Eric McAfee

Eric McAfee is a licensed urban planner currently working in emergency management. Though he hails from Indianapolis, his professional field grants him a certain degree of itinerancy, which he uses to his advantage to write about and photograph landscapes across the country in his blog, American Dirt. He lived and worked as a military planner in northern Afghanistan from 2010 to 2012, letting him fudge on the “American” aspect of his blog a little bit.  Though he loves the interplay of human will and the built environment, he doesn’t feel he has a great deal to offer in terms of conventional urban studies.The conventions that dictate “bad” and “good” urbanism do not appeal to him greatly, and, as his essays and accompanying photographs (taken on a $90 Fuji Finepix camera) prove, he is interested in all patterns of human settlement: from unpretentious mid-sized Midwestern burgs to glittery metropolises, from pastures to junkyards, from struggling small towns to rampant decentralization (what the less optimistic usually label “sprawl”). In the past, Eric’s writing has won him Outstanding Paper in Real Estate at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an outstanding research on housing award from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.  Aside from American Dirt, he has featured his writing on Urban Indy.com, Streetsblog.net and Urbanophile.com.