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Unitary Urbanism at the end of the 1950s

Unattributed
Internationale Situationniste #3, December 1959

In August 1956, a tract signed by the groups preparing the founding of the SI called for the boycott of a
would-be "Festival of Avant-Garde Art" being held in Marseille at the time, an event that the tract called the
most complete, official selection of "what in twenty years will represent the idiocy of the 1950s."

And, indeed, the modern art of this period turns out to have been dominated by, and almost exclusively
composed of, camouflaged repetitions -- a stagnation that bespeaks of both the definitive exhaustion of the
entire old theatre of cultural operations as well as the incapacity to discover a new one. At the same time,
however, underground movements have come into existence. Such is the case with the origins of unitary
urbanism (UU), intuited as early as 1953 and first named as such at the end of 1956 in a tract distributed on
the occasion of a demonstration by our Italian comrades in Turin. ("Obscure statements," wrote La Nouva
Stampa on 11 December, on the subject of the following warning: "Your children's future depends on it:
demonstrate in favor of unitary urbanism!"). Unitary urbanism is one of the central concerns of the SI and,
despite any delays and difficulties that might arise in its application, it is entirely correct (as the opening
report of the Munich conference confirms) that unitary urbanism has already begun at the moment that it
appears as a program of research and development.

The 1950s are about to come to a close. Without trying to predict whether the idiocy of this decade in the art
and practice of life -- itself a function of more general causes -- will diminish or intensify in the short run, it
is time to examine the current state of UU following the first stage of its development. A number of points
need to be clarified.

First all of, UU is not a doctrine of urbanism but a critique of urbanism. By the same token, our participation
in experimental art is a critique of art, and sociological research ought to be a critique of sociology. No
isolated discipline whatsoever can be tolerated in itself; we are moving toward a global creation of existence.

UU is distinct from problems of housing and yet is bound to engulf them; it is all the more distinct from
current commercial exchange. At present, UU envisages a terrain of experience for the social space of the
cities of the future. It is not a reaction to functionalism, but rather a move past it; UU is a matter of reaching -
- beyond the immediately useful -- an enthralling functional environment. Functionalism, which still has
avant-garde pretensions because it continues to encounter outdated resistance, has already triumphed to a
large extent. Its positive contributions -- the adaption to practical functions, technical innovation, comfort,
the banishment of superimposed ornament -- are today banalities. Yet, although its field of application is
(when all is said an done) a narrow one, this has not led functionalism to adopt a relative theoretical modesty.
In order to justify philosophically the extension of its principles of renovation to the entire organization of
social life, functionalism has fused, seemingly without a thought, with the most static conservative doctrines
(and, simultaneously, has itself congealed into an inert doctrine). One must construct uninhabitable
ambiances; construct the streets of real life, the scenary of daydreams.

The issue of church construction provides a particularly illuminating instance. Functionalist architects tend to
agree to construct churches, thinking -- if they are not stupid deists -- that the church, the edifice without
function within a functional urbanism, can be treated as a free exercise in plastic form. Their error is that
they fail to consider the psycho-functional reality of the church. The functionalists, who are the expression of
the technological utilitarianism of the era, cannot successfully build a single church if one considers that the
cathedral was once the unitary accomplishment of a society that one has to call primitive, given that it was
much further embedded than we are in the miserable prehistory of humanity. In the very era of the
technologies that give rise to functionalism, the Situationist architects, for their part, are searching to create
new frames of behavior free of banality as well as of all the old taboos. The Situationist architects are thus
absolutely opposed to the construction and even the conservation of religious buildings with which they find
themselves in direct competition. UU merges objectively with the interests of a comprehensive subversion.

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Just as UU cannot be reduced to questions of housing, it is also distinct from aesthetic problems. It opposes
the passive spectacle, the principle of our culture (where the organization of the spectacle extends all the
more scandalously the more the means of human intervention increase). In light of the fact that today cities
themselves are presented as lamentable spectacles, a supplement to the museums for tourists driven around
in glass-in buses, UU envisages the urban environment as the terrain of participatory games.

UU is not ideally separated from the current terrain of cities. UU is developed out of the experience of this
terrain and based on existing constructions. As a result, it is just as important that we exploit the existing
decors -- through the affirmation of a playful urban space such as is revealed by the derive -- as it is that we
construct completely unknown ones. This interpenetration (employment of the present city and construction
of the future city) entails the deployment of architectutal detournement.

UU is opposed to the temporal fixation of cities. It leads instead to the advocacy of a permanent
transformation, an accelerated movement of the abandonment and reconstruction of the city in temporal and
at times spatial terms. We are thus able to envisage making use of the climatic conditions in which two major
architectural civilizations arose -- in Cambodia and in southwest Mexico -- in order to construct moving
cities in the jungle. The new neighborhoods of such a city could be constructed increasingly toward the west
(which would be gradually reclaimed as one goes along), while to the same extent the east would be
abandoned to the overgrowth of topical vegetation, thereby creating, on its own, zones of gradual transition
between the modern city and wild nature. This city, pursued by the forest, would offer not only unsurpassable
zones of derive that would take shape behind it; it would also be a marriage with nature more audacious than
anything attempted by Frank Lloyd Wright. Furthermore, it would advantageously provide a mise-en-scene
of time passing over a social space condemned to creative renovation.

UU is opposed to the fixation of people at certain points of a city. It is the foundation for a civilization of
leisure and play. One should note that in the shackles of the current economic system, technology has been
used to further multiply the pseudo-games of passivity and social distintegration (television), while the new
forms of playful participation that are made possible by this same technology are regulated and policed.
Amateur radio operators, for example, are reduced to technological boy scouts.

Since the situationist experience of the derive is simultaneously a means of study of and a game in the urban
milieu, it is already on the track of UU. If UU refuses to separate theory from practice, this is not only in
order to promote construction (or research on construction by means of models) along with theoretical ideas.
The point of a such a refusal is above all not to separate the direct, collectively experienced, playful use of
the city from the aspect of urbanism that involves construction. The real games and emotions in today's cities
are inseparable from the projects of UU just as, when they have been realized, the projects of UU will not be
isolated from games and emotions that will arise within these accomplishments. The derives that the
Situationist International is committed to undertake in the spring of 1960 in Amsterdam -- using quite
powerful means of transportation and telecommunication -- are envisaged as both an objective study of the
city and as a game of communication. In fact, beyond its essential lessons, the derive furnishes only
knowledge that is very precisely dated. In a few years, the construction or demolition of houses, the
relocation of micro-societies, and the changes in fashion will suffice to change a city's network of superficial
attractions -- which is a very encouraging phenomenon for the moment when we will able to establish an
active link between the derive and situationist urban construction. Until then, the urban milieu will certainly
change on its own, anarchically, ultimately rendering obsolete the derives whose conclusions could not be
translated into conscious transformations of their milieus. But the first lesson of the derive is its own status as
a game.

We are only at the beginning of urban civilization; it is up to us to bring it about ourselves, using the pre-
existing conditions as our point of departure. All the stories that we live -- the drive(s) of our life -- are
characterized by the search for, or the lack of, an over-arching construction. The transformation of the
environment calls forth new emotional states that are first experienced passively and then, with heightened
consciousness, lead to constructive reactions. London was the first urban result of the industrial revolution,
and the English literature of the nineteenth century bears witness to an increasing awareness of the problems
of the atmosphere and of the qualitatively different possibilities of a large urban area.

The love between Thomas de Quincey and poor Ann, separated by chance and searching for one another, yet
never finding themselves, "through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps even within a few feet of each

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other," marks a turning point in the slow historical evolution of the passions. In fact, Thomas de Quincey's
real life from 1804 to 1812 makes him a precursor of the derive: "Seeking ambitiously for a northwest
passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I
came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys . . . I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be
the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in
the modern charts of London." Toward the end of the century, this sensation is so frequently expressed in
novelistic writing that [Robert Louis] Stevenson presents a character who, in London at night, is astonished
"to walk for such a long time in such a complex decor without encountering even the slightest shadow of
adventure" (New Arabian Nights). The urbanists of the twentieth century will have to construct adventures.

The simplest situationist act would consist in abolishing all the memories of the employment of time in our
epoch. It is an epoch that, up until now, has lived far below its means.

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