This new MONU issue on the topic of Post-Ideological Urbanism probably touches on one of the most fascinating and biggest issues of our time and in our culture, or what is left of it: the non-ideological – or better post-ideological – conditions of our society when it comes to cities. Today, ideology ap…pears to have become, and to have been reduced to, something merely aesthetic, something you can buy yourself into as Wouter Vanstiphout explains in an interview with us entitled “Acrobatic Narratives”. In that sense cities have become suspicious territories where hypocrisy and fakery prevail when it comes to urban ideologies…and a new sincerity is obviously needed in a world consisting of a multiplicity of choices and urban outcomes without a single consistent urban ideology as Melissa Dittmer, Jamie Witherspoon, and Noah Resnick point out in their piece “Choose Your Own Urbanism Presents: The Case of the Missing Ideal”.

The following text is an excerpt from an article entitled “CHOOSE YOUR OWN URBANISM PRESENTS: The Case of the Missing Ideal” that has been recently published in the latest MONU magazine:

It’s a hot, dry and dusty afternoon… But, then again, all the afternoons are hot, dry and dusty in Sin City.  You’re in your shoebox of an office with the top three buttons of your white cotton shirt undone, a damp towel on the back of your neck, and the sound of a rickety two-dollar fan blowing in your face.  The A.C. is on the fritz again, and you’re just about to phone up that good-for-nothing building super to complain, when you hear three soft taps on the glass pane of your office door – the one that reads: Calvin Lynch, Private Detective.

You ask her to have a seat in the worn leather armchair and offer her a cigarette and a glass of flat ginger ale.  She accepts neither and says she prefers to stand. 

“I’m searching for something,” she finally says, after standing in front of the window, staring out through the half-closed blinds. “They say what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, but this thing didn’t stay.  Or, maybe it never existed to begin with. Either way, I need your help.”

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