In his 1982 book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Marshall Berman writes about ‘the developer’ “who can bring material, technical and spiritual resources together, and transform them into new structures of social life,” in order to “satisfy modern people’s persistent need for adventurous, open-ended, ever-renewed development.”

Today private developers have taken over the main role as urban designers and city builders. Design and technology have worked to create desire for the ever-new, ever-changing products that capitalism requires for its endless growth. Corporations today exercise great power and control to manufacture desire and to reshape social life and spatial distribution. These works explore dystopian themes such as the loss of community, the homogeneity of our built environment, the emphasis of product over people, and the emptiness of our modern ‘culture of entertainment.’