When politicians begin to speak of a post-corona “new normality”, what does that imply? And why should we be concerned?   The spread of the coronavirus and the intensity

of reactions – from personal to political, emotional to economic – are literally mind-blowing. [...]

Infrastructure is, in common understanding, a very material thing. We think of it as something made of iron and concrete. Even when going unnoticed in our everyday lives, infrastructure

is an intimate presence in the working – or non-working – of much of what we deal with on a daily basis. [...]

Over the past two decades, infrastructure has emerged as a central concept in a larger conversation about architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Providing citizens with reliable

infrastructure systems is of pressing concern for the management of contemporary cities, where growing populations raise challenges for the provision of clean air, [...]

  The COVID-19 pandemic reveals a vital-lethal entanglement of human and nonhuman bodies at a global scale. This post first draws attention on how different viral strains

may interplay within and across species, both biologically and socially. The essay then considers the emerging multispecies viralscapes as a ‘wild’ planetary [...]

John William Waterhouse “Pandora” (1896). John William Waterhouse “Pandora” (1896). In the classic origin tale of “The Box” and its seductions, Pandora is driven

by curiosity—a distinctly feminized will to knowledge—to unleash chaos on mankind, her founding act of unboxing scrambling the prior all-male world of utopic [...]

  I have been – like anyone else in Italy – in quarantine for the past three weeks. Optimistically, Italy will be on lockdown for the next two weeks as well; realistically

it might well be for many more. The Covid-19 emergency started escalating on 7 March 2020 and has unfolded through the prime minister Giuseppe Conte’s murky public [...]

Once again, in November 2019, I found myself in an SJVN waiting room. But it was a new waiting room. Many things had changed in the two years since my last visit to the Arun

valley in Northeast Nepal. Most importantly, after ten years of planning, measuring and assessing, construction work for the Arun-3 hydropower project had started. [...]

How do we socially and culturally adapt to isolation? How do we experience empty spaces? Are new forms of solidarity emerging? How does it feel to have to work in hospitals,

assembly lines or shops when others stay at home? What new questions are we asking ourselves about our parenting and being a child? What new forms of exploitation [...]

Road building in the Maldives – an archipelago of small coralline islands – sounds a bit like a euphemism for a ridiculous task. Maldivian roads present uniquely closed

circuits, as they loop around and cross-cut discrete islands on the Indian Ocean archipelago – a location better known not for its connectivity but for the appeal [...]

This essay was written seated on my couch, trying to make sense of the contemporary ‘state of emergency’ as the world around me has gradually come to a standstill. It argues

that imagining the post-COVID19 era requires to move beyond technocratic and humanitarian modes of thinking that neutralize politics in the name of the higher moral [...]