo migrations crossing the US-Canada border, reclaiming transnational governance systems that predate colonial boundaries.

These aren’t isolated utopian fantasies, and they’re not perfect, but they’re functioning alternatives, each attempting to interrupt capitalism’s spirals at different points and places. Still, they face enormous opposition because for some reason, existing powerful systems that claim to embrace competition don’t seem to like it much.

Let’s face it, other complex and functional economic systems existed before capitalism destroyed them. Commons-based systems, gift economies, reciprocal obligations organized around kinship and place were sophisticated solutions to survival. And extractive and exploitive capitalism violently replaced them. Most of all them. There are still pockets around the world where other economic geographies persist — including informal economies, mutual aid networks, cooperative enterprises, and indigenous governance systems.

I recognize I’ve clearly over simplified what is a much more layered and complex evolution, and existing alternatives aren’t always favorable nor foolproof. But neither is capitalism. There is no denying the dominant forms of capitalism of today emerged in English fields through violent enclosure of shared space. It then spread through transformation of existing extraction systems into engines of competitive accumulation. And it locked in through feedback loops that benefit core regions while extracting from peripheral ones.

But it also took hold in hearts and habits. It’s shaping how we understand ourselves, what seems possible, and what feels “normal.” We’ve learned to see accumulation as virtue, competition as natural, individual success as earned and poverty as personal failure. The very category of the autonomous ‘individual’ — separate, self-made, solely responsible for their own outcomes — is itself a capitalist construction that obscures how all achievement and hardship emerge from relational webs of collective conditions.

This belief doesn’t just justify inequality, it reproduces it by generating the anxiety and shame that compel people to rent even more of their time and labor to capitalism. Pausing, resting, healing, caring for others, or resisting continue exploitation marks them as haven chosen their own ruin — regardless of their circumstance or relative position within our collective webs.

These aren’t just ideologies imposed from above but the makings of identity itself for all of us socialized within capitalism. A financial analyst optimizing returns, a policy maker promoting market efficiency, an entrepreneur celebrating “self-made” innovation — these aren’t necessarily cynical actors. They’re often people whose very sense of self has been shaped by a system they feel compelled to reproduce. After all, the system rewards individualism — even when it’s toxins poison the collective web — including the web of life.

Besides, if capitalism persists only through the conscious choices of so-called evil people, then exposing their villainy should be sufficient. Right? The law is there to protect innocent people from evil-doers. Right? Not if it persists through feedback loops that shape the identities, perceptions, and moral frameworks of everyone within it — including or especially those who benefit most or have the most to lose.

It seems change requires not just moral condemnation but transformation of the relationships and systems that constitute our very selves. After all, anyone participating is complicit at some level. And what choice is there? For a socio-economic political system that celebrates freedom of choice, it offers little.

To challenge a form of capitalism that can create wealth and prosperity but also unhealthy precarity isn’t just to oppose policies or demand redistribution, and it isn’t simply to condemn those who benefit from it as moral failures. It’s to recognize that the interactions between people and places that created this system through violence could create other systems through different choices. Making those different choices requires recognizing and reconstructing the very identities, relationships, and frameworks through which we understand ourselves and what’s possible. Perhaps even revealing a different form of capitalism that cares.

But it seems we’d need new patterns to be discussed and debated by the very people who keep these patterns going. We’re talking about rebuilding economic geographies based on mutual respect, shared responsibility, and a deep connection to our communities. To each other. This rebuilding needs to go beyond just changing institutions, it has to change the very people those institutions have shaped.

As fall deepens and we watch leaves and seeds spiral down, notice how each follows a path predetermined by its inherited form. Maple seeds spin like helicopters — their propeller wings evolved over millennia to slow descent and scatter offspring far from competition. Their form has been fashioned by evolutionary forces beyond any individual seed’s control, shaped by gusts and gravity in environments filled with a mix of competition and cooperation — coopetition.

Then reflect on this fundamental difference: Unlike seeds locked into their descent, we humans can collectively craft new conditions, consciously charting courses that climb, curl, cascade, or crash.

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References

Chibber, V., & Nashek, M. (Hosts). (2025, September 24). The origins of capitalism. [Audio podcast episode]. In Confronting Capitalism. Jacobin Radio.

1. Thompson, E. P. (1971). The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century. Past & Present, 50(1), 76–136.

2. Gudeman, S. (2016). Anthropology and economy. Cambridge University Press.

3. Neeson, J. M. (1996). Commoners: Common right, enclosure and social change in England, 1700–1820. Cambridge University Press.

4. Mintz, S. W. (1985). Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history. Viking Penguin.

5. Rodney, W. (1972). How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture.

6. Zeleza, P. T. (1997). A modern economic history of Africa: The nineteenth century (Vol. 1). East African Publishers.

7. Heywood, L. M., & Thornton, J. K. (2007). Central Africans, Atlantic creoles, and the foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660. Cambridge University Press.

8. Blackhawk, N. (2023). The rediscovery of America: Native peoples and the unmaking of US history. Yale University Press.

9. OBrien, J. M. (2010). Firsting and lasting: Writing Indians out of existence in New England. U of Minnesota Press.

10. Fourcade, M., & Healy, K. (2017). Seeing like a market. Socio-Economic Review, 15(1), 9–29.

11. Carter, M. (Ed.). (2015). Challenging social inequality: The landless rural workers movement and agrarian reform in Brazil. Duke University Press.

My wife and I recently started watching the mini-series 100 Foot Wave, which follows extreme surfer Garrett McNamara’s quest to ride the mythical 100-foot breaker. The show has put Nazaré, Portugal on the map — not just as a place, but as a symbol of human daring against forces far larger than ourselves.

At the same time, I’ve been listening to physicist-philosopher Sean Carroll’s recent “solo” podcast on the emergence of complexity, tracing how the universe began in simplicity and blossomed into stars, life, and consciousness. These two threads — towering waves and cosmic arcs — collided in my mind, stirring something that has been swelling in me for years: how to reconcile wonder at life’s improbable flourishing with despair at its accelerated unraveling on Earth.

Should despair be the only response? Or is it possible, like the surfers at Nazaré, to recognize the peril without surrendering to it — to ride, however briefly, the wave that could also destroy us?

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THE COSMIC WAVE

Beneath the lighthouse bluff at Nazaré, Portugal opens a canyon 140 miles long and three miles deep — three times deeper than the Grand Canyon. Born of tectonic fractures and sculpted over millions of years, it is less a static feature than a force in its own right: a conduit that gathers the ocean’s momentum and hurls it shoreward. Swells that elsewhere would pass unnoticed are here magnified into walls of water, indifferent to whether they become playground or grave. Geography conspires — wind, current, and rock — but the canyon itself is an accomplice, a reminder that Earth is never merely stage but actor. For today’s surfers, this is possibility. For centuries of fishermen, it was peril. The waves have not changed, but the stance we take toward them has — and that, too, becomes part of the story the canyon tells.

So it is with complexity. Every wave begins simple, a long low swell born of distant winds, that crescendos into chaos at the shoreline. It swirls and curls into turbulent foam piqued in curious but dangerous beauty, only to dissolve back into undertow, bubbles, and silence. Our own cosmos follows the same rhythm, driven by the logic of entropy — the tendency of energy to spread, of order to give way to disorder.1 In the beginning, we know the universe was astonishingly simple and ordered: a hot, uniform plasma, almost featureless in its smoothness.

Imagine the origin of life sitting at origin of a graph. It exists orderly in low entropy and low complexity. But entropy is restless. As it advanced diagonally up and to the right disorder increases in a straight line. This opens space for complexity to emerge. Early on in the cosmos tiny quantum fluctuations stretched into patterns, atoms gathered into stars, stars fused new elements as galaxies spun, coalesced, and collided. Imagine this as the complexity line on our graph. It also grows with time but takes the shape of a parabolic wave climbing upward to a smooth crest as it increases in complexity. Meanwhile, entropy ticks steadily up and to the right as a straight arrow of time forever growing in disorder as our universe continues to increase in complexity.

We are now somewhere on this complexity curve. And this is the paradox of our middle epoch. Entropy never reverses course — disorder always increases — yet along that trajectory the complexity within we live crests, like a wave gathering its final height. For a sliver of cosmic time, the universe has been rich, complex, and with structure. On at least one world in the cosmos, life emerges and even creates complex organisms like us. But if entropy pushes inexorably forward, complexity will not hold indefinitely. Stars will exhaust their fuel, galaxies will drift into darkness, and matter itself may decay. This diagram reminds us that complexity rises only to fall again, tracing an arc back toward simplicity even as entropy continues its steady climb.

In this framing, the universe is not a march from order to chaos but a cycle of simple-to-complex-to-simple played out against entropy’s one-way slope. We live in a fleeting middle where complexity momentarily flourishes. Like the wave at Nazaré, born as a long low swell, steepening into a towering wall of water, then dissolving again into foam, undertow, and silence, our cosmos crests only once. The question is not whether entropy wins — it does — but how we dwell, and what we make of meaning, within the brief surge of complexity it permits.

It took a lot to get us to this point. This complex space that entropy has carved within cosmic time leaves room for novelty. Complexity flourishes locally even as disorder deepens globally. Out of this novel initial imbalance, life emerged — fragile metabolisms harvesting energy from their surroundings, weaving temporary order against the grain of entropy. From single-celled organisms to multicellular bodies, from photosynthesis to predation, biology layered new strategies of survival atop older ones. Evolution diversified life into forests and reefs, wings and fins, neural nets and circulatory systems. These proliferations multiplied niches where order could briefly hold, even as the larger cosmos drifted toward disorder.

Only much later did consciousness arise, one of evolution’s rarest experiments: a capacity not merely to metabolize energy but to reflect upon the arc of complexity itself. With awareness came memory, imagination, culture — tools for navigating the turbulence of entropy’s middle chapter. Entropy still holds the reins: the universe will drift back toward simplicity, whether into a thin uniform haze or some other quiet ending. Yet here, in the middle, entropy’s detour has produced extravagant complexity — including beings capable of gazing back at the wave that carries them and wondering what it means.

THE INDIFFERENT EARTH

This same gaze can also induce speculation. Like speculative realism. Emerging in the early 2000s as a reaction against a tendency to keep reality tethered to human thought and language, its central claim is stark: the world is indifferent to us. Planets orbit, tectonic plates shift, and waves break whether or not anyone is there to see them. From this view, complexity arises from imbalances in matter and energy, from unfinished processes that unfold far beyond human agency. The wave doesn’t care whether it is surfed or feared; it builds from wind, water, and terrain, cresting and dissolving with no meaning to maintain.

Animated globe of tectonic plates shifting across hundreds of millions of years, reminding us that Earth’s movements unfold indifferent to human presence or perception. Source: Reddit. And below is where we go from here:

This speculation hits another conscious reality — optimism. Human optimism is as hard to contain as its constant refrain. Born of the Enlightenment but rebirthed amid the industrial expansion, world wars, and scientific breakthroughs of the early 1900s, modernist optimism leaned confidently on reason and science — a conviction that human ingenuity could transcend natural limits and bend uncertainty toward progress. Time and again, human ingenuity has found ways to stretch the boundaries of what seemed natural limits. Agricultural revolutions multiplied food production beyond what Malthus thought possible. Industrialization transformed energy regimes, substituting fossil carbon for dwindling forests. Urban innovations — from sanitation to electrification — allowed cities to grow far past the thresholds that once doomed them to collapse.2 Each leap suggested that collapse was not destiny but averted through cleverness.

This pattern sustains modernist faith: that humans can intervene wisely in the unfolding of complexity. Where speculative realism emphasizes the indifference of natural forces — entropy driving stars and systems toward disorder regardless of our designs — modernist thought wagers otherwise. It insists that ingenuity allows us not merely to endure the swell but to ride it, to carve temporary stability out of turbulence. In this view, the challenge of complexity is not simply to recognize its inevitabilities but to cultivate the foresight, restraint, and imagination that let human life persist in its fragile middle.

That is if humans “don’t do dumb things.” In other words, humans can and should preserve the conditions that let life and intelligence persist locally, even as the universal drift of entropy continues.3

Armed with the mathematical models that fuel both scientific confidence and human hubris, the world can appear elegant — even in its ugliness. Amidst entropy following a relentless trajectory we see scaling laws enfold organisms, cities, and civilizations alike. The planet itself is rendered as a singular complex system drifting through cosmic time. The physicist’s gaze simplifies this by design — reducing frictions, stripping away differences, until only lawlike arcs remain. As the polymath Heinz von Foerster once put it, “Hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; soft sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems.”4

Geography, by contrast, cannot ignore what falls through those cracks. The sweep of cosmology may remind us that complexity is not uniquely human — stars ignite, galaxies cluster, black holes churn — but such vistas stretch horizons so far that human lifetimes blur into insignificance. Civilizations, like waves, crest and crash in an instant against the span of cosmic time.

To move closer in, at a planetary scale, complexity narrows to the thin envelope where oceans, land, and atmosphere intertwine. It is within this fragile band that agriculture took root, cities rose, and civilizations flourished. Yet scientists, equipped with hard science, warn that this Holocene balance has already been breached.5 The “safe operating space” is no longer secure; the planetary is already in transition.

But even “the planetary” is too smooth a category. These upheavals are not shared evenly across the globe. They are bound to the ground — to places where histories sediment and lives unfold. From colonial dispossession to infrastructures of extraction, from economic logics that amplify inequality to political systems that harden vulnerability, complexity here is never neutral. It is situated, entangled with geographies of power and precarity.

What some describe as “geography envy” names this tension: physicists are drawn to Earth as a rich arena for testing universal models, yet in the process often flatten the contextual and uneven dynamics that geographers insist cannot be ignored.6 Geography refuses such reduction. It insists that the Earth is not merely a planetary system but a lived ground, fractured, uneven, and resistant to smooth incorporation into law-like arcs.

Speculative realism cuts deeper. It reminds us that both elegant arcs and messy ground are parts, never the whole. Reality is not exhausted by smooth models or contextual accounts; it exceeds them both. The planetary is not a canvas awaiting inscription, nor a kaleidoscope of situated and entangled stories. It is a force-field of matter and relation, where floods, famines, extinctions, and upheavals erupt whether or not we have the language to make sense of them.

Our minds, perhaps not yet evolved past binary thinking, want to declare one frame the winner: cosmic order or earthly mess. Modernism sought mastery through universal reason; postmodernism countered by unraveling every claim to stability. But metamodernism, a paradigm emerging in the 2010s, tries to move differently. It oscillates between these poles. It yearns for universal arcs while acknowledging the irreducible particularities of lived experience.

To see the “planetary” through this lens is to move between entropy’s inevitability and the instability of farmers, migrants, and city dwellers negotiating disrupted climates, markets, and states. Flows of capital expose some regions more than others, while systems of governance distribute or intensify that exposure. Human choices, bounded by perception and culture, compound these structural forces in ways behavioral geographers have long traced. All this unfolds across terrains and climates that set the boundaries of risk, while the distribution of plants, animals, and microbes reveals how even the nonhuman world is entangled in shifting geographies of survival.

DWELLING IN DUMBNESS

Complexity, then, cannot be abstracted into a question of whether it will continue. It will — cosmically, biologically, and geologically. The sharper question is how the continuities of our lived complexity register unevenly: whose livelihoods collapse, whose infrastructures crack, whose communities adapt or perish. Physics asks what the laws are; geography insists on whose lives are caught in them, whose ground is destabilized, and at what cost. Speculative realism pushes both disciplines to admit they never touch the whole: the real always exceeds our grasp, even as we are swept inside its turbulence.

Even as we oscillate, it’s unsettling to accept that the Holocene’s narrow band of stability — the “safe operating space” — is already behind us.7 The so-called Great Acceleration shows that nearly every Earth system indicator — from carbon concentration to biodiversity loss, from ocean acidification to nitrogen cycles — has surged beyond Holocene bounds in the span of a single human lifetime. More specifically, the lifetime of my parents and/or me. These curves do not slope gently toward some distant tipping point; they spike upward, marking thresholds already crossed. Talk of future risk obscures the present tense: destabilization is not looming; we are living it.89 The rhythms of climate, soil, and water no longer conform to the stable backdrop against which civilizations emerged.

And yet, here again, we are re-inscribing the Earth as a backdrop through statistics. This triggers a tendency to mother our “Mother Earth”. We’ve taken her thermometer out, read the value, and have reasoned her temperature is life threatening. Humans can’t resist caring for ailing life. But branches of geophilosophy warns us to wake up.10 The planet is no patient and we’re no doctor. Fires, tectonics, and oceans act with or without us, indifferent to notions of care, justice, or intention found in advanced organisms.11 The Anthropocene is not solely the record of human decisions but the scene of inhuman forces that have long shaped life’s precarious conditions. Here speculative realism returns — reality unfolds beyond our categories, whether in cosmic entropy, metabolic scaling, or the volatile indifference of a sick and angry Mother Earth…or the violence of an impending wave.

I recognize this indifference but also recognize it does not absolve us. If anything, it should sharpen the ethical demand. To dwell within dumbness is to accept that the wave is already forming, but also to recognize that some bodies are naturally positioned closer to its break, some can’t surf, and others are made to suffer the buffering effects of a crashing wave. Metamodernism’s pendulum of tragic optimism may just offer a way through the wash. We need not kneel to the naïve belief in perpetual progress, nor retreat into ironic despair, but foster an ethic of persistence that takes seriously both human responsibility and inhuman indifference.

Like Nazaré’s canyon, the Anthropocene multiplies force from conditions already set in motion. Swells crest into walls that thrill the few who ride but have long drowned those with fewer choices. Complexity will continue, but justice requires asking not only how we dwell in turbulence, but whose lives are lifted, and whose are pulled under. The wager is no longer whether to master the wave. It is whether we can learn to inhabit it without denying the unequal costs it exacts.

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It’s been awhile as I’ve been enjoying summer — including getting in my kayak to paddle over to a park to water plants. Time on the water also gets me thinking. Lately, it’s been about what belongs here, what doesn’t, and who decides? This week’s essay follows my trail of thought from ivy-covered fences to international borders. I trace how science, politics, and even physics shape our ideas of what’s “native” and what’s “invasive.”

INVASION, IVY, AND ICE

As I was contemplating this essay in my car at a stop light, a fireweed seedling floated through the sunroof. Fireweed is considered “native” by the U.S. Government, but when researching this opportunistic plant — which thrives in disturbed areas (hence it’s name) — I learned it can be found across the entire Northern Hemisphere. It’s “native” to Japan, China, Korea, Siberia, Mongolia, Russia, and all of Northern Europe. Because its primary dispersal is through the wind, it’s impossible to know where exactly it originated and when. And unlike humans, it doesn’t have to worry about borders.

So long as a species arrives on its own accord through wind, wings, currents, or chance — without a human hand guiding it — it’s often granted the status of “native.” Never mind whether the journey took decades or millennia, or if the ecosystem has since changed. What matters is that it got there on its own, as if nature somehow stamped its passport.

As long time Interactors may recall, I spend the summer helping water “native” baby plants into maturity in a local public green space. A bordering homeowner had planted an “invasive species”, English Ivy, years ago and it climbed the fence engulfing the Sword Ferns, Vine Maples, and towering Douglas Fir trees common in Pacific Northwest woodlands. A nearby concerned environmentalist volunteered to remove the “alien” ivy and plant “native” species through a city program called Green Kirkland. Some of the first Firs he planted are now taller than he is! Meanwhile, on the ground you see remnants of English Ivy still trying to muster a comeback. The stuff is tenacious.

This is also the time of year in the Seattle area when Himalayan Black Berries are ripening. These sprawls of arching spikey vines are as pernicious as they are delicious. Nativist defenders try squelching these invaders too. But unlike English Ivy, these “aliens” come with a sugary prize. You’ll see people walking along the side of roads with buckets and step stools trying their darnedest to pluck a plump prize — taking care not to get poked or pierced by their prickly spurs.

This framing of “invasive” versus “native” has given me pause like never before, especially as I witness armed, masked raids on homes and businesses carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. These government officials, who are also concerned and deeply committed citizens, see themselves as removing what they label “invasive aliens” — individuals they fear might overwhelm the so-called “native” population. As part of the Department of Homeland Security, they work to secure the “Homeland” from what is perceived as an invasion by unwanted human movement. In reflecting on this, I ask myself: how different am I from an ICE agent when I labor to eradicate plants I have been taught to call “invasive” while nurturing so-called “native” species back to health? Both of us are acting within a worldview that categorizes beings as either threats or treasures. At what cost, and with what consequences?

According to a couple other U.S. agencies (like the National Park Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture) species are considered native if they were present before European colonization (i.e., pre-1492). The idea that a species is “native” if it was present before 1492 obviously reflects less a scientific ecological reality than a political opinion of convenience. Framing nativity through the lens of settler history rather than ecological process ignores not only millennia of Indigenous land stewardship, but prehistoric human introductions and natural migrations shaped by climate and geology. Trying pin down what is “native” is like picking up a squirming earthworm.

These little critters, which have profoundly altered soil ecosystems in postglacial North America, are often labeled “naturalized” rather than “native” because their arrival followed European colonization. Yet this classification ignores the fact that northern North America had no earthworms at all for thousands of years after the glaciers retreated. There were scraped away with the topsoil. What native species may exist in North America are confined to the unglaciated South.

What’s disturbing isn’t just the worms’ historical presence but the simplistic persistent narrative that ecosystems were somehow stable until 1492. How is it possible that so many people still insist it was colonial contact that supposedly flipped some ecological switch? In truth, landscapes have always been in motion. They’ve been shaped and reshaped by earth’s systems — especially human systems — long before borders were drawn. Defining nativity by a colonial decree doesn’t just flatten ecological complexity, it overwrites a deep history of entangled alteration.

MIGRATION, MOVEMENT, AND MEANING

If a monarch butterfly flutters across the U.S. border from Mexico, no one demands its papers. There are no butterfly checkpoints in Laredo or Yuma. It rides the wind northward, tracing ancient pathways across Texas, the Midwest, all the way to southern Canada. The return trip happens generations later — back to the oyamel forests in the state of Michoacán. This movement is a marvel. It’s so essential we feel compelled to watch it, map it, and even plant milkweed to help it along. But when human beings try to make a similar journey on the ground — fleeing drought, violence, or economic collapse — we call it a crisis, build walls, and question their right to belong.

This double standard starts to unravel when you look closely at the natural world. Species are constantly on the move. Some of the most astonishing feats of endurance on Earth are migratory: the Arctic tern flies from pole to pole each year; caribou migrate thousands of miles across melting tundra and newly paved roads.1 GPS data compiled in Where the Animals Go shows lions slipping through suburban gardens and wolves threading through farmland, using hedgerows and railways like interstates.2 Animal movement isn’t the exception; it’s the ecological norm.

And it’s not just animals. Plants, too, are masters of mobility. A single seed can cross oceans, whether on the back of a bird, in a gust of wind, or tucked into a canoe by a human hand. In one famous case, researchers once proposed that a tree found on a remote Pacific Island must have arrived via floating debris. But later genetic and archaeological evidence suggested a different story: it may have arrived with early Polynesian voyagers — people whose seafaring knowledge shaped entire ecosystems across the Pacific.

DNA evidence and phylogeographic studies (how historical processes shape the geographic distribution of genetic lineages within species) now support the idea that Polynesians carried plants such as paper mulberry, sweet potato, taro, and even some trees across vast ocean distances well before the Europeans showed up. What was once considered improbable — human-mediated dispersal to incredibly beautiful and remote islands — is now understood as a core part of Pacific ecological and cultural history.

Either way, that plant didn’t ask to be there. It simply was. And with no obvious harm done, it was allowed to stay.

We humans can also often conflate our inability to perceive harm with the idea that a species “belongs.” We tend to assume that if we can’t see, measure, or immediately notice any negative impact a species is having, then it must not be causing harm — and therefore it “belongs” in the ecosystem. But belonging is contextual. It can be slow to reveal and is rarely absolute.

British ecologist and writer Ken Thompson has spent much of his career challenging our tidy categories of “native” and “invasive.” In his book Where Do Camels Belong?, he reminds us that the “belonging” question is less about biology than bureaucracy.3 Camels originated in North America and left via the Bering land bridge around 3–5 million years ago. They eventually domesticated in the Middle East about ~3,000–4,000 years ago to be used for transportation, milk, and meat. Then, in the 19th century, British colonists brought camels to Australia to help explore and settle the arid interior. Australia is now home to the largest population of feral camels in the world. So where, exactly, do they “belong”? Our ecological borders, like our political ones, often make more sense on a map than they do in the field.

Even the language we use is steeped in militaristic and xenophobic overtones. Scottish geographer Charles Warren has written extensively on how conservation debates are shaped by the words we choose. In a 2007 paper, he argues that terms like invasive, alien, and non-native don’t just describe, but pass judgment.4 They carrying moral and political weight into what should be an ecological conversation. They conjure feelings of threat, disorder, and contamination. When applied to plants, they frame restoration as a battle. With people, they prepare the ground for exclusion.

Which is why I now hesitate when I yank ivy or judge a blackberry bramble. I still do it because I believe in fostering ecological resilience and am sensitive to slowing or stopping overly aggressive and harmful plants (and animals). But now I do it more humbly, more questioningly. What makes something a threat, and who gets to decide? What if the real harm lies not in movement of species, but in the stories we tell about it?

MIGRATION, MYTHS, AND MATTER

The impulse to define who belongs and who doesn’t isn't limited to the forest floor. It echoes in immigration policy, in the architecture of the border wall, and in the sterile vocabulary of "population control." Historians of science Sebastian Normandin and Sean Valles have examined how science, politics, and social movements intersect. In a 2015 paper, they show that many conservation policies we take for granted today — ostensibly about protecting ecosystems — emerged from the same ideological soil that nourished eugenics programs and early anti-immigration campaigns.5 What began as a concern for environmental balance often mutated into a desire for demographic purity.

We see this convergence in the early 1900s, when the U.S. Dillingham Commission launched an exhaustive effort to classify immigrants by race, culture, and supposed “fitness” for American life. Historian Robert Zeidel, in his 2004 account of U.S. immigration politics, details how the Dillingham Commission’s findings hardened the notion that certain groups — like certain species — are inherently better suited to thrive in the nation’s “ecological” and cultural landscape.6 Their conclusions fueled the 1924 Immigration Act, one of the most restrictive in U.S. history, and laid groundwork for a century of racialized immigration policy.

These ideas didn’t stay in the realm of policy. They seeped into science. Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, built racial categories into the very fabric of biological classification. Historian of science Lisbet Koerner, in her 1999 study of Carl Linnaeus, shows how his taxonomy reflected and reinforced 18th-century European ideals of empire and control.7 His system sorted not only plants and animals, but people. Nature, under his framework, was not only to be known but to be ordered. As Linneaus often said, "God created, Linnaeus organized." Brad observes that Carl also spoke in the third person.

The Linnaeus legacy lingers. Legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts8 and anthropologist Robert Sussman9 both argue that modern science has quietly resurrected racial categories in genetic research, often under the guise of ancestry testing or precision medicine. But race, like “nativity,” is not a biological fact — it’s a social construct. Anthropologist Jonathan Marks10 and geneticist David Reich11 reach the same conclusion from different directions: the human genome tells a story not of fixed, isolated groups, but of constant migration, mixing, and adaptation.

This is why defining species as “native” or “invasive” based on a colonial timestamp like 1492 is more than just a scientific shortcut. It’s a worldview that imagines a pristine past disrupted by foreign intrusion. This myth is mirrored in nationalist movements around the globe — including the troubling MAGA blueprint: Project 2025.

When we talk about securing borders, protecting bloodlines, or restoring purity, we’re often echoing the same flawed logic that labels blackberry and ivy as existential threats, while ignoring the systems that truly destabilize ecosystems — like extractive capitalism, industrial agriculture, and global trade. But even these forces may not be purely ideological. As complexity theorist Yaneer Bar-Yam, founder of the New England Complex Systems Institute, has argued, large-scale societal and ecological patterns often emerge not through top-down intent, but through the bottom-up dynamics of complex systems under stress.12

These dynamics are shaped by entropy — not in the popular sense of disorder, but as the tendency of energy and influence to disperse across systems in unpredictable ways as complexity increases. In this view, what we experience as exploitation or collapse may also be the inevitable result of a world growing too intricate to govern by simple, centralized rules.

Consider those early Polynesians. Perhaps we best think of them as complex, intelligent, tool-bearing animals who crossed vast oceans long before Europe entered the story. They didn't defy nature, they expressed it. They simply scaled up the same dispersal seen in wind-blown seeds or migratory birds. Their movement, like that of camels, fireweed, or monarchs, reminds us that life is always pushing outward, but because it can. This outward motion follows physics.

Even in an open system like Earth, the Second Law of Thermodynamics holds sway. Energy flows in and life finds ever more complex ways to move it along. A sunbeam warms a rock, releasing energy into the air above. That warmth lifts air, forming wind. The wind carries seeds across fields and fence lines, scattering the future wherever friction allows. Seeds take root, drawing in sunlight, water, and minerals. They build structure to move energy forward. Muscles twitch as animals rise to consume that energy then follow warmth, water, or instinct. Wings of the bird lift so it may fly. Herds of the plain press so they may migrate.

These patterns stretch across microseconds, minutes, and millennia — creeks, crevices, and continents. And eventually, humans launch canoes in the ocean tracing the same thermodynamic pull, riding currents of wind, wave, desire, and need. None of it defies nature. It is nature. It can be seen as different forms of energy dispersing through motion, life, and relationship at different scales.

One of the first scientists to recognize this was a Belgian chemist in the 1970s who saw something radical in the chaos of fluctuations and energy flows in nonequilibrium chemical systems: that complexity could arise not despite entropy, but because of it. Ilya Prigogine called these emergent forms dissipative structures — systems that spontaneously self-organize to transform and disperse energy more efficiently. A familiar example is a snowflake, which forms highly ordered crystal structures as water vapor crystallizes under just the right conditions. This beautiful pattern represents order emerging directly from the molecular chaos of a winter storm.

Extending this idea, we might begin to see migration, dispersal, and adaptation not as disruptions or disturbances, but as natural expressions of complex systems tirelessly working toward order. These processes are ways in which living systems unfold, expand, and improvise — dynamically responding to the flows of energy they must transform to sustain themselves and their environments.

To call such movement unnatural is to forget that we, too, are part of nature’s restless patterning. The real challenge isn’t to freeze the world in place, but to understand these flows so we might shape them with care, rather than react to them with fear.

To be clear: not all movement is benign. Some species — like kudzu or cane toads — have caused undeniable ecological damage. But the danger lies not in movement itself, but in the conditions of arrival and the systems of control. Climate change, habitat destruction, and globalization create the disturbances that opportunistic species exploit. They don’t “invade” so much as arrive when the door is already open.

And entropy doesn’t mean indifferent inevitability, and complexity doesn’t mean plodding passivity. Living systems are capable of generating counter-forces like cooperative networks, defensive alliances, and feedback loops. This form of collective actions resists domination and reasserts balance. Forests shade out overzealous colonizers, coral fish guard polyps from overgrazers, microbial webs starve out pathogens. Agency, be it a fungus or a human community, operates within the same flow of energy, shaping it toward persistence, resilience, and sometimes justice.

So, when I pull ivy or water a fern, I do it with a different awareness now. I see myself not as a border guard, but as one actor in a much older drama — a participant in the ceaseless give-and-take through which living systems maintain their balance. My hands are not outside the flow, but in it, nudging here, ceding there, trying to tip the scales toward diversity, reciprocity, and resilience. It’s not purity I’m after, but possibility: a landscape, human and more-than-human, capable of adapting to what comes next.

It’s hard to ignore the situation in Texas, especially as I turn my attention to physical geography. 'Flash Flood Alley', as it’s called by hydrologists, had already been pounded by days of relentless rain, soaking the soil and swelling the rivers. It left the region teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Then came the deluge. A torrent so sudden and intense it dumped a month’s worth of rain in under an hour. Roads turned to rivers. Homes were lost. Lives were too. As the floodwaters recede, what remains isn’t just devastation — it’s a lesson. One about a changing water cycle, a shifting climate, and a stubborn way of thinking that still dominates how we plan for both.

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DROUGHT AND DELUGE

Is Texas drowning due to climate change? Just three years ago, we were told it’s drying up. That’s when a record drought emptied reservoirs and threw aquifers into steep decline. From 2011 to 2015, 90% of the state was in extreme drought. This seesaw between soaked and scorched is the kind of muddled messaging that lets climate deniers laugh all the way to the comment section.

The truth is Texas is drying up AND drowning.

This paradox isn’t just Texas-sized — it’s systemic. Our habit of translating global climate shifts into local weather soundbites is failing us.

According to hydrologist Benjamin Zaitchik and colleagues, writing in Nature Water in 2023, two dominant narratives frame how these events are explained.1 Public and policy reporting on patterns like those in Texas usually falls into two camps:

1. The "Wet-Get-Wetter, Dry-Get-Drier" (WWDD) hypothesis — climate change intensifies existing hydrological patterns, bringing more rain to wet regions and more drought to dry ones.

2. The "Global Aridification" (GA) hypothesis — warming increases the atmosphere's "thirst," drying out land even where rainfall remains steady.

Both frameworks can explain real conditions, but the recent Texas floods expose their limits. If a region long seen as drying can also produce one of the most intense floods in U.S. history, are these ideas flawed — or just too rigidly applied?

WWDD and GA aren’t competing truths. They’re partial heuristics for a nonlinear, complex water system. Yet our brains favor recent events, confirm existing beliefs, and crave simple answers. So we latch onto one model or the other. But these simplified labels often ignore scale, context, and the right metrics. Is a region drying or wetting based on annual rainfall? Soil moisture? Streamflow? Urbanization? Atmospheric demand?

Texas — with its sprawling cities, irrigated farms, and dramatic east–west gradient in rainfall and vegetation — resists binary climate narratives. One year it exemplifies GA, with depleted aquifers and parched soil. The next, like now, it fits WWDD, as Tropical Storm Barry — arriving after days of relentless rainfall — stalled over saturated land, unleashing a torrent so fierce it overwhelmed the landscape.

Zaitchik and his team call for a clarification approach. Instead of umbrella labels, we should specify which variables and timeframes are shifting. A place can be parched, pummeled, and primed to flood — sometimes all in the same season. And those shifting moods in the water set the stage for something deeper — a mathematical reckoning.

MATH MEETS MAYHEM

This debate boils down to three basic equations — one for the land, one for the sky, and one for how the system changes over time. But that means prying open the black box of math symbols still treated like sacred script by academics and STEM pros.

Let’s be clear, these equations aren’t spells. They’re just shorthand — like a recipe or a flowchart. The symbols may look like hieroglyphs, but they describe familiar things.

Precipitation falls (P). Water evaporates or gets sucked up by plants — evapotranspiration (E). Some runs off (R). Some sinks in (S). Time (t) tells us when it’s happening. The 'd' in dS and dt just means "change in" — how much storage (S) increases or decreases over time (t). The Greek letters — ∇ (nabla) and δ (delta) — simply mean change, across space and time. If you can track a bank account, you can follow these equations. And if you’ve ever watched a lawn flood after a storm, you’ve seen them in action.

You don’t need a PhD to understand water, just a willingness to see through the symbols.

1. LAND: The Water Balance Equation
   P − E = R + dS/dt
   Precipitation (P) minus evapotranspiration (E) equals runoff (R) plus the change in stored water (dS/dt).

2. SKY: The Vapor Flux Equation
   P − E = ∇ ∙ Q
   This links land and atmosphere. ∇ (nabla) tracks change across space, and Q is vapor flux — the amount of moisture moving through the atmosphere from one place to another, carried by winds and shaped by pressure systems. The dot product (∙) measures how much of that vapor is moving into or out of an area. So ∇ ∙ Q shows whether moist air is converging (piling up to cause rain) or diverging (pulling apart and drying).

3. SYSTEM: The Change Equation
   δ(∇ ∙ Q) = δ(P − E) = δ(R + dS/dt)
   This shows how if vapor movement in the sky changes (δ(∇ ∙ Q)), it leads to changes in net water input at the surface (δ(P − E)), which in turn changes the balance of runoff and stored water on land (δ(R + dS/dt)). It’s a cascading chain where shifts in the atmosphere ripple through the landscape and alter the system itself.

In a stable climate, these variables stay in sync. But warming disrupts that balance. More heat means more atmospheric moisture (E), and altered winds move vapor differently (∇ ∙ Q). The math still balances — but now yields volatility: floods, droughts, and depleted storage despite “normal” rainfall. The equations haven’t changed. The system has.

Texas fits this emerging pattern:

• Rainfall extremes are up: NOAA shows 1-in-100-year storms are now more frequent, especially in Central and East Texas.2

• Soil and streamflow are less reliable: NASA and USGS report more zero-flow days, earlier spring peaks, and deeper summer dry-outs.34

• Urban growth worsens impacts: Impervious surfaces around Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas accelerate runoff and flash floods.5

These shifts show how climate and land use intersect. It’s not just wetter or drier — it’s both, and more volatile overall.

In 2008, hydrologist Peter Milly and colleagues declared: “Stationarity is dead.”6
For decades, water planning assumed the future would mirror the statistically stationary and predictable past. But flood maps, dam designs, and drought plans built on that idea no longer hold.

We laid out land with rulers and grids, assuming water would follow. But floods don’t care about straight lines, and drought ignores boundaries. Modern hydrology rested on Cartesian geometry — flat, fixed, and predictable. But the ground is moving, and the sky is changing. The first two equations describe water in place. The third captures it in motion. This is a geometry of change, where terrain bends, vapor thickens, and assumptions buckle. To keep up, we need models shaped like rivers, not spreadsheets. The future doesn’t follow a line. It meanders.

And yet, we keep describing — and planning and engineering — for a world that no longer exists.

Somehow, we also need journalists — and readers — to get more comfortable with post-Cartesian complexity. Soundbites won’t cut it. If we keep flattening nuance for clarity, we’ll miss the deeper forces fueling the next flood.

VAPOR AND VELOCITY

If Texas is drying and flooding at once, it’s not a local contradiction but a symptom of a larger system. Making sense of that means thinking across scales — not just in miles or months, but how change moves through nested systems.

Cartesian thinking fails again here. It craves fixed frames and tidy domains. But climate operates differently — it scales across time and space, feeds back into itself, and depends on how systems connect. It’s scalar (different behaviors emerge at different sizes), recursive (what happens in one part can echo and evolve through others), and relational (everything depends on what it touches and when). What looks like local chaos may trace back to a tropical pulse, a meandering jet stream, or a burst of vapor from halfway across the world.

Zaitchik’s team shows that local water crises are often global in origin. Warming intensifies storms — but more crucially, it shifts where vapor moves, when it falls, and how it clusters[1]. The water cycle isn’t just speeding up. It’s reorganizing.

Thanks to the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship — a principle from thermodynamics that describes how warmer air effects vapor — each 1°C of warming allows the atmosphere to hold about 7% more moisture. That supercharges storms. Even if rain events stay constant, their intensity rises. The sky becomes a loaded sponge — and when it squeezes, it dumps.

But it’s not just about capacity. It’s about flow. Moisture is moving differently, pooling unpredictably, and dumping in bursts. That’s why Texas sees both longer dry spells and shorter, more intense storms. Systems stall. Jet streams wander. Tropical remnants surge inland. These aren’t bugs. They’re features.

The July 2025 Texas flood may have begun with Gulf moisture: its roots trace to warming oceans, trade wind shifts, and a migrating Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) — the low-latitude belt where trade winds converge and drive global precipitation patterns. As these systems reorganize, mid-latitude regions like Texas face more extreme rains punctuated by longer droughts[1]. More extremes. Fewer in-betweens.

So Texas’s water future isn’t just about reservoirs and runoff. It’s about vapor, velocity, and vertical motion and the hidden machinery of a water cycle behaving in unfamiliar ways.

This NOAA satellite (GOES-19 captures imagery every 5-10 minutes) loop captures the moisture swirling through the mid-atmosphere (Band 9 is ~20,000 feet) as the Storm pushed inland from July 3rd to the 6th. The darker blues show vapor pooling and stalling over Central and East Texas. This loaded sky, unable to drain, setting the stage for the deadly flash flood. It’s a visceral glimpse of vapor in motion, moving slowly but with devastating impact. A changing water cycle, playing out above our heads. This is what vapor, velocity, and vertical motion look like when they converge.

And then there’s us.

While climate reshapes water, human decisions amplify it. In 2023, hydrologist Yusuke Pokhrel and colleagues showed how irrigation, land use, and water withdrawals distort regional hydrology.7

Ignoring these human factors leads to overestimating runoff and underestimating atmospheric thirst. In some basins, human use matters more than what falls from the sky.

Texas proves the point:

• Irrigation in West Texas raises evapotranspiration and disrupts seasonal flow. Large-scale withdrawals from the Ogallala Aquifer reduce groundwater availability downstream, shifting the timing and volume of river flows and accentuates drought conditions in already water-stressed regions[4].

• Urban sprawl accelerates runoff and raises flood risk. Expanding suburbs and cities pave over natural land with impervious surfaces, reducing infiltration and sending stormwater rushing into creeks and rivers, often overwhelming drainage systems and increasing the frequency and intensity of flash floods[5].8

• Aging reservoirs can worsen both floods and droughts. Designed for a past climate, many are now ill-suited for more volatile conditions — struggling to buffer flood peaks or store enough water during prolonged dry spells. In some cases, outdated operations or degraded infrastructure magnify the very extremes they were meant to manage.9

Texas is a dual-exposure system. The climate shifts. The land shifts. And when they move together, their impacts multiply.

Texas isn’t an outlier — it’s a harbinger. A place where drought and deluge don’t trade places, but collide — sometimes within the same week, on the same watershed. Where the sky swells and the soil gives way. Where century-old assumptions about rain, rivers, and runoff crumble under the pressure of converging extremes.

The story isn’t just about rising temperatures. It’s about a water cycle rewritten by vapor and velocity, by concrete and cultivation, by geometry that flows instead of fixes. As climate shifts and land use compounds those changes, our past models grow brittle. And our narratives? Too often, still binary.

To move forward, we need more than updated flood maps. We need a new language rooted in complexity, scale, and feedback. One that can handle the meander, not just the mean. And we need the will to use it in our plans, our policies, and our press.

Because the future isn’t forged only by what we build. It’s shaped by what we burn. Roads and rooftops matter amidst a rising CO₂. When vapor collides with concrete, we’re reminded disasters aren’t just natural — they’re engineered.

This isn’t just about preparing for the next storm. It’s about admitting the old coordinates no longer work and drawing new ones while we still can.

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Happy Fourth of July and welcome to a brand new season of Interplace! We’re kicking things off with a video of my cross-country rail trip that took about four days to ride…and nearly twice as long to edit and produce. This first ever Interplace video launches our summer focus on physical geography and the environment. I hope you enjoy a slow journey through space, place, and the unexpected beauty between the coasts.

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My daughter in Manhattan’s East Village sent me an article about the curated lives of the “West Village girls.”1 A few days later, I came across a provocative student op-ed from the University of Washington: "Why the hell do we still go to Starbucks?"2 The parallels stood out.

In Manhattan’s West Village, a spring weekend unfolds with young women jogging past a pastry shop in matching leggings, iced matcha lattes in hand. Some film it just long enough for TikTok. Across the country, students cycle through Starbucks in Seattle’s U-District like clockwork. The drinks are overpriced and underwhelming, but that’s not the point. It’s familiar. It's part of a habitual loop.

Different cities, similar rhythms. One loop is visual, the other habitual. But both show how space and emotion sync. Like an ambient synth track, they layer, drift, and return. If you live in or near a city, you exist in your own looping layers of emotional geography.

FLASH FEEDS

My daughter has been deep into modular synthesis lately — both making and listening. It’s not just the music that intrigues her, but the way it builds: loops that don’t simply repeat, but evolve, bend, and respond. She’ll spend hours patching sounds together, adjusting timing and tone until something new emerges. She likens it to painting with sound. Watching her work, it struck me how much her synth music mirrors city life — not in harmony, but in layers. She’s helped me hear urban rhythms differently.

Like a pop synth hook, the Flash loop is built for attention. It's bright, polished, and impossible to ignore. Synth pop thrives on these quick pulses — hooks that grab you within seconds, loops that deliver dopamine with precision. Urban spaces under this loop do the same. They set a beat others fall in line with, often flattening nuance in exchange for momentum.

This isn’t just about moving to a beat. It’s about becoming part of the beat. When these fast loops dominate, people start adapting to the spaces that reflect them. And those spaces, in turn, evolve based on those very behaviors. It’s a feedback loop: movement shaping meaning, and meaning shaping movement. The people become both the input and the output.

In this context, the West Village girl isn’t just a person — she’s a spatial feedback loop. A mashup of Carrie Bradshaw nostalgia, Instagram polish, and soft-lit storefronts optimized for selfies. But she didn’t arrive from nowhere. She emerged through a kind of spatial modeling: small choices, like where to brunch, where to pose, where to post are repeated so often they remade a neighborhood.

Social psychologist Erving Goffman, writing in the 1950s, called this kind of self-presentation "impression management."3 He argued that much of everyday life is performance. Not in the theatrical sense, but in how we act in response to what we expect others see. Urban spaces, especially commercial ones, are often the stage. But today, that performance isn’t just for others in the room. It’s for followers, algorithms, and endless feeds. The “audience” is ambient, but its expectations are precise.

As places like the West Village get filtered through lifestyle accounts and recommendation algorithms, their role changes. They no longer just host people, but mirror back a version of identity their occupants expect to see. Sidewalks become catwalks. Coffee shops become backdrops. Apartment windows become curated messes of string lights and tasteful clutter. And increasingly, the distinction between what’s lived and what’s posted collapses.

This fast loop — what we might call spatial virality — doesn’t just show us how to act in a place. It scripts the place itself. Stores open where the foot traffic is photogenic. Benches are placed for backdrops, not rest. Even the offerings shift: Aperol spritzes, charm bars, negroni specials sold not for taste but for tagability.

These are the high-tempo loops. They grab attention and crowd the mix. But every modular synth set, like a painting, needs contrast.

So some people opt out, or imagine doing so. Not necessarily with loud protest, but quiet rejection. They look for something slower. Something that isn’t already trending...unless the trend of routine sucks you in.

PULSING PATTERNS

If Flash is the pop hook, Pulse is the counter-melody. It could be a bassline or harmony that brings emotional weight and keeps things grounded. In music, you may not always notice it, but you'd miss it if it were gone. In cities, this loop shows up in slow friendships, mutual aid, and cafés that begin to feel like second homes. These are places where regulars greet one another by name. Where where hours melt through conversations. It satisfies a need to be seen, but without needing to perform. It’s what holds meaning when spectacle fades.

If the fast loop turns space into spectacle, the counter loop tries to slow it down. It lures the space to feel lived in, not just liked. It’s not always radical. Sometimes it’s just choosing a different coffee shop.

Back in Seattle’s University District, students do have options. Bulldog News. Café Allegro. George Coffee. These places don’t serve drinks meant to be posted. They serve drinks meant to be tasted. They’re not aesthetic first. They’re relational. These are small gestures that build culture.

Social psychologists Susan Andersen and Serena Chen describe this through what they call relational self theory.4 We don’t become ourselves in isolation. We become ourselves with and through others — especially those we repeatedly encounter. Think about the difference between ordering coffee from a stranger versus someone who knows you like sparkling water with your Cortado. It’s a different kind of transaction. It eases things. It reinforces your own loop.

So why do people routinely return to Starbucks? It isn’t just about caffeine addiction. It’s about being part of a socially reinforced rhythm — anchored in convenience, recognition, and the illusion of choice.

Stores like Starbucks are often strategically located for maximum accessibility and convenience. They're nestled near transit hubs, along commuter corridors, or within high-traffic pedestrian zones. These placements aren’t arbitrary. They’re optimized to integrate into daily routines. It's less like a countermelody and more like a harmonic parallel melody. As a result, practical considerations like proximity, availability, and reliability often override ideological concerns.

People return not because the product is exceptional, but because the store is exactly where and when they need it. The Starbucks habit isn’t only about routine, but rhythmic predictability that appears personal. In this sense, it functions as a highly accessible pulse: a loop that’s easy to join and hard to break. It's made of proximity, subtle trust, and convenience, but is dressed as choice.

My daughter's chosen counter loop lives in the East Village — not far, geographically, from the Instagram inspired brunch queues of Bleecker Street. Her loops are different. She carries conversations across record stores, basement venues, bookstores with hand-scrawled signs, and a few stubborn restaurants.

These are Places where the playlists aren't streaming through Spotify. Her city isn’t organized around visibility. It’s organized around presence. Around being seen to be honored and remembered. Like the bookstore dude who knows the lore on everyone, or the cashier who waves her through without paying, or her Brooklyn bandmate friends who fold her in like family.

Sure, this scene intersects with the popular loops — modular synths are having a moment — but it sidesteps the sameness. It stays unpredictable, grounded in curiosity and care rather than clicks. The gear is still patched by hand. The performances are messy and often temporary. And yet, the loops — literal and figurative — keep returning. Not because they’re engineered for attention, but because they allow people to build something slowly...together...from the inside. Especially when done in partnership with another synthesist.

You might see this in your own city. The quiet transformation of spaces: a café hosting a poetry night; a yoga studio turned warming shelter during the storm; a laundromat that leaves a stack of free books near the dryers. These are not accidents. They are interventions. Sometimes small, sometimes subtle...but always deliberate.

They stand in contrast to the churn of the viral. They also offer an alternative to despair. Because the counter loop isn’t just critique. It’s care enacted. And care takes time.

Still, even pulsing care needs structure. It needs floor drains, power outlets, and open hours. It needs a stable substructure.

UNDERCURRENT UNDERTONES

Undertone is the foundational structure on which other elements are built. It's the core of modular synth music. This isn’t just rhythm. It’s the subtle, slow, and reactive scaffolding. These core loops evolve and shift setting the timing and emotional tonality for everything else.

They don’t dominate, but they shape the flow. They respond to what surrounds them to ground the composition. Cities, too, have these base layers. Often imperceptible, they are visceral, ambient, and persistent. They come into focus with the smell of rain on warm pavement. The clink of a key in a front door. These are not songs you hum, they’re the ones your heart and lungs make.

Long before the influencer run clubs, celebrity shoe stores, and curated stoops, there was the mundane sidewalk. Not the kind tagged on a friend’s story or filtered through the latest app. Just concrete. Scuffed by strollers, scooter wheels, boots, and time. The sidewalk doesn’t follow trends, but it does remember them.

Cities are built on these undertones: habitual routes, early deliveries, overheard exchanges, open signs flipped at the same hour each morning. They aren’t glamorous. They don’t go viral. But they are what hold everything together.

Urban scholar Ash Amin calls this the “infrastructure of belonging.”5 In his work on ordinary urban life, he writes that much of what connects us isn’t spectacular. It’s what happens when people brush past one another without ceremony: the steady hum of life happening without the need for headlines. Cities function not just because of design, but because of everyday cooperation — shared rhythms, implicit trust, systems that keep working because people show up.

It can seem mundane: a delivery driver making the same drop, a retiree watering the sidewalk garden they planted without permission, the clatter of trash bins returning to their spots. These moments don’t make the city famous, but they do make it work.

Even the flashiest loops rely on them. The West Village girl’s curated brunch only happens because someone sliced lemons before sunrise and wiped the table clean before she sat down. The Starbucks habit loop in the U-District clicks into place because the supply truck showed up at 5 a.m. and the barista clocked in on time. They’re the dominant undertone of cities: loops so steady we stop noticing them...until they stop. Like during the pandemic.

A synthesist might point to an LFO: Low Frequency Oscillator. These make slow drones that hum under a syncopated rhythm; a pulsing sub-bass holding space while textures come and go. The mundane in a city does the same: it holds the mix together. Without it, the composition falls apart.

If you’ve ever heard a modular synth set, you know it doesn’t move like pop music. The loops aren’t clean. They evolve, layer, drift in and out of sync. They build tension, release it, then find a new rhythm. Cities work the same way.

Their beauty isn’t always in sync — it’s in polyrhythm. Like when two synth voices loop at slightly different speeds: a saw wave pinging every three beats, a filtered drone stretching over seven. They collide, resolve, then drift again. Like when a car blinker syncs to the beat of a song and then falls out again. In modular music, this dissonance isn’t a flaw. It creates a sonic texture.

City rhythms don’t always align either. A delivery truck pulls up as a barista closes shop; protest chants counter a stump speech; showtimes shift with transit delays. These clashes don’t cancel each other out — they deepen the city’s texture, giving it groove.

Sociologists Scannell and Gifford call this place attachment: the slow accrual of meaning in a space through repetition, emotional memory, and lived interaction. It’s not always nostalgic.6 Sometimes it’s forward-looking. The act of building the kind of city you want to live in, one relationship at a time.

And beneath all of this, the city continues its own loop: subways running through worn tunnels, trash collected on quiet mornings, someone sweeping a shop floor before the door opens.

Both protest and performance rely on this scaffold. The Starbucks picket line doesn’t just appear. It’s supported by planning, scheduling, and shared labor. The music scene doesn’t just materialize. It's shaped by decades of flyers, friendships, and repeat customers.

The viral and the intentional both need the mundane.

Cities, when they work, are made of all three: the flash of now, the pulse of choice, and the undertone of the necessary. Like springtime flowers, the city creates blooms that emerge at the surface. They draw attention, cameras, and admiration. These blossoms don’t just attract the eye, they draw in pollinators who carry influence and energy far beyond the original scene.

But none of this happens without the rest of the plant. It’s the leaves that capture sunlight day after day, the roots that pulse the unseen through tunnels, the microbes that toil in the grime and dirt to nourish those all around them. Urban life mirrors this looping ecology. Moments that flash brightly, pulses that quietly sustain, and undertones that hold it all together. The bloom is what gets noticed, but it’s the layered and syncopated life below — repeating, decomposing, reemerging — that make the next blossom possible.

This week, four strange bird encounters landed in my lap — three in real life, one on my screen. First, a crow tore through the bushes in our yard chasing a frantic nuthatch. Moments later, I spotted two more crows feasting on roadkill just outside our house. Then, while walking with my wife, we watched four ducks in hot pursuit of another, flapping furiously down the street — some kind of aerial turf war. And finally, scrolling through my feed, I stumbled on a paper describing a Cooper’s Hawk hacking the city’s traffic system to hunt smarter. After all that, I tried seeing cities as a bird might. So I wrote as one.

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HISS, HUM, HUNT

I first sense the city as vibration. Before sun rays even breech the branches, a hiss of car tires emerge; street lamps click off; somewhere a garage door rumbles open. Each resonance strikes the hollow chambers of my bones like sonar. It’s a sketch of distance, density, and direction. This all makes perfect sense to me even though I am just a kid. A juvenile Cooper’s Hawk — Accipiter cooperii — yet the human-made maze below me is as legible to me as the nest I left barely two winters ago. What follows, in human words, is a recount of one day’s hunt. I hope to demonstrate what humans regard as intelligence, innovation, and enterprise exists in a single act of predation.

DANCING WITH DATA AT DAWN

Perched on a gray mast of the Main and Prospect traffic light, I begin to render the scene. My basemap is no pixel grid glowing on some screen across town; it is a topological organ in my scull. Topology matters when a lamppost sits one maneuver away from the porch roof, which is one glide away from the dumpster rim. My so-called ‘bird brain’ calculates dynamic flows of probability. One flip of a traffic light, a garbage truck rolls by, and that gust of wind changes direction. My internal map pulses between “larger” when prey likelihood rises and “smaller” when likelihood falls.

As I gaze out above the east-west avenue, a slipstream peels off the 7AM wave of commuters. I spot a sparrow in a vortex that spirals from the garbage truck’s wake at 07∶13. That acoustic shadow beneath that florist’s van is one place I could pass unseen. But is a sparrow worth it?

What I am doing — unknown even to myself — is what spatial scientists call real‑time kernel‑density estimation. At any point on a simple 2D path I can plop a small mathematical bump — a kernel. I can then reason about the density mapped below me by stacking up every bump’s contribution at a particular spot. That once scatter of points on a map morphs into a smooth curve that shows where meaningful observations truly cluster. I continuously weight a landscape of pigeons, cyclists, and idling SUVs by situational context rather than simple Euclidean distance.

Complexity geographer David O’Sullivan calls this kind of adaptive map a narrative model — a story the system tells itself so it can keep acting.1 My mental basemap obeys what is adjacent to what on this map. After all, a three‑meter hedge is more impenetrable than thirty meters of empty air; therefore straight‑line distances can lie and deceive. When humans try to simplify distances by saying, ‘as the crow flies’, they have no idea what they’re leaving out.

BRAKES BUILD BARRICADES

At 07∶26 a stainless‑steel button is pressed; I hear the relay’s metallic click 3.2 seconds before the little white pedestrian blinks alive. I am perched here because I anticipated this poke by pedestrians on their morning commute. Vehicles will now queue as these bi-peds spill into the cross walk. The stacked metal boxes of steel, rubber, and plastic will form a barricade forty meters long…potentially.

Brake‑lights align into a pulsing crimson corridor whose half‑life I have calculated and averaged across nineteen previous dawns. Humans call the coming congestion a nuisance, but I call it camouflage. For twenty‑two seconds the asphalt canyon’s turbulence drops below an acceptable range. I can now hover as if among cedars.

A scientist has been watching from the opposite curb. They will soon begin recording this trick in their field book as so: a hawk anticipates the signal pattern and times its dives to the red‑phase distribution of brake lights.2

Because most queues are short, but occasionally very long, I have to be careful to time this properly. If I dive for prey based on the overall mean of the lineup, I will arrive while half the cars were still rolling to a stop — dangerous. So instead, I consider just the top-10% longest lines. Scientists marvel that I learned this algorithm in a single winter. I marvel that they need calculators to compute it.

ZEBRA STRIPE SLALOM STRIKE

I drop. The scent of hot rubber folds swirls with the cedar‑resin on my breast feathers as the warm air fills my plumage. The slowing bumper of a school bus becomes a landing spot — a moving parapet. Fresh into the dive, the thermoplastic zebra stripes flash white‑white‑white like a stroboscopic speedometer. None of this was made for me, yet every dimension matters for my survival. The curb‑to‑planter setback of 0.9 meters sets my glide angle; the bollard spacing — installed last year to calm e‑scooters — creates a slalom that funnels starlings toward an ornamental plum in a front lawn.

Urban design handbooks invoke words like livability and placemaking, as if these geometries were some kind of neutral toolkit. But for me, in the instant before impact, this curb‑to‑planter setback, this bollard slalom, adjudicates more than legal fiction — it means life and death.

Urban forms may look passive, yet every angle, radius, and dwell time means someone has won and someone has lost — wide curb radii speed cars through a right-turn but lengthen the crossing exposure for a toddler. Urban geometry is power cast in concrete; it never clocks off, and is both political and ecological: a three‑second refuge for a starling is a three‑second targeting solution for me.

FORCE AND FEATHERS FACES FEEDBACK

Impact. Feathers erupt like dark gray confetti. The starling crumbles under thirty‑four newtons of closing force — about the weight of a brick slammed into its ribcage. While I mantle the prize, a more philosophical bird might wonder: Who authored this death? Was it my neuromuscular burst alone? Or the person whose fingertip initiated a forty‑second cascade of stopped traffic? Or the traffic engineer who — chasing level‑of‑service targets — extended the red phase by six seconds last fiscal year?

Philosophy of science warns against naïve linear causation; urban events rarely run in neat A → B lines. Herbert Simon, writing on complex systems, described cities and organisms as “nearly decomposable hierarchies,” where slow, macro‑scale layers — like signal‑cycle regulations, curb geometries, and commuter habits — set the boundary conditions within which rapid micro‑events unfold.3 My talon snap and a starling’s dodge happen inside those higher‑order constraints, even as countless such micro‑acts, in aggregate, keep the larger structure of life humming along.

My strike, therefore, is a city‑scale phenomenon folded into tendon and keratin — street grids, signal cycles, and global supply chains compressed into one ballistic gesture. In the metallic tang of blood this mystery unfolds. I taste data: adipose fat tissue infused with fryer grease, feather sheaths dusted in brake dust, hormone ratios ticking through molt stage like seasonal code. Each swallow becomes a lab assessment — an unwitting biopsy of the urban food web — revealing how corn subsidies, restaurant waste, and airborne microplastics percolate up the trophic ladder. To devour a single starling is to audit the metabolic ledger of the Anthropocene, one protein strand at a time.

All of which reminds me that agency, mine, yours, the starling, is relational: the prey’s demise is over‑determined by a network whose nodes include asphalt viscosity — how a petrochemical blend modulates surface friction, drainage, and midday heat plumes — and municipal bond ratings that decide whether this intersection receives fresh pavement or another crosswalk. Chemistry, finance, and instinct co‑author every kill I make, and every step you take.

FIBERS, FOSSILS, AND FIRMWARE REFRESH

Dusk now drapes the mast in violet. Streetlamps flicker on; LED headlight arrays begin tinting the roadway cyan. Beneath the darkening asphalt, copper once meant for a clicking telegraphs now pipes broadband; beneath that, bricks baked when canals were high‑tech cradle those cables like red‑clay fossils. Media archaeologist Shannon Mattern argues that cities have always computed — tallying grain on cuneiform tablets, ringing bell‑tower hours to synchronize labor, routing mail through pneumatic tubes — only the substrates keep shifting, from clay and bronze to fiber optics and silicon.4 And trust me, nature was doing math long before humans claimed to invent it.

From my perch, epochs overlay transparently: timber palisades, horse drawn carriage tracks, fiber conduits. My hunting tactic is merely firmware patch v.2025 in a 5,000‑year old operating system. Your protocol tomorrow may be Li‑Fi pulses from a smart pole — a future where streetlamps won’t just illuminate, they’ll whisper streams of data in rapid-fire flashes — or the hiss of an autonomous shuttle that brakes at frequencies human reflexes never reach.

And you’ll be impressed with yourself. Meanwhile, I listen, map, and adjust — in my world here, survival goes to whoever learns faster, not whoever hits harder. Every fresh tactic buys a heartbeat of advantage, yet it also tightens the ratchet: the prey adapts, signals change, habits shift. Humans follow the same spiral — each smarter signal controller, each app‑driven reroute, plugs one gap while opening two more, slipping us all a step deeper into the city’s endless, restless loop.

OF DASHBOARDS AND DAGGER-WINGS

Humans may obsess over their dashboards and digital twins, yet a hawk that weighs less than a laptop already runs a live cognitive twin of the urban systems you built. Your impressed with monthly model updates while my model is updated at wingbeat resolution. If Homo sapiens hope to build a resilient future they might start where I perch: by listening for weak signals, mapping contingencies as well as coordinates, and recognizing that every curb, click, and feather participates in these nested conversations of forces.

The next time you press that crosswalk button and that electromechanical relay inside the signal‑control box snaps the circuit closed, ask not only whether it is safe to cross but what other intelligences have read that clue before you.

Meet us in the hush of those red taillights — inhabit that brief, engine‑silent interstitial where the white pedestrian man shines — then test what flickers in your own peripheral “bird brain”. Listen for the thin rustle of variables you once called noise; trace how a single press of that button ripples through nerves, budgets, buildings and beaks. Hold the silence long enough to notice how even I, a vicious dagger‑winged stalker, leave scraps for ground‑feeders and vacate a block after one clean kill so others may eat. If you can rest in that hush without lunging for your phone or some manically measured meaningless metric, you may begin to practice reciprocity — paring appetite to need, letting leftovers seed the next cycle — while stalking your own assumptions with the same taloned precision I bring to feather and flesh.

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I was in Santa Barbara recently having dinner on a friend’s deck when a rocket’s contrail streaked the sky. “Another one from Vandenberg,” he said. “Wait a couple minutes — you’ll hear it.” And we did. “They’ve gotten really annoying,” he added. He’s not wrong. In early 2024, SpaceX launched seven times more tonnage into space than the rest of the world combined, much of it from Vandenberg Space Force Base (renamed from Air Force Base in 2021). They’ve already been approved to fly 12,000 Starlink satellites, with filings for 30,000 more.

This isn’t just future space junk — it’s infrastructure. And it’s not just in orbit. What Musk is doing in the sky is tied to what he’s building on the ground. Not in Vandenberg, where regulation still exists, but in Starbase, Texas, where the law doesn’t resist — it assists. There, Musk is testing how much sovereignty one man can claim under the banner of “innovation” — and how little we’ll do to stop him.

TOWNS TO THRUST AND THRONE

Musk isn’t just defying gravity — he’s defying law. In South Texas, a place called Starbase has taken shape along the Gulf Coast, hugging the edge of SpaceX’s rocket launch site. What looks like a town is really something else: a launchpad not just for spacecraft, but for a new form of privatized sovereignty.

VIDEO: Time compresses at the edge of Starbase: a slow-built frontier where launch infrastructure rises faster than oversight. Source: Google Earth

This isn’t unprecedented. The United States has a long lineage of company towns — places where corporations controlled land, housing, labor, and local government. Pullman, Illinois is the most famous. But while labor historians and economic geographers have documented their economic and social impact, few have examined them as legal structures of power.

That’s the gap legal scholar Brian Highsmith identifies in Governing the Company Town. That omission matters — because these places aren’t just undemocratic. They often function as quasi-sovereign legal shells, designed to serve capital, not people.

Incorporation is the trick. In Texas, any area with at least 201 residents can petition to become a general-law municipality. That’s exactly what Musk has done. In a recent vote (212 to 6) residents approved the creation of an official town — Starbase. Most of those residents are SpaceX employees living on company-owned land…with a Tesla in the driveway. The result is a legally recognized town, politically constructed. SpaceX controls the housing, the workforce, and now, the electorate. Even the mayor is a SpaceX affiliate. With zoning powers and taxing authority, Musk now holds tools usually reserved for public governments — and he’s using them to build for rockets, not residents…unless they’re employees.

VIDEO: Starbase expands frame by frame, not just as a company town, but as a legal experiment — where land, labor, and law are reassembled to serve orbit over ordinance. Source: Google Earth

Quinn Slobodian, a historian of neoliberalism and global capitalism, shows how powerful companies and individuals increasingly use legal tools to redesign borders and jurisdictions to their advantage. In his book, Cracked Up Capitalism, he shows how jurisdiction becomes the secret weapon of the capitalist state around the world. I wrote about a techno-optimist fantasy state on the island of Roatán, part of the Bay Islands in Honduras a couple years ago.

It isn’t new. Disney used the same playbook in 1967 with Florida’s Reedy Creek District — deeding slivers of land to employees to meet incorporation rules, then governing without real opposition. Highsmith draws a straight line to Musk: both use municipal law not to serve the public, but to avoid it. In Texas, beach access is often blocked near Starbase — even when rockets aren’t launching. A proposed bill would make ignoring an evacuation order a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by jail.

Even if Starbase never fully resembles a traditional town, that’s beside the point. What Musk is really revealing isn’t some urban design oasis but how municipal frameworks can still be weaponized for private control. Through zoning laws, incorporation statutes, and infrastructure deals, corporations can shape legal entities that resemble cities but function more like logistical regimes.

And yet, this tactic draws little sustained scrutiny. As Highsmith reminds us, legal scholarship has largely ignored how municipal tools are deployed to consolidate corporate power. That silence matters — because what looks like a sleepy launch site in Texas may be something much larger: a new form of rule disguised as infrastructure.

ABOVE THE LAW, BELOW THE LAND

Elon Musk isn’t just shaping towns — he’s engineering systems. His tunnels, satellites, and rockets stretch across and beyond traditional borders. These aren’t just feats of engineering. They’re tools of control designed to bypass civic oversight and relocate governance into private hands. He doesn’t need to overthrow the state to escape regulation. He simply builds around it…and in the case of Texas, with it.

Architect and theorist Keller Easterling, whose work examines how infrastructure quietly shapes political life, argues that these systems are not just supports for power — they are power. Infrastructure itself is a kind of operating system for shaping the city, states, countries…and now space.

Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite constellation, provides internet access to users around the world. In Ukraine, it became a vital communications network after Russian attacks on local infrastructure. Musk enabled access — then later restricted it. He made decisions with real geopolitical consequences. No president. No Congress. Just a private executive shaping war from orbit.

And it’s not just Ukraine. Starlink is now active in dozens of countries, often without formal agreements from national regulators. It bypasses local telecom laws, surveillance rules, and data protections. For authoritarian regimes, that makes it dangerous. But for democracies, it raises a deeper question: who governs the sky?

Right now, the answer is: no one. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 assumes that nation-states, not corporations, are the primary actors in orbit. But Starlink functions in a legal grey zone, using low Earth orbit as a loophole in international law…aided and abetted by the U.S. defense department.

VIDEO: Thousands of Starlink satellites, visualized in low Earth orbit, encircle the planet like a privatized exosphere—reshaping global communication while raising questions of governance, visibility, and control. Source: Starlink

The result is a telecom empire without borders. Musk commands a growing share of orbital infrastructure but answers to no global regulator. The International Telecommunication Union can coordinate satellite spectrum, but it can’t enforce ethical or geopolitical standards. Musk alone decides whether Starlink aids governments, rebels, or armies. As Quinn Slobodian might put it, this is exception-making on a planetary scale.

Now let’s go underground. The Boring Company digs high-speed tunnels beneath cities like Las Vegas, sidestepping standard planning processes. These projects often exclude transit agencies and ignore public engagement. They’re built for select users, not the public at large. Local governments, eager for tech-driven investment, offer permits and partnerships — even if it means circumventing democratic procedures.

Taken together — Starlink above, Boring Company below, Tesla charging networks on the ground — Musk’s empire moves through multiple layers of infrastructure, each reshaping civic life without formal accountability. His systems carry people, data, and energy — but not through the public channels meant to regulate them. They’re not overseen by voters. They’re not authorized by democratic mandate. Yet they profoundly shape how people move, communicate, and live.

Geographer Deborah Cowen, whose research focuses on the global logistics industry, argues that infrastructure like ports, fiber-optic cables, and pipelines have become tools of geopolitical strategy. Logistics as a form of war by other means.

Brian Highsmith argues this is a form of “functional fragmentation” — breaking governance into layers and loopholes that allow corporations to sidestep collective control. These aren’t mere workarounds. They signal a deeper shift in how power is organized — not just across space, but through it.

This kind of sovereignty is easy to miss because it doesn’t always resemble government. But when a private actor controls transit systems, communication networks, and even military connectivity — across borders, beneath cities, and in orbit — we’re not just dealing with infrastructure. We’re dealing with rule.

And, just like with company towns, the legal scholarship is struggling to catch up. These layered, mobile, and non-territorial regimes challenge our categories of law and space alike. What these fantastical projects inspire is often awe. But what they should require is law.

AMNESIA AIDS THE AMBITIOUS

Elon Musk may dazzle with dreams full-blown, but the roots of his power are not his own. The United States has a long tradition of private actors ruling like governments — with public blessing. These aren’t outliers. They’re part of a national pattern, deeply embedded in our legal geography: public authority outsourced to private ambition.

The details vary, but the logic repeats. Whether it’s early colonial charters, speculative land empires, company towns, or special districts carved for tech campuses, American history is full of projects where law becomes a scaffold for private sovereignty. Rather than recount every episode, let’s just say from John Winthrop to George Washington to Walt Disney to Elon Musk, America has always made room for men who rule through charters, not elections.

Yet despite the frequency of these arrangements, the scholarship has been oddly selective.

According to Highsmith, legal academia has largely ignored the institutional architecture that makes company towns possible in the first place: incorporation laws, zoning frameworks, municipal codes, and districting rules. These aren't neutral bureaucratic instruments. They're jurisdictional design tools, capable of reshaping sovereignty at the micro-scale. And when used strategically, they can be wielded by corporations to create functional states-within-a-state — governing without elections, taxing without consent, and shaping public life through private vision.

From a critical geography perspective, the problem is just as stark. Scholars have long studied the uneven production of space — how capital reshapes landscapes to serve accumulation. But here, space isn’t just produced — it’s governed. And it’s governed through techniques of legal enclosure, where a patch of land becomes a jurisdictional exception, and a logistics hub or tech campus becomes a mini-regime.

Starbase, Snailbrook, Reedy Creek, and even Google’s Sidewalk Labs are not just spatial projects — they're sovereign experiments in spatial governance, where control is layered through contracts, tax breaks, and municipal proxies.

But these arrangements don’t arise in a vacuum. Cities often aren’t choosing between public and private control — they’re choosing between austerity and access to cash. In the United States, local governments are revenue-starved by design. Most lack control over income taxes or resource royalties, and depend heavily on sales taxes, property taxes, and development fees. This creates a perverse incentive: to treat corporations not as entities to regulate, but as lifelines to recruit and appease.

Desperate for jobs and investment, cities offer zoning concessions, infrastructure deals, and tax abatements, even when they come with little democratic oversight or long-term guarantees. Corporate actors understand this imbalance — and exploit it. The result is a form of urban hostage-taking, where governance is bartered piecemeal in exchange for the promise of economic survival.

A more democratized fiscal structure — one that empowers cities through equitable revenue-sharing, progressive taxation, or greater control over land value capture — might reduce this dependency. It would make it possible for municipalities to plan with their citizens instead of negotiating against them. It would weaken the grip of corporate actors who leverage scarcity into sovereignty. But until then, as long as cities are backed into a fiscal corner, we shouldn’t be surprised when they sell off their power — one plot or parking lot at a time.

Highsmith argues that these structures demand scrutiny — not just for their economic impact, but for their democratic consequences. These aren't just quirks of local law. They are the fault lines of American federalism — where localism becomes a loophole, and fragmentation becomes a formula for private rule.

And yet, these systems persist with minimal legal friction and even less public awareness. Because they don’t always look like sovereignty. Sometimes they look like a housing deal. A fast-tracked zoning change. A development district with deferred taxes. A campus with private shuttles and subsidized utilities. They don't announce themselves as secessions — but they function that way.

We’ve been trained to see these projects as innovation, not governance. As entrepreneurship, not policy. But when a company owns the homes, builds the roads, controls the data, and sets the rules, it’s not just offering services — it’s exercising control. As political theorist Wendy Brown has argued, neoliberalism reshapes civic life around the image of the entrepreneur, replacing democratic participation with market performance.

That shift plays out everywhere: universities run like corporations, cities managed like startups. Musk isn’t the exception — he’s the clearest expression of a culture that mistakes private ambition for public good. Musk once tweeted, “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.”

In a New York Times article, Jill Lepore quoted Banks as saying his science fiction books were about “’hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.’ He also expressed astonishment that anyone could read his books as promoting free-market libertarianism, asking, ‘Which bit of not having private property and the absence of money in the Culture novels have these people missed?’”

The issue isn’t just that we’ve allowed these takeovers — it’s that we’ve ignored the tools enabling them: incorporation, annexation, zoning, and special districts. As Brian Highsmith notes, this quiet shift in power might not have surprised one of our constitution authors, James Madison, but it would have troubled him. In Federalist No. 10, Madison warned not of monarchs, but of factions — small, organized interests capturing government for their own ends. His solution was restraint through scaling oppositional voices.

“The inference to which we are brought is, that the causes of faction cannot be removed...and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”
— James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (1787)

Today, the structure meant to restrain factions has become their playbook. These actors don’t run for office — they arrive with charters, contracts, and capital. They govern not in the name of the people, but of “efficiency” and “innovation.” And they don’t need to control a nation when a zoning board will do.

Unchecked, we risk mistaking corporate control for civic order — and repeating a pattern we’ve barely begun to name.

We were told, sold, and promised a universe of shared governance — political, spatial, even orbital. But Madison didn’t trust promises. He trusted structure. He feared what happens when small governments fall to powerful interests — when law becomes a lever for private gain. That fear now lives in legal districts, rocket towns, and infrastructure built to rule. Thousands of satellites orbit the Earth, not launched by publics, but by one man with tools once reserved for states. What was once called infrastructure now governs. What was once geography now obeys.

Our maps may still show roads and rails and pipes and ports — but not the fictions beneath them, or the factions they support.

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References:

Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Zone Books.

Cowen, D. (2014). The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence in global trade. University of Minnesota Press.

Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Verso Books.

Highsmith, B. (2022). Governing the company town: How employers use local government to seize political power. Yale Law Journal.

Madison, J. (1787). Federalist No. 10. In A. Hamilton, J. Madison, & J. Jay, The Federalist Papers. Bantam Books (2003 edition).

Slobodian, Q. (2023). Crack-Up Capitalism: Market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy. Metropolitan Books.

This week, I’ve been reflecting on the themes of my last few essays — along with a pile of research that’s been oddly in sync. Transit planning. Neuroscience. Happiness studies. Complexity theory. Strange mix, but it keeps pointing to the same thing: cities aren’t just struggling with transportation or housing. They’re struggling with connection. With meaning. With the simple question: what kind of happiness should a city make possible? And why don’t we ask that more often?

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STRANGERS SHUNNED, SYSTEMS SIMULATED

The urban century was supposed to bring us together. Denser cities, faster mobility, more connected lives — these were the promises of global urbanization. Yet in the shadow of those promises, a different kind of city has emerged in America with growing undertones elsewhere: one that increasingly seeks to eliminate the stranger, bypass friction, and privatize interaction.

Whether through algorithmically optimized ride-sharing, private tunnels built to evade street life, or digital maps simulating place without presence for autonomous vehicles, a growing set of design logics work to render other people — especially unknown others — invisible, irrelevant, or avoidable.

I admit, I too can get seduced by this comfort, technology, and efficiency. But cities aren’t just systems of movement — they’re systems of meaning. Space is never neutral; it’s shaped by power and shapes behavior in return. This isn’t new. Ancient cities like Teotihuacan (tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN) in central Mexico, once one of the largest cities in the world, aligned their streets and pyramids with the stars. Chang’an (chahng-AHN), the capital of Tang Dynasty China, used strict cardinal grids and walled compounds to reflect Confucian ideals of order and hierarchy. And Uruk (OO-rook), in ancient Mesopotamia, organized civic life around temple complexes that stood at the spiritual and administrative heart of the city.

These weren’t just settlements — they were spatial arguments about how people should live together, and who should lead. Even Middle Eastern souks and hammams were more than markets or baths; they were civic infrastructure. Whether through temples or bus stops, the question is the same: What kind of social behavior is this space asking of us?

Neuroscience points to answers. As Shane O’Mara argues, walking is not just transport — it’s neurocognitive infrastructure. The hippocampus, which governs memory, orientation, and mood, activates when we move through physical space. Walking among others, perceiving spontaneous interactions, and attending to environmental cues strengthens our cognitive maps and emotional regulation.

This makes city oriented around ‘stranger danger’ not just unjust — but indeed dangerous. Because to eliminate friction is to undermine emergence — not only in the social sense, but in the economic and cultural ones too. Cities thrive on weak ties, on happenstance, on proximity without intention. Mark Granovetter’s landmark paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, showed that it's those looser, peripheral relationships — not our inner circles — that drive opportunity, creativity, and mobility. Karl Polanyi called it embeddedness: the idea that markets don’t float in space, they’re grounded in the social fabric around them.

You see it too in scale theory — in the work of Geoffrey West and Luís Bettencourt — where the productive and innovative energy of cities scales with density, interaction, and diversity. When you flatten all that into private tunnels and algorithmic efficiency, you don’t just lose the texture — you lose the conditions for invention.

As David Roberts, a climate and policy journalist known for his systems thinking and sharp urban critiques, puts it: this is “the anti-social dream of elite urbanism” — a vision where you never have to share space with anyone not like you. In conversation with him, Jarrett Walker, a transit planner and theorist who’s spent decades helping cities design equitable bus networks, also pushes back against this logic.

He warns that when cities build transit around avoidance — individualized rides, privatized tunnels, algorithmic sorting — they aren’t just solving inefficiencies. They’re hollowing out the very thing that makes transit (and cities) valuable and also public: the shared experience of strangers moving together.

The question isn’t just whether cities are efficient — but what kind of social beings they help us become. If we build cities to avoid each other, we shouldn’t be surprised when they crumble as we all forget how to live together.

COVERAGE, CARE, AND CIVIC CALM

If you follow urban and transit planning debates long enough, you’ll hear the same argument come up again and again: Should we focus on ridership or coverage? High-frequency routes where lots of people travel, or wide access for people who live farther out — even if fewer use the service? For transit nerds, it’s a policy question. For everyone else, it’s about dignity.

As Walker puts it, coverage isn’t about efficiency — it’s about “a sense of fairness.” It’s about living in a place where your city hasn’t written you off because you’re not profitable to serve. Walker’s point is that coverage isn’t charity. It’s a public good, one that tells people: You belong here.

That same logic shows up in more surprising places — like the World Happiness Report. Year after year, Finland lands at the top. But as writer Molly Young found during her visit to Helsinki, Finnish “happiness” isn’t about joy or euphoria. It’s about something steadier: trust, safety, and institutional calm. What the report measures is evaluative happiness — how satisfied people are with their lives over time — not affective happiness, which is more about momentary joy or emotional highs.

There’s a Finnish word that captures this. It the feeling you get after a sauna: saunanjälkeinen raukeus (SOW-nahn-yell-kay-nen ROW-keh-oos) — the softened, slowed state of the body and mind. That’s what cities like Helsinki seem to deliver: not bliss, but a stable, low-friction kind of contentment. And while that may lack sparkle, it makes people feel held.

And infrastructure plays a big role. In Helsinki, the signs in the library don’t say “Be Quiet.” They say, “Please let others work in peace.” It’s a small thing, but it speaks volumes — less about control, more about shared responsibility. There are saunas in government buildings. Parents leave their babies sleeping in strollers outside cafés. Transit is clean, quiet, and frequent. As Young puts it, these aren’t luxuries — they’re part of a “bone-deep sense of trust” the city builds and reinforces. Not enforced from above, but sustained by expectation, habit, and care.

My family once joined an organized walking tour of Copenhagen. The guide, who was from Spain, pointed to a clock in a town square and said, almost in passing, “The government has always made sure this clock runs on time — even during war.” It wasn’t just about punctuality. It was about trust. About the quiet promise that the public realm would still hold, even when everything else felt uncertain. This, our guide noted from his Spanish perspective, is what what make Scandinavians so-called ‘happy’. They feel held.

Studies show that most of what boosts long-term happiness isn’t about dopamine hits — it’s about relational trust. Feeling safe. Feeling seen. Knowing you won’t be stranded if you don’t have a car or a credit card. Knowing the city works, even if you don’t make it work for you.

In this way, transit frequency and subtle signs in Helsinki are doing the same thing. They’re shaping behavior and reinforcing social norms. They’re saying: we share space here. Don’t be loud. Don’t cut in line. Don’t treat public space like it’s only for you.

That kind of city can’t be built on metrics alone. It needs moral imagination — the kind that sees coverage, access, and slowness as features, not bugs. That’s not some socialist’s idea of utopia. It’s just thoughtful. Built into the culture, yes, but also the design.

But sometimes we’re just stuck with whatever design is already in place. Even if it’s not so thoughtful. Economists and social theorists have long used the concept of path dependence to explain why some systems — cities, institutions, even technologies — get stuck. The idea dates back to work in economics and political science in the 1980s, where it was used to show how early decisions, even small ones, can lock in patterns that are hard to reverse.

Once you’ve laid train tracks, built freeways, zoned for single-family homes — you’ve shaped what comes next. Changing course isn’t impossible, but it’s costly, slow, and politically messy. The QWERTY keyboard is a textbook example: not the most efficient layout, but one that stuck because switching systems later would be harder than just adapting to what we’ve got.

Urban scholars Michael Storper and Allen Scott brought this thinking into city studies. They’ve shown how economic geography and institutional inertia shape urban outcomes — how past planning decisions, labor markets, and infrastructure investments limit the options cities have today. If your city bet on car-centric growth decades ago, you’re probably still paying for that decision, even if pivoting is palatable to the public.

CONNECTIONS, COMPLEXITY, CITIES THAT CARE

There’s a quote often attributed to Stephen Hawking that’s made the rounds in complexity science circles: “The 21st century will be the century of complexity.” No one’s entirely sure where he said it — it shows up in systems theory blogs, talks, and books — but it sticks. Probably because it feels true.

If the last century was about physics — closed systems, force, motion, precision — then this one is about what happens when the pieces won’t stay still. When the rules change mid-game. When causes ripple back as consequences. In other words: cities.

Planners have tried to tame that complexity in all kinds of ways. Grids. Zoning codes. Dashboards. There’s long been a kind of “physics envy” in both planning and economics — a belief that if we just had the right model, the right inputs, we could predict and control the city like a closed system. As a result, for much of the 20th century, cities were designed like machines — optimized for flow, separation, and predictability.

But even the pushback followed a logic of control — cul-de-sacs and suburban pastoralism — wasn’t a turn toward organic life or spontaneity. It was just a softer kind of order: winding roads and whispered rules meant to keep things calm, clean, and contained…and mostly white and moderately wealthy.

If you think of cities like machines, it makes sense to want control. More data, tighter optimization, fewer surprises. That’s how you’d tune an engine or write software. But cities aren’t machines. They’re messy, layered, and full of people doing unpredictable things. They’re more like ecosystems — or weather patterns — than they are a carburetor. And that’s where complexity science becomes useful.

People like Paul Cilliers and Brian Castellani have argued for a more critical kind of complexity science — one that sees cities not just as networks or algorithms, but as places shaped by values, power, and conflict. Cilliers emphasized that complex systems, like cities, are open and dynamic: they don’t have fixed boundaries, they adapt constantly, and they respond to feedback in ways no planner can fully predict.

Castellani extends this by insisting that complexity isn’t just technical — it’s ethical. It demands we ask: Who benefits from a system’s design? Who has room to adapt, and who gets constrained? In this view, small interventions — a zoning tweak, a route change — can set off ripple effects that reshape how people move, connect, and belong. A new path dependence.

This is why certainty is dangerous in urban design. It breeds overconfidence. Humility is a better place to start. As Jarrett Walker puts it, “there are all kinds of ways to fake your way through this.” Agencies often adopt feel-good mission statements like “compete with the automobile by providing access for all” — which, he notes, is like “telling your taxi driver to turn left and right at the same time.” You can’t do both. Not on a fixed budget.

Walker pushes agencies to be honest: if you want to prioritize ridership, say so. If you want to prioritize broad geographic coverage, that’s also valid — but know it will mean lower ridership. The key is not pretending you can have both at full strength. He says, “What I want is for board members… to make this decision consciously and not be surprised by the consequences”.

These decisions matter. A budget cut can push riders off buses, which then leads to reduced service, which leads to more riders leaving — a feedback loop. On the flip side, small improvements — like better lighting, a public bench, a frequent bus — can set off positive loops too. Change emerges, often sideways.

That means thinking about transit not just as a system of movement, but as a relational space. Same with libraries, parks, and sidewalks. These aren’t neutral containers. They’re environments that either support or suppress human connection. If you design a city to eliminate friction, you eliminate chance encounters — the stuff social trust is made of.

I’m an introvert. I like quiet. I recharge alone. But I also live in a city — and I’ve learned that even for people like me, being around others still matters. Not in the chatty, get-to-know-your-neighbors way. But in the background hum of life around you. Sitting on a bus. Browsing in a bookstore. Walking down a street full of strangers, knowing you don’t have to engage — but you’re not invisible either.

There’s a name for this. Psychologists call it public solitude or sometimes energized privacy — the comfort of being alone among others. Not isolated, not exposed. Just held, lightly, in the weave of the crowd. And the research backs it up: introverts often seek out public spaces like cafés, libraries, or parks not to interact, but to feel present — connected without pressure.

In the longest-running happiness study ever done, 80 years, Harvard psychologist Robert Waldinger found that strong relationships — not income, not status — were the best predictor of long-term well-being. More recently, studies have shown that even brief interactions with strangers — on a bus, in a coffee shop — can lift mood and reduce loneliness. But here’s the catch: cities have to make those interactions possible.

Or they don’t.

And that’s the real test of infrastructure. We’ve spent decades designing systems to move people through. Fast. Clean. Efficient. But we’ve neglected the quiet spaces that let people just be. Sidewalks you’re not rushed off of. Streets where kids can safely bike or play…or simply cross the street.

Even pools — maybe especially pools. My wife runs a nonprofit called SplashForward that’s working to build more public pools. Not just for fitness, but because pools are public space. You float next to people you may never talk to. And still, you’re sharing something. Space. Water. Time.

You see this clearly in places like Finland and Iceland, where pools and saunas are built into the rhythms of public life. They’re not luxuries — they’re civic necessities. People show up quietly, day after day, not to socialize loudly, but to be alone together. As one Finnish local told journalist Molly Young, “During this time, we don’t have... colors.” It was about the long gray winter, sure — but also something deeper: a culture that values calm over spectacle. Stability over spark. A kind of contentment that doesn’t perform.

But cities don’t have to choose between quiet and joy. We don’t have to model every system on Helsinki in February. There’s something beautiful in the American kind of happiness too — the loud, weird, spontaneous moments that erupt in public. The band on the subway. The dance party in the park. The loud kid at the pool. That kind of energy can be a nuisance, but it can also be joyful.

Even Jarrett Walker, who’s clear-eyed about transit, doesn’t pretend it solves everything. Transit isn’t always the answer. Sometimes a car is the right tool. What matters is whether everyone has a real choice — not just those with money or proximity or privilege. And he’s quick to admit every city with effective transit has its local grievances.

So no, I’m not arguing for perfection, or even socialism. I’m arguing for a city that knows how to hold difference. Fast and slow. Dense and quiet. A city that lets you step into the crowd, or sit at its edge, and still feel like you belong. A place to comfortably sit with the uncertainty of this great transformation emerging around us. Alone and together.

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REFERENCES

Castellani, B. (2014). Complexity theory and the social sciences: The state of the art. Routledge.

Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity and postmodernism: Understanding complex systems. Routledge.

David, P. A. (1985). Clio and the economics of QWERTY. The American Economic Review.

Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology.

Hawking, S. (n.d.). The 21st century will be the century of complexity. [Attributed quote; primary source unavailable].

O’Mara, S. (2019). In praise of walking: A new scientific exploration. W. W. Norton & Company.

Roberts, D. (Host). (2025). Jarrett Walker on what makes good transit [Audio podcast episode]. In Volts.

Storper, M., & Scott, A. J. (2016). Current debates in urban theory: A critical assessment. Urban Studies.

Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster.

Walker, J. (2011). Human transit: How clearer thinking about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives. Island Press.

West, G., & Bettencourt, L. M. A. (2010). A unified theory of urban living. Nature.

Young, M. (2025). My miserable week in the ‘happiest country on earth’. The New York Times Magazine.

This week, the European Space Agency launched a satellite to "weigh" Earth's 1.5 trillion trees. It will give scientists deeper insight into forests and their role in the climate — far beyond surface readings. Pretty cool. And it's coming from Europe.

Meanwhile, I learned that the U.S. Secretary of Defense — under Trump — had a makeup room installed in the Pentagon to look better on TV. Also pretty cool, I guess. And very American.

The contrast was hard to miss. Even with better data, the U.S. shows little appetite for using geographic insight to actually address climate change. Information is growing. Willpower, not so much.

So it was oddly clarifying to read a passage Christopher Hobson posted on Imperfect Notes from a book titled America by a French author — a travelogue of softs. Last week I offered new lenses through which to see the world, I figured I’d try this French pair on — to see America, and the world it effects, as he did.

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PAPER, POWER, AND PROJECTION

I still have a folded paper map of Seattle in the door of my car. It’s a remnant of a time when physical maps reflected the reality before us. You unfolded a map and it innocently offered the physical world on a page. The rest was left to you — including knowing how to fold it up again.

But even then, not all maps were neutral or necessarily innocent. Sure, they crowned capitals and trimmed borders, but they could also leave things out or would make certain claims. From empire to colony, from mission to market, maps often arrived not to reflect place, but to declare control of it. Still, we trusted it…even if was an illusion.

I learned how to interrogate maps in my undergraduate history of cartography class — taught by the legendary cartographer Waldo Tobler. But even with that knowledge, when I was then taught how to make maps, that interrogation was more absent. I confidently believed I was mediating truth. The lines and symbols I used pointed to substance; they signaled a thing. I traced rivers from existing base maps with a pen on vellum and trusted they existed in the world as sure as the ink on the page. I cut out shading for a choropleth map and believed it told a stable story about population, vegetation, or economics. That trust was embodied in representation — the idea that a sign meant something enduring. That we could believe what maps told us.

This is the world of semiotics — the study of how signs create meaning. American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce offered a sturdy model: a sign (like a map line) refers to an object (the river), and its meaning emerges in interpretation. Meaning, in this view, is relational — but grounded. A stop sign, a national anthem, a border — they meant something because they pointed beyond themselves, to a world we shared.

But there are cracks in this seemingly sturdy model.

These cracks pose this question: why do we trust signs in the first place? That trust — in maps, in categories, in data — didn’t emerge from neutrality. It was built atop agendas.

Take the first U.S. census in 1790. It didn’t just count — it defined. Categories like “free white persons,” “all other free persons,” and “slaves” weren’t neutral. They were political tools, shaping who mattered and by how much. People became variables. Representation became abstraction.

Or Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swedish botanist who built the taxonomies we still use: genus, species, kingdom. His system claimed objectivity but was shaped by distance and empire. Linnaeus never left Sweden. He named what he hadn’t seen, classified people he’d never met — sorting humans into racial types based on colonial stereotypes. These weren’t observations. They were projections based on stereotypes gathered from travelers, missionaries, and imperial officials.

Naming replaced knowing. Life was turned into labels. Biology became filing. And once abstracted, it all became governable, measurable, comparable, and, ultimately, manageable.

Maps followed suit.

What once lived as a symbolic invitation — a drawing of place — became a system of location. I was studying geography at a time (and place) when Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and GIScience was transforming cartography. Maps weren’t just about visual representations; they were spatial databases. Rows, columns, attributes, and calculations took the place of lines and shapes on map. Drawing what we saw turned to abstracting what could then be computed so that it could then be visualized, yes, but also managed.

Chris Perkins, writing on the philosophy of mapping, argued that digital cartographies didn’t just depict the world — they constituted it. The map was no longer a surface to interpret, but a script to execute. As critical geographers Sam Hind and Alex Gekker argue, the modern “mapping impulse” isn’t about understanding space — it’s about optimizing behavior through it; in a world of GPS and vehicle automation, the map no longer describes the territory, it becomes it.

Laura Roberts, writing on film and geography, showed how maps had fused with cinematic logic — where places aren’t shown, but performed. Place and navigation became narrative. New York in cinema isn’t a place — it’s a performance of ambition, alienation, or energy. Geography as mise-en-scène.

In other words, the map’s loss of innocence wasn’t just technical. It was ontological — a shift in the very nature of what maps are and what kind of reality they claim to represent. Geography itself had entered the domain of simulation — not representing space but staging it. You can simulate traveling anywhere in the world, all staged on Google maps. Last summer my son stepped off the train in Edinburgh, Scotland for the first time in his life but knew exactly where he was. He’d learned it driving on simulated streets in a simulated car on XBox. He walked us straight to our lodging.

These shifts in reality over centuries weren’t necessarily mistakes. They unfolded, emerged, or evolved through the rational tools of modernity — and for a time, they worked. For many, anyway. Especially for those in power, seeking power, or benefitting from it. They enabled trade, governance, development, and especially warfare. But with every shift came this question: at what cost?

FROM SIGNS TO SPECTACLE

As early as the early 1900s, Max Weber warned of a world disenchanted by bureaucracy — a society where rationalization would trap the human spirit in what he called an iron cage. By mid-century, thinkers pushed this further.

Michel Foucault revealed how systems of knowledge — from medicine to criminal justice — were entangled with systems of power. To classify was to control. To represent was to discipline. Roland Barthes dissected the semiotics of everyday life — showing how ads, recipes, clothing, even professional wrestling were soaked in signs pretending to be natural.

Guy Debord, in the 1967 The Society of the Spectacle, argued that late capitalism had fully replaced lived experience with imagery. “The spectacle,” he wrote, “is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

Then came Jean Baudrillard — a French sociologist, media theorist, and provocateur — who pushed the critique of representation to its limit. In the 1980s, where others saw distortion, he saw substitution: signs that no longer referred to anything real. Most vividly, in his surreal, gleaming 1986 travelogue America, he described the U.S. not as a place, but as a performance — a projection without depth, still somehow running.

Where Foucault showed that knowledge was power, and Debord showed that images replaced life, Baudrillard argued that signs had broken free altogether. A map might once distort or simplify — but it still referred to something real. By the late 20th century, he argued, signs no longer pointed to anything. They pointed only to each other.

You didn’t just visit Disneyland. You visited the idea of America — manufactured, rehearsed, rendered. You didn’t just use money. You used confidence by handing over a credit card — a symbol of wealth that is lighter and moves faster than any gold.

In some ways, he was updating a much older insight by another Frenchman. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he wasn’t just studying law or government — he was studying performance. He saw how Americans staged democracy, how rituals of voting and speech created the image of a free society even as inequality and exclusion thrived beneath it. Tocqueville wasn’t cynical. He simply understood that America believed in its own image — and that belief gave it a kind of sovereign feedback loop.

Baudrillard called this condition simulation — when representation becomes self-contained. When the distinction between real and fake no longer matters because everything is performance. Not deception — orchestration.

He mapped four stages of this logic:

1. Faithful representation – A sign reflects a basic reality. A map mirrors the terrain.

2. Perversion of reality – The sign begins to distort. Think colonial maps as logos or exclusionary zoning.

3. Pretending to represent – The sign no longer refers to anything but performs as if it does. Disneyland isn’t America — it’s the fantasy of America. (ironically, a car-free America)

4. Pure simulation – The sign has no origin or anchor. It floats. Zillow heatmaps, Uber surge zones — maps that don’t reflect the world, but determine how you move through it.

We don’t follow maps as they were once known anymore. We follow interfaces.

And not just in apps. Cities themselves are in various stages of simulation. New York still sells itself as a global center. But in a distributed globalized and digitized economy, there is no center — only the perversion of an old reality. Paris subsidizes quaint storefronts not to nourish citizens, but to preserve the perceived image of Paris. Paris pretending to be Paris. Every city has its own marketing campaign. They don’t manage infrastructure — they manage perception. The skyline is a product shot. The streetscape is marketing collateral and neighborhoods are optimized for search.

Even money plays this game.

The U.S. dollar wasn’t always king. That title once belonged to the British pound — backed by empire, gold, and industry. After World War II, the dollar took over, pegged to gold under the Bretton Woods convention — a symbol of American postwar power stability…and perversion. It was forged in an opulent, exclusive, hotel in the mountains of New Hampshire. But designed in the style of Spanish Renaissance Revival, it was pretending to be in Spain.

Then in 1971, Nixon snapped the dollar’s gold tether. The ‘Nixon Shock’ allowed the dollar to float — its value now based not on metal, but on trust. It became less a store of value than a vessel of belief. A belief that is being challenged today in ways that recall the instability and fragmentation of the pre-WWII era.

And this dollar lives in servers, not Industrial Age iron vaults. It circulates as code, not coin. It underwrites markets, wars, and global finance through momentum alone. And when the pandemic hit, there was no digging into reserves.

The Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet with keystrokes — injecting trillions into the economy through bond purchases, emergency loans, and direct payments. But at the same time, Trump 1.0 showed printing presses rolling, stacks of fresh bills bundled and boxed — a spectacle of liquidity. It was monetary policy as theater. A simulation of control, staged in spreadsheets by the Fed and photo ops by the Executive Branch. Not to reflect value, but to project it. To keep liquidity flowing and to keep the belief intact.

This is what Baudrillard meant by simulation. The sign doesn’t lie — nor does it tell the truth. It just works — as long as we accept it.

MOOD OVER MEANING

Reality is getting harder to discern. We believe it to be solid — that it imposes friction. A law has consequences. A price reflects value. A city has limits. These things made sense because they resist us. Because they are real.

But maybe that was just the story we told. Maybe it was always more mirage than mirror.

Now, the signs don’t just point to reality — they also replace it. We live in a world where the image outpaces the institution. Where the copy is smoother than the original. Where AI does the typing. Where meaning doesn’t emerge — it arrives prepackaged and pre-viral. It’s a kind of seductive deception. It’s hyperreality where performance supersedes substance. Presence and posture become authority structured in style.

Politics is not immune to this — it’s become the main attraction.

Trump’s first 100 days didn’t aim to stabilize or legislate but to signal. Deportation as UFC cage match — staged, brutal, and televised. Tariff wars as a way of branding power — chaos with a catchphrase. Climate retreat cast as perverse theater. Gender redefined and confined by executive memo. Birthright citizenship challenged while sedition pardoned. Even the Gulf of Mexico got renamed. These aren’t policies, they’re productions.

Power isn’t passing through law. It’s passing through the affect of spectacle and a feed refresh.

Baudrillard once wrote that America doesn’t govern — it narrates. Trump doesn’t manage policy, he manages mood. Like an actor. When America’s Secretary of Defense, a former TV personality, has a makeup studio installed inside the Pentagon it’s not satire. It’s just the simulation, doing what it does best: shining under the lights.

But this logic runs deeper than any single figure.

Culture no longer unfolds. It reloads. We don’t listen to the full album — we lift 10 seconds for TikTok. Music is made for algorithms. Fashion is filtered before it’s worn. Selfhood is a brand channel. Identity is something to monetize, signal, or defend — often all at once.

The economy floats too. Meme stocks. NFTs. Speculative tokens. These aren’t based in value — they’re based in velocity. Attention becomes the currency.

What matters isn’t what’s true, but what trends. In hyperreality, reference gives way to rhythm. The point isn’t to be accurate. The point is to circulate. We’re not being lied to.
We’re being engaged. And this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

Which through a Baudrillard lens is why America — the simulation — persists.

He saw it early. Describing strip malls, highways, slogans, themed diners he saw an America that wasn’t deep. That was its genius he saw. It was light, fast paced, and projected. Like the movies it so famously exports. It didn’t need justification — it just needed repetition.

And it’s still repeating.

Las Vegas is the cathedral of the logic of simulation — a city that no longer bothers pretending. But it’s not alone. Every city performs, every nation tries to brand itself. Every policy rollout is scored like a product launch. Reality isn’t navigated — it’s streamed.

And yet since his writing, the mood has shifted. The performance continues, but the music underneath it has changed. The techno-optimism of Baudrillard’s ‘80s an ‘90s have curdled. What once felt expansive now feels recursive and worn. It’s like a show running long after the audience has gone home. The rager has ended, but Spotify is still loudly streaming through the speakers.

“The Kids' Guide to the Internet” (1997), produced by Diamond Entertainment and starring the unnervingly wholesome Jamison family. It captures a moment of pure techno-optimism — when the Internet was new, clean, and family-approved. It’s not just a tutorial; it’s a time capsule of belief, staged before the dream turned into something else. Before the feed began to feed on us.

Trumpism thrives on this terrain. And yet the world is changing around it. Climate shocks, mass displacement, spiraling inequality — the polycrisis has a body count. Countries once anchored to American leadership are squinting hard now, trying to see if there’s anything left behind the screen. Adjusting the antenna in hopes of getting a clearer signal. From Latin America to Southeast Asia to Europe, the question grows louder: Can you trust a power that no longer refers to anything outside itself?

Maybe Baudrillard and Tocqueville are right — America doesn’t point to a deeper truth. It points to itself. Again and again and again. It is the loop. And even now, knowing this, we can’t quite stop watching. There’s a reason we keep refreshing. Keep scrolling. Keep reacting. The performance persists — not necessarily because we believe in it, but because it’s the only script still running.

And whether we’re horrified or entertained, complicit or exhausted, engaged or ghosted, hired or fired, immigrated or deported, one thing remains strangely true: we keep feeding it. That’s the strange power of simulation in an attention economy. It doesn’t need conviction. It doesn’t need conscience. It just needs attention — enough to keep the momentum alive. The simulation doesn’t care if the real breaks down. It just keeps rendering — soft, seamless, and impossible to look away from. Like a dream you didn’t choose but can’t wake up from.

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REFERENCES

Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1957)

Baudrillard, J. (1986). America (C. Turner, Trans.). Verso.

Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1967)

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books.

Hind, S., & Gekker, A. (2019). On autopilot: Towards a flat ontology of vehicular navigation. In C. Lukinbeal et al. (Eds.), Media’s Mapping Impulse. Franz Steiner Verlag.

Linnaeus, C. (1735). Systema Naturae (1st ed.). Lugduni Batavorum.

Perkins, C. (2009). Philosophy and mapping. In R. Kitchin & N. Thrift (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Elsevier.

Raaphorst, K., Duchhart, I., & van der Knaap, W. (2017). The semiotics of landscape design communication. Landscape Research.

Roberts, L. (2008). Cinematic cartography: Movies, maps and the consumption of place. In R. Koeck & L. Roberts (Eds.), Cities in Film: Architecture, Urban Space and the Moving Image. University of Liverpool.

Tocqueville, A. de. (2003). Democracy in America (G. Lawrence, Trans., H. Mansfield & D. Winthrop, Eds.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1835)

Weber, M. (1958). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (T. Parsons, Trans.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1905)

Every week it seems to get harder to ignore the feeling that we're living through some major turning point — politically, economically, environmentally, and even in how our cities are taking shape around us. Has society seen this movie before? Spoiler: we have, and it has many sequels.

History doesn't repeat exactly, but it sure rhymes, especially when competition for power increases, climates collapse, and the urban fabric unravels and rewinds. Today, we'll sift through history’s clues, peek through some fresh conceptual lenses, and consider why the way we frame these shifts matters — maybe more now than ever.

PRESSURE POINTS AT URBAN JOINTS

Let’s ground where we all might be historically speaking. Clues from long-term historical patterns suggests social systems go through periodic cycles of integration, expansion, and crisis. Historical quantitative data reveals recurring waves of structural-demographic pressure — moments when inequality, elite overproduction, and resource strain converge to produce instability.

By quantitative historian Peter Turchin’s account, we are currently drifting through some kind of inflection point. His 2010 essay in Nature anticipated the early 2020s as a period of peak instability that started around 1970. That’s when people earning advanced degrees, entering law, finance, media, and politics skyrocketed from the 1970s onward. Meanwhile, the number of elite positions (like Senate seats, Supreme Court clerkships, high level corporate positions) remained fixed or even shrank. This created decades of increased income inequality, elite competition, and declining public trust that created conditions for events like the rise of Trump, polarization, and institutional gridlock.1

The symptoms are familiar to us now, and they are markers that echo previous systemic ruptures in U.S. history.

In the 1770s, colonial grievances and elite competition led to a historic revolutionary realignment. It also coincided with poor harvests and food insecurity that amplified unrest. The 1860s brought civil war driven by slavery and sectional conflict. It too occurred during a period of climate volatility and crop failures. The early 20th century saw the Gilded Age unravel into labor unrest and the Great Depression, following years of drought and economic collapse in the Dust Bowl. The 1960s through 1980s unleashed social protest, stagflation, and the shift toward neoliberal governance amid fears of resource scarcity and rising pollution. In each case, ecological shocks layered onto political and economic pressures — making transformation not only likely, but necessary.

Spatial patterns shifted alongside these political ruptures — from rail hubs and company towns to low flung suburban rings and high-rise financialized skylines. Cities can be both staging grounds creating these shifts and mirrors reflecting them. As material and symbolic anchors of society, they reflect where systems are strained — and where new forms may soon take root.

Urban transformation today is neither orderly nor speculative — it is reactive. These socio-political, economic, and ecological shifts have fragmented not just the city, but the very frameworks we use to understand it. And with urban scale theory as a measure, change is accelerating exponentially. This means our conceptual tools to understand these shifts best respond just as quickly.

Let’s dip into the academic world of contemporary urban studies to gauge how scholars are considering these shifts. Here are three lenses that seem well-suited to consider our current landscape…or perhaps those my own biases are attracted to.

Urban Political Ecology. This sees the city as a socio-natural process — shaped by uneven flows of energy, capital, and extraction. This approach, developed by critical geographers like Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika, highlights how environmental degradation is often tied to social inequality and political neglect.2 Matthew Gandy, an urban geographer who blends political theory and environmental history, adds to this view. He shows how infrastructure — from water systems to waste networks — shapes urban nature and power.3

The Jackson, Mississippi water crisis, for example, revealed how ecological stress and decades of disinvestment resulted in a disheartening breakdown. In 2022, flooding overwhelmed Jackson's aging water system, leaving tens of thousands without safe drinking water — but the failure had been decades in the making. Years of underfunding, political neglect, and systemic racism had hollowed out the city’s infrastructure.

Or take Musk's AI data center called Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee. It’s adjacent to historically Black neighborhoods and uses 35 methane gas-powered turbines that emit harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) and other pollutants. It’s reported to be operating without proper permits and contributes to air quality issues these communities already have long experienced. These crises are vivid cases of what urban political ecologists warn about: how marginalization and disinvestment manifest physically in infrastructure failure, disproportionately affecting already vulnerable populations.

Platform Urbanism. This explains much of the growing visible and invisible restructuring of urban space. From delivery networks to sidewalk surveillance, digital platforms now shape land use and behavioral patterns. Urban theorists like Sarah Barns and geographer Agnieszka Leszczynski describe these systems as shadow planners — zoning isn’t just on paper anymore; it’s encoded in app interfaces and service contracts.4 Shoshana Zuboff, a social psychologist and scholar of the digital economy, pushes this further.

She argues that platforms are not just intermediaries but extractive infrastructures. They’re designed to shape behavior and monetize it at scale.5 As platforms replace institutions, their spatial footprint expands. For example, Amazon has redefined regional land use by building vast fulfillment centers and reshaping delivery logistics across suburbs and exurbs. Or look at Uber and Lyft. They’ve altered curbside usage and traffic patterns in major cities without ever appearing on official planning documents. These changes demonstrate how digital infrastructure now directs physical development — often faster than public institutions can respond.

Neoliberal Urbanism. Though widely critiqued, this remains the dominant lens. Despite growing backlash, deregulated markets, privatized services, and financialized real estate continue to shape planning logic and policy defaults. Urban theorists like Neil Brenner and economic geographer Jamie Peck describe this as a shift from managerial to entrepreneurial cities — where the suburbs sprawl, the towers rise, and exclusion is reproduced not by public design input, but by tax codes, ownership models, and legacy zoning.6 Like many governing systems, the default is to preserve the status quo. Institutions, once entrenched, tend to perpetuate existing frameworks — even in the face of mounting social or ecological stress.

For example, in many U.S. cities, exclusionary zoning laws have long restricted the construction of multi-family housing in favor of single-family homes — limiting supply, reinforcing segregation, and driving up housing costs. Even modest attempts at reform often meet local resistance, revealing how deeply these rules are woven into planning culture.

These lenses aren’t just theoretical — they are descriptively powerful. They reflect what is, not what could be. But describing the present is only the first step.

NEW NOTIONS OF URBAN MOTIONS

It’s worth considering alternative conceptual lenses rising in relevance. These are not yet changing the shape of cites at scale, but they are shaping how we think about our urban futures. Historically, new conceptual lenses have often emerged in the wake of the kind of major social and spatial disruptions already covered.

For example, the upheavals of the 19th century. This rapid industrialization, urban crowding, and public health crises gave rise to modern, industrial-era city planning. The mid-20th century crises helped institutionalize zoning and modernist design, while the neoliberal turn of the late 20th century elevated market-driven planning models.

Emerging conceptual lenses of the 21^st century are grounded in complexity, care, informality, and computation. These are responses to the fragmented plurality of our planetary plight — characteristic of the current calamity of our many crises, or polycrisis. Frameworks for thinking and imagining cities gain traction in architecture and planning studios, classrooms, online and physical activist spaces, and experimental design projects. They’re not yet dominant, but they are gaining ground. Here are a few I believe to be particularly relevant today.

Assemblage Urbanism. This lens views cities not as coherent wholes, but as contingent networks that are always in the making. The term "assemblage" comes from philosophy and anthropology. It refers to how diverse elements — people, materials, policies, and technologies — come together in temporary, evolving configurations. This lens resists top-down models of urban design and instead sees cities as patchworks of relationships and improvisations.

Introduced by scholars like Ignacio Farias, an urban anthropologist focused on technological and infrastructural urban change, and AbdouMaliq Simone, a sociologist known for his work on African cities and informality, this approach offers a vocabulary for complexity and contradiction.78 It examines cities made of sensors and encampments, logistics hubs and wetlands.

Colin McFarlane, a geographer who studies how cities function and evolve — especially in places often overlooked in mainstream planning — shows how urban learning spreads through these networks that cross places and scales.9 As the built environment becomes more fragmented and multi-scalar, this lens offers a way to map the friction and fluidity of emergent urban life.

Postcolonial and Feminist Urbanisms. This lens challenges who gets to define the city, and how. Ananya Roy, a scholar of global urbanism and housing justice, Jennifer Robinson, a geographer known for challenging Western-centric urban theory, and Leslie Kern, a feminist urbanist focused on gender and public space, all center the voices and experiences often sidelined by mainstream planning: women, racialized communities, and the so-called Global South.101112 These are regions, not always in the Southern Hemisphere, that have historically been colonized, exploited, or marginalized by dominant empires of the so-called Global North.

These frameworks put care, informality, and embodied experience in the foreground — not as soft supplements to be ‘considered’, but as central to urban survival. They ask: whose knowledge counts and whose mobility is prioritized? In a world of precarity and patchwork governance, these lenses offer both critique and more fair and balanced paths forward.

Typological and Morphological Studies. These older, traditional lenses are reemerging through new tools. Once associated with the static physical form of cities, these traditions are finding renewed relevance through machine learning and spatial data. These approaches originate from architectural history and geography, where typology refers to recurring building patterns, and morphology to the shape and structure of urban space. Scholars like Saverio Muratori and Gianfranco Caniggia, both architects, emphasized interpreting urban fabric as a continuous, evolving record of social life.13

As mentioned last week, British geographer M. R. G. Conzen introduced town-plan analysis, a method for understanding how plots and street systems change over time. Today, this lineage is extended by Laura Vaughan, an urbanist who studies how spatial form reflects social patterns, and Geoff Boeing, a planning scholar using computational tools to analyze and visualize urban form also mentioned last week.14

AI models now interpret urban imagery, using historical patterns to predict future trends. This approach is evolving into a kind of algorithmic archaeology. However, unchecked it could reinforce existing spatial norms instead of challenging them. This stresses the importance of reflection, ethics, and debate about the implications and outcomes of these models…and who benefits most.

While these lenses don’t yet dominate design codes or capital flows, they do shape how we think and talk about our cities. And isn’t that where all transformation begins?

CHOOSING PATHS IN AFTERMATHS

Concepts don’t emerge in a vacuum. History shows us how they arise from the anxiety and urgency of uncertainty. As historian Elias Palti reminds us, frameworks gain traction when once dominant and grounding meanings begin crumbling under our feet. That’s when we invent or seek new ways to make sense of our shifting ground.

Donna Haraway, a pioneering feminist scholar in science and technology studies, urges us to stay with this mess and imagine new futures from within it. She describes these moments as opportunities to 'stay with the trouble' — to resist closure, dwell in complexity, and imagine alternatives from within the uncertainty.15

Historically, moments of systemic crisis — from the 1770s to the 1840s, the 1930s to the 1960s — have sparked shifts not just in spatial form, but in the conceptual tools used to understand and design it. Revolutionary and reformist movements have often carried with them new ways of seeing: Enlightenment ideals, socialist critiques, environmental consciousness, and decolonial frameworks. We may be living through another such moment now — where the cracks in the old invite us to rethink the categories that built it.

In 1960, five years before I was born, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave a speech called “Wind of Change”. It was a public acknowledgement of the decline of British empire and the rise of anti-colonial nationalism around the globe. Delivered in apartheid South Africa, it was a rare moment of elite recognition that a global shift in political and spatial order was already underway. Britain’s imperial dominance was fading just as American dominance was solidifying.

Today, we see echoes of that moment. The U.S. is facing economic fragmentation, growing inequality, and diminishing global legitimacy, while China asserts itself as a counterweight. Resistance and unrest in places like Palestine, Ukraine, Yemen, Congo, Sudan, Kashmir, (and many more) mirror the turbulence of previous historic transitions. Once again, the global “winds of change” are shifting, strengthening, and unpredictably swirling. It can be disorienting.

But the frameworks I’ve outlined above are more than cold attempts at academic neutral observations, they can serve as lenses of orientation. They help guide what we see, what we measure, and what we ignore. And in doing so, they shape what futures become possible.

Some frameworks are widely used but lack ethical depth. Others are less common but are full of imagination and ethical reconfigurations. The lenses we prioritize in public policy, early education, design, and discussion will shape whether our future systems perpetuate existing inequalities or purge them.

This is not just an academic choice. It's a civic one.

While macro forces of capital or climate are beyond our control, it is possible to shape the narratives that impact our responses. The question remains whether space should continue being optimized for logistics and financial speculation, or if there is potential to focus on ecological repair, historical redress, and spatial justice.

Future developments will be influenced by current thoughts. The most impactful decision in urban design may come down to us all being more intentional in selecting the concepts that guide us forward.

REFERENCES