Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
nearby, competing with their neighbors to hustle some action—a
new office tower here, a new mall there, rich flâneurs downtown,
affluent residents uptown.
Industrialization has commodified the city, set in motion the
decentering the city, created cleavages at work and in everyday
life: “Expelled from the city,” Lefebvre writes, “the proletariat will
lose its sense of œuvre. Dispensable from their peripheral enclaves
for dispersed enterprises, the proletariat lets its own conscious creative
capacity dim. Urban consciousness vanishes” (p. 77). “Only
now,” reckoned Lefebvre in the 1960s, “are we beginning to grasp
the specificity of the city” (p. 100), a product of society and of
social relations yet a special feature within those relations. Indeed,
urbanization now reacts back on society, for better or for worse,
and has run ahead of industrialization itself. It’s only now, he adds,
using his own emphases, that the “foremost theoretical problem
can be formulated”: “For the working class, victim of segregation
and expelled from the traditional city, deprived of a present and
possible urban life, a practical problem poses itself, a political one,
even if it hasn’t been posed politically, and even if until now the
housing question … has masked the problematic of the city and
the urban” (p. 100).
The latter allusion, of course, is to Engels’s famous pamphlet
The Housing Question (1872), in which Marx’s faithful collaborator
denounced those petty-bourgeois reformists who wanted to
resolve squalid worker housing conditions without resolving the
squalid social relations underwriting them. While Lefebvre, a fellow
Marxist, concurs with Engels’s analysis and critique, as well
as with his political reasoning, he can’t, circa late twentieth century,
adhere to Engels’s solution:
The giant metropolis will disappear. It should disappear.
Engels possessed this idea in his youth and never let it go. In
The Housing Question, he’d already anticipated, “supposing
the abolition of the capitalist mode of production,” an equal
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