Interplace Brad Weed

Hello Interactors,
The lengthening northern days have unleashed verdant chaos in my yard and it’s challenging my desire for order. Some unruly growth demands surrendering control, embracing life's rhizomatic entanglements — an invitation to honor multiplicity over singularity, relation over individuality, and emergence over stasis.
Let’s dig in…
FERN FRENZY IN FULL FORCE
Those skinny unattractive immigrants are invading. They’re nudging their way through every nook and cranny stealing resources and opportunity from those already here. Before long, they’ll be taking over the place. I’m talking about Leptinella squalida (Derived from the Greek "leptos" meaning slender and the Latin “squalid” meaning unattractive). That is the scientific name for a New Zealand native ground cover commonly referred to as ‘Brass buttons’ and it’s taking over my garden.
Leptinella squalida is rhizomatous. It sends rootlike horizontal shallow subterranean stems — a rhizome — in a multitude of unpredictable directions. At various intervals in its journey, it progressively produces small nodules that send whisker roots below while sprouting shoots vertically to the surface to form miniature fern-like fronds — sometimes green and other times ‘brass’ colored. Once a year it produces a yellow ‘button’ blossom that can send seeds aloft leapfrogging the host to colonize another territory.
I planted it in a shady moist area of my small backyard after ripping out a grass lawn. Liptinella squalida makes an even carpet that can withstand a fair bit of foot traffic, making it an attractive alternative to grass. Unfortunately, other plants can’t withstand is aggressive propagation, starving them of light and nutrients. That’s exactly what this exponentially expanding rhizome is doing to the slower growing, less aggressively sprawling Sedum rupestre 'Angelina' — a variety I also helped colonize from Western Europe.
I suspect strict immigration laws should be applied to my little rambunctious rhizomatous island ferns. Last week I eradicated an entire section at the border with a shovel and then carefully extracted the spindly rhizomes from the starved roots and foliage of the ‘Angelina.’ I’m contemplating building a subterranean Trump-like wall to resist the invaders. I may even perform widespread extirpation and dig it all up — especially given the primary section of Brass buttons have also been colonized. They are slowly being overtaken by another aggressive invasive species — clover.
I didn’t plan for this, but I did create the conditions for it to occur. In place of a grass lawn — which offers nothing to ecology in any shape or form — I planted a variety of low growing ground covers, sedums, and clumping ornamental grasses. Many of these ground covers have now intermingled. Some are more dominant in areas than others forming a diverse kaleidoscope of height, color, and texture.
There’s little strict cartesian geometric control I can apply to this tufted tapestry without hard physical barriers. And even then, their airborne spores can gleefully fly where the wind may carry them — oblivious to any tyrannical terrestrial territorial triangulations I may map in my head.
Rhizomes are their own kind of experimental map. They randomly route with their roots. Their genes map the way as MicroRNAs modulate their sway. Meanwhile, subterranean phytohormones signal route initiation and elongation in a coordinated but random multi-directional, non-linear physical cartographic network.
Rhizomic networks have no real beginning or end. They make connections in a non-hierarchical, decentralized way without a single origin or terminus. It is in a continual emergent state of being in the middle of having been made and becoming something new. There is no dualistic hierarchical parent/child branching that dominates Western mental images of hierarchical networks — like a family tree or even a real tree where a tru

Hello Interactors,
In an era where Western leaders craft policies that oscillate between harsh border controls and selective humanitarian aid, our understanding risks being clouded by data-centric approaches. Through the lens of critical cartography, we see how enhanced data collection can reduce displaced individuals to mere numbers, obscuring their complex human stories behind cold statistics.
Insights into the disorienting effects of domineering multinational capitalism further illuminate how these data practices, though aimed at clarity, often mask the real experiences and struggles of those displaced.
I explore some contradictions in these policies—how they promise to protect yet perpetuate power imbalances, offering a guise of support while fundamentally failing to address the root causes of displacement.
Let’s go…
DISORIENTED BY DOMINANCE
The Dutch government recently took a giant political step to the right. Some say this is as far right as a democratically elected Dutch government has ever been. It’s probably the most intolerant since Hitler installed a Nazi occupation regime from 1940-1945 implementing racist policies which persecuted not just Jews but other minorities as well.
The Dutch government leaned right as recent as 2010-2012, when the right-wing politician Geert Wilders was Prime Minister. Wilders is now back in office, though not as Prime Minister, and has formed a coalition government seeking to implement racist immigration policies that echo an ugly past.
In one of his campaign speeches he said he desires a strict and harsh Netherlands where
"people in Africa and the Middle East will start thinking they might be better off elsewhere".
Wilders joins the ranks of intolerant European populists like Le Pen of France, Meloni of Italy, and Hungary’s Orban, using anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric as rallying cries. Meanwhile, here in the Americas, Biden and Mexico’s López Obrador have deported tens of thousands of migrants to Mexico despite known risks of kidnapping, extortion, and assault. Biden has been silent on the matter while López Obrador erodes democratic institutions by undermining judicial independence, demonizing critics, and shielding the military from accountability for abuses.
The EU practices its own repressive transactional diplomacy to evade human rights duties to asylum seekers and migrants — especially from Africa and the Middle East. While numbers fluctuated, there has been a significant overall increase in asylum seeker rates into EU countries since 2010 when Wilders first came to power. That surge was driven by conflicts like the Syrian war, which Western governments were complicit in intensifying, and broader regional instability — including detrimental environmental effects due to climate change.
The Syrian conflict triggered a surge in asylum applications to EU countries, peaking at over 1.2 million annually in 2015 and 2016. Following a dip between 2017 and 2020, applications rebounded to 962,160 in 2022, a 20% increase from 2021, with Germany receiving the most (243,800), followed by France, Spain, Austria, and Italy. From 2010 to 2022, EU asylum applications rose from approximately 259,000 to over 962,000, a near fourfold increase. The primary asylum seekers in 2022 were from Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, Venezuela, and Colombia.
It’s curious how fear of immigration coincides with declining EU fertility rates. The average number of children per woman in the EU was 1.46 live births in 2022, well below the rate of 2.1 needed to maintain population levels without migration.
It could be these politicians, and the populist rhetoric they spew, are suffering from a kind of globalist vertigo. As political theorist and Director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University, Frederic Jameson puts it,
“a profound sense of disorientation and inability to cognitively map their position within the larger global system of economic and social relations.”
As a M

Hello Interactors,
Biden’s recent reflective quip got me thinking about how European colonial doctrines like the "Doctrine of Discovery" and the "civilizing mission," continue to justify the dominance over Indigenous peoples, including those in Papua New Guinea.
These lingering narratives not only influence contemporary struggles for self-determination, they also impact global politics and economic globalism. Join me as I unpack the complex interplay of decolonization, sovereignty, and the roles international actors, and their maps, play(ed) in shaping these dynamics.
Let’s go…
MAPS MARK MYTHS
Biden recently suggested his uncle was eaten by "cannibals". Reflecting on World War II war veterans, he said,
"He got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea."
Military records show that his uncle’s plane crashed off the coast of New Guinea for reasons unknown and his remains were never recovered.
Papua New Guinea's (PNG) Prime Minister James Marape didn’t take kindly to Biden's remarks, stating that
"President Biden's remarks may have been a slip of the tongue; however, my country does not deserve to be labeled as such."
Marape reminded Biden that Papua New Guinea was an unwilling participant in World War II. He urged the U.S. to help locate and recover the remains of American servicemen still scattered across the country.
President Biden is a victim of depictions of "cannibals" in Papua New Guinea that are part of a deeply problematic colonial and post-colonial narrative still debated among anthropologists. These often exaggerated or fabricated historical portrayals of Indigenous peoples as "savage" or "primitive" were used to justify colonial domination and the imposition of Western control under the guise of bringing "civilization" to these societies.
During the age of exploration and colonial expansion, European explorers and colonists frequently labeled various Indigenous groups around the world as “cannibals.” These claims proliferated in PNG by early explorers, missionaries, and colonial administrators to shock audiences and underscore the perceived necessity of the "civilizing mission" — a form of expansionist propaganda.
European colonial maps like these served as vital weapons. They defined and controlled space to legitimize territorial claims and the governance of their occupants. In the late 19th century, German commercial interests led by the German New Guinea Company, expanded into the Pacific, annexing northeastern New Guinea and nearby islands as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. In response, Britain established control over southern New Guinea, later transferring it to Australia. After World War I, Australia captured the remaining German territories, which the League of Nations mandated it to govern as the Territory of New Guinea. Following World War II, the two territories, under UN trusteeship, moved towards unification as the Independent State of Papua New Guinea in 1975.
Today, Papua New Guinea is central to Pacific geopolitics, especially with China's growing influence through efforts like the Belt and Road initiative. This is impacting regional dynamics and power relationships involving major nations like Australia, the US, and China resulting in challenges related to debt, environmental concerns, and shifts in power balances.
The Porgera gold mine, now managed by a joint venture with majority PNG stakeholders, had been halted in 2020 due to human rights and environmental violations but is resuming under new management. While the extractive industries are largely foreign-owned, the government is trying to shift the revenue balance toward local ownership and lure investors away from exploitative practices. Meanwhile, Indigenous tribes remain critical of the government's complicity in the social, environmental, and economic disruption caused by centuries of capitalism and foreign intrusion.
SUP

Hello Interactors,
The horrific acts of violence in Palestine have prompted acts of violence on university campuses around the world. This post is about one thing they have in common — maps. Maps legally define territory, the rights of those who occupy it, and the rights of those in power to silence them, displace them, or ‘invisible’ them. A pattern we also see with America’s unhoused.
Let me try to map this out…
CAMPUS CONFRONTATIONS ECHO
Citing "clear and present danger," Columbia University recently called for the New York Police to intervene. On April 18th, students had set up tents on a small patch of grass on campus — a form of protest calling for the university to divest from Israel due to the violence in Palestine. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, the President of the school claimed their presence was menacing and that they were trespassing. Evidently, parts of campus are closed to students during certain hours. The incident resulted in the arrest of 108 students. But many returned and were joined by more upon their release.
Nearly a week passed before House Speaker Mike Johnson called on the school’s President to resign if she can’t suppress the war protests at her school. He went on to threaten federal funding for colleges that he sees are creating unsafe environments for Jewish students. Many equate opposition to the state of Israel as opposition of Jewish people.
Meanwhile, the Jewish Voice for Peace is claiming the university is making it unsafe for both Jewish and non-Jewish students in their actions. Of the 85 students suspended for protesting the actions of the Israeli state, 15 are Jewish. The Jewish Voice for Peace writes,
“Yesterday’s statement by the White House, like the administrators of Columbia University, dangerously and inaccurately presumes that all Jewish students support the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians. This assumption is actively harming Palestinian and Jewish students.”
Restrictions on student rights have also led to Jewish students being obstructed from observing their religious events and blocking access to their Jewish community.
Columbia University, named after Christopher Columbus and echoing his legacy of exploration and exploitation, has experienced similar conflicts before. In 1968, protests erupted over the university's plan to build a segregated gym, viewed as oppressive by Harlem residents. There was also significant discontent with Columbia's involvement with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a center providing support to the U.S. Department of Defense during the Vietnam War.
Columbia’s recent protests spawned more across the country. The National Guard have been called to many campuses to sweep protesters away echoing the deadly protests at Kent State 54 years ago. Or Yale in 1986 when police extracted a student who had erected a replica structure found in South Africa’s shantytowns protesting apartheid.
One student protester said at the time,
“We find the Administrations actions highly ironic in light of the continuing efforts of the South African Government to remove the squatter committees with which our shanties expressed solidarity.” In defense of the school, a spokesman said of the protesters, “No group is permitted to have a monopoly on the space.”
No group except, perhaps, the administration.
These university confrontations are part of a larger pattern of forceful takeovers and displacement evident in various forms, including the routine 'sweeps' of homeless encampments in cities across America. These sweeps often involve the removal of homeless individuals from public or private spaces, displacing them without providing long-term solutions to homelessness. Critics argue that such actions not only fail to address the underlying issues of poverty and housing insecurity but also perpetuate a cycle of displacement and marginalization.
Similar critiques are leveled against these universities who in man

Hello Interactors,
Behind every map is intent. When it comes to making plans for a city, streets are more than mere passageways; they are the cartography of power, exacting politics and ideology for the unfolding of urbanity.
Paris is the blueprint of social order and control portrayed as a symbol of beauty and progress. I wanted to unravel the threads of intent, from communal aspirations to the heavy hand of authoritarianism — a kind of narrative map of a city renowned as much for its revolutions as for its romance.
Let’s go.
COMMON ROOTS, CONTRASTING COMMUNITIES
I’ll offer a word and you examine your emotional reaction to it. Communism. If you’re like me, you’ve been trained to have negative thoughts. Maybe even stop reading. Communism has been associated with authoritarian, repressive regimes that denied basic freedoms and human rights. Ask anyone who lived under these conditions and you can see why it’s been ideologically blackballed in America.
Now I’ll offer another word. Community. Ah, yes, good vibes. Who could possibly be against community? It’s strange how two words with common origins can differ so much by changing two letters.
The word Communism comes from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s Kommunismus as early as 1847 and is derived from the French word communisme which first appeared three years earlier in 1843. This word comes from the Old French word comun meaning "common, general, free, open, public."
A group of people in common, “the common people” who are not rulers of property, clergy, or monarchy, is from the 14th century French word comunité meaning "commonness, everybody" or community.
I had the experience of checking my own reaction to the word communist while reading about how communist ideals helped a politician in Paris help his community.
The French Communist senator, Ian Brossat, lead housing policy in Paris for a decade. He said his
“guiding philosophy is that those who produce the riches of the city must have the right to live in it.”
He and the local government under Mayor Hildago are doing their best to live up to this. Over the past decade, the French Communist Party has emphasized social justice and economic equality, advocating for stronger public services, wealth redistribution, and workers' rights. They've also focused on environmental sustainability, aligning with broader movements to address climate change and social disparities.
People from all over the world are drawn to Paris for its diverse array of small shops, cafes, expansive boulevards, monuments, and museums. It exudes old-world charm complete with cobblers, tailors, jewelers, and luthiers tucked in and among various neighborhoods — some more manicured than others. It’s a dappled array of diverse color and verdant softscapes that when viewed from afar offers an impression of a picture-perfect pointillist painting.  
Paris exists as a seemingly organic and emergent unfolding of placemaking complete with public spaces and parks for the taking — by all walks of life. For many, it’s a composite of ideals that harken back to romantic images of a fashionable and stylistic ‘pick your favorite’ century in Europe making it a perennial favorite destination for tourists.
But surrounding the parks where healthy blossoms glow are stealthy property plots where wealthy funds grow. Amidst the green where healthy plants are planted longtime residents squirm as their neighbors are supplanted. Despite the city building or renovating “more than 82,000 apartments over the past three decades for families with children”, 2.4 million people are on the waiting list for affordable housing.(1)
This isn’t the first time economically disadvantaged people have been displaced from Paris. In 1853, one year after Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew Napoleon III declared himself emperor in a successful coup d'état, he wasted no time embarking on what many believe to be the biggest ‘urban renewal’ project in histor

Hello Interactors,
We are fully into spring and that means a shift toward cartography. I’ll be exploring how abstract symbols, lines, and colors can both represent and misrepresent people, politics, and the physical environment. Maps are tools of power and persuasion, which can shape perceptions of space and reality, influence behavior, and maintain or challenge social norms and power structures.
Today’s post bridges Winter’s focus on human behavior with the maps, plans, and politics of cities. In this case, Los Angeles and their attempts at curbing rising traffic related fatalities through safer forms of transportation infrastructure…but not without a fight from some unlikely foes.
Let’s go…
CURBSIDE CASUALTIES LEAD TO ASPHALT ACTIVISM
Angelinos recently passed a controversial measure intended to save lives. It won 63 percent in favor to 37 percent opposed. Maybe it wasn’t so controversial after all. Why should helping save children from being violently killed be controversial in the first place? And why were firefighters leading the charge to kill a measure that saves lives.
Car collisions were the leading cause of death for children in Los Angeles County in 2022. Drug overdose and homicide have been in competition with ‘motor vehicle collisions’ for the top kid-killer spot over the last few years. Drowning, another preventable killer my wife is focused on eradicating, was the number three killer in 2021.
In January, the hyperlocal newsletter Crosstown reported data from the Los Angeles Police Department that 2023 was the “deadliest year on the roads in at least a decade, with 337 fatalities.”
More than half of these were pedestrians. In 2022, 160 pedestrians died from being struck by a motor vehicle. It’s been getting worse for some time.
If you’re not already depressed, this might push you over the edge. Hit and runs are also climbing.
In October of 2022, the County of Los Angeles Public Health Department published the “Leading Causes of Death and Mortality Rates (per 100,000) by Age Group” in Los Angeles County from January to June for 2019 to 2022. During these years, of those aged 0-17, 73 have been killed by motor vehicles. In 2022, it was the number one killer.
Alarmed by the trend, former Mayor Eric Garcetti formulated a “Mobility Plan 2035” in 2015 that “incorporates ‘complete streets’ principles and lays the policy foundation for how future generations of Angelenos interact with their streets.” This follows California state’s 2008 Complete Streets Act (AB 1358), which requires local jurisdictions to
“plan for a balanced, multimodal transportation network that meets the needs of all users of streets, roads, and highways, defined to include motorists, pedestrians, bicyclists, children, persons with disabilities, seniors, movers of commercial goods, and users of public transportation, in a manner that is suitable to the rural, suburban or urban context.”
The rise in traffic deaths reveals that the aspirational goals set in various levels of government often represent legal fictions—idealized plans that simplify complex issues, but don’t always lead to action. These legal frameworks, while not intentionally misleading, can result in a disconnect between policy intentions and outcomes, promoting a status quo bias due to the complexities of change, systemic inertia, and established interests — including those of firefighters.
But a group of citizen activists organized to bring action to the fiction and gain traction amidst the friction. They drew attention to the fact that although L.A. had laid out a progressive ‘complete streets’ plan, they had only executed 5% since its inception nearly a decade ago. At that rate they calculated it would take 160 years to build a minimum network of safe streets. All the while hundreds upon thousands would die while the legal fiction would continued to paint a different picture.
So, they devised Measure HLA, the Healthy Stre