ABSTRACT
In the face of increasing instability worldwide, generated by massive economic restructuring, climate change, civil war, all culminating in what Badiou has more generally called the "times of riots", the response from the world of architecture seems a unanimously timid call for reform. The re-centering of the political that his work adhered to can only be said to have been largely fulfilled in this time period precisely through such mechanisms and vast new institutions wielding administrative powers backed by a universal legal edifice characteristic of liberalism. Much more than an innocent gesture, his theory of urbanization was one rather more forcefully deployed as a political weapon aimed first at dismantling what remained in Europe of the absolutist state, only then to reconstruct it in the space of the urban. Its objective to measure the success, that will persist in how well it can adapt itself to suit the technological and social "necessities" of a blinding, apolitical present.
