CityReads│Lefebvre on the Centrality of the Urban

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Lefebvre on the Centrality of the Urban

The essential aspect of the urban phenomenon is its centrality, argues Lefebvre.

Lefebvre H 2003 [1970]. Translated by Robert Bononno, The urban revolution, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN.

This week I continue reading The urban revolution by Lefebvre. In chapter six, Lefebvre attempts to answer the classic question: what is the essence of the urban phenomenon? Centrality, is the essence of the urban, Lefebvre argues.

Lefebvre considers that there is a rupture between urban and its precedents, the industrial and agricultural spheres. Therefore we must exclude conventional models, which have generally been adopted, from industrialization, productionism, and economism. Lefebvre suggests we begin with a formal conception of logic and a dialectic of content. The following are excerpts from chapter six.

The essential aspect of the urban phenomenon is its centrality, but a centrality that is understood in conjunction with the dialectical movement that creates or destroys it. The fact that any point can become central is the meaning of urban space-time.

Piles of objects and products in warehouses, mounds of fruit in the marketplace, crowds, pedestrians, goods of various kinds, juxtaposed, superimposed, accumulated— this is what makes the urban urban.

The city is not only a devouring activity, consumption; it becomes productive (means of production) but initially does so by bringing together the elements of production. The city brings together whatever is engendered somewhere else, by nature or labor: fruits and objects, products and producers, works and creations, activities and situations. What does the city create? Nothing. It centralizes creation. And yet it creates everything.

A crowd can gather, objects can pile up, a festival unfold, an event— terrifying or pleasant— can occur. This is why urban space is so fascinating: centrality is always possible. At the same time, this space can empty itself, expel its content, become a place of pure scarcity or power. Centrality would produce hierarchy and therefore inequality.

The city creates a situation, the urban situation, where different things occur one after another and do not exist separately but according to their differences. The city constructs, identifies, and delivers the essence of social relationships: the reciprocal existence and manifestation of differences arising from or resulting in conflicts.

The urban is, therefore, pure form: a place of encounter, assembly, simultaneity. This form has no specific content, but is a center of attraction and life. It is an abstraction, but unlike a metaphysical entity, the urban is a concrete abstraction, associated with practice.

Living creatures, the products of industry, technology and wealth, works of culture, ways of living, situations, the modulations and ruptures of the everyday—the urban accumulates all content. But it is more than and different from accumulation. Its contents (things, objects, people, situations) are mutually exclusive because they are diverse, but inclusive because they are brought together and imply their mutual presence.

Urban form unites these differences, whether minimal or maximal. This form is defined only in and through this consolidating unity of difference.

Centrality, an aspect of mathematics, is also an aspect of drama. It unites them the way it unites everything, including symbols and signs. But during its realization, this concentration flexes and cracks. It requires another center, a periphery, an elsewhere. An other and different place. This movement, produced by the urban, in turn produces the urban.

It is a form. Because of this, it tends toward 

1. centrality, through distinct modes of production, different productive relations and

2. polycentrality, omnicentrality, the rupture of the center, dispersion—a trend that can be oriented either toward the constitution of different centers (analogous and possibly complementary) or toward dispersion and segregation.

The urban is both form and receptacle, void and plenitude, superobject and nonobject, supraconsciousness and the totality of consciousnesses.It is associated with the logic of form and with the dialectic of content (with the differences and contradictions of content).

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