topos 134

no 134
2026
to po s.

COVER
PHOTO: by visuals via Unsplash
The clenched fist is a symbol of courage,
defiance, and collective power. It embodies the
spirit of urban rebellion, challenging old
structures, taking action, and shaping cities
from the ground up. Bold, determined,
unstoppable: this is the energy driving change
in our urban worlds.
Cities, we are told, must be planned. They must
be orderly, resilient, smart, green, and – above
all – efficient. Their flows must flow. Their zones
must zone. Their development must be sustainable,
measurable and accompanied by stakeholder
dialogues with coffee-flavoured name
tags. And then someone comes along and plants
tomatoes in a parking lot.
This issue of topos is dedicated to those people.
To the ones who don’t wait for permission, who
don’t colour within the zoning map, who don’t
ask whether it’s allowed before asking whether it
makes sense. Rebels of Urbanism is not a celebration
of chaos – it is a tribute to disobedient
clarity. To those who look at the city not as a finished
product, but as an open system with
enough cracks to plant new ideas in.
We’re not talking about noise for the sake of
provocation. We’re talking about friction – and
how it generates movement.
From informal settlements that outsmart formal
planning, to community-built infrastructures that
succeed where governments have failed; from artists
who reprogram the meaning of public space,
to architects who refuse the rules of the market –
this issue explores urbanism as resistance, reinvention,
and, yes, rebellion.
You will encounter stories from all over the
world and beyond – places where the city has
been challenged not by ideology, but by daily
life and imagination. You’ll meet planners who
speak softly but act radically. Landscape architects
who refuse the polished masterplan. Activists
who turn dead zones into living rooms. And
fighters who remind us that rebellion does not
always wear a hoodie.
Rebels come in many forms. Some plant. Some
build. Some occupy. Some code. Some walk
slowly through a city designed for acceleration
– and that alone becomes a statement. What
unites them is not scale, but stance. They act
where others explain. They improvise where
systems hesitate. They remind us that the urban
contract is not fixed, and that rules – like kerbs
and fences – are made to be tested.
And yes, sometimes they fail. But in failure,
there is more truth than in a dozen glossy renderings.
Because rebellion, when done well, is
not just noise – it is method. So no: this is not a
handbook for polite participation. This is a
journal of urban courage, of stubborn optimism,
of brilliant misbehaviour.
I am particularly looking forward to hearing from
you, dear readers, whether via LinkedIn, email, or
in person. We are immensely proud of this issue.
On the one hand, it has once again pushed the
boundaries of topos; on the other, it has allowed
us to further broaden our own horizons.
TOPOS E-PAPER: AVAIL-
ABLE FOR YOUR DESKTOP
For more information visit:
www.toposmagazine.com/epaper
TOBIAS HAGER
Chief-Content-Officer
t.hager@georg-media.de
topos 134 005

CONTENTS
OPINION
Page 8
CURATED PRODUCTS
Page 104
THE BIG PICTURE
Page 10
METROPOLIS EXPLAINED
Page 12
"YOU CANNOT STOP LIFE"
Interview with Wladimir Klitschko
Page 24
NÚMENOR’S CODE
An Introduction by Tobias Hager
Page 16
"YOU CANNOT STOP LIFE"
Interview with Wladimir Klitschko
Page 24
THE CITY AND THE CAPITAL
From Marxist theory to the fight for equitable cities
Page 32
RUNNING ON REBELLION
(AND WINNING)
Zohran Mamdani’s fight for housing justice in New
York City
Page 38
"REBELLION HAPPENS IN
THE CRACKS"
Interview with Víctor Cano Ciborro
Page 46
(R)EVOLUTIONIZING URBAN SPACE
Architektoniczki’s feminist approach to public space
Page 56
REBELLION ON THE BUS LANE
Bogotá’s bold experiment in public transit
Page 64
"URBAN REBELLION
THRIVES ON COURAGE, CREATIVITY,
AND COMMITMENT"
Interview with Gerald Babel-Sutter
Page 70
THE NEIGHBOURHOOD THAT
REFUSES TO CONFORM
Vila de Gràcia and the art of autonomy
Page 80
"BEING REBELLIOUS MEANS TAKING UNCONVEN-
TIONAL APPROACHES"
Interview with Sebastian Rühl
Page 86
ASPHALT REVOLT
Tactical Urbanism in Action
Page 94
CONTRIBUTORS
Page 102
CITY GAMECHANGERS
Page 112
EDGE CITY
Page 114
IMPRINT
Page 113
THE CITY AND THE CAPITAL
An in-depth profile of David Harvey
Page 32
Photos: Press Service of Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, By FLOK Society, CC BY 3.0 License
006 topos 134

OPINION
THE
PARTICIPATORY
LIE
Participation has become urbanism’s favourite moral alibi. No masterplan
without a workshop. No redevelopment without sticky notes. No displacement
without a listening session. We tell ourselves that co-creation equals democracy
– that the presence of citizens in a room automatically redistributes power. But
what if the opposite is true? What if many of today’s participatory processes are
not tools of transformation, but instruments of pacification? Carefully moderated
arenas where anger is translated into Post-its, dissent into data, and resistance
into valuable input? In an era that celebrates inclusion as performance,
the most dangerous question is also the simplest: who still decides?
008 topos 134

Opinion
They promised democracy – we got design
thinking. From pop-up workshops to policy
hackathons, today’s planning culture celebrates
“co-creation” as the highest form of civic
virtue: inclusive, agile, and gloriously buzzword-compliant.
Participation, we are told, is
the antidote to top-down urbanism. But what
if it isn’t? What if co-creation, in its current
practice, does not dismantle power – but
politely repackages it?
What began as a hard-won democratic demand
has morphed into an increasingly hollow ritual.
Cities now perform participation like a
well-rehearsed play: invitations are sent, sticky
notes prepared, “local voices” gathered in a
semi-circle of sincerity. But scratch the surface
and a different picture emerges. The budget is
fixed. The timeline is set. The renderings are
already in circulation. The decision, quite
often, has already been made.
Let’s be clear: this is not an attack on listening.
It’s a critique of how little we’re willing to hear.
Because in too many processes, participation is
pre-structured to produce agreeable input –
not disruption. It asks residents to “share their
visions” within frames already drawn, to
colour inside policy lines, to help decorate
strategies that cannot be questioned in their
foundations. When critique emerges, it is
labelled as noise. When conflict arises, it is
“managed”. Participation, in this context,
becomes not empowerment – but containment.
The result is a peculiar choreography:
messy urban realities filtered through tidy consensus
protocols. Every stakeholder speaks.
Every opinion is heard. And in the end, the
same five firms get the contract. This is not
failure by accident. It is success by design.
Because co-creation is rarely neutral and never
honest. It is often deployed precisely where
legitimacy is lacking – as a compensatory gesture
in contexts of exclusion, speculation or
displacement. It becomes the sugar coating on
bitter pills: gentrification as “neighbourhood
revitalisation”, displacement as “strategic relocation”,
privatisation as “public–private collaboration”.
All apparently co-created. All deeply
familiar.
And yet, the myth persists. Participation, we
are told, builds trust. But trust in what? In a
system that cannot be meaningfully challenged?
In processes that invite marginalised
voices, only to translate them into bullet points
on a consultant slide deck?
In theory, participation should redistribute
power. In practice, it often performs inclusion
while consolidating control. The language of
co-creation flatters the citizen – while protecting
the architecture of the status quo.
Perhaps the real test is this: if a participatory
process cannot end in a fundamental “no” – to
the brief, the developer, the policy itself – then
what we have is not co-creation, but choreography.
And choreography, however well-intentioned
it may be, does not make a city better. It
simply makes inequality feel more polite. The
future of cities deserves better than being
polite. It demands planning processes that are
not only participatory in form, but confrontational
in content. Processes that acknowledge
conflict, redistribute authorship, and allow for
radical deviation – not just curated input.
Until then, the real work of urban rebellion
may still happen outside the planning room –
precisely because that’s the only place the rules
can still be broken.
TOBIAS HAGER is a journalist and Chief Content
Officer and member of the management board at
GEORG Media. Responsible for all GEORG brands
such as topos magazine, BAUMEISTER and
Garten + Landschaft, his focus is on the areas of content,
digital, marketing and entrepreneurship.
topos 134 009

rebels of urbanism
INTERVIEWEE: WLADIMIR KLITSCHKO
INTERVIEW: VERONIKA MINKINA
“YOU CANNOT STOP
LIFE“
Wladimir Klitschko is part of a city that refuses to stand still under siege. As
a member of Ukraine’s Territorial Defence, he is prepared to serve actively
in the war, joining his brother Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, in defending
the capital while also acting abroad as an advocate for military and humanitarian
support. In this conversation, he reflects on how Kyiv continues
to function as a global metropolis under constant attack, how communication
and digital infrastructure have become tools of survival, and why “urban
rebellion” in today’s Kyiv is not a metaphor, but a daily practice of resilience,
adaptation, and collective courage.
024 topos 134

Wladimir Klitschko as
part of Ukraine’s
Territorial Defence,
defending the capital
alongside its citizens
while advocating
internationally for
support and solidarity.
Photo: Press Service of Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko
topos 134 025

Kyiv continues to function as a global metropolis under constant
threat. What allowed the city to keep operating despite the pressures
and destruction of war?
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022, even though the
war really began back in 2014, Kyiv has never stopped functioning. Even
when the city was nearly encircled by Russian forces and more than 250
buildings were destroyed, life did not come to a halt.
It was a tragic and unprecedented moment when the attack occurred.
Before 25th February 2022, almost five million people lived and worked
in the city, including the residents of nearby towns such as Bucha, Hostomel,
and Borodianka –all just 10 to 15 minutes away by car. Bucha, as
you know, later became the site of a massacre. I remember how this bustling,
vibrant city suddenly emptied, with only a few hundred thousand
people remaining.
Everywhere, citizens stood in line to receive weapons and defend the city.
Volunteers queued for hours to arm themselves. Sandbags covered windows
everywhere as Kyiv prepared for street fighting. Yet, despite everything,
the city never ceased to function.
The mayor, my brother Vitali Klitschko, addressed the citizens every
morning and evening, broadcasting live through Kyiv City TV and via his
mobile phone. He never stopped communicating with the people who
stayed.
There were countless challenges at that time. Public transport had collapsed
– no subways, no buses. But despite everything, the city adapted.
Ukrainians are an extremely digitalised nation; digitalisation arrived in
Ukraine much earlier than in many European countries, including Germany.
Through digital tools we were able to coordinate supplies, identify
open pharmacies, and distribute essential goods.
Digitalisation also became a defence mechanism. Through CCTV surveillance,
we could see exactly where the enemy was –their faces, their
names, even their military units. All this data was collected and stored,
even though Russian cyberattacks tried to destroy our infrastructure. We
let them believe they succeeded, but in reality, we continued documenting
crimes, which will one day serve as evidence for justice.
So Kyiv kept functioning thanks to the mayor’s team and officials - some
left, but most stayed. Despite destruction, killings, and immense hardship,
the city never stopped working.
Many cities would have collapsed under such pressure. Which
strengths or mechanisms impressed you most when it came to keeping
daily life going?
Of course, digital tools and infrastructure have been crucial, as I mentioned.
But above all, it’s about people.
Life is both fragile and unstoppable. You cannot stop life, and we proved
that from the very first day of the full-scale war in 2022. Every day since
then, Ukrainians in the capital and across the country have shown this
resilience again and again.
What has impressed me most is the inner strength of our men and wom-
026 topos 134

rebels of urbanism
en, their resilience, their humanity. I also discovered something within
myself that I want to share. I remember sitting behind sandbags with my
weapon, preparing for street fighting, and asking myself: “Wlad, what is
really important in life? Why are you here? You could be in the US or in
Europe, living a comfortable life. Is the money in your bank account
important now? No. Are your Olympic gold medals or championship
belts important? No.”
Then I thought: “Is your child important? Yes,but even that’s not the
essence. What, then, truly matters?” And I realised that it was about moral
duty, the same moral strength that kept so many Ukrainians here to
defend their country, their city. Especially in those first days and weeks,
when the outcome was completely uncertain, we chose to stay and fight. I
have deep respect for everyone who made that choice and still continues
today.
One thing I can promise you: Putin’s Russia will never succeed in Ukraine.
Communication became a lifeline during the siege, both within Kyiv
and with the world. How has it shaped the city’s resilience?
Absolutely, communication is key to everything. In family life, among
friends, within communities, cities, countries, even globally ,it all begins
with communication. Without it, there is no understanding, no unity.
In modern times, communication is essential for survival. I have to say,
whatever people might think about Elon Musk, I am deeply grateful that
he created Starlink. Sometimes, even in Germany, I lose connection on a
train or motorway ,yet in Ukraine, thanks to Starlinks, we have built a
remarkable digital ecosystem.
The internet speed is extremely high, and you can connect almost anywhere
in the country, even in war zones. Mobile providers such as Kyivstar
have learned to integrate Starlinks so that, even without standard
mobile coverage, people can still send messages. For example, while sheltered
underground during an air raid.
Communication, adaptation, and innovation go hand in hand in this war.
Modern warfare changes constantly, and we must adapt as quickly as possible
– and we have. In just a few months, in February 2026, it will be four
years since the full-scale invasion, and twelve years since the conflict
began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and the fighting in eastern
Ukraine.
I often think of Darwin’s quote: “It is not the strongest of the species that
survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
We live by this principle, constantly adapting to our environment to
ensure survival.
“Rebellion” has become part of daily life in Kyiv. What does this kind
of resistance mean to you on an urban level?
I can best explain it through a comparison from nature. Think of a school
of fish in the ocean or a flock of birds in the sky. You’ve seen it in documentaries
,these clouds of movement that shift form in an instant. On the
one hand, they create an ecosystem of similar beings moving together.
topos 134 027

rebels of urbanism
RUNNING ON
REBELLION
(AND WINNING)
ERIC FLOOD
038 topos 134

Zohran Mamdani didn’t just win on election night, he tapped into something. The
chants of Housing is a human right could have come from any tenant rally over the
past five or more years. This time, though, New York City had finally voted like it
believed its chant.
In part, New Yorkers chose Mamdani because the status quo had become
unbearable. The city has a 1.4% rental vacancy rate – the lowest since 1968
- with few to no affordable units left to find. If renters are looking to spend
less than $1,100, that vacancy rate drops to 0.4%. That isn’t a housing
market, it‘s a closed system. For households earning less than $50,000
without subsidies, 86% are rent burdened. For those earning under
$25,000, the same share pays more than half their income to keep a roof
over their heads. When the median asking rent is $3,500 and median
household income sits around $70,000, the maths just doesn’t work.
This is the “unliveable” New York that gave Mamdani his mandate. However,
mandates don’t equal governance - it takes coalitions to get things
done. And the coalition that carried Mamdani to City Hall now meets a
reality his predecessors couldn't solve: a housing system that was failing
even before 200,000 asylum seekers arrived to face the same closed market
as everyone else.
New York's shelter system held 48,000 people in March 2022. Then federal
policy collapsed, Texas and Florida started busing migrants north as
political theatre, and the city's right-to-shelter obligation met a scale it
was never designed for. The city declared a state of emergency in October
2022 and has renewed it monthly since. To be clear, the crisis isn't that
migrants came. It's that decades of housing underproduction left no slack
in the system for anyone: not for the teacher priced out of Queens, not for
the family from Venezuela seeking asylum, not for the lifelong New Yorker
who aged out of affordability.
Mamdani’s win was a revolt against that failure. The test is whether affordability
politics can govern through historic scarcity when shelter is a legal
obligation and housing is a moral one.
New York’s Frozen System
New York’s housing crisis was a slow process decades in the making.
Between 2002 and 2014, the city lost nearly half of its low-rent housing
stock. Units affordable to working-class families didn't disappear, but they
were deregulated, flipped, or priced up until they no longer existed as
affordable options. By 2021, only about 526,000 low-rent units remained.
Meanwhile, the city kept growing. Since the last housing vacancy survey,
New York added 60,000 units of housing. It also added 275,000 households.
That isn’t just a gap, it’s a structural mismatch without an easy correction.
The upstream maths is equally broken. Throughout the 2010s, New York
built only 23 units per 1,000 residents annually. Studies estimate the city
needs 560,000 new units by 2030, with 277,000 needed immediately just
to stabilise the market. That pipeline isn't coming. In mid-2022, tax incentives
for construction expired and building permits dropped significantly
within six months of the expiration. Estimates suggest 33,000 units
already in process of construction are unlikely to ever be completed without
a replacement incentive.
This results in a frozen system. New Yorkers move 41% less often than the
national average. The share of renters who've stayed in the same apartment
for over a decade is three and a half times the U.S. rate. Renters don’t
040 topos 134

INTERVIEWEE: VÍCTOR CANO CIBORRO INTERVIEW: VERONIKA MINKINA
"REBELLION HAPPENS
IN THE CRACKS"
Victor Cano–Ciborro explores the city through the lens of its most overlooked
inhabitants. From street vendors in Ahmedabad to rappers in the Parisian
banlieues, he studies how bodies—human and non-human—produce, contest,
and transform urban space. In his work, “rebellion” is not defiance for
its own sake, but the everyday assertion of presence, creativity, and agency
within cities designed for conformity. By listening, mapping, and making visible
these non-normative practices, Cano-Ciborro reveals how urban life
thrives in friction, improvisation, and the gaps between regulation and reality.
Photo: Víctor Cano-Ciborro
046 topos 134

rebels of urbanism
Victor Cano Ciborro
explores how everyday
practices, from street
vending to youth culture,
shape cities from within,
revealing the hidden
rhythms and conflicts of
urban life.
topos 134 047

Photo: Carlos Martinez via unsplash
The enduring relevance
of TransMilenio may lie
less in its success story
than in its imperfections.
It reminds us that urban
rebellion is not a heroic
endpoint but a fragile
beginning – that it is
easier to redistribute
space than to govern it
justly over time.
topos 134 065

TransMilenio turned Bogotá into a global symbol of a rebellious transport revolution:
built swiftly, comparatively inexpensive, and driven by Enrique Peñalosa’s
vision of redistributing the city more fairly. Yet today, the celebrated bus rapid transit
system reveals the limits of infrastructural revolution. Between political ambition,
social reality, and chronic overload, Bogotá has become a case study in how urban
rebellions age—and what cities can learn from them.
The revolution did not arrive on rails. It came on rubber tires, painted red,
articulated instead of locomotive, and with the promise of reclaiming the
city – not for cars, but for people. When Bogotá began building its bus
rapid transit system, TransMilenio, in the late 1990s, it was less a technical
innovation than a political act. And perhaps that is why Enrique Peñalosa,
the man driving this transformation, can with some justification be
called a rebel.
Enrique Peñalosa Londoño, born in 1954 in Washington, D.C., the son of
Colombian diplomat Enrique Peñalosa Camargo, spent his childhood
between North America and Colombia and later studied at Duke University
in the U.S. and at the University of Paris. Early on, he became engaged
with questions of urban justice and social inclusion before entering politics
in the early 1990s.
A system as an attitude
TransMilenio is inseparable from his name. Peñalosa served as mayor of
Bogotá from 1998 to 2001 and again from 2016 to 2019. He was no traffic
engineer but an urbanist in the political sense: someone who saw the city
not as a set of infrastructures but as a moral project. His central conviction
was as simple as it was provocative: a city is only just if those without
cars also have access to mobility, space, and dignity.
Peñalosa is regarded internationally as a leading advocate of a “city for
people rather than for cars”. His speeches and writings on public space,
equality, and the reclaiming of streets have attracted worldwide attention.
Later he advised organisations such as UN Habitat and the Institute for
Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), and lectured at numerous
universities and conferences.
In Bogotá, a metropolis of around seven million residents, mobility is not
a marginal concern but an existential one. Approximately 15 to 18 million
trips are made daily, nearly half of them by public transport. For almost
one in two residents, transit is the only realistic means of moving across
the city, especially for low income households, students, and young people.
Rebellion against the rail
The true provocation of TransMilenio did not lie in its efficiency but in
Peñalosa’s deliberate decision to reject the construction of a metro. While
many cities of the Global South viewed rail systems as symbols of modernity
and progress, Peñalosa opted for a bus rapid transit model: exclusive
central bus lanes, level boarding platforms, pre paid fare collection, high
frequency, and large capacity vehicles.
066 topos 134

Discarded rubber boots
turned into planters – a
subtle intervention in the
asphalt. The spirit of
Tactical Urbanism takes
material form between
roadway and bloom:
improvised and
temporary, yet intent on
renegotiating urban
space.
Photo: Brett Bennett
topos 134 095

It often begins with a modest gesture: a row of planters placed on asphalt, a bench
assembled from salvaged timber, a stretch of roadway suddenly marked as a bike lane
where none existed the day before. What appears improvised is, in fact, symptomatic
of a profound shift in how cities are imagined and transformed. Tactical Urbanism – an
approach defined by temporary, low-cost, and often citizen-led interventions – has
evolved into one of the most compelling insurgent forces in contemporary urbanism.
Within the broader constellation of today’s urban rebels, Tactical Urbanism
occupies a singular position. It does not rely on iconic architecture or
sweeping masterplans; its currency is immediacy rather than spectacle.
Its protagonists are rarely starchitects or elected officials. Instead, they are
residents, neighbors, activists, and planners who share a dissatisfaction
with the inertia of conventional processes. Their rebellion is neither theatrical
nor purely oppositional. It is practical. It unfolds at the scale of a
crosswalk, a curb, a single block – and yet its implications reverberate far
beyond, reshaping how institutions think about risk, participation, and
the temporality of change.
The city as a prototype
At the heart of Tactical Urbanism lies a simple but radical premise: those
who inhabit a place possess an intimate understanding of its failures and
potentials. Traditional planning frameworks, with their procedural
rigour, expert-driven assessments, and extended timelines, often estrange
citizens from decision-making; years can pass between identifying a
problem and implementing a solution. In that temporal vacuum, frustration
accumulates – and with it a readiness to bypass established channels.
Tactical Urbanism collapses that distance. It substitutes deliberation with
demonstration, proposal with prototype. Streets become laboratories;
public space becomes a test site. An intervention is installed not as a final
answer but as a question posed in physical form: What if this intersection
prioritised pedestrians? What if this parking space became a micro-park?
What if a painted line could recalibrate traffic behaviour? Each of these
questions becomes legible, and contestable, in situ.
The power of this approach lies in its reversibility. Because interventions
are temporary and inexpensive, they lower the threshold for experimentation
and reduce political risk. If a measure proves ineffective, it can be
removed with minimal cost. If it succeeds, it provides tangible evidence to
justify permanent investment. Municipalities in Europe have increasingly
used this logic to reprogram streets and squares, testing pedestrianisation,
outdoor seating, or new mobility regimes over a few weeks or months
before committing capital budgets. The city, in this sense, is no longer a
static artefact but a continuous experiment conducted at full scale.
This experimental ethos aligns Tactical Urbanism with broader trends in
governance and urban innovation: “real-world laboratories” in which
policies are tested under everyday conditions, and “street experiments”
that deliberately unsettle established mobility patterns. Rather than treating
public space as a finished product delivered by experts, Tactical
Urbanism frames it as a shared prototype – a work in progress in which
design, use, and negotiation are inseparable.
From guerrilla gesture to institutional strategy
The genealogy of Tactical Urbanism is heterogeneous. It draws from the
ethos of guerrilla gardening, from informal placemaking, from activist
traffic calming and do-it-yourself safety measures. In the early 2000s,
experimental pedestrian plazas in New York City signalled a pivotal
096 topos 134