Unitary Urbanism

Unitary Urbanism

Unitary urbanism (UU) was the critique of status quo urbanism employed by the Lettrist International and then further developed by the Situationist International between approximately 1953 and 1960.

The praxis originates from the Lettrist technique of hypergraphics which was applied to architecture by the Lettrist International (LI). The UU critique of urbanism was further developed in the 1950s by the LI, consisting of a range of practices including but not limited to:

  • The situation
  • The dérive (drift)
  • Psychogeography
  • Detournement
  • industrial painting
  • recuperation
  • Revolution

The critical practice continued to be developed by the Situationists and others. It was largely abandoned for the Debordian theory of the spectacle after the Second Situationist International and Situationist Antinational were formed. London based evoL Psychogeographix is one of the few groups openly practicing unitary urbanism today.

Unitary Urbanism was announced as a very specific praxis at the Alba platform between the Lettrist International and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. In his Address to the Alba Conference of September 1956, the Lettrist International Delegate Gil J Wolman announced: "A unitary urbanism — the synthesis of art and technology that we call for — must be constructed according to certain new values of life, values which now need to be distinguished and disseminated." . This mode of urban practice was also called for in a tract distributed during a demonstration by Lettrists in Turin, Italy in December 1956.

Constant Nieuwenhuys and Guy Debord disagreed about the praxis, issuing the designation "the complex, ongoing activity which consciously recreates man's environment according to the most advanced conceptions in every domain," however the widening gulf between Nieuwenhuys' "structural" approach and Debord's focus on "content" eventually lead to Nieuwenhuy's split from the SI in 1960 .

Unitary urbanism, one of the major early Situationist concerns, stands on two tenets:

  • The rejection of the standard Euclidean, almost wholly functional approach to urban architectural design, and
  • The rejection of the compartmentalized way in which "art" is typically detached from its surroundings.

In the relative utopia of the UU ideal, the structural and artistic elements of human's metropolitan surroundings are blended into such grey area that one cannot identify where function ends and play begins. The resulting society, while it caters to fundamental needs, does so in an atmosphere of continual exploration, leisure, and stimulating ambience.

Read more about Unitary Urbanism:  Unitary Urbanists, Quotes