“Just as Jane Jacobs’s philosophy of the “urban village” has often been reduced by urban designers to a recommendation for building height and sidewalk width, the work of Matta-Clark should not be aestheticized in hindsight, nor should it be lamented as possible only in the context of a burnt, abandoned city. The films Matta-Clark made of his works’ progress show that his interest was not in the mystery of the feat but in undoing perceptions of fixity. He wanted to create a narrative for change, to alert fellow-citizens to the ways that urban space is imagined and discarded, imposed, and taken.”