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Title:
Erasure by design: Racial protocols of displacement, demolition, and extraction

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$32.00
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Summary:
This book travels back and forth in time through scenes of erasure at three primary locations—Southwest, Washington DC (displacement); North St Louis (demolition), and South Los Angeles (extraction). "Erasure by design" shares first person narratives of growing up in the wake of slum clearance—that is, "urban renewal"—in Southwest, Washington DC, while assembling archival references that narrate racialized erasure and its legal and spatial precedents. It traces a military complex under construction, where St Louis’s cleared grounds and blacked out sites are also defined by satellites, body experiments, explosions, and emptiness. It moves through specific grounds in Los Angeles—dirt walls, hills, oil fields, gas lines, and houses in the forest—to trace how those grounds matter and how their holding intersects with maps that plan erasure, inhabitation, and extraction.

Title:
The city of our dreaming: The Alchemy Lecture 3

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$34.00
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Summary:
The third annual Alchemy Lecture took place in October 2024 at York University to a sold-out in-person audience and online viewers from multiple continents. Four Alchemists—thinkers and practitioners working across disciplines and geographies—shared their ideas of cities and how to shape them according to community needs. Their urgent, poignant and inventive lectures have been captured and expanded in these pages. Princeton professor of architecture V. Mitch McEwen borrows the language of the swamp to suggest a city modeled on buoyancy, inviting us to consider floating "as something other than displacement." Iranian-American writer Laleh Khalili dreams of radical kinship, where even strangers have the means and desire to share a table, "creating [bonds] through the rituals of reciprocal giving." In the Bantu/Kongo tradition, Brazilian architect Gabriela Leandro Pereira points to dreams as the site from which all Black emancipation begins, leading to "projects paved by the audacity to inhabit."