If there was a high point for the radical imagination of a future for the planet, perhaps it was Constant Nieuwenhuys' New Babylon. Constant was a key member of the Situationist International in its early phase. He started work on New Babylon before he resigned from it, and continued working on it for many years. It embodied many of the situationosts' key ideas about constructing situations for permanent play, but here imagined at the scale of an infrastructure for a planetery utopia dedicated to nomadic play.
Constant built a future out of offcut plexiglass and bicycle spokes.
Later he would say that his marvelous models of New Babylon were appreciated in much the same way as African masks were in surrealist times, as interesting forms, but stripped of their magical significance. What is lost from New Babylon is a passion gone from the world, a desire to seize the world itself as the object of desire, to find a form for the whole of life.
Constant had photographs made of New Babylon, and a film. He produced a newspaper for it, and he gave his famous lecture performances. All to conjure into being a landscape that envisioned what was possible right here and now, but was held back by the fetter of outdated relations of production. It was not a utopia. “I prefer to call it a realistic project, because it distances itself from the present condition which has lost touch with reality, and because it is founded on what is technically feasible, on what is desirable from a human viewpoint, on what is inevitable from a social viewpoint.” The question that lingers is not whether New Babylon was merely a dream, but whether actually existing built form is really a nightmare.
Rather than demolish the old world to build a radiant city; rather than build a garden city on greenfield sites, Constant cantilevers new spaces up above, leaving both city and countryside untouched. Automated factories would be underground, the surface level is for transport, while up above stretches a new landscape for play, a massive superstructure of linked sectors, within which everything is malleable, changeable at whim. Considered vertically, as an elevation, New Babylon makes literal Marx’s diagram of base and superstructure. Its airy sectors are literally superstructures, made possible by an infrastructure below ground where mechanical reproduction has abolished scarcity and freed all of time from necessity. It is an image of what Constant imagines the development of productive forces has made possible, but which the fetter of existing relations of production prevents from coming into being.
New Babylon responds both to the expansion of material resources and the expansion of population. Like a suburban family that adds a new story when the second kid is born, Constant builds a second deck—for the whole planet. ...