Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
of a thousand-year-old community, “shaping its shell, building and
rebuilding it, modifying it again and again and again according to
its needs” (p. 116). History and civilization is a sort of seashell, he
reckons. Look closely at every medieval town, every little house,
every winding cobbled street, every courtyard or square, every
passageway or back alley and you’ll see the mucous trace of this
animal who “transforms the chalk in the soil around it into something
delicate and structured.”
Not every city or town, of course, has the luxury of either a
deep past or a rich culture, especially in the North American New
World. And yet, it is precisely the link between the animal and its
shell that Lefebvre forces us to consider, the form of the dilemma
as much as the content itself. The keyword here is unity. Lefebvre
is mesmerized by Navarrenx’s organic unity, by its intimacy, by
its style and function—by its “charm,” he jibes. Everything about
it has unity, is a seamless whole; everything relates, leads us into
another space with another function, and then onto an another, and
another, with a completely different function. “There is no clearcut
difference,” he writes, “yet no confusion exists between the
countryside, the streets and the houses; you walk from the fields
into the heart of the town and the buildings, through an uninterrupted
chain of trees, gardens, gateways, courtyards and animals”
(p. 117). What’s more, streets aren’t wastelands, nor are they simply
where people go from A to B. They are places “to stroll, to
chinwag [bavarder], to be alive in.” With a tonality reminiscent of
Jane Jacobs (whose Death and Life of the Great American Cities
was published exactly the same moment Lefebvre penned this critique),
“nothing can happen in the street without it being noticed
from inside the houses, and to sit watching at the window is a legitimate
pleasure. … The street is something integrated” (p. 117).
Sadly, Navarrenx, like many small towns and villages the
world over, has been dying for a while now, victim of changes in
industry and agriculture, trampled on by the march of “progress”;
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