Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
into a singular contesting force. Other member groups, like the
Ruckus Society, affirm a politics of pleasure, having fun while
getting serious, performing street theater and musical happenings,
dancing soirees, and holding educational seminars.
Many cities across the globe have also been disrupted and reappropriated
by another dynamic spontaneous presence: Reclaim the
Streets (RTS). In recent years, RTS demos have shut down streets
in Manhattan (at Astor Place, in the East Village, and around
Times Square); in Sydney; in north, south, and central London;
in Helsinki; and in Prague and other European capitals. In the
middle of major traffic thoroughfares, crowds have danced and
shouted and partied—revolutionaries, students, workers, activists,
madmen, and malcontents. In their “Festivals of Love and Life,”
they’ve brought cars to a standstill and demanded pedestrians’ and
bikers’ right to the city. In New York, they rallied against ex-mayor
Rudy Giuliani’s “quality of life” campaigns against the homeless,
the sidewalk vendors, and the poor. In Seattle, under the noses of
neoliberal bigwigs, RTS clasped hands with Global Exchange to
embarrass the hell out of politicians and business honchos plotting
to carve up the world into profit centers. RTS has rediscovered
a “new romantic” Lefebvrian oomph, “transforming stretches of
asphalt into a place where people can gather without cars, without
shopping malls, without permission from the state, to develop the
seeds of the future in the present society.” So said one RTS poster
I saw not so long ago on an East Village wall.
RTS began in London in 1991 when people banded together
to contest the Conservative government’s large-scale highway
construction program, a hair-brained policy destined to slice
huge swaths through verdant countryside and vibrant cityscape.
Before long, a concerted antiroads campaign surfaced over the
fate of Twyford Down, near Winchester, where rolling pastures
and ancient walkways stood in the path of the proposed (and subsequently
completed) M3 extension between Southampton and
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