Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of New Architecture

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. [em](June) [/em]