Kunlé Adeyemi

PA In 2007, while you were still working at OMA, you published an essay in the journal Log, entitled Urban Crawl. It was an occasion for the western/northern hemisphere to consider cities in developing countries as paragons and paradigms for the future, and also argued for a radical rethinking of the position of architecture.

KA The article was written shortly after my post-professional degree at Princeton, and I published it with a view in mind. My thesis at the time was on the role of market economies in rapidly emerging cities. I had a lot of reflection around the impact of cities of the Global South and how they would become more important in the future. It was a prompt to rethink our perceptions of cities, understanding that there’s a critical point where cities, just out of the growth of population and economy, begin to become a lot more organic in their expansion, and the nature of the performance of the city – whether economically, socially or environmentally – becomes exponential. That’s what we’re starting to see in several large, growing cities in the Global South. Without