What Is the Problem?

The philosophical discourse of biopolitics has led to a rediscovery of political agency inherent to the practice of architecture and the production of built form within an urban context. Its assimilation within contemporary architectural thought has largely been through its em-ployment as a critical approach to ideology, colonization or war, rang-ing from Michel Foucault’s disciplinary institutions to Eyal Weizman’s states of control. Most famously polemicized in the first lines of Walter Benjamin’s 1921 seminal essay “Critique of Violence,” an ethics of life is posited as the dialectical opposite from the violence of power.