Archinect - News

Who owns real estate flooded from climate change?

2018-05-03T16:54:00-04:00

As seas rise and coasts wash away, who owns the land that goes underwater? Versions of that debate are taking place in courtrooms, legislatures, and government offices, raising the question of whether and when climate change justifies seizing private property. The stakes are enormous, affecting not just ownership of offshore mineral and fishing rights but also potentially trillions of dollars of coastal real estate.

Climate change has left many rules governing real estate ownership murky. As sea levels rise this especially affects coastal property and laws hinging on high-tide lines.

Prop and Property: The House in American Film

2017-12-19T18:50:00-05:00

Cinema heightens the ambivalent but powerful pleasure we take in looking at property. The private property of the house is already a spectacle, of course, as the house is a medium for making visible the wealth of its owners and inhabitants. In a movie theater, this spectacular function is multiplied.

A history of the house in American cinema might well begin with Gone with the Wind, a film that is fascinated with the loss, acquisition, and consolidation of private property; and To Kill a Mockingbird, a putatively antiracist film whose production history is actually an archive of racist urban development. The houses in these pictures tell stories about property that the films do not mention, but cannot cease from showing.

Black Lives Matter and the politics of protesting in privatized space

2016-01-08T15:15:00-05:00

Mall of America’s ability to so zealously suppress the December 23 [Black Lives Matter] protest there highlights how, in a nation where more and more public life takes place in privatized spaces, the ability to exercise First Amendment rights has become increasingly contingent... Legal arguments that free political speech should be allowed at malls center around the idea that the shopping center has replaced the town square as a place where opinions can be heard and exchanged.

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New York Magazine gives an exclusive preview of Hudson Yards

2012-10-09T12:03:00-04:00

In a few weeks, construction begins on New York’s largest development ever. Hudson Yards is handsome, ambitious, and potentially full of life. Should we care that it’s also a giant slab of private property?