Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

U r b a n i t y
loss. Downgrading inhabit, reducing it to a mere habitat, signifies
a loss of the city as œuvre, a loss of integration and participation
in urban life. Indeed, it is to denigrate one of humanity’s great
works of art—not one hanging on a museum wall but a canvas
smack in front of our noses, wherein we ourselves are would-be
artists, would-be architects.
In those sections on inhabiting, and on the city as œuvre,
Lefebvre writes beautifully, and inspiringly, about the urban,
invoking the power of the city, the promise of the city, more as an
artist intent on pleasure than as a sociologist intent on measure.
Always his target is a bigger virtue, a deeper understanding of
human reality; always he blurs together past, present, and future,
conceiving the city as a historical as well as a virtual object,
something that’s simultaneously disappeared and yet to appear.
Conjecture pops up as quickly as fact—a trait destined to irk, or
befuddle, traditional social scientists, those motivated by is rather
than ought.
That the city is “an exquisite œuvre of praxis and civilization”
(p. 126) makes it very different from any other product.
“The œuvre,” Lefebvre insists, “is use value and the product is
exchange value. The eminent use of the city, that is, of its streets
and squares, buildings and monuments, is la fête (which consumes
unproductively, without any other advantage than pleasure and
prestige)” (p. 66). And this unproductive pleasure was a free-forall,
not a perk for the privileged. Needless to say, cities throughout
time have been seats of commerce, places where goods and
services are peddled, spaces animated by trade and rendered
cosmopolitan by markets. Middle Age merchants, Lefebvre confirms,
“acted to promote exchange and generalize it, extending the
domain of exchange values; yet for them the city was much more
than an exchange value” (p. 101). For sure, it’s only a relatively
recent phenomenon that cities themselves have become exchange
values, lucre in situ, jostling with other exchange values (cities)
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