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Title: Situationist Theses on Traffic Author: Guy Debord Date: 1959 Language: en Topics: car culture, cities, Guy Debord, situationist international Source: http://libcom.org/library/internationale-situationiste-3-article-2 Notes: Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology).
1
A mistake made by all the city planners is to consider the private
automobile (and its by-products, such as the motorcycle) as essentially
a means of transportation. In reality, it is the most notable material
symbol of the notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to
spread throughout the society. The automobile is at the center of this
general propaganda, both as supreme good of an alienated life and as
essential product of the capitalist market: It is generally being said
this year that American economic prosperity is soon going to depend on
the success of the slogan “Two cars per family.”
2
Commuting time, as Le Corbusier rightly noted, is a surplus labor which
correspondingly reduces the amount of “free” time.
3
We must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as a pleasure.
4
To want to redesign architecture to accord with the needs of the present
massive and parasitical existence of private automobiles reflects the
most unrealistic misapprehension of where the real problems lie.
Instead, architecture must be transformed to accord with the whole
development of the society, criticizing all the transitory values linked
to obsolete forms of social relationships (in the first rank of which is
the family).
5
Even if, during a transitional period, we temporarily accept a rigid
division between work zones and residence zones, we must at least
envisage a third sphere: that of life itself (the sphere of freedom and
leisure — the essence of life). Unitary urbanism acknowledges no
boundaries; it aims to form an integrated human milieu in which
separations such as work/leisure or public/private will finally be
dissolved. But before this is possible, the minimum action of unitary
urbanism is to extend the terrain of play to all desirable
constructions. This terrain will be at the level of complexity of an old
city.
6
It is not a matter of opposing the automobile as an evil in itself. It
is its extreme concentration in the cities that has led to the negation
of its function. Urbanism should certainly not ignore the automobile,
but even less should it accept it as its central theme. It should reckon
on gradually phasing it out. In any case, we can envision the banning of
auto traffic from the central areas of certain new complexes, as well as
from a few old cities.
7
Those who believe that the automobile is eternal are not thinking, even
from a strictly technological standpoint, of other future forms of
transportation. For example, certain models of one-man helicopters
currently being tested by the US Army will probably have spread to the
general public within twenty years.
8
The breaking up of the dialectic of the human milieu in favor of
automobiles (the projected freeways in Paris will entail the demolition
of thousands of houses and apartments although the housing crisis is
continually worsening) masks its irrationality under pseudopractical
justifications. But it is practically necessary only in the context of a
specific social set-up. Those who believe that the particulars of the
problem are permanent want in fact to believe in the permanence of the
present society.
9
Revolutionary urbanists will not limit their concern to the circulation
of things, or to the circulation of human beings trapped in a world of
things. They will try to break these topological chains, paving the way
with their experiments for a human journey through authentic life.