Once upon a time, the neoliberal city was a fiction: it is the aim of the present essay to discuss three key aspects of the neoliberal city through paradigmatic projects put forward in a decade when the first effects of post-Fordist production were starting to be visible in the European city. By rereading Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt (1966),Archizoom’s No-Stop City (1969), and Superstudio’s 12 Ideal Cities (1971), the essay tries to shed light on the changed role of education, consumption and reproduction in the contemporary condition.
The three projects will also offer an occasion to discuss the value of architecture as a critical tool: if architecture is always necessarily entangled with power and economy – and this is all the more true in the neoliberal era – these examples show that the political edge of architecture can lie in its being a laboratory for new concepts and archetypes. This continuous search can ultimately sharpen our awareness of character of the environment we live in.
After more than four decades, these projects have proved to be acts of radical realism, parables that sought to redefine the political subject the XXI century within and against capitalism. As a matter of fact, the issues put forward in these scenarios have become the hallmarks of the neoliberal city: the transformation of higher education into a form of industry, the collapsing of the difference between production and consumption, the transformation of architecture into a biopolitical apparatus for the reproduction of suitable subjects.