Radical Cities

March 24, 2014
According to art critic and curator McGuirk in this bracing debut, modernism’s utopian ambitions reached their nadir in Lima, Peru, in the 1960s with a scrapped social housing project called PREVI. Writing with verve and purpose, McGuirk explores how a new generation is developing strategies to build equitable communities in Latin America. From architects to social organizers and populist leaders, these “idealistic pragmatists” are concerned with small but focused interventions, with human needs rather than style. These activists work across political divides and under less than ideal conditions, and most importantly, they regard the slums not as the problem, but the inevitable solution. Reporting from Buenos Aires, Lima, Rio, and Tijuana, among other locations, McGuirk eloquently considers the implications of different housing projects and phenomena. He visits a “vertical gymnasium” in a slum outside Caracas, Venezuela, that helped violent crime rates drop 30%. He climbs Torre David, the unfinished skyscraper in Caracas that’s home to 3,000 squatters, whose fusion of formal and informal elements could serve as a model for urban housing around the world. As McGuirk writes, “This is not a book about objects, but about actions.” Like these activist architects, he is not interested in attractive buildings (there are none here in the traditional sense), but effective civic renewal.

June 15, 2014

Journalist and curator McGuirk presents a simple premise: the efficacy of completely planned cities is a myth and the various solutions to housing the urban dwellers of Latin America's booming metropolises illustrate perfectly this point. Whether the reader of this lively journey through the slums of Lima, Peru; the beachside developments of desert Chile; the dystopian towers of Caracas, Venezuela; the housing estates of Mexico City; and other spots will agree with McGuirk is moot because the writing is engaging, the characters and places fascinating, and the ideas of housing and community resonate far beyond Latin America. We visit a Caracas skyscraper in which thousands of previously homeless residents have created a barrio in the sky after the death of the building's developer. The theme of residents participating in the organization and building of at least part of their residence is illustrated in the half houses of Iquique, Chile. The rebellion against the gridwork face of 20th-century urbanism is never far from the center of this highly readable account. VERDICT This work will appeal not only to architecture and design professionals but also to urban dwellers and lovers of lively travel writing.--David McClelland, Andover, NY

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