This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2000, Number 12.
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© 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without
the permission of the publisher
Reviewed by Andy Merrifield
The Situationist
City
by Simon Sadler
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998
Constant’s New
Babylon
The Hyper-Architecture of Desire
Book
by Mark Wigley
Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1998
THE CITY OF MARX AND COCA-COLA
In November 1994, a sixty-two-year-old
reclusive Frenchman, living in the vil-
lage of Auvergne, put a bullet through
Reviews
his heart. The man was Guy Debord,
once the guru of the Situationist Inter-
national, a radical political and artistic
movement made up of romantic young
men and women—poets, writers, artists,
and socialists—that flourished in the late
1950s and ’60s and then languished as
the conservative rot set in during the
’70s and ’80s. By the 1990s, the spectac-
ular, show-biz-obsessed society that De-
bord had so vehemently denounced had
all but taken over the world. Debord had
plainly had enough; the jaded prizefight-
er had taken too many punches to the
head. He saw only darkness. His radiant
dream of spontaneous freedom never be-
came real. But for one brief instant, on
the volatile streets of Paris in May ’68,
“imagination seized power,” and the
dream seemed within sight. The stu-
dents who threw bricks and Molotov
cocktails and demanded the impossible,
whom Jean-Luc Godard christened “the
children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” were
famous for (at least) fifteen minutes. For
a while, the city was theirs; it never
would be again. Thirty-odd years on, the
Situationists’ legacy and spirit lingers,
continuing to tell us much about our-
selves and our cities, especially about
what we’ve lost and have yet to gain.
The publication of Simon Sadler’s The
Situationist City and Mark Wigley’s
handsome Constant’s New Babylon sug-
gests that some people out there still
want to listen.
The Situationists are lost prophets of
a bygone age, an age of innocence and
naïveté, of dreams and hopes, of espresso
and wine and Gauloises and mad raving
ideals. They were immature people—
many of them students—who taught
grown-ups a thing or two about mature
life and politics. They were the most
marginal of dissidents, never more than
a dozen or so free spirits; little of their
activity extended beyond the centers of
Paris, Amsterdam, and Brussels. Their
program was epigrammatic not system-
atic, and its legacy consists only of scraps
and preliminary ideas, blurry vignettes
and vague hypotheses. No completed or
coherent body of work endures. And yet
somehow, after the Situationists, urban
politics and radical art and design would
never quite be the same.
The tale is complex, full of acronyms
and bad faith, camaraderie and vanity,
with close friends falling out over each
other’s petit bourgeois pretensions
and counter-revolutionary predilections.
Sadler does his best to unravel the
fine-grained detail. He locates the Situa-
tionists in European cultural and archi-
tectural history and reveals the ideas and
shenanigans of their precious inner cir-
cle: Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Ivan
Chtcheglov, Michèle Bernstein, Asger
Jorn, and Constant Nieuwenhuys.
H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 1
Book Reviews
(Ralph Rumney sat on the fringes in
London, while Henri Lefebvre, an older
figure who taught many budding Situa-
tionists sociology and Marxism at the
University of Strasbourg in 1958, tow-
ered somewhere overhead.) It’s a ripping
yarn, with egos on show everywhere.
There’s hope and glory, too, as well as
blood and tears, back-stabbing and ex-
pulsions, ideological deviations and
squabbles, especially between Debord
and Constant, and Debord and Lefeb-
vre, and Constant and Jorn. As is so of-
ten the case with the Left, the
Situationists at times seem harder on
themselves and their fellow travelers
than they do on their ruling-class antag-
onists.
The prehistory of the Situationists
involves several small subversive art
groups. First came the Lettrist Interna-
tional, an underground Minimalist set-
up pioneered by Debord. Next was
COBRA, the Copenhagen, Brussels, and
Amsterdam Surrealist and experimental
design conglomerate, dominated by the
Dutch utopian architect and ex-Provo
and anarchist Constant Nieuwenhuys
(who later abbreviated his name to the
snappier “Constant”). Then the Imagin-
ist Bauhaus entered the fray, Asger Jorn’s
brainchild, a Brussels-based crew with
an Abstract Expressionist bent. London’s
Psychogeographical Association belongs
in there somewhere, as does the so-
called Congress of Free Artists. All these
groups were politicized, revolutionary in
their intention to renew art, to renew
the action of art on life, and to transform
both life and the city in the process.
Spontaneity and playfulness became
their lingua franca. They found intellec-
tual sustenance in the works of Hegel,
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Rabelais,
Piranesi, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Artaud,
Brecht, and Breton played cameo roles
in the drama that began to unfold after
July 1957, when delegates from all the
above groups gathered in the Italian vil-
lage of Cosio d’Arroscia, “in a state of
semi-drunkenness,” to establish the Sit-
uationist International.
The SI was a reaction to bourgeois
culture and politics, on the one hand,
and to the sterile, austere functionalism
2 H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E
The Situationist City and Constant’s New Babylon
of High Modernism, on the other. And
right from the start the SI engineered an
attack. Both bourgeois and avant-garde
high culture, they said, eviscerated the
city; each left its debilitating imprint on
the built environment and on social
space; each was pathological to the hu-
man spirit and to genuine social progress
and freedom. Architecture or revolu-
tion? Neither, to the Situationists, could
be avoided. In the modern city, Logos
triumphed over Eros, order over disor-
der, the organization man over the rebel.
The cities of the Communist Eastern
bloc were reviled as much as their com-
modified capitalist counterparts. Le
Corbusier’s machine aesthetic and “radi-
ant” utopia received the thumbs down,
as did the rigid minimalism of CIAM.
Ditto the notorious grand ensembles of
barrack blocks; and Oscar Niemeyer’s
Brasilia, Sadler notes, was “one of the
modern movement’s most extraordinary
achievements, and as such was despised
by the Situationists” (48). According to
the SI, all these places and ideas em-
braced the Cartesian master plan—strict
zoning laws and spatial compartmental-
ization created desolate desert-like
spaces, and these desert spaces created
deserts of the mind, Alphavilles of the
body and soul. In response, the Situa-
tionists defended the urban mix, wanted
to move beyond the rational city, strove
to reassert daring, imagination, and
thrill in social life and urban culture.
Guy Debord remained the SI’s lead-
ing theoretical light throughout its brief
life, and Paris became his workshop.
Much like Walter Benjamin two decades
earlier, Debord adored Paris, yet
lamented its downfall, detested its em-
bourgoisement, seethed in the face of cor-
porate colonization and anodyne
museumification. His beloved Les
Halles, with its cheap bars, gritty streets,
and market halls—and where Debord
lived on a shoestring in a studio apart-
ment with Michèle Bernstein—was es-
pecially under threat. The modernizing
bulldozer and the chic boutiques and
wine bars cast their shadow right outside
Debord’s doorstep. Before long, Les
Halles became the testing ground for the
ideas contained in his masterpiece, The
Society of the Spectacle (1967). Indeed,
Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s infa-
mous Pompidou Center, located in the
quarter, was, in Sadler’s words, “a show-
case for industrial design, canonically
great modern painting, and information,
sheathed in a brash functionalism.” As
such, it “represented one of the purest
and most refined forms of spectacle, an
attraction more popular than the Eiffel
Tower. Profoundly divorced from the
sort of radical local initiative implied by
situationist urbanism, Beaubourg
seemed to be one more piece of territory
lost in the battle for urban space” (65).
The Society of the Spectacle, since trans-
lated into dozens of languages, delved
into the belly of the spectacular beast. Its
221 strange, short theses, aphoristic in
form, peppered with irony, are Niet-
© 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher
zschean to a T. Yet the content of the
theses is uncompromisingly Marxist. In
Thesis 35, Debord writes, typically: “In
the essential movement of the spectacle,
which consists of taking up all that exist-
ed in human activity in a fluid state so as
to possess it in a congealed state as
things which have become the exclusive
value by their formulation in negative of
lived value, we recognize our old enemy,
the commodity, who knows so well how
to seem at first glance something trivial
and obvious, while on the contrary it is
so complex and so full of metaphysical
subtleties.” “This is the principle,” De-
bord adds in the next thesis, “of com-
modity fetishism”—Marx’s major insight
from the opening chapter of Capital.
Marx recognized how market economies
cannily transform relationships between
real people—workers and consumers
and citizens—into relationships between
“things” like money and capital and la-
bor power. After a while, these “things”
begin to control and condition every hu-
man being and assume a perverse logic
of their own, severing organic ties be-
tween people and their environments,
and between people and other people.
“Things” become at once illusory and
material, deceptive and seductive, the
worst and best that modern culture has
to offer.
But Debord takes commodity
fetishism a step beyond Marx. In postwar
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Book Reviews
capitalism, he reasons, “the spectacle is
the moment when the commodity has at-
tained the total occupation of social life”
(from Thesis 42). The “world of things”
has colonized images and events, archi-
tecture and culture, mass media and
everyday life. Little wonder that Debord
wrote The Society of the Spectacle “with
the deliberate intention of doing harm to
spectacle society,” of puncturing the
fetishism, overcoming the alienation. In
the process he and Constant and their SI
comrades formulated some weird truths
of their own. One was a holistic and
wholesome type of urbanism, an alterna-
tive city, sublime and prototypical, where
there’d simply be more there there. At
the heart of the Situationist city—at the
heart of The Situationist City—thus re-
sides a major political and spatial im-
pulse: “unitary urbanism.”
Unitary urbanism would battle against
planners and efficiency experts and men
in suits who sat in fancy offices high
above everyone else; it would work
against market-driven cities, too, against
cities where spaces became “abstract”
commodities, monopolized by the high-
est bidder. The unitary city would be dis-
ruptive and playful, reuniting all that had
been physically and socially sundered,
emphasizing forgotten and beleaguered
places, mysterious corners, quiet squares,
teeming neighborhoods, sidewalks filled
with strollers, parks with old-timers in
berets sitting on the benches. The only
predictable thing in the Situationist city
would be its unpredictability, its random
intensity, its “unity of ambience.” To
highlight their ideal city—their Naked
City—Debord and Jorn cut up a map of
Paris and rearranged the parts into a
thrilling collage. The counterpart activi-
ty was a surreal trip, a dreamy journey
through Parisian passageways, always on
foot, drifting for hours, often at night,
identifying subtle moods and nuances of
neighborhoods. In this way the SI would
tap the city’s unconscious; primitive
walkie-talkies helped them communicate
with each other, sometimes miles apart.
Through these imaginary and real
dérives, Situationists became latter-day
flâneurs, aimless strollers, botanizing on
the asphalt, wandering in and out of pub-
3 H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E
The Situationist City and Constant’s New Babylon
lic spaces, accumulating rich qualitative
data, key ingredients in their experimen-
tal “psychogeography.”
To up the political ante, the Situa-
tionists also invented détournement, or
hijacking, which monkey-wrenched ac-
cepted behavior and received meaning in
bourgeois cities. Squatting and occupy-
ing buildings and streets are classic ex-
amples of détournement, as are graffiti
and “free associative” expressionist art.
These actions would somehow create
new “situations,” turn things around,
recreate meaning out of nonsense (and
nonsense out of meaning); they would
inspire revolts inside one’s head as well
as revolts out on the street. The dé-
tourned city would transform the Pla-
tonic Republic into Rabelais’s Abbey of
Thélème: “hypocrites, bigots . . . hungry
lawyers . . . [and] money suckers, stay
away.” Détournement involved collec-
tive and individual feats of resistance,
both serious—deadly serious—and fun.
At best these feats were infectious “festi-
vals of the people,” luminous street
demonstrations that recalled the glory
days of the 1871 Paris Commune; they
combined rent strikes with a general
strike, while retaining—but only just—a
rambunctious carnivalesque spirit. A lot
of the May 1968 skirmishes incorporat-
ed détournement; the streets of Paris be-
came something of a microcosm of the
Situationist city, the staging of epic—or
absurd—theater. “To be free in 1968,”
read one wall graffito, “is to participate.”
In the end, détournement, as Harold
Rosenberg once said, is really “surreal-
ism in the streets.”1
One of the nice things about Sadler’s
book is that, unlike much writing on the
Situationists, it is relatively unpreten-
tious. These days the topic seems to be
fair game for hip cultural critics and
“discourse” merchants, those who speak
about transgressive and emancipatory
counter-hegemonic strategies and radi-
cal postmodern deconstructivist inter-
ventions. In contrast, Sadler says what
he has to say in plain language. If any-
thing, the language is maybe a little too
plain for its own good. The prose is of-
ten flat and, given the subject, surpris-
ingly uninspired and uninspiring.
Occasionally the narrative gets clogged,
unable to bear the weight of the accu-
mulated history, and its shifts back and
through time, as well as the large cast of
characters who enter and depart the
scene, can become confusing, even be-
wildering. The Situationist City has none
of the idiosyncratic charm and imagina-
tion of Greil Marcus’s “secret history of
the 20th century,” Lipstick Traces, which
explores the continuity between Dada
and Situationism and punk rock. (Appar-
ently Malcolm McLaren, flamboyant
creator of the Sex Pistols, was smitten by
the Situationists.) Moreover, Marcus
sketches in the connections between the
utopian events of ’68—when protestors
demanded the impossible—and the ni-
hilism of the early ’80s—a period that
saw the “end of history,” and the “No
© 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher
Future” of Johnny Rotten. Sadler stays
curiously silent on this crucial theme,
and says nothing, too, about how “No
Future” eventually became the platform
for the “There Is No Alternative”
mantra propounded by Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. (The re-
frain lives on, of course, in the wishful
thinking of today’s proponents of global-
ization.) Ultimately, The Situationist City
lacks serious political engagement; it
strives for but never quite achieves the
radical oomph of its subject.
This same shortcoming mars Con-
stant’s New Babylon, Mark Wigley’s im-
pressively designed, lavishly illustrated
monograph about the work and career of
Constant Nieuwenhuys. Some of the
photos are quirky, like the black-and-
white close-up of Debord and Constant,
et al., toasting each other’s health in
Munich’s Hofbräuhaus. There are exhil-
arating images of bright-colored decon-
structed landscapes and plexiglass
models of futuristic cities. A few of Con-
stant’s designs look like aircraft hangers,
or half-finished shopping malls, massive
construction sites with gaping steel scaf-
folding that dwarf anything Richard Ser-
ra has done. A lot of the designs appear
incomprehensible and dumb. In their
inimitable way, these are all raw attempts
to “concretize” unitary urbanism, to
make it more graphic; though it’s hard to
see any of this as a “hyper-architecture
FA L L 2 0 0 0
Book Reviews
of desire”—as the book’s subtitle puts
it—especially since none of the images
contains people.
Wigley’s accompanying text, which
prefaces Constant’s own scribbles, is
equally disembodied. It skirts real-life
content; written in the self-indulgent
tone of the haute cognoscenti, it has lit-
tle humanity. Wigley seems as detached
from his own prose as he is from the
people who’d supposedly live in Con-
stant’s city. “The floating transparent
layers,” he says, “carry delicate tracery of
some kind of embedded technical system
and the division between spaces is
formed by folded metal screens, cut-outs
in the floor, changes in lighting, and so
on. . . . Inhabitants of New Babylon
were meant to promiscuously combine
resources to produce unique transient
spaces. . . . Perhaps the most striking
resonance is the way the project prefig-
ures contemporary concerns with elec-
tronic space. Its fantasy of an infinitely
flexible, ever-shifting, interactive spatial-
ity is echoed in countless computer-
based models” (11, 63).
Debord first coined the term “New
Babylon” one winter’s night in 1959,
when he responded enthusiastically to
Constant’s drawing-board visions. The
name stuck, even as his and Constant’s
friendship waned. The project received
its first public unveiling a year later in a
small gallery in Essen, Holland. Con-
stant effectively gave the finger to the ar-
chitectural profession: architects, he
insisted, must shift their emphasis from
form to atmosphere—ambience—“so
radically that architecture itself will dis-
appear as a discrete practice” (34). With
New Babylon, Constant strove to model
dérive by constructing redolent passage-
ways and shocking landscapes, by super-
imposing routes and spaces on other
routes and spaces, sometimes on existing
cityscapes, other times on new cities.
Above all, he posited an urban environ-
ment overflowing with content and tex-
ture and topographic fantasy; Constant’s
hope against hope was that Marx’s nor-
mative Good Life, in which “the free de-
velopment of each is a condition for the
free development of all,” would become
the means as well as the ends. As Con-
4 H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E
The Situationist City and Constant’s New Babylon
stant conceived it, all useful yet repetitive
activity would become automated; mobi-
lized at grand scale, technology would
release people from the drudgery of ne-
cessity, guaranteeing a healthy dose of
free time. There’d be big institutional
transformations, too, like collective own-
ership of land and the means of produc-
tion, together with the rationalization of
the manufacturing of consumer goods,
making scarcity old hat. In this vein,
Wigley admits, “Constant designed a
provocation rather than a city”; “like
striptease,” New Babylon “stimulates ac-
tion and therefore it is real” (71).
Throughout the 1960s, Constant
mentored a lot of Provo street actions
and rebellion. After a while, he started to
borrow a few of the Provo’s disruptive
tropes for himself, inserting them into
his radical architectural models. While
he rejected the idea that human nature
was intrinsically violent, Constant saw
violence as legitimate in urban realpoli-
tik, fundamental to the achievement of
New Babylon ends. However, before the
dust could settle in the streets of Paris,
“revolutionary violence and postrevolu-
tionary life became indistinguishable”
(70). Both the progressive dreams of the
insurgents and the flailing batons of the
cops left a lot of bruised bodies. Sudden-
ly, the very idea of a postrevolutionary
life, with its optimism and promise, dis-
sipated. Constant’s visionary city idea
dissolved, the music was over, there was
no other side to break on through to.
Neither Sadler nor Wigley offers a
happy ending. In fact, neither offers any
discernible ending at all. We hope for an
epilogue, some coda to the tale, anything
that might bring the Situationists’ legacy
up to date. But we are left wondering
what these books have in mind beyond
the retrieval of eccentric architectural
history—beyond the vivid descriptions,
the glossy pictures, the remembrances of
lost spaces. What happened to those
children of Marx and Coca-Cola? We al-
ready know about Debord’s grim fate;
other ’60s children, of course, simply
lost their minds, while some, like Jerry
Rubin, turned to Wall Street for some
sort of redemption. But what about their
ideals, their dreams? Did they get buried
in the rubble, or did they get dialectical-
ly inverted? For during the 1980s and
’90s, our would-be revolutionaries had
to do the truly impossible: they had to
demand not the utopian but the realistic;
they had to wise up, grow up, listen up
to the pinstriped spin doctors, to the
technocrats and the disciples of the
Third Way. In the face of the emerging
Coca-Cola realism, the Situationists’ ur-
ban romance and in-your-face politics
began to appear juvenile, even idiotic.
Those children of Marx who tried to
overthrow the spectacular society even-
tually got consumed by it; eventually
they plunged down the abyss they’d
been staring into for way too long.
In The Situationist City and Constant’s
New Babylon, the story pretty much stops
in 1972, when the Situationist Interna-
© 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher
tional evaporated. Perhaps this prema-
ture closure can be explained by the fact
that neither book makes any argument,
posits a central thesis. They leave the
reader with nothing that cuts through the
description, that might let us out the
other side, into daylight. In both books
the Situationist saga is a benign not an
active history; neither book seems to see
the past as meaningful in the present, as
a past that might still be alive today—
even if the action has slowed. Indeed, if
the light grew dim in the 1980s, a shaft
of sunshine could be glimpsed in the
1990s. Slowly, air began to penetrate the
vacuum, water began to nourish arid
ground, and “childish” pranks erupted in
the streets once again. This time around
the hair styles and the fashions were dif-
ferent and the protagonists spoke a dif-
ferent language. And yet the spirit
remained definitively Situationist: the
new protestors wanted the world, and
they wanted it now.
“Reclaim the Streets,” one such
group calls itself. In recent years their
demonstrations have closed streets in
Times Square in Manhattan, in Sydney,
Australia, in north, south, and central
London, and in many European cities.
In these places crowds have danced and
shouted and partied, crowds of men and
women (and children) from diverse
backgrounds—revolutionaries, students,
dancers, workers, activists, madmen,
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Book Reviews The Situationist City and Constant’s New Babylon

malcontents. In their “Festivals of Love
and Life,” they’ve brought traffic to a
standstill and demanded pedestrians’ and
bikers’ right to the city. In New York,
they’ve rallied against Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani’s “quality of life” campaign
against the homeless, sidewalk vendors,
and the poor. In Seattle, right under the
noses of World Trade Organization big-
wigs, Reclaim the Streets and several
other radical groups established “Seat-
tle’s Citizen Committee.” This grass-
roots alliance instigated widespread civil
disobedience, embarrassed the politi-
cians and business honchos who were
meeting to carve up the world into prof-
it centers, and made a lot of noise de-
manding an “alternative to global
capitalism and local commercialism.”
These sorts of initiatives are rediscover-
who wanted “their own festivals, their
own weekdays, their own periods of
mourning,” and whose “greatest enjoy-
ment” was to live dangerously, to build a
city under Vesuvius. Maybe one day we
too can build a preparatory city, our very
own Situationist city, under a smolder-
ing volcano.
Notes
1. Harold Rosenberg, The Re-Definition of Art
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972),
chapter 4.
Andy Merrifield teaches urbanism and social theo-
ry at the Graduate School of Geography at Clark
University. His books include The Urbanization of
Injustice, coedited with Erik Swyngedouw; his arti-
cles have appeared in The Nation, Social Text,

© 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher
ing a new-millennium Situationism, Rethinking Marxism, and Monthly Review.
“transforming stretches of asphalt into a
place where people can gather without
cars, without shopping malls, without
permission from the state . . . to develop
the seeds of the future in the present so-
ciety,” in the words of a poster I saw on a
wall somewhere on the Lower East Side
of New York. Much like their ’60s fore-
bears, these participants have a keen
sense not only that cities should be excit-
ing places but also that politics can be
exciting too. And they’ve shown an
amazing capacity to politicize young
people—hitherto alienated from ballot-
box politics—and to make them care
about the fate of our cities and about
democracy. This is one way to read Situ-
ationist history backwards.
Ultimately, the Situationists remind
us of what’s gone, of the cheap thrills of
the everyday city, the city now belea-
guered from every side, airbrushed by
corporate logos, plagued by burgeoning
rents and inflated property values, greed
and exploitation. The Situationists still
sing a paean to the oppressed minor lea-
guer, to those who play in worn-out city
ballparks—to those who still mix and
mingle in street-corner societies in the
fast-disappearing affordable parts of the
city. Meanshile, the Situationists remind
us of what we need, of what we have yet
to achieve. Like Nietzsche, they were
“preparatory men,” people of the future,

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