International Critical Thought Henri Lefebvre’s Urban Critical Theory: Rethinking the City against Capitalism [10, 2020 ed.]

Table of contents :
Abstract
Introduction
Unveiling the Urban Reality from the Point of View of Peripheries
The New Fordist “Urban Society”
The City as an Oeuvre of Art
Conclusion
Notes
Disclosure Statement
Notes on Contributor
ORCID
References

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International Critical Thought

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Henri Lefebvre’s Urban Critical Theory: Rethinking the City against Capitalism Francesco Biagi To cite this article: Francesco Biagi (2020) Henri Lefebvre’s Urban Critical Theory: Rethinking the City against Capitalism, International Critical Thought, 10:2, 214-231, DOI: 10.1080/21598282.2020.1783693 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2020.1783693

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INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 2020, VOL. 10, NO. 2, 214–231 https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2020.1783693

Henri Lefebvre’s Urban Critical Theory: Rethinking the City against Capitalism Francesco Biagi Department of Political Sciences, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy ABSTRACT

ARTICLE HISTORY

In the article the author highlights the main ways of the Lefebvrian sociological analysis conceived starting from the transformations of the city in the Fordist era: From the production of urban marginality, through the proliferation of precarious living in the France of the Sixties and Seventies, to recording the gradual disappearance of the urban–rural dichotomy, that goes into an authentic spatial hegemony of urbanization processes. The goal is therefore to highlight the “urban critical theory” of Henri Lefebvre, coming to discuss the famous meaning of “right to the city,” strongly interconnected with the concept of “city as an artwork,” that is the idea of an urban space intended as horizontal and common design by those who live and inhabit in it.

Received 14 December 2019 Revised 13 March 2020 Accepted 24 March 2020 KEYWORDS

Henri Lefebvre; right to the city; production of space; urban outcasts; rural space

Introduction Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) was a philosopher and sociologist of the urban who crossed intensely the whole “short twentieth century”: he turns sixteen at the outburst of the Russian Revolution and dies aged ninety, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a few months before the Soviet Union’s implosion. His long life covered almost the entire span of the nineteen hundred and it wasn’t by pure chance that he lived through all of the century moments and most decisive issues. It should be noticed how the ongoing Lefebvre renaissance, in the European and international scene has put him under a sort of distortion that is reducing him, time and again, to a mere sociologist, urban planner, and so on. Conversely, Lefebvre instated a new kind of philosophy, following the steps of Marx and Engels, able of unfolding itself simultaneously on the theoretical plan and on the practical one. The fundamental trait of his philosophy can be identified in the interpretation of both of those German philosophers, and it’s featured by the unceasing call to unite the philosophical “theory” to the political “praxis.” Such a perspective is above all one that allows the author to understand the changes of the Fordist society, ranging from the topic of space onto everyday life until it accomplishes a general theory of politics which can congregate the whole analysis of the capitalist modernity. In the last decade his legacy has partially and sporadically reemerged mainly thanks to the recapture of some key-concepts (such as the “right to the city,” the “everyday life” and the “production of space”) in the domain of urban and CONTACT Francesco Biagi

[email protected]

© 2020 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

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cultural studies; but the research that surrounds his theoretical legacy is still extremely shallow (and is often subject to a damaging compartmentalization by previously settled academic spheres).

Unveiling the Urban Reality from the Point of View of Peripheries In 1961 Lefebvre transferred to the Strasbourg department of Sociology where rural studies were developing towards urban studies due to the debate of everyday life under the regime of a consumerist society such as was that of France and Europe in the Sixties (Lefebvre 2001; Elden 2004, 127–168). Nevertheless, a similar regime is delineated in the advanced capitalist societies as portrayed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2011); in other words, the wellbeing conveyed by abundance of merchandize and consumables is solely one of two masks, the second one actually thrives on the stabilization—at an endemic level—of a certain degree of social misery, poverty, exploitation and marginality. It is the fate doomed to weaker groups, to the immigrating Maghrebis from the colonies in the French capital. This scenario would strongly affect Lefebvre when he was summoned—in the year 1964—to teach at the Nanterre campus in Paris. The college edifice had been recently built based on the model of Le Corbusier’s functionalist architecture and in those years a great part of the quarter was an enormous shantytown, the lodging and living place assigned to the migrant workers. The settlement of this new athenaeum should firstly welcome the numerous French students, hence clearing the universities of the Parisian centre, and secondly would instate the requalification of that urban fabric that was by then peripheral, and that gathered Maghreb’s immigrants, on one hand stigmatized as “rebellious spectrum” (Bromberger 1958; Rigouste 2009; Hervo 2001), on the other hand regarded as cheap manpower always available for whatever sort of task. Lefebvre perceives the changes of the urban as resulting from the post-war development; the chosen point of view is that of the banlieue, in other words, the border between the latter and the architectonical functionalism of Nanterre, designed by white middle class French students. One may deduct therefore that Lefebvre’s reflection evolves from the margins, from the threshold that splits and shatters the urban space between the wealthier and the weaker groups.1 The margin becomes the privileged viewing point because it is the point that unfolds the reality pertaining to the city’s narrative. To recapture Stevenson’s metaphor, Mr. Hyde is the revealing personality of Dr. Jekyll’s truth, and the subaltern and invisible situation of the peripheries equally tears apart the “Maya veil” of the dominant urban-planning ideology. According to Laurence Costes’ testimony (2009, 42), the Nanterre scholar exhorted his students to examine Paris from the standing point of view of the production of urban marginality that had been settled by Fordism: urban sociology becomes thus that domain of critic that unmasks the functionalist ideology. The bidonville reality next to the La Folie railway stop, between the Saint-Lazaire station and the college campus, tells us of another Paris excluded from the wellbeing of consumption: a whole neighbourhood crowded and jam-packed of about ten thousand destitute inhabitants.2 The more precise researches about the slum of Nanterre in the Sixties were conducted by Hervo and Charras (1971), Sayad and Dupuy (1995) and Gastaut (2004), in which you

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can come across a meticulous inquiry useful to confirm Lefebvre’s hypothesis. In fact, several testimonials arise regarding the marginality regime in which migrant Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian and—in a smaller amount—Portuguese workers lay. It’s emblematic how the lodging issue is obsessively and repeatedly acknowledged by them and how most of the times it is stated that as soon as possible the main wish of the La Folie inhabitants is to get away from those quarters that lack water, light and proper sewerage and sanitary systems. Whatever the colour of the Municipality or Parisian Town Council the situation for migrant workers remains “swamped” (the title of Hervo and Charras’ volume is: Bindovilles, l’enlisement [The Sinking Bindovilles] [1971]). Literally enlisement means swamping or burying and this term also contains the idea of sinking to the interior of a lodging situation that was typical to the English peripheries at the end of the eighteen hundreds as narrated by Jack London in his novel The People of the Abyss. In addition, reading the following sociological researches, Lefebvre outlines that condition of radical expatriation that the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino (2002) defined as “the crisis of the presence”: which is the fact that a subject is neither capable of decrypting nor understanding by means of one’s interpretative code one’s own life experience. The radical loss of a symbolic order is what confers a reason to human existence (Pezzella 2009, 239–271). Therefore, for the immigrant the French society represents a shock similar to that of the “abyss of nothingness” that freezes the entire process of transcending one’s own everyday life (De Martino 2002, 203).3 Similarly Sayad (1999) talks about “double absence” as a structural condition of the subaltern colonized migrant.4 In his home of origin, the migrant endeavours a journey to reach the promised land of liberté—egalité—fraternité, only to find in France a social milieu that denies his being and makes him invisible, doubly invisible: and at the same time he’s “missing” from his native land, “uprooted” from his own world of origin, a real stateless and pariah in La Folie of Nanterre. Concerning this, it may be useful to refer to the film Outside the Law (Hors-La-Loi) directed by Rachid Bouchareb in 2010, a French director of Algerian origins, who stages the dramatic situation of extreme poverty in which the Algerians in Nanterre live, and how such a condition of injustice feeds the anti-colonialist rebellious actions of the Algerian National Liberation Front in the urban space of Paris.5 In fact the Algerian migrant also struggles in the French capital because he hits upon again—under other assumptions—the oppression gnaws already endured back home. Thus, the democratic regime of equality and liberty is denied to him even if he is expatriating to the land of Mother-France who can but offer underpaid jobs and wretched shacks for the inhumane survival of all migrant workers. Lefebvre takes a step forward and traces the character of “new inner colonialism” (Lefebvre 2000, 143) fed by the division between hyper-developed areas and other areas that are instead abandoned to misery and underdevelopment. What’s more, in foreseeing the broadened sociological literature on form-camp and the debate about the forms of containment and of urban concentration of specific social groups (Agamben 1998, 1999, 2005; Agier 2008, 2010, 2013, 2014; Agier et al. 2018), Lefebvre highlights the way the social status of the “concentration camp” adopted by the Nazis would be an extreme case of an institution that ended up being declensioned in several contexts and in different ways, managing nevertheless to keep a basilar common meaning on what refers to the capitalist way of governing: Fascism represents the most extreme form of capitalism, the concentration camp is the most extreme and paroxysmal form of a modern housing estate, or of an industrial town. There are

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many intermediary stages between our towns and the concentration camps: miners’ villages, temporary housing on construction sites, villages for immigrant workers. . . . Nevertheless, the link is clear. (Lefebvre 1991a, 245–246)

In order to avoid misinterpretations, the author doesn’t state that the ghettoization produced in a periphery is equivalent to that of the Nazi lager, conversely he outlines the common traces that materialize through means of different shades, in fact he talks about “mediations” and about a “relation” between the form-camp and the city model that started spreading since the 50s of the twentieth century. In other words we might say that the concentration camp is like a primary colour used by a painter and that its major or minor dilution defines so many more shades in the urban canvas. In this regard we may well be convinced of the fact that Lefebvre adopted urban marginality as elected perspective—for the sociologist—to unveil the true social reality, beyond and against the dream image promoted by the spectacular and hedonistic devices of the city shaped by Fordism. The author comes up with the hypothesis of a sociological epistemology of marginality: it is the staying put and watching from the point of view of the threshold that will allow one to gain a more accurate look over the complexity of social situations that one is facing. It is the specific point of view of those who are victims of oppression and who are weaker, of those who live in the margins as if they were waste that allows the actual state of health of urban life in the city to become intellectually attainable. In other words, it is the life of the “people in the abyss” from the urban peripheries that, more than in any other circumstances, has a word to say about a sociological urban task. Thus, the topicality of Lefebvre’s thinking is tested when standing before these scenarios that still haven’t abandoned the cities—may these be big or small—of our planet, as, by the way of example, Mike Davis (2017) duly explained in Planet of slums (see Seymour 2006). The concept of “periphery” is not related to a shift in space, a measure of distance or nearness to a spot defined as “centre,” but it is, above all, a point of view that redefines radically the glance over the remaining urban space. In the preface of “The Right to the City,” Lefebvre (1996) states that the urban problems aren’t fully acknowledged with an autonomous status of their own, since they still haven’t attained the adequate philosophical and political importance, and this means that the examination of the city from the point of view of the marginality it creates is an enlightening sociological reflection of the real position in which the “urban” is. Facing a model of a city that is obviously in crisis Lefebvre’s intention is that of delineating new possible emancipating opportunities starting with the tangible sub-alternity of spatial discrimination. Lefebvre’s sociology consequently is always an intellectual action of critic, a premise for the attempt to subvert the present of (spatial) inequalities of class. The hypertrophic synoecism of the urban fabric, in other words, the fact that the territory doesn’t delineate itself anymore and not only as “city” and neither exclusively as “countryside,” but in fact as “urban fabric” more or less organized, more or less designed with the minimum of dignified habitable standards, triggers an increase in the congestion of the particular situation of the outcasts. One who lives in the shantytown, one who “crams oneself” on the threshold around the city centre, acquires a fundamental status in the author’s reflections and thinking: he is simultaneously the privileged point of view and the object itself of reflection aiming at overturning such a state of things. As we shall see, re-reading the concept of the right to the city from this perspective will be

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an innovative gesture, way out of stereotypes and abuses, shedding light over a socio-political formula which is not so easy to understand. It would be useful—because of this—to draw the connection that correlates the analysis of the Fordist periphery of the 60s to the contemporary one as studied by Wacquant in Urban Outcasts (2007). Even in different contexts—in fact the current neoliberal city cannot overlap the model of city of the nineteen hundreds, based on the Keynesian pact—there are common features that progressively aggravate, that is, that urban regime of “advanced marginality” that Wacquant identifies as the future scenario of current space production processes in the twentyfirst century. A further proof is Petrillo’s thesis (2018) in which, to the precise denounce of the failure of the current urban project he associates, by means of a reading of the “Lefebvre of the peripheries,” novel overturning and healing concealed possibilities of the state of health of the city that can be detected in the actions of the right to the city as practiced in the crevices of the urban marginality and confinement.

The New Fordist “Urban Society” Now we should necessarily dig deeper. In view of rebuilding, step by step, the Lefebvrian perspective it is necessary to keep discussing his sociological lexicon, in order to understand what the author means by “city,” “urban,” “new urban society,” that is to say the constitutive jump that the metropolis would make after the changes that resulted from the Fordist capitalism. So, what is the “city” to Lefebvre? And in what way does it differ from the concept of “urban space”? But above all: what kind of city is before him when he addresses these concepts? It would be useful to recall how the so called “progressiveregressive method” (Elden and Morton 2016), even if it is not always referred to or explicit, remains as the framework of analysis that Lefebvre used in his sociological studies aiming at capturing the “Specificity of the city” (Lefebvre 1996, 100). The “progressive-regressive method” is in this way multiplied for every social fact, including the urban, as it emerges, for example, more clearly in the first section of the book about the Paris Commune under the Style et métode [Style and Method] (Lefebvre 1965, 31) but also—although not so obvious—in the historical-sociological reconstruction of the “city” that is proposed in his various writings about the “urban”: “Without the progressive and regressive operations (in time and space) of the analysis, it is impossible to conceive the urban phenomenon science” (Lefebvre 2001, 269; translated from French; emphasis added). Another example can be located in the second chapter of The Urban Revolution in which the author maintains that—introducing a hypothesis of historical-sociological reconstruction about the development of the city—the forms shaped by previous urban societies can only be understood on what pertains to their birth and to de development of their explosion (Lefebvre 2003, 14). Most of all, the French author considers the city as a metaphor, or should I say, as almost a synecdoche of the concept of “society,” in fact it is defined as a projection of the society over the territory: the city is a whole; . . . the city casts on the soil a society in its fullness, a social totality or a society retained as totality, including its culture, its institutions, its ethics, its values, soon its superstructures, including its economical basis and the social relations that form its actual structure. (Lefebvre 2001, 159; translated from French)

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The city is the society in its spatial declension it is the “projection of the city over the territory” (Lefebvre 1996, 107–112), however this element is analysed throughout time, on one hand as “crystallized past” on the other hand as “mutation of the present” (Lefebvre 2001, 160). As a consequence the city is “a space-time” and by means of such a dimension we can—with Lefebvre—shape an “ideal type” as sociological tool of analysis of the real (Lefebvre 2001, 160). The totality which is outlined by the author should not though stray away from the urban inquest; it is specified that this analysis is proportionally divided into sections, and that each section should keep its own autonomy even in the reticular correlation that, for example, a neighbourhood has with the remaining metropolitan space (Lefebvre 2001, 160–161). The method used to understand the totality, even in all of its parts, is the dialectical perspective of Hegel and Marx (Lefebvre 2001, 161). To summarize: the sociologist’s task is one that takes hold of this theoretical archetype, merging— simultaneously in his studies—the general dimension with its parts, with the temporal span of the city’s evolution. It is in the shape of the city that the society constitutes itself as such, and by creating the urban space allows itself a fully achieved organization. The author sets as his purpose the enquiry of the organization of the space and of the government of men, tracking in the spatial dimension the place where more than ever the capitalist economy shapes the social. Lefebvre chooses to inquire about the spatial placement of man, and—therefore—the city and the organization of the urban. In consequence, an actual incarnation of the society in the spatial dimension occurs; it’s isn’t only a mere “taking shape” in space, but an actual and real accomplished “becoming truthful” in the human “works,” in the monuments and buildings. It’s a symbolic materialization of the social organization itself, thus also of its asymmetric class relationships. Lefebvre’s original contribution is the following: the fact that he saw in the city and in the creation of the urban space a human work that re-projects the social in the dimension of space. The city and the urban are hence a coherent photography of a precise typology of society. In other words, we may say that Lefebvre assumes the spatial perspective with the awareness of how crucial a point of view it is to understand the human universe of his time. In this regard he identifies two levels of mediation that the city is comprised of: “the near order” of relations between individuals or groups more or less broadened and organized; “the far order” that is the society’s organizing dimension by means of political institutions and cultural coordinates (Lefebvre 1996, 113). The city is thus the frame inside which mediation between mediations, production and ownership relations and reproduction of the rule of the dominant speech are carved. In order to describe the role of the social, political and cultural mediator of the city, Lefebvre suggests the comparison to language or to a book (Lefebvre 1996, 115). The essence of the city as “object” produced by human action is understood in the role of the mediator between such levels. The city, hence, undertakes a specific “objectivity”: it is predetermined (in the far order) but also liable to being re-codified on other basis (in fact the far order doesn’t completely limit the near order). On the sphere of the near order the practical declension of the status quo is simultaneously carved but also the possibility that the inhabitants have of overturning it and rebuilding it, within the unpredictability of an emancipating political action. It is the “dialectical process” of the “continuity and discontinuity” between different forms that ramify in the space. Lefebvre reads a useful example in the planning of the shopping mall by contemporary French urban planners, the attempt to dispossess and illegitimate the medieval city of its intrinsic riches. The

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medieval city, even if it is traversed by a will of profit, still remains more often than not a valuable space to be used by its inhabitants. Once this function is expelled and the entire space becomes exclusively exchange value, the places of medieval social life die leaving the space solely to the amplification of the economical exchange structure: the shopping centre. Therefore, every urban age reuses waste and fragments of previous epochs with its new own purposes (Lefebvre 1996, 107). Lefebvre realizes that there is a new ongoing process—in the Fifties and Sixties of the twentieth century: industrialization is no longer creating urbanization and no longer determines the city development as in the 800s Marx and Engels acknowledged; conversely it is the production of the urban space itself that determines the industrial production, what is to be consumed and the economic flows of the emergence of capitalism as the typical economic shape of western society (Lefebvre 2001, 258–259). With the settling of the capitalist economy and of industrialization processes, the city itself becomes an object of profit and of exchange, it structures itself into the image of ability to attract money, tourists and investors; lifestyles tend to homogenize by means of standardized consumerism and the human being everyday life is totally capitalized. In order to clarify these matters, Lefebvre inverts the relation between industrialization and urbanization maintaining that it is not correct to define the advanced capitalism of the second half of the twentieth-century as “industrial society,” instead he proposes to define it as “urban society on ongoing formation” since “the inductive process” is industrialization and “the induced effect” is instead the progressive urbanization of the entire world society (Lefebvre 1996, 17; 2003, 5). Nevertheless, he specifies that the industrialization and urbanization process of society should be accurately compartmentalized through the dialectic method that is able to photograph simultaneously “the unity of both aspects” and “the conflict between them” (Lefebvre 1996, 68). Implicitly we can already deduce that Lefebvre surpasses the analysis methods of the Chicago School and abandons the classical dimension, “density” and “homogeneity” as proposed by Luis Wirth (1964) that was solely useful to photograph the urban up to the moment in which he remained within the city’s precinct (on Chicago School, see Caves 2005, 80–81). The arising of urbanization according to the author is thus epochal to the point it can be compared to the disorientation of those who started to study the horse-powered industry between the 600s and the 800s. Still lacking some adequate interpretative tools of the industrial phenomenon, the great Londoner factories appeared as a monstrous and unfathomable phenomenon: And aren’t we, faced with the urban phenomenon, in a situation comparable to the one faced a century ago by those who had to accommodate the growth of industrial phenomena? Those who hadn’t read Marx-which is to say, nearly everyone-saw only chaos, unrelated facts . . . society was being atomized, dissociating into individuals and fragments. (Lefebvre 2003, 184–185)

The process of uprooting and destruction of the city by urbanization is strongly outlined by the author. Urbanization became the novel socialization matrix for the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries (Lefebvre 1996, 130–131). By studying the urban problematic the Lefebvre also polemizes against the dogmatic Marxism that has always seen the city and the urban as “superstructure,” as mere consequence of the economical connections set by capitalism (Lefebvre 2003, 139, 162–164).

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In order to shed some light over this hypothesis it is crucial that the differences between the sociological categories of “city” and “urban space” are subject to a closer look. Both concepts are not synonyms. Lefebvre, to make us understand the differences but also the bonds between both concepts uses a metaphor taken from Physics: de dark hole. If the urban space “embraces a cosmic sense” (Lefebvre 2003, 123), the city ends up being that junction point where all flows of matter scattered over the universe congregate. Following the same metaphor, the urban space therefore delineates itself as universe for the matter, and in certain spots it agglomerates, in other spots it shatters and disperses itself. Consequently the city is a space–time centre that agglomerates in itself consistent portions of the urban, but does not coincide with it. It is a more or less organized agglutination of it. Furthermore, the city projects the time, meaning, the historical arc of the life of a precise place; such a temporal projection develops in that space a co-presence of heterogeneity of ages, of cultural symbols. It is the space, in fact, that determines its performative declension, giving life—during the course of time—to the urban society. The industrialization of society, and therefore of space, gives life to urbanization, a concept that can be conceived only in its future materialization, as the implosion and explosion horizon of all urban forms of the city (Lefebvre 2003, 14). Lefebvre is a theorist of the city’s “crisis,” meaning with this concept the connotation adopted by Massimiliano Tomba that helps us understand the ambivalence of the concept of city that the author proposes: The crisis is not a disease that should be distinguished from a supposed normal course. It is instead, according to the medical habit of the XIV century, the rapid mutation of the conditions of an illness. The krisis demands separation, choice and judgment. . . . The crisis is the moment of danger, it is not to put the train back into the trails, but to interrupt that particular course and take a different road. (Tomba 2011, 9; translated from French; emphasis added)

Thus, Lefebvre sees a strain in the city: on one side the “death” of the city, its actual decay by hand of the capitalist industrialization; on the other hand instead, new opportunities of changing the direction of the urban course of the whole society. Lefebvre’s urban spatiality always takes on such a dialectic tension: collapse versus chance of salvation. The French author, in order to bring to light the urban and its contradictions, borrows a metaphor from nuclear physics: “the implosion” of the city has to do with the enormous concentration of people, activities and housing in the urban fabric, and—at the same time —its “explosion” comprises the multiplication and dissemination, over all of the surrounding territory, of a disperse urban shape, made of peripheries, suburbs, satellite cities, hinterland, precarious housing that corrode the entire space that up to that moment wasn’t city, but rural and natural space more or less unfarmed. In this regard, Neil Brenner (2014) recaptured the image of a concatenation of matter that implodes and explodes in the frame of a world almost completely urbanized in the curatorship of one of his last volumes entitled Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. The productive capitalist processes that transform the work into serial product and mere merchandise move to the urban space of the city, and even the city becomes object of exchange and profit (Lefebvre 1996, 67–68). The urban space is in this way subject to merchandizing processes based on the action as described by Henri Lefebvre as “urbanplanning of developers” (Lefebvre 1996, 84), as “sales promoters,” in which prevail— thus—the economic logics of market, turning the city into an attractive and desirable product for capital and big financial groups. At the core of this process the exchange value of

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space imposes itself authoritatively over the citizenship use value, which is radically excluded from every decisional process. Nowadays, for instance, the speculative capitalist valuation of many forsaken and closed spaces due to the economic crisis takes on precisely this matrix: not the needs of citizens, lacking a shared urban-planning design, but the imposition of places that allow economic profit with no regard to their usefulness and good judgment. It’s an ambiguous reinvention: on one hand there’s the capitalist reinvention that reorganizes space according to market demands, on the other hand, as an antagonistic movement, there’s hope and the potential possibility of reversing fate and turning the urban revolution towards a fairer situation for the less favoured inhabitants and the natural environment. Within this critical knot of the urbanization, the city is crushed between the “Scylla” of the implosion and the “Charybdis” of its explosion of the urban fabric, and Lefebvre foresees the emergence of a necessary conflict situation. However, the city’s implosion/explosion metaphor used again in 1970 in The Urban Revolution (Lefebvre 2003, 14) had been anticipated in 1968 with the drafting of “The Right to the City” (Lefebvre 1996, 71). The author notices a tendency, that of the progressive urbanization of the entire world. In this regard, parallel to the concept of “urban society,” the meaning of “urban fabric” opens way, meant as an endless space containing some thicker knots, entangled over each other, and spaces that are instead more rarefied (Lefebvre 1996, 71–72). To clarify this further: Lefebvre places at the core of his reflections the great issue of the city’s disappearance, and therefore of the dichotomy between countryside and city. The urban fabric is that economic-cultural process of submission of both countryside and rural world that simultaneously erodes the peasants’ lifestyles, turning them into folklore, and the natural environment itself, turning it into a space that is no longer rural and that heads towards the course of development of the urbanizing action: “This was accompanied by the loss of rural areas, primarily through the industrialization of agricultural production and the disappearance of the peasantry (and therefore, the village), and the devastation of the land and the destruction of nature” (Lefebvre 2016, 121). The urban fabric is the spatial projection of the “Trojan horse” introduced by the industrialization that creates urbanization, and the other way round. To Lefebvre it indicates not just the spatial erosion but also the economic-cultural surrender of the countryside and of village economy. It is the process of “depeasantization” of hamlets spread over the countryside that lose their survival economy to a “touristification” or sub-alternity directed to more attractive metropolitan areas, becoming, in consequence, quieter dormitories for those who nevertheless wish to live in there, even if they carry out their own lives in the urban surroundings. Such extinction triggers the centralization of spaces that implode and the peripheralization of other spaces that are created as satellites of the explosion—that has occurred so far—of the city. Urbanization is not just producer of centres that become increasingly packed and entangled over themselves, but is also a system and process that feeds the submissiveness of some spaces to others, consequently, being the city—as we have seen—a projection of the social dimension over space, we are again before a “specific division of work” in the midst of the urban centres, between city and city, between city and surrounding rural space; following this line of interpretation, the State can be understood as a particular centralized type of power of a city that prevails over other cities (Lefebvre 1996, 67). The urbanization produces centralization and peripheralization, within a simultaneous and dialectic game between the two resulting poles. The urbanization is a hierarchical

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building of spatial relationships that take shape in time, to give evidence where a cardinal point of an age can be identified between the previous age of the city and a following one, after its murder was committed. Such an explosion can be envisaged as a bomb that explodes and initiates a process of progressive fragmentation, which splinters spread creating an authentic “urban hell” (Lefebvre 1996, 142). An entire world that becomes urban fabric, urbanized, and that readjusts the balance of the borders over new grounds: “To the old centralities, to the composition of centres, it substitutes the centre of decision-making” (Lefebvre 1996, 81). Lefebvre offers a lucid anticipation of the tendencies that nowadays characterize the socio-economic processes that cross our planet’s cities: The ideal city, the New Athens, is already there to be seen in the image which Paris and New York and some other cities project. The centre of decision-making and the centre of consumption meet. Their alliance on the ground based on a strategic convergence creates an inordinate centrality. . . . Coercion and persuasion converge with the power of decisionmaking and the capacity to consume. Strongly occupied and inhabited by these new Masters, this centre is held by them. Without necessarily owning it all, they possess this privileged space, axis of a strict spatial policy. (Lefebvre 1996, 161)

Contrarily to the vision of the Greek polis, Lefebvre brings to light the inequalities and limits of the ancient Athens, describes the reorganization of new urban processes of power and afterwards uses this metaphor to draw attention to the urban processes produced by the Fordist functionalism. We are in fact before an ante litteram conceptualization of the “global city” (Sassen 1991, 2004, 2014, 2016; Borja and Castells 1997). What is the “New Athens” but the shape of a “global city” that redefines the economical and political relationships of power of the current economy? Between the lines of Lefebvre we can envisage the first seeds of the city as economic-financial centre of command: the New York stock market or the Frankfurt and Brussels ones, strategic centres of the European freemarket, ultimate thrones of sovereignty and of financial rule, of urban places that are inaccessible to most, except to a small élite carrier of the real economical-political power. Urban locations that assemble the power, the market and the luxury, driving away, shattering and marginalizing the other parts of the city: Who can ignore that the Olympians of the new bourgeois aristocracy no longer inhabit. They go from grand hotel to grand hotel, or from castle to castle, commanding a fleet or a country from a yacht. They are everywhere and nowhere. That is how they fascinate people immersed into everyday life. They transcend everyday life, possess nature and leave it up to the cops to contrive culture. (Lefebvre 1996, 158–159)

In this regard Sassen (2002) points out how in global cities one can find an asymmetry between highly qualified work and an enormous search for precarious unqualified work, and often underpaid, that causes spatial relapses in the places where these workers dwell in. The polarization of income and labour opportunities necessarily produces periphery, housing precariousness and urban marginality (Sassen 2002, 254–274). In 1968 Lefebvre writes the following: the crisis of the city is world-wide . . . everywhere the city explodes. . . . In a number of poor countries, shanty towns are a characteristic phenomenon, while in highly industrialized countries, the proliferation of the city into “urban fabric,” suburbs, residential areas, and its relation with urban life is what causes the problem. (Lefebvre 1996, 124–125)

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The industrial urbanization, in other words, the capitalist urban revolution produces simultaneously centres of political-financial domination and urban precariousness. The social and spatial inequalities evolve at the pace of capitalist development. Marginality and spatial discrimination are a product and consequence of “global cities.” And therefore the “planet of the slums” is a legitimate child of global city. The concepts of “rural” and “urban” are progressively mixed and entangled in the urbanization of every part of the environment. The author beholds the French countryside of the second half of the twentieth century, a countryside that increasingly urbanizes itself, becoming the metropolis servant. The countryside undergoes a process of urbanization that simultaneously becomes submission to the city. The city grows due to the subtraction of resources from the countryside, and gains centrality overpowering the rural to its economic-social organization. In other words, the obesity of the city’s urbanization is what causes the anorectic weight loss of the rural space, increasingly exploited and given a currency cost by the capitalist economy interests (Lefebvre 1996, 119–120). As a result, the dialectical and conflictive process between city and countryside disappears at a pace that is typical to the expansion of a space that is reorganized by the urbanization. What’s striking is the fact that the asymmetric relationship between city-countryside is substantially characterized by the fact that it is forged by the rule of a form of capitalism that is able to create development solely aiming at profit. An evidence of this is the everyday life of the French peasants in the Pyrenees: in France, in the Pyrenees, just a stone’s throw from dams and powerful ultra-modern hydroelectric installations, there are many hamlets, thousands of houses where peasants live almost as “primitive” . . . They have no electric light either. Elsewhere, more or less everywhere, in town and country alike, electric light illuminates the peeling plaster of slums and the sordid walls of hovels. Although even in Paris there are still houses and flats without modern lighting. (Lefebvre 1991a, 230)

This is in fact the formation of the so called “urban fabric.” However, to be more precise, even the dialectics between industrialization and urbanization produces a new specific type of ruralization: it is the consequence of the depopulation of the countryside and of all the space outside the metropolitan centrality. With Lefebvre, we maintain that such a process is a new kind of ruralization (Lefebvre 2001, 249–250), since such a dynamic emerges by the abandonment of the peasant world, of hamlets, of rural communities and villages in favour of the congestion of the city peripheral rings that become attractive areas for manpower. This new type of ruralization is characterized in the 50s and 60s of the twentieth century for being a synonym of misery, poverty and survival economy, outside and far from the consumerism circuits. Nevertheless, as we have already pointed out, such massive abdication of the peasant way of living mainly creates two novel techniques of capitalistic valuation of the unfarmed space. The first pertains to the agricultural industrialization, in other words the fact that innumerable land plots become soil to be farmed with new technological tools and with new labour. The countryside becomes the main resource to be exploited in order to face the markets and the need for food in the metropolis, and adding to this, as a vampire the city takes possession of it so that it can bleed it to the core. The type of cultivated crops is redefined by the markets, from the moment that the world market crushes the French peasants and the farmers of the entire European continent that results from agricultural exploitation of the colonies and of so

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many Southern Countries in the world. The small peasant or share-crop farmer abandons the countryside, preferring to look for another occupation in the city, mainly because he cannot cope with the competition of exploitation of resources in other parts of the world. Mass production of the industrial model is moved to the farming space and this dynamics will cause similar consequences in the inner and outer production relationships of a country such as France (Lefebvre 1996, 71). I should clarify that the escape from the countryside is a phenomenon that also characterizes the countries on the southern world, and that passively suffer an exodus towards the habitation form of the bidonville, in the surroundings of the few dominant metropolitan centres. The rationalized and industrial organization of the urban space, unable to completely absorb former peasant inhabitants as labour, leads to continuous banishments of the less favoured social groups: “To sum up, a world-wide crisis in agriculture and tradition a l peasant life accompanies, underlies and aggravates a world-wide crisis of the traditional city. This is a change on a planetary scale” (Lefebvre 1996, 126). The second device of capitalization of the ancient peasant world is the countryside tourism and the turning of a lifestyle from the past into folklore (Lefebvre 2001, 220). A kind of profanation of the countryside, by the metropolitan universe, that is looking for escape passageways from its intrinsic limits. The countryside processes of capitalist valuation that we have examined so far demonstrate how the extending of the urban, that is, the “urban fabric” diffusion, detrimental to the rigid dichotomy between rural world and urban world, are a “new primitive accumulation” that was triggered by industrialization but that now has attained total autonomy.

The City as an Oeuvre of Art It is mainly in Espace et politique [Space and Politics] that Lefebvre (2000) clearly explains the meaning of the famous “right to the city” formula. The author offers a more detailed explanation on topics he had started studying in the Sixties, also specifically declaring to whom his work was addressed to: This expansion of the city is accompanied by a degradation of the architecture of the urban frame. People are forced to scatter, above all the workers, away from the urban centres. What has commanded the cities expansion process is the economic, social, cultural segregation. . . . The urbanization of society is accompanied by the deterioration of urban life. . . . It is with these peripheral inhabitants, their segregation, their isolation, in my mind that I speak to on a book of “right to the city.” (Lefebvre 2000, 144–145; translated from French)

It is possible, thus, to notice how the “right to the city” places itself in a line of continuity with the Marxist legacy. Lefebvre remains coherent to the purpose of testing Marx’s categories with the urban analysis, so that he can renew and update Marxism itself. The author’s original insight stands on the discussion and reflection of the Marxist “proletariat” as social subject (clearly connected to the situation of the nineteenth-century working class), beholding all of those periphery workers and inhabitants who concretely live the social segregation from those big buildings planned from the functionalist model in the Fordist reorganization of the banlieue. Consequently, upon reflecting over the “right to city” in an urban context produced by the Fordist capitalism spatial politics he succeeds in including in the emancipation theory contained in the Le droit à la ville [the right to the city] all social subjects who live a precarious condition on the outskirts of market

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and consumption: particularly, as we have seen, in light of what happened in what was then the Nanterre Parisian periphery congested by the precarious dwelling of immigrant workers. Secondly, it is crucial to draw attention to the meaning of “right.” As Lefebvre writes: “It is not ‘right’ in the lawful sense of the term . . . these rights are never literally put in practice, but they are continually mentioned in order to define the society situation” (Lefebvre 2000, 144; translated from French). The French philosopher has no intention of adding a new right to the long list of the new “human rights,” instead he wants to point towards a new struggle and social conflict path, concrete and performative. The “right to the city” in fact “is announced as a plea, as a—social and political—demand” (Lefebvre 1996, 158); without a radical critic of the capitalist system there is no space for its real materialization. We are not, therefore, beholding a legal issue, but we are instead facing a philosophicalpolitical one. With the concept of “right to the city” Lefebvre imagines a political theory of emancipation in the spatial context, which propelling force clashes, however, with the predatory will of the economic-politic logics of capitalism. As a result the city is interpreted as the scenario within which social conflicts are expressed and, in this regard, Lefebvre brings back Niccolò Machiavelli’s conflict theory: In the urban context . . . political confrontations between the “minuto popolo” [small people] the “popolo grasso” [fat people], the aristocracy and the oligarchy, have the city as their battle ground, their stake. These groups are rivals in their love of the city. As for the rich and powerful, they always feel threatened. They justify their privilege in the community by somptuously spending their fortune: buildings, foundations, palaces, embellishments, festivities. (Lefebvre 1996, 67)

As well known, the “small people” and the “fat people” that fight between themselves the political fate of the polis evoke the Machiavellian political philosophy, that republican and libertarian Machiavelli—rediscovered by Claude Lefort—who pretended to give lessons to monarchs, and instead gave them to oppressed people.6 The space of the city is the playing field of a rivalry among those who can be visible and have a voice and those who instead must remain invisible and without any possibility of uttering a word. Identity, social and political recognition is determined in democratizing and emancipating the space that is lived by subaltern groups. The politician status, in its spatial dimension, is necessarily crossed by partition, by the disagreement of those who are excluded and those who exclude: “the urban presents itself—thus to Lefebvre—as a place of conflict” (Lefebvre 2003, 175). For this reason, I believe that one can talk about a conflictive notion of the “right to the city.” That clash pertains to urban space and its organization. The radical interrogative that Lefebvre reflects upon is: Who makes decisions about the planning of space? Who decides how men should live and dwell in? In other words, deciding “about the city” is deciding “about politics.” Is it possible then to read Lefebvre as a philosopher and sociologist of conflict and, particularly, of the conflict that occurs in the spatial dimension of urban life. The “right to the city” materializes itself essentially through political deed, through political action which purpose is to attain authentic democracy, even in what pertains to managing and organizing space. It is the overturning of the city as “merchandize” by those excluded and oppressed, and the dialectic reconstruction of an actual state of being-with in a shared world in the context of the polis as “work” of those who reside in it. The definition of the concept “right to the city” remains

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accordingly an open field to the happening. Lefebvre doesn’t hypostatize a meaning or a system, but offers some clues that should be followed to formulate a theory that always derives from action and from what happens in society. The city to Lefebvre is not solely place and product of capitalist valuation, but also a solid opportunity to regenerate the social space by the active participation of the dwellers who live it and cross it. The city is thus the site of the possibility to take hold again of space and time based on the demands and needs of those who live it, particularly those who are most frail. The urban society, from this perspective, becomes “as an oeuvre, as an end, as place of free enjoyment, as domain of use value” (Lefebvre 1996, 126) in which the dwellers can initiate a path towards emancipation and liberation from the yoke of precariousness and poverty. A real “urban revolution” will take place when the social space becomes action, planning, project of those who dwell in it and who stride on it; when there is the possibility of free production of space, shared, plural, democratic and no more subjected to interests and private profit. To transform one’s own space of living, to make it useful to the needs of everyone is the authentic path to practice that utopian—practical ideal—that Lefebvre named “right to the city.” The city as “product,” as “merchandize” is thus overturned in favour of a city perceived as a genuine work of art, at the service of those who inhabit it: the right to the city legitimates the refusal to let oneself be excluded from the urban reality by a discriminating and segregating organization . . . the right to the city means then the foundation or the reconstruction of a space-time unity . . . instead of disintegration. (Lefebvre 2000, 22; translated from French)

The space as melting pot of differences, exchange of knowledge is the antechamber of an emancipating spiral of change of men’s daily life. The “right to the city” is therefore the right to participation and fruition of collective goods and services against the ownership and privatizing logic of capitalism: The right to the city manifests itself as a superior form of rights: right to freedom, to individualization in socialization, to habitat and to inhabit. The right to the oeuvre, to participation and appropriation (clearly distinct from the right to property), are implied in the right to the city. (Lefebvre 1996, 173–174)

The city, then, should be much more similar to “the work of art” than to merchandize: The city is an oeuvre, perceived as a work of art. Space is not only organized and instituted, but is also shaped, appropriated by one or another social group, according to its demands, its ethics and aesthetics, that is, its ideology. Monumentality is a critical feature of the city as oeuvre, the use of time by all members of the urban collectivity isn’t a less critical feature. The city as oeuvre should be studied under this double feature. (Lefebvre 2000, 74–75; translated from French; emphasis added)

Lefebvre thinks the urban space as a place to recapture an alternative way of life, for its own use and its own collective production: “the right to the city thus formulated implies and applies knowledge of a production, the production of the space” (Lefebvre 2000, 23; translated from French). The city as work of art is nothing else but a performative metaphor to describe the possibility to institute a new relationship with the space, subtracted from the market and from profit in the name of its own mutual and shared use:

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the city is an oeuvre, closer to a work of art than to a simple material product. . . . The city . . . is the work of a history, that is, of clearly defined people and groups who accomplish this oeuvre, in historical conditions. (Lefebvre 1996, 101)

Shortly after this last statement the author goes on: “If one considers the city as oeuvre of certain historical and social ‘agents,’ the action and the result, the group (or groups) and their ‘product’” (Lefebvre 1996, 103). The notion of city as “work of art” belongs to a wider conceptual constellation. Lefebvre in the Sixties works on the constitution of a general theory of the space politics that moves towards the definition of the meaning of “space production.” Such theories are briefly summarized in the first two chapters of Space and Politics entitled The Space and The Politics of Space (Lefebvre 2000; translated from French) that therefore are used as preparation drafts for the two monumental volumes of The Production of Space (Lefebvre 1991b). Furthermore, in the fifth chapter of Space and Politics, we understand how the topic highlighted by Lefebvre mainly concerns the “political economy of space,” a central issue for the studies of economic geography that are developed today, for example, by David Harvey (2001). Lefebvre’s re-updating undertaken by the English Geographer is in fact dedicated to the expansion of the real-estate market under the current economic crisis regime caused by the speculative bubble of the subprime loans (Harvey 2012, 27–66, 89–114, 115–154).7

Conclusion It is impossible here to expose entirely the general theory of space, although it is enough to offer a glimpse of its key-concept: Lefebvre intention is that of analysing the historical evolution of space and clarifying the production and reproduction relations that traverse the spatial dimension. To summarize, “production of space” means the problematization of the Marxist theories of “use value” and “exchange value.” The productive capitalist processes change the human work (use value) into serial product, into mere merchandize (exchange value). Such dynamics are transferred to the urban space of the city, and the latter becomes itself an object of exchange and profit. The urban space is hence subjected to merchandizing in which the economic logic prevails: the cities are in this way transformed in attractive and desirable products for capital investment. At the core of this process the “exchange value” of space imposes itself authoritatively over the “use value,” radically excluding the citizens from any decisional process. Nowadays, for instance, the speculative valuation of many forsaken or closed spaces due to the economic crisis acquires precisely this feature. Lefebvre, thus, points out how space is the new playing field of power dynamics.

Notes 1. I share this interpretation with De Simoni (2015, 2016), but my approach to the author is somehow different: I do not effectively share the more general insertion of Lefebvre in the Post-Fordist and Post-Workerism debate. 2. In Italy, similar researches about the peripheries were undertaken by Danilo Montaldi (2010). Montaldi had engaged a strong bond with the members of Socialisme ou Barbarie. We may hypothesize that Lefebvre and Montaldi, even without any existing proof that they knew each other, actually reached a mutual debate.

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3. On De Martino’s work, see Massenzio and Alessandri (2013). 4. On Sayad and the concept of “double absence” (see Saada 2000; Raimondi 2016; Avallone 2018). 5. The film shocked France at the Cannes Festival in 2010 opening a strong debate to the point that the film was labelled as anti-French for having mentioned historical events of the colonialist era that had been willingly excluded from the transalpine collective conscience. A real resentment against the film director took place for having conducted such a backward journey into the colonial past, especially for having evoked tortures and massacres carried out in the motherland and in the colonies. 6. Most probably Lefebvre was acquainted with Claude Lefort’s studies on Machiavelli (Lefort 1972) since he had initiated an amicable relationship with the Socialisme ou Barbarie group. On the conflict theory’s debate in Machiavelli’s thought, see Del Lucchese, Frosini, and Morfino (2015). 7. On the subprime economic crisis and its urban consequences, see Aalbers (2012).

Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributor Francesco Biagi, is a PhD researcher in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Pisa (Italy) and collaborates with the research group GESTUAL (Group of Socio-Territorial, Urban and Local Action Studies) at the Faculty of Architecture of Lisbon (Portugal). He also writes and devotes himself to political philosophy and urban studies. He is rediscovering the Henri Lefebvre’s thought in order to understand the current neoliberal urban questions. With this aim he has published the monography Henri Lefebvre. Una teoria critica dello spazio (Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Theory of Space) (Jaca Book, Milano, 2019).

ORCID Francesco Biagi

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3733-2706

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