Reading Socio-Spatial Interplay - Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i ...

R E A D I N G S O C I O - S P A T I A L I N T E R P L A Y P A R T 1Lefebvre: Specificities of the city and urban formHenri Lefebvre produced a number of books and articles devoted tounderstanding the urban, the city and urban transformation: dynamicdialectics between the urban and the city. 78 In Le droit à la ville (Right to theCity), 79 Lefebvre describes the city is as:(1) a spatial object,(2) a mediation, and(3) a work (oeuvre) – not a product.What unifies these three aspects is the particular urban form, which is bothmental and social.(1) The city as a spatial object: The city is direct, present reality, a tangibleand architectural fact, while “the urban” can be described as a social andmental reality. But neither urban society nor urban life can be understoodwithout a tangible basis – a morphology. 80 Urban space is both produced andproducing through the evolutionary interaction between tangible, urbanlandscapes and human social life. As urban development, urban problems arerelated to space, the city is discussed as a spatial object.(2) The city as a mediation: In his discussion of what characterizes the city(the urban phenomena), Lefebvre starts by pointing out that the city alwayshas been related to society as a whole, with all its elements (rural areas,offensive and defensive forces, political power, the State, etc.) and its history.Therefore the city changes when society as a whole changes. But urbantransformation cannot be reduced to a passive result of societal order orsocietal change alone: The relation between city and society is also dependant78 Most of his texts on urban matters were produced between 1966 and 1974, but both his dialectic approachfor studying the production of space, and the problems he addresses (for instance the liberating potential ofurban life) has clear links to earlier parts of his work: Logique formelle, logique dialectique; Critique de la viequotidienne, I: Introduction (both published in 1947); Critique de la vie quotidienne, II: Fondement d’unesociologie de la quotidienneté (1962); La Vallée de Campan, étude de sociologie rurale (1963). In the twolatter books issues of urban versus rural sociology are amongst the issues that are discussed.79 Two of Henri Lefebvre’s first books on urban matters, Le droit à la ville (1968, Paris, Anthropos) and Larevolution urbaine (1970, Paris, Gallimard), can be read together as a political manifest for the right to adecent urban life: the right to centrality, access to multiplicity, productive encounters of differences, the rightnot to be excluded from urban form (including decisions, actions of power and corporation in public space).Lefebvre’s discussions in these two books of both the specificity of the city, urban dynamics, and urban life,can be read as a critique of the persistent reductive conceptualization of space and society in modern urbanism:Lefebvre attempted to explain how functionalistic urban development, with zoning, segregation, etc. had vastnegative impacts on aspects of the city which are considered essential to both the quality of individual life andthe development of society in general. In his critique of modernist urbanism, Lefebvre emphasizes the relationsbetween social space, mental space and the space of practice (in physical, “real” space).80 “Urban life, urban society and the urban, detached by a particular social practice (whose analysis willcontinue) from their half ruined morphological base, and searching for a new base, these are the contexts of thecritical point. The urban cannot be attached to a material morphology (on the ground, in the practico-material),or as being able to detach itself from it. It is not an intemporal essence, nor a system among systems or aboveother systems. It is a mental and social form, that of simultaneity, of gathering, of convergence, of encounter(or rather, encounters). It is a quality born from quantities (spaces, objects, products). It is a difference, orrather an ensemble of differences”.Henri Lefebvre: Right to the City, translated in Kofman and Lebas 1996: p.13151