Background

Javier Arbona-Homar is an Associate Professor at UC Davis, joint appointed in American Studies and Design. He is an experimental geographer with a background in architecture, art, and design. At present, he focuses on the emerging field of explosivity studies (how, when, and where things do, or do not, blow up—and why). He studies the spatial politics of landscapes shaped by explosions—or the latent potential thereof—and the racial conditions of explosions. In short, my work has looked at the movement, logistics, and securitization of explosive substances (…and ideas).

Research

Arbona-Homar’s research dives into topics such as: explosive atmospheres, the historical geography of dynamite logistics, the mobility of remains and memory from the so-called Spanish American War, and the theorization of coloniality across the Pacific and Caribbean worlds. He took part in the year-long “Reparative Memories: Communities in Crisis and Archival Care” working group (2024-2025). He concentrates on the monumental design politics of names and naming the dead, disappearances (in life and in death), and disappearing landscapes and memorials.

Arbona-Homar serves as affiliate faculty for the UC Davis graduate groups in Cultural Studies and Geography. Students interested in doing scholarly work broadly related to design cultures, urban history and culture, visuality, geographical imaginations, and critical military studies are welcome to get in touch.

Publications and Work

Overall, Arbona-Homar has focused on problems of memorialization, visuality, and state violence. He draws from professional experience in architectural design to think spatially about bodies in movement. He’s interested in issues of materiality and archives, and in memory as something situated.

• Selected writings below:

Explosivity: Following What Remains, photographs by Andrea Gaffney, University of Minnesota Press, 2025. Link

Plus reflections, omens, anecdotes, lists, and recommendations in San Francisco Review of Whatever, no. 1, 2025. Link

Waterfront / Battlefront: Vallejo’s Black Landscapes of Resistance Against Police and Environmental Violence (with Julie Sze), in The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume II: Ecology, Social Participation and Marginalities, Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi, eds., Routledge, Nov. 21, 2024: pp. 93-108. Link

The Explosivity of Kelp, in Society and Space, Caren Kaplan, Gabi Kirk, and Tess Lea, eds. Everyday Militarisms: Hidden in Plain Sight/Site Forum, March 9 (2020). Link

The Port Chicago Sailors’ Wildcat Strike, in A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area, Rachel Brahinsky and Alex Tarr, eds., University of California Press, 2020: 217-219. Link

Trial by the Bay: Treasure Island and Segregation in the Navy’s Lake  in Urban Reinventions: San Francisco’s Treasure Island, Lynne Horiuchi and Tanu Sankalia, eds., University of Hawaii Press, 2017.

Suspunk: Thinking with Suspicious Packages (with Bryan Finoki and Nick Sowers), Harvard Design Magazine, no. 42, Spring/Summer 2016: 174-179. Link

Ecologies of Practices in a Post-Military Cinema, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors, Exhibition Catalog, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2016: 205-217.

OKLDCAAN: Capital Building of the Oakland Security Cloud (with Bryan Finoki and Nick Sowers), The Funambulist, no. 1, 2015: 26-31. Link

Forget Me Not, The New Inquiry, October 21 2015. Link

Anti-memorials and World War II Heritage in the San Francisco Bay Area: Spaces of the 1942 Black Sailors’ Uprising, Landscape Journal, vol. 34 no. 2, 2015: 177-192. Link

Zone, and Zone-Out, Progressive Planning, no. 203, Spring 2015: 15-18. Link

Footprinting Secrecy (with Bryan Finoki and Nick Sowers), Volume, no. 36, Summer 2013: 68-71.

Dangers in the Air: Aerosol Architecture and Its Invisible Landscapes (excerpted from Air, published by MIT Press, and conceptualized by Alphabet City Media, directed by John Knechtel), Places Journal, October 2010. Link 

“It’s in Your Nature: I’m Lost in Paris,” (On the work of Francois Roche and RSie), Architectural Design (UK) – Territory: Architecture Beyond Environment (David Gissen, Special Issue Ed.), Volume 80, Issue 3, May/June 2010: 46-53.

“Home Cooking,” (on the work of Santiago Cirugeda and his studio, Recetas Urbanas), SAM, Basel: Swiss Architecture Museum, No. 2, August 2007: 48-51.

“Vieques, Puerto Rico: From Devastation to Conservation and Back Again,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Volume XVII, Number 1, Berkeley: The International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments, 2005: 33-50. Link

Book Review: Loyd, Jenna (2014), Health Rights are Civil Rights, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2015, Special Site Link

Media Review: Findery, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, no. 1, March 2015: 133–136.

Event: Variable World, Bay Model Tour and Salon (with Chris Woebken), Avant, 2015. Link 

Podcast: A Weaponized Urbanity—Morning Drift in Militarized Downtown Oakland (with Bryan Finoki and Nick Sowers), Archipelago, Léopold Lambert, interviewer, May 2, 2014. Link

• Other creative collaborations

Site and urban design consulting with the Block Party: From Independent Living to Disability Communalism team, for Reset: Towards a New Commons exhibition at the Center for Architecture, Summer 2022, co-curated by Barry Bergdoll and Juliana Barton.

• Creative collaborations with the Demilit collective:

Speculative landscape fictions:
“[In]Visible Sites”, for the exhibition Timing Is Everything, University of California, San Diego, University Art Gallery, curated by Michelle Hyun (presented at opening events and accompanied with a La Jolla walk). 2013.  

They Came To The Desert And Were Consumed By A Flickering Fortress, The State: Speculative Geographies, 2012. Link 

Ice Curtain: The End of Victory – A Proposal for a Monument to Cold War Victory by DM 3 , 2012-2014. Link 

Terra Incognita, The New City Reader: Puzzles, no. 03, Istanbul Design Biennial, 2012. Link

• Selected talks:

Landscapes of Explosivity, UC Berkeley Geography Colloquium, February 12 2020

Memory/Cloud: a San Francisco Police Department Memorial, at Princeton University, School of Architecture, PhD Colloquium, March 3 2016

Footprinting the Urban Security Cloud, Emerging Voices series, Taubman College, University of Michigan, 2015

Military Abstractions: The Hidden Architecture of State Secrecy, University of Nevada, Reno, 2014

• Podcasts

Interview with Vallejo Sun about combined police and environmental violence, December 19 2022

Funambulist with Demilit — A Weaponized Urbanity: Morning Drift in Militarized Downtown Oakland, May 14 2024

Courses

Arbona’s teaching in the department will focus on design research and critical sustainability. More info on courses will be available.