In the projects shown here, architects and artists reflect on the problems and possibilities of economic and urban growth. How is rapid urbanization happening? Who is benefiting, and who is being displaced or excluded? What can architects and citizens do to exert leverage on processes at once local and global? — Places Journal

Our task — and we should well speak as architects — must be making the invisible visible, uncovering and retracing the concealed limits of the city. We must construct barriers and counter-spaces within and against the processes that tame and dissolve the crucial loci of democracy. — Places Journal

"All great public squares have a monument with a statue, right? ... Everyone in town can agree about that. But whenever we discuss which historical figure should go up on that column, it turns into a fight. We can’t come to a consensus. So we’ve decided to leave it empty. One day, this person will come. And when they do, we will have a place waiting for their statue. This will bring great pride to Anse-à-Pitres.” — Places Journal

The particular danger of TEDification to the design disciplines, I think, is its core message that the chief obstacle to our discovering grand solutions to global problems — to achieving the grand design, to "making a comprehensive entity," as that reviewer of Big History applauded — is our lack of sufficient connection. What we need, we're told, is a seamless web of ideas, capital, products and data. — Places Journal

I wish that it still existed.
— Frank Gehry

It would be the world's biggest nightmare if the Institute were still alive.
— Mark Wigley

It was the moment for something to happen.
— Diana Agrest

// — Places Journal

Lina Bo Bardi was loyal more to an emancipating concept of modernity than to the abstract, formal language of modern architecture. Her thinking and practice were situated at the intersection of different worldviews: north and south, city and hinterland, privilege and deprivation, modernism and tradition, past and present, abstraction and social realism. As she declared in 1989, “I didn’t make myself alone. I am curious and this quality broadens my horizons. ... I am somehow special.” — Places Journal

The default recourse to data-fication, the presumption that all meaningful flows and activity can be sensed and measured, is taking us toward a future in which the people shaping our cities and their policies rarely have the opportunity to consider the nature of our stickiest urban problems and the kind of questions they raise. — Places Journal

We’ve seen the movies, read the books, toured the spooky attractions. This we know: haunted houses are dangerous places. They’re built on evil ground, or on sites where bad things happened, or above the graves of people who don’t want company. ... But that’s not what I want to talk about here. Sometimes buildings are born bad. — Places Journal

I step out into the street but realize that I’d better not — there’s a current — and as my hallway fills, I remember the electrical panel in the basement. It shorts out, and I hear the breakers fall. Then there is an explosion outside, and the neighborhood goes dark. — Places Journal

My bewilderment quickly yields to a growing sense of dread. How is it that even in the heart of Silicon Valley it’s completely acceptable for smart technology to be buggy, erratic, or totally dysfunctional? ... We are weaving these technologies into our homes, our communities, even our very bodies — but even experts have become disturbingly complacent about their shortcomings. The rest of us rarely question them at all. — Places Journal

My own conviction is that the most meaningful prolonged response to the Pritzker — but much more, to the entrenched discrimination it both reflects and reinforces — will involve political action directed toward measureable change. It will involve ramping up the current professional and cultural conversation — now focused on sharing experiences, promoting awareness, influencing leaders in the field — and articulating specific goals, definable outcomes. — Places Journal

One of the most gratifying bits of feedback I ever received from one of my Ranger projects came from a 60-something woman who’d attended a campfire program on freeway landscapes in Los Angeles. Months later, she told me that she never looked at a freeway in the same way. Who knows what this kind of change in perception might ultimately lead to? — Places Journal

Smart city infrastructure can augment the ability of managers, planners, designers and engineers to define and implement a fundamentally better next generation of buildings, cities, regions — right? Maybe. For that to be a serious proposition, it’s going to have to be normal for planners and designers not only to collaborate productively with engineers, but to do so with the full and competent participation of the only people they mistrust more than each other ... customers. — Places Journal

We cannot expect big American cities to reach their potential when the very professions that purport to defend and perpetuate urbanism recoil at the presence of towers. Left rudderless by the experts, we are forced to inhabit the bleak consequences of a poorly regulated marketplace, analogous to a population that must operate on its own cancers due to the confused surgeons who keep cutting away at the healthy tissue. — Places Journal