Longa-polis: Immunizing Dystopia Through Radical Urban Architecture
Radical architecture envisions cities as immune systems, confronting capitalist dystopias through speculative urban design
In the ever-evolving discourse of urbanism, the project Longa-polis by Sung Ho Park stands out as a bold and imaginative response to the complex and disquieting trajectory of contemporary cities. As a shortlisted entry in the highly respected UnIATA 2019 competition, Longa-polis uses the lens of radical urban architecture to interrogate the embedded socio-political frameworks that shape modern urban life. The proposal explores how the doctrines of late-stage capitalism have shaped built environments into repetitive manifestations of control, inequality, and alienation, offering instead a speculative blueprint that challenges and reconfigures our expectations of what a city can be.
The foundation of Longa-polis rests on the provocative notion that present-day cities no longer serve as incubators of innovation, justice, or community, but rather as symptomatic outgrowths of a deeper systemic illness. Capitalism, in its most dystopian and extractive form, has warped the urban experience, reducing architecture to a functional backdrop for profit-driven activity. In response, Longa-polis refuses to offer escapist fantasies or nostalgic yearnings. Instead, it meets the illness where it lives. The city is recast not as a machine for living, but as a body under duress—one in desperate need of diagnosis, treatment, and care.
Drawing on the metaphor of biological immunity, the project introduces a new architectural vocabulary that likens design to medicine. The concept of the 'antigen'—a disruptive agent—becomes central to understanding and isolating the spatial and political pathogens within the urban condition. From this diagnosis arises an immune response, not in the form of defensive walls or barricades, but through spaces of transformation and critical reflection. These include vast infrastructural corridors, collective housing strategies, contemplative chambers, and migratory rituals that collectively form a dynamic new civic anatomy.
Longa-polis envisions the future city as a sentient and vulnerable organism—a territory in constant negotiation with its internal and external conflicts. The speculative environments proposed are less concerned with aesthetics and more focused on architectural affect. They provoke, unsettle, and challenge. The city becomes a theater of confrontation: large-scale steel trusses overshadow expansive landscapes, while human processions stretch beneath in symbolic exodus. These juxtapositions articulate the simultaneous scale of oppression and human endurance, of collective suffering and collective movement.
The visual language is rich, visceral, and layered. Renderings, collages, and axonometric projections depict monolithic black masses that appear both ancient and futuristic. In one image, the interior of a minimal room—titled 'maladjustment'—disintegrates into a psychological storm. Cracks rupture walls, soot-like textures invade space, and the human figure cowers beneath the burden of systemic weight. These visuals do not aim to comfort, but to expose. They suggest that real healing can only begin with confrontation—with acknowledgment of trauma rather than denial.
As the narrative progresses, the proposal offers a linear megastructure that slices across fragmented geographies. This infrastructural spine is not a neutral connector, but a provocative insertion into the landscape—a politically charged artery. It weaves together disparate urban fragments, offering shelter, surveillance, habitation, and provocation in equal measure. Its form suggests resistance to normative zoning and hierarchical planning. Instead of organizing space by function or class, Longa-polis recomposes the city through conflict, layering, and intensity.
Architectural diagrams reveal an intricate choreography of flows: people, goods, energy, and information all coursing through a spatial immune system. There is no singular solution—no single typology or style. Rather, Longa-polis presents an ecology of elements: rooftop gardens as lungs, communal spaces as nerves, corridors as circulatory systems, and observation decks as organs of vision. The city is alive, fallible, and always in flux. Its immunity is cultivated not through insulation, but through openness to discomfort, debate, and evolution.
What distinguishes Longa-polis from other dystopian futures is its commitment to layered meaning. It does not indulge in cynicism. Instead, it turns pessimism into a productive tool. Through speculative design, it asks: can architecture reclaim its agency in a world shaped by invisible systems of control? Can cities be designed not just to endure tragedy, but to metabolize it? And more urgently—what kind of architecture can emerge from the ashes of collapse?
Longa-polis operates at the crossroads of fiction, philosophy, and urban theory. It does not offer simple answers, but rather equips us with new questions. It invites planners, architects, and citizens to rethink resilience—not as resistance to change, but as the capacity to transform through struggle. In doing so, it joins a lineage of visionary architecture that dares to speculate, provoke, and envision radically different futures.
Ultimately, Longa-polis is not an act of escapism, but one of profound engagement. It is a confrontation with the failures of the present and a speculative rehearsal for the futures we must construct. It critiques, imagines, and designs simultaneously. As cities around the world grapple with environmental degradation, housing crises, and the collapse of public trust, the need for architectural antibodies has never been greater. Through its unapologetically radical urban architecture, Longa-polis builds those antibodies—not as walls, but as invitations to rethink the systems we inhabit. It does so layer by layer, image by image, drawing by drawing—and perhaps, dream by dream.
