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Environmental Planning

  And he who becomes master of a city used to being free and does not
  destroy her can expect to be destroyed by her, because always she has as
  pretext in rebellion the name of liberty and her old customs, which never
  through either length of time or benefits are forgotten, and in spite of
  anything that can be done or foreseen, unless citizens are disunited or
  dispersed, they do not forget that name and those institutions.... 

Machiavelli, The Prince 


165 
   The capitalist production system has unified space, breaking down the
   boundaries between one society and the next. This unification is also a
   process, at once extensive and intensive, of trivialization. Just as the
   accumulation of commodities mass-produced for the abstract space of the
   market inevitably shattered all regional and legal barriers, as well as all
   those corporative restrictions that served in the Middle Ages to preserve the
   quality of craft production, so too it was bound to dissipate the
   independence and quality of places. The power to homogenize is the heavy
   artillery that has battered down all Chinese walls. 

166 
   If henceforward the free space of commodities is subject at every moment to
   modification and reconstruction, this is so that it may become ever more
   identical to itself, and achieve as nearly as possible a perfectly static
   monotony. 

167 
   This society eliminates geographical distance only to reap distance
   internally in the form of spectacular separation. 

168 
   Human circulation considered as something to be consumed -- tourism -- is a
   by-product of the circulation of commodities; basically, tourism is the
   chance to go and see what has been made trite. The economic management of
   travel to different places suffices in itself to ensure those places'
   interchangeability. The same modernization that has deprived travel of its
   temporal aspect has likewise deprived it of the reality of space. 

169 
   A society that molds its entire surroundings has necessarily evolved its own
   techniques for working on the material basis of this set of tasks. That
   material basis is the society's actual territory. Urbanism is the mode of
   appropriation of the natural and human environment by capitalism, which, true
   to its logical development toward absolute domination, can (and now must)
   refashion the totality of space into its own peculiar decor. 

170 
   The requirement of capitalism that is met by urbanism in the form of a
   freezing of life might be described, in Hegelian terms, as an absolute
   predominance of "tranquil side-by-sideness" in space over "restless becoming
   in the progression of time." 

171 
   It is true that all the capitalist economy's technical forces should be
   understood as effecting separations, but in the case of urbanism we are
   dealing with the fitting out of the general basis of those forces, with the
   readying of the ground in preparation for their deployment -- in a word, with
   the technology of separation itself. 

172 
   Urbanism is the modern way of tackling the ongoing need to safeguard class
   power by ensuring the atomization of workers dangerously massed together by
   the conditions of urban production. The unremitting struggle that has had to
   be waged against the possibility of workers coming together in whatever
   manner has found a perfect field of action in urbanism. The effort of all
   established powers, since the experience of the French Revolution, to augment
   their means of keeping order in the street has eventually culminated in the
   suppression of the street itself. Evoking a "civilization . . . moving along
   a one-way road," Lewis Mumford, in The City in History, points out that with
   the advent of long-distance mass communications, the isolation of the
   population has become a much more effective means of control. But the general
   trend toward isolation, which is the essential reality of urbanism, must also
   embody a controlled reintegration of the workers based on the planned needs
   of production and consumption. Such an integration into the system must
   recapture isolated individuals as individuals isolated together. Factories
   and cultural centers, holiday camps and housing developments -- all are
   expressly oriented to the goals of a pseudo-community of this kind. These
   imperatives pursue the isolated individual right into the family cell, where
   the generalized use of receivers of the spectacle's message ensures that his
   isolation is filled with the dominant images -- images that indeed attain
   their full force only by virtue of this isolation. 

173 
   In all previous periods, architectural innovation served the ruling class
   exclusively; now for the first time there is such a thing as a new
   architecture specifically for the poor. Both formal poverty and the immense
   extension of this new experience in housing are the result of its mass
   character, dictated at once by its ultimate ends and by the modern conditions
   of construction. At the core of these conditions we naturally find an 
   authoritarian decision-making process that abstractly develops any
   environment into an environment of abstraction. The same architecture appears
   everywhere just as soon as industrialization begins, even in the countries
   that are the furthest behind in this regard, for even these are considered a
   fertile terrain for the implantation of the new type of social existence. The
   threshold crossed in the growth of society's material power, and the
   corresponding lag in the conscious appropriation of this power, are just as
   clearly manifested in urbanism as they are, say, in the spheres of nuclear
   weapons or of the management of births (where the possibility of manipulated
   heredity is already on the horizon). 

174 
   We already live in the era of the self-destruction of the urban environment.
   The explosion of cities into the countryside, covering it with what Mumford
   calls "formless masses" of urban debris, is presided over in unmediated
   fashion by the requirements of consumption. The dictatorship of the
   automobile, the pilot product of the first stage of commodity abundance, has
   left its mark on the landscape in the dominance of freeways that bypass the
   old urban centers and promote an ever greater dispersal. Meanwhile, instants
   of incomplete reorganization of the urban fabric briefly crystallize around
   the "distribution factories" -- giant shopping centers created ex nihilo and
   surrounded by acres of parking space; but even these temples of frenetic
   consumption are subject to the irresistible centrifugal trend, and when, as
   partial reconstructions of the city, they in turn become overtaxed secondary
   centers, they are likewise cast aside. The technical organization of
   consumption is thus merely the herald of that general process of dissolution
   which brings the city to the point where it consumes itself. 

175 
   The history of the economy, whose development has turned entirely on the
   opposition between town and country, has progressed so far that it has now
   succeeded in abolishing both of these poles. The present paralysis of overall
   historical development, due to the exclusive pursuit of the economy's
   independent goals, means that the moment when town and country begin to
   disappear, so far from marking the transcendence of the split between them,
   marks instead their simultaneous collapse. The reciprocal erosion of town and
   country that has resulted from the faltering of the historical movement by
   whose means existing urban reality should have been superseded is clearly
   reflected in the bits and pieces of both that are strewn across the most
   advanced portions of the industrialized world. 

176 
   Universal history was born in cities, and attained its majority with the
   town's decisive victory over the country. Marx considered that one of the
   bourgeoisie's great merits as a revolutionary class was the fact that it
   "subjected the country to the rule of the towns" -- whose very air made one
   free. But while the history of cities is certainly a history of freedom, it
   is also a history of tyranny, of State administration controlling not only
   the country but also the city itself. The towns may have supplied the
   historical battleground for the struggle for freedom, but up to now they have
   not taken possession of that freedom. The city is the locus of history
   because it embodies at once a concentration of social power, which is what
   makes the historical enterprise possible, and a consciousness of the past.
   The present urge to destroy cities is thus merely another index of the
   belatedness of the economy's subordination to historical consciousness, the
   tardiness of a unification that will enable society to recapture its
   alienated powers. 

177 
   The country demonstrates just the opposite fact<63> isolation and separation" (
   The German Ideology). As it destroys the cities, urbanism institutes a 
   pseudo-countryside devoid not only of the natural relationships of the
   country of former times but also of the direct (and directly contested)
   relationships of the historical cities. The forms of habitation and the
   spectacular control of today's "planned environment" have created a new,
   artificial peasantry. The geographic dispersal and narrow-mindedness that
   always prevented the peasantry from undertaking independent action and
   becoming a creative historical force are equally characteristic of these
   modern producers, for whom the movement of a world of their own making is
   every bit as inaccessible as were the natural rhythms of work for an earlier
   agrarian society. The traditional peasantry was the unshakeable basis of
   "Oriental despotism," and its very scatteredness called forth bureaucratic
   centralization; the new peasantry that has emerged as the product of the
   growth of modern state bureaucracy differs from the old in that its apathy
   has had to be historically manufactured and maintained: natural ignorance has
   given way to the organized spectacle of error. The "new towns" of the
   technological pseudo-peasantry are the clearest of indications, inscribed on
   the land, of the break with historical time on which they are founded; their
   motto might well be: "On this spot nothing will ever happen -- and nothing
   ever has." Quite obviously, it is precisely because the liberation of
   history, which must take place in the cities, has not yet occurred, that the
   forces of historical absence have set about designing their own exclusive
   landscape there. 

178 
   The same history that threatens this twilight world is capable of subjecting
   space to a directly experienced time. The proletarian revolution is that 
   critique of human geography whereby individuals and communities must
   construct places and events commensurate with the appropriation, no longer
   just of their labor, but of their total history. By virtue of the resulting
   mobile space of play, and by virtue of freely chosen variations in the rules
   of the game, the independence of places will be rediscovered without any new
   exclusive tie to the soil, and thus too the authentic journey will be
   restored to us, along with authentic life understood as a journey containing
   its whole meaning within itself. 

179 
   The most revolutionary idea concerning city planning derives neither from
   urbanism, nor from technology, nor from aesthetics. I refer to the decision
   to reconstruct the entire environment in accordance with the needs of the
   power of established workers' councils -- the needs, in other words, of the
   anti-State dictatorship of the proletariat, the needs of dialogue invested
   with executive power. The power of workers' councils can be effective only if
   it transforms the totality of existing conditions, and it cannot assign
   itself any lesser a task if it aspires to be recognized -- and to recognize
   itself -- in a world of its own design. 


   From the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord