Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

U r b a n i t y
as possible repatriation of the population over the entire land.
His solution to the urban question precludes the big modern
city. Engels doesn’t seem to wonder if this dispersion of the
city throughout the surrounding countryside, under the form of
little communities, doesn’t risk dissolving “urbanity” itself, of
ruralizing urban reality. 11
In truth, “there can’t be any return to the traditional city,”
Lefebvre rejoins (p. 148), notwithstanding his affection for
Navarrenx, notwithstanding his admiration for Engels, just as
there can’t be any “headlong flight towards a colossal and shapeless
megalopolis.” What we must do, he says, is “reach out and
steer ourselves towards a new humanism, a new praxis, another
man, somebody of urban society” (p. 150). This new humanism
will be founded on a new right, the right to an œuvre, the right to
the city, which will emerge “like a cry and demand,” like a militant
call to arms. This isn’t any pseudo right, Lefebvre assures us,
no simple visiting right, a tourist trip down memory lane, gawking
at a gentrified old town; neither is it enjoying for the day a
city you’ve been displaced from. This right “can only be formulated,”
he says, “as a transformed and renewed right to urban life”
(p. 158), a right to renewed centrality. There can be no city without
centrality, no urbanity, he believes, without a dynamic core,
without a vibrant, open public forum, full of lived moments and
“enchanting” encounters, disengaged from exchange value. “It
doesn’t matter,” he says, “whether the urban fabric encroaches
on the countryside nor what survives of peasant life, so long as
the ‘urban,’ place of encounter, priority of use value, inscription
in space of a time promoted to the rank of a supreme resource
amongst all resources, finds its morphological base, its practicalmaterial
realization” (p. 158). 12
Asserting his hard-core Marxist credentials, at the centenary
of Marx’s Capital (1967), only a united working class, concludes
Lefebvre in a series of “Theses on the City,” has the power and
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