The Situationists and the City

Book excerpt: "The French radicals at the forefront of the revolts in Paris in 1968 were re-imagining the city as a revolutionary utopia. The Situationist International (SI), led by Guy Debord and central to the Paris uprising in May 1968, published many incendiary texts on politics and art in the journal 'Internationale Situationniste'. One central theme to their work was rethinking the city: from a site for routine consumption and work to a utopia that breaks down barriers between function and play. In this essential volume, Tom McDonough collects together all of the SI's key essays on urbanism and the city." The book [is] ... illustrated by images that were core to the SI project [and] include[s] such key texts as 'The Theory of Derive', 'Formulary for a New Urbanism', and many previously untranslated texts, including those that came out of the Situationists' collaboration with Henri Lefebvre."