I had a great time during the seminar last week at the AA, where I presented my recent research on planning’s role in the destruction of working-class centralities through several historical illustrations from Germany and the US. This is a new episode of my ‘social history of planning’ project and it was the first time I was sharing some of the material. The conversation was very animated and tremendously fruitful for me. Thanks are due to Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici, their students and the rest of the audience for their hospitality and searching feedback.

Aureli and Giudici passed me a copy of Like a Rolling Stone. Revisiting the Architecture of the Boarding House, a book-artifact summarizing the result of the intervention/research project that Dogma and Black Square, their respective architectural and editorial collectives, prepared for the Venice Biennale last year. The book is not only beautifully edited but also full of illuminations about the boarding house as a site of subversion of domestic space, both historically and as a project for the future. Highly recommended and also relevant for some of the issues I’m dealing with right now in my own research.