Reading the urban revolts and outbursts of irrational violence preceding and following the crisis of neoliberalism as sings of discontent and of a desire for alternative designs of the urban, Erik Swyngedouw reintroduces the idea of the (dead) polis as a space of political encounter. Techno-managerial policies of governing colonised the polis. Politics as dispute is replaced by the neoliberal, postdemocratic consensus. This condition, which designers of all kinds helped to shape, excludes disagreement and disavows conflict as the constitutive element of democratic politics.