Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture John Davis has published (with Bryan Norwood) “‘The Coastline Opens Wide Tonight’: NORCO in the Greater Caribbean” in The Avery Review. The article examines the video game NORCO’s industrial landscapes of Louisiana from the viewpoint of similar environments around the Caribbean basin.

[T]he game’s labyrinthine story of capitalist extraction and the improvisational subcultures that work inside, beneath, and against its toxic landscapes is one that tumbles not down from its north but up from its south. Its geographies are built by pirates and runaways who inhabit and ignite the wake of watery currents, a world made as much in swamps and battures, in abandoned shopping malls and puppet theaters under interstate overpasses, as in corporate boardrooms and the chambers of city halls. These backwater places contain another structure that reframes the collective understanding of the US and the built environments of the Western Hemisphere: NORCO is a game about Louisiana’s place not in the United States but rather in the currents of the Caribbean Basin.

Read more at The Avery Review