AR Reading List 062: 2021’s most read stories

At the end of a year of endless news feeds, perpetually breaking stories, and circularly scrolled social media timelines, we are considering a slower form of journalism, that is printed in our pages and reflected in our editorial practice. This is a time that has been both quiet and frantic: a quietness inside us, as those of us who can are asked to give our gift of staying still amongst an unknowable attacker, and the frenzy outside, as the ongoing pandemic continues to bring to light the extant inequalities that our world is fraught with. During these days, as life both stood still and changed immeasurably, we have sought to tell stories of people and places that both transport us away from the current daunting reality, and bring to the fore vital stories in an age of great change. This week’s Reading List is curated by you, the reader, as we bring together the most read stories in 2021.

1. Outrage: Venice Biennale makes a mess, AR June 2021, Carolyn Smith
‘The Biennale’s reliance on temporary, bespoke installations – and the absence of a sustainability agenda from the Biennale Foundation to aid with recycling or reusing materials – is completely out of step with the global shift towards the careful use of resources’

2. Laying Antarctica to waste, AR June 2021, Sabrina Syed
‘Replacement anxiety, born from a settler-colonial mentality of operating, uneasily prioritises the need to stay visible over the health of the environment. Instead, an unconfirmed gradient of waste, ghostlike and spectral, haunts the continent’

3. Under Jerusalem: Israel’s subterranean expansion, AR April 2021, Nadi Abusaada
‘Simpson’s paintings depict the museum’s forgotten basement: the city’s long-buried tunnels, conduits, cisterns, old pavements and desolate tombs. The European imperial encounter with Palestine chiefly appears not grand nor territorial, but intimate’

4. Revisit: Quinta Monroy, AR December 2020/January 2021, Sandra Carrasco and David O'Brien
‘Fifteen years later, all but one of the original 93 households have extended their house with 60 expanding beyond the framework defined by Elemental. Residents’ experiences in being active actors in their housing construction has promoted significant engagement and pride’

5. The coloniality of planting: legacies of racism and slavery in the practice of botany, AR February 2021, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh
‘Much of mainstream white environmentalism tends to perpetuate the idea that ‘‘nature’’ or ‘‘the environment’’ needs to be protected from people, rather than understanding human beings as part of ecological systems’

6. Structural issues: the cost of material and the value of labour, AR June 2021, Steve Webb
‘In the past we used to think of waste as a crime against the needy. Now waste is also a crime against the environment: it means carbon, pollution and extinction’

7. Stepwells of Ahmedabad: water-harvesting in semi-arid India, AR April 2021, Tanvi Jain
‘As the water crisis sheds light on community-based harvesting efforts, women, affected disproportionately in rural and urban areas, are the first responders to droughts’

8. Pushed to the periphery: Lisbon’s rehousing policies lose the life of the neighbourhoods they demolish, AR December 2020/January 2021 2021, Ana Naomi de Sousa and António Brito Guterres
‘That’s when you realise the house you built was never really your own. You live there 20 years and, like that, suddenly you’re told to leave.’

9. Gardeners’ world: a short history of domestication and nurturance, AR February 2021, Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Giudici
‘With the rise of agriculture, the garden is built more for delight and contemplation than for subsistence or production: it becomes a mark of class distinction, often the most powerful sign of royal power’

10. Filling in: Kiln Place in London, UK by Peter Barber Architects, AR March 2021, Max L Zarzycki
‘The new homes work in synthesis with the smaller interventions to bring the more monolithic slab blocks down to the scale of the street, and gently work the estate into its surroundings’