ABSTRACT
A central urban crisis facing us today is inequality. Any discussion on architecture and urbanism that does not begin by engaging the asymmetry of urbanization today between enclaves of wealth and sectors of marginality would simply perpetuate the powerlessness of design. The context of pressing socio-political realities worldwide and the conditions of conflict have redefined the territory of intervention. It is unsettling, in fact, to witness some of the most “cutting edge” practices of architecture rush unconditionally to China and the United Arab Emirates to build their dream castles, and in the process reduce themselves to mere caricatures of agents of change, camouflaging, as they do, gentrification with a massive hyper aesthetic and formalist project. I certainly hope that in the context of urbanism’s and architecture’s euphoria for the “Dubais” of the world in recent years, and the seemingly limitless horizon of design possibilities they inspired, we now can be mobilized by a sense of dissatisfaction, a feeling of “pessimistic optimism” that can provoke us to also address, head on, the sites of conflict that define and will continue to define the cities of the twenty-first century.
