About 20 years ago Richard Sapper visited Dieter Rams. "We were talking about the things that each of us was doing," says Sapper, "and at a certain moment Dieter said: 'Well, you are doing many things that are quite closely related to what we do, but yours are much more exciting.'" Sapper, who is 80, leans back in his sofa and smiles.

On the eve of the Olympics, Justin McGuirk ponders the social and political consequences of London's white-hot real estate market and asks: what ever happened to the city that pioneered the modern ideal of social housing?

It began with a drive. A couple of friends and I set out one day to drive the circumference of São Paulo. We thought we would make a film about it, and in fact the photographer Thelma Vilas Boas – one of my companions that day – shot some beautiful footage. But we never made that film (largely because Thelma and I live on different continents), so instead it became a piece of writing.

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If, in the traditional communist view, the revolution was to be led by the industrial proletariat, then how do we explain the recent wave of urban protests? Are we witnessing the emergence of a new revolutionary force made up not of factory workers but of urbanites more generally?

Two books into a trilogy that he calls “the homo faber project”, the sociologist and philosopher Richard Sennett is revealing just what an ambitious task he has set himself. It is no less than to investigate the skills we need “to sustain everyday life”. Along the way, he is developing an uncanny knack of tuning into the zeitgeist through what seems like a crackly old wireless.

Over the last decade, Colombia has been a touchstone of what good design and enlightened politics can do for cities. If Barcelona was the urban exemplar of the 1990s, urbanists these days are more likely to mention Colombia's capital, Bogotá, and its second city, Medellín. In both cities, a succession of dynamic mayors has used transport infrastructure and new public buildings as tools of social change. But this tale of two cities doesn't come with two happy endings.

In the northwest of Argentina, a revolutionary movement called Tupac Amaru has developed a new model of social housing, and redefined what we should expect from it. Welcome to the country club.

In the north of Lima is a housing estate that could have changed the face of cities in the developing world. Its residents go about their lives feeling lucky that they live where they do, but oblivious to the fact that they occupy the last great experiment in social housing.

The GBU-28 was the primary tool in the redesign of southern Beirut. This two-tonne laser-guided bomb, designed to destroy concrete bunkers, was untested on apartment blocks until 13 July 2006, when Israeli F-15 fighter planes started bombing Dahieh, the city’s southern suburb. Now, in Beirut’s own Ground Zero, an ideological and logistical battle is beginning: what to do with Dahieh?