Finally, we arrive at some legal, conventional, low-income housing. This is the first of these vast and growing structural complexes not directly intended to hamper or harm people, and the first that directly involves architects and architectural ethics.

But do-good architecture does not merely respond to material poverty. Instead, it tangos with the colossal dysfunctionalities outside any blueprints. Today’s durable disorder is the playground of city-busting militias, gangsters, armed fanatics, and the blooming demimondes of narcotics, offshore pollution, and human trafficking. A vast, planet-girdling belt where the majority of the population has been systematically marginalized. Meanwhile, the elite is increasingly sequestered in gated containers like so many figures encased in snow globes.