Planning, design and the post-

modernity of cities
Ion Besteliu and Kees Doevendans, Technical University Eindhoven,
Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, Department of Urban
Design, Den Dolech 2, PO Box 513, Faculteit Bouwkunde/Stedebouw,
5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands

This essay draws on the concept of ‘weak thought’ from the writings of
the philosopher Gianni Vattimo, and connects it to a weakening of the
certitudes of modern urban design and planning. According to Vattimo,
modernity does not abruptly end; rather its grounding tenets such as
universalised ‘reason’, ‘progress’ or ‘overcoming’, lose their strength,
and the construction of the world based on absolute values is replaced
by a grounding without absolute ground. A weakened ontology is taken
up for its relevance to changing ways of thinking in post-modern design
and planning. In other words can this perspective lead to conceptual
change? 쎻 c 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: philosophy of design, aesthetics, architectural design, built

environment, planning

The city is the greatest spiritual creation of humanity; a collective work which
develops the expression of culture, society and the individual in time and space. Its
structure is intrinsically mysterious, developing more like a dream than a piece of
equipment.

Given this, alternatives are required to traditional urban planning ideas, which imply
continuity based on projection. My own project in search of the contemporary city
represents one possible alternative, an approach which understands and celebrates the
city as an evolving, poetic and unpredictable event.1

1 Libeskind, D ‘Traces of the
unborn’ in N Leach (ed.) Archi-
tecture and revolution: contem-
porary perspectives on Central
and Eastern Europe, Routledge,
London (1999) p 129
P
ost-modernity is often denied existence, or declared to have already
passed. When admitted to, post-modernity is often used as a name
for a new epoch of thought and creation. Otherwise the term is used
to describe a mood of thought permeating the end of modernity. When
understood as a mood of thought, post-modernity refers to an effort to
come to grips with the dramas of the age of reason. It can be interpreted
as a passage from modernity, where pain and promise, nostalgia and antici-
pation, mingle.
www.elsevier.com/locate/destud
0142-694X/02 $ - see front matter Design Studies 23 (2002) 233–244
PII: S0142-694X(01)00036-9 233
 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain

2 Bloch, E ‘Formative edu-
cation, engineering form, orna-
ment’ (trans. J Newman and J
Smith) Oppositions No. 17
(Summer 1979) 45–50.
Reprinted in N Leach (ed)
Rethinking architecture: a reader
in cultural theory, Routledge,
London (1997) 43–50
3 Simmel, G ‘The metropolis
and mental life’ (trans. E Shils)
Social sciences III Selections
and selected readings Vol. 2
(14th edn) University of Chicago
Press (1948). Reprinted in N
Leach (ed) Rethinking architec-
ture: a reader in cultural theory,
Routledge, London (1997) 69–
79
234
This passage from modernity can be traced in many ways. One is to look
at the link between thought and the city, or more precisely the relation
between ontology, as the philosophy of Being and the post-modern city,
as artefact. The argument is that the ontology of modernity and its corre-
sponding design and planning processes, have become too constraining for
today’s making of the city. An adaptation is called for, in order to make
a place for new categories: the aesthetic and the rhetorical. These categories
are prominent in the philosophy of Gianni Vattimo. In his work, a ‘weaken-
ing’ of the metaphysical base of Being is traced in post-modernity and it
paves the way for an optimistic and constructive reading of post-modern
existence. Such a reading is in turn linked to a conception of truth based
on aesthetic experience or a ‘model of rhetoric’, instead of a ‘positivistic
model’.
Turning to the city, one could begin from a few lines of Ernst Bloch: ‘We
also take the form of our surroundings, not only does man make his world
but the world makes the man. Homo faber, and also homo fabricatus—
both are equally true’2. Thus we may start by stating that the city as a
collective creation is a source of a certain consciousness of being in the
world, as well as a product of this consciousness. Putting this in post-
modern focus would mean looking at two relationships. How the post-
modern city is changing the consciousness of being. How this change to
a post-modern ontology is in turn influencing the making of the city: the
way its future is imagined and the role of its designers—in short it’s pro-
ject.
1 The contradictions of dwelling
Tracing a line from the metropolis to modern sensibility is by no means
new. In a famous and in many ways still relevant essay ‘The metropolis
and mental life’3, Georg Simmel describes the problems of modern life
as specifically metropolitan in origin. The metropolitan individuality is,
according to Simmel, a form of consciousness that is the result of psycho-
logical adaptation to the richness of ‘external and internal stimuli’ of the
metropolis. The direction of this psychological adaptation is in favouring
rational and intellectualised, instead of emotional reactions to the world,
thus creating a ‘mental predominance’. A calculating attitude, mirroring
the outward setting of mental life, would be the result.
The calculating exactness of practical life which has resulted from a money economy
corresponds to the ideal of natural science, namely that of transforming the world into
an arithmetical problem and of fixing every one of its parts in a mathematical
formula.
The consequences on the personality are not trivial, and Simmel summarises
Design Studies Vol 23 No. 3 May 2002

4 Lyotard, J F Domus and the
megalopolis, the inhuman (trans.
G Benington and R Bowlby) in
Polity Press, Cambridge (1991)
191–204
Planning, design and the post-modernity of cities
them as the exclusion of ‘irrational, instinctive, sovereign human traits and
impulses, which originally seek to determine the shape of human life from
within instead of receiving it from the outside in the general, schematically
precise form’.
There is however some contradiction, purposefully unresolved within the
essay. At the same time it is pointed out that the metropolitan condition,
by virtue of its accumulation of diversity, its ‘multiplicity of economic,
social and occupational life’, even its anonymity, is also a condition of
freedom and self-realisation for the individual.
With their contradictions, these thoughts point to a modern mood, which
can be described as a tension in the inner life of the individual. This is a
tension between the promise of self-determination and freedom from the
bonds of the small community, and on the other hand nostalgia for a sup-
posedly previous state where the objective spirit and the subjective were
in unity. In a sense one could state that the theme of the essay, although
nowhere specifically stated, is the problem of ‘dwelling’ in the metropolis
and of ‘dwelling’ in oneself.
The question of dwelling, and of its poetics remains open. This can be
seen in later re-proposals. Thus in an essay called ‘Domus and the mega-
lopolis’4, Francois Lyotard proposes a re-thinking of domus as an obli-
gation—the never-ceasing and impossible reconstruction of dwelling in the
‘megalopolis’. The domus is the place of domesticity, equated with the
domestic community and an attitude of ‘cultivating’, of ‘surrounding with
care’. It is intrinsically linked to temporal continuity, to memory ‘inscribed’
in objects, gestures, and the structures of community. Yet the domus was
bucolic only from afar. It always contained something ‘untameable’ in the
psyche. ‘The domestic monad is torn, full of stories and scenes, haunted
by secrets. Acts of violence stretch it to the breaking point, inexplicable
injustices, refused offers of affection, lies, seductions accepted and unbear-
able, petty thefts, lusts’.
According to Lyotard the domus has long passed, it is impossible today.
The city has eroded the filiation of the community. Its memory is the
archive, today computerised. And the memory of the megalopolis is all
encompassing, capable of storing, neutralising, mediating, treating and
interpreting the event. The sheer size and complexity of the megalopolis,
demands an unceasing effort of optimisation, combination and co-ordi-
nation in the field of material, technical creation. Lyotard notes that in all
this effort of ‘useful’ thinking, and in the multiplicity of the megalopolitan
memory, the untameable is left to the side. The domus is impossible, yet
235

5 Vattimo, G The end of mod-
ernity, nihilism and hermeneutics
in postmodern culture (trans.,
with an introduction by J R
Snyder) in John Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, Baltimore, MD (1988)
6 de Sola-Morales, I ‘Weak
architecture (Arquitectura dedil)’
Quadernis d’Arquitectura I
Urbanisme 175 (October–
december 1987). Trans. in de
Sola Morales Differences: top-
ographies of contemporary
architecture S Whiting (ed)
(trans. G Thompson), MIT
Press, Cambridge (1996)
7 Taylor, N Urban planning
theory since 1945 SAGE Publi-
cations, London (1998)
8 Faludi, A Planning theory
Pergamon Press, Oxford (1973)
236
it still calls. ‘How to inhabit the megalopolis? By bearing witness to the
impossible work, by citing the lost domus. […] We inhabit the megalopolis
only to the extent that we declare it uninhabitable, otherwise we are just
lodged there’.
According to Lyotard the post-modern condition of dwelling, if there is
such a one, could be described as transitory: ‘it is in passing that we dwell’.
Both the consciousness of nostalgia for the domus, and its impossibility
are to be accepted, witnessed. But is witnessing enough? Is this sufficient
grounding for the professions of design? Their task is still to create inhabit-
able spaces and places, in the multitude of today’s cities. Witnessing may
be a position for reflection, is it also one for making the city? It is here
that the thought of Gianni Vattimo may help to suggest some paths, and
it will be used as leit-motif for outlining the current position of making.
2 Making the city
In ‘The End of Modernity’5, Gianni Vattimo shows that any passage from
modernity is possible only because of, and after a ‘weakening’ of the for-
merly strong modern ‘truths’ that served as grounding. This leaves place
for new understandings, but these cannot be re-appropriations of human-
ism. Vattimo adds further insight to the relationship between modern and
post modern: namely that any emerging view cannot be entirely new. Pre-
vious ideas survive in a weakened form and so are freer to adapt. They
do not dissolve. Within this perspective, modernity does not abruptly end
and change into something radically different. It cannot be entirely left
behind. Rather its grounding tenets such as ‘progress’ or ‘overcoming’ lose
their strength, and thus the sense of being in the world is changed. The
weakening of absolutes imposes a thinking-through of being without
recourse to any end-state or ‘final destination’. Consequently a grounding-
without ground, a ‘weak ontology’, replaces the construction of the human
place in the world, which was based on absolute values. ‘Weak thought’
has been commented upon as a necessary concept for architects6 because
it ushers new ways of thinking about and making architecture. Here it is
taken up for its relevance to changing some ways of thinking in modern
urban planning and design. In other words, can this perspective lead to
conceptual change?
2.1 The deterministic–utopian base
In an outline of planning theory after the war7, drawing upon a distinction
made by Faludi8, Nigel Taylor describes two broad paradigms in making
the city: the ‘substantive’ and the ‘procedural’. In the substantive approach
the object of planning is determining or controlling the physical substance
of the city, and the various theories are also ways of understanding the
Design Studies Vol 23 No. 3 May 2002

9 Toulmin, S Cosmopolis, the
hidden agenda of modernity The
Free Press, Macmillan (1990)
10 Le Corbusier La ville radi-
euse Vincent, Paris (1933)
(trans. P Knight, E Levieux and
D Coltman) publ. as The radiant
city, Faber & Faber, London
(1967)
11 Vattimo, G ‘The end of
modernity, the end of the pro-
ject?’ (trans. D Webb) Journal of
Philosophy and the Visual Arts
74–77. Reprinted in N Leach
(ed) Rethinking architecture: a
reader in cultural theory, Rout-
ledge, London (1997) 148–154
Planning, design and the post-modernity of cities
city (such as in ‘blueprint’ or ‘master’ planning; or ‘systems theory’). In
the ‘procedural’ approach, still part of substantive planning, theory circles
around the activity of planning itself and what its aims and steps ideally
should be. These understandings of the object of planning as shaping and
control can be seen as manifest of a deep methodological schism, which
in fact goes back to the differences made by Descartes between ‘body’
and ‘spirit’, ‘matter’ and ‘consciousness’, ‘object’ and ‘subject’9. Much of
the thinking in science and philosophy after Descartes can be seen as an
attempt to bridge the divide between these different worlds. Unfortunately
this has not been the case in planning thought, where (as clearly shown
in the analysis of Taylor) the facile differentiation still creates confusion.
Moreover, ‘spirit’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘subject’ have been predominantly
interpreted through a metaphysics of will: men having free will at their
disposal create reality, including spatial reality, through planning.
Bringing this into focus, the mind-set at the core of substantive planning
can be characterised as:
앫 Deterministic, in the sense of believing that the city can be controlled
through planning
앫 Utopian, in the sense of striving towards a projected end state.
The substantive approach first originated as master planning with an image
and end-state in mind. Within a substantive approach the extension or
rebuilding of the city followed a blueprint plan, pre-determined in the same
way that all parts of a building are contained in its blueprints. Such is easily
traceable in for instance Le Corbusier’s proposal for la ‘Ville radieuse’10.
Determinism is evident since everything from total layout to the types of
buildings and to floor plans was pre-ordained: a rationally controlled
ensemble, where all parts are smoothly co-ordinated beforehand. That this
kind of planning was also utopian is clear from the imagery and the writ-
ings accompanying the images. The perfectly regulated spaces were to be
the locus and shaper of new forms of social life, imbued by the ‘new
spirit’. Thus the dream of total rational control of human affairs was put
in ink, through image. Such a scheme, of which real plans were the fol-
lowers, is also a caricature of modernism’s master narrative. As in modern-
ism, where the march of Reason and the path of History provide the
unequivocal grounding to life; in this kind of planning the role of history
and reason are taken up by the masterful designer, and by the plan. The
beauty or richness of life, and of the buildings and spaces created by the
myriad habitations of a city are schematised to the aesthetics of the drawing
board, and the architect-planner shapes dwelling in it. As Vattimo puts it:
the architect as ‘genius’11.
237

12 Giddens, A Beyond left and
right: the future of radical politics
Oxford, Polity Press (1994) 8,
58–59. Quoted in Taylor, N
Urban planning theory since
1945, SAGE Publications, Lon-
don (1998) p 73
13 Geddes, P Cities in evol-
ution: an introduction to the town
planning movement and the
study of civics Harper and Row,
New York (1971) First printed
Williams and Norgate, London
(1915) 339–358
238
Determinism, and utopianism were however persistent, and if the later
plans of the 60s were no longer blueprints, determinism survived in the
form of mono-functional zoning. This also proved insufficient to house the
metropolis, and further reiteration came in the form of applying systems
theory to planning. It starts from the idea of the city as a deterministic
system, and of the individual as a free consumer, whose behaviour can
also be causally determined. Causality can then be detailed with the help
of mathematical modelling. In this manner, forecasts of needs, including
spatial needs and land use can be specified. This mathematical geography
presupposes an abstract and general understanding of space, lending itself
to quantification. The aim is still utopian, but here the utopia is no longer
an image of the built form of the city and of its society. Utopia is determin-
ism itself. The goal is control of the city, and the model for control is seen
as a cybernetic one12. Planning is a science — and the city is a rationally
understandable and deterministic environment (systems theory) control-
lable through rational decision (process planning). As pointed out by Vat-
timo11, the planner is now a technician–scientist. A ‘functionary’ of the
society of techno-science: an operator aiding control instead of an artist
shaping.
This again proved to be insufficient to the reality of the city. Social desires,
the market and political factors criss-cross over time and shape the city in
ways difficult if not impossible to embrace in a cybernetic model. Spatial
reality remained stubborn to quantitative predictions, and the deterministic–
utopian consciousness underwent a salvage operation:
앫 Determinism—survived as a study of the process of policy and
decision making,
앫 Utopianism—survived as the assumed common goals of such a process.
The process planning discourse was based on an abstract model of how to
plan. According to the model, rational choice in planning follows a
sequence of steps. These were first: survey–analysis–plan (Patrick
Geddes)13. Steps added in the 60s and 70s were: problem definition, estab-
lishing alternatives, evaluation, implementation and monitoring. Under the
influence of cybernetics and systems theory, feed back loops were included
as part of the process. This instrumental model however said nothing about
what is actually planned, starting from what goals, for whose benefit, and
with what effects. It was a ‘blueprint’ process replacing ‘blueprint’ physical
plans. The effort was now directed towards devising a set of ideal steps,
as part of a strategy, into which the complexities of making the city could
be poured, accommodated, incorporated, while still preserving the idea
of control.
Design Studies Vol 23 No. 3 May 2002
 Along with determinism, planning was still based on modernistic assump-
tions of progress. In plans reason was applied to the process of decision-
making, towards goals that were confidently assumed to be universal and
in the common interest. Goals were abstract end states such as universal
hygiene, comfort and prosperity etc. They were defined quantitatively by
standards and norms and linked to objectives and a timetable.

Throughout these mutations of determinism and utopianism, the feeling

that pervades is no longer nostalgia for the small monad of the domus.
Instead there is a looking forward to the future as a yearning for unity.
The domus is impossible, indeed rejected, still the desire for a unifying
vision persisted; thrown forward in linear time in the form of the utopia
of the rational, controlled, hygienic state that planning can supposedly
advance towards. The whole city was a ‘machine for living’. It’s utopia
the regulated society.

2.2 Progress and overcoming: weakening the

deterministic–utopian base
As things stand today, the deterministic–utopian base of planning seems
too narrow for making the city. At the end of modernity its base has
been weakened.

In ‘The End of Modernity’5 Vattimo interprets an idea from Heidegger.

The rational ordering at the core of technology is metaphysical. In Vatti-
mo’s words: ‘technology, with its global project aimed at linking all entities
on the planet into predictable and controllable causal relationships, rep-
resents the most advanced development of metaphysics’ (p. 40).

Starting from these affirmations, one can also question the deterministic
assumptions in planning. In other words: does planning really determine
urban form? To what extent should planning strive to predict and control?

Studies by geographers in the 70s and 80s, on the impact of planning on

form (e.g. Pickvance, 197714) pointed to a negative answer to the first
question. The conclusion was that power relationships and land values are
more important than plans in determining overall urban growth patterns.
Planning rarely determines large-scale form, rather form follows market
forces, and planners ‘smooth’ the rough spots. Form follows planning is
then replaced by form follows profit and power. All this however makes
space for re-assembly because the power relationships are diversifying
14 Pickvance, C ‘Physical
planning and market forces in through the affirmation of women’s rights groups, ethnic minorities, com-
urban development’ National
munity groups etc. The determinism of any single factor (be it planners,
Westminster Bank Quarterly
Review August (1977) land values etc.) is no longer tenable. Further, it is increasingly accepted,

Planning, design and the post-modernity of cities 239

 as Nigel Taylor observes7, that planning is a form of social action, and not
a science. Increasingly, the plan is a contractual base, and a negotiated cre-
ation.

This does not amount to stating that the city is not deterministic. Seen as
a cybernetic model, as the result of market forces, or as the result of social
action, the city is deterministic in parts. It may well be deterministic in
whole, even if it is so bafflingly complex as to escape prediction at this
junction in history. The second question may however be more important
then the first. Indifferently if the city is or is not a wholly deterministic
entity, to what extent is it desirable to attempt render the city predictable
and controllable? And further, towards what desired state?

The counterpart of determinism, utopianism is also weakened in the post-

modern. Losing faith in the modern idea of ‘progress’ results in the loss
of an end-state for utopias (thus their grounding in the future). As described
by Vattimo11, progress assumed historical evolution towards a better or at
least different state, based on a ‘re-appropriation’ of ‘foundations’ or ‘ori-
gins’ or ‘truths’. If the foundation in such absolutes is weakened, then
successive stages in temporal evolution can no longer be seen as better
than previous ones. Note that ‘weakening’, as a philosophical concept, does
not abolish ‘the idea of history’, as it does not abolish that of rationality—
only its centrality to creating a worldview.

Progress is also linked to the idea of ‘overcoming’ a previous stage in

history, of replacing it or breaking loose from it. Applying the concept to
modernity creates an inconsistency. To ‘overcome modernity’ is problem-
atic since overcoming is also one of modernism’s basic concepts. It follows
that the relationship of modernity with post-modernity needs another term
to describe it. Vattimo explores Heidegger’s terms of ‘recollection’ (An-
denken), and the terms ‘healing’ and ‘resignation’ (Verwindung) as
opposite to ‘overcoming’ (Überwindung). The terms are used to argue that
the age of metaphysics cannot be simply left behind, but must be conva-
lesced from slowly, while still persisting. Persistence means also that value
systems are archaeologies. They bear the marks of a past evolution; and
since grounding upon absolutes is untenable, then a re-thinking of his-
toricism is warranted: an understanding of systems of values grounded not
in the absolute, but in their own existence within the time and place of
a society.

In planning, the universality of goals was questioned due to a growing

realisation (since the 70s) that assumed values in planning are far from
universal, and that there is not a consensus on public interest. This was

240 Design Studies Vol 23 No. 3 May 2002

 again sparked by the growing power of minority groups, community
associations and their demands on politicians and city managers. The new
voices led to new theories of advocacy planning, participatory planning
etc. within a ‘communicative’ paradigm. Not only does the process need
to re-adapt to changes; it is also politically driven. Instead of being determ-
ined by specialists assuming the consensus on common interest and using
quantified needs, the process is shaped through the plural needs and desires
of interest groups and power groups within communities.

As a result of these critiques the planner was seen less as a technical

specialist and was more of a social worker taking on roles of facilitator or
negotiator. Plans still follow future goals, but the goals are no longer
defined on the basis of absolute and abstract values, rather there are poli-
cies, which arise through a constant balancing of interests of different
groups within society. The highest values, in planning as well, become, as
Vattimo puts it ‘superfluous’. The subject now ‘dissolves its presence–
absence into a network offered by a society increasingly transformed into
an extremely sensitive organism of communication’5 (p. 47).

2.3 Positioning the project

Impasse. The city can no longer be made with the assumption of a great
degree of planning control. Nor is there a single narrative onto which to
pin the objectives of the plan. What then are planners and designers left
to work with? What is their position and what is the project of the city, if
such a one still exists? This is where Vattimo’s thought again proves semi-
nal. In an essay called ‘The End of Modernity, the End of the Project?’11,
the premises of the project are outlined as:

앫 Legitimacy of aesthetic value issuing from the voices constituting com-

munity, not from historicism
앫 New ‘monumentality’ or ‘recognisableness’,
앫 The position of the designer as ‘symbolic operator’

Because there is no longer a master narrative, a single view of history,

even in the same city, there is no longer a basis for a master plan. Form
cannot be aesthetically legitimised through a handing down from the past,
and from a single community. The continuity of taste, the filiation of forms
is ruptured. Instead of one community there is a ‘multiplicity’ of communi-
ties. Their condition is ‘simultaneity’, and handing down is replaced by
‘interpretation’ of the voices of all these communities.

A new monumentality becomes the orienting concept for the project and
the role of the designer.

Planning, design and the post-modernity of cities 241

 The ability to listen to the Überlieferung, the handing down, from the past no less
than the present, may also be expressed in the form of a new monumentality, or in
less solemn terms, in the forms of a new ensemble of recognisable characteristics, of
a ‘recognisableness.

It is neither a response to the nostalgia for re-localisation, nor a new offer

to ground our experience in some stable reality. It responds to a perhaps
affinitive need for a symbolic and ornamental dimension’. Here the ghost
of dwelling, that we saw weaving through Simmel, Heidegger or Lyotard,
flutters anew, without any pretence of recreating the domus. Vattimo is
perhaps talking of something akin to the untamed described by Lyotard;
when he contends that once the vital needs are appeased, and once meta-
physical reason fades, the ‘symbolic’ needs emerge all the more.

Vattimo’s last point is that the role of the architect has correspondingly
changed, from ‘genius’ to ‘symbolic operator’.
Once the architect is no longer the functionary of humanity, nor the deductive
rationalist, nor the gifted interpreter of a world-view, but the functionary of a society
made up of communities, then projection must become something both more complex
and more indefinite.

The project for the city then becomes a contract. It cannot be applied in
the same way a design for a building gets built. Vattimo describes the
project as a utopia that guides the making but will itself ‘never actually
be realised, ‘put into action’ and ‘applied’ on the landscape.’ Moreover
urban planning gains a rhetorical aspect. The ‘statutory form’ of the project
assembles ‘all the conditions of rhetoric, persuasion and argumentation
regarding the cultural traditions of the place in question’.

If we accept this, planning comes full circle: from a paradigm of control

to one of manifestation. Thus modernism’s attempt at a deterministic con-
trol of the city (through preordained blueprint, or by modelling as an
abstract system and its processes) is giving way to the creation of urban
form as a ‘putting into work’ of a world of urban values, and of a structure
of experience. Planning moves from patterns of thought modelled on
science to ones modelled on art and rhetoric; from determination to cel-
ebration, and from the utopia as a project, to the utopia as a charter, a
frame for the myriad richness of life. All very well, but what fills this
rhetorical plan, this charter, this unrealised utopia? Otherwise put, how can
the symbolic needs, the ‘recognisable’ be manifested in urban space, at the
scale of urban design, and at the scale of the architectural project? Perhaps
some insight can be gained from Vattimo’s thought on the paradigmatic
power of aesthetic experience in the post-modern.

242 Design Studies Vol 23 No. 3 May 2002


15 Kuhn, T S. The structure of
scientific revolutions (2nd edn)
Chicago University Press,
Chicago (1970)
16 Heidegger, M ‘Art and spa-
ce’ (trans. C Siebert) Man and
the World Fall 6 (1973) 3–8.
Reprinted in N Leach (ed)
Rethinking architecture: a reader
in cultural theory, Routledge,
London (1997) 121–124
17 Gadamer, H-G ‘The onto-
logical foundation of the
occasional and the decorative’
Truth and method (trans. G
Barden and J Cummings)
Sheed and Ward, London (1975)
127–142
Planning, design and the post-modernity of cities
3 The paradigmatic power of the aesthetic
In Vattimo’s philosophy5, following insights from Heidegger and Gadamer,
the power for a new, weak, re-collection is given to the aesthetic and to
rhetoric. Vattimo speaks of a ‘Structure of Artistic Revolutions’, akin to
‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’15. Ultimately, at the end of mod-
ernity, both art and science are rhetorical: systems of ‘interpretation’ and
‘persuasion’; with the distinction that art has more completely abandoned
the pretence of ‘truth-value’ and optimistically grounds without ground.
Not only is contemporary art more post modern in its workings than
science, it is also pervasive. This is however the presence of a weak form:
aesthetics generalised through the mass media. Art in the strong (utopian)
sense, as a realm separate from the rest of experience, dies. Its ubiquity
in weakened form however gives it paradigmatic power: the power of
assembling values.
Art performs a ‘bringing-into-the-work of truth’ (Heidegger16). According
to Vattimo’s interpretation, the truth of art is linked to a ‘historical world’.
A society, group, place and time have a system of values, which are self-
referential, much like language. This ‘world’ of values is ‘exhibited’ in the
work of art. The work makes manifest a world of values. The setting into
truth is also the consciousness of transformation, of the passage of time,
of ageing and mortality. Vattimo points out that the work of art can no
longer be seen as ‘a necessarily eternal form, or at a deeper level, in terms
of Being as permanence, grandeur or force’5 (p. 63). The values it exhibits
age as well. And through contact with the physical world, with the rhythms
of the earth, the work of art is again marked by time and new meanings
are created. ‘Truth’ then continues to exist in art, as a conscious and fleet-
ing power of assembly, without absolute pretences. Truth becomes an
‘event’. No longer the verifiable truths of universal reason, but the persuas-
ive truths of a work of poetry, of sculpture, architecture or music—capable
of creating a powerful unity, for a brief time. Truth in art is thus the
structuring of an aesthetic experience that profoundly affects the observer.
However Vattimo is careful to point out that this does not equate truth
with a purely subjective encounter, since both the work of art and its
experience are conditioned by ‘belonging’ to a changing ‘horizon of collec-
tive consciousness represented by language itself and the tradition that it
continues’5 (p. 134). Moreover, as stated by Gadamer and commented on
by Vattimo, the work of art draws attention to itself and redirects it to the
‘context of life which it accompanies’17. There is an exchange between the
locality and the region concentrated, framed in the work of art. If this is
accepted for the truth of art it could also inform the place of the urban
project, where aesthetics become a measure of its ‘truth’, between the lines
of the plan as both a statutory and a rhetorical frame.
243
 4 Concluding remarks
What has been put forward here has been an attempt at ontological re-
positioning, of possible interest to urban planners and designers. It is not
a recipe for design process, or for representation. The point was that the
modern ontology, based on the primacy of will, on a scientifically inspired
determinism, and on an undercurrent of utopianism, has become too con-
straining a base for working in today’s city. This does not mean that mod-
ernity is rejected outright. Instead, following Vattimo’s thought, weakening
makes room for other categories to be added. In this sense a ‘weakened’
ontology should not be read as an excuse for anti-rational fundamentalism
in design or reflection. There is no question of abandoning rationality or
determinism. There are however some doubts as to the desirability of
attempting to comprehensively determine the city, in other words to the
centrality of determinism to planning. Weakening determinism makes room
for the aesthetic and rhetorical, without assuming that determinism is to
vanish or be replaced. Accepting a ‘weak ontology’ of the city means
accepting the incompleteness of both this ontology and of the city. The
post-modern city is a collective project, a multiplicity without any single
designer or any single vantage-point. It is also a continuous and ever unfin-
ished project.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for suggesting a
different title, for making observations on ontology, and offering criticism
of some of the arguments in the initial version. All observations were
extremely helpful in revising the paper.

244 Design Studies Vol 23 No. 3 May 2002