Since the late 1990s, the world’s leading brands have used sophisticated communication techniques to give their image a set of values, an attitude, a way of life. Nike is one of the international brands using the branding techniques theorized by Naomi Klein in 2000 in the book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (ed. Knopf Canada, Picador, 2000). Nike approaches these techniques by mimicking counter-culture and discreetly taking possession of the urban space. In the era of intangible capitalism, are Western cities not the commercial achievement of the Situationist conception of urban space which condemned the disenchanted urbanism of the modern functional city and intended to “affirm the city as a laboratory of a playful revolution in everyday life “?
Friedrich von Borries is an architect, curator and professor of design theory.
(The text is an rewised excerpt of “Who’s Afraid of Niketown”, episode publishers, Rotterdam 2005.)
Nike’s urbanism shows similarities with drastic urban critiques as well as with the emphatic model of a “different city for a different life” advocated by the Situationists, the artist group once gathered around Guy Debord. What brings us close to the Situationists today is the radical critique of the rationalism of modernity and of social alienation, as well as the resultant demand for a new kind of urban development, for a different way of perceiving the city, of reading and using it. On this point, intriguing parallels are detectable with the critique of the city given expression in Nike’s campaigns. Such comparisons fail to do justice to the artistic and political motifs of the Situationists, who radically opposed Capitalism.Debord, Guy, Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels, Berlin: 1996, p. 10.
Meanwhile, the imaginary Niketown is born of Capitalism itself, it is an apotheosis of the Capitalist city. This comparison does not attempt to reappraise the content or the intentions of the Situationist movement, but instead to broaden the discourse about Nike’s urban interventions.
For if we apply a Situationist template to Nike’s urban interventions, we arrive at a problematic that goes to the heart of Niketown and its model of the city as a brand specific experiential space: Is Niketown the affirmative fulfillment – now transformed into commercialized form – of the vision of a Situationist city: is this ‘Corporate Situationism’?
Another City for Another Life: At the center of the Situationist movement stands a confrontation with the city as the experiential sphere of everyday life. “The urbanism of the Situationists was directed against an obsolete and impoverished functionalism, and proclaimed the testing of the city as a laboratory for the playful revolutionizing of everyday life. Planning and building were to have been nothing less than the realization of a philosophy, a collective Gesamtkunstwerk.”Xavier Costa, “Le grand jeu à venir – Situationistischer Städtebau,” Daidalos 67, Berlin: 1998, p. 74.
The Situationist city was to have generation of chance events, achiving them by the incessant transformation and reversal of hegemonic conditions. Accordingly, they wanted to supplant functionalist zoning with a city of play and adventure: “We demand adventure. Some people are searching for it on the moon, since they can no longer find in on Earth. First and foremost, we are always committed to a transformation on this planet. We intend to create situations – new situations. We take account of the rupture of the laws that inhibit the development of effective activities in life and in culture. We stand at the threshold of a new age, and already today we are seeking to conceptualize an image of a happy life and a unitary urbanism – an urbanism for pleasure.”Constant, “Another City for Another Life,” cited in Wigley, Mark, Constant’s New Babylon, Rotterdam: 1998.
The ideal of the Situationists was urban situations, “constructions of a different kind, which should lead toward radically new forms of life”.Thomas Y. Levin, “Der Urbanismus der Situationisten,” arch+ 139/140, Berlin: 1998, p. 70.
This city is characterized by the emergence of fortuitous events, movements, continuous change. “One day, we will build cities for wandering.”Debord, “Théorie des Dérivés’, cited in ibid, p. 75. The city of the future, as imagined by the Situationists, is a city of experiences, of dis-covery, of rebellions against the compulsions of a regimented life. “Every street, every animated square, could be the entrance to a metropolis, a prelude to a discovery through which life opens up, through which new faces are perceptible, with habits shed and familial duties or regulated professional lives now regarded as marginal epiphenomena, by which a free movement no longer cares to be disturbed.”Ivan Chtcheglov (Gilles Ivan), ‘Formular für einen neuen Urbanismus’, in I.S. NR 1, cited in Ohrt, Roberto, Phantom Avantgarde, Hamburg: 1990, p. 50. The architect of this city is no longer the designer of individual buildings, he is the creator of processes and atmospheres that allow room for the unfolding of individual freedom.
The analysis of the real-existing city as a functionalist, inhumane space, and the dream of a free city as counterproject: Here are the intersections between historical Situationism and Nike’s urban, experiential brand spaces. The imaginary Niketown, as the scenarization or simulation of a better reality, responds with exactitude to the drawbacks of the contemporary city as analysed by the Situationists: The absence of the magical, the unknown, the unforeseeable.
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