CityReads│Harvey comments on The Urban Revolution by Lefebvre

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David Harvey comments on The Urban Revolution by Henry Lefebvre

Lefebvre’s urban world is both inspiring and intriguing as is the continuing open encounter between Marxism and the city.

David Harvey, 2004. Possible urban worlds: a review essay. City and Community, vol. 3, no. 1, 83–9.

Picture source: https://www.pinterest.com/qian_feng/henri-lefebvre/

David Harvey made some comments on The Urban Revolution by Henry Lefebvre when the English translation was published in 2003. Here is the excerpt from his review essay, Possible urban worlds.

“I encountered the book sometime in 1972 and was moved to reflect on its theses in Social Justice and the City. Reading it anew, in the excellent translation by Robert Bonnono supported by a perceptive forward by Neil Smith, turned out to be much more than a trip down memory lane. The text has lost none of its challenging freshness, its beguiling and tantalizing formulations. The questions it opens up are still with us and deserve a thorough airing. Perhaps the delay in translation will prove advantageous, coming, as it does, after the rise of the post-structuralist, post-modernist and post-Marxist modes of thought that have dominated social and literary theory these last few years.

Lefebvre’s intellectual and political roots are grounded in Marxism. But Lefebvre found himself forced to move away from some dominant strains of Marxian orthodoxy then prevalent in France to extend, modify, and, in some respects, revolutionize Marxian theory in order to understand urban phenomena. He accepts that different modes of production are associated with different urban forms but is primarily interested in how transitions occur from one mode of production and of urbanization to another. This opens up the question of the role of urbanization in historical change. But Lefebvre takes the argument one step further. His fundamental thesis is that industrial society should be seen as a precursor to an urban revolution that is both global and comprehensive in scope.

To reflect on some of these questions Lefebvre creates a “virtual” or “possible object” of the urban—a freely utopian gesture—from the standpoint of which it becomes possible to identify some of the central transitions that are already in progress as the world becomes more thoroughly urbanized. He uses this to speculate on how social relations and productive forces might be turned “upside down” to create alternative possible urban worlds.

But Lefebvre draws us deeper and deeper into a series of conceptual revolutions that are of great potential revelatory power. Not that everything goes by the board, of course. He retains a dialectical sense of internal relations within the totality of what urbanization is about, but celebrates the potential outcome as differentiating rather than homogenizing. He retains the sense of imminent crisis and of the necessity for fierce class struggle to supercede and redirect the urban process. But he relocates the terrain upon which this struggle occurs from the workshop to the streets, from the world of work to that of everyday life, from the certainties of the accumulation of capital through commodity production and exchange to the more contingent world of the production of space.

Lefebvre does not abandon the idea of class but he sees that the meaning of that term is undergoing a dramatic transformation away from traditional Marxian ideas about the industrial proletariat toward urbanized masses in motion. Historical materialism must come to terms with the critique of everyday life and with the implications of the production of space. Capitalism not only produces a “second nature” of a globally urbanized world, but it does so through the construction of a secondary process of circulation of capital that produces the urban at the same time as it rises to supplant the primary relations of industrial capitalism. This is the urban revolution already in progress that has to be grasped and fought over, understood and reconfigured in intellectual and political practice.

Many years have passed and much ink has been spilt on all these questions since Lefebvre wrote. In retrospect it seems to me that the most singular areas that did not get taken up in sufficient depth are the critique of everyday life and the role of utopian thought in animating our understanding of future possibilities. His stance on how to understand everyday life is particularly worthy of resuscitation. He takes up the theme of differentiations under the heading of heterotopia  but roots the concept firmly in the urban process. He tacitly acknowledges something important about Heidegger’s notion of “dwelling” but strips it of its mythological roots and brings it into everyday life under the umbrella of “habiting.”

Lefebvre’s world is both inspiring and intriguing as is the continuing open encounter between Marxism and the city”.

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