The Modern/Postmodern Divide and Urban Planning

Abstract

One way of trying to establish connections between the humanities and urban planning is to explore some of the meanings of planning within the philosophical and cultural contexts of modernity and postmodernity. Modernists call it urban planning; postmodernists call it urban design. The difference signifies a transition, from the twentieth-century modernist ideal of large-scale, technical, and efficient city plans, and the International Style of functionalist, no-frills architecture, guided by the 'less-is-more' and 'form follows function' aesthetic of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, to a late twentieth-century postmodernist conception of urban life as being highly resistant to this approach. Urban design is preoccupied instead with a collage or pastiche of past styles within a fragmented, ephemeral, diverse environment. Derrida, for example, sees collage/montage as the essential form of postmodern discourse.