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Abstract
In the early 1950s, British culture was dominated by welfare-state visions of urban reconstruction. These projections of a stable civic society were premised on a particular way of looking at and reading the metropolitan environment. At odds with this project, the Independent Group’s discussions and collaborative work developed an alternative urban semiology, which found the city to be already rich in visual resources for fashioning a more profound form of social democracy. Soon, this critical engagement would develop in different directions, represented here by Lawrence Alloway’s commentary on Piccadilly Circus in his essay ‘City Notes’ and the London footage inserted by John McHale into his film for the Smithsons’ Berlin Hauptstadt project (both 1959). By the end of the 1950s, members of the erstwhile Independent Group had produced two contrasting critical accounts of how the metropolitan centre should be looked at, which challenged the strictures of post-war reconstruction in distinct and conflicting ways.
Highlights
In the early 1950s, British culture was dominated by welfare-state visions of urban reconstruction
In order to secure capitalism’s founding economic disparities, post-war social democracy had to coalesce around a “new common experience” ([1950]/1992: 33) or “a design for community living” (p. 35)
A mass population might become channelled into a network of governable flows, much like the circulatory patterns that Abercrombie had built into his metropolitan districts
Summary
In the early 1950s, British culture was dominated by welfare-state visions of urban reconstruction. Like the South Bank Exhibition two years before, Parallel of Life and Art inserted visitors into a designed, holistic environment in an attempt to encourage a more developed mode of spatial perception (Walsh: 2008).
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