ABSTRACT
Architecture has been recharged at the beginning of the new century. Infused with all kinds of energy from postmodern forms and theory, social and city challenges, new science and innovative art practices, architecture is once again placed centre stage in urban agendas worldwide. Does the new surge of architectural endeavour also mark a shift in the politics of architecture and the city? Is it the end of a certain twentieth-century tradition of architectural concerns with social change, economic progress, social and, even, revolutionary activity? Yes and no, for what we are witnessing here is at once the end of politics in one form, and the resurrection of a politics of another form; this is death and birth as one of those great dialectics of modernisation, that between production and reproduction, and it seems that the latter is gaining the upper hand.1
