Above all, the multiple forces of division at play across the globe and in the contemporary city are producing a crisis of both housing affordability and social and public infrastructure. In other words, as the worldwide neo-liberalist economic policies of homogenization and privatization define the identity of the global metropolis everywhere, these economic and political agendas are also engendering socio-economic inequalities across communities that our institutions of architecture theory and practice continue to ignore. In addition, the formal institutions producing the official hyper-development in the contemporary city continue to be at odds with the unofficial, micro-political and economic informalities defining many neighborhoods where the service sector needed to support such mega-projects of redevelopment lives.

The micro-heterotopias that are emerging within small communities across the city, in the form of non-conforming spatial and entrepreneurial practices, are defining a different idea of density and land use, setting forth a counter form of urban and economic development that thrives on social encounter, collaboration, and exchange. Can architects rethink political and economic systems in the context of these conditions? Can architects design collaboration and participation across agencies and institutions? Can conflict become an operational device to redefine practices of intervention in the city? Can we redefine the meaning of globalization by radicalizing the local? By reflecting over many of these questions, we can reopen the potential of the metropolitan as the site for a new brand of social realism and reevaluate the re-definition of the relationship between architectural form, the political, and the economic.