These theses were written by the French author Guy Debord in 1959. Despite being over 60 years old, many of these theses remain true today or were true and are now in the process of being overcome as new forms of capitalist urbanism gain ground. In this short writing, Debord succinctly explores key functions of traffic and city planning in the capitalist city which could provide a jumping off point for contemporary radical urbanist theories. Following the theses I have written some of my own commentary on the piece, teasing out some of the nuance and attempting to begin an application of its ideas to the contemporary, namely US, city.

Situationist Theses on Traffic

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 heart 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.”

Commuting time, as Le Corbusier rightly noted, is a surplus labor which correspondingly reduces the amount of “free” time.

We must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as a pleasure.

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).

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.

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 a 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.

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.

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.

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.

GUY DEBORD
1959

“Positions situationnistes sur la circulation” originally appeared in Internationale Situationniste #3 (Paris, December 1959). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

Republished from the Bureau of Public Secrets Website, read the original here!

Some Commentary:

In the US, cars have become a fact of life. Even as the real experience of driving continues to decline, our cities continue to be built around driving cars and advertisements keep pretending that happiness and freedom are found behind the wheel. The stress, anger, and frustration of driving has its roots in many places, but the alienation of the automobile noted in thesis 1 and the lost time in thesis 2 provides key insights and the start of a critique of cars. Cars are insular (some anti-car voices have even begun calling their operators “cagers”), separating those inside it from everything outside. This has its perks for sure, in extreme temperatures or stormy weather those inside the car are relatively protected, but this protection also reduces the experience of those inside the car, limiting their connection to both the world and the people around them.

The car offers only one form of communication with the outside world, the horn. Honking is the only way that car drivers can communicate, it is forced to capture all necessary messages drivers would need to tell each other. And since this is an impossible task for one method of communication to capture adequately, the result is that drivers do not communicate, and in fact can be said to view other drivers as potentially hostile competitors for space and time as they all rush to their respective destinations. The recent increase in road rage incidents on Utah roads attests to this fact. And this is all not even touching on how drivers relate to non-car-drivers.

Beyond driver’s insulation from other people, they are also isolated from the world around them. This finds a dual expression in both how the driver understands the spaces they are moving through and how those spaces are made. As thesis 8 explores, the creation of the city for the car (in Paris this involved the recreation of the old city, for more information check out this essay by David Harvey), reflects an ideology which lies at the heart of the state. This ideology is a belief “in the permanence of the present society,” a belief which denies the fact that “it is practically necessary only in the context of a specific social set-up”(emphasis added). On other words, the state acts to keep the world as it is currently set-up, acting in service of, and safeguarding and furthering the status-quo, whether that be private property, work, or cars. The beauty of thesis 8 is that it does not only critique the role of the state in reproducing the current order of things, but it also calls attention to the logic that the state would use against critiques of its actions. Cars are a practical necessity of capitalism as it currently exists; apart from the myriad industries which revolve around widespread car use, cars get people to work and privatize a good deal of the costs. The state is beholden to the economy and its grow-or-die imperatives, meaning anything that helps the economy becomes a de facto necessity. Transportation planners speak of transportation allowing “access to opportunities,” access to businesses and jobs, sites of consumption and production, access to the economy. In this way, the fight against cars in the US takes on an economic character as well, how would you get to work without your car? Or maybe more importantly, how would the company you work for gain access to your labor time if you have no way of getting to them?

But we don’t live in a world without work and cars yet, in-fact roads and spaces made for cars have proliferated in the US to a scale that Debord would never have imagined, a gas station next to a drive-through next to an auto shop broken up only by parking lots. Roads have been reduced in purpose but expanded in space to accommodate an ever-increasing number of lanes, to carry an always increasing number of cars, being built larger and larger every year. This has led to a hostile and dangerous experience for both cars and everyone not in a car. When pedestrians or bicyclists are given space (in many residential districts there are not even sidewalks) they remain under constant threat of drivers who continually kill thousands every year on US roads. But for the driver, this organization of space makes perfect sense. They, after all, are in a rush to go where they’re going, and waiting for pedestrians to cross the road, traveling behind bicyclists, or stuck in eternal traffic jams only further degrade their relationship to the space they’re traveling through. The interests of the car driver are antithetical to the creation of healthy spaces.

But Debord is perhaps not as pessimistic about the car as I am. In thesis 6 he insists that it is instead the degree of concentration of cars in cities and a city’s acceptance of cars as a central theme (what today many call being “car-oriented”) are the true issues, not the car as-such. While I am inclined to agree with this nuance, so many cities in the US, the entire Salt Lake metropolis certainly included, are scarred by cars and the infrastructure they demand. The detriments of cars in this age are myriad, and chiefly among them include the direct murder of people by cars and the indirect murder of many more by the pollution they produce. Where Debord could still speak in thesis 8 of the “the projected freeways in Paris” which would entail the destruction of thousands of homes, today we must reckon with already constructed freeways which decades ago demolished homes across the US, largely in lower-class neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color. Where Debord could imagine incorporating cars into a city without building that city around them, today we must fight against a world where the car is king, and has been for decades.

Debord is not stuck in critique, however, offering principles and visions of what he and other Situationists termed Unitary Urbanism. Theses 3, 4, 5, and parts of 6 and 9 explore such positive (as opposed to critique which is negative) aspects of his work. The core of Debord’s vision of unitary urbanism found in this work is captured in his call to create what he refers to in thesis 5 as “the sphere of freedom and leisure — the essence of life.” This is echoed earlier in thesis 3 which imagines travel as transforming from a chore, an adjunct to the working day, to travel as pleasure. Drawing from thesis 2 we can begin to understand what he means by this; currently commuting “is a surplus labor which correspondingly reduces the amount of “free” time,” this would need to stop in order for travel to have the potential of being a pleasurable experience, meaning its decoupling from work and the exchange of time found therein. Here we return to the economic character of the anti-car position. It is not just the car and the city the car has built that is to be opposed, but the conditions that make the car a necessity of life under capitalism. While the anti-work argument is far better articulated elsewhere, the connection between work and car-dependence does not seem to have been interrogated adequately, even though Debord has laid the groundwork, but if this blog is to take a crack at it that will need to be a writing unto itself.

Finally, in thesis 6 we find something that capitalist cities across the world have been all too eager to incorporate, the call of banning “auto traffic from the central areas of certain new complexes, as well as from a few old cities.” Hundreds of cities host permanent or temporary car-free streets and some cities have outright banned cars from city centers, reclaiming that space for pedestrians, bicyclists, and other non-motorized consumers… The apparent realization of this call says less about the radicalism of the municipalities in question, but more on the ability for capitalism to in one instance center the car as a tool for productivity and accumulation and in another instance decenter the car and create space for non-car modes of travel. After all, people on bikes or taking the train can be just as good workers as people who drive cars, it was not the car that makes the commute to work bad, but that it is a commute to work. When Debord imagines banning cars from city centers, he does not see this as a means of increasing foot traffic to local businesses. Rather, in thesis 9 he states that revolutionary urbanists (a title this blog is fond of) should “not limit their concern to the circulation of things, or to the circulation of human beings trapped in a world of things.” Whether a person is in a car or on their feet, if the primary matter at hand is how best they are getting to work or getting to the store, if we are looking, designing, and planning first-and-foremost for humans as workers and consumers then we are failing to create human spaces, spaces that are experiences unto themselves in which encounter, becoming, inhabiting, and sociability make for “experiments for a human journey through authentic life.”