Coming together and apart in Heiqiao Village, Beijing

Critical insight – and its insistence on the possible – depend on an ability to think with contradictions and locate something more enduring and unifying in whatever chaotic conditions one finds oneself in. In the elusive ‘poetics’ of the field, there can be found openings to other kinds of urban possibility, other ways of knowing and representing the conditions of coming together when familiar urban contexts are coming apart, writes Murray Mckenzie