Urbanists Agree to International Detente on Proliferation of Urbanisms

Singapore, 2.15.08 - An international committee of urban scholars and theorists came to a historic agreement Sunday to halt the dangerous and unwieldy proliferation of "urbanisms" that has threatened to overwhelm the intellectual ecosystem. Recent years have seen a spectacular increase in the practice of naming theory by attaching a snazzy adjective to Louis Wirth's not so favorite way of life - we now have dialectical, radical, splintered, blue, new, do-it-yourself, unitary, everyday, walkable, mega, sustainable, opportunity, green, postmodern, recombinant, magical, transnational, barrio, and postcolonial urbanisms. The lack of available adjectives has even led to the development of X-urbanism, which may be followed soon by F-urbanism, or 46-Urbanism.

Otto von Michnick, recent author of Flatular Urbanism and a co-signatory of the agreement, stated bluntly that he hopes that this agreement will convince urbanists to put down the adjectives and slowly walk away.

Not all were so sanguine about the possibilities of a peaceful transition. Esteban Wilson, noted planner, geographer and hypnotist, blamed the legendary Chicago-school sociologist for creating the dilemma in the first place, and sees further proliferation as inevitable. "Had only Wirth not perpetuated to everyone involved the ludicrous idea that urbanism could somehow refer to both the way of living in the city and the process of examining the city, this situation could have been avoided," Wilson stated from a press conference held by dissidents outside the coffee house where the agreement was developed and signed. "This confusion, and the emphasis on the former, has sullied the minds of urbanists (the people who think about the city, not just those who use it), and led to this ridiculous arms race. I predict that this will all come to naught, and we will soon see multi-adjectived or adverb-adjectived urbanisms emerging. Supposedly, some Scottish geographers are developing a transculturally-mitigated marginal urbanism that they plan to release in 2009."

In a related note, anthropologists and sociologists have announced plans for a human citizenship project, with plans to categorize all 4,278 forms of micro-citizenship. Citizenship, which some link to Aristotle or to the later emancipatory aspect of city life, was actually invented in Berkeley in the mid 1980's.