ABSTRACT
Carl Jung offered his reflective metaphor of life as a rhizome in 1963, and he could not have anticipated that it would become one of the central tenets of contemporary radical political economy. In contrast to the Fordist methods of standardized manufacturing and unionized labour that characterized Keyness time period, contemporary labour is dispersed, decentralized, and takes immaterial forms. Jameson, for example, described postmodern art and architecture as the cultural logic of late capitalism, arguing that its depthless reproduction of images reflected capitalist commodification. Contemporary architectural trends can also be described in these terms, where the built environment appears either to embrace these transaesthetics, or as a compensatory attempt to re-embed identity in local tradition, community, and neighbourhoods. A reflection of this latter impulse is New Urbanism a form of urban planning that emphasizes community interaction, walkability, and a neo-traditional design aesthetic. Tradition, in turn, is defined narrowly in reference to a primarily European design heritage.
