Culture has always been created in the margins of the system, he argues. In
previous ages it was not the masses who produced culture, but creative spirits
whom the system of patronage reprieved from the obligation to work every day. Cre-
ativity and a desire for play can only flourish when one’s total energy is not swallowed
up by the essential work of commodity production. Automatization will ensure that
the masses will also have these opportunities. This means that the conditions will ex-
ist for a genuine mass culture, a collective culture that will take on a totally different
form from the existing one. This form of culture can come into existence only in a
free society where nobody has any power over anyone else. In a situation like this,
each individual will be able to enjoy his creativity to the full, and norms will lose their
meaning. New Babylon should be thought of as foreshadowing this future. It is an ar-
tificial paradise, a world in which human beings as such can fulfill their destiny as cre-
ative beings, in accordance with their deepest longings.^30
Constant has illustrated this future situation in numerous maps, maquettes,
drawings, and paintings. The maps show a whole series of linked structures stretch-
ing out across the landscape. They exist on various scales, starting with a quasi-
European dimension—as, for instance, with the map for the Ruhr area of New
Babylon—and continuing with models simulating the development of concrete cities
or city districts (Amsterdam, Antwerp, Paris) (figure 71). Sometimes they are set in
a completely abstract, neutral background. On other occasions, existing contempo-
rary or historical maps serve as a background.
One intriguing series is that of the collages where “sectors” are created out
of parts of other urban plans. For instance, there is a symbolic representation of New
Babylon dating from 1969 in which fragments of existing maps of cities are pasted
on to a background showing minimal evidence of roads with thicker parts for inter-
sections (figure 72). Things like street names can still be read on the fragments of
the maps, so that they vaguely refer to specific cities. It is possible to discern a piece
of London and another piece of Berlin, side by side with a district of Amsterdam and
a chunk of a Spanish city. It is as though Constant is using this détournementto sug-
gest that New Babylon will unite the qualities of all these cities. It is quite clear that
he gives primacy to open, public space. He argues repeatedly that 80 percent of New
Babylon will consist of collective spaces and that private space will be reduced to an
absolute minimum.
The fact that he attaches great importance to the public quality of space can
be seen in the collection of his lectures and articles, Opstand van de homo ludens,
in which he states that public space is the area where people meet each other, and
that this means that it is the area for play. Without public space, he argues, no cul-
ture is possible. The forum in classical times, the market squares of the Middle Ages,
and, more recently, the boulevard—these were the places where cultural life devel-
oped.^31 The covered, large-scale structures of New Babylon are clearly thought of as
a continuation of this tradition. Constant is stating implicitly here that he sees New
Babylon as a fulfillment of Lefebvre’s droit à la ville. In coining this expression, Lefeb-
4
Architecture as Critique of Modernity