http://zena.secureforum.com/znet/souzacity.htm
Z Magazine / ZNet and Porto Alegre 3 present
Life After Capitalism Essays
Marcelo Lopes de Souza
We were asked for two tasks by the organisers[1]: First, we should present a vision about a just city of the future, that is a city in which social justice would reign (which presupposes another society, a post-capitalist society); secondly, we should develop a strategy in order to achieve this just city.
Well, we need a vision, but we must avoid the temptation to develop a normative model. A normative model is a rationalistic exercise; its premise is that we are able to anticipate details about future urban forms and/or that we are able to prescribe how the future city form should be. I think this approach is both intellectually and politically wrong. A genuinely alternative city of the future should be planned and managed by concrete free men and women, not “socialist” gurus, technocrats and party officials acting in the name of the people (or in the name of the “working class” or whatever); history itself and not theory must determine the concrete spatiality of the future. However, we can and should discuss criteria and parameters, with which help we can talk about the question to which extent and under which circumstances spatial organisation can fit to alternative social relations.
