Postmodern cities embody an aesthetic and ontological break from modernist paradigms, constructing urban landscapes that prioritize image over substance and simulacrum over memory. The theoretical framework underpinning this shift rejects the stylistic constraints of the International Style, giving rise to urban forms that are fragmented, thematized, and temporally unstable. These spaces, characterized by architectural eclecticism and symbolic superficiality, lack the historical anchoring that once shaped collective urban identity. The city thus becomes a stage for visual consumption, where the built environment is not designed for habitation but rather for spectacle and transient engagement. In this context, architecture loses its dialogical relationship with its inhabitants, producing environments that alienate rather than integrate, places that are simultaneously recognizable through signs yet devoid of meaning. This transformation reflects a broader postmodern condition—marked by the commodification of culture and the erosion of spatial continuity—that renders the city a mosaic of themed fragments, severed from historical narrative. The clearest example lies in the proliferation of shopping malls and themed districts, where neon signs and surface embellishments simulate urban experience, reducing the city to an orchestrated illusion, a “non-place” that resists memory and communal rootedness.
Barreiro León, B., 2017. Urban Theory in Postmodern Cities: Amnesiac Spaces and Ephemeral Aesthetics. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(1), pp.57–65.