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Internationaleries 35
be demystiWed and that public space had to be taken away from the specialized
few. Their objective was to teach citizens how to stop being passive
consumers and how to become self-governing, active producers of their own
culture and politics. However, it was not until the dramatic events of May
1968 that the theory and practice of unitary urbanism were truly brought
into focus and that “the city once again became a center of games.” 71 Albeit
temporary as well as brief in duration, this moment of critical festivities,
political upheaval, and urban joie de vivre seemed to fulWll Henri Lefebvre’s
speculation that the festival had the power to bring people back from the
periphery and into the urban center so as to reoccupy the city as its rightful,
FIGURE 1.6. Illustration of a détourned bomb shelter. Internationale Situationniste, no. 7 (April
1962). Copyright Librarie Arthème Fayard, 1997. The image Wrst appeared in this issue to illustrate
the editorial “Geopolitique de l’hibernation”; it appeared in other issues as a visual framing device and
as one of the ways the SI tactic of undoing the cold war discursive strategies was performed.