Building was a verb before it was a noun. Just as an enduring love is constructed day in and day out through a constant process of negotiation, attention, and effort, so too is a building made and remade day by day, year by year, through routine acts of maintenance—washing, editing, repainting, repairing, updating, replacing, weeding, watering, guarding, sorting, trash removing. Taken together, these acts constitute a co-authorship of space in the form of care. These are the rituals through which we become committed to kin and community.

The spatial practice of note for this issue is less architecture as we often know it than it is a keeping of (common) grounds. Moving beyond the commitment required of an architect to see a project to its ‘completion,’ what kind of commitment does it take to be its groundskeeper? Can we think of architecture not as the production of individual building objects, but as participation in the maintenance of collective socio-ecological processes? How might such a shift in thinking register in our working methods? What forms of care and collectivity are overlooked but necessary to sustain our wellbeing amidst the many challenging, exhausting circumstances of contemporary life and labor?

The writings, conversations, and images collected in this issue of Paprika! turn toward the myriad practices of individual and communal commitment that many of us engage in everyday—from gardening, to dreaming, to organizing, to repairing. These rituals of maintenance that we perform and repeat are acts of insistence—an insistence of our belonging to land, to place, to community.