Our departure point is a cryptic remark made by Henri Lefebvre soon after the close of the 1980 exhibition. Reflecting on the curators' claim that the modernist project of urban architecture was over, Lefebvre speculated whether the notion of 'the postmodern' meant the technological production of space was mutating into some as yet unknowable social form. Describing the architectural as 'common to technology, art, social practice and everyday life,' Lefebvre said, 'Developments in architecture always have a symptomatic significance initially, and a causal one subsequently'.[1]

The comment encapsulated a 'strategic hypothesis' Lefebvre had formulated the preceding decade about the changing significance of urbanism for the future of capitalism. The planetarisation of 'the urban' was, for Lefebvre, the manifestation of a global crisis in the social logic of value. Whereas the industrial city of the nineteenth century was the primary apparatus of capitalist exploitation, the productive forces of urbanisation were in a stage of transmutation, indexed by the increasing pressure of the circuits of finance and commercial capital upon the material structures of daily life. The curators' claim that modernist urbanism was no longer able to build a bridge to the future, and that architectural form had become devoid of content, supported Lefebvre's notion that architectural production was becoming the servant of an abstract space that was fragmentary, homogeneous and, like concrete, spreading everywhere.

Lefebvre's wager about the production of spatial abstraction inspired Jameson's curiosity about the dialectical relationship between architecture and historicity. The 'spatial', Jameson argued, not only expressed local changes to the overall system of capital accumulation; the totality of these transformations represented changes to the social reproduction of the relations of production, the means by which capitalism ensured that history flowed in only one direction. What was implicit in Jameson's interest in postmodern architecture was the attempt to tease out what lay behind an ideology which called time on the problem of 'totality' and the dialectical method. Why was it, Jameson asked, 'that 'concepts of totality' have seemed necessary and unavoidable at certain historical moments and, on the contrary, noxious and unthinkable at others?' [2]

Leaving to one side a historiography which traced the cause of the Gulag back to Marx's Capital, Jameson reckoned the abandoned effort to imagine society as a concrete totality was itself a symptom periodising a wider crisis in the practice of theory. What was intriguing was why, just at the moment the planetarisation of urban life was glimpsed, architecture dropped the future of the city as its coordinating problem.

The issue had a bearing on the fate of post-war modernist experimentation in Western Europe. By the late 1960s the pursuit of architecturally generated, state mandated 'urban fixes' for the increasing scale, mobility and complexity of the metropolis culminated in an impasse. For Jameson, the most concise diagnosis was given by the architect, urban theorist and Team X associate, Aldo Van Eyck. Van Eyck's commitment to an urbanism which mediated the thresholds separating house and city, city and world, while maintaining the social integrity and dignity of human life appeared to flounder on the scale of the design problem. 'We know nothing of vast multiplicity – we cannot come to grips with it – not as architects, planners or anybody else.'

For the architectural historian Kenneth Frampton, Van Eyck's 'doubts as to the ability of the profession to meet the pluralistic demands of society ... led him to question the authenticity of the society itself. In 1966 he asked, 'If society has no form – how can architects build its counterform?'' [3] Such expressions of doubt cast a shadow over the idea of urban architecture as an integrated solution to everyday social questions concerning the provision of healthcare, housing, education, etc. Moreover, alongside this crisis of confidence, a parallel proposition was taking shape, one that crystallised twenty years later into a principle of negation that would form neoliberalism's cutting edge.