Three decades of neo-liberal privatization has meant the systemic

destruction of the public sphere. The global economic crisis presents new possibilities for fundamental mutations of public/urban space, driven by 'emerging' cities like Shanghai, Mumbai and Lagos. If the global city was topographical, these mega-cities are topological, spaces of infolded atmospheres. In Walter Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence' justice was a violence that nullified the commodity and law. Benjamin's was a temporal, messianic critique. We must ask what kind of spatial violence can create a contemporary justice of new publics in both the emerging world and the West.