The programme Ebenezer Howard proposed, in 1898, was to halt the growth of London and repopulate the countryside, where villages were declining, by building a new kind of town, the Garden City, where the city poor might again live close to nature. So they might earn their living, industry was to be set up in the Garden City, for while Howard was not planning cities, he was not planning dormitory suburbs either. His aim was the creation of self-sufficient small towns,really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own, and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of your own significance belonged only to the planners in charge.
(Jane Jacobs," the death and life of great american cities")
Marc Auge's 'Non Places - Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity' argues that supermodernity creates non-places. The main characteristic of supermodernity is excess, so non-places are its results or perhaps some kind of side effects of the excess of time, excess of space and excess of ego. Hence supermodernity is created through the logic of excess. Furthermore, Marc Auge defines non-places as having no identity, no history and no urban relationships. Non-places are temporary spaces for passage, communication and consumption, from motorways seen from car interiors, motorway restaurants/service/petrol stations, large supermarkets and duty - free shops to the passenger transit lounges of world airports. Non-places are contrary to places, the exodus of public man and rise of self-obsessed man. Non-places are such due to their solitary arrangement, shielded by pin and credit-card numbers, as well as passwords, all creating solitude and alienation.
Edita Marelic sur Marc Auge à http://www.find-croatia.com/travelessays/nonplaces.html
(Raphael) Samuel's confidence in the potential of the material object to function as the locus of oppositional histories is shared by the London historian Patrick Wright. His 1985 study On Living in an Old Country was a sustained analysis of the ways in which the conservative uses of history in the 1980s undermined any attempt by a left-wing challenge to Thatcherite ideology. Wright's critique of Michael Foot's attempt to identify with a traditional labour past highlights the necessity of discovering an alternative model of historical engagement for the contemporary situation: "Shouldn't we be dismantling the past to make a theory (rather than a philosophical romance) of history -- one which can inform a political project which is capable of wining ground in the future and which therefore stands on an adequate analysis of the present rather than on wistful solidarity with marches of old."[17] For Wright, this history is to be found through creating histories from below, compiled from the detritus of those whom history has forgotten: "'Timeless' history is often also petrified history in another sense, for what survives is usually what was made and intended to survive: the edifices and cultural symbols of the powerful, structures of stone rather than wood, the official rather than the makeshift and vernacular.
(Reading London Stone: The Paradox of Alternative Material History in Representations of Contemporary London, by Alex Murray, on http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/london-journal/march2004/murray.html)