Work

Sole-authored book

Explosivity: Following What Remains. Andrea Gaffney, Photographer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (forthcoming 2025).

Co-authored chapter

Javier Arbona & Julie Sze. “Waterfront/Battlefront: Vallejo’s Black Landscapes of Resistance Against Police and Environmental Violence.” N. Bobic, F. Haghighi, ed.s. Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics II. Routledge (forthcoming 2024).

Peer Reviewed
“Anti-Memorials and World War II Heritage in the San Francisco Bay Area: Spaces of the 1942 Black Sailors’ Uprising.” Landscape Journal 34, no. 2 (2015): 177–92. https://doi.org/10.3368/lj.34.2.177

“Vieques, Puerto Rico: From Devastation to Conservation and Back Again,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Volume XVII, Number 1, Berkeley: The International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (2005): 33–50. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41758303

–Please contact me if you are searching and need a copy

Edited Forum

“The Explosivity of Kelp,” Society and Space, Caren Kaplan, Gabi Kirk, and Tess Lea, editors. Everyday Militarisms: Hidden in Plain Sight/Site Forum, March 9 (2020). https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-explosivity-of-kelp

Chapters in Edited Collections

“The Port Chicago Sailors’ Wildcat Strike,” Rachel Brahinsky and Alex Tarr (eds.), A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area, Oakland: University of California Press, 217-219. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520288379/a-peoples-guide-to-the-san-francisco-bay-area

“Trial by the Bay: Treasure Island and Segregation in the Navy’s Lake,” Urban Reinventions: San Francisco’s Treasure Island. Lynne Horiuchi and Tanu Sankalia, eds. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press (2017). https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/urban-reinventions-san-franciscos-treasure-island/  find on WorldCat


Critical Writings

Suspunk: Thinking with Suspicious Packages, collaboration with Bryan Finoki and Nick Sowers, Harvard Design Magazine, No. 42 (2016)

forget-me-not-social

Forget Me Not: on police memorials and injustice at The New Inquiry.

“Ecologies of Practices in a Post-Military Cinema” / “Ecología de prácticas en el cine posmilitar” (2016). Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: A Universe of Fragile Mirrors (exhibition catalog). María Elena Ortiz, curator and editor. Pérez Art Museum Miami.

demilitokld.jpg

Co-authored piece with Demilit – on a monument to networked surveillance in downtown Oakland: “OKLDCAAN: Capital Building of the Oakland Security Cloud,” The Funambulist no. 1 (Militarized Cities).

Zone, and Zone Out, essay for Progressive Planning — on planners, policing, and silence.


Variable World: Bay Model Tour & Salon (talk transcript) — an event co-curated with Chris Woebken and Avant.org

47a63695-5d64-4f6b-596e-abe2c99c26b1

A review of Findery, a geoweb app, at the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, on the combination of a “cartographic sensibility with a community that shares a passion of—and for—a mediated place.”


Podcasts

Interview with Vallejo Sun about combined police and environmental violence

Funambulist with Demilit — A Weaponized Urbanity: Morning Drift in Militarized Downtown Oakland

Demilit-Archipelago-Oakland

Participation

Site and urban design consulting with the Block Party: From Independent Living to Disability Communalism team, for Reset: Towards a New Commons exhibition at the Center for Architecture, Summer 2022, co-curated by Barry Bergdoll and Juliana Barton.

Winter Session 2013: Land, Place, Visuality

Summer Session 2013: Walking Seminar

Beta-Local

1149055_309785189165303_1622130223_n

Selected Talks…

Landscapes of Explosivity, UC Berkeley Geography Colloquium February 12 2020

Memory/Cloud: a San Francisco Police Department Memorial, at Princeton University, School of Architecture, PhD Colloquium

Footprinting the Urban Security Cloud, Emerging Voices series, Taubman College, University of Michigan, 2015

Military Abstractions: The Hidden Architecture of State Secrecy, University of Nevada, Reno, 2014

MIT History, Theory, and Criticism forum on blogs and architecture criticism, with Kazys Varnelis and Mark Jarzombek (moderator).

Previously…

Happy Fifty Years, Gentrification! … Does Gentrification Gentrify without Gentrifiers?

gentrification

An Unsolicited charter for the Very Large Organization, an exhibition by Jordan Geiger, 2013.

Architecture’s Avatars, Fulcrum, Issue 69, Architectural Association, March 4, 2013.

Fulcrum 69

The Rise Of the DaristsPLAT Journal: On the Bias, Issue 2.5, Fall/Winter 2012, Rice School of Architecture. [For a PDF draft without images see Final submission 2012 | post].

http://www.platjournal.com/ (please support this publication by ordering the journal via their website)cover2.5

cover2.5

….& more collaborative works with Demilit

Landscape fiction: Demilit (co-author), “[In]Visible Sites”, published for the exhibition Timing Is Everything, University of California, San Diego, University Art Galley, curated by Michelle Hyun (presented at opening events and accompanied with a La Jolla walk).

timingtalk

Footprinting Secrecy, Volume, number 36, Summer 2013.

ext

They Came To The Desert And Were Consumed By A Flickering Fortress, The State: Speculative Geographies, 2012.

Terra Incognita, The New City Reader: Puzzles, no. 03, Istanbul Design Biennial, 2012. | Biennial: Link | COMPLETE text: HTML | Original paper

& Even more of my stuff (if you’re still here)…

Journey to the transnational narcopolitical cityDomusWeb, August 24, 2011.

“It’s in Your Nature: I’m Lost in Paris,” (On the work of Francois Roche and RSie), Territory: Architecture Beyond Environment, Volume 80, Issue 3, pages 46–53, May/June 2010. PDF:

“Dangers in the Air: Aerosol architecture and its invisible landscapes,” Alphabet City: Air, Number 15, MIT Press and Alphabet City Media. (An edited excerpt appears at Design Observer, October 21, 2010)

“Spaces for Architectural Discourse, and the Unceasing Labor of Blogging,” MAS Context: Information, Number 7, Fall 2010

“La matrícula que no paró de subir: una mirada al presupuesto de la Universidad de California,” Diálogo Digital, May 31, 2010

“Home Cooking,” (on the work of Santiago Cirugeda and his studio, Recetas Urbanas), SAM, Number 2, August 2007, Number 02, 2007, Basel: Swiss Architecture Museum, 48-51.

 

•••

For a number of years I was the Chief Editor at Archinect, where I also wrote some articles. See my archive there.

•••

Here are more book reviews…

“What Is a City?: Rethinking the Urban After Hurricane Katrina,” Historical Geography, Volume 38, 2010, 145-183. PDF:

“The Known World: The State of Mapping,” Forum for Urban Design, 2007

•••

Some reviews of our work in press…

Ben Valentine, “Exposing Our Infrastructure: MacroCity Conference Reveals the Secret Machinery of Cities” (about the Macro City conference and walking Oakland’s securitized infrastructure), via core77.

Léopold Lambert, “Weaponised Urbanity” (about Demilit’s Oakland walking tours) for DAMN 09.

•••

And more…

A founding member of DM / Demilit / Decoding Military Landscapes:

Demilit is an experimental research and landscape arts collective founded in 2010 by Bryan Finoki, Nick Sowers, and Javier Arbona. We work with various collaborators on specific projects, performances, and improvisational exploring. We draw from architecture, sound art, creative writing, geography and other fields to produce work that encompasses events, texts, web memes, and more.

La Ciudad Usada was a workshop held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to research everyday social uses of the city, while also examining dominant discourses of sustainability and ecology about the transformation of urban realms. La Ciudad Usada was an intensive skills, methods and discussion seminar, open to the public, and hosted by non-profit arts organization BetaLocal, San Juan PR, August 2010 [link].

 

 

 

 

University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616