The Naked City: Illustration of a Hypothesis of Unitary Urbanism

Overview

Guy Debord's 1957 piece "The Naked City: Illustration of a Hypothesis of Unitary Urbanism" presents a striking critique of modern urban planning and a provocative counterproposal. Part theoretical manifesto, part visual provocation, it treats the city as a terrain of emotions and behaviors rather than a mere agglomeration of functions. Debord reframes urban space as a field of lived experience shaped by routes, atmospheres, and encounters, arguing that conventional planning fragments daily life and suppresses possibilities for play, spontaneity, and collective invention.
Debord stages that critique through a psychogeographic map of Paris composed of cut-up city fragments linked by arrows and labels. The map is both evidence and experiment: it names affective currents, suggests dérive routes, and exposes how architecture and circulation systems channel desire and alienation. The piece thus functions as diagnosis, method, and program, insisting that how people move and feel in the city must become a central concern of urban design.

Psychogeographic Method

At the core of the essay is psychogeography, an approach that treats geographic environments as generators of mood and behavior. The map's collage of neighborhood snippets and the arrows connecting them operate like a sensory graph, registering attractions, repulsions, intensities, and transitions. Rather than depicting space as neutral, the map reads it as charged, making visible the subtle psychological effects of streets, squares, and buildings.
The dérive, drifting through the city guided by affective pulls instead of functional purpose, is offered as a research method and a tactic for reclaiming urban life. By following the map's suggested currents or deliberately subverting them, individuals can test hypotheses about how built form and circulation shape experience, and thereby begin to design situations that produce unexpected encounters and collective play.

Hypothesis of Unitary Urbanism

Debord's "unitary urbanism" proposes an integrated practice that dissolves the boundaries between art, architecture, and everyday life. Against zoning, specialized infrastructures, and the instrumental logic of modernist planning, unitary urbanism seeks environments that foster creativity, participation, and emotional richness. The hypothesis holds that urban design should not merely organize flows of labor and consumption but should actively construct atmospheres and opportunities for lived experimentation.
This is a political as well as aesthetic project. Debord links spatial fragmentation to social fragmentation and the management of desire, anticipating later critiques of commodified urban space. The map therefore functions as both analysis and call to action: to redesign cities so that circulation and encounters are not subordinated to economic utility but organized around human psychogeographic needs.

Form and Style

The essay's form mirrors its content. Debord employs montage, abrupt captions, and visual disjunction to disrupt habitual readings and provoke new associations. The map resists conventional cartographic objectivity by privileging subjective charge over metric accuracy; streets are meaningful through their moods rather than their names. This aesthetic strategy enacts the very kind of situation the theory advocates, using form to produce insight and affect.
The work's fragmentary presentation, cut-outs, arrows, aphoristic notes, makes the reader a participant, invited to trace currents, imagine dérives, and test the hypothesis in situ. Its rhetorical bluntness and visual assertiveness are intended less to persuade through argumentation than to incite experimentation.

Impact and Legacy

"The Naked City" became a key artifact for the Situationist International and for later practices that blend art, activism, and urban critique. Its psychogeographic techniques influenced dérive experiments, tactical urbanism, and contemporary artistic interventions that repurpose public space. Scholars and practitioners credited Debord with foregrounding the emotional dimension of urban life and with demonstrating how maps and images can function as tools for political and spatial imagination.
The essay continues to resonate where urban theory seeks alternatives to functionalist planning and consumer-oriented redevelopment. Its insistence that cities be designed for play, encounter, and emotional richness remains a touchstone for those who view urban form as inseparable from social possibility.