The Society of the Spectacle

In this chapter, Debord outlines the spatial and architectural effects that capitalism has upon the use of public space. For Debord, it is because life is lived according to what is required for the expansion and accumulation of capital that metropolitan and suburban centers take on the characteristics that have come to distinguish them:

The dictatorship of the automobile […] inscribed itself on the earth with the domination of the highway, which dislocates ancient centers and requires an ever-larger dispersion. At the same time, the moments of incompleted reorganization of the urban tissue polarize temporarily around ‘distribution factories,’ enormous supermarkets constructed on bare ground, on a parking lot (Section 174).

In other words, the reason why cities and towns take on a certain architectural appearance is because it is the highway, the strip mall, the metropolitan boulevards lined with high fashion brand names that are the conducive spatial counterparts to the cycles of production-time and consumption-time of capitalism. Under capitalist society and the spectacle, public space is first and foremost a space reserved for the sale and display of the commodity before it is a space for a truly collectively-emancipated existence.