I want to suggest a different kind of reading which focuses on two fruitful impulses that I think Lefebvre offers here: first a theoretical one, the concept of paradoxes; and second a practical (and meanwhile well known) one, the claim for a right to the city.

On the Wrong Side of the Track situates the Olympics moment in longue durée tracing the depictions of the East End as the locus of Victorian gothic imaginary, a place inhabited by truculent locals long indifferent to national popular injunctions.

This book explores the transformation of the Middle West Side of Manhattan (1894-1914) through the lens of the sociospatial dialectic. In particular, it examines how this area of the city was conceived by reformists and government officials, lived by constrained residents, and altered through the deviating perceptions and practices of different people operating in and through this space.

A frequently referenced forerunner of the smart city is this proposal by the British architectural collective, Archigram, for a “Plug-In City,” which supplanted fixed buildings with a moveable network of spaces and interchangeable “programs” for urban inhabitations. 

To interrogate the relation between governmental practices and the slew of recent technologies developed and deployed in the name of sustainability—whether ‘green’, ‘resilient’, ‘ecological’ or otherwise—is of course to interrogate the political status of such technology itself.