New Babylon

Definition

New Babylon is Constant's extended utopian project (1956–1974) for a situationist city: a wide-mesh, decentralized network of elevated, multilayer sectors of movable prefabricated elements for a nomadic "New Babylonian" citizenry liberated from work, the family, and fixed habitation. Organized on the "principle of disorientation" — the deliberate confusion of spatial hierarchy through obstacles and incomplete geometries — and avoiding functional zoning, it is intended to multiply variability and enable endless play and the dérive. Its title evokes both the material abundance of automation and an anti-Christian morality.

Key Thinkers

• Constant — author of the New Babylon models and writings.
• Guy Debord — attributed the title and collaborated in the situationist framing.
• Libero Andreotti — documents the project's play-based rationale.

Related Concepts

• Unitary Urbanism — New Babylon is its architectural realization.
• Play — the New Babylonians' primary activity.
• Dérive — the city's continuous activity.

A cousin programme of the same years should be read alongside New Babylon: Superstudio's microevent/microenvironment (MoMA, 1972 — see microevent-microenvironment), reconstructed in this wiki by Gattegno & Johnson (2018). Both projects are nomad utopias of post-scarcity: "nomadism, impermanence, mobility, and transience were the norm," with habitation produced by plugging into an energy-and-information grid ("All you have to do is stop and connect a plug, and the desired microclimate is immediately created") rather than by built sectors. The difference is architectural: Constant's New Babylon multiplies sectors (built, movable, disorienting), while Superstudio abolishes the built altogether — "a landscape devoid of any enclosure, envelope, or environmental membrane." Constant's disorientation-engineering is replaced by pure infrastructure; play by the microevent. Gattegno & Johnson add the retrospective verdict: that energy landscape "exists today," but as a grid "rais[ing] issues of ownership, privacy, access, and capitalism" — the fate both utopias presupposed away.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Unitary Urbanism: Play-Tactics of the SI
• Debord, Constant, and the Politics of Situationist Urbanism
• Architecture and Modernity: A Critique
• Troubles in Theory Part VI: From Utopia to Heterotopia (Vidler 2008) — Constant's New Babylon as a situationist "other space" against the rationalised city.
• source-notes/gattegno-johnson-2018-ambient-environments-sentient-spaces

Open Questions

• Was New Babylon a genuine site of liberation or a romantic compensation, vulnerable to assimilation into the commercial megastructure speculation of the 1970s–80s (as several situationists charged)?