Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
twenty-three cities, nineteen will be in areas of the planet deemed
either “underdeveloped” or “developing.” By 2050, forty-nine of
the world’s poorest countries will have tripled their populations,
resulting in an exponential growth in urban slums.
“It’s a planetary revolution,” said Libération’s editorial
“Exodus” (p. 2), “destructive like all revolutions, and nothing is
controlling its destabilizing effects. An exodus that forces millions
of human beings to quit rural zones, where humanity has lived
since prehistory, towards the megalopoles more and more monstrous
and chaotic. … At the start of the 21st century, an immense
migration, fuelled by the fascination of the city’s bright lights and
the hope of escaping the stupefying misery of the countryside,
accelerates and extends urbanization to the furthest reaches of the
planet.” In two years time, “for the first time in our history,” the
report noted, “the majority of humanity will dwell in cities. …
Inequality and injustice, misery and violence, criminality and corruption,
are the price of this mutation, which economic globalization
amplifies.”
It was seemingly for good reason, with thirty-five years
hindsight, that Lefebvre kicked off his greatest urban text, The
Urban Revolution, with a chapter called “From the City to Urban
Society.” “We will depart from a hypothesis,” he began, which
needs supporting by argument and evidence: “society has been
completely urbanized.” Back then, Lefebvre thought we should
speak not of cities but of urban society—a “virtual reality,” he
wrote in 1970, yet “tomorrow real.” 22 That tomorrow is already our
today. A society born of industrialization has indeed succeeded
industrialization, has at once realized and surpassed it, has made
it somehow “postindustrial,” a point of arrival as well as a point
of departure. The United Nation’s Habitat program is set to look
down the abyss, poised to address this “urban gangrene.” Already
they know a thing or two: “The promotion of participatory and
inclusive styles of local governance,” United Nation–Habitat’s
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