Ls Land Issue 25, Ls Land review, independent publishing, critical geography, psychogeography, landscape theory, Issue 25 analysis.

The tagline for Issue 25 is telling: “Where the boundary dissolves.” Across nine thematic sections, the contributors wrestle with the dissolution of borders—between land and water, public and private, analog and digital, sanity and delirium. Unlike previous volumes that often felt like academic conference proceedings, Ls Land Issue 25 prioritizes narrative dissonance. Here are the three dominant threads running through the issue:

The issue’s most provocative section is “Trespassers Welcome,” a symposium on squatter’s rights and psychogeography. Legal scholar Dr. Henri Voss contributes “The Line of Scrub,” a dense but rewarding analysis of how invasive plant species (kudzu, Japanese knotweed) effectively redraw property boundaries faster than any court ruling. Voss’s argument—that ecological succession is a form of adverse possession—is the kind of lateral thinking that Ls Land pioneered. However, the symposium’s centerpiece is an anonymous diary from a “professional squatter” in Berlin, detailing the emotional toll of living in legal limbo. It is raw, uncomfortable, and essential.

The only production quibble is the typeface used for the photo captions: a near-illegible 6-point sans-serif that requires a magnifying glass. Whether this is an artistic choice (“the difficulty of seeing boundaries”) or a cost-cutting measure is unclear. Longtime readers will note a shift. Ls Land Issue 24 (the “Infrastructure” issue) was criticized for being too abstract, with essays that felt like they were written by algorithm. Issue 25 reverses course. There is a raw, diaristic quality to many submissions. The anonymous squatter’s diary, in particular, feels like a direct rebuke to the bloodless theory of previous years.