of individuals. The term suggests that one might make a relief map of the city, indi-
cating the constant currents, fixed points, and vortices by which urban environments
influence the emotions of passersby and inhabitants. Debord provides detailed in-
structions for carrying out a dériveproperly: it should take a fixed amount of time
(preferably twenty-four hours) and involve a small group of people whose path is de-
termined by a combination of system and randomness. The aim is to move through
the city without purpose, thus provoking unexpected occurrences and encounters.^10
In the “Declaration of Amsterdam,” a manifesto of 1958, Debord and Con-
stant describe unitary urbanism as “the uninterrupted complex activity through
which man’s environment is consciously recreated according to progressive plans in
all domains.”^11 Unitary urbanism is the fruit of a collective creativity of a completely
new kind. It cannot be produced by the activity of individual artists, but calls for the
combined efforts of all creative personalities. This will bring about a fusion of scien-
tific and artistic activity by which the development of transitory small-scale situations
is accompanied by the creation on a larger scale of a universal, relatively permanent
environment in which playfulness and freedom are the prime features.
The “Declaration of Amsterdam” emphasizes the synthetic and collective
character of “unitary urbanism.” It is based on the thesis that the most urgent task
of the artist is to implement this program: “It is the immediate task of today’s cre-
atively active people to bring about conditions favorable to this development.”^12 The
original French version has more resonance than the English. Instead of the neutral
word “conditions,” the French uses “ambiances,” meaning “atmospheres” and
suggesting the creation of specific situations. The declaration also states that the in-
dividual practice of any branch of art whatsoever is out of date and reactionary, and
that it will not be tolerated by members of the Situationist International. Given the ba-
sic goal of creating a unitary urbanism, it is the task of everyone to collaborate in or-
der to achieve a spatial and collective art.
With his New Babylon project, Constant was offering a quite specific response
to the aims of this manifesto. Whereas he started working on New Babylon under
the umbrella of the Situationist International, publishing the first articles on New
Babylon in the journal of the movement,^13 it soon became clear that he and Debord
would part company. Constant put all his energies into developing New Babylon as
a concrete model of how the world would look after the realization of unitary urban-
ism. The group around Debord, on the other hand, considered that Constant was too
exclusively concerned with what they called “structural problems of urbanism.” Ac-
cording to them, one should rather engage in activities emphasizing “the content,
the notion of play, the free creation of everyday life.”^14 For Debord unitary urbanism
was only a point of departure, a potential catalyst in the struggle for a total social rev-
olution, which he believed was waiting just around the corner. To develop a critique
on various fronts, moreover, it was necessary to involve not only artists and intellec-
tuals but also students and proletarians. New Babylon, conceived of and elaborated
in artistic terms and media, was, for Debord and his partisans, clearly limited in
4
Architecture as Critique of Modernity