Literary Dose #11

"In the context of a post 9-11 political equator that divides the world and the city between enclaves of mega wealth and sectors of poverty, urbanites of labor and surveillance, the formal and informal, our institutions of architecture have lost their socio-political relevance. Instead, the architecture avant-garde has become fully complicit with an international, neo-liberal project of privatization and homogenization, by camouflaging gentrification with a massive hyper aesthetic and formalist project.

New experimental practices of intervention in the collective territory will emerge only from zones of conflict. The radicalization of the local in order to generate new readings of the global is transforming the neighborhood -- not the city -- into the urban laboratory of the 21st century."

- Teddy Cruz, one of the 50 manifestos (excerpt) in icon's 50th issue.