Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

U r b a n i t y
a new field of knowledge: the analysis of rhythms, with practical
consequences.” 21 The idea of a rhythm was deliberately provocative,
an assault on those who reify the city as a thing, who
document only what they see rather than what they feel or hear.
Movement and process, along with frequency and melody, now
became Lefebvre’s muse. Here the old man listened to urban murmurs
much the same way he tuned into Schumann’s Carnaval or
Beethoven’s 9th. Secret rhythms, buried in the city’s subconscious,
are unearthed by Lefebvre, as are public rhythms that chime in
the agora, get instantiated by festivals and mass celebration; fictional
rhythms ring out, too, those invented in Lefebvre’s own
aging imagination, as he loses himself out of his own apartment
window, staring down on everyday Paris. Rhythmanalysis signals
an ancient scholar’s farewell, his last gasp, an indulgence we can
forgive, even when we know very little adds up or extends what
he’s told us already. Rhythmanalysis was Lefebvre’s personal right
to city, a right he perhaps should never have shared.
* * *
In the fall of 2004, the French newspaper Libération (September
16, 2004) headlined the findings of the United Nations–Habitat’s
“World Urban Forum,” held in Barcelona. “THE DAMNED OF
THE CITY” ran the bleak front-page leader. In 2020, two billion
people are projected to inhabit assorted shantytowns, favelas and
bidonvilles, and the majority of our megacities will burgeon into
spaces of the poor—gigantic, sprawling neighborhoods of cardboard
and tin, of prefabricated materials destined to be washed
away in the next mudslide. By 2015, twenty-three cities will
have populations in excess of 10 million, with Tokyo (26.4 million),
Bombay (26.13 million), Lagos (23 million), Dacca (21.1
million), São Paulo (20.44 million), Mexico City (19.2 million),
and Karachi (19.2 million) topping the premier league. Of those
75