The Evolution of Radical Urbanism

Actar, Alexis Kalagas, Alfredo Brillembourg, Ersela Kripa, Essay, expanding design practices, High Density, Hubert Klumpner, ka-au, Re-Living the City, Stephen Mueller, Territory and mobility

Architect’s role, Cape Town, City challenge, Contemporary utopias, Developing policies, Emergent geographies, Essay, Global Awareness, Informal city, Informal settlements, Khayelitsha, Lima, Mumbai, Notes towards a History of Urbanism, Perú, Planetary urbanizations, Radical urbanism, Resilience, Seoul Biennale 2017, South Africa, Timeless Model, Transformation, Urban sprawl, Urbanism, Utopian practices

Excerpt from “Re-Living the City: UABB 2015 Catalogue” curated by Aaron Betsky, Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner and Doreen Heng Liu. Edited by Gideon Fink Shapiro. Published by Actar Publishers.
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What does it mean to be radical architect or designer today? Never before have cities mattered as much to the future of humanity. As David Harvey attests, we have sleepwalked unknowingly into a full-blown “crisis of planetary urbanization”, with acute social, political, and ecological dimensions[1]. Cities are fundamentally places of opportunity – after all, urban migrants continue to be drawn in their millions by the promise of security as well as upward mobility. But cities are too often sites of yawning inequality, where land, housing, infrastructure, and services are transformed into symptoms of exclusionary growth. Faced with contemporary urbanization patterns, we are forced to question how cities and city-making have traditionally operated. More to the point, as architects and designers we are forced to rethink how we can operate within the city, learning from its emerging intelligence and shaping its outcomes to radical and tactical ends.