Places Journal is an essential and trusted resource on the future of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. We harness the power of public scholarship to promote equitable cities and resilient landscapes.
In these pages you will find writers, designers, and artists who are responding to the profound challenges of our time: environmental health and social inequity, climate change, resource scarcity, human migration, rapid technological innovation, and the erosion of the public sphere.
These challenges demand that we rethink how we plan, design, construct, and maintain the built environment. They also demand that ambitious design research and practice move from the margins to the center of cultural discussion.
Founded at MIT and Berkeley in 1983, Places has been online and free since 2009. We have deep associations with leading design faculties around the world. Bridging from the university to the profession to the public, our articles combine the scope and immediacy of serious journalism with the precision and depth of scholarship.
Read Places. Sign up to receive our newsletter. You’ll get a new round of articles every few weeks. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Submit to Places. We publish narrative journalism, essays, criticism, and photography, as well as peer-reviewed scholarship that deserves a wide audience. Read our submission guidelines.
Support Places. We are a nonprofit journal sustained by a network of academic partners as well as donors and foundations. Your support ensures that Places remains editorially independent and free.
Submission Guidelines (click above link for full details)
We seek lively and original writing on contemporary architecture, landscape, and urbanism. We define these areas broadly, and our approach is expansive, extending to allied fields including planning, geography, history, sociology, ecology, politics, media, and technology. We publish peer-reviewed scholarship as well as essays, criticism, narrative journalism, photography, and multimedia work.
We occasionally publish fiction, poetry, and work in other genres that illuminates the experience of cities, buildings, and landscapes.
We seek writing that probes hard questions and that balances the high-altitude concept with a sharp focus on the messy, complicated details of lived experience, of real places and politics. Whatever the form, we value prose that is both rigorous and accessible.
Payment ranges from a modest honorarium for scholarly articles to a more substantial fee for reported journalism and grant-supported projects. We do not pay for peer-reviewed articles or reprints.
Send manuscripts, proposals, or queries to editors@placesjournal.org. Write “Places submission” and the title in the subject line. Include detailed contact information, preferably a phone number.
We prefer to receive manuscripts as Microsoft Word attachments. Most of our articles range from 1,000 to 6,000 words, but we are not prescriptive about length, and happy to make exceptions. Citations should be formatted as endnotes in any standard style.
Submit images as separate files (JPEG/PNG/TIFF), as email attachments or using a file hosting service such as Dropbox. Do not embed images in Word documents. We like to see a wide selection of work, 20 to 30 images. Send captions or titles, if any, in a Word document.
Please inform us if you are submitting simultaneously to another publication. We will republish work under certain circumstances: for instance, if it has never been published in English, or has appeared only in a print publication with a limited readership. Let us know if your submission is part of a larger project, e.g., a chapter of a book in progress.
