Urbanism

Definition

Urbanism is the study and practice of city-making — the design, organization, and experience of urban environments. In this wiki, urbanism is approached from two principal directions. The critical-historical: Benjamin's "genealogy of urbanization" traces the shift from the bourgeois dwelling interior to the modernist collective, the rise of Haussmannization, and the city as the site of capital's spatial fix (Harvey). The experimental-utopian: the Situationists' unitary urbanism proposes an alternative city — the dérive, psychogeography, and the ludic city of New Babylon — in which play replaces work, wandering replaces commuting, and the city is a field of creative appropriation rather than spectacular consumption. These two threads — critique and utopia — structure the wiki's treatment of the city as the primary site of both architectural power and architectural imagination.

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — genealogy of urbanization; Paris as the capital of the 19th century.
• Guy Debord — unitary urbanism and the critique of the spectacular city.
• David Harvey — the urban process under capitalism; the spatial fix.
• Brian Elliott — Benjamin's account of cities and urbanization.

Related Concepts

• Unitary Urbanism — the Situationist project of a ludic, psychogeographic city.
• Psychogeography — the study of the city's affective geographies.
• Dérive — the practice of psychogeographic urban wandering.
• Modernity — the historical condition urbanization is central to.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Benjamin for Architects — genealogy of urbanization.
• Unitary Urbanism — the Situationist urban project.