Unitary Urbanism

Definition

Unitary urbanism is the Situationist project for a mode of city-making that abolishes the separation of art, architecture, and everyday life — an "urbanism intended to bring pleasure" that constructs situations rather than functional arrangements. It adapts the entire urban environment to the free, ludic activity of its inhabitants, replacing zoning and functional segregation with continuous, variable space for play and the dérive. It is the architectural-theoretical core of the Situationist critique of the spectacular, colonized city. (Note: the term's SI history spans the split between material/constructivist and formal/utopian currents.)

Key Thinkers

• Guy Debord — the dérive, the constructed situation, and the critique of "urban renewal."
• Raoul Vaneigem — the "reversal of perspective" and the revolution of everyday life that unitary urbanism's spaces would serve.
• Constant — New Babylon as the architecture of unitary urbanism.
• Libero Andreotti — reads unitary urbanism through Huizinga's play-tactics.

Related Concepts

• Dérive — the mobile practice that animates unitary urbanism.
• New Babylon — its fullest architectural realization.
• Play — the ludic ethics underpinning it.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Unitary Urbanism: Play-Tactics of the SI
• Debord, Constant, and the Politics of Situationist Urbanism
• The Revolution of Everyday Life (Vaneigem 2001) — the everyday/political basis of the situationist city.
• The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Tafuri 1987) — the avant-garde's relationship to the metropolis as "communication machine"; heterotopia and the voyage; the critique of the avant-garde's freedom as "freedom for techniques" rather than for writing.

Open Questions

• Can unitary urbanism's liberating spatial program resist recuperation into commercial speculation (the fate of New Babylon and of 1960s megastructures)?