Urbanist rhetoric: problems and origins in architectural theory

‘Urbanism’ has become a familar posture among architects, so familiar that it has recently become a target for ridicule. The actual developments of cities today make the neo-Sitte-esque contextualism of the 1970s look even more Utopian than the International Style. There are many and varied socio-economic and political determinants in many differing situations which might explain the hopes of the past and their distance from the realities of the present. However, much of the problem with urbanism is not to do with actual urban conditions or the success or failure of particular projects, but rather with how the concept of urbanism was framed in the architectural profession and academy. It ought still to be possible to develop a few operative concepts and a way of having a shared discourse on the architectural aspects of city sites. But at the moment we are caught between vast rhetorical claims for such work as ‘theory’; and a new naturalism that sees the city as generic global and beyond architecture. These notes are intended as a provocation both to the institutionalisation of urbanism and to the idea that it has becomepassé.