About Social Media Today
Posts by Polis Inclusive Subscribe 
Ecologies of Injustice: LA Water Wars & Owens Lake
A bandaged Jack Nicholson often comes to mind when I think of Los Angeles. The water wars that inspired Chinatown also gave rise to the current state of Owens Lake, the focus in mammoth's collective discussion of The Infrastructural City for the...
Enlightened (or not) urban despotism
Valencia, Spain, has been attracting the attention of journalists and urban planners in the last days. Once again, city authorities, with mainstream planners' support, have crashed their vision of the city against a traditional neighbourhod....
LISC Launches Community Development Institute
The gap between research and practical tools for community improvement got a little smaller last week. The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which supports community development organizations across the United States, launched its...
Rethinking Urban Planning Education, by Alexa Mills
Urban planning has long excelled at integrating different fields of study because cities, by nature, demand multidisciplinary thinking. Yet addressing the world’s most critical problems, such as urban poverty and energy efficiency, require a...
Tribal Connection
No can do this! No can do that! What the hell can you do, my friend? In this place that you call your town Today is undoubtedly the only somewhat-global, partly-legal, semi-holiday to emerge from Northern California. As California moves...
The Changing Texts of Architecture
In case our group reading of The Infrastructural City has merely opened the floodgates of interest in more texts on architecture and the city, this post highlights some new and interesting work. X Vitruvius' Ten Books on Architecture seek to...
Legitimizing the Illegitimate
The “slum” is often a place that people associate with lesser-value, filth, societal collapse, and criminals. A place to be avoided, shunned, and hopefully one day, destroyed and regenerated. The “slum” has become a typology of spatial arrangement...
Featured Artist: Dave Glass
Since the days of Baudelaire and Benjamin, those of us obsessed with the urban have found pleasure in the accidental and the serendipitous. One could even argue that it is the possibility of the unknown that leads us to that mixture of lived and...
Boundaries of Power
Fifth in a series on public parks in Moscow, this post is a brief visual overview of the period between the end of Stalin's rule in 1953 and the ascension of Gorbachev in 1985. It focuses on urban development under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, with...
Social Urban Forum vs. World Urban Forum
Last week, the World Urban Forum (WUF) took place in Rio, with a record in participants (over 10,000). The WUF is organized by UN-HABITAT every two years as a open space to debate the most up-to-date issues related to urban development worldwide,...
Urban Ffffinds: The City in Abstract, by Brendan Crain
What does the city look like, in your mind's eye. The internet has made visual communication the dominant mode as we have become more reliant on imagery to help us absorb ever more information at ever increasing speeds. How does this affect the way...
Toilet Heaven, Toilet Hell: Why the Sanitation Crisis Can't Be Solved Without Communities
Over half of the Indian population defecate in the open, according to the latest stats from the World Health Organization and the United Nations. A report released this month reveals that 638 million Indians (54% of the population) still lack...
