“Critical Cities: Ideas, Knowledge and Agitation Volume 4”
Myrdle Court Press, 2015
What a wonderful experience reading “Critical Cities.” I don’t know exactly what I was expecting when I picked up this book on cities, something interesting perhaps, but with a dull and/or standard academic approach and presentation. It caught me from the introduction.
I tried to skim through it to get the essence of the book but I was caught line by line, idea by idea, page by page, making notes, underlining and stopping to think about what I just read at each point.
“Critical Cities” is a powerful rare paradigm. It is a collection of thoughts by a variety of writers who have captured core ideas about cities and how cities connect to everything.
I love how the book cuts to the bone by daring to exhibit how everything relates to “the thieving world and the robbed world.” It tears up the polite curtains of the theatre of colonialism and its white supremacist terrorism, oppression and genocide. That alone shakes you to a clear place in reality.
These writers bring us subjects that we thought we understood, subjects and ideas torn to their naked form from their false or pretentious packaging.
The writings force us to do a lot of hard rethinking of our perceptions of cities and what sustains them in the fashion that we know them.
The writers present their complex ideas in a manner that is clear yet challenging. This book is thought provoking, it fascinates you, captivates you; it wants you to need more of “Critical Cities.”
Olin Tezcatlipoca
Mexica Movement
http://www.mexica-movement.org/
