In Transformation, It’s All Signal
In some media I’ve consumed recently, a woman speaker made a casual side remark that men act to act, and women act in context. I don’t know if those two categories are gendered, but I do recognize them. I have…
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Urbanist Series – Blood and Soil
One of the advantages in looking at community organizing and development through the field of social work is that it consistently invites you to dilate the lens from micro to macro. I am always intrigued, for example, by how communities…
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Just Whip It
<align=just>I moved to Detroit partly in response to a subconscious nudge which can never genuinely be broken down in rational terms: these nudges are Gestalt. But mentally, I expected Detroit to present every form of social questioning, and so it…
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The City Corner, a Crux and Axis
Detroit is a unique city in that, aesthetically, it’s not a city at all. It looks, to an eye trained for urban markers, like a suburb which has a size problem and unusual industrial impact. Few commercial corridors exist in…
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My Airbnb: Hostess with the Someness
I lived in diaspora from 2011-2014, traveling extensively while working internationally and engaging in barter agreements for housing while I went through my first post-bac program. When I entered my current graduate degree program and finally settled into my own…
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Not Like Silver: Exploring Hell’s Fire
The Book of Watchers within I Enoch strikes the reader as a vengeful departure from its more neutral netherworldly predecessors, its pits of fire casting doubt on the frequently maintained assertion “that there is no belief in life after death…
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The Master’s Tools: Subversive Planning in the Self-Help Revolution
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a [hu]man, you take it.-Malcolm X Introduction There is no planning that is separate from the essential function to make the human experience better:…
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Geddes Out of Tucson: A Desert Region and Its City
Introduction This article considers Tucson, Arizona through the lens of Patrick Geddes’ urban philosophy and methods. It is organized within his trinity rubric of lieu, travail and famille, first presenting a sampling of background information not meant to be exhaustive,…
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