In search of populism

Released by Italian publisher Quodlibet, Federico Ferrari’s book focuses on the rhetoric of banality, and certainly offers an original take on postmodernism.

Federico Ferrari, La seduzione populista: dalla città per tutti alla città normalizzata, Quodlibet, 2012 (pp. 240; € 23,00)

 

A cultural and institutional nostalgia for the postmodern (as evidenced by the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 2011 show “Style and Subversion”, Centre Pompidou’s 2012 show on the Tendenza, etc.) has highlighted a newly constituted analytical discourse of and around the architecture and urbanism of the 1960s and 1970s which has emerged over the past 10 years, as scholars, curators, critics and theorists, have begun to tackle the recent past. In a very timely manner, the publication of La seduzione populista: dalla città per tutti alla città normalizzata, a recent book by Federico Ferrari, a young Italian scholar, is an inquiry of the term “populism”, which, together with its antonym “elitism” constituted one of the primary binary oppositions of postmodernism.

La seduzione populista
Federico Ferrari, La seduzione populista, Quodlibet 2013. Cover
Two very straightforward questions are at the core of Ferrari’s study: What exactly do we mean by the term populism? And what are the possible relationships between the term and architecture and urbanism? Although the questions seem simple, the answers put forward by the author are complex, full of nuances, and develop over a variety of case studies, both within an American and a European context. 
La seduzione populista
Federico Ferrari, La seduzione populista, Quodlibet 2013. Back cover
In his book, Ferrari is mainly concerned with architecture as a form of discourse rather than in the act of building per se. And it is over a little more than two hundred pages that he disentangles how populist rhetoric has been used by politicians, real estate developers, architects and theorists from the mid 1960s to the early 1990s. Ferrari’s book unravels both retroactively and from the general to the particular. Divided into two main sections – the first concern with a series of concrete case studies, the second digging more deeply into the history of ideas – the work stems from the idea that populism is almost synonymous with postmodern.
La seduzione populista
Federico Ferrari, La seduzione populista, Quodlibet 2013
What does the ville nouvelle of Bussy Saint-Georges near Paris, the Celebration neighborhood in Florida and the Poundbury project near Dorchester, UK have in common? Seemingly very little, however, these three case studies constitute the first section of Ferrari’s book, or what the author identifies as a series of “scenarios” representing one or more facets of “populism”. When, in 1965, the French government decided to establish a scheme for the creation of nine villes nouvelles (new towns) to try to control the expansion of cities due to the emergence of an expanding middle class that had become the New elite, it wanted to give French people the power to choose how they wished to live.
La seduzione populista
Federico Ferrari, La seduzione populista, Quodlibet 2013
This democratization of taste obviously opened the door to populism and, consequently to the creation, in 1985, of Bussy Saint-Georges, a commune situated in Marne-la-Vallée’s sector 3. Also born from nothing and inaugurated in 1995, Celebration is an example of theme park as urban solution. Based on the idea of total control, Celebration is the paradigmatic example of a marketable populism in which inhabitants are both actors and spectators whilst architecture becomes part of the event. In Poundbury, an experimental new town realized from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s, architect Leon Krier was able to concretize part of his traditionalists ideas on architecture: contained dimensions, neighborly relations, high density and mix functionality. With all very different examples, Ferrari aims at showing how the spontaneity of popular tastes is directly link to the individualism characteristic of the postmodern consumer society.
In his book, Ferrari is mainly concerned with architecture as a form of discourse rather than in the act of building per se.

If the first case study (Bussy) is very well researched and documented, the second (Celebration) and to a certain extent the third (Poundbury) seems to reuse already published material and we regret that the author haven’t made further research into American archives. However, this leads to the study of Celebration being, perhaps less informative and more interpretative in scope.

The second section of the book is heavier and much more theoretical: it really aims at explaining the genesis of populism, starting from the architectural discourse and moving on to a more general history of ideas. In this section, Ferrari begins by revisiting the anti modern polemic through the paradigmatic example of the glorification, in the early 1970s, of the ordinary by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Ferrari writes: “The polemic of Prince Charles against modern establishment and the operations of Bussy Saint-Georges, Poundbury and Celebration wouldn't have exist without the cultural revolution of the 1960s, from which the theoretical corpus of Venturi and Scott Brown can be considered paradigmatic.” Following that is a more general chapter on populism and urban forms in which the author seems to have concentrated all (and perhaps sometimes too much) of his theoretical background.

La seduzione populista
Federico Ferrari, La seduzione populista, Quodlibet 2013
Part of Quodlibet studio’s series, La Seduzione Populista, is joining other titles – all with the same rather sober and elegant mustard color cover – such as Paola Nicolin’s Castelli di carte (2011) on the history of the 1968 Milan Triennale or Ernesto Ramon Rispoli’s Ponti sull’Atlantico (2013), on the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and the relations between Italia and America. Written in a dense and scholarly way, one that may seem paradoxical to the topic at hand, Ferrari’s book, by focusing on the rhetoric of banality, certainly offers an original take on postmodernism.

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