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PREFACE

Henri Lefebvre’s Vision

Sometime in the mid 1970s in Paris I came across a poster put out by the Ecologistes, a radical neighborhood action movement dedicated to creating a more ecologically sensitive mode of city living, depicting an alternative vision for the city. It was a wonderful ludic portrait of old Paris reanimated by a neighborhood life, with flowers on balconies, squares full of people and children, small stores and workshops open to the world, cafés galore, fountains flowing, people relishing the river bank, community gardens here and there (maybe I have invented that in my memory), evident time to enjoy conversations or smoke a pipe (a habit not at that time demonized, as I found to my cost when I went to an Ecologiste neighborhood meeting in a densely smoke-filled room). I loved that poster, but over the years it became so tattered and torn that I had, to my great regret, to throw it out. I wish I had it back! Somebody should reprint it.

The contrast with the new Paris that was emerging and threatening to engulf the old was dramatic. The tall building “giants” around the Place d’Italie were threatening to invade the old city and clasp the hand of that awful Tour Montparnasse. The proposed expressway down the Left Bank, the soulless high-rise public housing (HLMs) out in the 13th arrondissement and in the suburbs, the monopolized commodification on the streets, the plain disintegration of what had once been a vibrant neighborhood life built around artisanal labor in small workshops in the Marais, the crumbling buildings of Belleville, the fantastic architecture of the Place des Vosges falling into the streets. I found another cartoon (by Batellier). It showed a combine harvester crushing and gobbling up all the old neighborhoods of Paris, leaving high-rise HLMs all in a neat row in its wake. I used it as key illustration in The Condition of Postmodernity.

Paris from the early 1960s on was plainly in the midst of an existential crisis. The old could not last, but the new seemed just too awful, soulless and empty to contemplate. Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, captures the sensibility of the moment beautifully. It depicts married mothers engaging in a daily routine of prostitution, as much out of boredom as of financial need, against the background of an invasion of American corporate capital into Paris, the war in Vietnam (once a very French affair but by then taken over by the Americans), a construction boom of highways and high-rises, and the arrival of a mindless consumerism in the streets and stores of the city. However, Godard’s philosophical take—a kind of quizzical, wistful, Wittgensteinian precursor to postmodernism, in which nothing at the center of either the self or society could possibly hold—was not for me.

It was also in this very same year, 1967, that Henri Lefebvre wrote his seminal essay on The Right to the City. That right, he asserted, was both a cry and a demand. The cry was a response to the existential pain of a withering crisis of everyday life in the city. The demand was really a command to look that crisis clearly in the eye and to create an alternative urban life that is less alienated, more meaningful and playful but, as always with Lefebvre, conflictual and dialectical, open to becoming, to encounters (both fearful and pleasurable), and to the perpetual pursuit of unknowable novelty.1

We academics are quite expert at reconstructing the genealogy of ideas. So we can take Lefebvre’s writings of this period and excavate a bit of Heidegger here, Nietzsche there, Fourier somewhere else, tacit critiques of Althusser and Foucault, and, of course, the inevitable framing given by Marx. The fact that this essay was written for the centennial celebrations of the publication of Volume 1 of Capital bears mentioning because it has some political significance, as we shall see. But what we academics so often forget is the role played by the sensibility that arises out of the streets around us, the inevitable feelings of loss provoked by the demolitions, what happens when whole quarters (like Les Halles) get re-engineered or grands ensembles erupt seemingly out of nowhere, coupled with the exhilaration or annoyance of street demonstrations about this or that, the hopes that lurk as immigrant groups bring life back into a neighborhood (those great Vietnamese restaurants in the 13th arrondissement in the midst of the HLMs), or the despair that flows from the glum desperation of marginalization, police repressions and idle youth lost in the sheer boredom of increasing unemployment and neglect in the soulless suburbs that eventually become sites of roiling unrest.

Lefebvre was, I am sure, deeply sensitive to all of that—and not merely because of his evident earlier fascination with the Situationists and their theoretical attachments to the idea of a psychogeography of the city, the experience of the urban dérive through Paris, and exposure to the spectacle. Just walking out of the door of his apartment in the Rue Rambuteau was surely enough to set all his senses tingling. For this reason I think it highly significant that The Right to the City was written before The Irruption (as Lefebvre later called it) of May 1968. His essay depicts a situation in which such an irruption was not only possible but almost inevitable (and Lefebvre played his own small part at Nanterre in making it so). Yet the urban roots of that ’68 movement remain a much neglected theme in subsequent accounts of that event. I suspect that the urban social movements then existing—the Ecologistes for example—melded into that revolt and helped shape its political and cultural demands in intricate if subterranean ways. And I also suspect, though I have no proof at all, that the cultural transformations in urban life that subsequently occurred, as naked capital masked itself in commodity fetishism, niche marketing, and urban cultural consumerism, played a far from innocent role in the post-’68 pacification (for instance, the newspaper Libération, which was founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and others, gradually shifted from the mid ’70s to become culturally radical and individualistic but politically lukewarm, if not antagonistic to serious left and collectivist politics).

I make these points because if, as has happened over the last decade, the idea of the right to the city has undergone a certain revival, then it is not to the intellectual legacy of Lefebvre that we must turn for an explanation (important though that legacy may be). What has been happening in the streets, among the urban social movements, is far more important. And as a great dialectician and immanent critic of urban daily life, surely Lefebvre would agree. The fact, for example, that the strange collision between neoliberalization and democratization in Brazil in the 1990s produced clauses in the Brazilian Constitution of 2001 that guarantee the right to the city has to be attributed to the power and significance of urban social movements, particularly around housing, in promoting democratization. The fact that this constitutional moment helped consolidate and promote an active sense of “insurgent citizenship” (as James Holston calls it) has nothing to do with Lefebvre’s legacy, but everything to do with ongoing struggles over who gets to shape the qualities of daily urban life.2 And the fact that something like “participatory budgeting,” in which ordinary city residents directly take part in allocating portions of municipal budgets through a democratic decision-making process, has been so inspirational has everything to do with many people seeking some kind of response to a brutally neoliberalizing international capitalism that has been intensifying its assault on the qualities of daily life since the early 1990s. No surprise either that this model developed in Porto Alegre, Brazil—the central place for the World Social Forum.

When all manner of social movements came together at the US Social Forum in Atlanta in June 2007, to take another example, and decided to form a national Right to the City Alliance (with active chapters in cities such as New York and Los Angeles), in part inspired by what the urban social movements in Brazil had accomplished, they did so without for the most part knowing Lefebvre’s name. They had individually concluded after years of struggling on their own particular issues (homelessness, gentrification and displacement, criminalization of the poor and the different, and so on) that the struggle over the city as a whole framed their own particular struggles. Together they thought they might more readily make a difference. And if various movements of an analogous kind can be found elsewhere, it is not simply out of some fealty to Lefebvre’s ideas but precisely because Lefebvre’s ideas, like theirs, have primarily arisen out of the streets and neighborhoods of ailing cities. Thus in a recent compilation, right to the city movements (though of diverse orientation) are reported as active in dozens of cities around the world.3

So let us agree: the idea of the right to the city does not arise primarily out of various intellectual fascinations and fads (though there are plenty of those around, as we know). It primarily rises up from the streets, out from the neighborhoods, as a cry for help and sustenance by oppressed peoples in desperate times. How, then, do academics and intellectuals (both organic and traditional, as Gramsci would put it) respond to that cry and that demand? It is here that a study of how Lefebvre responded is helpful—not because his responses provide blueprints (our situation is very different from that of the 1960s, and the streets of Mumbai, Los Angeles, São Paulo and Johannesburg are very different from those of Paris), but because his dialectical method of immanent critical inquiry can provide an inspirational model for how we might respond to that cry and demand.

Lefebvre understood very well, particularly after his study of The Paris Commune, published in 1965 (a work inspired to some degree by the Situationists’ theses on the topic), that revolutionary movements frequently if not always assume an urban dimension. This immediately put him at odds with the Communist Party, which held that the factory-based proletariat was the vanguard force for revolutionary change. In commemorating the centennial of the publication of Marx’s Capital with a tract on The Right to the City, Lefebvre was certainly intending a provocation to conventional Marxist thinking, which had never accorded the urban much significance in revolutionary strategy, even though it mythologized the Paris Commune as a central event in its history.

In invoking the “working class” as the agent of revolutionary change throughout his text, Lefebvre was tacitly suggesting that the revolutionary working class was constituted out of urban rather than exclusively factory workers. This, he later observed, is a very different kind of class formation—fragmented and divided, multiple in its aims and needs, more often itinerant, disorganized and fluid rather than solidly implanted. This is a thesis with which I have always been in accord (even before I read Lefebvre), and subsequent work in urban sociology (most notably by one of Lefebvre’s erstwhile but errant students, Manuel Castells) amplified that idea. But it is still the case that much of the traditional left has had trouble grappling with the revolutionary potential of urban social movements. They are often dismissed as simply reformist attempts to deal with specific (rather than systemic) issues, and therefore as neither revolutionary nor authentically class movements.

There is, therefore, a certain continuity between Lefebvre’s situational polemic and the work of those of us who now seek to address the right to the city from a revolutionary as opposed to reformist perspective. If anything, the logic behind Lefebvre’s position has intensified in our own times. In much of the advanced capitalist world the factories have either disappeared or been so diminished as to decimate the classical industrial working class. The important and ever-expanding labor of making and sustaining urban life is increasingly done by insecure, often part-time and disorganized low-paid labor. The so-called “precariat” has displaced the traditional “proletariat.” If there is to be any revolutionary movement in our times, at least in our part of the world (as opposed to industrializing China), the problematic and disorganized “precariat” must be reckoned with. How such disparate groups may become self-organized into a revolutionary force is the big political problem. And part of the task is to understand the origins and nature of their cries and demands.

I am not sure how Lefebvre would have responded to the Ecologistes’ poster vision. Like me, he would probably have smiled at its ludic vision, but his theses on the city, from The Right to the City to his book on La Révolution Urbaine (1970), suggest that he would have been critical of its nostalgia for an urbanism that had never been. For it was Lefebvre’s central conclusion that the city we had once known and imagined was fast disappearing and that it could not be reconstituted. I would agree with this, but assert it even more emphatically, because Lefebvre takes very little care to depict the dismal conditions of life for the masses in some of his favored cities of the past (those of the Italian Renaissance in Tuscany). Nor does he dwell on the fact that in 1945 most Parisians lived without indoor plumbing in execrable housing conditions (where they froze in winter and baked in summer) in crumbling neighborhoods, and that something had to be, and—at least during the 1960s—was being done to remedy that. The problem was that it was bureaucratically organized and implemented by a French dirigiste state without a whiff of democratic input or an ounce of playful imagination, and that it merely etched relations of class privilege and domination into the very physical landscape of the city.

Lefebvre also saw that the relation between the urban and the rural—or as the British like to call it, between the country and the city—was being radically transformed, that the traditional peasantry was disappearing and that the rural was being urbanized, albeit in a way that offered a new consumerist approach to the relation to nature (from weekends and leisure in the countryside to leafy, sprawling suburbs) and a capitalist, productivist approach to the supply of agricultural commodities to urban markets, as opposed to self-sustaining peasant agriculture. Furthermore, he presciently saw that this process was “going global,” and that under such conditions the question of the right to the city (construed as a distinctive thing or definable object) had to give way to some vaguer question of the right to urban life, which later morphed in his thinking into the more general question of the right to The Production of Space (1974).

The fading of the urban–rural divide has proceeded at a differential pace throughout the world, but there is no question that it has taken the direction that Lefebvre predicted. The recent pell-mell urbanization of China is a case in point, with the percentage of the population residing in rural areas decreasing from 74 percent in 1990 to about 50 percent in 2010, and the population of Chongqing increasing by 30 million over the past half-century. Though there are plenty of residual spaces in the global economy where the process is far from complete, the mass of humanity is thus increasingly being absorbed within the ferments and cross-currents of urbanized life.

This poses a problem: to claim the right to the city is, in effect, to claim a right to something that no longer exists (if it ever truly did). Furthermore, the right to the city is an empty signifier. Everything depends on who gets to fill it with meaning. The financiers and developers can claim it, and have every right to do so. But then so can the homeless and the sans-papiers. We inevitably have to confront the question of whose rights are being identified, while recognizing, as Marx puts it in Capital, that “between equal rights force decides.” The definition of the right is itself an object of struggle, and that struggle has to proceed concomitantly with the struggle to materialize it.

The traditional city has been killed by rampant capitalist development, a victim of the never-ending need to dispose of overaccumulating capital driving towards endless and sprawling urban growth no matter what the social, environmental, or political consequences. Our political task, Lefebvre suggests, is to imagine and reconstitute a totally different kind of city out of the disgusting mess of a globalizing, urbanizing capital run amok. But that cannot occur without the creation of a vigorous anti-capitalist movement that focuses on the transformation of daily urban life as its goal.

As Lefebvre knew full well from the history of the Paris Commune, socialism, communism, or for that matter anarchism in one city is an impossible proposition. It is simply too easy for the forces of bourgeois reaction to surround the city, cut its supply lines and starve it out, if not invade it and slaughter all who resist (as happened in Paris in 1871). But that does not mean we have to turn our backs upon the urban as an incubator of revolutionary ideas, ideals, and movements. Only when politics focuses on the production and reproduction of urban life as the central labor process out of which revolutionary impulses arise will it be possible to mobilize anti-capitalist struggles capable of radically transforming daily life. Only when it is understood that those who build and sustain urban life have a primary claim to that which they have produced, and that one of their claims is to the unalienated right to make a city more after their own heart’s desire, will we arrive at a politics of the urban that will make sense. “The city may be dead,” Lefebvre seems to say, but “long live the city!”

So is pursuit of the right to the city the pursuit of a chimera? In purely physical terms this is certainly so. But political struggles are animated by visions as much as by practicalities. Member groups within the Right to the City Alliance consist of low-income tenants in communities of color fighting for the kind of development that meets their desires and needs; homeless people organizing for their right to housing and basic services; and LGBTQ youth of color working for their right to safe public spaces. In the collective political platform they designed for New York, the coalition sought a clearer and broader definition of that public that not only can truly access so-called public space, but can also be empowered to create new common spaces for socialization and political action. The term “city” has an iconic and symbolic history that is deeply embedded in the pursuit of political meanings. The city of God, the city on a hill, the relationship between city and citizenship—the city as an object of utopian desire, as a distinctive place of belonging within a perpetually shifting spatio-temporal order—all give it a political meaning that mobilizes a crucial political imaginary. But Lefebvre’s point, and here he is certainly in league with if not indebted to the Situationists, is that there are already multiple practices within the urban that themselves are full to overflowing with alternative possibilities.

Lefebvre’s concept of heterotopia (radically different from that of Foucault) delineates liminal social spaces of possibility where “something different” is not only possible, but foundational for the defining of revolutionary trajectories. This “something different” does not necessarily arise out of a conscious plan, but more simply out of what people do, feel, sense, and come to articulate as they seek meaning in their daily lives. Such practices create heterotopic spaces all over the place. We do not have to wait upon the grand revolution to constitute such spaces. Lefebvre’s theory of a revolutionary movement is the other way round: the spontaneous coming together in a moment of “irruption,” when disparate heterotopic groups suddenly see, if only for a fleeting moment, the possibilities of collective action to create something radically different.

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.”

Lefebvre was far too well aware of the strength and power of the dominant practices not to recognize that the ultimate task is to eradicate those practices through a much broader revolutionary movement. The whole capitalist system of perpetual accumulation, along with its associated structures of exploitative class and state power, has to be overthrown and replaced. Claiming the right to the city is a way-station on the road to that goal. It can never be an end in itself, even if it increasingly looks to be one of the most propitious paths to take.