The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City

...if, for the better part of the 20th century, it was New York and its 
glistening imitations that symbolised the future, it is now the 
stacked-up, sprawling, impromptu city-countries of the third world. The 
idea of the total, centralised, maximally efficient city plan has long 
since lost its futuristic appeal: its confidence and ambition have 
turned to anxiety and besiegement, its homogenising obsession has 
constricted the horizons of spiritual possibility and induced 
counter-fantasies of insubordination, excess, and life-forms in chaotic 
variety. Such desires flee the West’s surveillance cameras and 
bureaucratised consumption to find in the Third World metropolis a 
scope, a speed, a more fecund ecology.

http://www.ranadasgupta.com/texts.asp?text_id=36