In the jungle is a city that moves. When it’s inhabitants build new districts it is always to the west. Each time they cut the ribbon opening a new district, an old one to the east is abandoned. Gradually it disappears beneath the overgrowth of tropical vegetation. Why can such a city not exist? The conceit of private property is that it is something fixed, eternal. Once it comes into existence it remains, passed in an unbroken chain of title from one owner to the next. In the course of time whole cities really do disappear. We live among the ruins. We later cities know we are mortal. And yet in the name of property we would hold back the very sea.∗
In the bombed-blasted darkness after World War Two, a whole new urban landscape sprouted, like toadstools after the rain. These new cities were functional, rational, or so their planners imagined. They would sweep away the debris of the old city, where shops and workshops, houses and bars jostled each other on crooked streets. In its place would be clean-lined towers, supermarkets, and multilane freeways. It is happening all over again. Where building a new suburb or a new town was the very apex of ambition in the mid 20th century, in the early 21st century, the urban planners’ scale leapt to a whole new level. Not just towns but whole cities would be conjured out of surveyed dirt and digital plans. Whereas it has taken the war to level the old landscape in Europe or Japan, in China half a century later the commodity form would remake space in its image by decree.
“We are only at the beginning of urban civilization.” All we have managed is the same cemeteries in reinforced concrete on an ever expanding scale. The whole of space becomes the platform for the assembly, distribution and disposal of the commodity and its remains. No qualities remain.
Every aspect of the spectacle of society has its specialists whose doctrine professes to make its chosen aspect of the commodity form serve life but which actually does quite the reverse. So it is with so called ‘urban planning’, which one could be forgiven for imagining is a profession which plans the city on behalf of people, but which is more a matter of planning people on behalf of the city. Urban planning can be understood only as the staging of participation in something in which it is impossible to participate.
What the Situationists called unitary urbanism is the negation of urban planning. Unitary urbanism is not a doctrine of urbanism but a critique of it. Unitary urbanism does not propose new forms for the city. It shows what the spectacle of society prevents the city from becoming. In place of cities organized for the convenience of the commodity, in which objects rule and desire is subject to their needs, unitary urbanism imagines cities built for adventure. Unitary urbanism proposes a different city for a different life.
Unlike the modernist urban planning of the postwar years, and its development for the permanent war of the commodity against its servants closer to our time, unitary urbanism does not propose a rationalizing of the city. “This terrain will be at the level of complexity of an old city.” Nor does it seek to erase the past. There might be much to be learned from the pre-modern city: “the cathedral was once the unitary accomplishment of a society.” Hence the vexed question of what to do with them. Michele Bernstein’s solution was perhaps the best: let them fall into ruins. The ideology of the eternal would then confront most directly its own mortal coil. It is a provocation to urban thinking even to try to imagine what the contemporary city could accomplish along these lines.
It is instructive to compare the most elaborate proposal for unitary urbanism with what actually transpired in the spectacular domination of space. Constant’s New Babylon is the most daring proposal for a landscape of pure play. Unlike most ‘utopias’, it has little positive content. It bears some relation to the phalasteries of Fourier but is the most original reworking of them. Constant has no interest in laying down the law for the shape of a dwelling or the organization of sleeping arrangements. Nor does New Babylon require the leveling of the old city. It is content to leave the playgrounds of the old urban core alone, and extends itself out above the suburbs and shopping malls of the postwar additions to the city, built on huge pylons. It makes abundant use of the technology and transport infrastructure that the twentieth century so assiduously built up, but it builds over this infrastructure a whole new superstructure.
The key to New Babylon is what Constant does not imagine. It’s upper deck is a variable space which the New Babylonians can compose and recompose at will. The underlying infrastructure is equally as lacking in detail. Existing industrial and technical means offer more than enough capacity to meet basic needs while leaving a surplus for play. The commodity form has already rendered itself obsolete. Scarcity is dead.
Constant does not detail what either the infrastructure or the superstructure of New Babylon will really be like. What he concretizes in an image is the relation between them. While the latter is still physically ‘above’ the former, it is as if the whole of society had previously been standing on its head and was finally right-side-up. The purpose of industry and technology is to make possible a zone of play and invention for everybody. It is not unitary urbanism’s job to imagine what a free people might do there, merely to imagine that they could be free, and in being free might build a whole new city. That, says Constant, is the way to leave the 20th century.
Compare this boldly imagined exit to the door we actually took into the new millennium. Space is even more subordinated to the logic of the commodity than ever. Spaces of play are not exempt from the law of the commodity, but rather become its leading industry, the research and development zone for new necessities, for new thresholds of boredom. Yet while the commodity circles the globe freely, outpaced only by its managers and rulers, an even more ingeniously dispossessed people finds itself trapped in a space partitioned, not horizontally, as Constant imagined, but vertically.
Not the city but the whole planet finds itself divided on the one hand into ever more giant workhouses – whole cities specialized in the manufacture of socks or the stripping of used circuit boards. On the other hand, whole regions become devoted to nothing but the display, amusement and servicing of the spectacle’s governing agents. New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London have no function but as repositories for the spectacle of the wealth and the wealth of spectacle. Meanwhile, surplus to requirements, whole populations languish in urban zones which one could hardly call cities, surviving for the most part on exploiting each other, excluded from both the manufacture of things and the management of appearances. The more the core functional spaces for the production and reproduction of spectacle develop, the more they produce as their inevitable byproduct whole cities, countries, even continents with no function at all.
New Babylon might indeed appear to be a ‘utopian’ city, but its purpose, as a work of unitary urbanism, is not to offer something that is ‘possible’, but rather to show what is impossible under the present organization of life. That it could be imagined at all gives the lie to the necessity and inevitability of the three monstrous forms of urban space that now dominate the planet. And in any case, New Babylon might not be possible, but by what stretch of the imagination is one to believe that our existing cities are in any sense ‘possible’ either?