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Hello Interactors,
Watching all the transnational love at the Olympics has been inspiring. We’re all forced to think about nationalities, borders, ethnicities, and all the flavors of behavioral geography it entails. After all, these athletes are all there representing their so-called “homeland.” And in the case of Alysa Liu, her father’s escape from his. Between the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the fall of the Berlin wall, “homeland” took on new meaning for many immigrants. This all took me back to that time and the start of my own journey at Microsoft at the dawn of a new global reality.
HOMELAND HATCHED HERE
With all the focus on Olympics and immigration recently, I’ve found myself reflecting on my days at Microsoft in the 90s. As the company was growing (really fast), teams were filling up with people recruited from around the world. There were new accents in meetings, new holidays to celebrate, and yummy new foods and funny new words being introduced. This thickening of transnational ties made Redmond feel as connected the rest of the world as the globalized software we were building. By 2000 users around the world could switch between over 60 languages in Windows and Office. In behavioral geography terms, working on the product and using the product made “here” feel more connected to “elsewhere.”
This influx of new talent was all enabled by the Immigration Act of 1990. Signed by George H. W. Bush, it increased and stabilized legal pathways for highly skilled immigrants. This continued with Clinton era decisions to expand H-1B visa allocations that fed the tech hiring boom. I took full advantage of this allotment recruiting and hiring interaction designers and user researchers from around the world.
In the same decade the federal government expanded access to the United States, it also tightened security. Terrorism threats, especially after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, spooked everyone. Despite this threat, there was more domestic initiated terrorism than outside foreign attacks. The decade saw deadly incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 by radicalized by white supremacist anti-government terrorists, which killed 168 and injured hundreds, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history before 9/11.
A year later, the Atlanta Olympic bombing and related bombings by anti-government Christian extremists caused multiple deaths and injuries. Clinic bombings and shootings by anti-abortion extremists began in 1994 with the Brookline clinic shootings and continued through the 1998 Birmingham clinic bombing. These inspired more arsons, bombings, and shootings tied to white supremacist, anti-abortion, and other extreme ideologies.
Still, haven been shocked by Islamist extremists in 1993 (and growing Islamic jihadist plots outside the U.S.) the federal government adopted new security language centered on protecting the “homeland” from outside incursions. In 1998, Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 62, titled “Protection Against Unconventional Threats to the Homeland and Americans Overseas,” a serious counterterrorism document whose title quietly normalized the term homeland inside executive governance.
But there was at least one critical voice. Steven Simon, Clinton’s senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, didn’t think “Defense of the Homeland” belonged in a presidential directive.
Simon’s retrospective argument is that “homeland” did more than name a policy, it brought a territorial logic of legitimacy that the American constitution had historically resisted. He recalls the phrase “Defense of the Homeland” felt “faintly illiberal, even un-American.” The United States historically grounded constitutional legitimacy in civic and legal abstractions (people, union, republic, human rights) rather than blood rights or rights to soil. Membership was to be mediated by institutions, employment, and law rather than ancestry.
“Homeland” serves as a powerful cue that suggests a mental model of ‘home’ and expands it to encompass a nation. This model is accompanied by a set of spatial inferences that evoke familiarity, appeal, and even an intuitive sense. However, it also creates a sense of a confined interior that can be breached by someone from outside.
This is rooted in place attachment that can be defined as an affective bond between people and places — an emotional tie that can anchor identity and responsibility. But attachment is not the same thing as ownership. Research on collective psychological ownership shows how groups can come to experience a territory as “ours.” This creates a sense of ownership that can be linked to a perceived determination right.
Here, the ingroup is entitled to decide what happens in that place while sometimes feeding a desire to exclude outsiders. When the word “homeland” was placed at the center of statecraft it primed public reasoning from attachment of place through care, stewardship, and shared fate toward property ownership through control, gatekeeping, and exclusion. It turns belonging into something closer to a property claim.
What makes the 1990s especially instructive from a geography perspective is that “access” itself was being administered through institutions that are intensely spatial: consulates, ports of entry, employer locations, housing markets, and the micro-geographies of office life. The H-1B expansions was not simply generosity, but a form of managed throughput in a system designed to meet labor demand. And it was paired with political assurances about enforcement and domestic worker protections.
Mid-decade legal reforms strengthened enforcement by authorities in significant ways. Mechanisms for faster removals and stricter interior enforcement reinforced the idea that the state could act more decisively within the national space. The federal government found ways to expand legal channels that served economic objectives while also building a governance style increasingly comfortable with interior control. “Homeland” helped supply the conceptual bridge that made that socioeconomic coexistence feel coherent.
It continues to encourage a politics of boundary maintenance that determines who counts as inside, what kinds of movement are legible as normal, and which bodies are perpetually “out of place.” If the defended object is a republic, the default language justification is legal and civic. If the defended object is a homeland, the language jurisdiction becomes territorial and affective. That shift changes what restrictions, surveillance practices, and membership tests become thinkable and tolerable over time.
HOMELAND’S HOHFELDIAN HARNESS
If “homeland” structures a place of belonging, then “rights” are the legal grammar that tells us what may be done in that place. The trouble is that “rights” are often treated as moral abstract objects floating above context. Legally, they are structured relations among people, institutions, and things. But “rights” can take on a variety of meanings.
Wesley Hohfeld, the Yale law professor who pioneered analytical jurisprudence in the early 20th century, argued that many legal disputes persist because the word “right” is used ambiguously.
He distinguished four basic “incidents” for rights: claim, privilege (liberty), power, and immunity. Each is paired with a position correlating to another party: duty, no-claim (no-right), liability, and disability. When the police pull you over for speeding you hold a privilege to drive at or below the speed limit (say, 40 mph). The state has no-right to demand you stop for going exactly 40 mph. But if you’re clocked at 50 mph, the officer enforces your no-right to exceed the limit which correlates to the state’s claim-right. You have a duty to comply by pulling over. If the officer then has power to issue a ticket, you face a liability to have your driving privilege altered (e.g., fined). But you also enjoy an immunity from arbitrary arrest without probable cause.
Let’s apply that to “homeland” security.
If a politician says we must “defend the homeland,” it can mean at least four different things legally:
* Claim-Rights: Citizens can demand that the government protect them (e.g., from attacks). Officials have the duty to act — think TSA screening or border patrol.​
* Privileges: Federal Agents get freedoms to act without legal blocks, such as stopping and questioning people in so-called high-risk zones, while bystanders have no-right to interfere.​
* Powers: Federal Agencies hold authority to change your legal status. For example, they can label you a watchlist risk (e.g., you become a liability). This can then lead to loss of liberties like travel bans, detentions, or asset freezes.​
* Immunities: Federal Officials or programs shield themselves from lawsuits (via qualified immunity or classified data rules), effectively blocking citizens’ ability to sue.
Forget whether these are legitimate or illegitimate, Hohfeld’s point is they are different forms of rights — and each has distinct costs. Once “homeland” is the object, the system tends to grow powers and privileges (capacity for overt or covert operations), and to seek immunities (resistance to challenge), often at the expense of others’ claim-rights and liberties.
Rights are not only relational, but they are also often spatially conditional. The same person can move through zones of legality experiencing different practical rights. Consider border checkpoints, airports, perimeters of government buildings, protest cites, or regions declared “emergency” zones. Government institutions operationalize these spaces as “behavioral geographies” which determines who gets stopped, where scrutiny concentrates, and which movements count as suspicious.
The state looks past the abstract bearer of unalienable liberties and due process to see only a physical entity whose movements through space dissolve their Constitutional immunities into a series of observable, trackable traces. Those traces become inputs to enforcement. This is what makes surveillance so powerful. “Homeland” governance is especially trace-hungry because it imagines safety as a property of space that must be continuously maintained.
But these traces are behavioral cues and human behavior is never neutral. They are interpreted through normalized cultural and institutional schemas about who “belongs” in which places. Place attachment and territorial belonging can become gatekeeping mechanisms. Empirical work on homeland/place attachment links it to identity processes and self-categorization. Related work suggests that collective psychological ownership — “this place is ours” — can predict exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants and outsiders. In legal terms, those social attitudes can translate into pressure to expand state powers and narrow outsiders’ claim-rights.
A vocabulary rooted in a ‘republic’ tends to emphasize rights as universal claims against the state. This is where we get due process, equal protection, and rights to speech and assembly. A homeland vocabulary tends to emphasize rights as statused permissions tied to membership and territory. Here we find rights of citizens, rights at the border, rights in “emergencies”, and rights conditioned on “lawful presence.” The shift makes some restrictions feel like a kind of protecting of the home. Hence the unaffable phrase, “Get off my lawn.”
HOMELAND HIERARCHIES HUMBLED
If the “homeland” is framed as a place-of-belonging and rights are the grammar of that place, then the current crisis of American democracy boils down to a dispute over the nature of equality. This tension is best understood through the long-standing constitutional debate between anticlassification and antisubordination, which dates back to the Reconstruction era.
Anticlassification, often called the “colorblind” or “status-blind” approach, holds that the state’s duty is simply to avoid explicit categories in its laws. Antisubordination, by contrast, insists that the law must actively dismantle structured group hierarchies and the “caste-like” systems they produce. When the state embraces a “homeland” logic, it leans heavily on anticlassification to mask a deeper reality of spatial subordination.
In what we might call the “Theater of Defense,” agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) increasingly rely on anticlassification principles to justify aggressive interior crackdowns. They frame enforcement as a territorial necessity by protecting the sanctity of the soil itself. A workplace raid or roving patrol, in this view, does not target any specific group. Instead, it simply maintains the “integrity” of the homeland. This reflects what law professor Bradley Areheart and others have described as the “anticlassification turn,” where formal attempts to embody equality end up legitimizing structural inequality.
Put differently, the state exercises a Hohfeldian Power to alter individuals’ legal status based on their geographic location or “lawful presence.” At the same time, it shields itself from legal challenge by insisting that the law applies equally to everyone who is “out of place.” This claim of territorial neutrality is a dangerous legal fiction. As scholars Solon Barocas and Andrew Selbst have shown in their work on algorithmic systems, attempts at neutral criteria often replicate entrenched biases.
Triggers like “proximity to a border” or “behavioral traces” in a transit hub do not produce blind justice. They enable targeted scrutiny and the erosion of immunity for those whose identities fail to match the “belonging” model of the “homeland.” The state circumvents its Hohfeldian Disability, avoiding the creation of second-class statuses, by pretending to manage space rather than discriminate against persons.
This shift from a civic Republic to a territorial “homeland” is the primary driver of democratic backsliding. Political scientist Jacob Grumbach captured this dynamic in his 2022 paper, Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding. Analyzing 51 indicators of electoral democracy across U.S. states from 2000 to 2018, Grumbach developed the State Democracy Index. His findings reveal how American federalism has morphed from “laboratories of democracy” into sites of subnational authoritarianism.
States with low scores on the index — often under unified Republican control — have pioneered police powers that insulate partisan dominance. We see this in the rise of state-level immigration enforcement units, the criminalization of movement for marginalized groups, and the expansion of a “right to exclude.”
These states are not just enforcing the law. They are forging what Yale legal scholar Owen Fiss would recognize as a new caste system. By fixating on “defending” state soil against “infiltrators,” legislatures dismantle the public rights of the Reconstruction era — the right to participate in community life without indignity. Today’s backsliding policies transform the nation’s interior into a permanent enforcement zone. They reject the Enlightenment ideals of America, rooted in beliefs like liberty, equality, democracy, individual rights, and the rule of law.
To fully understand Constitutional history, we best acknowledge that America’s universalist creedal definition wasn’t solely European. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything shows how Enlightenment values of liberty and equality arose from intellectual exchanges with Indigenous North American thinkers. Kandiaronk, a Huron statesman, traveled to Europe in the late 17th century and debated French aristocrats. His critiques were published and circulated widely among European intellectuals, including Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau.
Graeber and Wengrow point out that before the widely popular publication of these dialogues in 1703, the concept of "Equality" as a primary political value was almost entirely absent from European philosophy. By the time Rousseau wrote his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men in 1754, it was the central question of the age.
Kandiaronk criticized European society’s subservience to kings and obsession with property. He contrasted it with the consensual governance and individual agency of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy embodied in their Great Law of Peace — a political order prioritizing the public right to exist without state-sanctioned indignity.
The writers of the U.S. Constitution codified a Republic of “unalienable rights,” synthesizing Indigenous/European-inspired liberty with Hohfeldian Disabilities that legally restrained the state from territorial monarchy. Backsliding erases this profound philosophical endeavor. Reclaiming the Republic means honoring the Indigenous critique that a nation’s legitimacy rests on its people’s freedom, not its fences.
We seem to be moving from governance by the governed to protecting an ingroup. In Hohfeldian terms, the state expands its privileges while shrinking the claim-rights of the vulnerable to move and exist safely. This leads to “spatial subordination,” managed through adiaphorization — a concept from social theorist Zygmunt Bauman’s 1989 Modernity and the Holocaust.
Bauman, a Polish-Jewish survivor who escaped the Nazis’ grip on his early life, drew “adiaphora” from the Greek for matters outside moral evaluation. Modern bureaucracies make horrific actions morally neutral by framing them as technical duties, enabling atrocities like the Holocaust without personal ethical torment.
As territorial belonging takes precedence, non-belongers are excluded from moral and legal obligations. They become “non-spaces” or “human waste” in the eyes of ICE and DHS. This betrays antisubordination, the “core and conscience” of America’s civil rights tradition, as Yale constitutional scholars Jack Balkin and Reva Siegel called it. A democracy can’t endure if it permanently relegates any group to legal impossibility.
In the “homeland”, immigrants may live, work, and raise families for decades, yet remain mere “traces” to expunge. Weaponized place attachment turns affective bonds into property claims. This empowers the state to “cleanse” those deemed to be “out of place.” Rights become statused permissions, not universal ideals. If immunity from search depends on territorial status, the Republic of laws has yielded to a Heimat — a term the Nazis’ usurped for their blood-and-soil homeland…that they then bloodied and soiled.
Reversing this demands confronting the linguistic and legal architecture that rendered it conceivable. It’s time to rethink the “homeland” frame and its anticlassification crutch. A truer and fairer Republic would commit to antisubordination and the state would be disabled from wielding space for hierarchy. A person’s immunity from arbitrary power should be closer to an inalienable right to be “secure in one’s person” that holds firm beyond checkpoints or workplace doors…or your front door.
Steven Simon was right to feel uneasy with Clinton’s wording. “Homeland” planted a seed that sprouted into hedgerows of exceptional powers and curtailed liberties. Are we going to cling to a “homeland” secured by fear and exclusion, forever unstable, or finally become a Republic revered for securing universal law and rights? As long as our rights remain geographically conditional, we all dwell in liability. Reclaiming the Republic, and our freedoms within it, may require transforming the Constitution from a Hohfeldian map of perimeters into a boundless plane of human dignity it aspires to be.


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Hello Interactors,
Minnesota has seen federal incursion and overreach before. And not just in 2020. These removal tests we’re witnessing are rooted in the premise of US ‘manifest destiny’ and how quickly the notion of ‘home’ can be made fungible by a violent state.
But likeminded bodies always resist being bullied.
SCAFFOLD, SOVEREIGNTY, AND SEIZURE
On December 26, 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln authorized the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota. The execution, staged as public theater, was not a solemn judicial act. A special scaffold was built, martial law was declared, and an estimated 4,000 spectators witnessed the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
The spectacle mattered because it carried meaning beyond Mankato. The hanging marked the end of the six-week U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. This brutal conflict devastated the Minnesota River Valley and left deep trauma in Dakota communities. It also conveyed that the state could swiftly and effectively attempt control of contested land by violent force.
Mankato was the visible climax, but Fort Snelling was the quieter cruelty that continued. After the war, Dakota families — women, children, elders — were confined in harsh conditions near the fort during the winter of 1862–63. Disease and exposure killed between 130 and 300 Dakota people. Execution and exile worked together. One provided public power, the other attempted to ensure territorial outcomes.
Here’s what Dakota Chief Wabasha’s son-in-law, Hdainyanka, wrote to him shortly before his execution:
“You have deceived me. You told me that if we followed the advice of General Sibley, and gave ourselves up to the whites, all would be well; no innocent man would be injured. I have not killed, wounded or injured a white man, or any white persons. I have not participated in the plunder of their property; and yet to-day I am set apart for execution, and must die in a few days, while men who are guilty will remain in prison. My wife is your daughter, my children are your grandchildren. I leave them all in your care and under your protection. Do not let them suffer; and when my children are grown up, let them know that their father died because he followed the advice of his chief, and without having the blood of a white man to answer for to the Great Spirit.”
This moral failing was part of a larger burgeoning political economy. In 1862, the Twin Cities were still emerging, with mills, river commerce, and infrastructure. Yet the region’s future as an urban, financial, and political center depended on converting Dakota and Ojibwe homelands into transferable property. The spring prior to the massacre, in May 1862, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, handing out 160-acre chunks of stolen land labeled now as “public.” Colonizers and immigrants could occupy this land, and be defended by the US government, if they showed they could “improve” it through five years of occupation.
This act negated all Dakota treaties, seized 24 million acres of Minnesota lands, and mandated removal of what were now called Dakota “outlaws.” This converted communal Indigenous homelands into surveyed “public domain” eligible for homesteading, auctions, and rail grants, directly feeding wheat production for Minneapolis mills. Speculators and railroads exploited the act via proxy filings, reselling “cleared” parcels at profit to European immigrants.
By 1870, non-Native population surged from 172,000 to over 439,000. The “clearing” of land was not metaphorical. It was the prerequisite for surveying, fencing, settlement, rail corridors, and the wider commodity circuits that would bind the Upper Midwest to national and global markets.
That is what Harvard historian Sven Beckert calls war capitalism. He argues that global capitalism’s ascent was not a clean evolution toward free exchange. It relied on coercion, conquest, and violence. As his book on the history of Capitalism lays out, state funded war capitalism fundamentally relied on slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed commerce, and the imposition of sovereignty over both people and territory.
In this framing, the Dakota and Ojibwe were obstacles to industrialization and commodification. The frontier needed to be safe for settlement and investment of Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians, as well as railroads and industry. This included these two flour mills, the world’s largest by 1880: General Mills and Pillsbury.
The gallows in Mankato were the blunt instrument that made the state-capital alliance credible. The point was not only to punish alleged crimes, but to demonstrate a capacity and will to kill. The American state needed to show it could override Indigenous sovereignty and reorder space. The subsequent removals and confinement at Fort Snelling completed the transformation. “Home” was recoded from relationship into asset. This land was no longer lived geography but extractable territory, from stewarding real soil to the selling of real estate.
TOPHOPHILIA, TIES, AND TENSIONS
War capitalism is not merely to punish resistance, but to convert a lived place into a fungible asset. But violence plays a deeper role than just legal rearrangement. It has to break this constant of human life: our attachment to place.
Behavioral geographer Yi-Fu Tuan borrowed the term topophilia to describe this attachment — the “affective bond between people and place or setting.” The phrase can sound soft and sentimental but it can also cause friction in projects of political economy.
The state may be able to abolish or rewrite a treaty, redraw a border, rename a river, and issue new deeds, but it still confronts bodies that have been oriented by firm ground. It’s on these grounds that paths are walked, food gathered, relatives buried, stories anchored to landmarks, and seasonal rhythms internalized as a habit of life. The obstacle is embedded and embodied in the physiology, including cognitive, and grounds to location.
Modern neuroscience gives a concrete account of how place becomes part of a person. The hippocampus plays a central role in spatial memory and navigation, and research on place cells shows that hippocampal neurons fire in relation to specific locations in an environment. Familiar surroundings are not only around us they are within us. The brain builds spatial scaffolding that links location to memory, routine, prediction, and emotional regulation.
When cognition is tied to the specificity of place, it becomes hard for a parcel to be made equivalent to another. Commodification demands interchangeability. A home cannot easily be made equivalent to another home when it’s part of the nervous system — not quickly, not cleanly, and often not at all. When the state-capital alliance imagines territory as a grid of extractable value, it is implicitly trying to override how humans experience territory.
That is why “simple” displacement so often produces disproportionate harm. Psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove coined the term root shock to describe the traumatic stress that follows the destruction of one’s “emotional ecosystem.” Root shock is not only grief or nostalgia. It is a stress response to the sudden loss of the social and spatial cues that stabilize daily life. The shredding of a mesh of relationships, routines, and meanings embedded in a neighborhood or homeland.
The root shock of the state violence of 1862 was not just incidental to the project of transformation. It was structurally necessary. If topophilia is a biological and psychological anchor, then a purely legal or economic strategy (bureaucratic coercion) will often be insufficient because the anchor of topophilia holds. To clear land at speed and scale, the state reaches for tools that can sever attachment abruptly. Public executions, mass incarceration, forced marches, and exile doesn’t just relocate people. They’re violent attempts to scramble the conditions under which people can remain attached at all. It transforms topophilia into vulnerability.
Work on social exclusion and “social pain” helps explain why. In a widely cited fMRI study, Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues found increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex during experiences of exclusion. This parallels patterns seen in physical pain studies where distress is tracked with painful activities. The point is not that social threat is “just like” physical injury, but that the brain treats social severing as a serious alarm condition. It’s something that demands attention, vigilance, and behavioral change to overcome.
ROOTS, RESISTANCE, AND REPAIR
Topophilia doesn’t end with the so-called frontier or attempts at ‘removing’ its inhabitants. It reappears wherever people form durable bonds. That includes the streets and schools, churches and parks, language, kin, and the local economies and cultures war capitalism eventually built. The Dakota and Ojibwe were never “removed” in any final sense. Many live and organize in and around the Twin Cities today.
In South Minneapolis, the Indigenous Protector Movement, a biproduct of the American Indian Movement, works out of the American Indian Cultural Corridor along Franklin Avenue — an immediate target for ICE. The protectors made their presence known as a form of ongoing place-based care and defense.
It is a living archive of tactics for defending attachment under pressure through direct action, community building, patrols, and the mundane discipline of showing up. What it offers is not merely a critique of state violence, but vigilance without spectacle, care without permission, and solidarity as a daily habit rather than a momentary sentiment.
Other areas of Minneapolis show how when federal enforcement turns public space into a zone of uncertainty, topophilic neighbors often respond by adopting exactly those same “weapons” of persistence — care, documentation, rapid communication, mutual aid — that have long characterized Indigenous resistance and slavery abolitionist networks.
Standing Rock, where the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and allies gathered in 2016 to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline, demonstrated how quickly infrastructure can scale when a place becomes a shared object of defense.
The #NoDAPL movement assembled a broad coalition of Indigenous nations and allies, over 200 tribes, alongside legal support, medical care, and communications systems designed to withstand state patience.
The 2020 George Floyd uprising in Minneapolis also revealed how love of place can become a platform for organized care rather than retreat. Alongside protest, residents built mutual-aid channels, street-medic networks, food distribution, and neighborhood defense efforts that treated the city as an emotional ecosystem worth repairing. What looked to outsiders like spontaneous eruption was, on the ground, a rapid layering of roles that included medics, legal observers, supply runners, translators, and de-escalators. This ecology of participation made it possible for large numbers of people to act without centralized command.
Social psychology helps explain why these movements generate allies rather than only sympathizers. One key concept is collective efficacy — the combination of social cohesion and a shared willingness to intervene for the common good. It blossoms when people repeatedly see each other act, learn local norms of mutual obligation, and build trust that intervention will be supported rather than punished. All rooted in topophilia.
Place attachment can bridge boundaries that would otherwise keep people separate. Work in community psychology and planning shows that place attachment and meaning can support participation and collective engagement, especially when development or coercion threatens everyday life. In other words, topophilia is not just private feeling. When it’s under threat it can become public motive and an engine for coalition.
The coalition in Minneapolis is being characterized by the federal government as terrorists. This borrows from a long history of resistance to violence because war capitalism has never been only domestic. The United States and its allies refined coercive governance overseas through night raids and “capture-or-kill” operations in Afghanistan, midnight house raids in Iraq, and broader militarized campaigns that treat homes as “searchable terrain” and communities as “intelligence environments.”
Many of the officials, contractors, and voters who authorized or normalized these methods rarely imagined the same atmosphere of violent seizure in their neighborhood. As unimaginable as it may be watching unmarked vehicles, sudden detentions, and public uncertainty coming to American streets — used against the very citizens and taxpayers who fund such operations — it’s not to those victims overseas in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, or even inner city America.
That return is what the poet and politician Aimé Césaire called the “imperial boomerang” effect, the idea that techniques tolerated in peripheral countries can come home to roost. In the U.S., the boomerang has long “landed” first on people of color. It emerges through surveillance and disruption campaigns like the two decades of the covert and illegal COINTELPRO program where the FBI targeted counterculture groups of the so-called New Left.
Or the “Palmer Raids” of 1919 and 1920 targeting largely Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their left-leaning politics. These led to riots in 30 US cities and culminated in the bombing of the home of A. Mitchell Palmer, the US attorney general. These programs all reflect the notion that war can come home — just look at the increased militarizing of policing complete with SWAT tactics.
And the same history that produced the scaffold of war capitalism of the past also produced reservoirs of resistance we see here and now. When neighbors anywhere respond to incursions not only with fear but with organized vigilance and material support, they are adapting older strategies of care found in Indigenous, abolitionist, and other movement-based defenses of people and places against infiltration, intimidation, and attempted violent removal.
We can see how war capitalism endures. Mankato’s 1862 gallows aimed to clear Dakota homelands of their people for homesteading, rails, and mills. Meanwhile, today’s Operation Metro Surge includes thousands of federal agents raiding Minneapolis homes and streets, attempting to sever immigrant attachments to allegedly enforce labor control and national security. These militarized spectacles of warrantless entries, tear gas, and shootings echo what Beckert has uncovered. They treat people and place as obstacles to commodification rather than roots of stewardship.
Yet topophilia also persists. These cross cultural rapid-response networks are not new to these lands, even though the US government tried to erase them centuries ago. The inspiring actions we see in Minneapolis reflect the values of compassion, positiveness, and respect for all relatives with neighborly solidarity that the first occupants of that land embraced. They’re now woven with their allied 21st century neighbors in common and shared resistance. As best expressed here by Indigenous studies and political ecology scholar Melanie Yazzie. (and the longer version here)
Minneapolis, like those acts of resistance in the nearby Dakotas, enacts and rehearses an alternative form of civil governance that centers mutual obligation over coercion and extraction. It shows how cities can survive the strain and stay alive — not through fear and gain, but through care that grounds and sustains.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Hello Interactors,
It’s winter. So, as the sun tilts toward the sun (up north) my writing tilts toward the brain. It’s when I put on my behavioral geography glasses and try to see the world as a set of loops between bodies and places, perception and movement, constraint and choice. It’s hard to do that right now without running into AI. And one thing that keeps nagging at me is how AI is usually described as this super-brain perched in the cloud, or in a machine nearby, thinking on our behalf.
That framing inherits an old habit of mind. Since Descartes, we’ve been tempted by the idea that the “real” mind sits apart from the messy body, steering it from some inner control room. Computer metaphors reinforced the same split by calling the CPU the “brain” of the machine. And now we’re extending the metaphor again with AI as the brain of the internet, hovering overhead, crunching data, issuing guidance. An intelligence box directing action at a distance is a tidy picture but it risks making us miss what’s actually doing the work.
Let’s dig into how the brain leverages the loops of people, places, and interfaces we all move through to extend it’s richness and reach.
GRADIENTS GUIDE WHILE BODIES BALANCE
Have you ever hiked or skied in snow or fog and seen the middle distance just in front of you disappear? It takes the world you thought you knew, like ridge lines, tree lines, and the comforting predictable geometry of “just ahead” and reduces it to panic stricken near-field fragments. I’ve sensed once familiar ski runs become suddenly unfamiliar not because it changed, but because it was no longer accessible to my brain.
In these moments, we’re all forced to reckon, recalibrate, and (usually) slow down as our senses sharpen. We take note of the slope under our feet and the way the ground shifts. We listen for clues our eyes can’t see and notice which direction the wind is blowing, how the light is changing, and how our own heartbeat and breath changes with each calculated risk. We know where we are, but the picture is fuzzy. Our memory only gets us so far. Everything around us becomes this multi-faceted relationship between our body making sense of it all while our brain updates its status moment by moment. The last thing a brain wants is to have its co-dependent limbs fail and risk falling.
That experience demonstrates how the world is coupled with us. In world-involving coupling a living system survives through ongoing coordination with the affordances and constraints of its surroundings. In behavioral geography this frames spatial behavior as dynamic, reciprocal coordination between individuals and their environments, rather than just isolated internal cognition.
Places actively shape decisions through the physics of the world and all its constraints. Actions, in turn, then reshape those surroundings in ongoing loops. This approach to cognition shifts focus from isolated mental maps to lived, constitutive engagements. It treats the world as a partner in our own competence.
Before brains, gradients existed. Living systems navigated heat, cold, salt, sugar, thirst, dark, and light to persist. The first cognitive problems were biophysical. Surviving in a world that constantly disrupted viability relied on basic mechanisms like membrane flows, chemical reactions, and feedback. These primordial loops coupled an organism to a given environment directly. There were not yet any neural intermediaries. These were protozoa drifting toward nutrients or recoiling from toxins. It is in this raw attunement that world-involving coupling emerges.
In 1932, physiologist Walter Cannon coined the term “homeostasis” to describe the body’s active pursuit of stability amidst environmental pressures. Living systems, whether single-celled or more complex, maintain survival variables within narrow bands. Cells detect changes in these variables, which affect molecular states. Temperature, acidity, pressure, osmosis, and metabolic concentrations all influence reaction rates. Feedback loops alter cell-environment interactions through heat transfer, ion flux, water movement, and gas exchange, ultimately restoring the system to a viable band. Organisms are not passive vessels but actively engage with these detection loops, triggering adjustments like a wilting plant drawing water. Sensing and action are fused operations for persistence.
About 600 million years ago, cells in an ancient sea sensed electrical fields or chemical plumes on microbial mats. These pioneering cells formed diffuse nerve nets, evolving into jellyfish and anemones. Simple meshes firing to contract thin membranes in bell-shaped forms, they lacked a brain but coordinated propulsive pulses to keep the organism in bounds or sting prey. Within 10s of millions of years, bilateral animals evolved. Flatworms like planaria emerged with nerve cords laddered along their undersides, thickening toward their tips. These proto-brains sped signal spread across their elongated forms.
As vertebrates appear, control becomes more layered. Circuits in the brainstem evolve to coordinate breathing, heart rate, posture, and basic orienting reflexes. The cerebellum emerges to sharpen timing and coordination. Competing actions, drives, and habits become sorted with the help of the basal ganglia. With mammals — and especially primates — the cortex expands. Perception and action become more flexible across situational contexts and with it comes longer-horizon learning, social inference, and planning.
But at every milestone, bodies are still constrained and governed by gradients and fields related to gravity, friction, heat, oxygen, hydration, predators, prey, and terrain. The cortex sits on top of these older loops, stretching them in time and recombining them in new ways. Even the most “abstract” human cognition still rides on the same foundation of reflexes and sensorimotor sampling. This is what keeps an organism in operable biochemical ranges while it propels itself through an environment that perpetually pushes and pulls.
BOXED BRAINS BEGET BIG BELIEFS
The field of physiology deepened this bio-chemical inquiry through the early 20th century. Physiologist and neurologist Ivan Pavlov revealed how sensory cues could chain to responses through neural rerouting creating conditioned ‘Pavlovian’ reflexes. Neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington coined the term “synapse” as he dissected and described them as switches in these loops coupled to the world. Through this inquiry, the autonomic nervous system emerged as a kind of homeostatic controller. Sympathetic surges in the system were found to create fight or flight reactions as our parasympathetic system kicks in to dial us back. This can be seen as a more complex version of the same push-pull of Cannon’s original homeostasis.
By the mid-20th century, mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener, working closely with physiologists and engineers, compared the nervous system to a servomechanism — a self-correcting governor found in engines. He coined the term cybernetics in his 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine where he treated animals and machines as systems that regulate themselves through feedback.
He and his collaborators argued this was a form of “purposeful behavior” or goal-directed action — a kind of negative feedback loop that reduces the difference between a current state and a target state. These ideas hardened in engineering fields during wartime as they were used in weapon systems for prediction and control of trajectories by compensating for delay and uncertainty. Cybernetics helped make the physiological regulation of Cannon’s biological homeostasis structurally analogous to engineering.
This mechanical metaphor sparked a long-standing debate, dating back to Descartes’ 17th-century mind-body split. Dualism posited an immaterial mind as a rule-following pilot controlling mechanical flesh. Alan Turing’s 1936 paper had already formalized this possibility, presenting a “machine” capable of computing any algorithm.
Two decades later, the Dartmouth summer workshop coined “artificial intelligence” and encouraged the idea of engineering minds as programs. Around the same time, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell built early “logic theorist” programs that proved theorems, making intelligence seem like a boxed process involving symbols and reasoning.
That lineage hasn’t disappeared. This is largely the default engineering posture of AI. Even when the machinery shifts from hand-coded rules to learned statistical patterns, we still talk as if intelligence lives inside a system. AI models claim to “form representations,” “build a world model,” “store knowledge,” “plan,” and “reason.” Contemporary training methods reward this language because they really do produce rich internal states that can be probed, steered, and reused across tasks.
Less discussed is the metaphysical shift from “the system has internal structure supporting performance” to “the system contains an inner arena where meaning emerges and is inspected before action.” Daniel Dennett, a philosopher who dismantled this intuition in theories of mind and consciousness, called this picture the “Cartesian theater.”
He noticed that scientific explanations often subtly reintroduce the central place where “it all comes together” for an internal witness. Dennett believes this inner stage is a comforting fiction derived from Descartes’ split between observer and world. Brain imaging reveals coordinated network activity, but not a literal inner ‘screen’ presenting a unified world-model. Many neuroscientists describe cognition as emerging from distributed, parallel, and recurrent processes, sometimes with large-scale integration. Dennett’s point is not that internal processing is unreal, but that our language tempts us toward a surreal Cartesian picture in a central place we can’t empirically reveal.
RESAMPLE, RESTABILIZE, AND RESHAPE
Neuroscience reveals that perception differs from a camera feeding a private theater. Our eyes rapidly sample information based on our actions, and the brain stabilizes perception during movement. Much visual processing is organized in the service of action, with partially distinct but interacting pathways supporting perceptual report and real-time visuomotor control. This suggests that the brain resembles a system for maintaining a relationship with the world through continuous sampling, correction, and skilled engagement, rather than a world-reconstruction engine.
James J. Gibson, the founder of ecological psychology, arrived at a similar conclusion earlier from behavioral and perceptual evidence. He argues that the world provides lawful patterns, regularities constrained by physics and geometry, that guide behavior because they remain stable across changing viewpoints. These patterns are not complete. Organisms make them available by moving, shifting gaze, turning the head, walking, or touching. Perception is an active process of sampling the world.
If perception is about staying attuned to lawful structures in the environment, the evolutionary consequence is organisms don’t just read the world, they also write it. As organisms became more complex and mobile, they gained the power to reshape the very patterns they depend on. They start cutting paths (pathways worn into grass, game trails beaten into forests), building shelters (bird nests, termite mounds, human dwellings), altering flows of water and heat (beaver dams, termite mounds), and laying chemical trails (ants depositing pheromones).
Evolutionary biologists call this niche construction. Organisms modify their environments, which then feed back into selection pressures and development, creating a dynamic cycle where the environment becomes a product of life and a force that shapes it further. As the world guides behavior, behavior reshapes the world, and the remade world trains bodies and brains into new skills and expectations. Over time, these modifications become external organs of coordination, storing information, reducing uncertainty, and channeling action.
A worn trail is navigational memory made durable, a nest or mound is a climate-control device that stabilizes temperature and airflow, and a pheromone path is a distributed signal that recruits other ants into collective action and direction. Complexity scientist David Krakauer calls this broader idea of “mind outsourced into engineered matter” exbodiment — where artifacts actively constrain and channel cogntion. In this view, cognitive work is no longer confined to nervous tissue but accomplished through bodies working with worlds they’ve built.
Humans take this to an extreme. Clothing and shelter externalize thermoregulation, fire externalizes digestion and protection, tools externalize force and precision, drugs alter chemistry, writing and calendars externalize memory and timing, and institutions externalize norms and coordination. Much of what we call “human intelligence” is not only in our brains but also distributed across artifacts and practices that have accumulated over generations.
Cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins made the point vivid by studying navigation. On a ship, “knowing where you are” is not privately derived nor sealed in a captain’s skull. It is a collective achievement through a system of charts, maps, instruments, procedures, language, coordinated roles — an entire ecology of cognition comprised of tools and social organization. Here geography and cognition merge. Orientation is not just mental but enacted in relation to representations that are anchored and socially maintained in our material reality.
When I was at Microsoft, I followed the work of sociologist Lucy Suchman who studied human-machine interaction. She arrived at a similar conclusion criticizing the fantasy that action is simply “execution of an internal plan.” Real action, she argues, is situated. It’s responsive to unfolding circumstances — often improvisational — and is shaped by context in ways that cannot be fully specified in advance. In other words, if we look for intelligence as a prewritten script inside the head, we will miss how intelligence is often produced when enacted in a world that refuses to hold still.
Large language models, at first glance, seem to embody the “internal plan” fantasy. They’re sealed systems containing competence in weights and parameters, ready for queries. However, they’re closer to Suchman’s warning. Trained on vast archives of human writing, LLMs learn statistical regularities in vast continuations of text. When used, they produce a new continuation conditioned on prompts and context. Prompts aren’t mere inputs. They’re situated actions in human-computer interactions. They set frames, narrow affordances, cue roles, establish constraints, and often iterate in a back-and-forth that resembles Suchman’s improvisation with a powerful partner who is also techy and textual.
Philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, in their extended mind thesis, claim under certain conditions, external tools can become constitutive parts of cognition when they are reliably integrated into the organism’s routines. As we’ve learned, the boundary of cognition is not always the boundary of skin or skull, it’s the boundary of a stable loop.
When the fog rolls in and visibility gets low, the boundary of this loop becomes quickly apparent. “The mind’s eye” is not that helpful…practically or metaphorically. If anything, the brain wants nothing more than for the body to widen contact with the world. It slows us down, sharpens listening, and increases tactile attention. It calculates different gradient thresholds to measure risk…it might even glance at an external sensing device that is prompting some intervention or improvisation! We are not watching a movie in our head to get through the fog. We are trying to stay oriented in a world that refuses to be fully represented.
This is the reframing of intelligence — artificial and otherwise — I wish for. I’d like to see more talk of intelligence being less a coveted individualistic thing hidden inside us and more an achievement of coordinated biophysical, social, infrastructural loops across time. When we mistake a metaphor (“there’s a theater in there”) for an ontology (“that’s where cognition lives”), we get misled about minds and we get misled about AI. The alternative is not anti-technology. It’s conceptual hygiene. Let’s start asking where cognition actually happens, what it is made of, and how places — natural and built — participate in making it possible. You know, Interplace — the interaction of people and place.


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Hello Interactors,
Spain’s high-speed trains feels like a totally different trajectory of modernity. America prides itself on being the tech innovator, but nowhere can we blast 180 MPH between city centers with seamless transfers to metros and buses…and no TSA drudgery.
But look closer and the familiar comes into view — rising car ownership, rush-hour congestion (except in Valencia!), and growth patterns that echo America.
I wanted to follow these parallel tracks back to the nineteenth-century U.S. rail boom and forward to Spain’s high-spe ed era. Turns out it’s not just about who gets faster rail or faster freeways, but what kind of growth they lock in once they arrive.
TRAINS, CITIES, AND CONTRADICTIONS
My wife and I took high-speed rail (HSR) on our recent trip to Spain. My first thought was, “Why can’t we have nice things?”
They’re everywhere.
Madrid to Barcelona in two and a half hours. Barcelona to Valencia, Valencia back to Madrid. Later, Porto to Lisbon. Even Portugal is in on it. We glided out of city-center stations, slipped past housing blocks and industrial belts, then settled into the familiar grain of Mediterranean countryside at 300 kilometers an hour. The Wi-Fi (mostly) worked. The seats were comfortable. No annoying TSA.
Where HSR did not exist or didn’t quite fit our schedule, we filled gaps with EasyJet flights. We did rent a car to seek the 100-foot waves at Nazaré, Portugal, only to be punished by the crawl of Porto’s rush-hour traffic in a downpour. Within cities, we took metros, commuter trains, trams, buses, bike share, and walked…a lot.
From the perspective of a sustainable transportation advocate, we were treated to the complete “nice things” package: fast trains between cities, frequent rail and bus service inside them, and streets catering to human bodies more than SUVs. What surprised me, though, was the way these nice things coexist with growth patterns that look — in structural terms — uncomfortably familiar.
In this video 👆 from our high-speed rail into Madrid, you see familiar freeway traffic but also a local rail running alongside. This site may be more common in NYC, DC, Boston, and even Chicago but less so in the Western US.
Spain now operates one of the world’s largest high-speed networks. Spaniards reside inside a country roughly the size of Texas and enjoy about 4,000 kilometers of dedicated lines. This is Europe’s largest HSR system and one of only a handful of “comprehensive national networks” worldwide (Campos & de Rus, 2009; Perl & Goetz, 2015; UIC, 2024). Yet, like most of Europe, it has also seen a steady rise in car ownership. Across the EU, the average number of passenger cars per capita increased from 0.53 to 0.57 between 2011 and 2021, with Spain tracking that upward trend (Eurostat, 2023). Inland passenger-kilometers remain dominated by private cars, with rail — high-speed and conventional combined — taking a modest minority share (European Commission, 2021).
Spain, in other words, has both extensive HSR and rising car ownership. The tension between the pleasant micro-geographies of rail stations, sidewalks, and metro lines and the macro-geography of an ever-familiar car-dependent growth regime makes it interesting from an economic geography standpoint. HSR in Spain is not so much an alternative to growth but a particular way of organizing it.
America was once organized around rail. But our own car-dependent growth regime pushed it away. In the late nineteenth century, the United States was the HSR superpower of its time.
From the 1830s through the early twentieth century, a dense mesh of rail lines shortened distances across the continent. By 1916, the U.S. rail network peaked at roughly 254,000 route miles — enough track to circle the globe multiple times. It then went into steep decline under competition from cars and trucks (Stover, 1997; The RAND Corporation, 2008). Rail was not merely a mode of transport. It was the primary infrastructure for integrating an entire continent’s economy.
Chicago was the canonical beneficiary. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis makes the case that rail-driven “time–space compression” did as much as natural endowments to elevate Chicago from muddy frontier town to the pivot of a continental system of grain, lumber, and meat (Cronon, 1991). Rail lines did not simply connect places that already mattered; they reorganized what mattered by funneling resources, capital, and people through specific nodes. Economic geography here is not just about location, but about which locations are made central by network design.
This “time–space compression” traces back to Karl Marx’s 1857–58 Grundrisse, where he described the “annihilation of space by time” as capitalism’s drive to overcome spatial barriers through faster transport like railroads to enable quicker turnover of capital. Geographer David Harvey formalized the term “time–space compression” in his 1989 The Condition of Postmodernity, building on Marx to analyze how nineteenth-century rail networks (alongside telegraphs) shrank perceived distances during the first major wave of compression from the mid-1800s to World War I.
At the metropolitan scale, those same rail technologies produced an earlier generation of “nice things” that sustainable transportation advocates now associate with Europe. Horsecar, cable car, and later electric streetcar networks radiated from downtowns into the countryside, creating early “rail suburbs” connected by frequent service and walkable main streets (Jackson, 1985; Fishman, 1987). Streetcar suburbs offered middle-class households a promise of a commuter train to a walkable compact neighborhood with quiet residential streets, relatively clean air, and quick access back to the city.
But these “nice things” were never neutral amenities. Rail suburbs became instruments of class and, in the U.S. context, racial segregation. (Jackson, 1985; Fishman, 1987) Access to frequent rail service and detached houses on leafy streets was tightly bound to property ownership and exclusionary practices. Chicago’s rail-driven boom reshaped hinterlands into “commodity frontiers.” It, like many other cities later, externalized environmental costs onto landscapes far from the city’s sidewalks, station concourses, and less than desirable living conditions.
RAILS, ROADS, AND REGIMES
The core paradox of economic growth is already visible here. Rail dramatically reduced transport costs and enabled agglomeration economies — thick labor markets, specialized firms, information spillovers — that enriched certain cities and classes. At the same time, those very efficiencies intensified resource extraction, spatial inequality, and political conflicts. Capital and power decided who could benefit and who would be pushed to the margins.
America once ran on rails — dense, local, and linked — its own version of the “nice things” seen in Spain. But they carried with them the costs of congestion and expansion, sending us on a different path for mobility.
The transition from rail to road in the twentieth-century United States is not just a story of transportation technology. It’s a story of how a country decided to scale itself.
As motor vehicles diffused in the early 1900s, they interacted with existing urban and regional patterns largely established by rail networks. Postwar sprawl is largely a confluence of car-based living. Rising incomes, coupled with finance institutions rewarding new developments and cheaply manufactured cars, led households and corporate firms to trade close proximity for space (Glaeser & Kahn, 2004). Cars did not invent the desire for separation from industrial cities, but they multiplied the potential configurations.
Federal policy amplified that shift. The 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act created a 41,000-mile limited-access network funded primarily by federal fuel taxes. This embedded a new high-speed system on top of the pre-existing rail grid (National Archives, 2022; Weingroff, 1996). While railroads remained vital for freight, the intercity passenger market was increasingly organized around airports and interstates.
Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier documents how federal mortgage guarantees, tax incentives, and highway construction converged to make owner-occupied suburban homes the normative “good life” for white middle-class Americans (Jackson, 1985). Robert Fishman’s Bourgeois Utopias similarly traces how suburban landscapes became aspirational geographies of domestic desire separated from the din and drive of the urban mire, rising from London to Los Angeles (Fishman, 1987).
From an economic geography perspective, the postwar highway and aviation regime did not end agglomeration; it reconfigured it. Metropolitan regions sprawled outward along radial freeways and beltways. Airports became new nodes of connectivity, often surrounded by logistics parks and office clusters. The benefits of scale — large labor markets, diversified industries, hordes of consumers — remained, but the physical form of cities stretched into low-density, car-centric webs of cul-de-sacs.
This system has its own “nice things” that I enjoy every day: door-to-door convenience on your own schedule, cheap flights between distant cities, and a logistic network that will deliver almost anything in two days…or even the next hour. But it also hardened a built environment that is difficult to retrofit for different “nice things” like rail. The very success of car-based ascendence created a geography whose path dependence only leaves alternatives of prohibitive transcendence.
HSR projects worldwide tend to cluster where dense city pairs sit 300–800 km apart, with strong pre-existing travel demand and robust local transit systems (Campos and de Rus, 2009). National HSR strategies lead to “exclusive corridors,” “hybrid networks,” and “comprehensive national networks,” placing Spain firmly in the last camp (Perl and Goetz, 2015). It’s a country that is clearly attempting to knit together most major regional centers through high-speed lines.
Spain’s choice of a comprehensive network is legible on the ground. High-speed services plug directly into metropolitan rail systems like metros, trams, and intercity bus terminals. Stations are embedded in walkable fabrics rather than isolated off highway interchanges (or distant airports EasyJet often targets). That integration creates what Robert Cervero calls a “transit metropolis”: a region where a workable fit exists between transit services and urban form, so that high-capacity lines feed and are fed by dense, mixed-use neighborhoods (Cervero, 1998).
The economic geography of such a system is subtle. Spain’s HSR lines certainly reduce travel times between Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, and other hubs. But the benefits do not simply diffuse evenly along the tracks. Research reviewing European cases shows that HSR is rarely “transformative” by itself. It mostly reinforces existing centers that can already capture agglomeration effects, especially when combined with supportive policies around land use and local transit. (Vickerman, 2018)
In practice, that means Madrid and Barcelona feel closer together in time and opportunity space, while smaller intermediate cities may or may not see proportional gains. Agglomeration economies intensify in the big nodes. Firms can draw on larger markets, workers can access more jobs, and weekend tourism can boom. At the same time, the network expands the radius within which people can consider “everyday” trips. Like a business meeting in Barcelona, or a spontaneous weekend in Valencia to attend the opera inside Calatrava’s futuristic Opera House.
This is where the growth paradox reappears. EU transport statistics show that, despite decades of rail investment, private cars still account for the majority of inland passenger-kilometers, with rail’s share modest but slowly increasing (European Commission, 2021). HSR does not eliminate car dependence so much as layer another growth-enabling system on top of it. The same reduction in time–space frictions that makes HSR delightful to ride also facilitates more and longer trips overall, even if some of them substitute for flights.
From the traveler’s perspective, a seamless itinerary from Barcelona to Valencia to Madrid feels like a triumph of infrastructure. From an economic geography lens, it is a particular resolution of the trade-off between agglomeration and externalities: more connectivity, more opportunity, more consumption, and more pressure on housing, landscapes, and local services.
If Spain’s network represents one way of managing the growth paradox, what would it take for the United States to “have nice things” again in the form of HSR?
At first glance, the answer seems straightforward: build lines between the major city pairs where distances are right and air travel is heavy — the Northeast Corridor, California’s Los Angeles–San Francisco line, maybe a Chicago-centered Midwest hub. The HSR literature broadly supports this corridor logic. Successful lines typically connect large, dense cities with strong existing flows, while weaker corridors struggle to generate enough ridership to justify their capital costs (Campos and de Rus, 2009; Perl and Goetz, 2015).
But those studies also assume something the United States often lacks: the local transit and land-use framework that lets HSR actually function as part of everyday mobility.
Hong Kong’s “Rail + Property” model is instructive here (Cervero and Murakami’s, 2009). By combining transit infrastructure with dense, mixed-use property development around stations — and capturing a share of the resulting land value increases — Hong Kong has been able to finance much of its rail network while creating environments where rail is the default option for many trips. The value capture mechanisms and zoning regimes are context-specific, but the broader lesson travels: HSR works best when station areas are intense agglomeration zones, not park-and-ride lots surrounded by arterials.
In much of the United States, however, rail stations — where they exist at all — sit in landscapes optimized for cars. Many potential HSR terminal sites are currently flanked by freeways, surface parking, and single-use zoning. Introducing high-speed service into such environments without altering their land-use and transit logics risks reproducing the patterns the research warns against: an expensive, symbolic infrastructure with limited transformative impact.
There is also the matter of scale. Low-density sprawl is, in part, the spatial expression of a car-and-highway technological regime. HSR requires a different spatial regime: one where trip volumes are high between specific nodes and where a substantial share of people and jobs cluster within catchments of good local transit. Without that, high-speed lines struggle to fill trains. Even worse, the per-passenger carbon and financial math becomes far less compelling.
None of this makes HSR impossible in the U.S. It just means that “nice things” are not only about technology or even capital. They are about the entire bundle of institutions, regulations, and growth patterns that give that technology something to plug into. The United States did this once with rail, then again with highways and aviation. Each time, the network we built reorganized economic geography in its own image.
HAVING NICE THINGS, ON PURPOSE
What I learned riding Spanish high-speed trains is not that the United States should abandon its HSR ambitions. Nor did the experience confirm a simple morality tale where Europe has virtuous trains and America has sinful freeways.
Instead, it underscored how transportation technologies are always embedded in larger growth regimes, and how those regimes come with paradoxes baked in. Rail made Chicago while it also helped empty hinterlands and deepen urban inequalities. Highways and airports made postwar American suburbs. They also locked in carbon-intensive sprawl and hollowed out many urban cores. Spain’s HSR enables low-carbon intercity travel and multiplies the number of places you can reasonably visit for a weekend, while car ownership quietly continues to rise.
While economic geography gives us a language of agglomeration economies, time–space compression, and path dependence, this question remains: “why can’t we have nice things?” It becomes less about copying Spanish trains and more about asking what kind of growth we are willing to organize ourselves around.
If the United States wants HSR to be one of its “nice things” again, it will have to be done on purpose and in sequence. Yes it requires corridors where the numbers pencil out, but also land-use reform around stations, reinvestment in local transit, and governance mechanisms. We’ll need structures that not only capture some of the value that rail can generate but also be used to perpetually fund the system.
It will mean recognizing that the very digital tools we already rely on — route planners, booking apps, algorithmic pricing — can either deepen our commitment to car-and-flight geographies or be leveraged to make multi-modal rail the path of least resistance. And in a country where residents in every metropolitan area reject attempts at building new airports, HSR is the only viable alternative. SeaTac’s former operations director once told me (over dinner on a train!) the he believes Denver’s 1995 airport may be America’s last new greenfield airport.
What’s frustrating is America knows how to do big transportation projects. We’ve done it before at different times, with different technologies, and with different winners. Spain was a reminder that “nice things” are possible and they’re never just amenities. They are big decisions about how to grow big. They’re also about who benefits from proximity and what kinds of landscapes we are willing to live with — even if and when the trains do arrive.
References
Campos, J., & de Rus, G. (2009). Some stylized facts about HSR: A review of HSR experiences around the world. Transport Policy.
Cervero, R. (1998). The transit metropolis: A global inquiry. Island Press.
Cervero, R., & Murakami, J. (2009). Rail and property development in Hong Kong: Experiences and extensions. Urban Studies.
Cronon, W. (1991). Nature’s metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. W. W. Norton.
European Commission. (2021). EU transport in figures: Statistical pocketbook 2021. Publications Office of the European Union.
Eurostat. (2023, May 30). Number of cars per inhabitant increased in 2021. Eurostat News.
Fishman, R. (1987). Bourgeois utopias: The rise and fall of suburbia. Basic Books.(Internet Archive)
Glaeser, E. L., & Kahn, M. E. (2004). Sprawl and urban growth. In J. V. Henderson & J. F. Thisse (Eds.), Handbook of regional and urban economics (Vol. 4, pp. 2481–2527). Elsevier.
Jackson, K. T. (1985). Crabgrass frontier: The suburbanization of the United States. Oxford University Press.(Internet Archive)
National Archives. (2022). National Interstate and Defense Highways Act (1956). U.S. National Archives.(National Archives)
Perl, A. D., & Goetz, A. R. (2015). Corridors, hybrids and networks: Three global development strategies for high speed rail. Journal of Transport Geography.
Stover, J. F. (1997). American railroads (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.(Internet Archive)
The RAND Corporation. (2008). The state of U.S. railroads: A review of capacity and performance. RAND.
UIC (International Union of Railways). (2024). HSR atlas 2024 edition. UIC.Vickerman, R. (2018). Can HSR have a transformative effect on the economy? Transport Policy, 62, 31–37.
Weingroff, R. F. (1996). Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956: Creating the Interstate System. Public Roads.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Hello Interactors,
I’m back! After a bit of a hiatus traveling Southern Europe, where my wife had meetings in Northern Italy and I gave a talk in Lisbon. We visited a couple spots in Spain in between. Now it’s time to dive back into our exploration of economic geography.
My time navigating those historic cities — while grappling with the apps on my phone — turned out to be the perfect, if slightly frustrating, introduction to the subject of the conference, Digital Geography.
The presentation I prepared for the Lisbon conference, and which I hint at here, traces how the technical optimism of early desktop software evolved into the all-encompassing power of Platform Capital. We explore how digital systems like Airbnb and Google Maps have become more than just convenient tools. They are the primary architects of urban value.
They don’t just reflect economic patterns. They mandate them. They reorganize rent extraction by dictating interactions with commerce and concentrating control. This is the new financialized city, and the uncomfortable question we must face is this: Are we leveraging these tools toward a new beneficial height, or are the tools exploiting us in ways that transcends oversight?
CARTOGRAPHY’S COMPUTATIONAL CONVERGENCE
I was sweating five minutes in when I realized we were headed to the wrong place. We picked up the pace, up steep grades, glissading down narrow sidewalks avoiding trolley cars and private cars inching pinched hairpins with seven point turns. I was looking at my phone with one eye and the cobbled streets with the other.
Apple Maps had led us astray. But there we were, my wife and I, having emerged from the metro stop at Lisbon’s shoreline with a massive cruise ship looming over us like a misplaced high-rise. We needed to be somewhere up those notorious steep streets behind us in 10 minutes. So up we went, winding through narrow streets and passages. Lisbon is hilly. We past the clusters of tourists rolling luggage, around locals lugging groceries.
I had come to present at the 4th Digital Geographies Conference, and the organizers had scheduled a walking tour of Lisbon. Yet here I was, performing the very platform-mediated tourism that the attendees came to interrogate. My own phone was likely using the same mapping API I used to book my AirBnB. These platforms were actively reshaping the Lisbon around us. The irony wasn’t lost on me. We had gathered to critically examine digital geography while simultaneously embodying its contradictions.
That became even more apparent as we gathered for our walking tour. We met in a square these platform algorithms don’t push. It’s not “liked”, “starred”, nor “Instagrammed.” But it was populated nonetheless…with locals not tourists. Mostly immigrants. The virtual was met with reality.
What exactly were we examining as we stood there, phones in hand, embodying the very contradictions we’d gathered to critique?
Three decades ago, as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, I would have understood this moment differently. The UCSB geography department was riding the crest of the GIS revolution then. Apple and Google Maps didn’t exist, and we spent our days digitizing boundaries from paper maps, overlaying data layers, building spatial databases that would make geographic information searchable, analyzable, computable. We were told we were democratizing cartography, making it a technical craft anyone could master with the right tools.
But the questions that haunt me now — who decides what gets mapped? whose reality does the map represent? what work does the map do in the world? — remained largely unasked in those heady days of digital optimism.
Digital geography, or ‘computer cartography’ as we understood it then, was about bringing computational precision to spatial problems. We were building tools that would move maps from the drafting tables of trained cartographers to the screens of any researcher with data to visualize. Marveling at what technology might do for us has a way of stunting the urge to question what it might be doing to us.
The field of digital geography has since undergone a transformation. It’s one that mirrors my own trajectory from building tools and platforms at Microsoft to interrogating their societal effects. Today’s digital geography emerges from the collision of two geography traditions: the quantitative, GIS-focused approach I learned at UCSB, and critical human geography’s interrogation of power, representation, and spatial justice. This convergence became necessary as digital technologies escaped the desktop and embedded themselves in everyday urban life. We no longer simply make digital maps of cities and countrysides. Digital platforms are actively remaking cities themselves…and those who live in them.
Contemporary digital geography, as examined at this conference, looks at how computational systems reorganize spatial relations, urban governance, and the production of place itself. When Airbnb’s algorithm determines neighborhood property values, when Google Maps’ routing creates and destroys retail corridors, when Uber’s surge pricing redraws the geography of urban mobility — these platforms don’t describe cities so much as actively reconstruct them. The representation has become more influential or ‘real’ than the reality itself.
This is much like the hyperreality famously described by the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard — a condition where the simulation or sign (like app interfaces) replaces and precedes reality. In this way, the digital map (visually and virtually) has overtaken the actual territory in importance and impact, actively shaping how we perceive and interact with the real world.
As digital platforms become embedded in everyday life, we are increasingly living in a simulation. The more digital services infiltrate and reconstitute urban systems the more they evade traditional governance. Algorithmic mediation through code written to influence the rhythm of daily life and human behavior increasingly determines who we interact with and which spaces we see, access, and value. Some describe this as a form of data colonialism — extending the logic of resource extraction into everyday movements and behaviors. This turns citizens into data subjects. Our patterns feed predictive models that further shape people, place…and profits. These aren’t simple pipes piped in, or one-way street lights, but dynamic architectures that reorganize society’s rights.
LISBON LURED, LOST, AND LIVED
The scholars gathered in Lisbon trace precisely how digital platforms restructure housing markets, remake retail ecologies, and reformulate the rights of humans and non-humans. Their work, from analyzing platform control over cattle herds in Brazil to tracking urban displacement, exemplifies the conference’s focus: making visible the often-obscured mechanisms through which platforms reshape space.
Two attendees I met included Jelke Bosma (University of Amsterdam), who researches Airbnb’s transformation of housing into asset classes, and Pedro Guimarães (University of Lisbon), who documents how platform-mediated tourism hollows out local retail. At the end of the tour, when a group of us were looking to chat over drinks, Pedro remarked, “If you want a recommendation for an authentic Lisbon bar experience, it no longer exists!”
Yet, even as I navigated Lisbon using the very interfaces these scholars’ critique, I was reminded of this central truth: we study these systems from within them. There is no outside position from which to observe platform urbanism. We are all, to varying degrees, complicit subjects. This reflection has become central to digital geography’s method. It’s impossible to claim critical distance from systems that mediate our own spatial practices. So, instead, a kind of intrinsic critique is developed by understanding platform effects through our own entanglements.
Lisbon has become an inadvertent laboratory for this critique. Jelke Bosma’s analysis of AirBnB reveals how the platform has facilitated a shift from informal “home sharing” to professionalized asset management, where multi-property hosts control an increasing share of urban housing stock. His research shows “professionally managed apartments do not only generate the largest individual revenues, they also account for a disproportionate segment of the total revenues accumulated on the platform”.
This professionalization is driven by AirBnB’s business model and its investment in platform supporting “asset-based professionalization,” which primarily benefits multi-listing commercial hosts. He further explains that AirBnB’s algorithm “rewards properties with high availability rates,” creating what he calls “evolutionary pressures” on hosts to maximize their listings’ availability. This incentivizes them to become full-time tourist accommodations, reducing the competitiveness of long-term residential renting.
The complexity of this ecosystem was also apparent during our Barcelona stop. What I booked as an “Airbnb” was a Sweett property — a competitor platform that operates through AirBnb’s APIs. This apartment featured Bluetooth-enabled locks and smart home controls inserted into an 1800s building. Sweett’s model demonstrates how platform infrastructure not only becomes an industry standard but is leveraged and replicated by competitors in a kind of coopetition based on the pricing algorithms AirBnB normalized.
In Lisbon, my rental sat in a building where every door was marked with AL (Alojamento Local), the legal framework for short-term rentals. No permanent residents remained; the architecture itself had been reshaped to platform specifications: fire escape signage next to framed photos, fire extinguishers mounted to the wall, and minimized common spaces upon entry. It’s more like a hotel disaggregated into independent units.
Pedro Guimarães’s work provides the commercial counterpart to Jelke’s residential analysis, focusing on how platforms reshape urban consumption. His longitudinal study demonstrates that the “advent of mass tourism” has triggered a fundamental “adjustment in the commercial fabric” of Lisbon’s city center.
This platform-mediated transformation involves a significant shift from services catering to locals to spaces optimized for leisure and consumption. Pedro’s data confirms a clear decline and “absence of Food retail” and convenience shops. These essential services are replaced by a “new commercial landscape” dominated by HORECA (hotels, restaurants, and cafes), which consolidates the area’s function as a tourist destination.(3)
Crucially, the new businesses achieve algorithmic visibility by manufacturing “authenticity”. They leverage local culture and history, sometimes even appropriating the decor of previous, traditional establishments, as part of “routine business practices as a way of maximizing profit”. The result is the “broader construction of a new commercial ambiance” where local food and goods are standardized and adapted to meet international tourist expectations.(3)
My own searches validated these findings. Searching for restaurants on Google Maps throughout Southern Europe produced a bubble of highly-rated establishments near tourist sites, many featuring nearly identical, tourist-friendly menus. The platforms had learned and enforced preferences, creating a Lisbon curated only for visitors. Furthermore, data exhaust from tourist movements becomes a resource for further optimization. Google’s Popular Times feature creates feedback loops where visibility generates visits, which reinforce visibility. The city becomes legible to itself through platform data, then reshapes itself to optimize what platforms measure.
The Lisbon government, while complicit, also shows resistance. Both scholars highlighted municipal attempts to regulate platform effects, including issuing licensing requirements for AirBnB, zoning restrictions, and promoting local commerce apps that compete with global platforms (e.g., Cabify vs. Uber). These interventions reveal platform urbanism can be contested. However, as Jelke noted, platforms evolve faster than regulation, finding workarounds that maintain extraction while performing compliance.
All through the trip, I felt my own quiet sense of complicity. Every ride we called, every Google search we ran, every Trainline ticket I purchased, fueled the very datasets everyone was dissecting. It’s an uneasy position for a critical digital geographer — studying problematic systems we help sustain. We are forced to understand these infrastructures by seeing. Can that inside view start seeking a new urban being?
CODE CRACKED CITIES. GOVERNANCE GONE
My conference presentation leveraged my insider vantage from three decades at Microsoft. I traced how these digital infrastructures have sunk into everyday life by reshaping labor, space, and governance. From early desktop software I helped to build to today’s platform urbanism, I showed how productivity tools became cloud platforms that now coordinate work, logistics, and mobility across cities.
My framing used a notion of embeddedness through the lens of three key figures in the literature: Karl Polanyi, a political economist who argued that markets are always “embedded” in social and political institutions rather than operating on their own; Mark Granovetter, a sociologist who showed that economic action is structured by concrete social networks and relationships; and Joseph Schumpeter, an economist who described capitalism as driven by “creative destruction,” the continual remaking of industries through innovation and destruction. Platforms help mediate mobility, labor, commerce, and governance, even as they position themselves at arm’s length from the regulatory and civic structures that historically governed urban infrastructures.
This evolution is paradoxical. As platforms weave themselves into the operational fabric of urban life, they also recast the division of responsibilities between state, market, and infrastructure provider. Their ability to sit slightly outside traditional regimes of oversight allows them to appear as ready-made “fixes” for governments and consumers at multiple scales. Yet each fix comes with systemic costs, deepening dependencies on opaque, tightly coupled infrastructures and amplifying the vulnerabilities of urban systems when those infrastructures fail.
This progression reveals distinct phases of infrastructural transformation. It began in the Desktop Era (1980s-1990s) when I started at Microsoft and software was fixed to devices, localizing information work on individual desktops. Updates arrived episodically on physical media like floppy disks — users controlled when to install them. The shift to local area networks gave IT departments a hand in that control. Soon the Internet was commercialized which fundamentally altered not just how software circulated but how it was installed and updated. How it was governed. What once required user consent — inserting a disk, clicking “install” — became silent, automatic, and infrastructural. Today’s cloud services and IoT extend this transformation, embedding computational governance into vehicles, supply chains, and bodies themselves.
This progression reveals distinct phases of infrastructural transformation. The Desktop Era (1980s-1990s) embedded information work in individual devices — the fix was productivity, the limit was scalability. The Network Era (1990s-2000s) transformed software into continuous services — the fix promised seamless coordination, the exposure was infrastructural dependency. The Platform Era (2000s-2010s) decoupled software from devices entirely through APIs and cloud computing — the fix was coordination at scale, the cost was asymmetric control. The current IoT and Surveillance Era embeds platform logic in everyday urban environments — the fix is pervasive coordination. This creates a total dependency on opaque infrastructures provided primarily by three companies: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. This chokepoint is what contributes to global vulnerability and cascading failures.
Recent large-scale cloud incidents, such as the latest AWS outage in Virginia in October — a week before the conference — make this evident. When a single region fails, payment systems, logistics platforms, and mobility services stall simultaneously. This pattern echoes an earlier cloud-network outage in 2021, in the same Virginia region, that effectively took much of Lisbon offline for hours, disrupting everything from transit information to local commerce. In both cases, what looks like flexible, placeless digital infrastructure turns out to be highly geographically concentrated and deeply embedded in local urban systems.
And yet, in nearly every case, these platforms really do operate as fixes at many different geographical scales. For capital, they open new rent-extraction terrains. For workers, they provide precarious income patches through part-time gig work. For users, they deliver connectivity and convenience. But a paradox emerges. Those same apps include affective hooks: user interfaces offering intermittent rewards — dopamine hits stemming from posts, likes, and ratings — embedded within endless, ad-riddled feeds. For cities, they promise smooth, efficient solutions to chronic problems. Yet as my presentation argued, these fixes are mutually reinforcing, binding participants into infrastructures of dependency that appear empowering while deepening exposure to systemic risk.
The paradox is clearest in places like the Sweett apartment in Barcelona. For users, it’s frictionless: Bluetooth locks, smart controls, and seamless check-in. For Sweett it’s all running on AirBnB’s own APIs even as they compete with AirBnB. For locals, the same infrastructure can help homeowners supplement income by renting a room, but it mostly converts affordable real estate into a short-term rental market. This drives up values, rents, and displacement. Platform standards like this spread until they feel inevitable. The logic embeds so deeply in the housing system that not optimizing for transient guests starts to seem irrational. Eventually, alternative futures for the neighborhood become hard to imagine and politically unviable.
What distinguishes digital platforms from earlier infrastructural transformations is their selective embeddedness. At the micro scale, interfaces shape conduct through programmable boundaries. At the meso scale, standards lock institutions into ecosystems. At the macro scale, chokepoints concentrate control in firms whose decisions cascade globally. Across all scales, platforms govern without being governed. They embed coordination while evading accountability.
The conference made clear that digital geography has fully evolved from my days studying ‘computer cartography’ in the 80s. It’s scaled to meet a world organized by the infrastructures I went on to help build. We are no longer observing digital representations of space. We’re mapping out the origins of a new way of thinking about space using algorithms. My tenure at Microsoft, spent building tools that would transform into embedded, governing platforms, was a preview of the world we now inhabit. This is a world where continuous deployment has become continuous urban reorganization. The silence of the automatic software update metastasized into the silent, pervasive governance of the city itself.
Lisbon, then, is not merely a case study but a dramatic staging of hyperreality. The Alojamento Local (AL) sign outside our Lisbon apartment door is not a description of a short-term rental; it is a code enforced reality optimized for a tourist’s online profile. The digital map, our simplified version of reality, has not just overtaken the actual territory; it now precedes it, dictating its function and challenging its original meaning.
This convergence leaves the critical digital geographer in an inherently unstable ethical position. Studying problematic systems while structurally forced to sustain them requires critiquing the data exhaust our own movements and decisions generate.
This deep understanding of digital platforms effects, gained from the trenches, is an asset. How else would this complex entanglement get revealed? It begs to move beyond just observing platform effects to articulating a collective response to this fundamental question: How do we encode accountability back into these infrastructures and rebuild a foundation for civic life that is not merely an optimization of its own surveillance?


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