SoA faculty member Dr. Chantal El Hayek will present the lecture “The Spiritualist Foundations of Urbanism” on April 14 at the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) conference. The lecture examines the spiritualist foundations of urbanism as established by French scholar Marcel Poëte (1866–1950), whose theories were shaped by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, renowned author of Creative Evolution (1907). Poëte founded and taught at the Institut d’Urbanisme, France’s first urbanism school, and established La Vie Urbaine (1919), then the country’s leading journal on urbanism.
Analyzing Poëte’s writings on the “creative evolution” of Paris, especially its historic core, neighborhoods, and monuments, El Hayek’s lecture shows how he challenged the dominant secularism, materialism, and scientific positivism of his time by framing urbanism as an inventive, intellectual practice centered on spiritualism and human agency. Bergson viewed life as driven by an élan vital, a creative force resisting material inertia and generating new forms. Building on this, Poëte argued that cities evolve through instinct and intellect, forming complex material and social organisms. He replaced conventional, materialist histories of Paris with a spiritualist interpretation that challenges deterministic views of history.
Poëte and Bergson adhered to Spiritualism, a philosophical doctrine that identified the mind, l’esprit, with an immortal, free soul possessing faculties and ideas beyond physiology. Poëte asserted that the city is driven by mystical forces. Spiritual insight, whether religious or secular, guided humanity toward higher potential. While Poëte established urbanism as a modern science, emerging only after the Industrial Revolution, he gave it multifaceted meaning, reconciling science and art, and pre- and post-industrial methods of planning. In critiquing modernization and the machine, he redefined urbanism as an art urbain that harmonized spiritualism with modern technology.