Urban-Think Tank's remark seems the obverse of another, more famous planner's words: "Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men's blood." That is Daniel Burnham, whose 1909 plan of Chicago depicted a set of grand boulevards radiating from a proposed lakeshore civic centre, with ring roads and parks at the city boundary. McGuirk reverses Burnham's emphasis, focusing on the in-between spaces in that dream of 20th-century city organisation. He chronicles the history of post-modernist development in cities across Latin America, setting up, again and again, a contrast between the planned and the made, top-down versus bottom-up, high versus low and, most important, centre versus periphery. The strongest argument he makes, backed by examples in Bogotá, Caracas and Rio, is the importance of access to transportation. If modernist Latin American architects, often following in the footsteps of Le Corbusier's concrete blocks, saw housing as the way to democratise the city, 21st-century politicians and planners should be thinking about motion, with cable cars and bus rapid transit giving people in the slums more time and more opportunities.

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Yet patterns do persist. Perhaps you can see the radical city as a set of waves, infiltrating, rather than washing over or cutting through, a la Burnham, what exists today. The first wave is transportation, then public space and public buildings, and, finally, housing. McGuirk does a service by collecting and connecting these ideas, making a movement out of pieces, and showing an alternative way to shape the city.