Sustainability meets Situationism in the City: A tale of détournement and the resurrection of a just and rebellious Ecotopia

Résumé En

The Situationist City could not be built. Both its conception and construction required the participation of a post-revolution anarchist population (Sadler, 1999). Yet the Situationists believed that the materiality of such a city could actually foment revolution. Paradox: Utopia. Defying Situationist orthodoxy, the architect Constant modeled New Babylon, an anti-capitalist city prefiguring a playful and participatory unitary urbanism. Suspended above 'nature', however, New Babylon was no Ecotopia: It offered no hope of or in (re)integration. In the wake of the disbanding of the Situationist International and the passing of the revolutionary moment of 1968, a loose collective of 'othered' people occupied a former barracks site: In the midst of Copenhagen, 'Freetown' Christiania was born. Locked in perpetual struggle with the Danish state, Christiania's existence has been under constant threat ever since. The community has developed a particular place-based anarchism infused with tensions: non-violent and 'spiky', quiescent and revolutionary, ecologically-minded and resource poor. In this paper, I assert that the notion of sustainable urbanism has been recuperated by the society of the spectacle (Debord, 1983). To resurrect the sustainable city (Whitehead, 2011), I propose a turn to situationism and that city's détournement, looking to Christiania particularly for the threat of a good example.