Culture industry cities: From discipline to exclusion, from citizen to tourist

Abstract

Using historical and contemporary examples (the 19th‐century Vienna Ringstraße and ‘rent barracks’, the early 20th‐century ‘Red Vienna’ Gemeindebau, yesterday's Plattenbau East and West, today's urban sprawl, the recent international prison architecture and the new Berlin Potsdamer Platz) cities are analyzed as ‘domination built in stone’, that is, examples of ‘culture industry’. With few exceptions the ruling class also determined labor architecture, that is, how the proletariat lived in factory settlements, public housing and urban sprawl. History shows that claiming a ‘right to the city’ needs more than a struggle against the very effective claim of capital on the same city: radical new ideas for a politicized ‘architecture from below’.