Situationist City

Situationist city is a term referring to radical engagements with urban questions by members of the Situationist International (SI) and their associates during the 1950s and 1960s. As a group of artists, activists, and writers based mainly in Western Europe and seeking to revolutionize contemporary societies, the situationists had a long and multifarious concern with cities. They opposed processes of capitalist urbanization and planning at the time, attacking the ways in which cities were being destroyed and remade within what they called “the society of the spectacle.” Drawing on and developing Marxist understandings of urban space and everyday life, and also engaging with the legacies of avant-gardes from earlier in the twentieth century, especially Dada and surrealism, they depicted cities as sites of alienation, control, and segregation through which prevailing capitalist sociospatial relations of domination are produced and reproduced. At the same time, however, they explored cities as sites of potential freedom, believing they could become realms of emancipation and human fulfillment.

Situationist city was not a term employed by the SI and derives instead from writings and exhibitions on the group that have proliferated since the 1990s, as it has been rediscovered within academia and mainstream culture and positioned within histories of the avant-garde as well as Western Marxism. Such references may imply a singular theory or doctrine based on design or planning, but this is misleading because the ideas and practices of the SI were evolving, diverse, and contested, developed in varied ways by the group's 70 members during its formal existence between 1957 and 1972 as well as by a number of forerunners. They also far exceeded any specialist discipline and stemmed, above all, from the desire to change everyday urban life and space. A crucial insight that the SI shared with Henri Lefebvre and with many radical geographers since Lefebvre is that, to change everyday life, it is necessary to change everyday space and vice versa. Their critical concern with cities therefore came out of this appreciation of the social and political significance of space as they addressed how to envisage and construct urban spaces as part of a strategy for social [Page 727]transformation, so that they might become both the products and the instruments of emancipation.