As financial capital progressively invents new forms of value to mine as exhaustively as the last, there is need, once again, to attend to the particularities and irregularities of place. For it is the unthought, overlooked, and discarded that can be captured without alarm; forgotten without notice. The Urban Village represents a tipping point with the past. Yet if we have learned anything from the present about the forces that engender such visions of a future, we should know that its very difference is in risk of sliding into the same. The Urban Village is a petri dish of criticality; a laboratory of flight. Being left alone has never been an option. New mechanisms of relation, new protocols of exchange, new conditions of belonging are needed for living, and growing, together.

Urban Village is collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the 7th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB) within the context of its theme, "Cities, Grow in Difference."