Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
To some extent, that’s the good news. As for the bad news,
the urban fabric [tissu urbain] has been mortally wounded, sliced
into like live flesh, leaving amputated body parts and a whole
lot of blood. “Populations are heaped together,” Lefebvre notes,
“reaching worrying densities. At the same time, old urban cores
are deteriorating or shattering. People are displaced to far-off residential
or productive peripheries. Offices replace housing in urban
centers. Sometimes (in the United States) centers are abandoned
to the ‘poor’ and become ghettoes of the disenfranchised. Other
times, the most affluent people retain their stake at the heart of
the city” (p. 71). The city has become either recentered or decentered,
asphyxiated or hollowed out, a showcase or a no place.
Consequently, it hasn’t just lost a sense of cohesion and definition;
its dwellers have lost a sense of creative and collective purpose.
Cities are little more than places where people earn money,
speculate on money, or merely live. What should be stunning
projects that people inhabit have become dismal habitats, seats
of decivilization. Lefebvre uses here the term inhabiting to stamp
a richer gloss on city life, evoking urban living as becoming, as
growing, as something dynamic and progressive. Being in a city,
he stresses, is a lot more than just being there. The nod, duly
acknowledged, is made to Martin Heidegger (1889–1976): “To
inhabit,” Lefebvre explains, “meant to take part in a social life, a
community, village or city. Urban life possessed, amongst other
qualities, this attribute. It bestowed dwelling, it allowed townspeople-citizens
to inhabit. It is thus that ‘mortals inhabit while
they save the earth, while they wait for gods … while they conduct
their own being in preservation and use.’ Thus speaks the poet and
philosopher Heidegger of the concept to inhabit” (p. 76).
But Lefebvre loosens the deep ontological moorings of the
German philosopher’s notion of “place as the unique dwelling of
being” and beds the concept down in political and historical reality.
10 As such, a loss of inhabiting is a political, social, and aesthetic
6