Rebel Cities

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David Harvey. Rebel Cities

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REBEL CITIES

From the Right to the City

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That coming together is symbolized by Lefebvre in the quest for centrality. The traditional centrality of the city has been destroyed. But there is an impulse towards and longing for its restoration which arises again and again to produce far-reaching political effects, as we have recently seen in the central squares of Cairo, Madrid, Athens, Barcelona, and even Madison, Wisconsin and now Zuccotti Park in New York City. How else and where else can we come together to articulate our collective cries and demands?

It is at this point, however, that the urban revolutionary romanticism that so many now attribute to and love about Lefebvre crashes against the rock of his understanding of capitalist realities and capital’s power. Any spontaneous alternative visionary moment is fleeting; if it is not seized at the flood, it will surely pass (as Lefebvre witnessed first-hand in the streets of Paris in ’68). The same is true of the heterotopic spaces of difference that provide the seed-bed for revolutionary movement. In The Urban Revolution he kept the idea of heterotopia (urban practices) in tension with (rather than as an alternative to) isotopy (the accomplished and rationalized spatial order of capitalism and the state), as well as with utopia as expressive desire. “The isotopy-heterotopy difference,” he argued, “can only be understood dynamically … Anomic groups construct heterotopic spaces, which are eventually reclaimed by the dominant praxis.”

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