Beyond Functionalism: the production of space by Rahul Paul

Title Beyond Functionalism: the production of space.

Study Situationist International

Author Rahul Paul MA Landscape Urbanism Architectural Association, London +44 79 42 84 53 99 labyrinth.arch@gmail.com

Abstract

The notion of engagement of ‘everyday life’ or the theory ‘that human behaviour is determined by its surroundings circumstances’ was the principle hypothesis through which the Situationists demonstrated the validity of their ideas. The Situationist called for attention to the priority of real life, real live activity, which continually experiments and mutates rather than indulge into static ideologies which like everything else in capitalist society tend to rigidify and become fetishised, just as one more thing to passively consumed. Through this approach of celebrating the human actions of play, relations and movement this article investigates the concept of ‘structuring’ space which performs a dual model - as a medium of social relations as well as a product that can affect social relations – to construct the society. The production, derivation and the contextualisation of space is highlighted as a process through the participation and communication of the living with its surroundings rather than processed and perceived through the rigid ideologies of the functional and hierarchical syntaxes of modern society. Space is determined as a series of experiences constructed by human performance as well as a field that allows the free play of human activities without any resistance from preconceived notions .The diagram of ‘The Naked City’ – union of the different fragments of the city based on the ‘unities of atmosphere’ and the concept of ‘Unitary Urbanism’ - the theory of the combined use of arts and techniques as means contributing to the construction of a unified milieu in a dynamic relation with experiments in behaviour’1– both serve as an abstract knowledge on the ‘representation of space’ as well as ‘space as a representation’. In the contemporary practices, concepts of hybrid , multi –functional and heterotopic spatial norms where space is determined by ‘events’ and ‘experiences’ rather than ‘programs’ and ‘patterns’ reflect the transcending of the Situationist principles of encouraging and potentialising human engagement as the directive to spatial definition and performs the role of a common denominator to the heterogeneous set of actions. Space expresses itself not through forms or principles but through the ‘collision of human bodies’ as a terrain of social experiences to serve as a potential symbiotic field in producing ‘the way of life’ – Urbanism. An urbansim which redefines the city as an ecological processual organisation.

Keywords Situationist International/Space/Society/Human Behaviour/Urbanism

http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/unitary_urbanism.html,Chardronnet, Ewen, History of Unitary Urbanism and psychogeography at the turn of the sixties, lecture notes for a conference in Riga May 2003.

Introduction: Situationist International – towards anarchism "People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths.”2 This statement which puts forth the advocacies of ‘everyday life’ as a process and the relation of ‘human emotions’ performs as a rationale for Situationist ideas that came from the European organisation the Situationist International, formed in 1957. Situationist ideas resisted to follow any dictums of ideology and focussed on the freedom of expression beyond constraints and thus never dictated their prophecies as ‘principles’ - as principles in themselves are a certain form of ideologies – but translated them as ‘thoughts’ to be interpreted. Situationist thoughts, as interpreted were largely focussed on generating cultural ideas, particularly in relation to detournement (subverting elements of popular culture) and the development of punk, with the roots of their ideas are in Marxism - with the central idea that workers are systematically exploited in capitalism and that they should organise and take control of the means of production and organise society on the basis of democratic workers3. Situationists argued against the prevailing norms of the capitalist movement where the demands and establishment of the production of goods - as the principle dictum of the society was transforming the human life into the interplay of tangible consumeristic living which induced passivity rather than action in the human environment thus degrading life into materialism. The freedom of conversation of human relations was superseded by the consumer product discourse – which transmuted themselves as autonomous images representing the facts of life 4and had taken over the experiences of social relations, which was once marked by religious, cultural and traditional notions. As Guy Debord states in the opening lines of his journal The Society of the Spectacle “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was lived has moved away into a representation”5 The domination of economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having6. The situationists logic of recuperation rested on their belief in capitalism’s fundamentally static, affirmative and materialistic quality7. Situtationist’s concern in the uniformisation of society was focussed on the "suppression and realisation of art in life" and what they called the "construction of situations" - a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events8. This constructed situation, what we can term as ‘space’ was perceived as a potential where humans would interact together as people and not mediated by commodities. An experiential field shaped by emotional and rational tendencies of human behaviour enhanced by the coordination of artistic and scientific means to serve a unitary action that would lead to the total fusion of the social sphere. “Space” - a social body that encouraged the participation and relationships of the human society as well as a unifying set of the heterogeneous fragments of the social sphere.

Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life http://libcom.org/thought/situationists-an-introduction 4 Marcus Greil, The long walk of the Situationist International, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 7- 8, 2002, October books,MIT Press 5 Marcus Greil, The long walk of the Situationist International, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 7- 8, 2002, October books,MIT Press 6 Marcus Greil, The long walk of the Situationist International, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 10, 2002, October books,MIT Press 7 Mc Donough,Tom,Introduction:Ideology and the Situationist Utopia, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 10, 2002, October books,MIT Press 8 http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/unitary_urbanism.html,Chardronnet, Ewen, History of Unitary Urbanism and psychogeography at the turn of the sixties, lecture notes for a conference in Riga May 2003. 3

Human relations and the construct of society ‘Space’ as a set defined by emerging human relations was a concept that was totally neglected in the Modern Society, where life tended to be more functionally derived and cities perceived as “machines to live in”. The diagram of the city generated in the functionalist society where the parameters of live, work, recreation and circulation are adopted as strategies to dictate the way of life, reflect the reduction of human life into a mere streamlined strategy of survival – man from being a ‘social animal’ was transmuted to a ‘consumed animal’. The visuals of this behaviour of society, is best elucidated in the 1927 silent science fiction film Metropolis which is based on set in a futuristic urban dystopia and examines the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. Dualism is a running theme amongst many of the characters in the film, who demonstrate that they cannot be confined to the rigid class system of the city. The workers are dehumanised, existing either as part of a mob or as work-units, almost part of the machines themselves (the shots of them working do not let the viewer see their faces, and they work and move as rhythmically as the machines they operate), and yet they are also human beings who are being exploited.9

Image 1: Metropolis: the film

Situationist ideas were rooted in the opposition of this nature of the capitalist’s society which was distinguished by class distinction, stratification and dehumanisation, which they seeked to resolve by ‘constructed situations’ – space, which if abstracted as a thought would be the identification and revivification of human as a ‘social animal’ and the role of a human in shaping itself in the society it belongs , as well as , find mediums in which he (the human),is related, rather intangibly to its surroundings. This notion bears great significance to the ideas and concepts of Sir Patrick Geddes who believed that social processes and spatial form are related therefore, by changing the spatial form it was possible to change the social structure as well10. Though this relationship between determination and change in society with respect to change in construction of spatial form (which in the ideas of Patrick Geddes would refer to the physical form) would be contradicting Situationist principles - which concentrated in shaping of urban relations that was derived from a utopia of process(experience) rather than utopia of form (physical notion) - nonetheless the first half of the belief (where spatial form can be interpreted as a set of experiences) put forward by Patrick Geddes - of relationship between human and society, the production of social interactions and the shaping of human societies based on laws of human actions surface as a preface to Situationist thoughts and focus. The diagram of the ‘Valley Section’ developed by Geddes holds precise interest in understanding the phenomenon of ‘human behaviour’ and ‘constructed situations’ where the diagram “represents the section of a valley along which are distributed (in this order, from the mountains to the sea): miners, woodsmen, hunters, shepherds, poor peasants, farmers, and fishermen. To each occupation corresponds a precise type of society and culture”11 This sectional diagram if defined through the words of Chombart de Lauwe would represent a quartier which is not only the ‘expression of the needs of its habitants but also the spatial form of their social relations.’12 The term ‘spatial form’ used in this statement is not put forth as the physical notion of form but rather the intangible quality – experience that is borne out of the social actions of the society. The ‘valley section’ though derived as a hierarchical relationship 9

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Geddes 11 Patrick Geddes, "The Valley Plan of Civilization," in the series "Talks from My Outlook Tower," in Ponte Alessandra,ed.,Building the Stair Spiral of Evolution:the index museum of Sir Patrick Geddes,pg51,MIT Press. 12 Mc Donough,Tom,Situationist Space, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 252, 2002, October books,MIT Press 10

and conveys the idea of a ‘whole region forming a city’ 13also investigates in abstracting the city process based on ‘human relationships’ to its surroundings and indexes a region not by physical or functional derivatives but by deriving set of specific varying spatial conditions. The valley section reveals the specific language of space that every society composes for itself. The section which communicates the regional level relationship of human and its surrounding focuses on how the social, political and the physical conditions of the human society specifically defines and constructs the spatial interactions for itself, indigenous to its own parameters. These communication parameters defines and relates a particular cohesive set of the human to its surroundings, which are developed by their behaviour pattern and their set of relationships defined by their social interactions.

Image 2 : The Valley Section - Patrick Geddes

The ‘social animal’ by virtue of their condition of living , crafts these set of particular social relationships, where he performs , lives and interacts with his other fellow social beings to draft a particular region / condition suited best for a particular community. These regional social interactions are the basis of community interactions and relationships, unique to a give condition and developed by the constant collision of human thoughts and ideas. Though it might be seen that this valley section puts forward in particular the idea of human relationship to construct its space and society, but what the section never indulges in, is the idea of defining the aspects and virtues of ‘space’ – the conditions to which space should be related or the spatial definitions. This non indulgence of referring to space probably restricts the valley section from being defined as a comprehensive diagram acting as a preface expressing the Situationist ideas, but what the diagram also conveys is the relation of the study of geography and the city making. A discourse that was be engaged as well as unconsciously refuted in the Situationist time.

Social Geography: spatializing actions Social Geography, a discourse that involves “the study of patterns and processes that shape human interaction with the built environment, with particular reference to the causes and consequences of the spatial distribution of human activity”14 was term that was first used by Elisse Reclus. 15 For Reclus geography would become ‘history in space’ which is “not an immutable thing. It is made, it is remade, everyday; at each instant, is modified by men’s actions”.16 Reclus’s theory of constant construction and mutation of social situations based on human behaviour, experience and actions served him to perceive space as a socially produced category – as an medium where social relations are reproduced and as a social

Welter, Volker,City and Geography,Biopolis:Patrick Geddes and The City of Life,pg 64, MIT Press http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_geography 15 Mc Donough,Tom,Situationist Space, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 250, 2002, October books,MIT Press 16 Mc Donough,Tom,Situationist Space, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 250, 2002, October books,MIT Press 14

relation itself”17, thus reflecting a direct relationship between urbanism and human experience as symbiotic and as a collective medium to generate the concepts of space – transcending beyond the notions of functional and deterministic dictums regulating the ideas of space making – an idea that reflects space as more malleable thought generated by actions of society. Debord, developing similar ideas, would also comprehend this indivisibility of urban space and social relations, but with the experience of pyschogeogarphic exploration, space could also be the arena for the contestation of these relations through an active construction of new ‘unities of atmosphere’18– an idea that was probably best reflected in the creation of the Naked City,1957.

Image 3 The Naked City diagram - Guy Debord

The Naked City is comprised of nineteen cut – out sections of a map of Paris, printed in black ink, which are linked by directional arrows printed in red. The arrows in the map link the segments of this ‘psychogeographical map’ where each segment has a different ‘unity of atmosphere’. “The arrows describe the spontaneous turns of direction taken by a subject moving through these surroundings in disregard of the useful connections that ordinarily govern his conduct”.19 In puristic visions the Naked City is not really a map or what you call a ‘good’ map as it does not cover the entire of Paris holistically, nor does one fragment have any logical relation to one another, they are not even properly oriented according to the cardinal axes and the distance between the fragments does not correspond to the actual distance separating the various locales. The derivation of this collage based approach is in a way ‘analogous to the mode of discourse called “description” which acts to mask its successive nature and present it as a redundant repetition, as if all were present at the same time.’20 .The Naked City is predicated on a model of moving, on “spatializing actions,” know 17

Mc Donough,Tom,Situationist Space, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 250, 2002, October books,MIT Press 18 Mc Donough,Tom,Situationist Space, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 250, 2002, October books,MIT Press 19 Mc Donough,Tom,Situationist Space, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 243, 2002, October books,MIT Press 20 Mc Donough,Tom,Situationist Space, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 246, 2002, October books,MIT Press

the Situationists as derives; rather than presenting the city from a totalizing point of view, it organizes movements metamorphically around psychogeographic hubs. These movements constitute narratives that are openly diachronic, unlike description’s false “timelessness”. The Naked City makes it clear, in it’s fragmenting of the conventional, descriptive representation of urban space, that the city is only experienced in time by a concrete, situated object, as a passage from “unity of atmosphere” to another, not as the object of totalized perception.21 The Naked City probably acts as a poignant tool to reflect on city as a process of actions and territories of experiences, rather than a collective image as often represented to view a map. Though it can be argued that the Naked City is not a comprehensive tool to reflect the city as a process, but what it proposes is to abstract a city processing by indexing certain virtues , which in this case would be the movement of particular set of people in a given time and in a give condition. The Naked City through its collage based approach tends to adopt a reductionist procedure by highlighting a specific set of rules and abandoning the other relative relations that are borne with it. Though this could be seen as negative quality in perceiving a city but the fact that it represents the city as ‘constructed situations’ of experiential spaces, spaces that for certain cohesive set of relations, transcends the outlook of absorbing a city as a vector of social relations governed by human behaviour and movement rather than physical, geographical and imagery based ‘descriptions’. Dedord’s psychogeography and it graphic representation in the Naked City takes into account , constructing unities of atmosphere rather than discovering them like physical, geographical phenomena that exist in a spatial context. This methodology of Debord , stating these fragments as ‘unities of atmosphere’ makes it a much less empirical idea as compared to that of Chombart de Lauwe’s of definition of a quartier , where he defines these quartier space as a residential unit having its own “physiognomy” , thus giving it a preemimently a functional role which can be ‘discovered’ in space. In the terms of Chombart de Lauwe, space is seen as a context and a container for social relations where as Debord’s graphic compilation transcends this thought by defining space not only as a set that reflect social relations but is constitutive of and constituted by them. The Naked City denies space as a context and instead incorporates space as an element of social practice. Rather than a container suitable for description, space becomes part of a process: the process of inhabiting enacted by social groups constructed 22by “spatializing actions” – derives.

Derive and space as a product One of the basic situationist practices is the ‘derive’, a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Derives involve playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll. In a derive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a derive point of view - cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. But derive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science, despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself, provides psychogeography with abundant data.23 Operating in the realm of everyday life, the ‘derive’ constitutes an urban practice that must be distinguished, first, from “classical notions of the journey and the walk,” as Debord noted in “Theory of the Derive”. The person on the ‘derive’ consciously attempts to suspend class allegiances for some time. This serves dual purpose: it allows for a heightened receptivity to 21

Mc Donough,Tom,Situationist Space, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 247-248, 2002, October books,MIT Press 22 Mc Donough,Tom,Situationist Space, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 251-252, 2002, October books,MIT Press 23 http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm

the “psychogeographic relief” of the city as well as contributing to the sense of “depaysement,” a characteristic of the lucid sphere.24 The Situationists also located the ‘derive’ in relation to surrealists experiments in space. In his article on the “derive’, Debord cited “the celebrated aimless stroll” undertaken in May 1924 by Aragon, Breton, Morise and Vitrac, whose course was determined by chance procedures. Chance - thus became an important ideology to understand the phenomena of the urban construct. Chance, which could be classified as an emergence of making of space, based on human intentions which could not be comprehensively predicted or space that could not be determined by specific set of happenings to be worked upon. Thus, experiencing space as a potentialising agent (as already space is considered as an arena of social relations) rather than a set of definitive concrete events. The act of chance thus produces a space, rather than being acted upon in a space – revealing the idea of space as a more intangible, viscous entity which is non existent, unless acts, actions and movement are stimulated. The ‘derive’ appropriates this urban space in the context of what may be called “pedestrian speech act,” in that “the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language.”25 Through the conscious appropriation of the city, the situationists force to speak of the divisions and fragmentations masked by abstract space, the contradictions that enable political struggle over the production of space to exist at all. The fragmented space of the city, as actualised in the ‘derive’ is precisely what is imaged in The Naked City, with its invention of quartiers, its shifting about of spatial relations, and its large white blanks of non – actualized space – whole segments of Paris are made to disappear, or rather that never even existed in the first place. The ‘derive’ as a pedestrian act is a reinstatement of the “use value of space.” In this manner, the ‘derive’ is a political use of space, constructing new social relations through its “ludic – constructive behaviour”26

Image 4

The ‘derive’, was an attempt to change the meaning of the city through changing the way it was inhabited – an understanding of the ephemeral and malleable quality of space making determined by processes generated by opportunities. It (the ‘derive’) was conducted to construct a more collective space (social notions), a space whose potentialities remained open-ended for all participants in the “ludic-constructive” narrative of the new urban terrain.27 The ‘derive’ therefore, does not possess a space of its own , but takes place in a space that is imposed by capitalism in the form of urban planning – a routine that was challenged , questioned and revisited through the concepts Unitary Urbanism – a continuity to the ‘derive’ thought developed by the Situtationists.

Unitary Urbanism and the ‘social space’ ‘Unitary Urbanism’ - the theory of the combined use of arts and techniques as means contributing to the construction of a unified milieu in a dynamic relation with experiments in behaviour’28 . Unitary Urbanism envisages a terrain of experience for the social space of the 24

Mc Donough,Tom,Situationist Space, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 251-252, 2002, October books,MIT Press 25 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life,translated by Randell, Steve, pg 37, 2002, University of California Press, 26 Mc Donough,Tom,Situationist Space, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 260, 2002, October books,MIT Press 27 Mc Donough,Tom,Situationist Space, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 262, 2002, October books,MIT Press 28 http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/unitary_urbanism.html,Chardronnet, Ewen, History of Unitary Urbanism and psychogeography at the turn of the sixties, lecture notes for a conference in Riga May 2003.

cities of the future. It is not a reaction to functionalism, but rather a move past it; Unitary Urbanism is a matter of reaching -- beyond the immediately useful -- an enthralling functional environment.29.As the Situationists would say that ‘unitary urbanism is not a doctrine of urbanism but a critique of urbanism’30, it is a processual thought that engaged in the free play of human behaviour by putting forth the idea that urbanism is ‘a way of life’ constructed by different conditions and situations of life through acts of human chances and experience towards the expression of ‘collective creativity’.31 The idea of unitary urbanism which tended more towards an utopian ideology rendered itself as a thought that was very complex, very changeable, a constant activity, a deliberate intervention in the praxis of daily life and in the daily environment; an intervention aimed at bringing our lives into lasting harmony with our real needs and with the new possibilities that will arise and that will in turn transform these needs.32 By tending towards a more pluralistic form of urbanism, the domain of unitary urbanism projected a heterogeneous application of processes towards the construct of society i.e. social space which often in the industrially produced cities was lost to governance of fixed commodities, infrastructure and machinically performing fragmented society. The ideology of unitary urbanism behaved as an adaptive process of metabolic activities regulating city, society and human forms and projected itself to the realm of creating terrain of social experiences by the ‘play of human life.’ This projection of creating a space as a cultural milieu resonates Henri Lefebvre’s doctrines on space making , as Gottdiener remarks ‘Lefebvre attempts to avoid reductionism, whether it is of the economistic (Marxist) or the idealist (deconstructionist) kind. He proposes a unitary theory of space that ties together the physical.’33 Situationist thoughts as well as Lefebvre’s principles both tended define space as content and a container which give way to and tends toward a social platform ; space as a series of processes towards a more performative identity to produce the social interaction as well as be produces by social actions. In this regard, probably Lefebvre’s tends to define in a more comprehensive manner, where he suggests is to be an intangible experiential field and as a medium capable of articulating relations and as operative field which can evolve complex urban activities – a thought process that was hinted and suggested in the contemporary postmodernist era for a ‘meaningful’ and ‘livable’ community.34 Lefebvre puts forth the idea of space as an adaptable system which is a dialectical in nature where space was both a material product of social relations (the concrete) and a manifestation of relations, a relation itself (the abstract).35 As Gottdiener reflects on Lefebvre’s concept of ‘the production of space’ - 'Every mode of social organization produces an environment that is a consequence of the social relations it possesses. In addition, by producing a space according to its own nature, a society not only materializes into distinctive built forms, but also reproduces itself. The concept "production of space" means what Giddens calls the "duality of structure. That is, space is both a medium of social relations and a material product that can affect social relations. This dialectical idea is a major tenet of the ‘new urban sociology.’36 This theorem of social space production or what we can term as ‘Urbanism’ renders the idea of a more collective ‘cultural’ approach of city and space making and becomes a suggestive methodology which is a dynamic process characterized more by terms like fluidity,

http://www.notbored.org/UU.html, Unitary Urbanism at the end of 1950’s, Internationale rd Situationniste#3, 3 December, Unattributed, 1959. 30 Shepley, John, Critique of Urbanism, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 103, 2002, October books,MIT Press 31 Constant, translated by Sheeply, John,A Different City for Different Life, in Mc Donough,Tom ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, page 95, 2002, October books,MIT Press 32 Unitary Urbanism, Original in Dutch, 'Unitair Urbanisme,' unpublished manuscript of a lecture held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 33 Gottdiener, M, A Marx for Our Time: Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Space, Sociological Theory, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), pp. 129-134, American Sociological Association. 34 Waldheim, Charles, Landscape as Urbanism, in Waldheim, Charles ed.,The Landscape Urbanism Reader, pg 39, 2006, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 35 Gottdiener, M, A Marx for Our Time: Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Space, Sociological Theory, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), pp. 129-134, American Sociological Association. 36 Gottdiener, M, A Marx for Our Time: Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Space, Sociological Theory, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), pp. 129-134, American Sociological Association.

spontaneous feedback, and non-linearity, than stability, predictability, or rationality37 – the constant fixation of Capitalist’s society. Thus, indicating urbanism to be a processual model, constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed by social relations in a potential performative arena proliferating varied terrain of social experiences rather than as a model of preconceived constants of indicative modules.

Processual urbanism: city as an ‘ecological notion’ The strategies put forth in the realm of Unitary Urbanism, might be reflected upon as a contradiction in time, but at the same time it can be regarded as the future. It certainly tends to suggest towards an urbanism that is more robust and complex to account for the uncertainties of the contemporary metropolis, which may or may not be easily classified.38 The ideas of pluralistic approach, through the construction of malleable of social spaces rendered to put forth the idea of a city beyond ‘object making’ as it transcended beyond visual, structure oriented and image based conventions of urban planning. The concepts of the Unitary Urbanism tended towards utopia of city making as a symbiotic process developed for the free play and life of human life through the notions ‘social ecology’ (the term ecology used here as a metaphor to reflect an integrated relationship). By doing so, it refuted the general practice of urban planning approach and questioned the application of the discourse. The process of this condition of urbanism contradicts the approach of modern planning by stating that the failure of modern urban planners can be attributed to their opportunism, their passive attitude to the problems confronting them, their uncritical deference to an obsolete cultural convention, to the existing image of society. What nowadays counts for town planning confines itself to the more or less aesthetic solution of current socio –economic problems; for the most part housing and traffic problems. For pragmatic reasons, that is, for the sake of a quick provisional solution, urban planners isolate these problems from the totality of social life they see them as detached from the cultural issue. The result is that town planners lag behind it their times, that they are forever out of step with developments.39 Rather it proposes to comprehend the city as an ‘artificial landscape built by human beings in which the adventure of our life unfolds’ through a constant coalition of human behaviour as an performative operation producing ‘space’ - a metabolic process tending towards ‘social ecology.’ This suggestive idea of the Situationist’s developed through the facet of unitary urbanism of processing a city as an organism of artificial ecology, performed through relation of human behaviour with its surrounding atmosphere creating platforms of social milieu finds great relevance in thoughts and practices in certain realms of contemporary urbanism. This notion of ecological understanding finds relevance to the thoughts of Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Banham understood that the historian cannot stand outside and analyse the new city as an object, but must enter into it, subject to the mobile forces of its field – like space: “the language of design, architecture and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement…the city will never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture.”40 In Banham’s case, as would be in the case of many contemporary the old (art historical) models do not work and the new unifying concept of ecology offers him as a way of organising the apparently random mix of ‘ geography, climate , economics , demography mechanics and culture.’41 : a more heterogeneous plural and a relative set as suggested by the Situationist’s. This notion of understanding a city as an ecological system offers a more utopian, yet as a more comprehensive and symbiotic system of organisation based on virtues of timelessness and open endedness where 'territories' and 'potential' instead of 'program' is used to define a

Corner, James, Terra Fluxus, in Waldheim, Charles ed.,The Landscape Urbanism Reader, pg 20, 2006, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 38 Allen, Stan, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, pg 165, 2009, Routledge. 39 Unitary Urbanism, Original in Dutch, 'Unitair Urbanisme,' unpublished manuscript of a lecture held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 40 Banham, Reyner, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, pg 5, 2001, University of California Press. 41 Allen, Stan, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, pg 174, 2009, Routledge.

place's use and thinks the city in terms of adaptable 'systems' – social terrains instead of rigid 'structures' as a better way to organize space.42 To see the city as an artificial ecology is not to establish a loose analogy between the city and the natural systems, but rather to take advantage of ecology as a powerful conceptual model for managing the city’s inherent complexity. It further suggests that what architecture might learn from ecology is a more flexible form of practice itself: a series of working concepts flexible enough to accommodate the wildly improbable demands of the contemporary city.43 Ecologies are dynamic systems that maintain equilibrium by interaction and feedback among multiple variables. Cities, like natural ecologies, emerge through the recursive procedures. They are the cumulative result of countless individual operations repeated over time with slight variation.44 This relation of a city as an ecological phenomenon surfaces a new form of late post modern urbanism: layered, non – hierarchical, flexible, time based and most importantly strategic.45 It triggers complex organizational potentials incorporating a sense of time and change over time and project the participation and consensus of multiple of agents.

Image 5, 6: Parc De Le Villete/ Oma proposal: diagram of strips (left); planting plan (right)

This organizational dynamics, though not at a city scale, but rather at the scale of an urban park can be significantly seen in the second – prize entry submitted by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture and Rem Koolhaas for the Parc de la Villette, 1982. The unbuilt scheme explored the juxtaposition of unplanned relationships between various park programs. Koolhaas’s organizational conceits of parallel strips of landscape, juxtaposed irreconcilable contents, a logic which allowed intense local variations to develop in adjacent bands. As conceived by Koolhaas/OMA, the infrastructure of the park would be strategically organized to support an indeterminate and unknowable range of future uses over time “it is safe to predict that during the life of the park, the program will undergo constant change and adjustment. The more the park works, the more it will be in a perpetual state of revision…The underlying principle of programmatic indeterminacy as a basis of the formal concept allows any shift, modification, replacement or substitutions to occur without damaging initial hypothesis.”46 As Choay states the OMA project is neither a conventional proposal, nor a traditional park design. It is instead “a system of evolving relationships” not so far, perhaps from Pynchon’s notion of the suburban landscape as a printed cut out, from Baetsons information landscapes47 or what we can say from the social-ecology aspects understated in the concepts of Unitary Urbanism. 42

Corner, James, Terra Fluxus, in Waldheim, Charles ed.,The Landscape Urbanism Reader, pg 20, 2006, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 43 Allen, Stan, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, pg 176, 2009, Routledge. 44 Allen, Stan, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, pg 175-76, 2009, Rouledge. 45 Waldheim, Charles, Landscape as Urbanism, in Waldheim, Charles ed.,The Landscape Urbanism Reader, pg 40,2006, New York: Princeton Architectural Press 46 Koolhaas, Rem, “Congestion without Matter,” S, M, L, XL, pg 921, 1999, Monacelli. 47 Allen, Stan, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, pg 187, 2009, Routledge.

Events and Disjunction – the emerging spatial norms Though the major innovation in the Parc De la Villete Competition proposal was in the realm of urbanism: the clarity of its organising diagram and its force as a spatial proposition48, what cannot be overlooked is the emphasisation on the idea of ‘events’ as opposed to functions to foresee the park as an experiment in contemporary urban lifestyle. The other distinctive aspect that was being consciously or unconsciously cultivated was the idea of disjunction, as the programs/events collided arbitrarily across the bands49, as in the proposal by Rem Koolhaas and OMA. These two concepts of space making of evolving function to an ‘event’ and linguistic association architecture and urbanism with ‘disjunction’ would serve as precedent to many contemporary theories and practices. This term ‘event’ in this context would also find great significance to the idea of ‘constructed situations’ as both were malleable in nature, time and place dependant and both through their norms were defining a terrain of social space that was characterised by behaviour and action. ‘Events’ as defined by Bernard Tschumi: “an incident, an occurrence; a particular item in a programme…. events can encompass particular uses, singular functions or isolated activities….events have an independent existence. Rarely are they purely the consequence of their surroundings.”50 Derrida expanding on the definition of the event calls it ‘the emergence of a disparate multiplicity.’51 This notion of the event as an entity of multiplicity and as independent performer in an organisational tactics redefines the new contemporary city processes which are often marked by multiple, heterogeneous and complex actions and processes tending towards a hybrid rather than an ideological form. A city that is in a condition of being disjoined and cannot be perceived as a ‘complete described’ object, which only finds continuum through different ‘unities of atmosphere’ and voices different varied layers of city processes – resonates an abstraction to the Naked City diagram by Guy Debord. These notions of events and disjunction – the act of disjoin or condition of being disjoined; separation and disunion,52 tends to put forth a city that is layered, non-hierarchical, time based and processesed through series of experiential terrains which are constructed, reconstructed and remade as an artificial ecology. This idea of disjunction, which tends to offer the idea of reading a city as multiple layered organisation, finds relevance in Michael Foucault finding in the emergence of this transcending notion: ‘how to specify the different concepts that enable us to conceive of the discontinuity or the threshold between nature and culture, the irreducibility one to another of the balances or solutions found by each society or each individual, the non existence of a continuum existing in space or time.’53 The concepts of events and the act of disjunction found a clarified expression in the work of Bernard Tschumi, in his winning proposal for the Parc De la Villete Competition. Tschumi proposes three autonomous systems: a grid of points, a web of lines and a substrate of surfaces. The superposition of these three systems creates disjunctions, which are registered in the formal complexities of the follies, but superimposition also creates programmatic collisions and new spatial configurations, activating the life of the park as a new form of public space.54 What is also of great relevance here , in this proposal , is the act of diagramming which shifts our focus of relating to the park not as a complete object, but as systems varying layers which possess their own spatial and experiential qualities acting as the derives for the project. Each of the systems are independent, yet dependant but focuses on perceiving the park as a layered organism representing malleable terrains of engagement.

Image 7: Follie System

Allen, Stan, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, pg 184, 2009, Routledge. Allen, Stan, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, pg 187, 2009, Routledge. 50 Tschumi, Bernard, Questions of Space: lectures on architecture, pg 98-99, 1990,Architectural Association 51 Tschumi, Bernard, Architecture and Disjunction, pg, 256-57, 1996, MIT Press. 52 Tschumi, Bernard, Architecture and Disjunction, pg 1, 1996, MIT Press. 53 Tschumi, Bernard, Questions of Space: lectures on architecture, pg 98-99, 1990,Architectural Association 54 Allen, Stan, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, pg 184, 2009, Routledge. 49

The diagram of the park anticipates a loose typology program, each one associated with a geometric order. Hence ‘point’: kiosks, cafes or viewpoints, ‘lines’ programs: primarily movement systems and ‘surface’ programs: athletic fields, gathering places or event spaces that require and extended horizontal expanse. It adopts a reductionist approach to accommodate the complex and often inconsistent programmatic demands of a contemporary park: at once immediate, precise and specific, while at the same time flexible and openended.55 Both these proposals by Tschumi and Koolhaas oscillating in the understanding of open endedness, timelessness , layering and disparate complexities constructed a horizontal field of infrastructure that might accommodate all sorts of urban activities, planned and unplanned, imagined and unimagined over time. It also positioned another common denominator which signalled the role that landscape would come to play as a medium through which to articulate strategic, processual and a socio- ecological urbanism – transcending the Situationist’s notions of urbanism through the lens of the performative landscape field. Thus transgressing landscape as a field of cultural milieu and as a performative reciprocal agency to shape its context outwards through the constant reproduction of ‘constructed situations’.

Image 8: Points, Lines and Surfaces

Image 9: View of the Follie Prototype; Sequences

Landscape: the Situationist rendition beyond functionalism With the emergence of land art since the 1970, landscape has started drawing to attention itself as a visceral and elemental art form. Landscape started both acting as a venue (site) and material (medium) of artistic expression. Landscape beyond its scenographic expression, soon explored its possibilities and potentials and transgressed as a medium and acted as a means to resist the homogenization of the environment while also heightening local attributes and a collective sense of place.56 This recovery or what we may term as redefinition of landscape, now serves as the medium and the lens that can accommodate, stimulate and generate the ideas (in a more diluted manner) of the free play of society, the relation to human behaviour and the ‘social space’ phenomenon that the Situationist put forth in their search. Landscape with its innate qualities of timelessness, open –endedness and the maturity to evolve over time rendered itself as a poignant tool to perform beyond the ideological form of urbanism towards a more collective, pluralistic and ecological form of contemporary urbanism by the production of social spatial terrains of experience – an transcending of the concepts of Unitary Urbanism set out by the Situationist International. Landscape, through the Situationist lens reinvents itself both as a Situationist medium (through which collective experiences are 55

Allen, Stan, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, pg 184, 2009, Routledge. Corner , James, Recovering Landscape as Critical Cultural Practice, in Corner,James ed., Recovering Landscape : Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, pg 13, 1999, Princeton Architectural Press 56

determined and performed) and as a Situationist space (in which social actions are continuously made and remade.) Corner, in his essay, Recovering Landscape as Critical Cultural Practice, resonates, the relation between the potentials of landscape and unconsciously the Situationist ideas as he states “landscape reshapes the world not only because of its physical and experiential characteristics but also because of its eidetic content, its capacity to contain and express idea and so engage the mind…..because of its bigness – in both scale and scope – landscape serves as a metaphor for inclusive multiplicity and pluralism….overview that enables differences to play themselves out…synthetic and strategic form, one that aligns diverse and competing forces (social consequences, political desires, ecological processes, program demands etc.) into newly liberating and interactive alliances.”57 This idea of the landscape oscillating beyond the functional and ideological notion towards the flexible and multi polar idea of collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events is highlighted most aptly in Anuradha Mathur’s description of the maidans in the Indian cities. The Indian maidans (empty fields) provide indeterminate and flexible territories for both nomadic and collective life. The maidans are landscapes that engage urbanism not through antithesis but through use and time. Thus, these sites are less as scenes and objects and more as ongoing and evolving processes.58 Maidans have emerged as a result of human intervention directed not towards the addition of identity, events or character but rather towards keeping land free indeterminate.59 They reflect (personally experienced) the collective aspirations of people, society and the city in a holistic manner through an existence of nomadic nature. In cities of increasingly circumscribed social, political, racial or economic enclaves – can be classified as the rigid ideologies of Capitalist society, the maidan serves to both symbolize and provide neutral territory, a ground where people can gather on a common plane. It is a place that offers ‘freedom’: a term around which the Situationist thoughts have revolved around, without obligation. This abilty to accommodate a diverse range of social and political structures makes the maidan an extremely significant space in the city. It is a place where people can “touch the spirit of of commonness.”60

Image 10: The maidans at Kolkata

The understanding of landscape as as a verb rather than as a noun and realising the potentials of it to perform as an agency is probably one of the significant developments in the past few decades which in its own terms and conditions, especially in the case of the above mentioned maidan draws in reflections and virtues of the Situationist ideas. Though it cannot be termed that the Situationist ideas are inspirational or act as stimuli to generate the new concepts of finding landscape as a cultural milieu, but parallels can be drawn to critically assess the constant dilution of Situationist ideas in contemporary urbanism – where landscape is becoming, both the lens through which the contemporary city is represented and the medium through which it is constructed.61 Landsape – ‘a situationist medium and a space’ rendering a disciplinary alignment currntly underway termed as Landscape Urbanism. 57

Corner , James, Recovering Landscape as Critical Cultural Practice, in Corner,James ed., Recovering Landscape : Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, pg 1-2, 1999, Princeton Architectural Press 58 Corner , James, Recovering Landscape as Critical Cultural Practice, in Corner,James ed., Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, pg 22, 1999, Princeton Architectural Press 59 Mathur, Anuradha, Neither Wilderness nor Home, in Corner, James ed., Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, pg 214, 1999, Princeton Architectural Press. 60 Mathur, Anuradha, Neither Wilderness nor Home, in Corner, James ed., Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, pg 214, 1999, Princeton Architectural Press 61 Waldheim, Charles, Landscape as Urbanism, in Waldheim, Charles ed.,The Landscape Urbanism Reader,2006, New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Conclusion: Transcending Situationism “We have a world of pleasure to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.” 62 This statement potently describes the vision, thoughts, ideas and iterations of the Situationist International was directed towards- the free play of human behaviour over rigid ideologies and commodity driven life in the Capitalist society. They saw in moments of true community the possibility of a future, joyful and un-alienated society.63 The upbringing of the idea of community life determined by ‘’constructed situtaions – the social space towards Urbanism – reflected as the way of life, all characterised by human activities, actions, movements and behaviour is probably the most significant binding concept that Situationist put forth in their studies and ‘gestures.’ This idea of the recognition of the notion of space and relate space to human determimanacy proliferated a certain rationale in contemporary works where the definition of space would constantly be redefined. Tschumi in his writing poses questions of space: ‘a cosa mentale? Kant’s priori category of consciousness? A pure form? Or, rather, a social product, the projection on the ground of socio- political structure. The age of modernity: architectural spaces can have an autonomy and logic of their own. Distortions, ruptures, compressions, fragmentations and juxtapositions are inherent in the manipulation of form, from Piranesi to Schwitters, from Dr. Calligari to Rietveld.’64 This generation of the concept of space would be questioned, redefined, interpreted and muted by several contemporary practitioners in relation to present urban scenarios, in relation to social life and conditions, testing its performance as an arena and as a product to find possibilities and potentials to determine its representation and what it represents. Thus making space an intangible expression - beyond functional notions and determinants. Space in contemporay terms is defined through dictums and events and programs, over functions and relatable commodities, transcending into an eventful arena construted and performed by actions expressing a cultural and playful domain which expresses a clear abstraction of the transgression of Situationist intentions. This macro concept of space production through reproduction also surfaces the new notion of contemporary urbanism – one that performs over ideological forms and post modern nostalgia that posed restrictive criterias on our immediate cultural notions. Most contemporay urbanism thoughts are now reflected towards the production of ‘way of life’, one that does not adopt reductionism and negation, but is more megalomanic in approach and more metabolic in process. Urbanism that is pushed into regimes of malleabilty, open endedness, layered and non hierachial which is constituted through series of events and disjunctions of programs, producing chance as is its new form of order and the Situationist derive as a process of creating terrains of heterogenous and multi – layered experience. Contemporay architecture pictures itself as a dilution of the notions of presented by the Situationist International, in a manner that it unconscious, abstracted and deconstructed. Though comparing architecture with the Situationist can be misleading at times, as the Situtionist constantly refuted the idea to contruct architecture, as they stated on architects “he will no longer construct mere forms but complete environments. What make’s the architecture of today so infuriating is its primarily formal preoccupations. Architecture's problem is no longer the opposition between function and expression; this question has been superseded.” 65- The statemant that forced them to exclude Constant from their group for his vision and construction of the New Babylon Project. This statemant though can be read in new light, especially with the advent of the new discourse of Landscape Urbanism which

Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/unitary_urbanism.html,Chardronnet, Ewen, History of Unitary Urbanism and psychogeography at the turn of the sixties, lecture notes for a conference in Riga May 2003. 64 Tschumi, Bernard, Questions of Space: lectures on architecture, pg 99-100, 1990,Architectural Association 65 http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/ 63

governs on the principle that ‘landscape, rather than architecture, is more capable of 66 organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience.’ If interpreted through, the realm of the emergence domain of Landscape Urbanism, the Situationist statemant probably suggested foreseeing beyond the symbolic and functionally driven building blocks as a medium to ‘complete environment’ – where this environment is was suggesting towards the notion of Urbanism. The incapabilty or we can say that the shortfalling of architecture as an art which tended to static and which would ‘freeze over time’ and not respond and form a continuum to the processual urbanism suggested by the Situationist, demanded that they look beyond architecture as the governing principle to generate the way of free playful life. Probably, a reason why Constant was exiled from the group, as in his proposal architecture was still proposed as the constituent and which constitutes urbanism? In the current stage of ‘recovery’ of the genre of landscape, where landscape is seen as tool of contextualization, heightening experiences and embedding time, culture and nature in the built world67, possibly surfaces itself as the tool though which the Situationist were attempting to ‘complete the environment.’ Landscape with its inherent qualities of timelessness, open endedness and its potential to absorb and grow put forths itself as the terrain towards Unitary Urbanism – or in present what has diluted and reconstructed as an adaptive process called Landscape Urbanism. In present contemporary notions of architecture, landscape and more specifically urbanism, Situationist thoughts and ideas are seen as parallels - it definitely cannot be termed as influences as direct references is more unlikely to occur – which from, time to time, tends to find roots and surface as unconscious and intangible nodes. This constant juxtaposition of thoughts might be foreseen as a recurrent theme in the future, as Situationist ideas are themselves not bound in a specific time frame, with ‘unities of atmosphere’ beingly constantly constructed through the rapid transformation of the ‘derive’ and as contemporary life is tending towards the digitally and new age communication driven - processual utopia.

Waldheim, Charles, Landscape as Urbanism, in Waldheim, Charles ed.,The Landscape Urbanism Reader,2006, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 67 Corner , James, Recovering Landscape as Critical Cultural Practice, in Corner,James ed., Recovering Landscape : Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, pg 16, 1999, Princeton Architectural Press

References Books: Tom Mc Donough ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, “An October Book”, 2002, MIT Press, ISBN 0262134047 Raoul Vaneigem, 9780900575044

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Volker M. Welter, Contributor Iain Boyd Whyte, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life, 2003, MIT Press, ISBN 0262731649, 9780262731645 Michel de Certeau, translated by Steve Randell, The practice of everyday life. Vol.1, The practice of everyday life, University of California Press. Charles Waldheim ed., The Landscape Urbanism Reader, 2006, Princeton Architectural Press, ISBN 1568984391, 9781568984391. Mohsen Mostafavi, Architectural Association, Ciro Najle, James Corner, Architectural Association (Great Britain), Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape, Architectural Association, 2003, ISBN 1902902300, 9781902902302 Stan Allen, Practice - Architecture, Technique+Representation: Revised and Expanded Edition, 2009, Taylor & Francis Group, ISBN 0415776244, 9780415776240. Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, 2001, MIT Press, ISBN 0262700603, 9780262700603. Bernard Tschumi, Architectural Association (Great Britain), Questions of Space: Lectures on Architecture, 1990, Architectural Association, ISBN 0904503895, 9780904503890. Rem Koolhaas, Barbara Steiner, Rasmus Nielsen, Bruce Mau, Doris Berger, Jakob Fenger, Jennifer Sigler, Superflex (Group of artists, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, Hans Werlemann, Small, Medium, Large, Extra-large ( S, M, L,XL), 1997, Taschen, ISBN 3822877433, 9783822877432. James Corner, Alan H. Balfour, Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, 1999, Princeton Architectural Press, ISBN 1568981791, 9781568981796. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 2001, University of California Press, ISBN 0520219244, 9780520219243.

Journal: Alessandra Ponte ed., Building the Stair Spiral of Evolution: the index museum of Sir Patrick Geddes, MIT Press. Louis Wirth, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 44, No. 1(Jul., 1938), pp. 1-24. Unitary Urbanism, Original in Dutch, 'Unitair Urbanisme,' unpublished manuscript of a lecture held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. M Gottdiener, A Marx for Our Time: Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Space, Sociological Theory, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), pp. 129-134, American Sociological Association.

Websites: http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/unitary_urbanism.html - Chardronnet, Ewen, History of Unitary Urbanism and psychogeography at the turn of the sixties, lecture notes for a conference in Riga May 2003. http://libcom.org/thought/situationists-an-introduction - Situationists – an Introduction, OCT 12 2006 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film) – Wikipedia, the free online dictionary ,Metropolis (the Film)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Geddes - Wikipedia, the free online dictionary, Patrick Geddes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_geography - Wikipedia, the free online dictionary, Human geography. http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm - Bureau of Public Services, Thoery of Derive. http://www.notbored.org/UU.html - Unitary Urbanism at the end of 1950â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, Internationale rd Situationniste#3, 3 December, Unattributed, 1959. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/ - Inaugural Report to the Munich Conference, Internationale Situationniste#3, 3rd December, Unattributed, 1959.

Image Courtesy: (all other images unless otherwise mentioned are credits of the author). Image 1 - chasness.files.wordpress.com/.../metropolis.jpg Image 2 - farm3.static.flickr.com/2173/2003887773_e0128... Image 3 - www.notbored.org/naked-city.gif Image 4 - www.donalforeman.com/.../2007/11/debord_sofs.jpg Image 5&6 - Charles Waldheim ed., The Landscape Urbanism Reader, 2006, Princeton Architectural Press, ISBN 1568984391, 9781568984391. Image 7 - www.arch.mcgill.ca/.../villettefollies.jpg Image 8 - http://ead.nb.admin.ch/web/biennale/bi06_A/index_n.htm Image 9 - http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/teaching/nds/ws96/script/space/st-space.html