Sociologists have demonstrated how public and private actors reproduce economic and racial inequality, by protecting the values of lucrative real estate, enforcing the tastes of elite and middle‐class populations, and unfavorably sorting low‐income and minority residents. Building inspections and code violations affect each of these processes. Yet, we know remarkably little about how decisions about building code violations are made. Drawing on fieldwork with building inspectors and statistical analysis of data on building violations in Chicago, I find that building inspectors allocate code violations in surprising ways: They go easy on low‐ and moderate‐income property owners and go after professional landlords and wealthy homeowners. I join others in urging sociologists to look beyond assumptions about the unified logic of the growth machine and fully unpack the relationship—in terms of potential and parameters—between frontline agents of the state and inequality.

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Simulations are increasingly integral to scientific and social knowledge making. While a number of social scientists study simulation, extant literature is yet to fully investigate how simulated settings are different from and similar to other scientific places. I draw on scholarship on the importance of place within knowledge making in order to study two medical simulation labs and ask what role place plays in these simulated settings. I show that effective pedagogical simulations ironically depend upon departures from 'real' places of medical and scientific knowledge production. I highlight the importance of divergences in the sequence of events and scripts, in the behaviour of the manikins and actors, and in the materiality and arrangement of the settings. For medical and nursing students, it is the very disjunctures between the simulated environment and the hospital environmentthe infidelity of placethat allows learning to happen. Overall, this article offers an exploratory investigation into the mechanisms at work in pedagogical places of medical simulation and qualifies understandings of the relationship between place and knowledge production.