Urbanism today is operating from a position of relative impotence. Urbanists analyze self-organizing systems and sketch political, economic, organizational or communicational strategies to influence their behavior. Such pragmatism is often characterized as “beyond ideology” because it cannot start any longer from clearly outlined ideals as the top-down planning strategies promoted by modernism did. An urbanism that doesn’t design but limits itself to “actualizing latent potentials” appears immunized against critique. But of course, ideology has all but disappeared from urbanism: it just went hiding within the mechanism of the pragmatic project. Planning is used to organize processes in a more efficient way. Functionalist urbanism started out from a broad consensus on the kind of efficiency to be achieved. In contrast, contemporary urban projects are always based on the configuration of alliances between the requirements and wishes of many parties. They have to invent their efficiency anew each time: Strategies that appear dysfunctional under certain criteria can make perfect sense if seen from another point of view. Economical efficiency is often far from being efficient technologically, ecologically, politically or marketing-wise. Furthermore long-term and short-term efficiencies tend to exclude each other. To cut a long story short: its efficiency is the crucial ideological choice of the pragmatic project and therefore the starting point of choice for its critique.

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