PhD Candidate in Architecture at University of Michigan / mylesz@umich.edu
Myles researches the urban and spatial history of the New York metropolitan region, as well as topics in urban history more broadly. He is interested in how ideas about politics, race, and culture are imprinted on the urban form. Through writing, art, digital humanities, and community engagement, he aims to introduce new audiences to history. In some form or another, all of his work reflects the observation that: We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.
Myles is a Ph.D. candidate in Architecture and Urban History at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where he teaches courses on urban history, architectural history, and college-level writing. His research examines how political power, racial capitalism, and cultural narratives become embedded in the built environment, with a particular focus on the New York metropolitan region and mid-size American cities in the twentieth century. His current book project, Plundering the City: How Capital Eroded an American Community’s Social Infrastructure, traces how investment regimes, public policy, and technologies such as television and the automobile reshaped everyday civic life—weakening neighborhood institutions like corner stores and voluntary associations while accelerating displacement through practices like redlining and urban renewal. Drawing on archival research, architectural analysis, and cartography, his work challenges moralizing explanations for urban inequality by documenting the institutional production of decline and its uneven costs.
His research is circulated primarily through digital and public humanities scholarship, including peer-reviewed films, websites, and mapping projects. He creates interactive websites, films, and mapping projects that translate historical research for broad audiences and for classroom use. Recent projects include Envisioning Seneca Village (2025), a collaborative, interactive digital model that reconstructs a nineteenth-century, majority-black community demolished to create Central Park. Other work includes Newark Changing (2023), a first-of-its-kind visual encyclopedia of neighborhood demolition that pairs 2,400 historic street photographs with contemporary 360-degree panoramas on a searchable map. He has produced widely viewed time-based cartographies such as Here Grows New York (2020). His digital reconstructions and construction-sequence films on Gothic cathedrals, city planning, architectural history, and the carceral state have also appeared in venues such as Le Monde, Aeon, and Discovery Channel.
Beyond the university, he serves on the Newark Landmarks & Historic Preservation Commission and contributes to community-facing preservation and planning initiatives.
Name in Chinese: 张之远 / Zhāng Zhīyuǎn
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Education:
University of Michigan
PhD in architecture and urban history
University of Cambridge
Master’s degree in history of the carceral state
Columbia University 
University of Oxford
The Hudson School
Myles in the News:
Read more from University of Michigan
January 2025
Read more from Urban Omnibus
June 2025
Read more from Barnard College
November 2024
Read more from Discovery Channel
July 2024
Read more from Library of Congress
May 2019
My research for this publication was also featured in the following news articles. Click to expand.
Also featured in:
– Wikipedia
– Laughing Squid March 2019
– Viewing NYC March 2019
– silive.com March 2019
– Open Culture April 2019
– Columbia Data Science Institute May 2019
– Library of Congress Blog May 2019
– Kottke.org May 2019
– NYNJ.com May 2019
– 6sqft May 2019
– UK Daily Mail August 2019
– LangweileDich.net June 2020
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January 2022
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November 2021
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May 2021 for the Municipal Art Society
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December 2020
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September 2019
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August 2019
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March 2019
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January 2019
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August 2018
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April 2017
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September 2016
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April 2016