After Ford

Author: Patrik Schumacher & Christian Rogner (in Stalking Detroit)
Year: 2001 (orig.); repr. in Stalking Detroit; file dated 2024
Source type: article/chapter
Raw file: raw/articles/schumacher-rogner-2024-after-ford.md

Summary

Schumacher and Rogner's contribution to Stalking Detroit articulates the relationship between Fordism and Modernism and uses Detroit to glimpse post-Fordist urbanism. It examines how the Fordist production paradigm forged modernist urban form, and — after Fordism's exhaustion — how the post-Fordist condition points toward a reorganization of urban space and society, laying groundwork relevant to Schumacher's later parametricism.

Key Claims

• Fordism and Modernism: modernist urbanism was "shaped by fundamentally Fordist agendas regarding the role of urban arrangement as an analog to patterns of production"; Detroit is the most legible site of this coupling.
• Post-Fordism and the urban: with the exhaustion of the Fordist cycle, urban organization must be rethought for a post-Fordist, information- and flexibility-driven mode of production and subjectivity.
• Detroit as a glimpse of the future: Detroit "recommends itself" because its legibility, scale, and social impact show "what can now be understood as increasingly global tendencies in the infrastructural, spatial, and material development of cities internationally"; its influence "grew while its population receded."

Connections

Concepts: Parametricism · Neoliberal Metropolis · Entrepreneur of Self
Authors: Patrik Schumacher & Christian Rogner · Douglas Spencer
Debates: (post-Fordism & parametricism)
Related source notes: Stalking Detroit

Direct Quotes

"[T]he very project of modernist urbanism itself was shaped by fundamentally Fordist agendas regarding the role of urban arrangement as an analog to patterns of production."

"Mobile capital rendered the city impermanent."

Open Questions

• Does Schumacher's later parametricism inherit or break from the Fordist/post-Fordist urban reorganization traced here — and does it serve the flexible, entrepreneurial subject (Spencer, Gough)?