Visions of the City

Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth Century Urbanism

David Pinder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317972853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Visions of the City is a dramatic history of utopian urbanism in the twentieth century. It explores radical demands for new spaces and ways of living, and considers their effects on planning, architecture and struggles to shape urban landscapes. The author critically examines influential utopian approaches to urbanism in western Europe associated with such figures as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, uncovering the political interests, desires and anxieties that lay behind their ideal cities. He also investigates avant-garde perspectives from the time that challenged these conceptions of cities, especially from within surrealism. At the heart of this richly illustrated book is an encounter with the explosive ideas of the situationists. Tracing the subversive practices of this avant-garde group and its associates from their explorations of Paris during the 1950s to their alternative visions based on nomadic life and play, David Pinder convincingly explains the significance of their revolutionary attempts to transform urban spaces and everyday life. He addresses in particular Constant's New Babylon, finding within his proposals a still powerful provocation to imagine cities otherwise. The book not only recovers vital moments from past hopes and dreams of modern urbanism. It also contests current claims about the 'end of utopia', arguing that reconsidering earlier projects can play a critical role in developing utopian perspectives today. Through the study of utopian visions, it aims to rekindle elements of utopianism itself. A superb critical exploration of the underside of utopian thought over the last hundred years and its continuing relevance in the here and now for thinking about possible urban worlds. The treatment of the Situationists and their milieu is a revelation. David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, City University of New York Graduate School

Figure 1.1 Map from Gilles Ivain (pseudonym for Ivan Chtcheglov), ‘Formulary for a new urbanism’, Internationale situationniste 1 (June 1958).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Utopia has been discredited, it is necessary to rehabilitate it. Utopia is never realised and yet it is indispensable to stimulate change.

Henri Lefebvre¹

‘Change life!’ ‘Change society!’ These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space.

Henri Lefebvre²

An urban adventure

‘Everyone will live in his own personal “cathedral”, so to speak,’ declared Ivan Chtcheglov in 1953. ‘There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love. Others will be irresistibly alluring to travelers.’ In his manifesto entitled ‘Formulary for a new urbanism’, written under the pseudonym of Gilles Ivain, he set out a ‘new vision of time and space’. Among other proposals he called for the invention of ‘new, changeable decors’, and for the construction of cities bringing together ‘buildings charged with evocative power, symbolic edifices representing desires, forces, events past, present and to come.’³ At the time Chtcheglov was nineteen years old and part of a small band of young revolutionaries who had announced their presence in Paris during the previous year by breaking away from the Letterist Movement to found a splinter group called the Letterist International.⁴ Although his statement was not published until some years later, it was one of the first documents to be adopted by its members.

The manifesto’s visionary qualities expressed the Letterist International’s critical attitude towards capitalist urban life and its opposition to the current social and political constitution of cities. But the text spoke not just of what existed at the time and what the group contested, it also invoked what its members believed was possible. It gave vague but tantalising glimpses of riches that, in their opinion, could be obtained but were currently suppressed by dominant social relations and ideological apparatuses. According to Chtcheglov, an awareness of such possibilities in the mid-twentieth century had become obscured by what he called the ‘banalization’ of city space, and the hypnotic effect of modern commodities and labour-saving devices. He argued that the realm of production and conveniences – ‘sewage system, elevator, bathroom, washing machine’ – had overstepped an initial aim of alleviating material cares and had now ‘become an obsessive image hanging over the present’.⁵ ‘Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit,’ he raged. The urban landscape itself, which once might have seemed a charged and poetic realm, had become a closed field, drained of mystery and passion.⁶

In an effort to break out of this state he proposed a radical programme for transforming urban spaces. At the heart of this was an effort to re-imagine the city and to think about how its geographies might be changed and reconstructed in line with different needs and desires. In part, he suggested, this required a transformation of urban consciousness. It was not enough to appeal to abstract notions of ‘the imagination’, though, since in his view ‘[o]ur imaginations, haunted by the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines.’⁷ He therefore argued that it was necessary to renew people’s understandings and perceptions of their environments, to expand senses of social and political possibility by ‘bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones’, and by ‘carrying out an intensive propaganda in favour of these desires’. This included working with and developing resources from the past as well as the realm of the unconscious, for as he put it: ‘A rational extension of the old religious systems, of old tales, and above all of psychoanalysis, into architectural expression becomes more and more urgent as all the reasons for becoming impassioned disappear.’⁸

With its sweeping tone and visionary language, Chtcheglov’s text shares characteristics often associated with utopian tracts and avant-garde manifestos. However, unlike many utopian thinkers, Chtcheglov did not propose ideal plans or formal spatial representations for the reconstruction of the environment. Rather, he stressed that his vision of time and space was a provisional statement, oriented towards experimentation, and that it needed to be developed through interactions with present urban conditions before it could be used as the basis for future constructions. While he acknowledged the evocative power of certain existing urban areas and their potential for providing a sense of original conceptions of space, he emphasised the importance of experimenting with architecture and spatial forms in the city as a way of challenging conceptions of the environment. ‘Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams’, he wrote. With the rise of relativity in all spheres of life, and with the establishment of an increasingly mobile and machine-based society, architecture can be ‘a means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life, with a view to a mythic synthesis’.⁹

Chtcheglov’s text raises issues at the heart of this study. In condemning the degradation of the city and urban life, and attempting to outline how they might be imagined differently and transformed, his writing is imbued with a utopian spirit. Through imaginative projection, he attempts to expand what is regarded as a possibility and explore what cities might be. A similar impatience with aspects of the present and a desire to bring about radical spatial and social change marks the pages that follow. This book is about the utopian search, as expressed by Chtcheglov, for an other space and society. The twentieth century was replete with manifestos demanding new cities and urban environments, and the fact that Chtcheglov calls for a new urbanism is hardly remarkable in itself. A distinctive aspect of his text, though, is the way in which he poses the question of change. He closely links changes in urban space with changes in urban life and implies that the transformation of one is bound up with the transformation of the other. He thus effectively calls for a new approach to the geographies of everyday life. Such a concern with everyday life and urban geography, and with thinking how they might be mutually transformed, threads through the study. So too do a number of other questions raised by Chtcheglov’s text that include: In what senses might utopian visions such as this be regarded as revolutionary? Of what wider geographical imaginations and political projects are they a part? How do they differ from competing conceptions of urban space, including more dominant forms of utopian urbanism? And what might the relevance of such projects be now for those studying urban areas, and those seeking to engage critically with and to change urban space and society?

Underground visions

A prominent part of my study is concerned with the radical movements that formed the background to Chtcheglov’s essay, especially the group that was founded several years after it was written, the Situationist International (SI). This group brought together activists, artists and writers from all over western Europe and beyond during the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to contest the changing conditions of the post-war world and ultimately to bring about revolution. The situationists published ‘Formulary for a new urbanism’ under the pseudonym of Gilles Ivain in the opening issue of their journal Internationale situationniste in June 1958.¹⁰ The essay was accompanied by an imaginary map of a landscape by the sea that showed a variety of physical features – lagoons, bays, plains, hills, volcanoes – in the manner of an illustration in a children’s book that, in classical utopian fashion, spoke of no place in particular (figure 1.1). In giving Chtcheglov’s work a significant place in their journal five years on, the situationists showed their recognition of its inspiring and visionary qualities. Several members, including Guy Debord and Michèle Bernstein, had been colleagues with Chtcheglov in the Letterist International (LI) during the early 1950s and had then adopted the text as an important document. Chtcheglov did not make it into the situationist group himself. By the time the letterists came together with two other organisations, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus and the London Psychogeographical Association, to form the SI in July 1957, he had long left their ranks. He was expelled three years previously along with several others of the so-called ‘old guard’ in the LI, in his case for supposed ‘mythomania’ and ‘delirium’ and lacking in ‘revolutionary consciousness’.¹¹ The publication of Chtcheglov’s essay in the journal was therefore important for highlighting the significance of his ideas for the situationists and their immediate predecessors as he set out a crucial set of issues that the groups would develop. The SI further acknowledged this later when they accorded him the status of ‘member from afar’, referring to his role in the origins of the movement as ‘irreplaceable, both in its first theoretical endeavours and in its practical activity’.¹²

When Chtcheglov’s text appeared it was accompanied by other writings on the situationists’ fledgling revolutionary programme. There were discussions of art, cinema and youth rebellion. A strident tone was established with dismissals of the dissent of the American Beat Generation and the British Angry Young Men. An essay introduced an activity that the situationists believed should be central to new forms of art and politics, the ‘construction of situations’. This involved breaking down artistic specialisms and consciously and collectively creating moments, settings and ambiences of everyday life. ‘As opposed to all the regressive forms of play,’ they argued, ‘it is necessary to promote the experimental forms of a game of revolution.’¹³ In later years the journal continued to range widely. Among the issues addressed were urbanism, modes of political organisation and representation, the problems of Stalinism and discourses of the left, and international political struggles including those in Algeria, China and Vietnam. The situationists critiqued the alienating and image-saturated conditions of the post-war era. They insisted on confronting them as a totality and to this end employed the concept of the ‘spectacle’. They argued that the conditions of ‘the society of the spectacle’ necessitated new means of resistance and contestation, and they advocated autonomous struggles against hierarchical power in all its manifestations.¹⁴ One of the SI’s tasks, argued Debord in 1963, was to contribute to the ‘theoretical and practical articulation of a new revolutionary contestation’. But he stressed that this action was part of a ‘unitary approach’ and that it had to be combined with the SI’s simultaneous manifestation as an ‘artistic avant-garde’ and as ‘an experimental investigation of the free construction of daily life’.¹⁵

The group’s theoretical and political framework was indebted to Marx and Hegel, and had significant connections with strands of western Marxism. The SI also positioned itself in relation to earlier twentieth-century avant-garde groups. At the foundation of the group in 1957, Debord acknowledged the significance and constructive possibilities of earlier avant-gardes, especially dada and surrealism. He believed, however, that the initial radicalism of the avant-gardes around the 1920s had since been lost and he therefore called on the SI to surpass these preliminary efforts and to develop a truly revolutionary critique of everyday life and space.¹⁶ Early on the situationists argued that they were ‘of a nature different from preceding artistic avant-gardes. Within culture the SI can be likened to a research laboratory, for example, or to a party in which we are situationists but nothing that we do is situationist … We are partisans of a certain future of culture, of life.’¹⁷ Throughout its existence the SI remained a small, tightly organised and internationally diverse group with the number of members at any one time being around ten to twenty. By the time it was officially disbanded in 1972, seventy individuals had participated from sixteen different countries.¹⁸ It was this evolving band of people that produced the journal and a range of texts and works that included paintings, graphics, films, maps, models and plans as well as interventions in cultural and political arenas through events, political agitations and situations. Despite its deliberate avoidance of most ‘official’ media channels – the SI declared that it was ‘interested not in finding a niche in the present artistic edifice, but in undermining it’ and that it was ‘in the catacombs of visible culture’¹⁹ – it became increasingly well known in the late 1960s, especially after its involvement in the revolts in Paris in May 1968.

For the situationists and their avant-garde associates, a key task for radical political action lay in changing cities and social space. From Chtcheglov’s ‘Formulary for a new urbanism’ on, they approached urban space through a commitment to revolutionary change. They understood that attempts to change urban spaces had to go beyond narrow conceptions of design, architecture and planning, being critical of these fields as specialist activities that conceptualised space as a terrain to be shaped by experts. For them urbanism was not reducible to planning but incorporated political questions about everyday life and urban culture. They addressed the production of space as part of the process of revolutionising socio-spatial relations, as a necessary component in any radical transformation of everyday life. In this sense they shared Lefebvre’s conviction signaled in the second of the quotations at the head of this chapter – one that has also been at the heart of radical geography, and one that continues to need to be asserted – that to change society and life it is necessary also to transform space.

Utopian spaces past and present

This book explores aspects of the situationist project. My interest in the situationists, however, is part of a wider concern with utopian visions of cities, one that ranges beyond the group’s activities to address other episodes of utopianism in twentieth-century western Europe. The concept of utopia, derived from Thomas More’s famous text of that name in 1516, traditionally refers both to somewhere good and to nowhere. The double meaning is contained within the word itself, which plays on the Greek compounds eu-topos (a happy or fortunate place) and ou-topos (no place). The term is often associated with visions of other worlds, outlined through literary or other art forms. Utopia has also played a vital role in social and political thought and activism from across the spectrum, relativising present conditions by transcending their limitations in the name of a better world elsewhere or yet to come. Questions of space and place are important to the definition of utopia, as the roots of the term demonstrate. The connections between utopian thought and the city have been particularly significant, with fantastic urban visions running through social and artistic imaginaries and often being part of dreams of social transformation. Utopian thought is replete with names invoking glittering city images from the Heavenly City, New Jerusalem, the City of the Sun, on to the Garden City and Radiant City of more recent times. Cities have more generally often been viewed as sites of potential freedom, in tension with countervailing perspectives that cast them at the same time as centres of alienation, despair and dystopian nightmares.²⁰

The visions of cities addressed in this book were all driven by a desire to change urban spaces radically. They confronted the conditions and problems of cities of the time and sought to produce spaces conducive to different ways of living. One characteristic of the visions discussed, however, is that for the most part their instigators insisted that they were not utopian, at least where that term is used in the common colloquial way to mean ‘unrealisable’ or ‘impractical’ and as belonging to a distant future or to the realm of fantasy. Rather, they asserted that the transformation they imagined could be realised if certain changes were set in motion. They proposed the possible nature of what they envisaged and indeed its necessity for producing a better world. Their concern with avoiding the description ‘utopian’ was in part due to the narrow standard definitions of that term, something that I discuss further below. But it also came from an effort to sidestep the pejorative connotations of utopian, where ideas and practices are sometime labeled that way by opponents seeking to impute that they do not require serious attention. As Karl Mannheim once pointed out, ‘the representatives of a given order will label utopian all conceptions of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Illustration credits
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. RESTORATIVE UTOPIAS
• 3. MODERNIST CALLS TO ORDER
• 4. DREAMS OF CITIES AND MONSTERS
• 5. SITUATIONIST ADVENTURES
• 6. THE GREAT GAME TO COME
• 7. LIFE WILL RESIDE IN POETRY
• 8. PARTISANS OF POSSIBILITIES
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index