high-modernism

The chapter critically examines Le Corbusier's high-modernist vision of the city as a rational, hierarchical machine designed to optimize collective urban functions, exemplified by the planned city of Brasilia. It highlights how Brasilia, conceived as a utopian break from Brazil's historical urban traditions, embodies principles of functional segregation, state control, and the elimination of traditional public spaces, ultimately prioritizing abstract planning ideals over the lived social realities of its residents. The analysis underscores the tension between scientific urban planning and the complex, informal social life that such top-down designs tend to suppress.

The chapter critically examines Lenin's persistent high-modernist belief in centralized state power, technical rationality, and mechanization as essential for building socialism, emphasizing his advocacy for a disciplined vanguard party and bureaucratic organization. It highlights Lenin's support for large-scale mechanized agriculture and electrification as transformative technologies, contrasting these views with empirical evidence and the autonomous, unpredictable nature of working-class movements emphasized by Rosa Luxemburg. The chapter underscores the tension between Lenin's authoritarian, instrumentalist approach to revolutionary leadership and Luxemburg's vision of worker autonomy and the complexity of social change.

This chapter analyzes Soviet high modernism's cultural and administrative roots, emphasizing the Bolsheviks' ambition to reshape society through monumental projects and cultural revolutions. It highlights the transnational exchange of ideas between Soviet and American agricultural planners who shared a high-modernist faith in large-scale, mechanized industrial farming. The chapter also critically examines the failures of such industrial farms, which often ignored local contexts and complexities, revealing the limitations of centralized, standardized planning.

The chapter critically examines Tanzania's ujamaa villagization campaign (1973-1976) as a high-modernist state project that sought to reorganize rural populations into planned villages to enhance state legibility, promote socialist agriculture, and facilitate modernization. It situates this campaign within a continuum of colonial agricultural policies and earlier failed large-scale development schemes like the lower Shire Valley and groundnuts projects, emphasizing how reliance on standardized models and disregard for local ecological and social knowledge led to economic and ecological failures. The chapter also highlights the tension between Nyerere's initial voluntarist approach to villagization and the eventual coercive enforcement necessitated by peasant resistance, illustrating the limits of technocratic social engineering.

This chapter critiques the high-modernist ideology underpinning state-led villagization and urban planning, emphasizing its reliance on an aesthetic and teleological faith rather than empirical evidence, which leads to failures when applied universally. It explores the tension between formal, schematic planning and the complex, adaptive social realities of communities, highlighting how high-modernist projects often retreat into miniaturized, controlled environments like model cities and planned villages. The chapter also discusses the symbolic role of capital cities as utopian showcases of state power, while revealing the indispensable yet hidden informal 'dark twin' realities that sustain these planned spaces.

Chapter 4 explores Le Corbusier's high-modernist vision of urban planning, particularly his Radiant City concept, which emphasizes aerial perspective, rational design, and authoritarian social order to create legible, efficient cities. It critically examines the social consequences of such top-down planning, including disruptions to community conviviality and informal social networks. The chapter concludes with Jane Jacobs's influential critique, advocating for organic, community-based urban development that values social trust, economic diversification, and informal surveillance over rigid zoning and imposed order.