Infrastructure Archives - Public Seminar

Capitalism

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Our first responsibility, always, is to preserve the world, and our second is to improve it

May 21, 2025 • by Jedediah Britton-Purdy

The following text was first presented on April 22, 2025, as a distinguished lecture presented by the Henry H. Arnhold Forum on Global Challenges and the New School for Social Research. I want to trace the outline of an era that has closed. It ran from roughly the end of the ...

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Interviews

Why Progressive “Myths” Distort Solutions to the Housing Shortage

A big deal that’s not nearly big enough: what the “city of yes” will (and won’t) do

March 18, 2025 • by Center for New York City Affairs and Richard McGahey

In January 2025, Urban Matters, Center of New York City Affairs's weekly journal of ideas and opinion, wrapped up a wide-ranging two-part interview with noted urban policy expert Richard McGahey on the likely impact of New York City’s newly adopted "City of Yes" zoning package intended to jumpstart housing production. ...

Why Progressive “Myths” Distort Solutions to the Housing Shortage

Habitats

Testing the Waters in Gotham

A look at how residents throughout the city’s history have chosen what to drink

March 20, 2024 • by Liviu Chelcea

The three forms of water distribution form a fluid archive of community formation, civic pride, and the many different possible ways New Yorkers can choose the water they drink....

Politics

The Politics of Infrastructure

How the Lebanese struggle for public infrastructure is a lesson for all

November 17, 2021 • by Joanne Randa Nucho

Last month, Lebanon’s national electricity grid went dark—and this tiny Mediterranean country, known for its elite educational institutions, tourism and banking, but struggling to emerge from decades of conflict and corruption, found itself in newspaper headlines around the world again. The state’s two power plants had run out of fuel. Having ...

Economy

“Opportunity Zones” Are a Game Only the Rich Can Play

Too often they bring storage facilities and upscale college housing, but not economic prosperity

October 20, 2021 • by Arlene Martínez

On SW Taylor Street in Portland, Oregon, there is a shiny new glass-and-steel building with a fireplace in its grand lobby. Developers got approval for the posh retail and office project in 2016 and, a year later, a local gas utility inked a 20-year lease to house its headquarters there. As it ...

“Opportunity Zones” Are a Game Only the Rich Can Play

Politics

The Moderates Have to Catch Up

In the fight over his agenda, Biden is making liberals the center

October 6, 2021 • by John Stoehr

I continue to think regime change is a useful way of understanding politics. That’s the idea that American political history turns in cycles. For 40 or 50 years, one party and its ideas prevails over the other with a majority of voters. From the 1930s to the 1970s, it was ...

Politics

Plugged and Abandoned Wells? Not A Problem-It’s the Orphans that the Federal Government Should Worry About

What the Biden administration needs to know about “orphaned wells” before taking the American Jobs Plan to the House floor

April 29, 2021 • by Joseph Castillo

_____ On March 31, 2021, the Biden Administration released “The American Jobs Plan.” It’s an infrastructure proposal aimed at rebuilding the American economy, putting Americans back to work, while simultaneously addressing important environmental issues. One key problem the plan highlights, and that Biden discussed on the campaign trail, is the large ...

Plugged and Abandoned Wells? Not A Problem-It’s the Orphans that the Federal Government Should Worry About

Exiles on 12th Street

Habitat

Exiles on 12th Street, Episode Nine

November 18, 2020 • by Claire Potter

This is the ninth episode of Public Seminar’s podcast, Exiles on 12th Street. If you like it, go to iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe. The future of New York has been thrown into question by COVID-19, as the pandemic has taken a massive physical and economic toll on ...

History

The QE2 Bridge and the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) Hangover

A collectively inherited misfortune

February 4, 2020 • by David Anderson

High levels of traffic mean that the bridge is routinely denounced as Britain’s worst section of motorway, although it is in fact technically only an A-road, and not an M: this, according to a helpful attendant at the ‘crossing office’ on the Dartford side, being to permit the passage of ...

The QE2 Bridge and the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) Hangover

Exiles on 12th Street

Graphic New York

Exiles on 12th Street, Episode One

February 13, 2019 • by Claire Potter

What does New York look like, feel like, sound like, smell like? In celebration of the city that Exiles on 12th Street calls home, the first episode of the podcast is dedicated to the stories of those who live here. Join us as we hit the streets to explore the ...

Feature

Vicious Infrastructure

Security dams, military fortresses, and mosques in the “new” Turkey

April 17, 2018 • by Hakan Topal

The Turkish State is building a series of reservoirs alongside the Turkish-Iraqi border, not to produce electricity or to irrigate farms, but to prevent “terrorists” infiltrating from Iraq. At the same time, the state is installing military fortresses, called kalekol in Turkish, within Kurdish towns as a way to assert its powerful ...

Uncategorized

No-Futurism

June 22, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

As a tenured academic I am one of the last of an almost extinct social class – the bourgeois. Unlike the capitalist, who owns capital, the bourgeois is the professional who keeps the superstructures of capitalism going, including those of art and knowledge. Our job is to be a superstructure ...