Basic Program of the
Bureau of Unitary Urbanism
1. NOTHINGNESS OF URBANISM AND NOTHINGNESS OF THE SPECTACLE
Urbanism(1)
doesn’t exist; it is only an “ideology” in Marx’s sense of the word.
Architecture does really exist, like Coca-Cola: though coated with ideology, it is a real
production, falsely satisfying a falsified need. Urbanism is comparable to the advertising
about Coca-Cola — pure spectacular ideology. Modern capitalism, which organizes the
reduction of all social life to a spectacle, is incapable of presenting any spectacle
other than that of our own alienation. Its urbanistic dream is its masterpiece.
2. CITY PLANNING AS CONDITIONING AND FALSE PARTICIPATION
The development of the urban milieu
is the capitalist domestication of space. It represents the choice of one particular
materialization, to the exclusion of other possibilities. Like aesthetics, whose course of
decomposition it is going to follow, it can be considered as a rather neglected branch of
criminology. What characterizes it at the “city planning” level — as
opposed to its merely architectural level — is its insistence on popular consent, on
individual integration into its bureaucratic production of conditioning.
All this is imposed by means of a
blackmail of utility, which hides the fact that this architecture and this conditioning
are really useful only in reinforcing reification. Modern capitalism dissuades people from
making any criticism of architecture with the simple argument that they need a roof over
their heads, just as television is accepted on the grounds that they need information and
entertainment. They are made to overlook the obvious fact that this information, this
entertainment, and this kind of dwelling place are not made for them, but without them and
against them.
City planning must be
understood as a society’s field of publicity-propaganda, i.e. as the
organization of participation in something in which it is impossible to participate.
3. TRAFFIC CIRCULATION, SUPREME STAGE OF CITY PLANNING
Traffic circulation is the
organization of universal isolation. As such, it constitutes the major problem of modern
cities. It is the opposite of encounter: it absorbs the energies that could otherwise be
devoted to encounters or to any sort of participation. Spectacles compensate for the
participation that is no longer possible. Within this spectacular society one’s
status is determined by one’s residence and mobility (personal vehicles). You
don’t live somewhere in the city, you live somewhere in the hierarchy. At the summit
of this hierarchy the ranks can be ascertained by the degree of mobility. Power is
objectively expressed in the necessity of being present each day at more and more places
(business dinners, etc.) further and further removed from each other. A VIP could be
defined as someone who has appeared in three different capitals in the course of a single
day.
4. DISTANCIATION FROM THE URBAN SPECTACLE
The spectacle system that is in the
process of integrating the population manifests itself both as organization of cities and
as permanent information network. It is a solid framework designed to reinforce the existing
conditions of life. Our first task is to enable people to stop identifying with their
surroundings and with model patterns of behavior. This is inseparable from making possible
free mutual recognition in a few initial zones set apart for human activity. People will
still be obliged for a long time to accept the era of reified cities. But the attitude
with which they accept it can be changed immediately. We must encourage their skepticism
toward those spacious and brightly colored kindergartens, the new dormitory cities of both
East and West. Only a mass awakening will pose the question of a conscious construction of
the urban environment.
5. AN INDIVISIBLE FREEDOM
The main achievement of
contemporary city planning is to have made people blind to the possibility of what we call
unitary urbanism, namely a living critique of this manipulation of cities and their
inhabitants, a critique fueled by all the tensions of everyday life. A living critique
means setting up bases for an experimental life where people can come together to create
their own lives on terrains equipped to their ends. Such bases cannot be reservations for
“leisure” activities separated from the society. No spatio-temporal zone is
completely separable. The whole society exerts continual pressure even on its present
vacation “reservations.” Situationist bases will exert pressure in the opposite
direction, acting as bridgeheads for an invasion of everyday life as a whole. Unitary
urbanism is the contrary of a specialized activity; to accept a separate urbanistic domain
is already to accept the whole urbanistic lie and the falsehood permeating the whole of
life.
Urbanism promises happiness. It
shall be judged accordingly. The coordination of artistic and scientific means of
denunciation must lead to a complete denunciation of existing conditioning.
6. THE LANDING
All space is already occupied by
the enemy, which has even reshaped its basic laws, its geometry, to its own purposes.
Authentic urbanism will appear when the absence of this occupation is created in certain
zones. What we call construction starts there. It can be clarified by the positive
void concept developed by modern physics. Materializing freedom means beginning by
appropriating a few patches of the surface of a domesticated planet.
7. THE ILLUMINATION OF DÉTOURNEMENT
The basic practice of the theory of
unitary urbanism will be the transcription of the whole theoretical lie of urbanism,
detourned for the purpose of de-alienation. We have to constantly defend ourselves from
the poetry of the bards of conditioning — to jam their messages, to turn their
rhythms inside out.
8. CONDITIONS OF DIALOGUE
Functional means practical. The
only thing that is really practical is the resolution of our fundamental problem: our
self-realization (our escape from the system of isolation). This and nothing else is
useful and utilitarian. Everything else is nothing but by-products of the practical,
mystifications of the practical.
9. RAW MATERIAL AND TRANSFORMATION
The situationist destruction of
present conditioning is already at the same time the construction of situations. It is the
liberation of the inexhaustible energies trapped within a petrified daily life. With the
advent of unitary urbanism, present city planning (that geology of lies) will be replaced
by a technique for defending the permanently threatened conditions of freedom, and
individuals — who do not yet exist as such — will begin freely constructing
their own history.
10. END OF THE PREHISTORY OF CONDITIONING
We are not contending that people
must return to some stage previous to the era of conditioning, but rather that they must
go beyond it. We have invented the architecture and the urbanism that cannot be realized
without the revolution of everyday life — without the appropriation of conditioning
by everyone, its endless enrichment and fulfillment.
ATTILA KOTÁNYI, RAOUL VANEIGEM
1961
[TRANSLATOR’S NOTE]
1. The French word urbanisme usually means “city planning,” but it also refers to the general policy and ideology of urban development. For more analysis of urban “territorial domination,” see Chapter 7 of The Society of the Spectacle.
“Programme élémentaire du Bureau d’Urbanisme Unitaire”
originally appeared in Internationale Situationniste #6 (Paris, August
1961). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the
Situationist
International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, PM Press, 2024). No copyright.