Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

U r b a n i t y
Is the city a technical object or an aesthetic moment, an œuvre or
a product?
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Lefebvre began to confront these questions head on—with typical
“cavalier intention”—in a provocative text, The Right to the City
(1968), a series of exploratory essays, drafted during the 1960s
(and updated and upgraded in 1972). Here the aging Rabelaisian
Marxist unveils for the first time, as a coherent whole, his analysis
on an emergent urban society. 9 A “double process” (p. 70) is before
us, he says near the beginning: “industrialization and urbanization,
growth and development, economic production and social
life.” An inseparable and inexorable unity has been born, a terrible
Janus-faced beauty, coexisting in Manichean disunity, pitting
industrial reality against urban reality, a mode of production
against its built form: a rabid animal is set to burst out of its beatup
shell.
Industrialization, Lefebvre reminds us, produces commodities
at the same time as it proletarianizes people, creates wealth
while it needs to reproduce its workforce, somewhere. The process
spawns fields and factories, haciendas and housing estates, bosses
and managers, bank districts and financial centers, research complexes
and political power hubs. All of which prizes open, and
hacks up, urban space itself, transforming the countryside to boot,
reforging everything and everywhere on the anvil of capital accumulation.
To “manage” an unmanageable contradiction, a new
crew of frauds enters the fray: planners and politicians, technocrats
and taskmasters, who speak a new “discourse,” Lefebvre
says, replete with a new ideology: that of urbanism. Orchestrated
by the state, the urban question henceforth becomes a political
question; class issues are now explicitly urban issues, struggles
around territoriality, out in the open.
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