Reading a syllabus such as the one penned by Richard Plunz, director of the “urban design” graduate program at Columbia University, New York, may give an idea of the nature of the semantic and discursive investments in play. “Urban Design is pursued as a critical re-assessment of conventional approaches relative to questions of site, program, infrastructure, and form-mass, as they have been defined by urban design practice during the past century. The Urban Design curriculum is pedagogically unique on the role of architecture in the formation of a discourse on urbanism at this moment of post-industrial development and indeed, of post-urban sensibility relative to traditional Euro-American settlement norms.” (Urban Design, Open House for GSAPP Architecture Programs – MArch, MSAAD, MSAUD, Columbia University, November 4, 2009). The expression “post-urban sensibility” is intriguing, as it points to the possibility of thinking beyond the discipline which is advertising itself by using it. Although the term “post-urban” has developed a very specific meaning in the architectural and urbanist debate of late, imagining a “post” of the “urban” in historical and/or systematic terms could be considered in various ways, for instance, as looking for a different kind of conceptualization of what the “urban” is and should be; or, as a call to overcome a specific imagination and representation of the “urban” as well as overcoming the binarisms of public and private, corporatism and street-level resistance, revanchist fortification and insurgent survival strategies, all characterizing key features of the “urban” that have been rehearsed for such a long time.
See Juris Milestone, “Design as Power: Paul Virilio and the Governmentality of Design Expertise,” in Culture, Theory & Critique 48, no. 2 (October 2007): 175–198.
See Michael Hardt and Christopher Hight, “Designing Commonspaces: Riffing with Michael Hardt on the Multitude and Collective Intelligence,” in Architectural Design 76, no. 5 (September/October 2006): 70–73.
Adrian Lahoud, review of Urban Politics Now: Reimagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City, ed. BAVO (Gideon Boie and Matthias Pauwels) (Rotterdam: NAi, 2008), Post-Traumatic Urbanism.com, May 14, 2009.
“Kambing,” comment on “Autonom(ous)(ist) Marxism – Half baked anarcho-syndicalism?,” libcom.org, comment posted June 5, 2009.
Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 136, 141.
Carlo Vercellone, Capitalismo cognitivo: conoscenza e finanza nell’epoca postfordista (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2006).
Žižek, First as Tragedy, 145.
Ibid., 147.
Chantal Mouffe, “Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension,” interview by Rosalyn Deutsche, Branden W. Joseph, and Thomas Keenan, Grey Room, no. 02, (Winter 2001): 118.
Žižek, First as Tragedy, 155.
Raqs Media Collective, “Stubborn Structures and Insistent Seepage in a Networked World,” in Seepage (New York/Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010). See →.
Karl Marx, Capital: The Process of Capitalist Production, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, and ed. by Frederick Engels. Volume 1 of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (London: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1921), 365–6.
Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 103.
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 44.
See Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk),” keynote lecture at the “Network of Design” meeting held by the Design History Society in Falmouth, Cornwall, September 3, 2008, text available at →. This paragraph is partly cited from Tom Holert, “Design and Nervousness,” trans. Gerrit Jackson, Texte zur Kunst 72 (December 2008):108f.
Ibid.
J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxix–xxx.
Ibid, xxx.
Ibid, xxxii.
Ibid., xxxii–xxxiii, xxxiii.
Ibid., xxxvi.
Ibid., 5, 20.
Ibid., 205.
Cf. ibid., 224.
Richard Latham, “Communication of Values Through Design,” in The Aspen Papers: Twenty Years of Design Theory from the International Design Conference in Aspen, ed. Reyner Banham (London: Pall Mall Press, 1974), 91.
Raqs Media Collective, “Stubborn Structures.”
Some parts of this essay were written for the conference “Design for the Post-Neoliberal City,” organized by Jesko Fezer and Matthias Görlich for Civic City/Design2Context, ZHdK, Zurich, March 12–13, 2010.