Andrew Friedman

The Global Postcolonial Moment and the American New Town: India, Reston, Dodoma

As with many of the 1960s new towns, scholars place Reston, Virginia, in the garden city tradition. This essay argues instead that Reston brought to the United States a unique midcentury architectural vernacular, born not in Britain but in the postcolonial world. The war effort spirited American architects abroad. Some stayed to advise governments building independent nations. One of them was the New Yorker Albert Mayer, along with members of his firm. Designing new cities in India, these Americans came into contact with Indian architects creating their own sense of a national built environment. Reston brought the form created by these encounters to the Washington suburbs. The essay highlights the links between the revised modernism of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) in the 1950s and postcolonial building practices. Reston then became a pedagogical space, as international visitors circulated its representative forms abroad again, to India, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania.

US empire, World War 2 and the racialising of labour

This essay examines US empire in World War 2 and showcases how the American war was based on the extraction of colonial labour. It focuses on builders laying infrastructure and supply lines for the Pentagon in the colonial world – in the Navy Seabees, Air Transport Command and Army Corps of Engineers – to retrieve the history of the planet-spanning, trans-colonial system of labour and transit that Americans established during this period. They called this system ‘the five highways’. They knew its crucial labourer as the ‘native’. Across the wartime archive, the ‘native’ appears in these accounts, the author argues, as the trace of US settler colonialism, a resource continually renewed for imperial projects in the mid-twentieth century. Histories of racialised labour in colonial settings, meanwhile, followed the five highways home, linking the creation of a global racial capitalist US market during the war to the country’s abundant postwar economy and built environment.

Book review: Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia

Editor’s Introduction This forum brings together three in-depth reviews of Andrew Brooks’ Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-Hand Clothes. Published in 2015, Clothing Poverty explores some of the “hidden” geographies of the global trade in new and secondhand clothing by developing a marxist “systems of provision” approach. Both wide-ranging in its theoretical purview and also in its empirical focus, Clothing Poverty is a quintessentially geographical work. It’s therefore all the more significant that on its publication, the book was engaged with by both an academic and a popular audience, featuring on the BBC, within The Guardian and The Globe and Mail. In a lively Author Meets Critics session of the 2015 AAG conference, Mike Goodman, Josh Lepawsky, James Sidaway and Bradley Wilson offered their thoughts on the book: three of their reviews are brought together in this forum. Goodman first provides a personal account and challenges Brooks to take another critical look at ethical consumption; Lepawsky then interrogates Brooks’ positionality in the production of the text; and, finally, Sidaway explores the book’s popular contribution. Responding to his critics, Brooks offers a brief conclusion to the forum.

Book review: Friedman, Andrew: Covert Capital : Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia. Berkeley, 2013

Editor’s Introduction This forum brings together three in-depth reviews of Andrew Brooks’ Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-Hand Clothes. Published in 2015, Clothing Poverty explores some of the “hidden” geographies of the global trade in new and secondhand clothing by developing a marxist “systems of provision” approach. Both wide-ranging in its theoretical purview and also in its empirical focus, Clothing Poverty is a quintessentially geographical work. It’s therefore all the more significant that on its publication, the book was engaged with by both an academic and a popular audience, featuring on the BBC, within The Guardian and The Globe and Mail. In a lively Author Meets Critics session of the 2015 AAG conference, Mike Goodman, Josh Lepawsky, James Sidaway and Bradley Wilson offered their thoughts on the book: three of their reviews are brought together in this forum. Goodman first provides a personal account and challenges Brooks to take another critical look at ethical consumption; Lepawsky then interrogates Brooks’ positionality in the production of the text; and, finally, Sidaway explores the book’s popular contribution. Responding to his critics, Brooks offers a brief conclusion to the forum.

Book review symposium

Editor’s Introduction This forum brings together three in-depth reviews of Andrew Brooks’ Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-Hand Clothes. Published in 2015, Clothing Poverty explores some of the “hidden” geographies of the global trade in new and secondhand clothing by developing a marxist “systems of provision” approach. Both wide-ranging in its theoretical purview and also in its empirical focus, Clothing Poverty is a quintessentially geographical work. It’s therefore all the more significant that on its publication, the book was engaged with by both an academic and a popular audience, featuring on the BBC, within The Guardian and The Globe and Mail. In a lively Author Meets Critics session of the 2015 AAG conference, Mike Goodman, Josh Lepawsky, James Sidaway and Bradley Wilson offered their thoughts on the book: three of their reviews are brought together in this forum. Goodman first provides a personal account and challenges Brooks to take another critical look at ethical consumption; Lepawsky then interrogates Brooks’ positionality in the production of the text; and, finally, Sidaway explores the book’s popular contribution. Responding to his critics, Brooks offers a brief conclusion to the forum.