The global unification of nations seems well underway. Its basis is economic and financial. When the New York stock market crashed in 1988, a shockwave followed the sun, forcing steep declines in the London, Frankfurt, and Tokyo stock markets. This event destroyed the illusion that the world was divided into distinct nations and their respective cultures, and that human affairs- down to the level of the individual citizen of each nation- would continue to be decided in terms of national interests. It seems to be no coincidence that within three years of this event, socialism breathed its last in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. No nation can now afford to miss out on the global unification game and hope to survive. The future will no longer be decided on the traditional competition between nation-states, but on the proficiency of international corporations and their loyal politicians in playing on a single financial field covering the entire planet, whose boundaries and markers are statistical, not geographical.

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There is, however, another trend active in the world today, which opposes global unification and is therefore opposed by the institutions of finance and government promoting it. This is the trend towards a breaking of the nation-states into smaller and smaller units. Modern nations- such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia- have already broken up along historical and ethnic lines into smaller states. But these events will only be the initial phase of the atomisation of the planet.

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If one traces the ethical development of Western civilisation, it clearly points towards the liberation of the individual from social masses. In the most advanced Western cultures, the evolution of political theory and systems, of education, techniques of transportation and communication, have already resulted in more autonomy for most individuals than has previously existed in its history. As this evolution continues in the West, and continues to spread itself into other cultures around the world, more individuals will achieve an unprecedented degree of mobility and choice, with all their existential benefits and burdens.

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This second, anti-unification trend can be summarised in terms of politics, law, economics and culture: the nation-state of the future is the individual human being.

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The individual human being is organically autonomous, in fact, an organism. Strictly speaking, a group of individuals is not an organism, however much philosophers and apologists of hierarchical structures might wish it to be, however much groups might behave like an organism in certain situations. By nature, only the individual human being is autonomous. When architects and planners speak of the city in terms of the human body- roads as 'arteries', communications networks as 'nerve systems', corporate and government headquarters as 'brain centres'- they make no more than a primitive analogy to the individual human organism, one that becomes tragic and totalitarian when CEOs and politicians, who wield power in society, act as though this analogy were literally true.

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When I went to Brazil in 1987, I was taken to the top of the tallest building in Sao Paulo. There, as I teetered on a narrow catwalk, looking out in all directions over the city, the television people shoving their video cameras at me, asking what I would propose for their city of seventeen million inhabitants, I optimistically offered the results of my research up to that time. To solve the incredible congestion of traffic, to restore social equity, community and coherence to a mad landscape, the neighbourhoods should be reorganised according to the principles of Centricity. 'The universel science...whose workers include all individuals...seeks general principles whose discovery continuously reunifies all fields of knowledge on a universal plane, towards the achievement of an egalitarian and humanistic culture...The universal plane is the urban field.' All those interlocking circles and cycles, like so many ripples on a smooth pond struck in the same instant by a handful of pebbles. A Leonardo drawing. A Renaissance ideal. The proper study of humankind is the human. Not so much a science of architecture, but science in the spirit of architecture.

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From the height of the tower at the centre of Sao Paulo, the city stretched towards all horizons, confused, formless and uncontained. It was not universal, nor egalitarian, nor humanistic- a system too complex to see. An inconsistent pattern, lacking only a self-conscious architecture of insinuation, one that radically transforms and at the same time deeply preserves. Somewhere in the city, the life of the favela was eating away the roots of the serene white towers, a transformation their electronic surveillance systems would never detect. Knowing a thing just as it is known.