Space and city in the situationist theory: towards a critique of urbanism

Abstract

The members of the Situationist International wrote about various topics, this being one of the aspects that characterize them: the search for a totality. Within those emerging topics are related to architecture, urban planning and geography. The space is understood from the notion of the epectacle, where the mediation of images creates social relationships with purposes of accumulation of wealth. The city is nothing more than the physical expression of the ideology of urbanism, a medium presented to the people who alien to them, which hides the structures that produce and reproduce it. With an emphasis based on the recovery of daily life, the situationists countered the urban planning of experts and planners, unitary urban planning or a reappropriation of life as a joint experience based on the means that humanity possesses.