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One day in this hot, late summer of 2009, a collective of artists dressed up as city workers painted a continuous red line on the streets of my neighborhood that demarcates a territory of at least two square kilometres. They called it RedRedLand. But hey, my house was just outside of this territory! I felt somewhat excluded.

Gated communities in the USA; squatter settlements in Brazil and Ethiopia; spaces of “refuge” in Cairo, Amman, Dubai, Istanbul, and Palestine; mass-produced housing estates in Russia – and throughout the world; informal economies in Jakarta; Rotterdam as a “makeable” city after the financial crisis of 2008. These are the six international “situations” that are examined in Open City: Designing Coexistence, published to coincide with the 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, which opened last month at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and runs through the 10th of January.

Architecture is a fiction.  Buildings, of course, are very real.  Architecture, however, is everything that is about buildings, or about building.  It is the way we think about buildings, talk about buildings, write about buildings, draw and compose buildings, and organize buildings.  Until it becomes embodied in a building, it is therefore always a notional idea.  When the proposition that is architecture becomes embodied in buildings, it disappears.  It is very difficult to find architecture in a building, because you have to see it in ephemeral qualities such as proportions, the sequence of spaces or that most difficult phenomenon of all, space.  Architecture, in other words, becomes completely abstract when it is built.  It is then up to the critic or interpreter to tease architecture back out of the building.  This is where writing takes over.