Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

U r b a n i t y
“the expiring seashell,” Lefebvre laments, “lies shattered and open
to the skies” (pp. 117–18). Likewise it has gotten more boring as
time has passed. Navarrenx’s market day is tiny compared with
those of yesteryear; surviving storekeepers are little more than
managers now; narrow streets are gridlocked each day with cars
and trucks. Nevertheless, its boredom is more complacent, softer,
and cozier, more comforting and carefree than Mourenx; it’s the
boredom of a lazy summer Sunday afternoon or a long winter
night in front of a roaring open fire. Mourenx’s boredom, conversely,
“is pregnant with desires, frustrated frenzies, unrealized
possibilities. A magnificent life is waiting just around the corner,
and far, far away. It is waiting like the cake when there’s butter,
milk, flour and sugar.” In Mourenx, “man’s magnificent power
over nature has left him alone to himself” (p. 124). This is a thoroughly
modern boredom, one affecting heavily the youth, those
without a future, and women, who always, Lefebvre says, bear the
brunt of an isolated and dismembered everyday life.
Lefebvre can’t hide his admiration of old medieval towns. And
who can blame him, given the ugly giant sprawls we today call cities?
By choice or default, large numbers of us have lives that open
out onto vast voids of desolation and nothingness. But Lefebvre’s
alternative warrants caution. At times, his fondness smacks of
gemeinschaft nostalgia, a romantic yearning for paradise lost,
for a bygone age when everything was unified and whole, artisanal
and authentic. He knows he’s treading through Proudhonian
minefields. 6 Yet it soon becomes evident he has something else in
mind. The metaphor of the seashell is crucial. With it, Lefebvre
wants to emphasize the relationship between an animal (i.e.,
human beings) and its habitat (i.e., our cities), specifically how
the habitat should be flexible enough to permit free growth of the
animal, responsive enough to “the laws of its species.” 7 Growth
of an animal, he says, follows a certain functioning order. And
in the case of human beings, we produce our lives knowingly and
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