Spatial Imagination and the Avant-Garde
Spatial Imagination and the Avant-Garde
This chapter looks at the urban explorers and theorists who were instrumental in fashioning the image of Paris in the 1950s, focusing on urban sociologists, urban planners, and the 1950s avant-garde. It examines their engagement with the city and the ways in which their mutual point of focus created a mood of poetic humanism, along with the commonality of vision in this intellectual cluster. These individuals shared a profoundly left-wing grounding inherited from Marxist tradition, the Popular Front, and Liberation as well as from deeply held humanist convictions. Their idealized vision of society was that of a brotherhood of people, a powerful and enthusiastic working class ready to rebuild France. Intellectual elites aligned themselves with the peuple, the proletariat, the poor and oppressed. They imagined Paris as a puzzle of enclaves, or îlots, that were pedestrian and particularist in scale.
Keywords: Paris, urban sociologists, urban planners, avant-garde, poetic humanism, Popular Front, Liberation, France, intellectual elites, working class
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