Looking down on Hornos de Cal Metrocable station in the barrio of San Agustín in Caracas, Venezuela IMAGE Iwan Baan

"The social revolution," wrote Karl Marx, "cannot take its poetry from the past, but only from the future." Anyone interested in architecture and discontented with an ultra-capitalist present must find that poetry difficult to conjure, in a situation where "futuristic" usually entails computer-aided billowing-and-swooping “centres" for despots. More often, solace is found in the social modernism of the recent past, so near in time and so apparently distant in possibility. What is important about Justin McGuirk's Radical Cities – Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture, is that here radicalism is not retrospective, but living. Teeming, even.

In fact, McGuirk begins by endorsing the familiar narrative in which state-sponsored modernist projects were a top-down "failure". In the Latin American context, he notes, giant superblock Villes Radieuses, usually built by right-leaning military dictatorships, were followed in the 1970s by a sharp withdrawal of government involvement in housing across the continent, as it lurched towards neoliberalism. The "pink tide" of left-wing governments elected since the late 1990s have had to base their social programmes on cities defined by the self-built favelas that filled the gap. Rather than replacing the slums, McGuirk's radical architects have tried to work within them – an "activist pragmatism" he endorses, and finds almost everywhere in a journey across the continent, with chapters on Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia and finally, the Mexico-US border, where he imagines the lessons learned from "informality" being applied in the rich world....Continue Reading

text written by Owen Hatherley, an architectural critic and the author of Militant Modernism and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

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