Unitary Urbanism

Unitary urbanism (UU) was the critique of status quo "urbanism", employed by the Letterist International and then further developed by the Situationist International between 1953 and 1960.

The praxis originates from the Lettrist technique of hypergraphics which was applied to architecture by the Lettrist International (LI). The UU critique of urbanism was further developed in the 1950s by the LI, and consists of a range of practices that include, but are not limited to:

The critical practice continued to be developed by the Situationists and others. It was largely abandoned for the Debordian theory of the spectacle after the Second Situationist International and Situationist Antinational were formed. London based evoL PsychogeogrAphix is one of the few groups openly practicing unitary urbanism today.

Unitary urbanism was announced as a very specific praxis at the Alba platform between the Lettrist International and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. In his Address to the Alba Conference in September 1956, the Lettrist International Delegate Gil J Wolman said: "A unitary urbanism—the synthesis of art and technology that we call for—must be constructed according to certain new values of life, values which now need to be distinguished and disseminated." This mode of urban practice was also called for in a tract distributed during a demonstration by Lettrists in Turin, Italy in December 1956.

Constant Nieuwenhuys and Guy Debord disagreed about the praxis, issuing the designation "the complex, ongoing activity which consciously recreates man's environment according to the most advanced conceptions in every domain," however the widening gulf between Nieuwenhuys' "structural" approach and Debord's focus on "content" eventually lead to Nieuwenhuy's split from the SI in 1960.

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