The essays gathered here—some forthcoming, others in progress—form part of The Moral Aesthetics of the Contemporary City, an ongoing series exploring how urban design, behaviour, and climate express competing visions of care and control.
New lyrical personal essay
Palimpsest
Forthcoming in the Ex-Puritan (March 2)
“Cities keep people by forgetting them slowly.”
The Virtue of Waiting
“Waiting becomes a form of faith: faith that the ice cream will come, that the bus will arrive, that other people will keep their place in line.”
The Iron Law of the Sweep: Why Cities Choose Erasure Over Shelter
“Sweeps solve a political problem: they make homelessness disappear from view in the blink of an eye.”
Noise, Order, and the Vanishing Night
Forthcoming in About Place Journal
On Montréal’s noise bylaws and the moral acoustics of urban life—how the regulation of sound reveals what a city believes about joy, order, and disturbance.
In the Afterlife of Language: On Grief, Translation, and the Walls Between Tongues
In submission
“Maybe this is what it means to live in the afterlife of a language—the words fade, but their rhythm survives.”
Lys Granier 