The Situationists are lost prophets of a bygone age, an age of innocence and naïveté, of dreams and hopes, of espresso and wine and Gauloises and mad raving ideals. They were immature people— many of them students—who taught grown-ups a thing or two about mature life and politics. They were the most marginal of dissidents, never more than a dozen or so free spirits; little of their activity extended beyond the centers of Paris, Amsterdam, and Brussels. Their program was epigrammatic not systematic, and its legacy consists only of scraps and preliminary ideas, blurry vignettes and vague hypotheses. No completed or coherent body of work endures. And yet somehow, after the Situationists, urban politics and radical art and design would never quite be the same. (continued...)