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    heUrban evo lu t ion

    IS N 0 8166 4160 9

    780816 64160' '

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    The Urban evolution

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    The Urban evolution

    Henri LefebvreTranslated y Robert ononno

    oreword by Neil Smith

    University of Minnesota PressMinneapolis London

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    The of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financialassistance provided for the translation of this book by the FrenchMinistry of Culture.Copyright 2003 by Robert BonannoForeword copyri ght 2003 by the of the University ofMinnesotaOriginaUy published in French under the title La evolution urbainecopyright 1970Editions Gallirnard.AU rights reserved. No part of this publicationmay be reproduced,siored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by anymeans, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.Published by the Universityof Minnesota PressJ 11 Third Avenue South, Suite 290Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520htlp:llwww.upress.unm.eduLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in Publication DataLefebvre, Henri, 1901-1991

    Revolution urbaine. English1The urban revolution Henri Lefebvre; translated by Robert

    Bononno j foreword by Neil Smith.p em.

    Translation of: La Revolution urbaiue.ISBN 0-8166-4159-5 He; all< paper) ISBN 0-816641609

    PB : alk. paper )1 Cities and towns. 1 Title.HT1SI .L3752003307.76-dc21

    2002015036Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paperThe University ofMinnesota is an equal-opportu.nity educator andemployer.12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    ontents

    Foreword viiNeil Smith1 From the City to Urban Society G2. Blind Field 23

    The Urban Phenomenon 45~ 4 levels and Oimensions 5 Urban Myths and Ideologies @:6 Urban Form 1. Toward an Urban Strategy 135

    8 The Urban Illusion 1519 Urban Society 165

    Conclusion 181Notes 189

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    forewordNeil Smith

    This translation into nglish of Henri Lefebvre s classic icontested text is long overdue. a evolution urbaine first ap-peared in 1970, in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprising inParis. Cities around the world from Detroit to Tokyo, Pragueto Mexico City, were the scene of major revolts, connectedless through any organizational affiliation than through po-litical empathy ljnking highly diverse struggles, and as the19605 culminated in worldwide challenges to capitalism, war,racism, patriarchy, imperialism, and the alienation of mod-ern urban life, the book was inevitably received as a politicaltestament to the possibilities for fundamental political andsocial change. Although the revolution of 1968, as it hascome to be seen, ult imately failed, the appeal to urban revo-lution captured the aspirations of the period, and nowheremore than in Paris; it was as realistic as it was anticipatory,and the book became a pivotal if controversial inteUectualtext on the European and Latin American left. Along withsome of LefebVTe s earlier work, it put the urban on the agen-da as an explicit locus and target of political organizing.

    Most surprising, perhaps, is that despite the turbulentvii

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    orewordcircumstances of its writing and publication, and especialJy

    Lefebvre's direct in events of tber:ime, a Revolution urbaine is remarkably sober, politicallyif not always phiJosophicaUy, avoiding both the wild effervescence of the moment, as Lefebvre would have put it, andthe suicidal agony of 1t an hope-fulness and openness toward future that often beenhard to sU5 aiu in the three decades since its publication butwhich characterizes Lefebvre's ph.ilosophicaUy induced intel-

    and political optimism. At the same time. as an examination of translation atrests, this is no merehistorical document. lu some ways even more than when itwas fust publ.isbed, it bears a strong sense of pootical immediacy and contemporary relevance. Lefebvre wasthings at the end of the 1960s that many of us, often with hishelp, came to see only in more recent and noware sr.ill discovering. It is worth highlighting some of these issues by way of providing a few signposts to the text.

    Bm first some biographical context Born at the turn ofthe twentieth century in a small Pyrenean village in south-ern Lefebvre came to political

    horrors World War I and promises of theRussian Revolution. tn the early 19205 he moved to Paris tostudy at Sorbonne and became engulfed i n an extraordi-nary political, cultural, and intellectual mat

    artists with cornmunists and a newyoung radical philosophers. of influ-

    enCt'S on Lefebvre's political and intellectual developmentderived foremost from this period as he devoured

    Marx, and Nietzsche, among others, as well as thework Heidegger. He joined the Cornmunisl

    Party in 1928, combining political with writ-. that, c r o s s span of hi.s ninety years, would eventually

    ~ ~ l d an astonishing string of book-length philosophical, pohtlcal, and sociological studies. An emerging intellectua.1 fig-

    oreword II ix

    me by the eve of World War II, ~ l e was f o r c ~ d fTOn: Paris andITom his university post followmg NazI lIwaSlOn and helived out the war as abecoming one of its mostLefebvre's relationship with t.he Conununist Party wastesry at best, and, as party's Stalinism retrenched \ ~ i t hthe cold war in, he chafed more and more at bnesit took. As with so many others, his end came after the 1956Khrushchev report unveiled the authoritarian violence andcorruption of Stalin's regime; after an u n s u c c e ~ s f u anemptto reform a recalcitrant party was expeIJed l l Overthe next few years he publisbed two books on Ivlarx and twoselections of work, but he also turned h.is attentionto a series of questions tbat interested him deeply but onwhich the Communist Party leadership had of en frowned.Via the themes of ideology, alienation) and life, hereturned to a long-standing concern with rural s ~ c i o l o g yand also picked up an earlier. broader, critical analysis ofquotidian in an effort to explore the and fab-rication of the everyday. Althoughby the mid-196os he turned his attention to urban .day, announced by Le roit a a ville (The right to the Ctty),stUl untranslated in its entirety into English. Between 1966and 1974 produced, in addition to o ~ h e r titles, no

    than eight books devoted to understandtng the u r ~ a nand, more broadly, the production of (as he put It).From Heraclitus to Hegel to Marx:' Lefebvre once ob dialectical thinking has been bound up with rime,

    and although his effort was most focused in th.is period, acentral of lifework involved the attempt toremink the dialectic in terms of If as Foucault oncecommented. the nineteenth-century obsession with bisto-the . . ~

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    x II Foreworda Production de I espace (1974; English translation, 1991), Tire

    Urban evolution stands as the most enduring explorationfro.m this period. t wa s and remains the pathbreaking ana

    ~ y t l C a l work connecting ur ban research not just with marx]st t h ~ o r y b u t with social theory and philosophy, broadlyconceived.

    o, ~ p r c c i a t e the novelty of what Lefebvre was trying todo t IS Im p,ortant to recall that urban research in the 19605was dramatically undertheorized. Throughout the social sciences. an,d especially in soc iology, urban analysis was largelydescnptlve. ~ r it aspired to theory, most notably in thework of the Ch icago school. which remained influential into

    ~ e 19605, or in the case of social ecology, urban research relied more on empirical generalizat ions than on theory perse: Innovations in social theory that helped codify the socialsciences after World War J (the work of Max Weber Freud

    M a l i n o w s ~ the Frankfurt school) largely avoided an e x p l i c i ~concern With the urban, even if the earlier theoretical workof Durkheim all.d certainly Simmel did help to frame a generally untheoretlCal urban sociology. Louis Wirth, for examp l ~ , ~ r i t i n g about urbanism as a way of life, applied Durk-helm s social p.ositivism to advance the themes of he Chicago

    s c h o ~ l . Questions of housing, industrial organization, segr e g ~ t l O n . or conununity development certainly arose in the

    s o c l ~ 1 SCiences but were generally framed in technocraticfashIOn a c c o ~ d i n g to the impress of liberal policy require

    m e n ~ ~ r x l s t theory, constrained by no such injunction,prOVided httJe alternative: many marxists rejected the notionthat the urban represented a specific social realm, and the

    ~ o s h v a r Stalinism of the communist parties was openly hos~ I l e to the proposal of an identifiable urban regime, arguin gInstead Ihal the.urba n represented a superstructural appur-tena?ce rooted III the basal social and economic forces andrelatlons.of production. This was Lefebvres primary target.By focusmg on what he identified as the urban revolution,

    FOfeword n xihe sought to tu rn this state of affairs on its head. s late asthe 1960s it was a novel proposition that the urban had to betheorized: "The expression 'urban society,' he says, "meetsa theore tical need. At the same time he insisted that whenit came to processes of urbanizatio n, it made little sense toseparate the experiences of capitalism and socialism, asfound on the ground. In this sense, more than a decadeafter he disavowed party membership, The Urban evoilltionrepresents a forceful rebuttal of the closed-mindedness ofthe cold war French com munist party.

    By urban revolution, Lefebvre sough t to connote a far )more profound change in social organization than that symbolized by the momentary urban revolts of the 1960s, muchas these were symptomatic of this larger picture. Urbanrevolu tion identifies a long historical sh ift, from an agricultural to an industrial to an urban world, according toLefebvre's account, but it also cap tures a shift in the internal territorial form of the city, from the originary politicalcity through the mercantile, then industrial, city to the pres-)ent critical phase, the harbinger ~ f a c e r t ~ i n g l o b a l i z a t i ~ nof the urban. Integral with these ShiftS, the unage of the Cityalso transforms, as do the concept of the urban and the ideologyof urbanism. Long before the notion of p o s t i n . d u ~ t r i a lsociety beca me popularized in the 1970s, Lefebvre IS nght-Iy critical of the intent of such a label, yet ~ t the, same t ~ m . ehis central argument is that the problematiC of IIldustnah zation, which ha s dominated capi talist societies for more

    - than two centuries, i n r e a s i n g l y superseded by the urban:the urban problematic becomes predominant. The ~ o . l i t i -

    cal crisis of 1968, he suggests, was more profoundly a cns ls of-urban society than a crisis of capitalist industrialism .

    For English-language readers, one of the remarkable aspects of this book is Lefebvre's engagements with a broadrange of soc ial theorists whose work during the 1960s sub sequently became influential in Anglo-American circles. Not

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    xii Foreword

    all of these encounters a re obvious or well referenced, but allare implicitly if not explicitly critical. Somewhat ciliptically,Lefebvre appropriates Althusser's notion of continentsof knowledge but immediately launches into a critical discussion of ideological blind fields, before then using thistopographic metaphor to frame the temporal transitionfrom agrarian to industrial to urban worlds. His discussionof heterotopy clearly engages Foucault. Where Foucault'sheterotopias are evoked almost randomly in relation totime and space-cemeteries, malls, rugs, brothels, coloni es,ga rdens-Lefebvre envisaged heterotopias in a more criticalregister, rooting them in a sense of political and historicaldeviance from social norms. The archetypal heterotopias forL e f ~ ~ v r e are the places of renegade commercial exchange,

    p o l ~ t ~ c a l l y and geog raphically independent from the earlypoiJtlcal City: caravansaries, fa irgrounds, suburbs. Less successfully, in an ob lique effort to distinguish scales of sociospatial reality, Lefebvre differentiates between the globalmixed , and private levels, and draws on the work ~ f

    Pierre Bourdieu (but with Heidegger clearly hovering overthe text) to designate the private as the level of habiting. Inthe process he insists on a distinction between the place andprocess of habiting: hab it ing takes precedence over habitator habitus. His discussion of the blind field of ideology,together with references to revolution in the streets, continues a ~ o n g - t e r m dialogue with the Situationists, particularlyengagmg Guy Debord's Society nd the Spectacle published ayear earl ier. Blind fields for Lefebvre are places cum practicesthat obscure constitutive sociospatial relations.

    Much as The Urban Revolution expresses the rich intellectual and political ferment of Paris in the period, it alsorepresents the unfolding of Lefebvre's own thinking. Manyof the formulations in this text can be seen as precursors toarguments that are more fully developed and explored in11,e Production ofSpace. published six years later, and more

    Foreword xiii

    familiar to English-speaking audiences. The discussion ofheterotopy fades but not that of utopia, while the c o n c ~ r nwith habiting broadens into a much d e n s e ~ explorat.lonof spatial practice and form. The concern with u r ~ a n t s mas an ideological blind field is likewise broadened iOta aninterrogation of spatial ideologies; urban practice b e o ~ e sa subset of spatial practice. And there is a clear contll.lll1tybetween the evo lution from a political to a commercial toan industrial urbanity on the one hand and on the other thehistorical transition posited in The Production of Space fromabsolute space to historical, abstract, and ultimately differential space. The continuit ies between ~ h . e s e ~ e x t s a ~ e r e ~ lbut so too are the discontinuities. A pohtlcallmmedtacy Oparticular marks Tile Urban Revolution as a quite differenttext from the more abstract and more expansive wo rk of afew years later. .Whereas space came alive in early-twentteth-cen.tury art,physics, and ma thematics, in social theo ry and philosophyit was a quite different story. Space there w ~ s more ~ f t e nsynonymou s with rigidity, immobility, stasIs; space Itselfhad become a blind field. For Lefebvre. by contrast. spaceholds the promi se of liberation: liberation from th.e tyrannyof time apart from anything else. but also from social r e ~ r e s sian and exploitation, from self-imprisoning c tegones-liberation jnto desire. Space is radically open for Lefebvre;he refuses prec isely the closure of space that so dominatedwestern thinking and in some circles co ntinues to do so.Only when we pause to reflect on the radical c 1 o s ~ r e o f . s ~ a c erepresented by contemporary financial capitalists V ionsof globalization, or left-wing parodies of the same. does thegenius of Lefebvre's spatial insistence b.ecome clear. WhenThe Urban Revolution was originally wntten, the world wascerta inly more open to change, but it was far less o p ~ nseeing political change in spatial ~ e r . m s . ~ h e very sluft 1I1political thinking to embrace a spatlaitzed view of the world,

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    xiv 1 orewordin significant part due to Lefebvre's work, makes it difficultloday to see how genuinely iconoclastic this position was.The U r b a n R e ~ ~ / u t i o n is a paean to the space of the city andto the poss ibilitIes of revolutionary social change that comesfrom the stree ts.

    But this radical openness comes with costs attached. Whereas Lefebvre is unrivaled in the analysis o f the circulation ofsigns, capi tal, meanings, and ideas into and out of urbanspace and exp./orin g [he po ss ibilit ies for political change

    ~ a t result, he IS less adept at ferreting out how certain soCial meanings become fixed, however temporar ily. in and as

    s ~ a ~ e a ~ d place. In the present text he makes a synchronicd l s ~ t l O n b e t w e e n global, mixed, and private levels ofSOCiety, which are roughJy equated with the state the urband h b In a lting, respectively. In contemporary parlance this

    ; e p r ~ ~ e n t s a halting effort at what migh t now be called aPOlttl Sof scale, but Lefebvre's reluctance, in deference tothe openness of space, to allow this production of levels to

    c.rys tallize into anything approaching coherent spa tial entities f o ~ e c J o s e s Our understanding of the political pr ocessesby which soc ial assumptions are written into the scaled

    a r t o g r a p h y of everyday places. rn The roduction ofSpacel I l t ~ n t on a un ified scien ce of space, he tackled th is issu:agam, but backed away from the discussion of levels. Insteadhe proposed, as part of a well-known conceptual triad thenoti02 of representational spaces. AJthough d i f f e r e ~ t i a 1space becomes Lefebvre's spatial code for socialism thefut.ure, always co iled in the beUy of the capitalist beas: his

    ~ h i l o s ~ p h i c a l insistence on the openness of spa ce a U ~ w slittle hmt at all about how that differentiation of spa ce ismade and. remade. Yet the architectonics of scale, as he might

    h ~ v e put. It,. become the most vibrant technology of spatialdifferentiatIOn: the spatial arbiters of What gets empoweredand what gets contained.

    Lefebvre's treatment of nature is nowhere nea r as central

    oreword II xvto h is argument, but it does work as a kind of coun terpointto his sense of space. In the context of the late 1960s, Lefebvrewas weU ahead of his tim e in his willingness not only totake environmental qu estions se riously but also to theorizenature while criticizing the emerging environmental movement. Quite unlike the radical openness that characterizes histreatment of space, the treatment of nature is less nuanced.For Lefebvre the transition from agriculture to industrybrings a feti shism of nature at the same time that nature issubjected to unprecedented ravages. The tr ansition to ur-banization brings a further shrinkage of nature, while thesigns o f nature, by cont ra st, proliferate; the steady, violentdeath of nature is matched y an obsessive ideologica lnaturalization of society and the parodic reproduction ofnature as denatured open spaces, parks, gardens, imagesof femininity. In clear cont radistinction to his treatment ofspace, nature for Lefebvre seems radically closed as a venuefor political change. Whether this closure of nature drewfrom his early and enduring experience with the southernFrench peasantry and the steady erosion of peasant life orwhether it simply continued a prejudice of ce rtain narrowreadings of marxism is not clear, but th is putative conn ection would seem to cry out for an engage ment with someof the contemporaneous work of Raymond Williams. In anycase, the making of nature , unlike space, represents a causefor lament, even as he criticizes various romanticisms of theenvironmental movement. Space in the end retains an optimistic Hegelian a p riorism visa-vis nature, Philosophically.the unfulfilled) promise of Einstein's relativity theory, namelya recombination of space and ma tter in favor of the philosophical p rimacy of the latter, remains unglimpsed.

    But it would be a regrettable mistake if The Urban evo-lution were to be read simply through the lenses of Lefebvre 'slater work, which adopts the rubric of space more exp lici tly.The book's initial recepti on predated that work. Indeed, it

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    Ixvi oreword

    might be suggested that in the English.language world TheUrban Revolution has suffered insofar as several widely readcritiques quickly saw the light of day in the 19705 more thana quarter century before the book was finally translated,and these have established a certain pattern of response. Bythe same token, the prominence of these critiques has alsoheightened the anticipation for this English translation.With greater or lesser amounts of respect, Lefebvre's pro-vocative thesis that the urban problematic not only globalizes itself but also supplants industrialization as the motiveforce of historical change was quickly critiqued by two otherof the most prominent urbanists of the twentieth cen tury. Astudent of Lefebvre and a witness to the Paris sp ring of 1968Manuel CasteUs respo nded immediately to a Revolution ur-baine, and his critique was triple-ba rreled. In the first placehe identified a certain romanticism in Lefebvre's sense thaturban propinquity created a unique quotidian environmentavailable for future reconst ructions of soc iability and desi re.A philosophical utopianism, he suggested, undergirds theenterprise. Second, more generally and more decisively, Castells challenged the very presumption that the urban represented any kind of coherent scientific object available forstudy; the urban , for Castells, was at best an ideological con struction, requiring desquamation rather than exaltation.Third, and most viscerally, Castells objected to the fact thatLefebvre's announcement of the urban revolution displacedmarxist analyses of history, politics, and economics: implicitly reinstating the party line about base and superstructure(an argument often erroneously attributed to Marx), Castellscomplained that Lefebvre moves from a marxist analysis ofthe urban to an urbanist analysis of marxism La QuestionIIrbaine, 1972; English translation,1977).

    The seco nd critique came not from Paris but from Baltimore. Completing a book that affected English-languageurban soc ial science much as a Revolution urbaine did in

    oreword xviiFrance and elsewhere, David Harvey, recognizing both theimportance of Lefebvre's text and the critical convergencewith his own work. engages Lefebvre in the conclusion toSocial Justice nd the City (1973). For Harvey. despite thebroad commonality of effort with Lefebvre, it was simplyunrealistic that the contradictions between urbanism andindustrial capitalism are now resolved in favor of the urban.Where Castells deployed a structu ralist critique fashionedover a blueprint of marxism, Harvey came at Lefebvre witha political economic critique of the sort that typified (notleast because of Harvey's own efforts) Anglo-Americanmarxism after the 1960s. Harvey was certainly sympa theticto Lefebvre's assault on party dogma, but for him industrialcapitalism continues to create the conditions for urban ization, rather than the other way around, and the surplusvalue produced by capital accumulation, and especially itsmode of circulation. is the raw material out of which urbanchange crystallizes. U rbanization here is the excrescence ofthe circulation of capital. The global spread of urbanism,he concedes, is real, but the circuit of industrial capitalismst ill predominates over that of property capital devoted tourbanization.

    The present translation comes at a time when Lefebvreis gone and both Castells and Harvey have significantly developed their ideas. but these critiques remain relevant bothvis-a.-vis the text itself and as regards our understandingof twenty-first-century capitalism. CasteUs has long sincemoved on from the structuralism that drove his early critique, and Harvey has engaged critically and decisively with the critiques of st ructuralism that were hatching inLefebvre's work, as well as with postmodernism, with whichneither he nor Lefebvre had much symp athy.

    Castells's accusation of utopianism is, as readers will findout, precisely aimed yet, especially in the present context,off target. One of the strengths of Lefebvre, especially when

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    xviii Forewordviewed with the benefit of three decades of hindsight andin the context of a would-be rw-cnty-first-century Americanimperium, is his indefatigable optimism that a differentworld is possible. This book stands as a thoroughly contemporary antidote to the sense that the re is no alternative tocapitalism, a notion popularized in the grim 19805 by Britishprime minister Margaret Thatcher and globalized in brutalform in the early twenty-first-century war on terrorismthat, outside the blind field , is in actuality an endgame to theglobalization of ruling-class U.S. power. That Lefebvre's political optimism appears to spring directly from his philosophyand from his social theory rather than from a detached,facile political ebullience is even more remarkable. As for thequestion whether the urban constitutes a real object of socialscience inquiry, the conditions of this cri tique seem to havebeen set by a strange convergence berween a positivist socialsc ience that insists on an object of analysis and a structuralist reformulation of official marxism that embraces muchthe same presumption. To that end, Castells's crit ique mobilizes Louis Althusser against Lefebvre, yet even by the timeof the English translation of The Urban Question in 1977,Castells was coming to see the formalism of this critiqueas excessive. On the other hand, the language of base andsuperst ructure, which also appears in Lefebvres text, seemsby the beginning of the twenty-first century to be thankfullyobsolete.

    The remaining critique. that indust ria l capital ism st illprovides the framework for urbanization ralher than the reverse. as Lefebvre claims, needs to be taken more se riously.If in quite different tones. Castells and Harvey in the early1970Seffectively agreed in their critique: urbanization. powerful as it was, in no way supplant ed industrialization as themotor of capital accumulation. This insistence might bewritten off as merely a defense of marxist political economy:certainly Lefebvre s argument would seem to challenge the

    Foreword xix

    theory of surplus value or at the very least to suggest that thehistorical development of capitalism increasingly circumscribes the validity of the theory in favor of something else.But that something else is never theorized. If Lefebvre is correct, it would presumably be important to know how the ~ -litical economic transitio n from industrialization to urbaOlzation operates. That is neither a rhetorical point nor is it .aquestion that Lefebvre himself addresses in any systematlcmanner. His answer is oblique and incomplete. Th us by thetime he wrote The Production o Space he had reconstructedthe orthodox teleology of modes of production-primitivecommunism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism-intohis evolution of space: absolute, historical, abstract. anddifferential spaces. Although it might seem like an o ~ vous overture to argue that the sup ersession of industnalization by urbanization marks the transi tional moment fromabstract to differential space, in the language of the laterwork Lefebvre resists this move. Instead. by th e lime hewrites the four volume e I erat in the mid -1970S, he ISbare-ly concerned with urbanization and theorizes instead ~ o u t(among other things) the globalization of the state. It IS .notat aU clear how we are to fit together the victory of urbaOlzation over industrialization, the product ion of space, and theglobalization of the state. . .Yel on several levels there is something emplflcaUy veryappealing about Lefebvres argument. First, purely in q u a ~ t itative terms: As Lefebvre was writing The Urban RevolUtIOnjust over a thi rd of the world's population was urbanized,according to United Nations statistics. By 2002 the figurewas almost 50 percent. The most explosive growth has beenin countries that in the 1960s would have been consideredThird World but that have now undergone perhaps the

    most rapid industrialization and urbanization in h i s t ~ r yBetween 1970 and 2000 Mexico City grew from a populationof 8.8 million to 18.1 million. Similarly, Sao Paulo went from

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    83 million to 8 million. Both have superseded New York City.Bombay (M umbai) grew in the same period from 6.2 m illionto 16.1 million , and is projected to supersede the New Yorkmetropolitan area by 2005. Only TokyofYokohama is largerthan these three rapidly growing metropolises. The languageof world cities and global cities emerged in the 19805, but already in 1968, pr ior to most of this explosive u rban growth,we find Lefebvre talking explicitlyabout wo rld cities (in fact.he attributes the concept to Mao). But there is more thansimply a quantitative aspect to the dominance of the urban,and here the relationship with industrialization is intense. Thetrue global cities of the twenty-first century may we lJ be thoselarge metropolises that are simultaneously emerging as production motors not of nat ional economies but of the globaleconomy. Industrialization and urbanization are more notless, interwoven, and the cities of most intense populationgrowth are a lso those of greatest industrial expansion. Inany case, as this language of world cities indicates, the transformation of urbanization is tied to transformations at theglobal scale captured, however ideologically, in the languageof globalization: as Lefebvre sensed, the evident quantitativegrowth of urban areas does indeed express a much morecomplex shift.

    Most urban growth has taken place at the periphery ofthe world's larger cities, whether as functionaUy integratedsuburban development, industrial expansion, or burgeoningsquatter settlements and favelas. But something symptomatic is happening in urban centers at the same time. Lefebvreremarks on the gentrification ( embourgeoisement ) ofurban centers, but that process, too, has changed dramatically since the 1960s. There are of course significanllarge-scaleprecurso rs, such as Hausmann in Paris in the nineteenthcentury, but the contemporary experience of gentrificationdates to the post-World War II period and is usually associated with small-scale renovation of neighborhoods that

    oreword n n ihad experienced major economic disinvestment. Since the1980s, gentrification has become increasingly generalized as astrategy of global urban expansion. Central urban reconstruction increasingly integrates residential with all other kindsof land uses--offices, retail, recreation, transport-and isalso increasingly integrated into not just the overall urbaneconomy hut into the global economy. A highly mobile globalcapital increasingly descends to and aspires to the remake ofurban centers. At the same time there is a more seamless collaboration among property capital, the state, retail capital,and financial capital than at any previous time. This process has probably gone farthest in Eu rope, where neoliberalurban regeneration (a label Lefebvre would have abhorredas patently ideological) has become ofFIcial urban policy inthe European Union and in individual stales as well as cities.The massive reconstruction along the Thames in Londonexemplifies the way in which gentrificat ion generalized hasbecome a highly significant part of the city's productiveeconomy. Nor is this process restricted any longer toies in Europe, North America, or Oceania. From Shanghaito Beirut, Kuala Lumpur to Bogota, the reconstruction ofurban centers has become the means of embedding the logics, threads, and assumptions of cap ital accumulation moredeeply than ever in the urban landscape. One can see herea glimmering of the concep tual inversion Lefebvre posesbetween the industr ial and the urban.

    t is a deliberate part of Lefebvre's style to pose exaggerated opposites in order to force the dialectic forward. t isof course a style he shares with Hegel and Marx and manyothers. Different readers will surely interpret differently theargument that urbanization supplants industrialization andconclude differently about the veracity or usefulness of theargument. It may well be that in this stark form the argumentis less useful than when seen as pa rt of a larger tendency, alogical as much as historical movement with un ce rtain end.

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    xxii ForewordCe rtainly this is how Lefebvre interpreted his own notionof the complete urban ization of the world, The point wasnot that the planet was already fu y urbanized and ruralityforever gone but that the tendency toward that end was verypowerful. The distinction benveen urbanization and industria1ization may well be m orc important as a means to get usto recognize this point rather than as an enduring reality.Finally, a word about Le febvre's style. Evoking the di minut ive name of the small genera of birds (titmice) and theexquisiteness of their gemlike eggs, the Scottish poet HughMacDiarmid once explained his own lifework: My job . as Isec it, has never been to lay a tit's egg, hut to erupt like a volcano, emining not only flame but a lot of rubbish. Withoutin any way indicting the quality orLefebvre's work, I think,judging by the sixty-six books that pepper his life s work,that this French poet of social theory and philosophy mu sthave approached his work in a similar fashion. At times, especially to English-speaking audiences, his writing can comeacross as a stream of philosophical consciousness that mixescoherent analytical agendas with fascinating diversions, apparently casual o r completely int ended , that might doubleback or end abruptly, before picking up the th read of theargument again--or stretching for a related th read that thereader must struggle to connect. Lefebvre is always suggestive, reaching, pushing his a rgument fa rther than he wouldlater want to go in order to get a point out, less than direct,retracing steps, electing a different path. He always embracesa tension between rigor and fantasy, hard-nosed critique andpolitical desire, which is why he is so exciting to read . Heembodies the magic of a ma rxism liberated from dogma, ye tthis philosophical adventu rousness also makes it fa irly easyto find apparent paradoxes in his work. Recognizing thathe rarely if ever provides a linear argument , th ese nonetheless have to be taken seriously, but there is a la rger picture.Lefebvre actually gives us the braided complexity of the tit's

    Foreword xx i iinest, paradoxical interweaving and all, together with a clutchof delica te eggs laid alo ng the way. This present text has itssha re of diversions but it is also well directed. His dearestdesire in this book is that the eggs laid would hatch and thatthe ur ban problema tic would give way again to a new generation of urban revolutionaries and urban revolutions. Butwhy, Lefebvre wants to know, have the eggs of urban revolution not hatched before?

    The aftermath of 1968 tested Lefebvre's optimism. As withso many others, nol just in Paris but around the world , hehad thought that revolutionary change was at hand , and,defeated as they were, they were only half wrong. In the con clusion to this text Lefebvre makes a wistful comparison between Paris in 1968 and the extraor dinary political, cultural,and social tr ansformations that took place in Russ ia in the1920S while the revolutionary moment remained alive. Suchleaps of optimism are precisely what makes this text notsimply contemporary but forward-looking. The tremendouscreativity of Russia in thi s pe riod has had to be destroyedand forgotten by those enforcing the blind field-before1989 but especially afterward-in order to justify the globalconsummation of capitalism. But the globalization of everything, as Lefebvre might have put it, cannot possibly succeed.An antiglobalization movement that wants to build a newanticapitalist internationalism can take a lot of insp irationfrom the ferment in Ru ssia in its pre-Stalinist days, but it canalso learn a lot from Le febvre s insistence on urban revolutionand the prospect of a globalized creat ivity, urban and otherwise, delinked from the effects of a ubiquitous economic andideological slavery that Lefebvre understood as so deadening, bu t which he knew could never win.

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    ll egin wit l the following hypothesis Society has been completely urbanized. This hypothesis implies a definition: Anurb n society is a soc iety that results from a process of complete urbanization. This urbanization is virtual today, but willbecome real in the futu re

    The above definition resolves any ambiguity in the useof our terms The words urban society are often used torefer to any city or urban agglomeration: the Greek polis, theoriental or medieval city, commercial and industrial cities.small cities, the megalopolis. As a re sult of the confusion. wehave forgotten or overlooked the soc ial relationships (pri marily relationships of production) with which each urbantype is associated. These so-called urban societies are oftencompared with one another. even though they have nothingin common. Such a move serves the underlying ideologies oforg nicism (every urban society, viewed on its own, is seen asan organic whole ). continuism (there is a sense of historicalcon tinuity or permanence associated with urban society).and evolutionism urban society is characterized by different

    1

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    2 From the City to Urban Soc ietyperiods, by the transformation of soc ial relations that fadeaway or disappear).

    Here, r use the term urban society to refer to the society that results from industrialization, which is a processof domination that absorbs agr icultural production. Thisurban society cannot take shape conceptually until the endof a process during which the old urban forms, the end result of a series of discontinuous transformations, burst apart.An important aspect of the theoretical problem is the abilityto situate the discontinuities and continuities with respect toone another. How could any absolute discontinuities existwithout an underlying continuity, without support, without some inherent process? Conversely, how can we havecontinuity without crises, without the appearance of newelements or relationships?

    The specialized sciences (sociology. political economy.history, human geography) have proposed a number ofways to characterize 'our society, its reality and deep-seatedtrends. its actuality and virtuality. Terms such as "industrialand postindustrial society, the technologica l society. "theSOciety of abundance, the leisure society. "consumer society. and so on have been used. Each of these names contains an element of empirical or conceptual truth, as well asan element of exaggeration and extrapolation. Instead of theterm postindustrial society"-the society that is born of indu strialization and succeeds i t I will use urball socie ty, a

    ( term that refers to tendencies. orientations. and virtualities ,\ rather than any preordained reaJity. Such usage in no wayprecludes a critical examination of contemporary reality.such as the analysis of the bureaucratic society of controlledconsumption.

    Science is ce rtainly justified in formulating such theoretical hypotheses and using them as a point of departure. Notonly is such a procedure current among the sciences. it isnecessary. There can be no science without theoretical hy-

    From the City to Urban Society II 3potheses. My hypothesis. which involves the so-called soc ialsciences. is based on an epistemological and methodologicalapproach. Knowledge is not n e c e ~ s r i l y a copy or reflection ,a simulacrum or simulation of an object that is already real.Nor does it necessarily construct its object for the sake of atheory that predates knowledge. a theory of the ob ject orits models. In my approach, the object is included in thehypothesis; the hypothesis comprehends the object. Eventhough this object is located outside any (empirical) fact.it is not fictional. We can assume the existence of a virtu lobject urban society; that is, a possible object whose growthand development can be analyzed in relation to a processand a praxis (pract ical activity). Needless to say, such a hypothesis must be validated. There is, however. no shortage ofarguments and proofs to sus tain it, from the simplest to themost complex.

    For example, agricultural production has lost aU its autonomy in the major industrialized nations and as part ofa global economy. t is no longer the principal sector of theeconomy. nor even a sector characterized by any distinctivefeatures (aside from underdevelopment). Even though localand regional features from the time when agricultural production dominated haven't entirely disappeared. it has beencha nged into a form of industrial product ion . having be-\come subordin ate to its dema nds, subject to its constraints.Economic growth and industrializat ion have become selflegitimating, extending their effects to entire territories, regio ns. nations. and cont inents. As a result, the tradition - val unit typical of peasant life, namely the village, ha s beentransformed. Absorbed or obliterated by larger units, it hasbecome an integral part of industrial production and consumption. The concentration of the population goes hand inhand with that of the mode of production. The 14rban f bricgrows, extends its borders. corrodes the residue of agrarianlife. This expression, urban fabric;' does not narrowly define

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    (the built world of cities but all manifestations of the domi-nance of the city over the country. In this sense, a vacationhome, a highway, a supermarket in the countryside are allpart of the urban fabric. Of varying density, thickness, andactivity, the only regions untouched by it are those that arestagnant or dying. those that are given over to nature.With the decline of the village life of days gone by agricul-tural producers, farmers, are confronted with the gri ul-tural town Promised by Khrushchev to the Soviet peasants.agricultural towns have appeared in various places aroundthe world. In the United States, aside from certain parts ofI h e South, peasants have virtually disappeared, and we findIslands of farm poverty alongside islands of urban p o v e r ~ty. As this global process of industrialization and u r b a n i z a ~tion was taking place, the large cities exploded, giving ri se togro\.vths of dubious value: suburbs, residential conglomera.tions and industrial comp lexes, satellite cities that differedlittle from urbanized towns. SmaU and midsize cities becamedependencies, partial colonies of the metropolis. In this waymy hypothesis serves both as a point of arrival for existingknowledge and a point of departure for a new study and new

    1projects: com plete urbanization. The hypothesis is anticipalory. It prolongs the fundamental tendency of the present.

    I Urban society is gestating in and through the bureaucrat icsociety of controlled consumption.

    A negative argument, proof by the absu rd: No other hypothesis will work, no other hypothesis can cover the entirerange of problems. Postindustrial society? Then what happens after industrialization? Leisure society? This addressesonly part of the ques tion, since we limit our examination oftrends and virtualities to infrastructure, a realist attitudethat in no way circumvents the demagoguery inherent in thisdefinition. The indefinite growth of mass consumption? Here,we measure current indices and extrapolate from them,thereby runni ng the risk of reducing reality and virtuality toon ly one of their aspects. And so on.

    From the i ty to Urban soc iety 5The expression urban society meets a theoretical need.

    It is more than simply a literary or pedagogical device, oreven the expression of some form of acquired knowledge;

    . it is an elaboration, a search, a conceptual formulation. Amovement of thought toward a certain concrete and perhapstoward tile concrete. assumes shape and detail. This movemenl, if it proves to be true, will lead to a practice. urbanpractice that is finally or newly comprehended. Needless tosay a threshold will have to be crossed before entering theconcrete, that is, social practice as understood by theory.But there is no empirical recipe for fabricating this product.this urban reality. Isn't this what we so often expect fromurbanism and what urbanists so often promise? Unlike a

    fact.filled empiricism with its risky extrapolations and frag.ments of indigestible knowledge, we can build a theory froma theoretical hypothesis The development of such a theoryis associated with a methodology For example, research in volving a virtual object. which attempts to define and realizethat object as part of an ongoing project , already has a namv

    J transduction The term reflects an intellectual a p p r o ~ c h to1 ward a possible object, which we can employ alongSIde the

    more conventional activities of deduction and induction.The concept of an urban society. which I introduced above,thus implies a hypothesis and a definition.

    Similarly. by urban revolution I refer to the transfor-mations that affect c o n t ~ o r a y society, ranging from theperiod when questions of growth and industrialization pre-dominate (models, plans, programs) to the period when theurban problematic becomes predominant, when the searchfor solutions and modalities unique to urban socie ty areforemost. Some of these transformations are sudd en; othersare gradual, planned, determined. But which ones? This is alegitimate question. It is by no means certain in advance thatthe answer will be clear, intellectually satisfying or unambiguous. The words urban revolution do not in themselvesrefer to actions that are violent. Nor do they exclude them.

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    6 I rom the City to Urban SocietyBut how do we discriminate between the outcome of violentaction and th e product of rational action before their occurrence? Isn't violence characterized by its ability to spin out ofcontrol? Isn't thought characterized by the effort to reduceviolence, beginning with the effort to destroy the chains thatbind our thought?

    There are two aspects of urbanism that we will need toaddress:1. For years scholars have viewed urbanism as a social practice

    that is fundamentally scientific and technical in nature.In this case, theory can and should address this practiceby raising it to a conceptual level and, more specifically,to the level of epistemology However, the absence of anysuch urban epistemology is striking. Is it worth developing such an epistemology, then? No . In fact, its absenceis highly significant. For the institutiotr l and ideologicalnature of what is referred to as urbanism has-until anew order comes into being-taken precedence over itsscientific nature. If we assume that this procedure canbe generalized and that understanding always involvesepistemology, then it is dear that it plays no role in contemporary urbanism. t is important to understand whyand how.

    2. As it current ly exists, that is, as a policy (having institutional and ideological components), urbanism can becriticized both from the rig ht and the left. The critiquefrom the right, which is well known, is focused on thepast and is frequently humanist. t sub sumes and justifiesa neoliberal ideology of "free enterprise," directly or indirectly. t opens a pa th for the various "private" initiativesof capitalists and capital. The critique from the left, fre-quently overlooked, is not associated with any so-calledleftist group, club, party, apparatus, or ideology. Rather,it attempts to open a path to the possible, to explore and

    From the City to Urban Society II 7delineate a landscape that is not merely part of the real,the accomplished, occupied by existing social, political,and economic forces. t is a utopi n critique because itsteps back from the real without, however, losing sightof it.

    We can draw an axis as follows:0 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 100

    The axis runs from the complete absence of urbanization("pure nature," the earth abandoned to the elements) on theleft to the completion of the process on the right. A signifierfor this signified-the urb n (the urban reality)-this axisis both spatial and tem poral: spa t ial because the processextend s through space, which it modifies; temporal becauseit develops over time. Temporality, initially of secondaryimportance, eventually becomes the predominant aspect ofpractice and history. This schema presents no more than anaspect of this history, a division of time that is both abstractand arbitrary and gives rise to operations (periodizations)that have no absolute privilege but are as necessary (relative)as other divisions.

    I'd like to plant a few signposts along this path delineatedby the urban phenomenon (the urban, in short)_ Initiallythere were populations that had been identified by anthropology and ethnology. Around this initial zero, the firsthuman groups (gatherers, fishers, hunters, possibly herders)marked out and named space; they explored it while marking it. They indicated place-names, fundamental topoi. twas a topology and spatial grid that peasants, attached to thesoil, later perfected and refined without upsetting the overall fabric. What is importan t is that in many places aroundthe world, and most cer ta inly any place with a history, theexistence of the city has accompanied or followed that of

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    II rom the City to Urban Societythe village. The representation according to which cultivated land, the village, and farm civilization slowly secretedurban reality reflects an ideology. It generalizes from whattook place in Europe during the breakdown of the RomanEmpire and following the reconstruction of the medievalcity. It's just as easy to maintain the contrary position, however. AgricuJture was little more than gathering, and wasonly formalized through pressure (authoritarian) from theurban centers, generally occupied by skillful conquerors whohad become protectors, exploiters, and oppressors, that is,administrators, the founders of a state, or the rudiments ofa state. The political city accompanies or closely follows theestablishment of organized social life, agriculture, and thevillage.

    It goes without saying that such an assumption is meaningless when it involves endless spaces cha racterized by aseminomadic existence, an impoverished itinerant agriculture. It is obviously based primarily on studies and docu-ments concerning As ian modes of production, the ancientcivilizations that created both urban and agricultural life(Mesopotamia , Egypt, and so on).1 The general qu estion ofthe relationship between the city and the countryside is farfrom being resolved. however.

    Im going to take the risk of locating the political cityat the point of origin on the space-time axis. The politicalcity was populated primarily by priests. warriors, princes.nobles. and military leaders, but administrators and sc ribeswere also present. The political city is inconceivable without

    writing: do cuments, laws, inventories, tax collection. It iscompletely given over to orders and decrees. to power. Yet italso implies the existence of exchange to procure the materials essentiaJ to warfare and power (metal. leather. and so on),and of artisanship to fashion and maintain them. Thus. sucha city also comprises artisans and workers. The political cityadministers, protects. and exploits a territory that is often

    rom the City to Urban Society II 9vast. t manages large-scale agricultural projects such asdrainage, irrigation , the construction of dams, the clearingof land. t rules over a number of villages. Ownership of theland becomes the eminent right of a monarch, the symbolof order and action. Nonetheless, peasants and communitiesretain effective possession through the payment of tribute.

    In such an environment. exchange and trade can only expand. Initially confined to suspicious individuals, to strangers;' they become functionally integrated into the life ofthe city. Those places given over to exchange and trade areinitially strongly marked by the signs of heterotopy Likethe people who are responsible for and inhabit them, theseplaces are at the outset excluded from the political city: caravansaries, fairgrounds. suburbs. This process of integratingmarkets and merchandise (people and things) in the citycan last for centuries. Exchange and trade, which are essential to the survival of life, bring wealth and moveme nt. Thepolitical city resists this with all the power at its disposal, allits cohesiveness; it feels, knows, that it is threatened by markets, merchandise, and traders, by their form of ownership(money, a form of personal property, being movable by definition). There is ample evidence that Athens, a political city,coexisted with Piraeus, a commercial city, and that attemptsto ban the presence of merchandise in the agora, a free spaceand political meeting place, were unsuccessful. When Chri stchased the merchants from the temple. the ban was similar,had the same meaning. n China and Japan. merchants werefor years an urban underclass. relegated to a special (heterotopic) part of the city. In truth, it is only in the EuropeanWest, at the end of the Middle Ages, that merchandise. themarket, and merchants were able to successfully penetratethe city. Prior to this, itinerant merchantsp rt warrior, partthief--deliberately chose to remain in the fortified remainsof anc ient (Roman ) cities to facilitate their struggle againstthe territo rial lords. Based on this assumption, the renewed

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    1 II From the City to Urban Soc ietypolitical city would have served as a frame for the action thatwas to transform it. During this (class) st ruggle against theoverlords, who were the owners and rulers of the territory, aprodigiously fecund struggle in the West that helped createnot only a history but history itself, the marketplace becamecentralized. It replaced and supplanted the place of assembly(the agora, the forum ). Around the market, which had nowbecome an essential part of the city, were grouped the churchand town hall (occupied by a mer chant oligarchy), with itsbelfry or campanile, the symbol of liberty. Architecture follows and translates the new co nception of the city. Urbanspace becomes the meeting place for goods and people. forexchange. t bears the signs of this conquered liberty. whichis perceived as Liberty- a grandiose but hopeless struggle.In this sense, it is legitimate to assign a symbolic value tothe bastides. or walled towns, of southwest France, the firstcities to take shape around the local marketplace. Histo ry isfilled with iron y The fetishism associated with merchandi seappeared along with the rise of merchandise. its logic andideology. its language and world. In the fourteenth centuryit wa s believed that it was sufficient to establish a market andbuild stores, gateways, and gaUeries around a central sq uareto promote the growth of goods and buyers. In thi s way,both the nobility and the bourgeoisie built merchant citiesin areas that were undeveloped, practically desert, and st illcrisscrossed by herds and migratory, sc minomadic tribes.These cities of the French southwest, although they bea r thenam es of some of our great and wealthy cities (Barcelona,Bologna, Plaisa nce, Florence , Grenada . and s o on , werefailures. The merchant city succeeded the political city. Atthis time (approximately the fourteenth century in westernEurope), commercial exchange became an urban fun ctionwhich was embodied in a form (or forms, both architecturaland urban). This in turn gave urban space a new structure.The changes that took place in Paris illustrate this comp lex

    From the City to Urban Soc iety IIinteraction among the three essential aspects of function,form, and structure. Market towns and sub urbs, which wereinitially commercial and artisanal-Beaubourg, SaintAntoine,Sa int-Honore-grew in importance and began to strugglewith centers of political power (institutions) for influence,prestige. and space, forcing them to compromise, en teringwith them in the construction of a powerful urban unity.

    At one moment in the history of the European West, anevent of great importance occurred, but one that remainedlatent because it went unnoticed. Th e importance of the cityfor the social whole became such that the whole seemed toshift. In the relationship between town and country, the em phasis was still on the countryside: real property wealth, theproducts of the soil, attachment to the land (owners of fiefsor noble titles). Compared with the countryside, the townretained its heterotopic character, marked by its rampartsas well as the transition to suburban areas. At a given mo menl, these various relationships were reversed; the situationchanged. The momen t when this shift occurred, this reversalof heterotopy, shou ld be marked along our axis. From thismoment on, the city would no longer appear as an urbanisland in a rural ocean, it would no longer seem a paradox, amonster, a hell or heaven that contrasted sharply with villageor cou ntry life in a natural environment t entered people'sawareness and understanding as one of the terms in the opposition between town and country. Country? It is now nomore than-nothing more than- the town's environment,its horizon, its limit. Villagers? As far as they were concerned,they no longer worked for the territorial lords, they produced for the city. for the urban market. And even thoughthey realized that the wheat and wood merchants exploitedthem, they understood that the path to freedom crossed themarketplace.

    So wha t is happening around thi s crucial moment in history? Thoughtful people no longer see themselves reflected

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    2 II From the City to Urban Societyn nature, a shadowy world subject to mysterious forces.

    Between them and nature, between their home (the focalpoint of thought, existence) and the world, lies the urbanreality, an essential mediating factor. From this momenton society no longer coincides with the countryside. It nolonger coincides with the city, either. The state encompassesthem both, joins them in its hegemony by making use oftheir rivalry. Yet, at the time, the majesty of the state wasveiled to its contemporaries. Of whom or what was Reasonan attribute? Royalty? Divine right? The individual? Yet thisis what led to the reform of the city after the destruction ofAthens and Rome, after the most important products ofthose civilizations, logic and law, were lost from view. Thelogos was reborn, but its rebirth was not attributed to therenaissance of the urban world but to transcendent reason.The rationalism that culminated in Descartes accompaniedthe reversal that replaced the primacy of the peasantry withthe priority of urban life. Although the peasantry didn't seeit as such. However, during this period, the image o the citycame into being.

    The city had writing; it had secrets and powers, and clarified the opposition between urbanity (cultured) and rusticity(naive and brutal . After a certain point in time , the city

    e e l o p e d its own form of writing: the map or plan thescience of planimetry. During the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, when this reversal of meaning took ~

    uropean cities began to appear, including the first maps of' the city of Paris. These are not yet abstract maps, projectionsof urban space onto geometric coordinates. A cross betweenvision and concept, works of art and science, they displayedthe city from top to bottom, in perspective, painted, depicted, and geometrically described. This perspective, simultaneously idealist and realist-the perspective of thought andpower-was situated in the vertical dimension, the dimension of knowledge and reason, and dominated and consti-

    From the City to Urban Society II 13tuted a totality: the city. This shift of social reality toward theurban, this (relative) discontinuity, can be easily indicatedon a space ime axis, whose continuity can be used to situateand date any (relative) breaks. All that is needed is to draw aline between the zero point and the terminal point (whichI ll assume to be one hundred).

    This reversal of meaning can't be dissociated from thegrowth of commercial capital and the existence of the mar- \keto It was the rise of the mercantile city, which was graftedonto the political city but promoted its own ascendancy, thatwas primari ly responsibl e. This was soon followed by the appearance of industrial capital and, consequently, the industrial city This requires further explanation. Was industry associated with the city? One would assume it to be associatedwith the non-city the absence or rupture of urban reality. Weknow that industry lnitially developed near the sources ofenergy (coal and water), raw materials (metals, textiles), andmanpower reserves. Industry gradually made its way into thecity in search of capital and capitalists, ma rkets, and an abundant supply of low-cost labor. It could locate itself anywhere,therefore, but sooner or later made its way into existing citie s or created new cities, although it was prepared to moveelsewhere if there was an economic advantage in doing so.Just as the political ci ty resisted the conquest-half.pacific,half-violent--of the merchants, exchange, and money, simi larly the political and mercantile city defended itself frombeing taken over by a nascent industry, industrial capital,and capital itself. But how did it do this? Through corpora tism, by establishing relationships. Hi storical continuity andevolution mask the effects and ruptures associated with suchtransitions. Yet something strange and wonderful was alsotaking place, which -helped renew=diakcttcal thought: thenon-city and the anti-city would conquer the city, penetrateit, break it apart, and in so doing extend it immeasurably,bringing about the urbanization of society. r:d the growth qf

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    (the urban fabric that covered what was left of the city priorto the arrival of industry. This extraordinary movement hasescaped our attention and has been described in piecemealfashion because ideologues have tried to e liminate dialecticalthought and the analysis of contradictions in favor of logicalthought-that is the identification of coherence and nothing but coherence. Urban reality, simultaneously amplifiedand exploded, thus loses the features it inherited from theprevious period: organic totality, belonging, an upliftingimage, a sense of space that was measured and dominatedby monumental splendor. It was populated w i t ~ ~ n s ofthe urban within the dissolutio[LQf u r ~ ~ l J l t r ; it becamestipulative, r e p r e s s i v e , m a r k e d . b y - s j & ' I ? I ~ s.l .l mary gldes f9rcirculation (routes), and signage.1t was sOITletimes read as arough draft, sometimes as an a u t h o r i t a r i ~ ~ m e s a g e t w a simperious. But none of these descriptive terms completelydescribes the historical process of implosion-explosion (ametaphor borrowed from nuclear physics) that occurred:the tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth,goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought) of urbanreality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, s u b u r b s ~ ~ ~ ~homes, satellite towns) into space.

    The industri l city (often a shapeless town, a barely urbanagglomeration, a conglomerate, or conurbation like the RuhrValley) serves as a prelude to a critic l zone. At this moment,the effects of implosion-explosion are most fully felt . Theincrease in industrial production is superimposed on thegrowth of commercial exchange and multiplies the numberof such exchanges. Th is growth extends from simple barterto the global market, from the simple exchange between twoindividuals all the way to the exchange of products, works ofart, ideas, and human beings. Buying and selling, merc handise and market, money and capital appear to sweep away allobstacles. During this period of generalization, the effect of

    From the City to Urban Society II 5the process-namely the urban reality-becomes both causeand reason. Induced factors become dominant (inductors).The urban problem tic becomes a global phenomenon. Canurban reality be defined as a "superstructure" on the surfaceof the economic structure, whether capitalist or socialist?The simple result of growth and productive forces? Simplya modest marginal reality compared with production? Notat all. Urban reality modifies the relations of productionwithout being sufficient to transform them. It becomesa productive force, like science. Space and the politics ofspace "express" social relat ionships but react against them.Obviously, jf an urban reality manifests itself and becomesdominant, it does so only through the urban problematic.What can be done to change this? How can we build cities or"something" th3:t replaces what was formerly the City? Howcan we reconceptualize the urban phenomenon? How canwe formulate, classify, and order the innumerable questionsthat arise, questions that move, although not without considerable resistance, to the forefront of our awareness? Canwe achieve significant progress in theory and practice so thatour consciousness can comprehend a reality that overflows itand a possible that flees before its grasp?

    We can represent this process as follows:Political Mercantile Industrial Critical----- -----ity city city zone0---------------- ---------------. 100

    transition from agrarianto urban I

    implosion explosion(urban concentration, rural

    exodus, extension of the urbanfabric complete subordination of

    the agrarian to the urban)

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    6 rom the City to Urban Soc ietyWhat occurs during the critica l phase? This book is an

    attempt to answer that question, which situates the urbanproblematic within the overall process. rue the theoreticalassumptions that enable us to draw an axis such as the oneshown above, introduce directed time, and make sense of thecritical zone sufficient to help us unders tand what is takingplace? Possibly. In any event, there are several assumptionswe can make now. Lacking any proof to the contrary, we canpostulate that a second transition occurs, a second reve rsalof direction and situation. Industrialization, the dominantpower and limiting factor, becomes a dominated reality uring peri ods of profound crisis. This results in tremendousconfusion, during wh ich the past and the poss ible, the bestand the worst, become intertwined.

    In spite of this theoretical hypothes is concerning theposs ibl e and its relation to the actual (the real ),we shouldnot overlook the fact that the onset of urban society and themodalities of urbanization depend on th e characteristics ofsociety as it ex isted during the course of industrialization(neoca pitalist or sociali st, full economic growth or intenseautomation ). The onset of urban society at different times,the implications and consequences of these initial differences, arc part of the problematic associated with the urbanphenomenon, or simply the urban. These terms are preferable to th e word city, which appears to designate a clearlydefined, definit ive object a sc ientific object and the immediate goal of action, whereas the theoretica l approach requiresa critique of this object and a more complex notion of thevirtual or possible object. Within this perspective there is noscience of the city (s uch as urban sociology or urban economy), but an emerging understanding of the overall process,as we ll as its term (goal and direction).

    The urban (an abbreviated form of urban society) cantherefore be defined not as an accomplished reality, situatedbehind the ac tual in time, but, on the contrary, as a horizon,

    rom the City to Urban Society 17I n illuminating virtuality. It is the possible, defined by adirection, that moves toward th e urban as the culminationof its journey. To reach it- in other words, to realize it- wemust first ove rcome or break through the obstacles that currently make it impossible Can theoretica l knowledge treatthis vi rtual object, the goa l of ac tion, as an abstraction? No.Fro m this point on, it is abstract only in th e sense that it is ascientific and therefo re legi timate, abstraction. Theoretica lknowledge can and must reveal the terra in , the foundationon which it resides: an ongOing social practice , an urbanpractice in the process of fo rmation . It is an aspect of thecritical phase that this practice is currently ve iled and disjo inted, that it possesses only fragments of a rea lity and ascie nce that are st ill in the future. It is our job to demonstratethat such an approach has an outcome, that there a rc so lutions to the current problematic. The virtual object is nothing but planetary society and the global city, and it standsoutside the global and pla netary crisis of reality and thought,outside the old borders that had bee n drawn when agriculture was dominant and tha t were maintained during thegrowth of exchange and industrial production. Nevertheless,the urban problematic can't abso rb every problem. Thereare problems that are un ique to agriculture and industry,even though the urban real ity modifies them. Moreover,the urban problematic requires that we exercise considerable caution when exploring the realm of the possible. It isthe analyst's responsibility to identify and describe the various forms of urb anization and explain what happens to theforms, functions, and urban structures that are transformedby the breakup of th e ancient.fi ty and the process of ge neralize'd urbanization. Until now the critical phase wa s perce ivedas a ki nd of black box. We know what enters the box, andso metimes we see what co me s out, but we don't know whatgoes on inside. This makes conventional procedu res of forecasting and projection useless, since they extrapolate from

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    8 from the Cityto Urban oc ietythe actual, from a set of facts. Projections and forecasts havea determined basis onJy in the fragmentary sciences: demography, for example, or political economy. But what is at stakehere, objectively, is a totality.

    To illustrate the depth of the crisis, the uncertain ty andperplexity that accompany the critical phase, an element ofcont rast may be useful. Is this merely a question of style?Yes but not entirely. Here, I would like to introduce the prosand cons of st reets and monuments. I'll leave other issues-nature, the city, urbanism, the urban for later.

    For the street. The street is more than just a place formovement and circulation. The invasion of the automobileand the pressure of the automobile lobby have turned the carinto a key object, parking into an obsession, traffic into a priority, harmful to urban and social life. The day is approaching when we will be forced to limit the rights and powers ofthe automobile. Naturally, this won't be easy, and the faU out will be considerable. What about the street, however?t serves as a meeting place (tapas), for without it no other

    designated encounters are possible (cafes, theaters halls).These places animate the street and are served by its animation, or they cease to exist.ln the street, a form of spo ntaneous theater, I become spectacle and spectator, and sometimes an actor. The street is where movement takes place,the interaction without which urban life would not exist,leaving only separation, a forced and fixed segregation. Andthere are consequences to eliminating the street (ever sin ceLe Corbusier and his nouveaux ensembles : the exti nctionof life, the reduction of the city to a dormitory, the aberrantfunctionalization of existence. The street conta in s functionsthat were overlooked by Le Corbusier: the informative function, the symbo lic function, the ludic function . The street isa place to play and learn. The street is disorder. All the elements of urban life, which are fixed and redundant elsewhere, are free to fill the streets and through the streets flow

    from the City to Urban Society 9to the centers where they meet and interact, torn from theirfixed abode. This disorder is alive. It inform s. t surprises.The work of Jane Jacobs has shown that, in the United States,the street (highly trafficked, busy) provides the only securitypossible against criminal violence (theft, rape, aggression).Wherever streets disappeared, criminality increased, becameorganized. In the street and through the space it offered, agroup (the city itself) took shape, appeared, appropriatedplaces, realized an appropriated space-time. This apprOpria-)tion demonstrates that use and use value can dominate exchange and exchange value.

    Revolutionary events generally take place in the street.Doesn't this show that the disorder of the street engendersanother kind of order? The urban space of the street is aplace for talk, given over as much to the exchange of words \and signs as it is to the exc hange of things. A place where .speech becomes writing. A place where speech can become jsavage and, by escaping rules and institutions, inscribe it; Jself on walls. '

    Against the street. A meeting place? Maybe, but such meetings are superficial. In the street , we merely brush shoulders with others, we don't interact with them. It's the wethat is important. The street prevents the constitution of agroup, a subject; it is populated by a congeries of people insearch of of what exactly? The world of merchandise isdeployed in the street. The merchandise that didn't make itinto specialized locales or markets ( marketplaces halls) hasinvaded the entire city. In antiquity the streets were merelyextensions of places with specialized functions: the temple,the stadium, the agora, the garden. During the Middle Agesartisans occupied the streets. The artisan was both producerand seUer. The artisans were followed by merchants, who, al though only merchants, soon became masters. The street became a display, a corridor flanked by stores of various kinds.Me rchandise became spectacle (provocative attractive) and

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    ,,

    2 rom the -City to Urban Societytransformed the individual into a spectacle for others. Here.more than elsewhere. exchange and exchange value take precedence over use, reducing it to a residue. Therefore, the critique of the street must be morc incisive: the street becomesthe focus of a form of repression that was made possible bythe real - that is, weak, alienated, and alienating-characterof the relationships that are formed there. Movement in thestreet, a communications space, is both obligatory and repressed. Whenever threatened, the first thing power restrictsis the ability to linger or assemble in the street. Although thestreet may have once had the meaning of a meeting place, ithas since lost it, and could only have lost it, by reducing itself,through a process of necessary reduclion, to nothing morethan a passageway, by splitting itself into a place for the passage of pedestrians (hunted) and automobiles (privileged ).The street became a network organized for and by consumption. The rate of pedestrian circulation , although still tolerated, was determined and measured by the ability to perceivestore windows and buy the objects displayed in them. Timebecame merchandise time (time for buying and selling,time bought and sold). The street regulated time outside ofwork; it subjected it to the same system, the system of yieldand profit. It was nothing more than the necessary transitionbetween forced labor, progr ammed leisure, and habitation asa place of consumption.

    In the st reet, the neocapitalist organization of conswnption is demonstrated by its power, which is not restricted topolitical power or repression (overt or covert). The street, aseries of displays, an exhibition of objects for sale. illustratesjust how the logic of merchandise is accompanied by a formof (passive ) contemplation that assumes the appearance andsignificance of an aesthetics and an ethics. The accumulationof objects accompanies the growth of population and capital; it is transformed into an ideology, which, dissimulatedbeneath the traits of the legible and visib le . comes to seem

    rom the City to Urban Society n 21self-evident. In this sense we can speak of a colonization ofthe urban space, which takes place in the street through theimage, through publicity, through the spectacle of objecta system of objects that has become symbol and spectacle. ,Through the uniformlzation of the grid, visible in the mod/ernization of old streets, objects (merchandise) take on theeffects of color and form that make them attractive. Theparades, masquerades. balls. and folklore festivals authorizedby a power stru ctu re caricaturize the appropriation an d reappropriation of space. The true appropriation characteristic of effective demonstrat ions is challenged by the forcesof repression, which demand silence and forgetfulness.

    Against the monument The monument is essentially repressive. It is the seat of an in stitu tion (the church, the state,the university . Any space that is organized around the monument is colonized and oppressed. The great monumentshave been raised to glorify conquerors and the powerful.Occasionally they glorify the dead or the beauty of death(the Taj Mahal) in palaces and tombs. The misfortune ofarchitecture is that it wanted to construct monuments, butthe idea of habiting them was either conceived in terms ofthose monuments or neglected entirely.2 The extension ofmonumental space to habiting is always catastrophic, andfor the most part hidden from those who are subject to it.Monumental splendor is formal And although the monument is always laden with symbols. it presents them to socialawareness and contemplat ion (passive ) just when those symbois. already outda ted, are beginning to lose their meaning,such as the symbols of the revolution on the Napoleonic Arcde Triomphe.

    or the mont/metlt It is the only conceivable or imaginable site of collective (social) life. It controls people. yes, butdoes so to bring them together. Beauty and monumentalitygo hand in hand. The great monuments were transfunctional (cathedrals) and even transcultural (tombs). This is what

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    I,

    From the City to Urban Societygave them their ethical and aesthetic power. Monumentsproject onto the land a conception of the world, whereas thecity projected and continues to project) social life globality). In their very essence, and sometimes at the very heart ofa space in which the characteristics of a society arc most recognizable and commonplace, monuments embody a sense oftranscendence, a sense of being elsewhere They have alwaysbeen u-topic. Throughout their height and depth, along adimension that was alien to urban trajectories, they proclaimed duty , power, knowledge, joy, hope.

    2 lind Field

    n this ook have not for the most part followed the historical method as it is generally understood. Superficially itmay appear that I have been describing and analyzing thegenesis of the city as object and its modifications and transformations. But my initial concern has been with a virtualobject, which I h ave used to describe a space-ti me axis. Thefuture illum ina tes the past, the virtuaLalJ.Q:ws..us..to_examine....and situate the realized. The breakdown of the preindustrialist and precapitalist city caused by the impact of industryand capitalism helps us understand the conditions and antecedents of the industrial city. Its predecessor. the mercantilecity, in turn enables us to comprehend the political city onwhich it was superimposed. Marx believed that adulthoodcomprises the child as subject awareness) and enables us tounderstand its point of departure the rough form that maybe richer and more complex than the adult. as a real object.And it is bourgepis S O f i c t y h m i ~ y c r m m p l e x a r u : L Q p a q u e it\might be, that allows us to u n d e r s ~ n the TI0st transparentsocieties. ancient-and medieval SOCM ty. NOJ. .the.......ap.PQsite.With the arrival of time and historicity, our awareness is '

    23

    24 B ind Field Blind Field 25

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    ,, able to grasp two opposing movements: r gr ssiv (from thevirtual to the actual. the actual to the past) and progr ssiv(from the obsolete and completed to the movement thatanticipates that completeness, that presages and brings intobeing something new).

    Historical time can e broken down (periodized) by modeof production: Asiatic, slave. feudal. capitalist, socialist. Thi sbreakdown has certain advantages and certain disadvantages.When pushed too far, when we emphasize the divisions. theinternal character of each mode of production, the consistency of each mode as a t o t a l ~ the transition betweenthem becomes unintelligible at the very moment when theiri;;-dividual intelligibility -becomes most evident. Moreover.each mode of production has produced (not in the senseof any ordinary thing but as a privileged work) a type of city,which expresses it in a way that is immediately visible andlegible on the environment, by making the most abstractrelationships-legal, political, ideological-tangible. Thisdiscontinuous aspect of time cannot be pushed so far as to. .. _make continuity unintelligible. A relatively continuous cumulative process is also at work in the city: the accumulationof knowledge, technologies, things, people, wealth , money,and ca pital. The city)s where this accumulation occurs, eventhough capit;l ~ a y arise-from wealth t h ~ t has been createdin the countryside and even though indust rial investmentmay be detrimental to the city.

    The Marxist theory of surplus value di stinguishes theformation of surplus value from its realization and distribution. Surplus value is initially formed in the co untryside. Thisformation is shifted to the city to the extent that it becomesthe center of production, cra ft activities, an d industry. Incontrast, the commercial and banking system found in citieshas always been all organ for the realization of surp lu s value.in dist ributing wealth, those who controlled the city havealso attempted to retain the majority of this surplus value

    (greater than the average profit from their investments). Forthese three aspects of surplus value, the urban center playsan increasingly important role, an aspect of urban centralitythat is essential yet misunderstood (unnoticed) within themode of capitalist production. This contradicts the beliefthat the city of old and the contemporary urban center wereno more than superstructures and had no relation to productive forces and the mode of production.

    The space-time axis can be used to situate both certainrelationships between city and cou ntry and their transformations. t neither reflects nor contain s all of them. For example, it contains neither the conditions nor the elements ofconcepts associated with those relationships: nature {physis}and logos (reason). It fails to reveal the genealogyof the ideaof Nature and its development. The diagram in chapter I indicates a reversal with in European history at a moment thatis currently referred to as the Renaissance. What happeneaexactly to the concepts and representations des ignated bythe terms nature and reason during th is critica l phase?Because the elationship between city and cou ntry was profoundly altered, was there any correspondence or distortionbetween these alterations and the alteration of the associatedconcepts? Can the unique polysemy of nat ure and reason e analyzed and explained on the basis of history given ,above? Possi bl y. Whrdid the fetishism of nature occur at theend of the e i g h t e ~ b and beginning of the nineteenth cen -:tU Y? What did mean? Wasn't there a n ofold negation ofnature, as something prior to thought and human action,a twofold negation by the city and by industry, which onceagain exposed and mirrored nature? From this moment on,the City appeared as a second natu;eof slone and metal,builton an init ial, fundamental nature made of earth, air,, ~ a t e r , and fire. This second nature acquired its paradigm, itssystem of pertinent oppositions-light and dark, water andstone, tree and metal, monstrous and paradisiac, rough and

    26 II Blind Field

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    .

    .

    I

    .I

    I

    I 1 rI

    polished, savage and artificial-in and through the poets(Ruga, Baudelaire). This in turn refers us back to the mythsof the city. which I'll discuss below. But what becomes of theattempt, inherent in urban space, to reunite the spontaneous and the artificial. nature and culture? There is no city,no urban space without a garden or park, without the simulation of nature, without labyrinths, the evocation of theocean or forest, without trees tormented into strange human

    ,

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    II

    1II

    \

    sometimes confused as partners in an ambiguous duo, sometimes as twins or warring siblings. as distant colleagues andrivals. examine the black box. They know what goes in, areamazed at what comes out, but have no idea what takes placeinside. My schema won't help them. For it assumes that thecity (the urban ccnter) has been a place for c reation and notsimply a result, the simple spatial effect of a creative act thatoccurred elsewhere. in the Mind, or the Intellect. t stipulatesthat the urban can become objective, that is, creation andcreator, meaning and goal.

    There are three layers. Three periods. Three fields. Theseare not simply social phenomena but sensations and perceptions. spaces and times, images and concepts, language andrationality, theories and social practices:

    the rural (peasant) the industrial the urban

    They are accompanied by eme rgences and interferences,shifts, advances and delays, various inequalities of development. There are painful transitions, crit ica l phases. Thespace-time axis reveals a number of highlights or divisions,so many theoretical assumptions in need of verification.But what happens between two periods, at the point oftransition between two periods, wi thin the break or fold(today, betw'een the industrial and the urban)? Verbal layers, detached floating signifiers whose signified (ind ustry,rationality, and pract ice) is no longer sufficient. even thoughit is necessary. These verbal layers, wandering about their na tive soil, are unable to attach themselves to a philosophicalsubjec t or a privileged object or a his torical totalization.We can look at them the way we look at various cloud layersfrom an airplane. Here, high above the earth , floating lightly,is the cirrus of ancient philosophy, the nimbus of rationality,

    and the heavy cumulus of scientism. They are languages, ormetalanguages, halfway between the real and the fictive, between the realized and- the possible:-They float freely, escaping the incantations of sorcerer philosophers.

    Between fields, which are regions of force and conflict,there are blind fields These are not merely dark and uncertain, poorly explored, but blind in the sense that there is ablind spot on the retina, the center-and negation-of vision. A paradox. The eye doesnt see; it needs a mirror. Thecenter of vision doesn't see and doesn 't know it is blind. Dothese paradoxes extend to thought, to awareness, to knowledge? In the past there was a field ben-veen the rural and theindustrial-just as there is today between the industrial andthe urban-thal was invisible to us.

    What does our blindness look like? We focus attentivelyon the new field, the urban , b


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