Urbanism

Definition

Urbanism is the study and practice of city-making — the design, organization, and experience of urban environments. In this wiki, urbanism is approached from two principal directions. The critical-historical: Benjamin's "genealogy of urbanization" traces the shift from the bourgeois dwelling interior to the modernist collective, the rise of Haussmannization, and the city as the site of capital's spatial fix (Harvey). The experimental-utopian: the Situationists' unitary urbanism proposes an alternative city — the dérive, psychogeography, and the ludic city of New Babylon — in which play replaces work, wandering replaces commuting, and the city is a field of creative appropriation rather than spectacular consumption. These two threads — critique and utopia — structure the wiki's treatment of the city as the primary site of both architectural power and architectural imagination.

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — genealogy of urbanization; Paris as the capital of the 19th century.
• Guy Debord — unitary urbanism and the critique of the spectacular city.
• David Harvey — the urban process under capitalism; the spatial fix.
• Brian Elliott — Benjamin's account of cities and urbanization.
• Edward W. Soja — the geohistory and the postmetropolis: urbanism as a way of life since Jericho; the six discourses; the open fourth Urban Revolution.

Related Concepts

• Unitary Urbanism — the Situationist project of a ludic, psychogeographic city.
• Psychogeography — the study of the city's affective geographies.
• Dérive — the practice of psychogeographic urban wandering.
• Modernity — the historical condition urbanization is central to.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Benjamin for Architects — genealogy of urbanization.
• Unitary Urbanism — the Situationist urban project.
• Inside Looking In: The Prospect of the Aspect (McClure & McClure 2018) — the interior-architectural register of urbanism: the city read as a set of connected interiors — the Pantheon's piazza as "an urban room designed as an interior space" whose surrounding buildings "read as interior walls of the space, not as exterior facades"; the Pompidou's plaza as "very much an interior room in the city, entered through multiple portals," with "the city never stops; it passes right through the building"; and Säynätsalo as "a building and an urbanism… most of all… an overlapping of interiors." Where Benjamin's and the Situationists' city is the field of capital and play, the McClures' is a field of held thresholds — urbanism as the extension of the prospect of the aspect across scales. See prospect-of-the-aspect, inside-outside-dialectic.
• Metropolitan hybrids: Programming for a thriving urbanity (Luna 2018) — the classificatory and continuity registers: urbanism graded into levels of urbanity — village, town, city, metropolis — each generating its programming type (single-use, mixed-use, high-rise, metropolitan hybrid), with "a relationship… between the different levels of urbanity and the different building typologies they create"; and the programme of "maintaining a vibrant, uninterrupted urban landscape, intensifying urban cores, and adapting infrastructure into the urban fabric" — "The continuity of growth and prosperity in our cities depends on understanding different programmatic intents." Where Benjamin's urbanism is the genealogy of urbanization and the Situationists' its ludic negation, Luna's is the operational register: urbanism as what programming maintains across the existing fabric (see metropolitan-hybrids, polycentrality, urban-systems).
• Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015) — the suburban register, and the concept's edge-reversal: what happens "when the role of the suburbs shifts, so that they are no longer interpreted as a response to urbanization, but, rather, understood to be a defining aspect of urbanism?" (pp. 567–568); against the "romanticized and elegiac notions of the 'urban' as a place of community and easy diversity" (Jacobs, Young & Wilmott), and via Keil: "it almost appears that the suburban way of life has come to define the urbanism of the twenty-first century" (p. 569). The conclusion demands "forms of suburban urbanism" — spaces "not simply afterthoughts in a world of spectacular city centre and office development… of fundamental importance to any understanding of the dynamics of the contemporary city" (p. 576). See suburbanism, post-suburbia.
• Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — the explosion register and the metropolitan terminus: Lefebvre dating "the end of city-centred urbanism to 'the moment that the historic city exploded into peripheries, suburbs – like what happened in Paris, and in all sorts of places, Los Angeles, San Francisco, wild extensions of the city'" (quoted p. 592) — urbanism's historic city form exploded into the "order of horizontality and dispersal" (Quinby, quoted pp. 591–592) that displaces "the logic of the traditional city"; the outskirts adopting "almost all the characteristics of the classic city and adapted them to a lower density" (De Meyer, quoted p. 584). Against this, Keil's normative terminus is post-suburban metropolitanism: the pathway through which post-suburban metropolitanism "has to find solutions to some of the most pressing social, economic and environmental issues we confront in urban regions today" (p. 579) — and the demand that the region's densification "must be a democratic and differentiated affair that defies the stereotypes used in much public debate and planning discourse" (p. 589). Where Cochrane et al. reverse the centre-periphery economics, Keil dates urbanism's own dissolution into the peripheries — and assigns urbanism its regional-scale task. See suburbanism, implosion-explosion-dialectic, suburban-governance.
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the geohistorical and postmetropolitan registers: "urbanism as a way of life" recovered as a 10,000-year-old Chicago School phrase applied to Jericho's symbolic zone (p. 34); societal urbanization in the third Urban Revolution (Britain "from being more than 80 percent rural in 1750 to being over 80 percent urban in 1900," p. 77); "every mode of production beyond the most primitive forms of hunting and gathering deserves to be described as intrinsically urban and city-centric in its origins and development" (p. 69); the postmetropolis as the current phase — "it becomes increasingly difficult to 'escape from the city,' for the urban condition and urbanism as a way of life are becoming virtually ubiquitous" (p. 242) — with the possible fourth Urban Revolution left open (pp. 6, 148, 197). See synekism, urban-revolutions, postmetropolis.