CityReads│How Lefebvre Has Changed Urban Studies?
Lefebvre's hypothesis of complete urbanization marked a turning point in critical urban theory and opened up a new way of thinking “the urban”. Lefebvre's legacy in urban research is theory, not method.
Łukasz Stanek, Christian Schmid, and Ákos Moravánszky (eds). 2014 . Urban Revolution Now: Henri Lefebvre in Social Research and Architecture, Ashgate.
Picture source: http://utl.livework.io/publications/
The twenty-first century was declared to be "the urban century" and the world has entered an “urban age”, because for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population lives in cities (UN-Habitat, 2007). However, this thesis is based on a narrow and limited definition of urbanization. It focuses on the size of cities as they are defined in national statistics.
Such empiricist, city-centric conceptualizations give only pale and even distorted accounts of the full dimension of urbanization. They ignore all the urbanization processes that are transforming the “non-urban” spaces and thus underestimate the whole dimension of urbanization. Far from Lefebvre’s call for a careful analysis of the complexity of this process, simple concepts dominate today’s scientific as well as political debates on cities and urbanization, thus leading to an undifferentiated and ahistorical understanding of urbanization.
At the same time, the ‘urban’ is sometimes perceived as invested with an almost magical power. In recent years, a new meta-narrative evolved that even declares the ‘urban’ a superior form of life, thereby establishing a city-centric vision of the world developing towards a ‘new metropolitan mainstream’.In a kind of urban triumphalism, cities are presented as places of wealth and progress, as engines of innovation, and as privileged places that make people richer and happier. The term ‘urban revolution’ is even used for the promotion of modernization policies and growth-oriented urban development strategies.
Against such approaches, a revisiting of Lefebvre’s original concepts is crucial. The challenge today is to do empirical research with this theory.
Henri Lefebvre, was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist who authored several prominent books and writings including La Production de l’éspace (1974) [the Production of Space], La Révolution urbaine (1970) [the Urban Revolution], and Critique de la vie quotidienne (1947, 1961, 1981) [the Critique of Everyday Life].
In 1970, Henri Lefebvre formulated his thesis on complete urbanization. He understood urbanization as a general transformation of society, fundamentally changing the living conditions in urban and rural areas. Having studied rural life for decades, Lefebvre was well aware of the fundamental transformations of the traditional forms of agrarian societies occurring as a result of urbanization: not only the material structure, the built environment and the urban morphology were changing, but also everyday life. For Lefebvre, urbanization was an encompassing process stretching out in time and space, transforming all aspects of society and having a planetary reach. He describes this process as “the expanding city attacks the countryside, corrodes and dissolves it. This urban life penetrates peasant life, dispossessing it of its traditional features. The village has been absorbed or obliterated by larger entities and has become an integral part of networks of industrial production and consumption. At the same time cities have experienced the dissolution of their social and morphological structure through the extension of financial,commercial, and industrial networks accompanied by the dispersion of all sorts of urban fragments: suburbs, residential conglomerations, industrial complexes, tourist resorts, distant urban peripheries and so on.
In a powerful metaphor, borrowed from atomic physics, Lefebvre described the urban process as ‘implosion-explosion’: ‘the tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought) of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vocation homes, satellite towns).
At the time when Lefebvre put forward this hypothesis, he expressed a tendency rather than an already existing reality. Lefebvre projected the current tendency into the future in order to allow the future to illuminate the past, the virtual to examine and situate the realized. Thus the hypothesis of complete urbanization served as a point of arrival for existing knowledge and as a point of departure for a new study and a new project. The complete urbanization of society marks a decisive turning point and indicates a possibility—the fundamental transformation of a society into an urban society. Urbanization lays the groundwork for this urban society, but in order to be realized, it needs a social upheaval—the urban revolution that unleashes and realizes the potentials that the urbanization process generates.
Lefebvre’s hypothesis of complete urbanization marked a turning point in critical urban theory and opened up a new way of thinking “the urban”.
First, it changed the focus of analysis from urban form to urban process, which has profound consequences for the definition of the urban. For a long time, the urban was defined mainly in respect of morphological and/or sociospatial form, indicated by the size or density of the population, or by similar characteristics, while approaches that understood the urban as a process of social transformation were rare. Once the urban is conceptualized as process, it becomes obvious that urban form is a floating and ephemeral phenomenon, as it is a constantly changing, temporary result of an underlying transformation, and is thus shaped according to the trajectory and the rhythms of urbanization, which brings new urban forms constantly to the fore.
Second, Lefebvre understood the urban as totality, and thus proceeded towards a multidimensional analysis of urbanization while criticizing reductive definitions, which limit urbanization to one single element or a restricted series of factors, such as the growth of cities or the expansion of urban networks. Lefebvre strove to grasp the concept’s complexity and contradictions—which led him to a conception of urbanization as a process that transforms not only physical and socioeconomic structure but also everyday life and lived experience.
Third, Lefebvre not only critically analyzed the phenomenon of urbanization and its implications, but at the same time explored and revealed its potentials. His research was among the first studies that theorized the instrumentality of urbanization processes in the reproduction of capitalist relationships, but at the same time he also explored urban space as a place of transgression and alternative social projects. Urbanization carries on this projective energy, which he captured in concepts such as ‘centrality’, ’difference’, ‘the right to the city’, and ‘concrete utopia’.
When Lefebvre was writing four decades ago, the urban society appeared as a black box, an unknown continent stretching out in time and space. Today, we are living on this urban continent: urbanization has become a dominant reality in almost all parts of the globe, giving rise to a variety of urban situations.
Lefebvre gives no clear-cut or read-to-use proposals, but provides us with a series of concepts that he developed over decades. He put the urban question into an overarching context and developed his theory of the production of urban space.
The theory of production of space is a reinterpretation and development of Marxian categories from within a series of studies on the processes of urbanization of postwar France, which Lefebvre carried out or supervised from the late 1940s to the 1980s.
This theory had appeared in his work in rural and urban sociology from the 1940s, but its core was formulated in a short period between 1968 (The right to the city’) and 1974(The production of space).
This theory offers a general framework integrating the main topics of Lefebvre’s research: everyday life, the state, and the urban as intermediary and mediating level. Thus the urban lies in the core of this open-ended social theory.
For a long time, debates on his work concentrated on theoretical questions, which have clarified many questions, such as the basic construction of this theory, questions of dialectics, the concept of everyday life, the relationship between urbanization and the urban, the role of space, the spatial triad, the state and the production of nature.
Applications and mobilizations of Lefebvre’s theory for empirical studies came late. It was not until the 1990s when The production of space was translated into English.
At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century the stream of applications and mobilizations of Lefebvre’s theory expanded, spreading out into many different fields, including geography, sociology, cultural anthropology, urban studies, cultural studies, architecture and urban design, planning, humanities, literature studies, arts, pedagogy, history and even legal studies.
This book aims to offer diverse ideas and methods for critically understanding urbanization as a process.
Their volume is composed of four sections. Each section tries to provide an answer to a different question derived from core concepts of Lefebvre. The first section investigates the concept of complete urbanization. Chapters in this section show how different urbanization processes from different spatial and historical contexts can be understood by developing the concept of complete urbanization.
In the second section, each chapter investigates how the ‘right to the city’ is threatened in contemporary urbanization processes led by the state. In the middle of the first decade of the 2000s ‘the right to the city’ has been placed on the official agenda of UN-Habitat. The second section studies various examples of the functionalization, homogenization and commodification of urban space, and explores the struggles involved in the creation of concrete utopias of “difference”, a term that Lefebvre in his later writing substituted for the “right to the city”.
The third section focuses on the theory of the production of space. Authors in this section utilize the concept of the three different dimensions of space and their dialectical relationships to analyze different kinds of urban space.
The starting and the end point of any Lefebvrean analysis is everyday life. Urbanization and the changes that come with it are first and foremost visible in the changes in everyday. The concept of everyday life was also the first conveyor of Lefebvre’s concepts into the architectural history and theory in Anglo-American architectural audience in the 1990s.
The last section of this book is entitled ‘urban society and its projects’, discussing the possibilities of “concrete utopias” and the contributions of urban projects and strategies to the development of an urban society.
First of all, they appear as decisively transdisciplinary, encompassing the work of sociologists, geographers, architects and planners, but also historians of architecture and the city. Lefebvre’s concepts, such as everyday life, complete urbanization, the perceived, conceived, lived space, the concept of rhythms, and the ‘right to the city’, are mobilized as research perspectives stressing the heterogeneity of social practices of the production space. Thus a convergence of perspectives that appears through these different engagements not only reveals shared points of interest, but also establishes a transdisciplinary field of urban research.
Second, most of the contributions are characterized by an ambition to link the analysis of a specific case study to an account of the urban society as a whole. What brings these different accounts together is their shared understanding that urban society is becoming ‘planetary’.
Third, most of these contributions develop Lefebvre’s understanding of production of space as a dialectical process irreducible to one original contradiction. The three ‘moments’ of space production do not form a synthesis but rather exist in interaction, in conflict or in alliance with each other.
A fourth characteristic is that many authors treat Lefebvre’s theory more as a general orientation than as a solid and codified corpus of knowledge.
This points finally to the Marxist core of Lefebvre’s theory. Lefebvre constantly stressed the non-reductionist character of the thinking of Marx and aimed that thinking the social whole without reducing the underlying heterogeneity of its phenomena and processes.
Lefebvre’s concepts are not technical, well-defined and ready-to-hand tools to be implemented. Doing research ‘with’ Lefebvre goes far beyond a simple application of concepts and ideas. It is not possible to apply them using a unified method, not even with a standardized set of methods.
Theory, not method: this is Lefebvre’s legacy in urban research. He aimed at a confrontation of a variety of methods from within a shared theoretical framework, which allows outlining long-term research projects and in turn, offers criteria for choosing specific case studies from within a historical conjuncture. These two sides of Lefebvre’s work—the theoretical guidelines that form a persistent structure throughout his texts, and the experience of their operationalization in response to urgent questions—constitute the essential dynamics of his writings and one that can be learned from and developed today. Taking Lefebvre as a starting point for research and design is still an endeavor and an adventure, and an expedition into unknown field.