Javier Arbona

Javier Arbona's career has spanned architecture, writing and criticism, research, and authoring web content. After diving into design and construction in Los Angeles, he stumbled upon the links between everyday landscapes and the direction of culture and politics.

With a grant from Cornell University, his research on California's behemoth prison-industrial complex led to his so-called awakening to Marxist and cultural geography. Since then his academic work at MIT and Berkeley has focused on a scrutiny of space as an active medium of power and on the study of landscapes to understand how power is reproduced.

Arbona's writing on Vieques, Puerto Rico, explores how military occupation and production of the landscape shaped Arcadian nature readings by protest and opposition groups.

His current interest is with the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 90s, an effervescent period of spatial inventiveness and creativity. From newly opened military spaces to the challenges of biking rights, those years seem to be a cutting edge of public spatial practice that still continues to influence myriad epistemes.

Arbona specializes on American cities, the geography of capitalist accumulation, theories on the production of space, and ideas of nature. Currently he's a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley.

Arbona also has collaborated with colleagues on a number of competitions, including the proposal for an experimental pleached home with Team HED, published in The HOME House Project: The Future of Affordable Housing (edited by David J. Brown, MIT Press). The project also has been widely covered by the international press and exhibited worldwide.

As a freelance architecture writer and reporter, Arbona has published for Mark magazine, the Urban Design Review, the Architect's Newspaper, Architect, and Entorno. His academic writing has appeared in 306090, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review and Swiss Architecture Museum.

Arbona was on the undergraduate faculty of the School of Architecture at Polytechnic University, Puerto Rico, was the former chief editor of Archinect.com, and a researcher with Eric Klinenberg of New York University sociology.

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