We have plenty of maps and data visualizations that trace the macro-scale public health and political-economic forces that precipitated the “Great Pause”; but we have relatively few that show all those under-appreciated agents that are making it possible — all the something anchoring and abetting that nothing, all the pulsing activity powering the ... See more

The multidisciplinary collective BlackSpace has drafted a manifesto calling for designers and planners to “reckon with the past as a means of healing … and deepening understanding”; to center Black joy and lived experience; to take the time to build trust and deconstruct hierarchies; to ensure that designers act as “humble learners” who “walk with ... See more

But when we looked out our own windows — or through the newsfeeds on our screens — we witnessed not only suspension but also decline, and at a much grander scale. Maps and graphs showed stilled air traffic and transit systems, depressed economies, shuttered businesses, sheltering communities. Those downward-trending graphs were juxtaposed with risi... See more

an ostensible pause that instead merely extends, and in many ways exacerbates, the injustices of our society and the inadequacies of our ways of conceptualizing and modeling city life.

Medieval and Renaissance mapmakers famously demarcated the edges of the discovered world with mythical sea creatures that embodied the limits of exploration and knowledge. As historian Chet Van Duzer argues, those monsters represented a variety of epistemological orientations. They served as “interfaces between the known and unknown,” possible port... See more

the pandemic has merely accelerated a years-long descent into negation and sensory deprivation, a “desire for nothingness” that embodies the exhaustion of optimism and the embrace of nihilism.

Scientists couldn’t look directly at nothing to see something; they had to look and listen around the void, deploying techniques similar to image compositing and echolocation. We might apply these lessons, these techniques, to our own attempts to comprehend the pandemic’s pause, which has its own experiential event horizon. We have to look and list... See more

maps can serve as “tools for social transformation”; that they can “produce worlds instead of simply reflecting them.”

Undergirding the geographies of suspension were networks in furious motion, continual overstimulation, and exhaustive exertion.