"I want to argue that one of the most urgent problems
in planning and architectural theory today is the need to develop a different
social imagination — one that is not modernist but that nevertheless reinvents
modernism's activist commitments to the invention of society and to the
construction of the state. I suggest that the sources of this new imaginary lie
not in any specifically architectural or planning production of the city but
rather in the development of theory in both fields as an investigation into
what I call the spaces of insurgent citizenship....By insurgent, I mean to
emphasize the opposition of these spaces of citizenship to the modernist spaces
that physically dominate so many cities today. I also use it to emphasize an
opposition to the modernist political project that absorbs citizenship into a
plan of state building and that, in the process, generates a certain concept
and practice of planning itself. ... The spaces of an insurgent citizenship
constitute new metropolitan forms of the social not yet liquidated by or
absorbed into the old. As such, they embody possible alternative futures."
