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.

It begins with a photograph. It’s a blow-up of a faded colour picture of the Great Mosque at Djenné, in Mali, from some time in the mid-20th century. In the picture, the largest mud structure in the world still looks healthy.

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?

What’s the name of that English designer who did the spiral bookshelf, asks Enzo Mari, stirring the air with his cigar stub. Ron Arad? "Merda Pura!" he screams in Italian. “Pure shit,” deadpans our interpreter as Mari thunders away. “Pure shit! Who cares?” The outburst startles us.

Jenin took ten days to destroy and three years to rebuild. The Palestinian refugee camp, in the northern West Bank, held the world’s attention for a brief moment in April 2002 when Israeli tanks and bulldozers moved in against armed insurgents, levelling more than 500 homes and leaving nearly 4,000 residents homeless. The scale of the destruction prompted accusations that the incursion was a war crime – but it was also an act of urban planning.

In Ouagadougou, there is no reply from Francis Kéré. The “call me when you get here” system is fallible enough on a trip to the cinema, but worryingly so after a 3,000-mile flight to Burkina Faso.

It is fashionable these days for economic historians to indentify the London riots of 2011 as the tipping point of late capitalism. Some have labelled the unrest “violent consumerism” and others “acquisitive rioting”, but the consensus is that it represented a temporary subprime economy in which Reebok trainers were as fungible as barrels of oil, except purchased not with electronic money wired from computer to computer but with bricks delivered from garden walls to plate-glass windows.

In Patagonia, the wind can tear your arms off. It makes everything lean – the trees, the houses, even the people. It strafes the landscape, using rain, snow or hail as ammunition. So you need to be equipped for it. And, boy, are the tourists here equipped.