REVIEWS
Book Review
—Sergio Veyzaga
A review of The Urban Revolution and changing means of the urban realm
Lefebvre, Henri. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Image courtesy of: Jack Hollingsworth, © Corbis Images.
The announcement of a new smart-city at the riverfront in Toronto opens a debate about the implications of pure rationalism superseding all possibility of alternative realities. In the case of the urban realm it translates as a social reality. A social reality where the urban technocracy ignores cultures and ways of living in the search for utopia or a blind ideology.The genealogy of the urban project is a complex issue to explore, but Henri Lefebvre in his chef d’oeuvre The Urban Revolution,originally published in 1970, tries to synthesize it. He explores beyond mere economic materialism and focuses on daily life experiences and its transforming social processes throughout history.
Structures of Production and Dwellers Relationships
“Total Urbanization is an inevitable process”[2]. Lefebvre defines the urban realm as relationships between society and its forms of production, in a classic Marxist approach or pure Hegelian materialism[3]. Agricultural production at one time was the core of economic interdependence, now it is no longer the principle sector of the economy. As a result, “in mostly urbanized countries the traditional urbanity of peasant life, the village, has been transformed[4].
The idea of spatiality in the village was immersed in an authoritarian relationship between the landlords and peasant in Medieval Europe. This landlord-peasant relationship was the core economic process for both the urban and rural. As this relationship deconstructed over the centuries to one of merchants and an increasingly mobile labour force, so too did the understanding of the urban or the street. The street, which used to be a place for festivities and friendly encounters, has been transformed into a market for the artisan, which in turn created a spectacle of consumption. “There is no more place for la fete”[5], this urban evolution marked a spatiotemporal trend in Western Europe.
In Western Europe, the disruption between the urban and rural was imperceptible until the 15th and 16th century. During this period inhabitants were granted further individualization while also seeing production de-individualized in order to transition to the “production-line”. Society fragmented and common cultural elements vanished. Villages began growing, the individual started to lose a sense of community and merchants replaced artisans. The street has become a place of consumption and casual human inter-relations. Industry and manufacturing has transformed the uniqueness of artisan production to just mere copies of goods.
Following the rationality and mechanization of production, economic relations have become the main core for ideological relations. This can be exemplified the case of Marxist “class-struggle” or “free movement of capital” in Economic Liberalism. Lefebvre raises the case for the Marxist critic by recognizing that the Stalinist experience of the Iron Curtain brought State Capitalism and restrictions of liberties[6]. In the case of Liberalism in western countries, rational economic relations developed an ideology in which shaped the understanding of the city, which we know as urbanism today.
The Logic of Urbanism
Where in western liberal nations the urban is a process after industrialization in the eyes of Lefebvre, urbanism uses a false representation of reality in order to control the urban realm and its policies. The social relationships that were important in the agrarian society and “la fete” villages, have been reduced to concrete abstractions[7]. The street is now understood as intersections of geometric elements rather than a result of human interaction.
The French Revolution, understood as a bourgeoisie “triumph of merchants”[8], displaced the Catholic Church and monarchy. This led to the social hegemony of the merchant class, which followed with the implementation of institutions in order to maintain the control of everyday life. The dominance of industrial logic, by technocracy complimented with individualism, led the way towards homogenizing urban space[9]. This homogenization has been the final triumph of the bureaucratic intervention in urban space.
“Bureaucratic society of controlled consumption”, also known as urbanism, provides the false appearance of being free, accessible, and cultivating rational activity[10]. It controls the consumption of space and the landscape favouring the production of Real Estate speculation. Western Societies have followed this system since after the Second World War. It is a system that produces the illusory justification of Liberal humanism and technocratic utopia[11], which is the words of Lefebvre “needs to be superseded[12]”
The Social Super-Structure
Lefebvre’s main criticism of the urban derives from a leftist perspective. His perspective rejects “the politics of space” meaning that space should not be understood as a product and the inhabitants as mere buyers of the space in this sense Urbanism is the main layout of the Marxist Base. In order to overcome this system, Lefebvre proposes the need of an urban society with a global scope because the world has become completely urbanized[13]. Lefebvre has adopted the term “global city” from Maoism and criticizes social fragmentation resulting from a spate of elements in space[14]. This also represents the substantial participation of society in order to build a Super-Structure. Social participation reverses our passive qualities and challenges technocratic urbanism in favour of a more spontaneous, artistic and chaotic urban realm.
Not surprisingly social participation was a solution of CoBrA[15]and its situationist city vision, in which Lefebvre was a short-time member and intellectually allied. The idea of boredom and the lack of creativeness was the implication behind Constant’s New Babylon project[16]or more participation by Giancarlo de Carlo[17]who produced the concept of Participatory Design in his essay “Architecture’s Public”[18].
Fig.1. Lefebvre Marxist. Understanding of Urban Society, in this case the base is composed of technocracy of the Urban, which mainly influence the Super-Structure, and should be able to reverse the influence. The main problem arises in the fragmentation of the society and individualization of problems
Apart from theoretical writing by Lefebvre that discuses individual involvement of creativeness in forming the urban, there are still inconsistent language and concepts, which reflect an intellectual paternalism in his writing. One should avoid employing the western intellectual tradition as the only touchstone[19]and avoid the over-estimation of “the global expansion of Liberalism” and the reduction of people as mere individuals[20]. A more holistic approach should be taken to understand that the urban is not homogenous, but an assemblage of cultural elements present in a society. A society that interacts with objects, communications, and institutions. The urban is an “anthropocentric Actor Network Theory”[21]of society, being mainly a human collective.
We should avoid forming collectives that pledge to follow the organization and rules of participation that follow a pattern of hegemony rather than diversity. This understanding has been obvious to the American indigenous in which indigenous societies have viewed settler’s perspective as “unnatural” and since the colonizing project.
As has been demonstrated by the country with the largest percentage of indigenous in the western hemisphere, The Plurinational State of Bolivia, Indigenous people can bring elements of tolerance in diversity, hard money with the environment and cultural assertiveness[22].
While Lefebvre mentions a total subordination of the rural in favour of urban hegemony, in the indigenous understanding there is not a struggle, but a synthesis. Identities live together and cooperate in a harmony with the environment.
In settler nations, incorporating the indigenous realm into urban patterns can be a starting point towards strong cultural assertiveness. This is in contrast to the latest reinvention of Economic Liberalism which “promotes data as the new oil”[23]and automation. This has physically manifest itself by the eruption of many smart-city projects that followsthis economic, technocratic, determinism.
Society goes beyond pure economic reductionism and in our specific context different peoples of Canada have much to learn, not only about each other but from each other[24]. We should embody a process of Interculturalism that avoids the mistranslation of other Canadian Cultures particularly the Indigenous voices. Urban planners and urbanists should avoid attempting to translate Indigenous culture and values through the logic of urbanism. On the contrary, the logic of bureaucratic urbanism should be avoided. The competing cultures involved should collaborate to recover local elements of Indigenous geometry, ways of life and spirituality, which could transform the Canadian Urban project into something more than a concrete-data jungle.
This would result in present elements of economic dependence having a counterpoint of social, cultural, and urban interdependence that build a middle ground in our Intercultural process in order to create alternative urban patterns. Nunavut, the First Nation Community Project in Saskatchewan[25],or the Seven Generation Project, should be understood as elements of sharing our cultural identities rather than fragmentation of our urban society.
Fig.2. A proposed Relationship between a Super Structure of a Intercultural Process which mainly influence the Urban Layout or Pattern. This rely more in common cultural elements rather than periodic economic changes and this dictate the morphology of the city.
Overall, we need a counter element in the dehumanization and pure abstraction of the urban. Henri Lefebvre’s “Urban Revolution” is a well elaborated attempt to create an urban epistemology that incorporates the transformation of societies through the means of productions. Consequently, the submission of society to the political supremacy of the rationalized, economically determinant spaces should be countered with populist[26]appropriation of this space. The Urban Revolution’sanalysis of the urban is well described and the solutions are debatable and thought provoking. The writing remains highly recommended, although the narrative must be taken as a reference in order to create our own conclusions and narratives of reality.
[1]The Urban Revolution: Henri Lefebvre,Translated by Robert Bononno
[2]Lefebvre, Henri. The urban revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011:1.
[3]Julie E. Maybee, “Hegel’s Dialectics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, June 03, 2016, , accessed December 28, 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/.
[4]Lefebvre, Henri. The urban revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011:3.
[5]La Fête is a celebration which consumes unproductively, without other advantage but pleasure
and prestige and enormous riches in money and objects.
[6]See “Base and Superstructure”
Nicki Lisa Cole, “Understanding Marx’s Base and Superstructure,” ThoughtCo, April 21, 2017, , accessed December 28, 2017, https://www.thoughtco.com/definition-of-base-and-superstructure-3026372.
[7]La Fête as a celebration used to be an important element of sense of community which basically disappeared to mere working individuals.
Lefebvre, Henri. The urban revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011:87.
[8]Pilbeam, Pamela M. The middle classes in Europe: 1789-1914: France, Germany, Italy and Russia. Chicago, IL: Lyceum Books, 1990:235-293.
[9]Lefebvre, Henri. The urban revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011:34.
[10]Lefebvre, Henri. The urban revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011:4.
[11]Lefebvre, Henri. The urban revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011:153.
[12]Lefebvre mentioned the Liberal Humanism should be superseded by an Urban Society which produce an Urban Revolution.
[13]Lefebvre, Henri. The urban revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011:167.
[14]Lefebvre, Henri. The urban revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011:169.
[15]The CoBrA group was a short-lived but highly influential artist collective formed in Paris. Named for the three northern European cities that its founders originated from – Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam – its approximately thirty members became known for their vigorously spontaneous, rebellious style of painting that was heavily inspired by the art of children and the mentally ill.
“The CoBrA Group.” The Art Story. Accessed December 16, 2017. http://www.theartstory.org/.
[16]“New Babylon 1956-1974,” Fondation Constant / Stichting Constant, May 14, 2015, , accessed December 29, 2017, http://stichtingconstant.nl/new-babylon-1956-1974.
[17]“Giancarlo De Carlo (1919-2005),” Architectural Review, January 20, 2014, , accessed December 25, 2017, https://www.architectural-review.com/rethink/reputations-pen-portraits-/giancarlo-de-carlo-1919-2005/8658151.article?search=https://www.architectural-review.com/searcharticles?qsearch=1&keywords=giancarlo de carlo.
[18]Jencks, Charles A., and Karl Kropf. Theories and manifestoes of contemporary architecture. Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2008:47.
[19]Clarence Karr, “What is Canadian Intellectual History?” Dalhousie Review 55, no. 3 (1975): 433, accessed December 19, 2017, http://hdl.handle.net/10222/59882.
[20]Lefebvre, Henri. The urban revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011:185.
[21]Farías, Ignacio. Bender, Thmas . Urban assemblages: how actor-network theory changes urban studies. London: Routledge, 2011:3.
[22]“Redefining Fashion & Architecture in Bolivia: Cholitas Y Cholets,” VICE, , accessed December 28, 2017, https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/miscelanea-cholitas-y-cholets/58c893bfc6ec61147e5f0077.
[23]Taplin, Jonathan. Move fast and break things: how Facebook, Google, and Amazon have cornered culture and what it means for all of us. London: Macmillan, 2017.
[24]Cairns, Alan C. Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State. UBC Press, 2000.
[25]S. Yvonne Prusak, Ryan Walker, and Robert Innes, “Toward Indigenous Planning? First Nation Community Planning in Saskatchewan, Canada,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 36, no. 4 (2016): , doi:10.1177/0739456×15621147.
[26]In On Populist Reason, Laclau considered the nature of populism, the creation of a popular hegemonic bloc such as “the people”.Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. Verso, 2005.
Sergio Veyzaga: is an intern architect based in Calgary. He can often be found, notebook in hand, pondering the social effects of the built environment.
Editor: Justin Loucks
Look for this at The FOLD’s local Recommend Shelf at Shelf Life Books in Calgary.