The Urban Revolution The Urban Revolution Henri Lefebvre Translated by Robert Bononno Foreword by Neil Smith University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance provided for the translation of this book by the French Ministry of Culture. Copyright 2003 by Robert Bononno Foreword copyright 2003 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Originally published in French under the title La Revolution urbaine, copyright 1970 Editions Gallimard. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other wise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lefebvre, Henri, 1901-1991 [Revolution urbaine. English) The urban revolution I Henri Lefebvre ; translated by Robert Bononno ; foreword by Neil Smith. p. em. Translation of: La Revolution urbaine. ISBN 0-8166-4159-5 (HC: alk. paper)-ISBN 0-8166-4160-9 (PB: alk. paper) 1. Cities and towns. I. Title. HT151 .L375 2003 307.76-dc21 2002015036 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Foreword vii Neil Smith (i.: 1. From the City to Urban Society 2. Blind Field 23 3. The Urban Phenomenon 45 ~-­ _4. levels and Dimensions i 71) '_/ .. ····~ 5. Urban Myths and Ideologies ~,~ /~ 6. Urban Form ~ 7. Toward an Urban Strategy 135 8. The Urban Illusion 151 9. Urban Society 165 Conclusion 181 Notes 189 Foreword Neil Smith This translation into English of Henri Lefebvre's classic if contested text is long overdue. La Revolution urbaine first ap peared in 1970, in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprising in Paris. Cities around the world from Detroit to Tokyo, Prague to Mexico City, were the scene of major revolts, connected less through any organizational affiliation than through po litical empathy linking highly diverse struggles, and as the 1960s culminated in worldwide challenges to capitalism, war, racism, patriarchy, imperialism, and the alienation of mod ern urban life, the book was inevitably received as a political testament to the possibilities for fundamental political and social change. Although the "revolution" of 1968, as it has come to be seen, ultimately failed, the appeal to ~rban revo lution captured the aspirations of the period, and nowhere more than in Paris; it was as realistic as it was anticipatory, and the book became a pivotal if controversial intellectual text on the European and Latin American left. Along with some of Lefebvre's earlier work, it put the urban on the agen da as an explicit locus and target of political organizing. Most surprising, perhaps, is that despite the turbulent vii viii II Foreword circumstances of its writing and publication, and especially despite Lefebvre's direct involvement in the events of the time, La Revolution urbaine is remarkably sober, politically if not always philosophically, avoiding both the wild effer vescence of "the moment;' as Lefebvre would have put it, and the suicidal agony of defeat. It expresses an inveterate hope fulness and openness toward the future that has often been hard to sustain in the three decades since its publication but which characterizes Lefebvre's philosophically induced intel lectual and political optimism. At the same time, as an ex amination of this careful translation attests, this is no mere historical document. In some ways even more than when it was first published, it bears a strong sense of political im mediacy and contemporary relevance. Lefebvre was seeing things at the end of the 1960s that many of us, often with his help, came to see clearly only in more recent years and now are still discovering. It is worth highlighting some of these is sues by way of providing a few signposts to the text. But first some biographical context. Born at the turn of the twentieth century in a small Pyrenean village in south ern France, Henri Lefebvre came to political consciousness amid the horrors of World War I and the promises of the Russian Revolution. In the early 1920s he moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and became engulfed in an extraordi nary creative, political, cultural, and intellectual ferment that mixed avant-garde artists with communists and a new breed of young radical philosophers. The eclectic range of influ ences on Lefebvre's political and intellectual development derived first and foremost from this period as he devoured Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, among others, as well as the emerging work of Heidegger. He joined the Communist Party in 1928, combining political activism with intense writ ing that, across the span of his ninety years, would eventually yield an astonishing string of book-length philosophical, po litical, and sociological studies. An emerging intellectual fig- Foreword II ix ure by the eve of World War II, he was forced from Paris and from his university post following the Nazi invasion and he lived out the war as a Resistance fighter in southern France. Despite becoming one of its most heralded intellectu als, Lefebvre's relationship with the Communist Party was testy at best, and, as the party's Stalinism retrenched with the cold war closing in, he chafed more and more at the lines it took. As with so many others, his end came after the 1956 Khrushchev report unveiled the authoritarian violence and corruption of Stalin's regime; after an unsuccessful attempt to reform a recalcitrant party he was expelled in 1958. Over the next few years he published two books on Marx and two selections of Marx's work, but he also turned his attention to a series of questions that interested him deeply but on which the Communist Party leadership had often frowned. Via the themes of ideology, alienation, and everyday life, he returned to a long-standing concern with rural sociology and also picked up an earlier, broader, critical analysis of the quotidian in an effort to explore the political fabric and fab rication of the everyday. Although the rural focus continued, by the mid-1960s he turned his attention to the urban every a day, announced by Le Droit Ia ville (The right to the city), still untranslated in its entirety into English. Between 1966 and 1974 he produced, in addition to several other titles, no fewer than eight books devoted to understanding the urban and, more broadly, the production of space (as he put it). "From Heraclitus to Hegel to Marx," Lefebvre once ob served, "dialectical thinking has been bound up with time," and although his effort was most focused in this period, a central theme of Lefebvre's lifework involved the attempt to rethink the dialectic in terms of space. If, as Foucault once commented, the nineteenth-century obsession with histo ry brought a "menacing glaciation of the world,:' Lefebvre sought to reinvigorate our grasp of modern capitalism b~ ~~eezing it through the neglected sieve of space. Along with