Slumming it: Mike Davis’s grand narrative of urban revolution

Writing in 1970, the French philosopher and social theorist Henri Lefebvre proposed a ʻtheoretical hypothesisʼ: by ʻurban revolution I refer to the transformations that affect contemporary society, ranging from the period when questions of growth and industrialization predominate … to the period when the urban problematic becomes predominant, when the search for solutions and modalities […]

On Rem Koolhaas

and fleeting; the city as empty spaces, panic, insecurity, screams and rags, infrastructural parasitism, and so on. The postmodern, a fundamental category in regard to Koolhaas, which he had already inaugurated in his retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, Delirious New York, is here defined as an irreversible category and as a way of seeing the present. […]