In April 1947, the architect Percival Goodman and his brother, the social critic Paul Goodman, published what would become a classic in urban planning: Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life. Exploring the form cities have taken and how they have been envisioned over the centuries, they argued that far more is at stake in urbanism than technical functionality.

Cities always express the moral and cultural values of their inhabitants. How “men work and make things,” they added, is crucial to determining “how they live.” The aim of Communitas was therefore to try to imagine the city from the standpoint of the “relation between the means of livelihood and the ways of life.” To explore such a relationship, the Goodman brothers imagined different community paradigms that each took “value-choices” as “alternative programs and plans,” or different ways to define human needs and social purpose.

The first of these paradigms was a city organized around “the premises of the official economics” — a “metropolis as a department store” where everything is organized “according to the acts of buying and using up.” In such a model, the center of the city and of social life is a giant air-conditioned mall. Inside, a “permanent fair” is ongoing and, in every corridor, all the products “that make it worthwhile to get up in the morning to go to work” are on display. All around the commercial center, hotels and restaurants form a ring where customers can eat and rest.