New York City planning officials have focused on fetishized public space - the Highline, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Ground Zero - to “rebrand New York as a nexus of culture and capital” which blinds its citizens to the wave of privatization that has left its civic apparatus - schools, hospitals, social housing, etc - underfunded and decaying.

On historical consciousness: “If there is one abiding historical certainty it is that, eventually, things change. And they can be made to change.”

“To contest public space is also to contest - rather than simply to reject - the state as a redistributive technology.” The question that architects can help to contemplate in advance is “What new system might follow the one to which we object?”, what happens the day after revolution? “We can answer: Its own empty shell, made unrecognizable. Surely, then, architecture is capable of reactivating its capacity to pose and to answer such questions concretely, and in advance — to reinvent what used to be called housing, schools, hospitals, factories, and farms in a way that asks: What else must change for these changes to be possible?”