Regieren in der Planstadt. Raum, Wissen und Macht in der »Ville Contemporaine«

Abstract

Le Corbusier‟s Ville Contemporaine has frequently been quoted as a major example of “authoritarian
high modernism” and often serves as a negative foil for present-day approaches to urban planning. Diverging from this line of normatively charged approaches, the present article sets the groundwork for a “critique” which emancipates the Ville Contemporaine from its creator and places it at the crossroads of contemporary discourses problematizing urban agglomerations. The aim is to scrutinize the epistemic preconditions of Le Corbusier‟s approach
towards urban planning in order to better understand the “answer” he gave by designing the Ville Contemporaine. The article identifies three main axes of reasoning: first, the bird‟s eye as a mode of abstraction and an imperative of “ordering” intervention; second, statistical representations of traffic as well as population and the prognostic evidence emanating from them; third, a “physiological” conceptualization of the city and the consequent necessity of enforcing “(re)organization”.