Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism (review)

When I was growing up, my family lived in a big, old, rambling house full of nooks, crannies, odd chambers, extra staircases, basement rooms, and attic closets—just the sort of spaces children love to explore and the situationists loved to imagine they could duplicate on the vast scale of the cityscape. Childlike play and nomadic wandering ranked high in the estimation of the situationists, and not least that of the Dutch artist Constant who dominates the concluding chapters of David Pinder's study of twentieth-century urban visionaries. There has been a resurgence of interest in the situationists over the past couple of decades, and Pinder's volume comes on the heels of several other studies, in particular Simon Sadler's The Situationist City (1998). While much of the ground Pinder covers will be familiar to readers of Sadler, Kristin Ross, and others (not to mention the veritable cottage industry in French, of which a good number are noted here), Visions of the City makes several new claims on the reader's attention: a critical consideration of the situationists in the context of twentieth-century urbanism, especially Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier; a depth of research and a careful historicization of the different situationists at different moments in the movement's history; and an analysis of the situationists' urbanism specifically in the context of utopia.

Pinder provides what we could term a psychogeographical map of twentieth-century urbanism on the model of his situationist subject: rationalistic and analytical in its methodology but based on a profound belief that the surface contours of its subject provide a partial, deadened, and sanitized image of the insights it has to offer. Visions of the City is framed by chapters that contextualize its concerns in terms of radical twentieth-century social movements, space theory (especially that of Henri Lefebvre), urban planning and architecture, and the vagaries of utopianism during the last century. Within this frame, three chapters are devoted to "abstract utopias" (246)—the "restorative utopias" characterized by the garden city movement and other urbanisms rooted in images of the past, and the "modernist calls to order" of Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus, and other proponents of a resolutely futuristic urbanism. A further three chapters are given over to the "concrete utopia" (246) of the situationists.

Pinder's methodology and argumentation differ somewhat for each set of chapters. His goal in revisiting the touchstone movements of early twentieth-century urban planning is to read them against the grain of their critical reputation and practical reception as urbanisms of "authoritanism and controlling perfectionism" (53). Not that Pinder denies the accusation; rather, he wants to uncover what he also sees as "a richness and potential subversiveness of function" (53) that have been obscured in the mainstream legacy of these movements. Pinder's psychogeographical reading employs two strategies. First, and far more than most writers on the subject, he resolutely historicizes the writings and architecture of Howard, Le Corbusier, and others, tracing their development, detours, dead ends, and changes of direction through a careful study of published and unpublished texts and images. Second, he reads them dialectically, putting, for example, Le Corbusier in dialogue with the surrealists in both a theoretical and a historical sense (Chapter 4), and scrutinizing utopian urbanism for the insights it can provide into ambivalences and contradictions in the social construction of urban space rather than as a fixed and monolithic body of theory.

Pinder's task in Chapters 5–7 is more complicated, since his critical method leads him to seek the hidden conservatism and countenance the possible obsolescence of a movement whose strategy of critique closely mirrors (and inspires) his own. At times, these chapters of necessity retread familiar situationist topoi and clichés without adding anything new, just as Pinder's argument against a "fundamental break" in the Situationist International from unitary urbanism toward a critique of urbanist ideology is so anodyne as to constitute...