Durban

“Geography is destiny ”1: one of the most famous – and out-dated – adages in the world. Culture, economy and climate have always condemned entire civilisations to disappear and have always determined the organisation of world space. This book comes out of an image. The image produced by overlaying the picture and the history of modern metropolises (the mega-cities, with over ten million inhabitants): Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Jakarta, Karachi and Manila with the London, Berlin or Paris of two centuries ago. The overlaying compresses the distance between two historical moments and makes the two hundred years in between vanish. This image implicitly introduces two opposite interpretations of the relation between these moments. The first one warns against the risk of a repetitive pattern. The second one sees the results of the overlaying as a useful exercise in recollection and critical review. The former opens our eyes to the risks of neglecting “global urbanism and architecture”2. This negligence is caused by the overestimation of geography, its marking of the distance between things and reality – obsolete, but hard to erase. The latter transforms the interest in global architecture and urbanism into a memory exercise. It retraces the fundamental steps of modern architecture and urbanism, trying to develop a socially and politically “objective” narrative.