Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

5
Urban Revolution
It is in the countryside that seditious thought ferments, but it
is in the city that such thought erupts. Liberty likes extreme
crowds or absolute solitude.
—Louis Gauny, Le philosophe plébéien
The Urban Revolution did indeed represent an arrival as well as
a point of departure, for both Henri Lefebvre and the world. Here
was a book rooted and incubated in the tumult of 1968 yet anticipated
much more a new era ahead, a post-1968 age, replete with
its cynicism and promises, its possibilities and impossibilities.
The Urban Revolution marked a new beginning, the dawn of a
thoroughly urbanized society; “the urban” entered the fray like
the Nietzschean “death of God” or the Marxian “loss of halo”:
all hitherto accepted values and morals had been drowned in
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