One of the goals of the Situationist International was to open up a space of resistance in the city, a resistance to the dominant progressive thought of high modernism. The way they hoped to do so was centered on the collective action of numerous individuals: it would be defined simply by using the city – by walking through it, by reclaiming what was interesting, by remapping it and editing out what was in their
view uninteresting (mostly the modernist developments). This dérive as practiced by the situationists was perhaps flawed in its dependence on individual creativity and sensibility, yet it did reveal a major gap in the modernist utopia: the absence of such human qualities as desire, intuition, feeling. Although these may not be quantifiable or directly applicable to a design, their absence in the modernist city could clarify why the perfectly designed open parks and playgrounds were not being efficiently utilized as expected. There was something missing in these designs, something that ran counter to rational understanding.
I’ve been reading about Guy Debord and the International Situationniste. It is dense reading, some of these people wrote like they never wanted people to read them. These ideas of walking as a form of understanding the city, of talking about them and reclaiming them strikes me as fascinating.
