This collection brings together essays on how governance, urban change, and cultural memory shape civic life. Drawing on experiences across civic, institutional, and cultural settings, these pieces examine how spatial politics, diaspora, and ethics influence our understanding of power, identity, and belonging today.
Civic Accountability | Urban Change | Diaspora | Civic Ethics
Civic Accountability
Loafers Lodge: Public Sector Accountability in the Wake of a Disaster
Wellington, NZ — Long‑form policy essay
A fatal 2023 fire at a Wellington boarding house exposed deep systemic failures in housing, regulation, and public oversight. Written while serving as Government Accountability Advisor at New Zealand’s housing ministry and as a graduate student at Victoria University of Wellington, this essay investigates the institutional friction between state responsibility and regulatory neglect.
Urban Change & Spatial Politics
Things (Continue to) Fall Apart
London, UK — Essay + short film
With London’s Elephant and Castle Mall as an allegory for capitalist displacement and the slow violence of redevelopment, this modernist photo essay and short film blends literary critique, personal observation, and cultural memory to investigate what is lost when the physical places that hold communities are erased.
A Paean to the Mall at Elephant & Castle
London, UK — Essay
A layered meditation on urban regeneration, nostalgia, and the politics of public space written while living in South London. Drawing on field notes, historical fragments, and personal reflection, this piece investigates the authentic, everyday use of urban architecture and the displacement that follows top-down development, questioning what makes a place worth keeping and who gets to decide.
On Power, Profit, and the Architecture of Displacement
Vancouver (and beyond) — Short Commentary
Examines how modernist ideals, speculative development, and urban design dictate who the city serves—and who it excludes. Drawing on architecture, literature, and urban theory to analyze the gap between beauty and belonging in an increasingly commodified landscape, this text investigates what happens when place-making becomes an intentional tool of erasure.
Diaspora & Social Memory
Ruins and Reckonings: On Identity, Memory, and Belonging in Rome
Explores how Rome’s overlapping layers of myth, empire, decay, and renewal shape ideas of cultural inheritance. The essay uses the historic landscape as an allegory to reflect on how we mediate personal identity, selfhood, and belonging in the wake of profound environmental and systemic change.
Civic Ethics & Governance
Leading wisely: how benevolent governance can help society flourish
Brings classical philosophy into conversation with modern public policy, exploring how virtue, wisdom, and moral imagination can pivot the exercise of state power toward the genuine well-being and flourishing of the public good. It re-envisions public leadership by asking how governance changes when exercised with the welfare of all in mind.
Friend or enemy: Schmitt’s specious dichotomy
A critical examination of Carl Schmitt’s friend–enemy framing and its persistent influence on modern politics. The text analyzes how conflict‑based institutional legitimacy systematically erodes democratic belonging, questioning whether democracy can survive when political inclusion is framed as an existential threat.
Human Flourishing: Aristotle on How to Live Your Best Life
Explores Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia as a lifelong, practical exercise of purpose, virtue, and thoughtful action. The piece frames the idea of living well not merely as an individual pursuit, but as a collective civic duty necessary for the world.