Formulary for a New Urbanism

Different Maps on fine form at the moment, with enjoyable demolitions of smug anarchists, 'si-mon creetchley' and discussing the preposterously underrated reality TV dystopia Series 7- The Contenders- and interestingly, promising a 'course' on the Barbican's Future City exhibition.



He discusses this in relation to the Situationist International, so a few points on the relation between the Situs and what we could call actually existing modernism (ie people who got stuff built) might be pertinent. The SI often get corraled into arguments over the alleged destruction of community and sterility of zielenbau housing projects, and were usually entertainingly horrified by Le Corbusier (though he is approvingly cited in Debord's Theses on Traffic). See also how Ralph Rumney's version of psychogeography rested on an opposition to the ICA based Independent Group, who he regarded as implicated in town planners' demolition of the twisted streets and hidden corners of the Victorian City.



But the SI's critique is very much within Modernism, and doesn't just propose the reactionary urbanism that pomo (often citing the SI) borrows from Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford- or the hippy anti-modernism of many post-Situs. There was an overlap, via Constant and the (obviously) expelled Dutch wing of the SI between the Situs and the New Brutalists of Team 10, a similar messthetic, cities as essentially irrational, based on hidden places, corners, holes, most potent in Ivan Chtcheglov's writing; 'Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. The SI's urbanism was partly the addition a measure of the unpredictable to the modernist project (and making the same art-into-life progression)- cf their project title for an 'Imaginist Bauhaus'.