Marcel Poëte's Bergsonian Urbanism

Abstract

Marcel Poëte was a founding figure of French urbanisme, or town planning, both its pedagogy and its codification as a discipline and practice in the early twentieth century. The philosophy of Henri Bergson was central to his writings on the city and teaching at the École des Hautes Études Urbaines. I argue that Poëte's use of Bergson's philosophy, his ideas of the vital impulse and duration, may be understood in two ways. First, Poëte's Bergsonian urbanism participates in the greater context of continental fascism wherein Bergson's vitalism fomented a critique of scientific positivism and class hierarchy. Second, Poëte imports Bergson's ideas of time, la durée or duration, and “creative evolution,” into urbanisme as a means of resistance to vulgar functionalism in architecture and town planning.