Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

U r b a n r e v o L U t i o n
global canvas as they colonize the lived. And they unite around a
common urban praxis: “the generalized terrorism of the quantifiable”
(p. 244; p. 185).
This motley band he pejoratively dubs “the urbanists,” who
“cut into grids and squares.” “Technocrats,” Lefebvre notes,
“unaware of what’s going on in their own mind and in their working
concepts, profoundly misjudging in their blind field what’s
going on (and what isn’t), end up meticulously organizing a repressive
space” (p. 208; p. 157). Urbanism thus finds itself caught
between the rock and the hard place, “between those who decide
on behalf of ‘private’ interests and those who decide on behalf
of higher institutions and power.” The urban wilts under a historic
compromise between neoliberalism and neomanagerialism,
“which opens the playing field for the activity of ‘free enterprise.’
” The urbanist duly slips into the cracks, making a career
in the shady recesses between “developers and power structures,”
a monkey to each organ grinder. A true left critique, accordingly,
must attack the promoters of the urban “as object,” as an entity
of economic expansion in which investment and growth are ends
in themselves. The agents of this mind-set, meanwhile, the topdown,
self-perpetuating cybernanthropes, must everywhere and
always be refuted.
For Lefebvre, the cybernanthrope was the antihumanist incarnate,
a reviled man cum machine, the air-conditioned official
obsessed with information systems, with scientific rationality,
with classification and control. In a profoundly witty and scathing
text, Vers le cybernanthrope [Towards the cybernanthrope] (1971),
Lefebvre claims cybernetic culture has cut—not unlike Robert
Moses slicing into New York—a swath for the urban revolution
and proliferated through urbanism as ideology. Voici everything
Lefebvre hates. Their type, their policies, their urban programs,
the very presence of technocrats on planet earth offended him; they
were antithetical to all he stood for, all he desired. Their type plots
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