David Pinder

Visions of the City is a dramatic account of utopian urbanism in the twentieth century. It explores radical demands for new spaces and ways of living, and considers their effects on planning, architecture and struggles to shape urban landscapes. Such visions, it shows, have played a crucial role in informing understandings and imaginings of the modern city. The author critically examines influential traditions in western Europe associated with such figures as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, uncovering the political interests, desires and anxieties that lay behind their ideal cities, and drawing out their 'noir side'. He also investigates oppositional perspectives from the time that challenged these rationalist conceptions of cities and urban life, and that disturbed their dreams of order, especially from within surrealism.

At the heart of this richly illustrated book is an encounter with the explosive ideas of the situationists. Tracing the subversive practices of this avant-garde group and its associates from their explorations of Paris during the 1950s to their projects for an alternative 'unitary urbanism', David Pinder convincingly explains the significance of their revolutionary attempts to transform urban space and everyday life. He addresses in particular Constant's vision of New Babylon, finding within his proposals for future spaces produced through nomadic life, creativity and play a still powerful challenge to imagine cities otherwise. The book not only recovers vital moments from past hopes and dreams of modern urbanism. It also contests current claims about the 'end of utopia', arguing that reconsidering earlier projects can play a critical role in developing utopian perspectives today. Through the study of utopian visions, it aims to rekindle elements of utopianism itself.

CONTENTS

Preface

1.  INTRODUCTION
An urban adventure
Underground visions
Utopian spaces past and present
In the wake of utopia?
Utopia, desire and the city
Outline of the chapters

2.  RESTORATIVE UTOPIAS
Utopian awakenings
The vision of Ebenezer Howard
Smokeless, slumless cities
The ‘master key’ to socio-spatial reform
Biologically sound cities and bodies
Securing space

3.  MODERNIST CALLS TO ORDER
Time and space died yesterday
Le Corbusier and the spirit of construction
Spatial purification
Water-tight formulae
Urban surgery
Political authority and the plan

4.  DREAMS OF CITIES AND MONSTERS
Between two journeys
White cathedrals: confronting New York
Of monsters and organic life
Utopian regulation and authoritarianism
Counter-spaces of the surrealists
Destabilising dreams of order

5.  SITUATIONIST ADVENTURES
To build the haçienda
The critique of human geography
Environments of abstraction
Bringing fuel to the fire
Never work
Unchaining the city
In quest of new spaces

6. THE GREAT GAME TO COME
A science fiction of architecture
Unitary urbanism and the construction of situations
Passionate environments
Living art of the Imaginist Bauhaus
Games with machines
A camp for nomads

7. LIFE WILL RESIDE IN POETRY
Welcome to New Babylon
Play structures
Paradise on earth
Not yet: utopianism and games to come
For another city and another life
A lived utopianism
Reappropriating cities: urban critique

8. PARTISANS OF POSSIBILITIES
Dark skies
For utopianism
Re-dreaming modernist urbanism
Spaces and times of the avant-garde
Challenges of utopia
Future paths

Notes
Selected bibliography
Illustration credits
Index

'Cultural Geography in Practice' provides an innovative and accessible approach to the sources, theories and methods of cultural geography. Written by an international team of prominent cultural geographers, all of whom are experienced researchers, this book is a fully illustrated guide to methodological approaches in cultural geography. In order to demonstrate the practice of cultural geography each chapter combines the following features:

* Practical instruction in using one of the main methods of cultural geography (e.g. interviewing, interpreting texts and visual images, participatory methods)

* An overview of a key area of concern in cultural geography (e.g. the body, national identity, empire, marginality)

* A description of the actual application of the theories and methods within a piece of research.

With the addition of boxed definitions of key concepts and descriptions of research projects by students who devised and undertook them, 'Cultural Geography in Practice' is an essential manual of research practice for both undergraduate and graduate geography students.

What roles can utopia play in contemporary critical urban studies? The concept has often been treated warily, sidelined or dismissed. Recent years, however, have seen a revival of interest, as writers, activists and artists have sought openings to urban worlds that are different and better. By returning to aspects of the urban thought and practice of Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s and early 1970s, this article challenges common understandings of utopia and clarifies some of its potential uses for critical urban studies today. It explores Lefebvre's emphasis on the possible, and in particular the importance he attached to extending and realizing the possible through struggling for what seems impossible. Rather than being a free-floating or endlessly open project, however, this engagement with the ‘possible-impossible’ emerged in critical dialogue with other currents of utopian urbanism, including prospective thought then influential in France. It was also rooted in long-standing concerns with the critique of everyday life and with experimentation through projects with urbanists, architects and others. By attending to these often neglected aspects of Lefebvre's utopianism, a series of provocations emerge for addressing the urban question in ways that take seriously not only what urbanization processes and urban life are but also what they could become and how they might be constituted differently.

Walking has moved into increasing visibility in social, cultural, and geographical studies as well as art and cultural practice in recent times. Walking practices are often mobilised as a means for sensing and learning about spaces, for enabling reflection on the mutual constitution of bodies and landscapes, and for finding meaning within and potentially re-enchanting environments. Through the influence of Michel de Certeau in particular, the idea that walking ‘encunciates’ spaces and is a creative, elusive, and resistive everyday practice, counterpoised to the ‘solar eye’, has become commonplace. This paper focuses on projects by the artist Francis Alÿs that are based on walking in London and other cities, to consider their engagements with the politics of urban space. Attention is paid to walking as his method of unfolding stories, and to its potential to unsettle and bring into question current realities, especially in the context of the regulated, fortified, and surveilled zones of London. Addressing the poetics and politics of his spatial practices, however, reveals the inadequacy of undifferentiated models of creative resistance, nomadism, and subversion beloved of much recent theory, and often endorsed through a partial reading of Certeau. Instead, the openness and ambivalence of these practices suggest a need for a more nuanced approach to the multiple rhythms, trajectories, and narratives that constitute urban spaces as well as to their contested (in)visibilities.

Questions about what it means to locate and be located are being significantly reconfigured through the digitalization of urban life and space, and as computer processing becomes embedded or ‘pervasive’ in urban environments. With position becoming increasingly automatically monitored and tracked within a standardized space and time, some critics suggest that it becomes less consciously thought about than part of a ‘technological unconscious’. Emblematic in this regard is the global positioning system (GPS), which is often promised to resolve questions of location definitively. This paper focuses on efforts by artists working within the realm of locative media to appropriate, reframe and repurpose GPS so as to question aspects of positioning technologies as well as their targeting of locations and their subjects. Attention centres on how these practices are embedded within a context of urban militarization and securitization, and how they may be complicit with military and corporate interests. But asserting the need to move beyond generalized condemnatory or celebratory accounts of the kind that have characterized much discussion in the field, the paper focuses on specific cases to draw out their dis-locative dimensions whereby they unsettle, unfix and reimagine forms of locating and being located. If political claims on their behalf are not secured in advance, critical potential is nevertheless found in the ambiguities, disturbances and resistances they hold open.

Challenging perspectives on the urban question have arisen in recent years from beyond academic realms through the work of artists and cultural practitioners. Often in dialogue with urban theory and political activism, and employing a range of tactical practices, they have engaged critically with cities and with the spatialities of everyday urban life. They are typically concerned less with representing political issues than with intervening in urban spaces so as to question, refunction and contest prevailing norms and ideologies, and to create new meanings, experiences, understandings, relationships and situations. Such interventionist practices may rarely be seen as part of the traditional purview of urban studies. Yet in asserting their significance here, this essay argues that growing dialogues across and between urban and spatial theory, and artistic and cultural practice, have considerable potential for inspiring and developing critical approaches to cities. The essay highlights a number of specific challenges thrown up by such interconnections that are of political and pedagogical significance and in need of further debate.

Récemment, d’intéressantes perspectives sur la question urbaine se sont dégagées au-delà des sphères de recherches, à travers le travail d’artistes et de professionnels de la culture. Dans un échange fréquent avec la théorie urbaine et le militantisme politique, et à l’aide de toute une panoplie de pratiques tactiques, ils se sont impliqués dans les villes et les spatialités de la vie urbaine au quotidien. En général, ils se soucient moins de représenter des thèmes politiques que d’intervenir dans les espaces urbains pour remettre en question, rediriger ou contester les normes et idéologies en vigueur, et pour créer de nouvelles significations, expériences, compréhensions, relations et situations. Il est rare de pouvoir inscrire ces modes interventionnistes dans le champ traditionnel des études urbaines. Toutefois, cet essai défend leur importance en soulignant le potentiel considérable d’une accentuation du dialogue à travers et entre les théories urbaine et spatiale, et les pratiques artistique et culturelle, pour inspirer et élaborer des approches critiques des villes. Ce travail met en avant plusieurs enjeux spécifiques nés de ces interconnexions, significatifs sur le plan politique et pédagogique, et appelant à un débat approfondi.

This paper addresses ways in which artists and cultural practitioners have recently been using forms of urban exploration as a means of engaging with, and intervening in, cities. It takes its cues from recent events on the streets of New York that involved exploring urban spaces through artistic practices. Walks, games, investigations and mappings are discussed as manifestations of a form of ‘psychogeography’, and are set in the context of recent increasing international interest in practices associated with this term, following its earlier use by the situationists. The paper argues that experimental modes of exploration can play a vital role in the development of critical approaches to the cultural geographies of cities. In particular, discussion centres on the political significance of these spatial practices, drawing out what they have to say about two interconnected themes: ‘rights to the city’ and ‘writing the city’. Through addressing recent cases of psychogeographical experimentation in terms of these themes, the paper raises broad questions about artistic practices and urban exploration to introduce this theme issue on ‘Arts of urban exploration’ and to lead into the specific discussions in the papers that follow.

This paper is concerned with urban walking and the work of contemporary artists and writers who take to the streets in order to explore, excavate and map hidden spaces and paths in the city. The focus is on an audio-walk by the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff entitled The missing voice (case study B), which is set in east London. Connections are also drawn with other recent projects in the same area by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair. The paper discusses how these artists raise important issues about the cultural geographies of the city relating to subjectivity, representation and memory. Cardiff’s audio-walk in particular works with connections between the self and the city, between the conscious and unconscious, and between multiple selves and urban footsteps. In so doing, she directs attention to the significance of dreams and ghostly matters for thinking about the real and imagined spaces of the city

What is the role of utopian visions of the city today? What is their use at a time when, for many people, the very concept of utopia has come to an end? Taking a wide perspective on contemporary debates, this paper addresses the general retreat from utopian urbanism in recent years. It connects it with the so–called crisis of modernist urbanism in the capitalist West as well as forms of ‘utopic degeneration’, and assesses some of its implications. Arguing against the abandonment of utopian perspectives, it advocates a rethinking of utopianism through considering its potential function in developing critical approaches to urban questions. The authoritarianism of much utopian urbanism certainly needs acknowledging and criticising, but this need not entail a retreat from imagining alternatives and dreaming of better worlds. Instead, it is necessary to reconceptualise utopia, and to open up the field of utopian urbanism that for too long has been understood in an overly narrow way. The paper suggests the potential value of developing, in particular, modes of critical and transformative utopianism that are open, dynamic and that, far from being compensatory, aim to estrange the taken–for–granted, to interrupt space and time, and to open up perspectives on what might be.

The term ‘spectacle’ has played an important role in recent critical discussions of vision and visuality.  In human geography it has often been used to designate new forms of capitalist urban development, associated with display and show.  This paper examines aspects of the term by addressing the critique of the spectacle developed by the situationist Guy Debord.  It situates his writings on the subject back into the context of his engagements with the modern city between the 1950s and 1970s, and especially in Paris where he spent much of his life.  In particular, it reads them in terms of both his bleak view of urban change and alienation under capitalism as well as the ‘glimmers of light’ that he found in ‘the setting sun of this city’.  Debord’s attachment to certain urban sites within this critique of urban spectacle was often nostalgic.  Yet it can also be understood as part of his concern with challenging the ways in which urban spaces were being reconstructed, and as opening up gaps or cracks for thinking about ‘counter-sites’ and points of political intervention.

It is increasingly recognised that cartography is a contested practice, embedded within particular sets of power relations, and that maps are bound up with the production and reproduction of social life.  This paper begins by emphasising the importance of these issues for considering how the city has been mapped and represented through cartographic schemes, and it draws on debates around the power and politics of mapping, and contentions that maps are 'preeminently a language of power, not of protest' (Harley).  However, it argues that maps and mapping have not been the preserve of the powerful, and the main part of the paper is devoted to examining some specific challenges to ‘official’ cartographies of the city.  It focuses on the radical art and political group, the Situationist International, and its avant-garde predecessors of the Lettrist International, who sought to appropriate urban maps and cartographic discourses, and to develop a new form of 'psychogeographical mapping' during the 1950s and 60s. The paper provides an account of their subversions, and an assessment of how their concerns might inform contemporary discussions on cartography and the mapping of urban space.