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Title: The Right to the City
Author: Henri Lefebvre
Date: 1968 (*Le Droit à la ville*), 1996 (English translation as *The Right to the City*)
Language: en
Topics: right to the city, urbanism, Marxism, municipalism, grassroots organizing, community organizing, right to the city, dialectics, the city, revolution, libertarian marxism, not anarchist
Source: Chapters 2–17 from *Writings on Cities*, Selected, translated and introduced by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas.
Notes: The ‘right to the city’ is an idea and a slogan that was first proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book *Le Droit à la ville*  and that has been reclaimed more recently by social movements, thinkers and several progressive local authorities alike as a call to action to reclaim the city as a to-created space — a place for life detached from the growing effects that commodification and capitalism have had over social interaction and the rise of spatial inequalities in worldwide cities throughout the last two centuries. While Lefebvre never identified with libertarian Marxism, his conceptual framework of Right to the City is of use to a libertarian Marxist reading.

Henri Lefebvre

The Right to the City

Preface

Great things must be silenced or talked about with grandeur, that is,

with cynicism and innocence...

I would claim as property and product of man all the beauty, nobility,

which we have given to real or imaginary things...

— Frederic Nietzsche

This work will take an offensive form (that some will perhaps find

offending). Why?

Because conceivably each reader will already have in mind a set of ideas

systematized or in the process of being systematized. Conceivably, each

reader is looking for a ‘system’ or has found his ‘system’. The System

is fashionable, as much in thought as in terminologies and language.

Now all systems tend to close off reflection, to block off horizon. This

work wants to break up systems, not to substitute another system, bur to

open up through thought and action towards possibilities by showing the

horizon and the road. Against a form of reflection which tends towards

formalism, a thought which tends towards an opening leads the struggle.

Urbanism, almost as much as the system, is fashionable. Urbanistic

questions and reflections are coming out of circles of technicians,

specialists, intellectuals who see themselves as at the ‘avant-garde’.

They enter the public domain through newspaper articles and writings of

diverse import and ambitions. At one and the same time urbanism becomes

ideology and practice. Meanwhile, questions relative to the city and to

urban reality are not fully known and recognized, they have not yet

acquired politically the importance and the meaning that they have in

thought (in ideology) and in practice (we shall show an urban strategy

already at work and in action). This little book does not only propose

to critically analyse thoughts and activities related to urbanism. It’s

aim is to allow its problems to enter into consciousness and political

policies.

From the theoretical and practical situation of problems (from the

problematic) concerning the city, reality and possibilities of urban

life, let us begin by taking what used to the called a ‘cavalier

attitude’.

Industrialization and Urbanization

To present and give an account of the ‘urban problematic’, the point of

departure must be the process of industrialization. Beyond any doubt

this process has been the dynamic of transformations in society for the

last century and a half. If one distinguishes between the inductor and

the induced, one can say that the process of industrialization is

inductive and that one can count among the induced, problems related to

growth and planning, questions concerning the city and the development

of the urban reality, without omitting the growing importance of leisure

activities and questions related in ‘culture’. Industrialization

characterizes modern society. This does not inevitably carry with it

terms of ‘industrial society’, if we want to define it. Although

urbanization and the problematic of the urban figure among the induced

effects and not among the causes or inductive reason, the preoccupation

these words signify accentuate themselves in such a way that one can

define as an urban society the social reality which arises around us.

This definition retains a feature which becomes capital.

Industrialization provides the point of departure for reflection upon

our time. Now the city existed prior to industrialization. A remark

banal in itself but whose implications have not been fully formulated.

The most eminent urban creations, the most ‘beautiful’ oeuvres of urban

life (we say ‘beautiful,’ because they are oeuvres rather than products)

date from epochs previous to that of industrialization. There was the

oriental city (linked to the Asiatic mode of production), the antique

city (Greek and Roman associated with the possession of slaves) and then

the medieval city (in a complex situation embedded in feudal relations

but struggling against a landed feudalism). The oriental and antique

city was essentially political; the medieval city, without losing its

political character, was principally related to commerce, crafts and

banking. It absorbed merchants, who had previously been quasi nomadic

and relegated outside the city.

When industrialization begins, and capitalism in competition with a

specifically industrial bourgeoisie is born, the city is already a

powerful reality. In Western Europe, after the virtual disappearance of

the antique city, the decay of Roman influence, the city took off again.

More or less nomadic merchants elected as centre of their activities

what remained of the antique urban cores. Conversely, one can suppose

that these degraded cores functioned as accelerators for what remained

of exchange economies maintained by wandering merchants. From the

growing surplus product of agriculture, to the detriment of feudal

lords, cities accumulate riches: objects, treasures, virtual capitals.

There already existed in these urban centres a great monetary wealth,

acquired through usury and and commerce. Crafts prosper there, a

production clearly distinct from agriculture. Cities support peasant

communities and the enfranchisement of the peasants, not without benefit

for themselves. In short, they are centres of social and political life

where not only wealth is accumulated, but knowledge (connaissances),

techniques, and oeuvres (works of art, monuments). This city is itself

‘oeuvre’, a feature which contrasts with the irreversible tendency

towards money and commerce, towards exchange and products. Indeed the

oeuvre is use value and the the product is exchange value. The eminent

use of the city, that is, of its streets and squares, edifices and

monuments, is la fête (a celebration which consumes unproductively,

without other advantage but pleasure and prestige and enormous riches in

money and objects).

A complex, but contradictory, reality. Medieval cities at the height of

their development centralize wealth: powerful groups invest

unproductively a large part of their wealth in the cities they dominate.

At the same time, banking and commercial capital have already made

wealth mobile and has established exchange networks enabling the

transfer of money. When industrialization begins with the pre-eminence

of a specific bourgeoisie (the entrepreneurs), wealth has ceased to be

mainly in real estate. Agricultural production is no longer dominant and

nor is landed property. Estates are lost to the feudal lords and pass

into the hands of urban capitalises enriched by commerce, banking,

usury. The outcome is that ‘society’ as a whole, made up of the city,

the country and the institutions which regulate their relations, tend to

constitute themselves as a network of cities, with a certain division of

labour (technically, socially, politically) between cities linked

together by road, river and seaways and by commercial and banking

relations. One can think that the division of labour between cities was

neither sufficiently advanced nor sufficiently aware to determine stable

associations and put an end to to rivalries and competition. This urban

system was not able to establish itself. What is erected on chis base is

the State, or centralized power. Cause and effect of this particular

centrality, that of power, one city wins over the others: the capital.

Such a process takes place very unevenly, very differently in Italy,

Germany, France, Flanders, England, and Spain. The city predominates and

yet it is no longer the City-State of antiquity. There are three

different terms: society, State and city. In this urban system each city

tends to constitute itself as an enclosed self-contained,

self-functioning system. The city preserves the organic character of

community which comes from the village and which translates itself into

a corporate organization (or guild). Community life (comprising general

or partial assemblies) does not prohibit class struggle. On the

contrary. Violent contrasts between wealth and poverty, conflicts

between the powerful and the oppressed, do not prevent either attachment

to the city nor an active contribution to the beauty of the oeuvre. In

the urban context, struggles between fractions, groups and classes

strengthen the feeling of belonging. Political confrontations between

the ‘minuto popolo’ the ‘popolo grosso’, 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. It is important to

emphasize this paradox, for it is not a well understood historical fact:

very oppressive societies were very creative and rich in producing

oeuvres. Later, the production of products replaced the production of

oeuvres and the social relations attached to them, notably the city.

When exploitation replaces oppression, creative capacity disappears. The

very notion of ‘creation’ is blurred or degenerates by miniaturizing

itself into ‘making’ and ‘creativity’ (the ‘do-it-yourself,’ etc.).

Which brings forth arguments to back up a thesis: city and urban reality

are related to use value. Exchange value and the generalization of

commodities by industrialization tend to destroy it by subordinating the

city and urban reality which are refuges of use value, the origins of a

virtual predominance and revalorization of use.

In the urban system we are attempting to analyse, action is exercized

over specific conflicts: between use value and exchange value, between

mobilization of wealth (in silver and in money) and unproductive

investment in the city, between accumulation of capital and its

squandering on festivities, between the extension of the dominated

territory and the demands of a strict organization of this territory

around the dominating city. The latter protects itself against all

eventualities by a corporate organization which paralyses the

initiatives of banking and commercial capitalism. The coporarion does

not only regulate a craft. Each enters into an organic whole: the

corporate system regulates the distribution of actions and activities

over urban space (streets and neighbourhoods) and urban time (timetables

and festivities). This whole tends to congeal itself into an immutable

structure. The outcome of which is that industrialization supposes the

destructuration of existing structures. Historians (since Marx) have

showed the fixed nature of guilds. What perhaps remains to be shown is

the tendency of the whole urban system towards a sort of crystallization

and fixation. Where this system consolidated itself, capitalism and

industrialization came late: in Germany, in Italy, a delay full of

consequences.

There is therefore a certain discontinuity between an emerging industry

and its historical conditions. They are neither the same thing nor the

same people. The prodigious growth of exchanges, of a monetary economy,

of merchant production, of the ‘world of commodities’ which will result

from industrialization, implies a radical change. The passage of

commercial and banking capitalism as well as craft production to

industrial production and competitive capitalism is accompanied by a

gigantic crisis, well studied by historians, except for what relates to

the city and the ‘urban system’.

Emerging industry tends to establish itself outside cities. Not that it

is an absolute law. No law can be totally general and absolute. This

setting up of industrial enterprises, at first sporadic and dispersed,

depended on multiple local regional and national circumstances. For

example, printing seems to have been able in an urban context to go from

a craft to the private enterprise stage. It was, otherwise for the

textile industry, for mining, for metallurgy. The new industry

establishes itself near energy sources (rivers, woods then charcoal),

means of transport (rivers and canals, then railways), raw materials

(minerals), pools of labour power (peasant crahmen, weavers and

blacksmiths already providing skilled labour).

There still exist today in France numerous small textile centres

(valleys in Normandy and the Vosges, etc.) which survive sometimes with

difficulty. Is it not remarkable that a part of the heavy metallurgical

industry was established in the valley of the Moselle, between two old

cities, Nancy and Metz, the only real urban centres of this industrial

region? At the same time old cities are markets, sources of available

capital, the place where these capitals are managed (banks), the

residences of economic and political leaders, reservoirs of labour (that

is, the places where can subsist ‘the reserve army of labour’ as Marx

calls it, which weighs on wages and enables the growth of surplus

value). Moreover, the city, as workshop, allows the concentration over a

limited space of the means of production: cools, raw materials, labour.

Since settlement outside of cities is not satisfactory for

‘entrepreneurs’, as soon as it is possible industry comes closer to

urban centres. Inversely, the city prior to industrialization

accelerates the process (in particular, it enables the rapid growth of

productivity). The city has therefore played an important role in the

take-off of industry. As Marx explained, urban concentrations have

accompanied the concentration of capital. Industry was to produce its

own urban centres, sometimes small cities and industrial agglomerations

(le Creusot), at times medium-sized (Saint-Etienne) or gigantic (the

Ruhr, considered as a ‘conurbation’). We shall come back to the

deterioration of the centrality and urban character in these cities.

This process appears, in analysis, in all its complexity, which the word

‘industrialization’ represents badly. This complexity becomes apparent

as soon as one ceases to think in terms of private enterprise on the one

hand and global production statistics (so many tons of coal, steel) on

the other — as soon as one reflects upon the distinction between the

inductor and the induced, by observing the importance of the phenomena

induced and their interaction with the inductors. Industry can do

without the old city (pre-industrial, precapitalist) but does so by

constituting agglomerations in which urban features are deteriorating.

Is this not the case in North America where ‘cities’ in the way they are

understood in France and in Europe, are few: New York, Montreal, San

Francisco? Nevertheless, where there is a pre-existent network of old

cities, industry assails it. It appropriates this network and refashions

it according to its needs. It also attacks the city (each city),

assaults it, takes it, ravages it. It tends to break up the old cores by

taking them over. This does not prevent the extension of urban

phenomena, cities and agglomerations, industrial towns and suburbs (with

the addition of shanty towns where industrialization is unable to employ

and fix available labour).

We have before us a double process or more precisely, a process with two

aspects: industrialization and urbanization, growth and development,

economic production and social life. The two ‘aspects’ of this

inseparable process have a unity, and yet it is a conflictual process.

Historically there is a violent clash between urban reality and

industrial reality. As for the complexity of the process, it reveals

itself more and more difficult to grasp, given that industrialization

does not only produce firms (workers and leaders of private

enterprises), but various offices — banking, financial, technical and

political.

This dialectical process, far from being clear, is also far from over.

Today it still provokes ‘problematic’ situations. A few examples would

be sufficient here. In Venice, the active population leaves the city for

the industrial agglomeration which parallels it on the mainland: Mestre.

This city among the most beautiful cities bequeathed to us from

pre-industrial times is threatened not so much by physical deterioration

due to the sea or to its subsidence, as by the exodus of its

inhabitants. In Athens a quite considerable industrialization has

attracted to the capital people from small towns and peasants. Modern

Athens has nothing more in common with the antique city covered over,

absorbed, extended beyond measure. The monuments and sites (agora,

Acropolis) which enable to locate ancient Greece are only places of

tourist consumption and aesthetic pilgrimage. Yet the organizational

core of the city remains very strong. Its surroundings of new

neighbourhoods and semi-shanty towns inhabited by uprooted and

disorganized people confer it an exorbitant power. This almost shapeless

gigantic agglomeration enables the holders of decision-making centres to

carry out the worst political ventures. All the more so that the economy

of the country closely depends on this network: property speculation,

the ‘creation’ of capitals by this means, investments of these capitals

into construction and so on and so forth. It is this fragile network,

always in danger of breaking, which defines a type of urbanization,

without or with a weak industrialization, but with a rapid extension of

the agglomeration, of property and speculation; a prosperity falsely

maintained by the network.

We could in France cite many cities which have been recently submerged

by industrialization: Grenoble, Dunkirk, etc. In other cases, such as

Toulouse, there has been a massive extension of the city and

urbanization (understood in the widest sense of the term) with little

industrialization. Such is also the general case of Latin American and

African cities encircled by shanty towns. In these regions and countries

old agrarian structures are dissolving: dispossessed or ruined peasants

crowd into these cities to find work and subsistence. Now these peasants

come from farms destined to disappear because of world commodity prices,

these being closely linked to industrialized countries and ‘growth

poles’. These phenomena are still dependent on industrialization.

An induced process which one could call the ‘implosion-explosion’ of the

city is at present deepening. The urban phenomenon extends itself over a

very large part of the territory of great industrial countries. It

happily crosses national boundaries: the Megalopolis of Northern Europe

extends from the Ruhr to the sea and even to English cities, and from

the Paris region to the Scandinavian countries. The urban fabric of this

territory becomes increasingly tight, although not without its local

differentiations and extension of the (technical and social) division of

labour to the regions, agglomerations and cities. At the same time,

there and even elsewhere, urban concentrations become gigantic:

populations are heaped together reaching worrying densities (in surface

and housing units). Again at the same time many old urban cores are

deteriorating or exploding. People move to distant residential or

productive peripheries. Offices replace housing in urban centres.

Sometimes (in the United States) these centres are abandoned to the

‘poor’ and become ghettos for the underprivileged. Sometimes on the

contrary, the most affluent people retain their strong positions at the

heart of the city (around Central Park in New York, the Marais in

Paris).

Let us now examine the urban fabric. This metaphor is not clear. More

than a fabric thrown over a territory, these words designate a kind of

biological proliferation of a net of uneven mesh, allowing more or less

extended sectors to escape: hamlets or villages, entire regions. If

these phenomena are placed into the perspective of the countryside and

old agrarian structures, one can analyse a general movement of

concentration: from populations in boroughs and small and large towns —

of property and exploitation — of the organization of transports and

commercial exchanges, etc. This leads at the same time to the

depopulation and the ‘loss of the peasantry’ from the villages which

remain rural while losing what was peasant life: crafts, small local

shops. Old ‘ways of life’ become folklore. If the same phenomena are

analysed from the perspective of cities, one can observe not only the

extension of highly populated peripheries but also of banking,

commercial and industrial networks and of housing (second homes, places

and spaces of leisure, etc.).

The urban fabric can be described by using the concept of ecosystem, a

coherent unity constituted around one or several cities, old and recent.

Such a description may lose what is essential. Indeed, the significance

of the urban fabric is not limited to its morphology. It is the support

of a more or less intense, more or less degraded, ‘way of life’: urban

society. On the economic base of the urban fabric appear phenomena of

another order, that of social and ‘cultural’ life. Carried by the urban

fabric, urban society and life penetrate the countryside. Such a way of

living entails systems of objects and of values. The best known elements

of the urban system of objects include water, electricity, gas (butane

in the countryside), not to mention the car, the television, plastic

utensils, ‘modern’ furniture, which entail new demands with regard to

‘services’. Among the elements of the system of values we can note urban

leisure (dance and song), suits, the rapid adoption of fashions from the

city. And also, preoccupations with security, the need to predict the

future, in brief, a rationality communicated by the city. Generally

youth, as an age group, actively contributes to this rapid assimilation

of things and representations coming from the city. These are

sociological trivialities which are useful to remember to show their

implications. Within the mesh of the urban fabric survive islets and

islands of ‘pure’ rurality, often (but not always) poor areas peopled

with ageing peasants, badly ‘integrated’, stripped of what had been the

nobility of peasant life in times of greatest misery and of oppression.

The ‘urban-rural’ relation does not disappear. On the contrary, it

intensifies itself down to the most industrialized countries. It

interferes with other representations and other real relations: town and

country, nature and artifice, etc. Here and there tensions become

conflicts, latent conflicts are accentuated, and then what was hidden

under the urban fabric appears in the open.

Moreover, urban cores do not disappear. The fabric erodes them or

integrates them to its web. These cores survive by transforming

themselves. There are still centres of intense urban life such as the

Latin Quarter in Paris. The aesthetic qualities of these urban cores

play an important role in their maintenance. They do not only contain

monuments and institutional headquarters, but also spaces appropriated

for entertainments, parades, promenades, festivities. In this way the

urban core becomes a high quality consumption product for foreigners,

tourists, people from the outskirts and suburbanites. It survives

because of this double role: as place of consumption and consumption of

place. Thus centres enter more completely into exchange and exchange

value, not without retaining their use value due to spaces provided for

specific activities. They become centres of consumption. The

architectural and urbanistic resurgence of the commercial centre only

gives a dull and mutilated version of what was the core of the old city,

at one and the same time commercial, religious, intellectual, political

and economic (productive). The notion and image of the commercial centre

in fact date from the Middle Ages. It corresponds to the small and

medium-sized medieval city. But today exchange value is so dominant over

use and use value that it more or less suppresses it. There is nothing

original in this notion. The creation which corresponds to our times, to

their tendencies and (threatening) horizons is it not the centre of

decision-making? This centre, gathering together training and

information, capacities of organization and institutional

decision-making, appears as a project in the making of a new centrality,

chat of power. The greatest attention must be paid to this concept, the

practice which it denotes and justifies.

We have in fact a number of terms (at least three) in complex relations

with each other, definable by oppositions each on their own terms,

although not exhausted by these oppositions. There is the rural and the

urban (urban society). There is the urban fabric which carries this

‘urbanness’ and centrality, old, renovated, new. Hence a disquieting

problematic, particularly if one wishes to go from analysis to

synthesis, from observations to a project (the ‘normative’). Must one

allow the urban fabric (what does this word mean?) to proliferate

spontaneously? Is it appropriate to capture this force, direct this

strange life, savage and artificial at the same time? How can one

strengthen the centres? Is it useful or necessary? And which centres,

which centralities? Finally, what is to be done about islands of

ruralism?

Thus the crisis of the city can be perceived through distinct problems

and problematical whole. This is a theoretical and practical crisis. In

theory, the concept of the city (of urban reality) is made up of facts,

representations and images borrowed from the ancient pre-industrial and

precapitalist city, but in a process of transformation and new

elaboration. In practice the urban core (an essential part of the image

and the concept of the city) splits open and yet maintains itself:

overrun, often deteriorated, sometimes rotting, the urban core does not

disappear. If someone proclaims its end and its reabsorption into the

fabric, this is a postulate, a statement without proof. In the same way,

if someone proclaims the urgency of a restitution or reconstitution of

urban cores, it is again a postulate, a statement without proof. The

urban core has not given way to a new and well-defined ‘reality’, as the

village allowed the city to be born. And yet its reign seems to be

ending. Unless it asserts itself again even more strongly as centre of

power...

Until now we have shown how the city has been attacked by

industrialization, giving a dramatic and globally considered picture of

this process. This analytical attempt could lead us to believe that it

is a natural process, without intentions or volitions. There is

something like this, but that vision would be truncated. The ruling

classes or fractions of the ruling classes intervene actively and

voluntarily in this process, possessing capital (the means of

production) and managing not only the economic use of capital and

productive investments, but also the whole society, using part of the

wealth produced in ‘culture’, art, knowledge, ideology. Beside, or

rather, in opposition to, dominant social groups (classes and class

fractions), there is the working class: the proletariat, itself divided

into strata, partial groups, various tendencies, according to industrial

sectors and local and national traditions.

In the middle of the nineteenth century in Paris the situation was

somewhat like this. The ruling bourgeoisie, a non-homogenous class,

after a hard-fought struggle, has conquered the capital. Today the

Marais is still a visible witness to this: before the Revolution it is

an aristocratic quarter (despite the tendency of the capital and the

wealthy to drift towards the west), an area of gardens and private

mansions. It took but a few years, during the 1830s, for the Third

Estate to appropriate it. A number of magnificem houses disappear,

workshops and shops occupy others, tenements, stores, depots and

warehouses, firms replace parks and gardens. Bourgeois ugliness, the

greed for gain visible and legible in the streets takes the place of a

somewhat cold beauty and aristocratic luxury. On the walls of the Marais

can be read class struggle and the hatred between classes, a victorious

meanness. It is impossible to make more perceptible this paradox of

history which partially escaped Marx. The ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie

taking charge of economic growth, endowed with ideological instruments

suited to rational growth, moves towards democracy and replaces

oppression by exploitation, this class as such no longer creates — it

replaces the oeuvre, by the product. Those who retain this sense of the

oeuvre, including writers and painters, think and see themselves as ‘non

bourgeois’. As for oppressors, the masters of societies previous to the

democratic bourgeoisie — princes, kings, lords, emperors — they had a

sense and a taste of the oeuvre, especially in architecture and urban

design. In fact the oeuvre is more closely related to use value than to

exchange value.

After 1848, the French bourgeoisie solidly entrenched in the city

(Paris) possesses considerable influence, but it sees itself hemmed in

by the working class. Peasants flock in, settling around the ‘barriers’

and entrances of the fortifications, the immediate periphery. Former

craftsmen and new proletarians penetrate right up to the heart of the

city. They live in slums but also in tenements, where the better-off

live on the ground floors and the workers on the upper ones. In this

‘disorder’ the workers threaten the ‘parvenus’, a danger which became

obvious during the days of June 1848 and which the Commune was to

confirm. A class strategy is elaborated, aimed at the replanning of the

city, without any regard for reality, for its own life.

The life of Paris reaches its greatest intensity between 1848 and the

Haussmann period — not what is understood by ‘la vie parisienne’, but

the urban life of the capital. It engages itself into literature and

poetry with great vigour and power. Then it will be over. Urban life

suggests meetings, the confrontation of differences, reciprocal

knowledge and acknowledgement (including ideological and political

confrontation), ways of living, ‘patterns’ which coexist in the city.

During the nineteenth century, a democracy of peasant origins which

drove the revolutionaries could have transformed itself into an urban

democracy. It was and it is still for history one of the beliefs of the

Commune. As urban democracy threatened the privileges of the new ruling

class, that class prevented it from being born. How? By expelling from

the urban centre and the city itself the proletariat, by destroying

‘urbanity’.

Act One. Baron Haussmann, man of this Bonapartist State which erects

itself over society to treat it cynically as the booty (and not only the

stake) of the struggles for power. Haussmann replaces winding but lively

streets by long avenues, sordid but animated ‘quartiers’ by bourgeois

ones. If he forces through boulevards and plans open spaces, it is not

for the beauty of views. It is to ‘comb Paris with machine guns’. The

famous Baron makes no secret of it. Later we will be greateful to him

for having opened up Paris to traffic. This was not the aim, the

finality of Haussmann ‘planning’. The voids have a meaning: they cry out

loud and dear the glory and power of the State which plans them, the

violence which could occur. Later transfers towards other finalities

take place which justify in another way these gashes into urban life. It

should be noted that Haussmann did not achieve his goal. One strong

aspect of the Paris Commune (1871) is the strength of the return towards

the urban centre of workers pushed out towards the outskirts and

peripheries, their reconquest of the city, this belonging among other

belongings, this value, this oeuvre which had been torn from them.

Act Two. The goal was to be attained by a much vaster manoeuvre and with

more important results. In the second half of the century, influential

people, that is rich or powerful, or both, sometimes ideologues (Le

Play) with ideas strongly marked by religions (Catholic and Protestant),

sometimes informed politicians (belonging to the centre right) and who

moreover do not constitute a coherent and unique group, in brief, a few

notables, discover a new notion. The Third Republic will insure its

fortune, that is, its realization on the ground. It will conceive the

notion of habitat. Until then, ‘to inhabit’ meant to take part in a

social life, a community, village or city. Urban life had, among other

qualities, this attribute. It gave the right to inhabit, it allowed

townsmen-citizens to inhabit. It is thus that ‘mortals inhabit while

they save the earth, while they wait for the gods ... while they conduct

their lives in preservation and use’. Thus speaks the poet and

philosopher Heidegger of the concept to inhabit. Outside philosophy and

poetry the same things have been said sociologically in prose. At the

end of the nineteenth century the notables isolate a function, detach it

from a very complex whole which was and remains the city, to project it

over the ground, not without showing and signifying in this manner the

society for which they provide an ideology and a practice. Certainly

suburbs were created under the pressure of circumstances to respond to

the blind (although motivated and directed) growth of industrialization,

the massive arrival of peasants led to the urban centres by ‘rural

exodus’. The process has none the less been oriented by a strategy.

A typical class strategy, does that mean a series of concerted actions,

planned with a single aim? No. Class character seems that much deeper

than several concerted actions, centered around several objectives, has

nevertheless converged towards a final result. It goes without saying

that all these notables were not proposing to open up a means to

speculation: some of them, men of good will, philanthropists, humanists,

seem even to wish the opposite. They have none the less mobilized

property wealth around the city, the entrance without restriction into

exchange and exchange value of the ground and housing. This had

speculative implications. They were not proposing to demoralize the

working classes, but on the contrary, to moralize it. They considered it

beneficial to involve the workers (individuals and families) into a

hierarchy clearly distinct from that which rules in the firm, that of

property and landlords, houses and neighbourhoods. They wanted to give

them another function, another status, other roles than those attached

to the condition of the salaried producers. They meant in this way to

give them a better everyday life than that of work. In this way they

conceived the role of owner-occupied housing. A remarkably successful

operation (although its political consequences were not always those

anticipated by its promoters). Nevertheless, a result was achieved,

predicted or otherwise, conscious or unconscious. Society orients itself

ideologically and practically towards other problems than that of

production. Little by little social consciousness ceased to refer to

production and to focus on everyday life and consumption. With

‘suburbanization’ a process is set into motion which decentres the city.

Isolated from the city, the proletariat will end its sense of the

oeuvre. Isolated from places of production, available from a sector of

habitation for scattered firms, the proletariat will allow its creative

capacity to diminish in its conscience. Urban consciousness will vanish.

In France the beginnings of the suburb are also the beginnings of a

violently anti-urban planning approach; a singular paradox. For decades

during the Third Republic appeared documents authorizing and regulating

owner-occupied suburbs and plots. What could be more accurately referred

to here is the banlieue pavillonaire, a type of suburbanization begun in

this period in France characterized by small owner-occupied houing whose

nearest Anglo-Saxon equivalent in terms of typology and social relations

is the ‘bungalow’.

A de-urbanized, yet dependent periphery is established around the city.

Effectively, these new suburban dwellers are still urban even though

they are unaware of it and believe themselves to be close to nature, to

the sun and to greenery. One could call it a de-urbanizing and

de-urbanized urbanization to emphasize the paradox.

Its excesses will slow this extension down. The movement it engenders

will carry along the bourgeoisie and the well-off who will establish

residential suburbs. City centres empty themselves for offices. The

whole then begins to struggle with the inextricable. But it is not

finished.

Act Three. After the Second World War it becomes evident that the

picture changes according to various emergencies and constraints related

to demographic and industrial growth and the influx of people from the

provinces to Paris. The housing crisis, acknowledged and proven, turns

into a catastrophe and threatens to worsen the political situation which

is still unstable. ‘Emergencies’ overwhelm the initiatives of capitalism

and ‘private’ enterprise, especially as the latter is not interested in

construction, considered to be insufficiently profitable. The State can

no longer be content with simply regulating land plots and the

construction of informal suburban housing or fighting (badly) property

speculation. By means of intermediary organisms it takes charge of

housing construction and an era of ‘nouveaux ensembles’ (large-scale

housing estates) and ‘new towns’ begins.

It could be said that public powers take charge of what hitherto was

part of a market economy. Undoubtedly. But housing does not necessarily

become a public service. It surfaces into social consciousness as a

right. It is acknowledged in fact by the indignation raised by dramatic

cases and by the discontent engendered by the crisis. Yet it is not

formally or practically acknowledged except as an appendix to the

‘rights of man’. Construction taken in charge by the State does not

change the orientations and conceptions adopted by the market economy.

As Engels had predicted, the housing question, even aggravated, has

politically played only a minor role. Groups and parties on the Left

will be satisfied with demanding ‘more housing’. Moreover, what guides

public and semi-public initiatives is not a conception of urban

planning, it is simply the goal of providing as quickly as possible at

the least cost, the greatest possible number of housing units. The new

housing estates will be characterized by an abstract and functional

character: the concept of habitat brought to its purest form by a State

bureaucracy.

This notion of habitat is still somewhat ‘uncertain’. Individual

owner-occupation will enable variations, particular or individual

interpretations of habitat. There is a sort of plasticity which allows

for modifications and appropriations. The space of the house — fence,

garden, various and available corners — leaves a margin of initiative

and freedom to inhabit, limited but real. State rationality is pushed to

the limit. In the new housing estate habitat is established in its

purest form, as a burden of constraints. Certain philosophers will say

that large housing estates achieve the concept of habitat by excluding

the notion of inhabit, that is, the plasticity of space, its modelling

and the appropriation by groups and individuals of the conditions of

their existence. It is also a complete way of living (functions,

prescriptions, daily routine) which is inscribed and signifies itself in

this habitat.

The villa habitat has proliferated in the suburban communes around

Paris, by extending the built environment in a disorderly fashion. This

urban, and at the same time non-urban, growth has only one law:

speculation on plots and property. The interstices !eh by this growth

have been filled by large social housing estates. To the speculation on

plots, badly opposed, was added speculation in apartments when these

were in to-ownership. Thus housing entered into property wealth and

urban land into exchange value. Restrictions were disappearing.

If one defines urban reality by dependency vis-a-vis the centre, suburbs

are urban. If one defines urban order by a perceptible (legible)

relationship between centrality and periphery, suburbs are de-urbanized.

And one can say that the ‘planning thought’ of large social housing

estates has literally set itself against the city and the urban to

eradicate them. All perceptible, legible urban reality has disappeared:

streets, squares, monuments, meeting places. Even the cafe (the bistro)

has encountered the resentment of the builders of those large housing

estates, their taste for asceticism, the reduction of ‘to inhabit’ to

habitat. They had to go to the end of their destruction of palpable

urban reality before there could appear the demand for a restitution.

Then one saw the timid, slow reappearance of the cafe, the commercial,

centre, the street, ‘cultural’ amenities, in brief, a few elements of

urban reality.

Urban order thus decomposes into two stages: individual and

owner-occupied houses and housing estates. But there is no society

without order, signified, perceptible, legible on the ground. Suburban

disorder harbours an order: a glaring opposition of individually

owner-occupied detached houses and housing estates. This opposition

tends to constitute a system of significations still urban even into

de-urbanization. Each sector defines itself (by and in the consciousness

of the inhabitants) in relation to the other, against the ocher. The

inhabitants themselves have little consciousness of the internal order

of their sector, but the people from the housing estates see and

perceive themselves as not being villa dwellers. This is reciprocal. At

the heart of this opposition the people of the housing estates entrench

themselves into the logic of the habitat and the people of

owner-occupied houses entrench themselves into the make-believe of

habitat. For some it is the rational organization (in appearance) of

space. For others it is the presence of the dream, of nature, health,

apart from the bad and unhealthy city. But the logic of the habitat is

only perceived in relation to make-believe, and make-believe in relation

to logic. People represent themselves to themselves by what they are

lacking or believe to be lacking. In this relationship, the imaginary

has more power. It overdetermines logic: the fact of inhabiting is

perceived by reference to the owner-occupation of detached dwellings.

These dwellers regret the absence of a spatial logic while the people of

the housing estates regret not knowing the joys of living in a detached

house. Hence the surprising results of surveys. More than 80 per cent of

French people aspire to be owner-occupiers of a house, while a strong

majority also declare themselves to be ‘satisfied’ with social housing

estates. The outcome is not important here. What should be noted is that

consciousness of the city and of urban reality is dulled for one or the

other, so as to disappear. The practical and theoretical (ideological)

destruction of the city cannot but leave an enormous emptiness, not

including administrative and other problems increasingly difficult to

resolve. This emptiness is less important for a critical analysis than

the source of conflict expressed by the end of the city and by the

extension of a mutilated and deteriorated, but real, urban society. The

suburbs are urban, within a dissociated morphology, the empire of

separation and scission between the elements of what had been created as

unity and simultaneity.

Within this perspective critical analysis can distinguish three periods

(which do not exactly correspond to the distinctions previously made in

three acts of the drama of the city).

First period. Industry and the process of industrialization assault and

ravage pre-existing urban reality, destroying it through practice and

ideology, to the point of extirpating it from reality and consciousness.

Led by a class strategy, industrialization acts as a negative force over

urban reality: the urban social is denied by the industrial economic.

Second period (in part juxtaposed to the first). Urbanization spreads

and urban society becomes general. Urban reality, in and by its own

destruction makes itself acknowledged as socio-economic reality. One

discovers that the whole society is liable to fall apart if it lacks the

city and centrality: an essential means for the planned organization of

production and consumption has disappeared.

Third period. One finds or reinvents urban reality, but not without

suffering from its destruction in practice or in thinking. One attempts

to restitute centrality. Would this suggest that class strategy has

disappeared? This is not certain. It has changed. To the old

centralities, to the decomposition of centres, it substitutes the centre

of decision-making.

Thus is born or reborn urban thought. It follows an urbanism without

thought. The masters of old had no need for an urban theory to embellish

their cities. What sufficed was the pressure exercised by the people on

their masters and the presence of a civilization and style which enabled

the wealth derived from the labour of the people to be invested into

‘oeuvres’. The bourgeois period puts an end to this age-old tradition.

At the same time this period brings a new rationality, different from

the rationality elaborated by philosophers since ancient Greece.

Philosophical Reason proposed definitions of man, the world, history and

society which were questionable but also underpinned by reasonings which

had been given shape. Its democratic generalizations later gave way to a

rationalism of opinions and attitudes. Each citizen was expected to have

a reasoned opinion on every fact and problem concerning him, this wisdom

spurning the irrational. From the confrontation of ideas and opinions, a

superior reason was to emerge, a general wisdom inciting the general

will. It is fruitless to insist upon the difficulties of this classical

rationalism, linked to the political difficulties of democracy, and to

the practical difficulties of humanism. In the nineteenth and especially

in the twentieth century, organizing rationality, operation at various

levels of social reality, takes shape. Is it coming from the capitalist

firm and the management of units of production? Is it born at the level

of the State and planning? What is important is that it is an analytical

reason pushed to its extreme consequences. It begins from a most

detailed methodical analysis of elements — productive operation, social

and economic organization, structure and function. It then subordinates

these elements to a finality. Where does this finality come from? Who

formulates it and stipulates it? How and why? This is the gap and the

failure of this operational rationalism. Its tenets purport to extract

finality from the sequence of operations. Now, this is not so. Finality,

that is, the whole and the orientation of the whole, decides itself. To

say that it comes from the operations themselves, is to be locked into a

vicious circle: the analysis giving itself as its own aim, for its own

meaning. Finality is an object of decision. It is a strategy, more or

less justified by an ideology. Rationalism which purports to extract

from its own analyses the aim pursued by these analyses is itself an

ideology. The notion of system overlays that of strategy. To critical

analysis the system reveals itself as strategy, is unveiled as decision,

that is, as decided finality. It has been shown above how a class

strategy has oriented the analysis and division of urban reality, its

destruction and restitution; and projections on the society where such

strategic decisions have been taken.

However, from the point of view of a technicist rationalism, the results

on the ground of the processes examined above represent only chaos. In

the ‘reality’, which they critically observe — suburbs, urban fabric and

surviving cores — these rationalists do not recognize the conditions of

their own existence. What is before them is only contradiction and

disorder. Only, in fact, dialectical reason can master (by reflective

thought, by practice) multiple and paradoxically contradictory

processes.

How to impose order in this chaotic confusion? It is in this way that

organizational rationalism poses its problem. This is not a normal

disorder. How can it be established as norm and normality? This is

unconceivable. This disorder is unhealthy. The physician of modern

society see himself as the physician of a sick social space. Finality?

The cure? It is coherence. The rationalist will establish or

re-establish coherence into a chaotic reality which he observes and

which offers itself up to his action. This rationalist may not realize

that coherence is a form, therefore a means rather than an end, and that

he will systematize the logic of the habitat underlying the disorder and

apparent incoherence, that he will take as point of departure towards

the coherence of the real, his coherent approaches. There is in fact no

single or unitary approach in planning thought, but several tendencies

identifiable according to this operational rationalism. Among these

tendencies, some assert themselves against, others for rationalism by

leading it to extreme formulations. What interferes with the general

tendencies of those involved with planning is understanding only what

they can translate in terms of graphic operations: seeing, feeling at

the end of a pencil, drawing.

One can therefore identify the following:

(1) The planning of men of good will (architects and writers). Their

thinking and projects imply a certain philosophy. Generally they

associate themselves to an old classical and liberal humanism. This not

without a good dose of nostalgia. One wishes to build to the ‘human

scale’, for ‘people’. These humanists present themselves at one and the

same time as doctors of society and creators of new social relations.

Their ideology, or rather, their idealism often come from agrarian

models, adopted without reflection: the village, the community, the

neighbourhood, the townsman- citizen who will be endowed with civic

buildings, etc. They want to build buildings and cities to the ‘human

scale’, ‘to its measure’, without conceiving that in the modern world

‘man’ has changed scale and the measure of yesteryear (village and city)

has been transformed beyond measure. At best, this tradition leads to a

formalism (the adoption of models which had neither content or meaning),

or to an aestheticism, that is, the adoption for their beauty of ancient

models which are then thrown as fodder to feed the appetites of

consumers.

(2) The planning of these administrators linked to the public (State)

sector. It sees itself as scientific. It relies sometimes on a science,

sometimes on studies which call themselves synthetic (pluri or

multidisciplinary). This scientism, which accompanies the deliberate

forms of operational rationalism, tends to neglect the so-called ‘human

factor’. It divides itself into tendencies. Sometimes through a

particular science, a technique takes over and becomes the point of

departure; it is generally a technique of communication and circulation.

One extrapolates from a science, from a fragmentary analysis of the

reality considered. One optimizes information and communication into a

model. This technocratic and systematized planning, with its myths and

its ideology (namely, the primacy of technique), would not hesitate to

raze to the ground what is left of the city to leave way for cars,

ascendant and descendant networks of communication and information. The

models elaborated can only be put into practice by eradicating from

social existence the very ruins of what was the city.

Sometimes, on the contrary, information and analytical knowledge coming

from different sciences are oriented towards a synthetic finality. For

all that, one should not conceive an urban life having at its disposal

information provided by the sciences of society. These two aspects are

confounded in the conception of centres of decision-making, a global

vision, planning already unitary in its own way, linked to a philosophy,

to a conception of society, a political strategy, that is, a global and

total system.

(3) The planning of developers. They conceive and realize without hiding

it, for the market, with profit in mind. What is new and recent is that

they are no longer selling housing or buildings, but planning. With or

without ideology, planning becomes an exchange value. The project of

developers presents itself as opportunity and place of privilege: the

place of happiness in a daily life miraculously and marvellously

transformed. The make-believe world of habitat is inscribed in the logic

of habitat and their unity provides a social practice which does not

need a system. Hence these advertisements, which are already famous and

which deserve posterity because publicity itself becomes ideology. Parly

II (a new development) ‘gives birth to a new an of living’, a ‘new

lifestyle’. Daily life resembles a fairy tale. ‘Leave your coat in the

cloakroom and feeling lighter, do your shopping after having left the

children in the nurseries of the shopping mall, meet your friends, have

a drink together at the drugstore ...’ Here is the fulfilled

make-believe of the joy of living. Consumer society is expressed by

orders: the order of these elements on the ground, the order to be

happy. Here is the context, the setting, the means of your happiness. If

you do not know how to grasp the happiness offered so as to make it your

own — don’t insist!

A global strategy, that is, what is already an unitary system and total

planning, is outlined through these various tendencies. Some will put

into practice and will concertize a directed consumer society. They will

build not only commercial centres, but also centres of privileged

consumption: the renewed city. They will by making ‘legible’ an ideology

of happiness through consumption, joy by planning adapted to its new

mission. This planning programmes a daily life generating satisfactions

— (especially for receptive and participating women). A programmed and

computerized consumption will become the rule and norm for the whole

society. Others will erect decision-making centres, concentrating the

means of power: information, training, organization, operation. And

still: repression (constraints, including violence) and persuasion

(ideology and advertising). Around these centres will be apportioned on

the ground, in a dispersed order, according to the norms of foreseen

constraints, the peripheries, de-urbanized urbanization. All the

conditions come together thus for a perfect domination, for a refined

exploitation of people as producers, consumers of products, consumers of

space.

The convergence of these projects therefore entails the greatest

dangers, for it raises politically the problem of urban society. It is

possible that new contradictions will arise from these projects,

impeding convergence. If a unitary strategy was to be successfully

constituted, it might prove irretrievable.

Philosophy and the City

Having contextualized the ‘cavalier’ attitude mentioned at the

beginning, particular aspects and problems concerning the urban can now

be emphasized. In order to take up a radically critical analysis and to

deepen the urban problematic, philosophy will be the starting point.

This will come as a surprise. And yet, has not frequent reference to

philosophy been made in the preceding pages? The purpose is not to

present a philosophy of the city, but on the contrary, to refute such an

approach by giving back to the whole of philosophy its place in history:

that of a project of synthesis and totality which philosophy as such

cannot accomplish. After which the analytical will be examined, that is,

the ways fragmentary sciences have highlighted or partitioned urban

reality. The rejection of the synthetic propositions of these

specialized, fragmentary, and particular sciences will enable us — to

pose better — in political terms — the problem of synthesis. During the

course of this progress one will find again features and problems which

will reappear more dearly. In particular, the opposition between use

value (the city and urban life) and exchange value (spaces bought and

sold, the consumption of products, goods, places and signs) will be

highlighted.

For philosophical meditation aiming at a totality through speculative

systematization, that is, classical philosophy from Plato to Hegel, the

city was much more than a secondary theme, an object among others. The

links between philosophical thought and urban life appear clearly upon

reflection, although they need to be made explicit. The city and the

town were not for philosophers and philosophy a simple objective

condition, a sociological context, an exterior element. Philosophers

have thought the city: they have brought to language and concept urban

life.

Let us leave aside questions posed by the oriental city, the Asiatic

mode of production, ‘town and country’ relations in this mode of

production, and lastly the formation of ideologies (philosophies) on

this base. Only the Greek and Roman antique city from which are derived

societies and civilizations known as ‘Western’ will be considered. This

city is generally the outcome of a synoecism, the coming together of

several villages and tribes established on this territory. This unit

allows the development of division of labour and landed property (money)

without however destroying the collective, or rather ‘communal’ property

of the land. In this way a community is constituted at the heart of

which is a minority of free citizens who exercise power over other

members of the city: women, children, slaves, foreigners. The city links

its elements associated with the form of the communal property (‘common

private property’, or ‘privatized appropriation’) of the active

citizens, who are in opposition to the slaves. This form of association

constitutes a democracy, the elements, of which are strictly

hierarchical and submitted to the demands of the oneness of the city

itself. It is the democracy of non-freedom (Marx). During the course of

the history of the antique city, private property pure and simple (of

money, land and slaves) hardens, concentrates, without abolishing the

rights of the city over its territory.

The separation between town and country takes place among the first and

fundamental divisions of labour, with the distribution of tasks

according to age and sex (the biological division of labour), with the

organization of labour according to tools and skills (technical

division). The social division of labour between town and country

corresponds to the separation between material and intellectual labour,

and consequently, between the natural and the spiritual. Intellectual

labour is incumbent upon the city: functions of organization and

direction, political and military activities, elaboration of theoretical

knowledge (philosophy and sciences). The whole divides itself,

separations are established, including the separation between the

Physics and the Logos, between theory and practice, and in practice, the

separations between between praxis (action on human groups), poiesis

(creation of ‘oeuvres’), techne (activities endowed with techniques and

directed towards product). The countryside, both practical reality and

representation, will carry images of nature, of being, of the innate.

The city will carry images of effort, of will, of subjectivity, of

contemplation, without these representations becoming disjointed from

real activities. From these images confronted against each other great

symbolisms will emerge. Around the Greek city, above it, there is the

cosmos, luminous and ordered spaces, the apogee of place. The city has

as centre a hole which is sacred and damned, inhabited by the forces of

death and life, times dark with effort and ordeals, the world. The

Apollonian spirit triumphs in the Greek city, although not without

struggle, as the luminous symbol of reason which regulates, while in the

Etruscan-Roman city what governs is the demonic side of the urban. But

the philosopher and philosophy attempt to reclaim or create totality.

The philosopher does not acknowledge separation, he does not conceive

that the world, life, society, the cosmos (and later, history) can no

longer make a Whole.

Philosophy is thus born from the city, with its division of labour and

multiple modalities. It becomes itself a specialized activity in its own

right. But it does not become fragmentary, for otherwise it would blend

with science and the sciences, themselves in a process of emerging. just

as philosophy refuses to engage in the opinions of craftsmen, soldiers

and politicians, it refutes the reasons and arguments of specialists. It

has totality as fundamental interest for its own sake, which is

recovered or created by the system, that is, the oneness of thought and

being, of discourse and act, of nature and contemplation, of the world

(or the cosmos) and human reality. This does not exclude but includes

meditation on differences (between Being and thought, between what comes

from nature and what comes from the city, etc.). As Heidegger expressed

it, the logos (element, context, mediation and end for philosophers and

urban life) was simultaneously the following: to put forward, gather

together and collect, then to recollect and collect oneself, speak and

say, disclose. This gathering is the harvest and even its conclusion.

‘One goes to collect things and brings them back. Here sheltering

dominates and with it in turn dominates the wish to preserve ... The

harvest is in itself a choice of what needs a shelter.’ Thus, the

harvest is already thought out. That which is gathered is put in

reserve. To say is the act of collection which gathers together. This

assumes the presence of ‘somebody’ before which, for whom and by whom is

expressed the being of what is thus successful. This presence is

produced with clarity (or as Heidegger says, with ‘non-mystery’). The

city linked to philosophy thus gathers by and in its logos the wealth of

the territory, dispersed activities and people, the spoken and the

written (of which each assumes already its collection and recollection).

It makes simultaneous what in the countryside and according to nature

takes place and passes, and is distributed according to cycles and

rhythms. It grasps and defends ‘everything’. If philosophy and the city

are thus associated in the dawning logos (reason), it is not within a

subjectivity akin to the Cartesian ‘cogito’. If they constitute a

system, it is not in the usual way and in the current meaning of the

term.

To the organization of the city itself can be linked the primordial

whole of urban form and its content, of philosophical form and its

meaning: a privileged centre, the core of a political space, the seat of

the logos governed by the logos before which citizens are ‘equal’, the

regions and distributions of space having a rationality justified before

the logos (for it and by it).

The logos of the Greek city cannot be separated from the philosophical

logos. The oeuvre of the city continues and is focused in the work of

philosophers, who gather opinions and viewpoints, various oeuvres, and

think them simultaneously and collect differences into a totality: urban

places in the cosmos, times and rhythms of the city and that of the

world (and inversely). It is therefore only for a superficial

historicity that philosophy brings to language and concept urban life,

that of the city. In truth, the city as emergence, language, meditation

comes to theoretical light by means of the philosopher and philosophy.

After this first interpretation of the internal link between the city

and philosophy, let us go to the European Middle Ages. It begins from

the countryside. The Roman city and the Empire have been destroyed by

Germanic tribes which are both primitive communities and military

organizations. The feudal property of land is the outcome of the

dissolution of this sovereignty (city, property, relations of

production). Serfs replace slaves. With the rebirth of cities there is

on the one hand the feudal organization of property and possession of

land (peasant communities having a customary possession and lords having

an ‘eminent’ domain as it will later be called), and on the other hand,

a corporate organization of crafts and urban property. Although at the

beginning seigneurial tenure of land dominates it, this double hierarchy

contains the demise of this form of property and the supremacy of wealth

in urban property from which arises a deep conflict, basic to medieval

society. ‘The necessity to ally themselves against the plunderer lords

associated themselves together; the need for common market halls at a

time when industry was craft, when serfs in breach of their bondage and

in competition with each other were flooding to the increasingly rich

cities, the whole of feudal organization was giving birth to the

corporations (or guilds). Small capitals, slowly saved by isolated

craftsmen, their numbers stable in the middle of a growing population,

developed a system of journeymen and apprentices which established in

the cities a hierarchy similar to that of the countryside’ (Marx). In

these conditions theology subordinates philosophy. The latter no longer

meditates on the city. The philosopher (the theologian) deliberates upon

the double hierarchy. He gives it shape, with or without raking

conflicts into account. The symbols and notions relative to the cosmos

(spaces, the hierarchy of matter in that space) and to the world (the

actualization of finished matter, hierarchies in time, descent or fall,

ascension and redemption) erase the consciousness of the city. From the

moment when there are not two but three hierarchies (feudal landed

property, guild organization, the king and his State apparatus), thought

takes again a critical dimension. The philosopher and philosophy find

themselves again, no longer having to choose between the Devil and the

Lord. Philosophy will not however recognize its link to the city,

although the rise of rationalism accompanies the rise of capitalism

(commercial and banking, then industrial), and the development of

cities. This rationalism is attached either to the State or to the

individual.

For Hegel, at the height of speculative, systematic and contemplative

philosophy, the unity between the perfect Thing, chat is, the Greek

city, and the Idea, which animates society and the State, this admirable

whole, has been irremediably broken by historic becoming. In modern

society, the State subordinates these elements and materials, including

the city. The latter, however remains as a sort of subsystem in the

total philosophico-political system, with the system of needs, that of

rights and obligations, and that of the family and estates (crafts and

guilds), that of art and aesthetics, etc.

For Hegel, philosophy and the ‘real’ (practical and social) are not, or

rather, are no longer external to each other. Separations disappear.

Philosophy is not satisfied to meditate upon the real, to attempt the

link up of the real and the ideal: it fulfills itself by achieving the

ideal: the rational. The real is not satisfied with giving excuse to

reflection, to knowledge, to consciousness. During a history which has a

meaning — which has this meaning — it becomes rational. Thus the real

and the rational tend towards each other; each from their own side moves

towards an identity thus acknowledged. The rational is basically

philosophy, the philosophical system. The real is society and law and

the State which cements the edifice by crowning it. Consequently, in the

modern State, the philosophical system, becomes real: in Hegel’s

philosophy, the real acknowledge the rational. The system has a double

side, philosophical and political. Hegel discovers the historical moment

of this shift from the rational into the real and vice versa. He brings

to light identity at the moment when history produces it. Philosophy

achieves itself There is for Hegel, as Marx will articulate it, at one

and the same time a becoming of a philosophy of the world and a becoming

of the world of philosophy. An initial repercussion: there can no longer

be a divide between philosophy and reality (historical, social,

political). A second repercussion: the philosopher no longer has

independence: he accomplishes a public function, as do other officials.

Philosophy and the philosopher integrate themselves (by mediation of the

body of civil servants and the middle class) in this rational reality of

the State — no longer in the city, which was only a thing (perfect, it

is true, but only thing), denied by a higher and more inclusive

rationality.

One knows that Marx neither refuted nor refused the essential Hegelian

affirmation: Philosophy achieves itself. The philosopher no longer has a

right to independence vis-a-vis social practice. Philosophy inserts

itself into it. There is indeed a simultaneous becoming-philosophy of

the world and a becoming-world of philosophy, and therefore a tendency

towards wholeness (knowledge and acknowledgement of non-separation). And

yet Marx thrusts Hegelianism aside. History does not achieve itself.

Wholeness is not reached, nor are contradictions resolved. It is not by

and in the State, with bureaucracy as social support, that philosophy

can be realized. The proletariat has this historic mission: only it can

put an end to separations (alienations). Its mission has a double facet:

to destroy bourgeois society by building another society — abolish

philosophical speculation and abstraction, the alienating contemplation

and systematization, to accomplish the philosophical project of the

human being. It is from industry, from industrial production, from its

relation with productive forces and labour, not from a moral or

philosophical judgement, that the working class gets its possibilities.

One must tum this world upside down: the meeting of the rational and the

real will happen in another society.

The history of philosophy in relation to the city is far from being

accomplished within this perspective. Indeed, this history would also

suggest the analysis of themes whose emergence are linked to the

representation of nature and the earth, to agriculture, to the

sacralization of the land (and to its desacralization). Such themes,

once born, are displaced and represented sometimes far from their

starting points in time and space. The points of imputation and impact,

conditions, implications, consequences do not coincide. The themes are

enunciated and inserted into social contexts and categories different

from those which distinguish their emergence, inasmuch as one can speak

of ‘categories’. The urban problematic, for example that which refers to

the destiny of the Greek city, used to disengage itself or hide itself,

cosmic themes anterior or exterior to this city; the visions of a

cyclical becoming or of the hidden immobility of the human being. The

purpose of these remarks is to show that the relation considered has yet

to receive an explicit formulation.

What relation is there today between philosophy and the city? An

ambiguous one. The most emminent contemporary philosophers do not borrow

their themes from the city. Bachelard has left wonderful pages on the

house. Heidegger has meditated on the Greek city and the logos, and on

the Greek temple. Nevertheless the metaphors which resume Heideggerian

thought do not come from the city but from a primary and earlier life:

the ‘shepherds of being’, the ‘forest paths’. It seems that it is from

the Dwelling and the opposition between Dwelling and Wandering that

Heidegger borrows his themes. As for so-called ‘existential’ thought, it

is based on individual consciousness, on the subject and the ordeals of

subjectivity, rather than on a practical, historical and social reality.

However, it is not proven that philosophy has said its last word on the

city. For example, one can perfectly conceive of a phenomenological

description of urban life. Or construct a semiology of urban reality

which would correspond for the present city to what was the logos in the

Greek city. Only philosophy and the philosopher propose a totality, the

search for a global conception or vision. To consider ‘the city’ is it

not already to extend philosophy, to reintroduce philosophy into the

city or the city into philosophy? It is true that the concept of

totality is in danger of remaining empty if it is only philosophical.

Thus is formulated a problematic which does not reduce itself to the

city but which concerns the world, history, ‘man’.

Moreover, a certain number of contemporary thinkers have pondered on the

city. They see themselves, more or less clearly, as philosophers of the

city. For this reason these thinkers want to inspire architects and

planners, and make the link between urban preoccupations and the old

humanism. But these philosophers lack breadth. The philosophers who

claim to think the city and put forward a philosophy of the city by

extending traditional philosophy, discourse on the ‘essence’ of the city

or on the city as ‘spirit’, as ‘life’ or ‘life force’, as being or

‘organic whole’. In brief, sometime as subject, sometime as abstract

system. This leads to nothing, thus a double conclusion. Firstly, the

history of philosophical thought can and must reclaim itself from its

relation with the city (the condition and content of this thought). It

is a way of putting this history into perspective. Secondly, this

articulation figures in the problematic of philosophy and the city

(knowledge, the formulation of the urban problematic, a notion of this

context, a strategy to envisage). Philosophical concepts are not

operative and yet they situate the city and the urban — and the whole of

society — as a totality, over and above analytical fragmentations. What

is proclaimed here of philosophy and its history could equally be

asserted for art and its history.

Fragmentary Sciences and Urban Reality

During the course of the nineteenth century, the sciences of social

reality are constituted against philosophy which strives to grasp the

global (by enclosing a real totality into a rational systematization).

These sciences fragment reality in order to analyse it, each having

their method or methods, their sector or domain. After a century, it is

still under discussion whether these sciences bring distinct

enlightenment to a unitary reality, or whether the analytical

fragmemation chat they use corresponds to objective differences,

articulations, levels and dimensions.

One cannot claim that the city has escaped the researches of historians,

economists, demographers and sociologists. Each of these specialities

contributes to a science of the city. It has already been ascertained

and corroborated that history elucidates better the genesis of the city,

and especially identifies better than any other science, the problematic

of urban sociecy. Inversely, there is also no doubt that the knowledge

of urban reality can relate to the possible (or possibilities) and not

only to what is finished or from the past. If one wishes to build a

commercial or cultural centre, taking into account functional and

functioning needs, the economist has his word to say. In the analysis of

urban reality, the geographer, the climatologist, the botanist also

intervene. The environment, global and confused concept, fragments

itself according to these specialities. In relation to the future and

the conditions of the future, mathematical calculations provide

essential evidence. Yet, what gathers these facts together? A project,

or in other words, a strategy. On the other hand, a doubt remains and is

even confirmed. Is the city the sum of indices and facts, of variables

and parameters, of correlations, this collection of facts, of

descriptions, of fragmentary analyses, because it is fragmentary? These

analytical divisions do not lack rigour, but as has already been said,

rigour is uninhabitable. The problem coincides with the general

questioning of the specialist sciences. On the one hand, the only

approach which seeks to find the global reminds us strangely of

philosophy when it is not openly philosophical. On the ocher hand, the

partial offers more positive but scattered facts. Is it possible to

extract from fragmentary sciences a science of the city? No more than a

holistic science of society, or of ‘man’, or of human and social

reality. On the one hand, a concept without content, on the other,

content or contents without concept. Either one declares that the

‘city’, the urban reality as such, does not exist but is only a series

of correlations. The ‘subject’ is suppressed. Or the continues to assert

the existence of the global: one approaches and locates it, either by

extrapolations in the name of a discipline, or by wagering on an

‘interdisciplinary’ tactic. One does not grasp it except by an approach

which transcends divisions.

Upon closer examination, one realizes that specialists who have studied

urban reality have almost always (except in the case of a logically

extremist positivism) introduced a global representation. They can

hardly go without a synthesis, settling for a quantity of knowledge, of

dividing and splitting urban reality. As specialists, they then claim to

be able to go legitimately from their analyses to a final synthesis

whose principle is borrowed from their speciality. By means of a

discipline or interdisciplinary endeavour, they see themselves as ‘men

of synthesis’. More often, they conceptualize the city (and society) as

an organism. Historians have frequently linked these entities to an

‘evolution’ or to an ‘historical development’: cities. Sociologists have

conceptualized them as a ‘collective being’, as a ‘social organism’.

Organicism, evolutionism, continuism, have therefore dominated

representations of the city elaborated by specialists who believed

themselves to be scholars and only scholars. Philosophers without

knowing it, they leapt, without legitimizing their approach, from the

partial to the global as well as from fact to right.

Is there a dilemma? An impasse? Yes and no. Yes, there is an obstacle,

or if one wants another metaphor, a hole is dug. No. One should be able

to cross the obstacle because there is a quite recent practice which

already spills over the speculative problem, or the partial facts of the

real problem, and which tends to become global by gathering all the

facts of experience and knowledge, namely, planning. What is involved

here is nor a philosophical view on praxis, but the face that so-called

planning thought becomes practice at a global level. For a few years now

planning has gone beyond partial techniques and applications (regulation

and administration of built space) to become a social practice

concerning and of interest to the whole of society. The critical

examination of this social practice (the focus being on critique) cannot

not allow theory to resolve a theoretical difficulty arising from a

theory which has separated itself from practice.

As social practice, planning (which it becomes without having reached a

level of elaboration and action, which indeed it can only reach through

confrontation with political strategies) has already crossed the initial

stage, namely, the confrontation and communication of experts, and the

gathering of fragmentary analyses, in brief, what is called the

interdisciplinary. Either the planner is inspired by the practice of

partial knowledge which he applies, or he puts into action hypotheses or

projects at the level of a global reality. In the first case, the

application of partial knowledge gives results which can determine the

relative importance of this knowledge: these results, experimentally

revealing absences and lacunae, enable us to specify on the ground what

is lacking. In the second case, the failure (or success) allows the

discernment of what is ideological in the presuppositions, and to

identify what they define at the global level. Thus, what is effectively

involved is a critical examination of the activity called ‘planning’,

and not a belief in the word of planners or the unchallenged acceptance

of their propositions and decisions. In particular, the displacements

and distortions between practice and theory (ideology), between partial

knowledge and results, come to the fore instead of being hidden. As does

the questioning over use and users.

Philosophy of the City and Planning Ideology

In order to formulate the problematic of the city (to articulate

problems by linking them), the following must be clearly distinguished:

The philosophers and philosophies of the city who define it

speculatively as whole by defining the ‘homo urbanicus’ as man in

general, the world or the cosmos, society, history.

Partial knowledge concerning the city (its elements, functions,

structures).

The technical application of this knowledge (in a particular context

defined by strategic and political decisions).

Planning as doctrine, that is, as ideology, interpreting partial

knowledge, justifying its application and raising these (by

extrapolation) to a poorly based or legitimated totality.

The aspects or elements which this analysis distinguishes do not appear

separately in various works; they interest, reiforcing or neutralizing

each other. Plato proposes a concept of the city and ideal town in

Critias. In The Republic and The Laws, Platonic utopia is tempered by

very concrete analyses. It is the same for Aristode’s political writings

which study the constitution of Athens and other Greek cities.

Today, Lewis Mumford and G. Bardet among others still imagine a city

made up not of townspeople, but of free citizens, free from the division

of labour, social classes and class struggles, making up a community,

freely associated for the management of this community. As philosophers,

they make up a model of the ideal city. They conceive freedom in the

twentieth century according to the freedom of the Greek city (this is an

ideological travesty: only the city as such possessed freedom and not

individuals and groups). Thus they think of the modern city according to

a model of the antique city, which is at the same time identified with

the ideal and rational city. The agora, place and symbol of a democracy

limited to its citizens, and excluding women, slaves and foreigners,

remains for a particular philosophy of the city the symbol of urban

society in general. This is a typically ideological extrapolation. To

this ideology these philosophers add partial knowledge, this purely

ideological operation consisting in a passage (a leap), from the partial

to the whole, from the elementary to the total, from the relative to the

absolute. As for Le Corbusier, as philosopher of the city he describes

the relationship between the urban dweller and dwelling with nature,

air, sun, and trees, with cyclical time and the rhythms of the cosmos.

To this metaphysical vision, he adds an unquestionable knowledge of the

real problems of the modern city, a knowledge which gives rise to a

planning practice and an ideology, a functionalism which reduces urban

society to the achievement of a few predictable and prescribed functions

laid out on the ground by the architecture. Such an architect sees

himself as a ‘man of synthesis’, thinker and practitioner. He believes

in and wants to create human relations by defining them, by clearing

their environment and decor. Within this well-worn perspective, the

architect perceives and imagines himself as architect of the world,

human image of God the Creator.

Philosophy of the city (or if one wanes, urban ideology), was born as a

superstructure of society into which structures entered a certain type

of city. This philosophy, precious heritage of the past, extends itself

into speculations which often are travesties of science just because

they integrate a few bits of real knowledge.

Planning as ideology has acquired more and more precise definitions. To

study the problems of circulation, of the conveying of orders and

information in the great modern city, leads to real knowledge and to

technical applications. To claim that the city is defined as a network

of circulation and communication, as a centre of information and

decision-making, is an absolute ideology; this ideology proceeding from

a particularly arbitrary and dangerous reduction-extrapolation and using

terrorist means, see itself as total truth and dogma. It leads to a

planning of pipes, of roadworks and accounting, which one claims to

impose in the name of science and scientific rigour. Or even worse!

This ideology has two interdependent aspects, mental and social.

Mentally, it implies a theory of rationality and organization whose

expression date from around 1910, a transformation in contemporary

society (characterized by the beginning of a deep crisis and attempts to

resolve it by organizational methods, firstly the scale of the firm, and

then on a global scale). It is then that socially the notion of space

comes to the fore, relegating into shadow time and becoming. Planning as

ideology formulates all the problems of society into questions of space

and transposes all that comes from history and consciousness into

spatial terms. It is an ideology which immediately divides up. Since

society does not function in a satisfactory manner, could there not be a

pathology of space? Within this perspective, the virtually official

recognition of the priority of space over time is not conceived of as

indication of social pathology, as symptom among others of a reality

which engenders social disease. On the contrary, what are represented

are healthy and diseased spaces. The planner should be able to

distinguish between sick spaces and spaces linked to mental and social

health which are generators of this health. As physician of space, he

should have the capacity to conceive of an harmonious social space,

normal and normalizing. Its function would then be to grant to this

space (perchance identical to geometrical space, that of abstract

topologies) preexisting social realities.

The radical critique of philosophies of the city as well as of ideology

is vital, as much on the theoretical as on the practical level. It can

be made in the name of public health. However, it cannot be carried out

without extensive research, rigorous analyses and the patient study of

texts and contexts.

The Specificity of the City

A philosophy of the city answered questions raised by social practice in

precapiralisr societies (or if one prefers this terminology, in

pre-industrial societies). Planning as technique and ideology responds

to demands arising from this vast crisis of the city already referred

to, which starts with the rise of competitive and industrial capitalism

and which has never stopped getting deeper. This world crisis gives rise

to new aspects of urban reality. It sheds light on what was little or

poorly understood; it unveils what had been badly perceived. It forces

the reconsideration of not only the history of the city and knowledge of

the city, but also of the history of philosophy and that of an. Until

recently, theoretical thinking conceived the city as an entity, as an

organism and a whole among others, and this in the best of cases when it

was not being reduced to a partial phenomenon, to a secondary,

elementary or accidental aspect, of evolution and history. One would

elms see in it a simple result, a local effect reflecting purely and

simply general history. These representations, which are classified and

are given well-known terms (organicism, evolutionism, continuism), have

been previously criticized. They did not contain theoretical knowledge

of the city and did not lead to this knowledge; moreover, they blocked

at a quite basic level the enquiry; they were ideologies rather than

concepts and theories.

Only now are we beginning to grasp the specificity of the city (of urban

phenomena). The city always had relations with society as a whole, with

its constituting elements (countryside and agriculture, offensive and

defensive force, political power, States, etc.), and with its history.

it changes when society as a whole changes. Yet, the city’s

transformations are not the passive outcomes of changes in the social

whole. The city also depends as essentially on relations of immediacy,

of direct relations between persons and groups which make up society

(families, organized bodies, crafts and guilds, etc.). Furthermore, it

is not reduced to the organization of these immediate and direct

relations, nor its metamorphoses to their changes. It is situated at an

interface, half-way between what is called the near order (relations of

individuals in groups of variable size, more or less organized and

structured and the relations of these groups among themselves), and the

far order, that of society, regulated by large and powerful institutions

(Church and State), by a legal code formalized or not, by a ‘culture’

and significant ensembles endowed with powers, by which the far order

projects itself at this ‘higher’ level and imposes itself. Abstract,

formal, supra-sensible and transcending in appearances, it is not

conceptualized beyond ideologies (religious and political). It includes

moral and legal principles. This far order projects itself into the

practico-material reality and becomes visible by writing itself within

this reality. It persuades through and by the near order, which confirms

its compelling power. It becomes apparent by and in immediacy. The city

is a mediation among mediations. Containing the near order, it supports

it; it maintains relations of production and property; it is the place

of their reproduction. Contained in the far order, it supports it; it

incarnates it; it projects it over a terrain (the site) and on a plan,

that of immediate life; it inscribes it, prescribes it, writes it. A

text in a context so vast and ungraspable as such except by reflection.

And thus the city is an oeuvre, closer to a work of art than to a simple

material product. If there is production of the city, and social

relations in the city, it is a production and reproduction of human

beings by human beings, rather than a production of objects. The city

has a history; it is the work of a history, chat is, of dearly defined

people and groups who accomplish this oeuvre, in historical conditions.

Conditions which simultaneously enable and limit possibilities, are

never sufficient to explain what was born of them, in them, by them. It

was in this way that the city created by the Western Middle Ages was

animated and dominated by merchants and bankers, this city was their

oeuvre. Can the historian consider it as a simple object of commerce, a

simple opportunity for lucre? Absolutely not, precisely not. These

merchants and bankers acted to promote exchange and generalize it, to

extend the domain of exchange value; and yet for them the city was much

more use value than exchange value. These merchants of Italian, Flemish,

English and French cities loved their cities like a work of art and

adorned them with every kind of works of an. So that, paradoxically, the

city of merchants and bankers remains for us the type and model of an

urban real icy whereby use (pleasure, beauty, ornamentation of meeting

places) still wins over lucre and profit, exchange value, the

requirements and constraints of markets. At the same time, wealth

arising from commerce in goods and money, the power of gold, the

cynicism of this power, are also inscribed in this city and in it

prescribe an order. So that, as such it still remains for some model and

prototype.

By taking ‘production’ in its widest sense (the production of oeuvres

and of social relations), there has been in history the production of

cities as there has been production of knowledge, culture, works of art

and civilization, and there also has been, of course, production of

material goods and practico-material objects. These modalities of

production cannot be disjointed unless one has the right to confuse them

by reducing differences. The city was and remains object, but not in the

way of particular, pliable and instrumental object: such as a pencil or

a sheet of paper. Its objectivity, or ‘objectality’, might rather be

closer to that of the language which individuals and groups receive

before modifying it, or of language (a particular language, the work of

a particular society, spoken by particular groups). One could also

compare this ‘objectality’ to that of a cultural reality, such as the

written book, instead of old abstract object of the philosophers or the

immediate and everyday object. Moreover, one must take precautions. If I

compare the city to a book, to a writing (a semiological system), I do

not have the right to forget the aspect of mediation. I can separate it

neither from what it contains nor from what contains it, by isolating it

as a complete system. Moreover, at best, the city constitutes a

sub-system, a sub-whole. On this book, with this writing, are projected

mental and social forms and structures. Now, analysis can achieve this

context from the text, but it is not given. Intellectual operations and

reflective approaches are necessary to achieve it (deduction, induction,

translation and transduction). The whole is not immediately present in

this wrinen text, the city. There are other levels of reality which do

not become transparent by definition. The city writes and assigns, that

is, it signifies, orders, stipulates. What? That is to be discovered by

reflection. This text has passed through idealogies, as it also

‘reflects’ them. The far order projects itself in/on the near order.

However, the near order does not reflect transparently the far order.

The later subordinates the immediate through mediations. it does not

yield itself up. Moreover, it hides itself without discovering itself.

This is how it acts without one having the right to speak of a

transcendence of order, the Global or the Total.

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’ can be clearly identified without separating them. There is no

oeuvre without a regulated succession of acts and actions, of decisions

and conduces, messages and codes. Nor can an oeuvre exist without

things, without something to shape, without practico-material reality,

without a site, without a ‘nature’, a countryside, an environment.

Social relations are achieved from the sensible. They cannot be reduced

to this sensible world, and yet they do not float in air, they do not

disappear into transcendence. If social reality suggests forms and

relations, if it cannot be conceived in a way homologous to the

isolated, sensible or technical object, it does not survive without

ties, without attachment to objects and things. We must insist on this

methodologically and theoretically important point. There is cause and

reason to distinguish between material and social morphologies. We

should perhaps here introduce a distinction between the city, a present

and immediate reality, a practico-material and architectural fact, and

the urban, a social reality made up of relations which are to be

conceived of, conscructed or reconstructed by thought. This distinction

none the less reveals itself to be dangerous and the designation

proposed cannot be handled without risk. Thus designated, the urban

seems not to need land and material morphology and is outlined according

to a speculative mode of existence of entities, spirits and souls, freed

from attachments and inscriptions; a kind of imaginary transcendence. If

one adopts this terminology, the relations between the city and the

urban will have to be determined with the greatest care, by avoiding

separation as well as confusion, and metaphysics as well as reduction to

the immediate and tangible. Urban life, urban sociecy, in a word, the

urban, cannot go without a practico-material base, a morphology. They

have it and do not have it. If they do not have it, if the urban and

urban society are conceived without this basis, it is that they are

perceived as possibilities, it is chat the virtualities of actual

society are seeking, so to speak, their incorporation and incarnation

through knowledge and planning thought: through our ‘reflections’. If

they do not find them, these possibilities go into decline and are bound

to disappear. The urban is not a soul, a spirit, a philosophical entity.

Continuities and Discontinuities

Organicism and its implications, namely the simplifying evolutionism of

many historians and the naive continuism of many sociologists, has

disguised the specific features of urban reality. The acts or events

‘producers’ of this reality as formation and social oeuvre escaped

knowledge. In this sense, to produce is to create: to bring into being

‘something’ which did nor exist before the productive activity. For a

long time knowledge has hesitated in the face of creation. Either

creation appears to be irrational, spontaneity swelling up from the

unknown and the unknowable. Or else it is denied and what comes to be is

reduced to what was already existing. Science wants itself to be a

science of determinisms, a knowledge of constraints. It abandons to

philosophers the exploration of births, of decline, transitions,

disappearances. In this, those who challenge philosophy abandon the idea

of creation. The study of urban phenomena is linked to overcoming these

obstacles and dilemmas, to the solution of these internal conflicts by

reason which knows.

As much in the past as now, history and sociology conceived as an

organicist model have not known better how to apprehend differences.

Abusive reductions take place to the detriment of these differences and

to the detriment of creation. It is quite easy to grasp the link between

these reductive operations. The specific flees before simplifying

schematas. In the rather troubled light shed by many confused crises

(such as the city and the urban), among the crevices of a ‘reality’

which too often one believes to be as full as an egg or as a entirely

written page, analysis can now perceive why and how global processes

(economic, social, political, cultural) have formed urban space and

shaped the city, without creative action arising instantaneously and

deductively from these processes. Indeed, if they have influenced urban

rhythms and spaces, it is by enabling groups to insert themselves, to

cake charge of them, to appropriate them; and this by inventing, by

sculpting space (to use a metaphor), by giving themselves rhythms. Such

groups have also been innovative in how to live, to have a family, to

raise and educate children, to leave a greater or lesser place to women,

to use and transmit wealth. These transformations of everyday life

modified urban reality, not without having from it their motivations.

The city was at one and the same rime the place and the milieu, the

theatre and the stake of these complex interactions.

The introduction of temporal and spatial discontinuities in the theory

of the city (and the urban), in history and sociology, does not give one

the right to abuse it. Separations must not be substituted for

organicism and continuism by consecrating them by theory. If the city

appears as a specific level of social reality, general processes (of

which the most important and accessible were the generalization of

commercial exchanges, industrialization in such a global context, the

formation of competitive capitalism), did not take place above this

specific mediation. Moreover, the level of immediate relations, personal

and interpersonal (the family, the neighbourhood, crafts and guilds, the

division of labour between crafts, etc.) is only separated from urban

reality through an abstraction: the correct approach of knowledge cannot

change this abstraction into separation. Reflection emphasizes

articulations so that delineations do not disarticulate the real but

follow articulations. The methodological rule is to avoid confusion in

an illusory continuity as well as separations or absolute

discontinuities. Consequently, the study of articulations between the

levels of reality enables us to demonstrate the distortions and

discrepancies between levels rather than to blurr them.

The city is transformed not only because of relatively continuous

‘global processes’ (such as the growth of material production over a

long period of time with its consequences for exchanges, or the

development of rationality) but also in relation to profound

transformations in the mode of production, in the relations between

•town and country’, in the relations of class and property. The correct

approach consists in going from the most general knowledge to that which

concerns historical processes and discontinuities, their projection or

refraction onto the city and conversely, particular and specific

knowledge of urban reality to its global context.

The city and the urban cannot be understood without institutions

springing from relations of class and property. The city itself,

perpetual oeuvre and act, gives rise to specific institutions: that is,

municipal institutions. The most general institutions, those which

belong to the State, to the dominant religion and ideology have their

seat in the political, military and religious city. They coexist with

properly urban, administrative, and cultural institutions. Hence a

number of remarkable continuities through changes in society.

One knows that there was and there still is the oriental city,

expression and projection on the ground, effect and cause, of the

Asiatic mode of production; in this mode of production State power,

resting on the city, organizes economically a more or less extensive

agrarian zone, regulates and controls water, irrigation and drainage,

the use of land, in brief, agricultural production. There was in the era

of slavery, a city which organized its agricultural zone through

violence and by juridical rationality, but which undermined its own base

by replacing free peasants (landowners) with latifundial type

properties. In the West there was also the medieval city, rooted in a

feudal mode of production where agriculture was predominant, but which

was also place of commerce, theatre of class struggle between an

emerging bourgeoisie and territorial feudalism, the point of impact and

lever of royal State action. Finally, in the West, and in North America,

there has been the capitalist, commercial and industrial city, more or

less delimited by the political State whose formation accompanied the

rise of capitalism and whose bourgeoisie knew how to appropriate the

management of the whole of society.

Discontinuities are not only situated between urban formations, but also

between the most general of social relations, and the immediate

relations of individuals and groups (between codes and sub-codes). The

medieval city has however lasted for almost eight centuries. The rupture

of the big city tends to disintegrate urban cores of medieval origins,

although these persist in many small or medium-sized towns. Many urban

centres, which today perpetuate or protect the image of centrality

(which might have disappeared without them) are of very ancient origins.

This can explain without inasmuch legitimizing the illusion of

continuism and evolutionary ideology. This illusion and this ideology

have disguised the dialectical movement in the metamorphoses of cities

and the urban, and particularly in the relations of

‘continuity-discontinuity’. In the course of development some forms

change themselves into functions and enter structures which take them

back and transform them. Thus the extension of commercial exchanges from

the European Middle Ages onwards, contributes to this extraordinary

formation, the merchant city (integrating completely the merchants

established around the market square and market hall). Since

industrialization these local and localized markets have only one

function in urban life, in the relations of the city with the

surrounding countryside. A form which has become function enters into

new structures. And yet, planners have recently come to believe that

they have invented the commercial centre. Their thinking progressed from

that of a denuded space, reduced to a residential function, to that of a

commercial centrality which brought a difference, an enrichment. But

planners were only rediscovering the medieval city laid bare of its

historical relation to the countryside, of the struggle between the

bourgeoisie and feudalism, of the political relation with a royal and

despotic State, and as a consequence reduced to the unifunctionality of

local exchanges.

Forms, structures, urban functions (in the city, in the relations of the

city to the territory influenced or managed by it, in the relations with

society and State) acted upon each other modifying themselves, a

movement which thought can now reconstruct and master. Each urban

formation knew an ascent, an apogee, a decline. Its fragments and debris

were later used for/in other formations. Considered in its historical

movement, at its specific level (above and beyond global

transformations, hut above immediate and locally rooted relations, often

linked to the consecration of the ground, and therefore durable and

quasi-permanent in appearance), the city has gone through critical

periods. Destructurations and restructurations are followed in time and

space, always translated on the ground, inscribed in the

practico-material, written in the urban text, but coming from elsewhere:

from history and becoming. Not from the supersensible, but from another

level. Local acts and agents left their mark on cities, but also

impersonal relations of production and property, and consequently, of

classes and class struggles, that is, ideologies (religious and

philosophical, that is, ethical, a esthetical, legal, etc.). The

projection of the global on the ground and on the specific plane of the

city were accomplished only through mediations. In itself mediation, the

city was the place, the product of mediations, the terrain of their

activities, the object and objective of their propositions. Global

processes, general relations inscribed themselves in the urban text only

as transcribed by ideologies, interpreted by tendencies and political

strategies. It is this difficulty upon which one must now insist, that

of conceiving the city as a semantic system, semiotic or semiological

system arising from linguistics, urban language or urban reality

considered as grouping of signs. In the course of its projection on a

specific level, the general code of society is modified: the specific

code of the urban is an incomprehensible modulation, a version, a

translation without the original or origins. Yes, the city can be read

because it writes, because it was writing. However, it is not enough to

examine this without recourse to context. To write on this writing or

language, to elaborate the metalanguage of the city is not to know the

city and the urban. The context, what is below the text to decipher

(daily life, immediate relations, the unconscious of the urban, what is

little said and of which even less is written), hides itself in the

inhabited spaces — sexual and family life — and rarely confronts itself,

and what is above this urban text (institutions, ideologies), cannot be

neglected in the deciphering. A book is not enough. That one reads and

re-reads it, well enough. That one goes as far as to undertake a

critical reading of it, even better. It asks from knowledge questions

such as ‘who and what? how? why? for whom?’ These questions announce and

demand the restitution of the context. The city cannot therefore be

conceived as a signifying system, determined and closed as a system. The

taking into consideration the levels of reality forbids, here as

elsewhere, this sytematization. None the less, the city has this

singular capacity of appropriating all significations for saying them,

for writing them (to stipulate and to ‘signify’ them), including those

from the countryside, immediate life, religion and political ideology.

In the cities, monuments and festivities had this meaning.

During each critical period, when the spontaneous growth of the city

stagnates and when urban development oriented and characterized by

hitherto dominant social relations ends, then appears a planning

thought. This is more a symptom of change than of a continuously

mounting rationality or of an internal harmony (although illusions on

these points regularly reproduce themselves), as this thinking merges

the philosophy of the city in search of a with the divisive schemes for

urban space. To confuse this anxiety with rationality and organization

it is the ideology previously denounced. Concepts and theories make a

difficult path through this ideology.

At this point the city should be defined. If it is true that the concept

emerges little by little from these ideologies which convey it, it must

be conceived during this progress. We therefore here propose a first

definition of the city as a projection of society on the ground, chat

is, not only on the actual site, but at a specific level, perceived and

conceived by thought, which determines the city and the urban. Long-term

controversies over this definition have shown its lacunae. Firstly, it

requires more accuracy. What is inscribed and projected is not only a

far order, a social whole, a mode of production, a general code, it is

also a time, or rather, times, rhythms. The city is heard as much as

music as it is read as a discursive writing. Secondly, the definition

calls for supplements. It brings to light certain historical and generic

or genetic differences, but leaves aside other real differences: between

the cypes of cities resulting from history, between the effects of the

division of labour in the cities, between the persistent

‘city-territory’ relations. Hence another definition which perhaps does

not destroy the first: the city as the ensemble of differences between

cities. In turn, this definition reveals itself to be insufficient, as

it places emphasis on particularities rather than on generalities,

neglecting the singularities of urban life, the ways of living of the

city, more properly understood as to inhabit. Hence another definition,

of plurality, coexistence and simultaneity in the urban of patterns,

ways of living urban life (the small house, the large social housing

estates, to-ownership, location, daily life and its changes for

intellectuals, craftsmen, shopkeepers, workers, etc.).

These definitions (relative to the levels of social reality), are not in

themselves exhaustive and do not exclude other definitions. If a

theoretician sees in the city the place of confrontations and of

(conflictual) relations between desire and need, between satisfactions

and dissatisfactions, if he goes as far as to describe the city as ‘site

of desire’, these determinations will be examined and taken into

consideration. It is not certain that they have a meaning limited to the

fragmentary science of psychology. Moreover, there would be the need to

emphasize the historical role of the city: the quickening of processes

(exchange and the market, the accumulation of knowledge and capitals,

the concentration of these capitals) and site of revolutions. Today, by

becoming a centre of decision-making, or rather, by grouping centres of

decision-making, the modern city intensifies by organizing the

exploitation of the whole society (not only the working classes, but

also other non-dominant social classes). This is not the passive place

of production or the concentration of capitals, but that of the urban

intervening as such in production (in the means of production).

Levels of Reality and Analysis

The preceding considerations are sufficient to show that the analysis of

urban phenomena (the physical and social morphology of the city, or if

one prefers, the city, the urban and their connexion) requires the use

of all the methodological tools: form, function, structure, levels,

dimensions, text, context, field and whole, writing and reading, system,

signified and signifier, language and metalanguage, institutions, etc.

One also knows that none of these terms can attain a rigorous purity, be

defined without ambiguity, or escape multiple meaning. Thus the word

form takes on various meanings for the logician, for the literary

critic, for the aesthetician, and for the linguist.

The theoretician of the city and the urban will say that these terms are

defined as form of simultaneity, as field of encounters and exchanges.

This acceptance of the word form must be clarified. Let us again

consider the term function. The analysis distinguishes the functions

internal to the city, the functions of the city in relation to territory

(countryside, agriculture, villages and hamlets, smaller towns

subordinated within a network), and lastly, the functions of the city —

each city — in the social whole (the technical and social division of

labour between cities, various networks of relations, administrative and

political hierarchies). It is the same for structures. There is the

structure of the city (of each city, morphologically, socially,

topologically and topically), then the urban structure of society, and

finally the social structure of town-country relations. Hence a muddle

of analytical and partial determinations and the difficulties of a

global conception. Here as elsewhere three terms most often meet, whose

conflictual and (dialectical) relations are hidden under term by term

oppositions. There is the countryside, and the city and society with the

State which manages and dominates it (in its relations with the class

structure of that society). There is also as we have attempted to show,

general (and global) processes, the city as specificity and intermediary

level, then relations of immediacy (linked to a way of life, to

inhabiting, and to regulating daily life). This requires therefore more

precise definitions of each level, which we will not be able to separate

or confuse, but of which we shall have to show the articulations and

disarticulations, the projections of one upon the other, and the

different connections.

The highest level is found at the same time above and in the city. This

does not simplify the analysis. The social structure exists in the city,

makes itself apparent, signifies an order. Inversely, the city is a part

of the social whole; it reveals, because contains and incorporates them

within sentient matter, institutions and ideologies. Royal, imperial and

presidential buildings are a part of the city: the political part (the

capital). These buildings do not coincide with institutions, with

dominant social relations. And yet, these relations act upon them, by

representing social efficacy and ‘presence’. At its specific level, the

city also contains the projection of these relations. To elucidate this

analysis by a particular case, social order in Paris is represented at

the highest level in/by the Ministry of the Interior, and at the

specific level by the prefecture of police and also by neighbourhood

police stations, without forgetting various police agencies acting

either at a global level, or in the subterranean shadow. Religious

ideology is signified at the highest level by the cathedral, by seats of

large religious organizations of the Church, and also by neighbourhood

churches and presbyteries, various local investments of

institutionalized religious practice.

At this level, the city manifests itself as a group of groups, with iu

double morphology (practico-sensible or material, on the one hand,

social on the other), It has a code of functioning focused around

particular institutions, such as the municipality with its services and

its problems, with its channels of information, its networks, its powers

of decision-making. The social structure is projected on this plane, but

this does not exclude phenomena unique to the city, to a particular

city, and the most diverse manifestations of urban life. Paradoxically,

taken at this level, the city is made up of uninhabited and even

uninhabitable spaces: public buildings, monuments, squares, streets,

large or small voids. It is so true that ‘habitat’ does not make up the

city and that it cannot be defined by this isolated function.

At the ecological level, habitation becomes essential. The city envelops

it; it is form, enveloping chis space of ‘private’ life, arrival and

departure of networks of information and the communication of orders

(imposing the far order to the near order).

Two approaches arc possible. The first goes from the most general to the

most specific (from institutions to daily life) and then uncovers the

city as specific and (relatively) privileged mediation. The second

starts from this plan and constructs the general by identifying the

elements and significations of what is observable in the urban. It

proceeds in this manner to reach, from the observable, ‘private’, the

concealed daily life: its rhythms, its occupations, its spatio-temporal

organization, its clandestine ‘culture’, its underground life.

Isotopies are defined at each level: political, religious, commercial,

etc. space. In relation to these isotopies, other levels are uncovered

as heterotopies. Meanwhile, at each level spatial oppositions are

uncovered which enter in chis relationship of isotopy-heterotopy. For

example, the opposition between social and owner-occupied housing.

Spaces at the specific level can also be classified according to the

criterion of isotopy-heterotopy, the city as a whole being the most

expanded isotopy, embracing others, or rather, superimposing itself over

others (over the spatial sub-wholes which are at one and the same time

subordinated and constitutive). Such a classification by opposition

should not exclude the analysis of levels, nor that of the movement of

the whole with its conflictual aspects (class relations among others),

At the ecological level, that of inhabiting, are constituted significant

ensembles, partial systems of signs, of which the ‘world of the detached

house’ offers a particularly interesting case. The distinction between

levels (each level implying in tum secondary levels) has the greatest

use in the analysis of essential relations, for example in understanding

how the ‘values of detached housing’ in France become the reference

point of social consciousness and the ‘values’ of other types of

housing. Only the analysis of relations of inclusion-exclusion, of

belonging or non-belonging to a particular space of the city enables us

to approach these phenomena of great importance for a theory of the

city.

On its specific plane the city can appropriate existing political,

religious and philosophical meanings. It seizes them to say them, to

expose them by means — or through the voice — of buildings, monuments,

and also by streets and squares, by voids, by the spontaneous

theatricalization of encounters which take place in it, not forgetting

festivities and ceremonies (with their appropriate and designated

places). Beside the writing, there is also the even more important

utterance of the urban, these utterances speaking of life and death, joy

or sorrow. The city has this capacity which makes of it a significant

whole. None the less, to stress a previous remark, the city does not

accomplish this task gracefully or freely. One does not ask it.

Aestheticism, phenomenon of decline, comes later. Such as planning! In

the form of meaning, in the form of simultaneity and encounters, in the

form, finally of an ‘urban’ language and writing, the city dispatches

orders. The far order is projected into the near order. This far order

is never or almost never unitary. There is religious order, political

order, moral order, each referring to an ideology with its practical

implications. Among these orders the city realizes on its plane a unity,

or rather, a syncretism. It dissimulates and veils their rivalries and

conflicts by making them imperative. It translates them as instructions

for action, as time management. It stipulates (signifies) with the

management of time a meticulous hierarchy of place, moments,

occupations, people. Moreover, it refracts these imperatives in a style,

inasmuch as there is a genuine urban life. This style characterizes

itself as architectural and is associated to art and the study of art

objects.

Therefore the semiology of the city is of greatest theoretical and

practical interest. The city receives and emits messages. These messages

are or are not understood (that is, are or are not coded or decoded).

Therefore, it can be apprehended from concepts derived from linguistics:

signifier and signified, signification and meaning. Nevertheless, it is

not without the greatest reservation or without precautions that one can

consider the city as a system, as a unique system of significations and

meanings and therefore of values. Here as elsewhere, there are several

systems (or if one prefers, several sub-systems). Moreover, semiology

does not exhaust the practical and ideological reality of the city. The

theory of the city as system of significations tends towards an

ideology; it separates the urban from its morphological basis and from

social practice, by reducing it to a ‘signifier-signified’ relation and

by extrapolating from actually perceived significations. This is not

without a great naivety. If it is true that a Bororo village signifies,

and that the Greek city is full of meaning, are we to build vast Bororo

villages full of signs of Modernity? Or restore the agora with its

meaning at the centre of the new town?

The fetishization of the formal ‘signifier-signified’ relationship

entails more serious inconveniences. It passively accepts the ideology

of organised consumption. Or rather, it contributes to it. In the

ideology of consumption and in ‘real’ consumption (in quotations), the

consumption of signs plays an increasing role. It does not repress the

consumption of ‘pure’ spectacles, without activity and participation,

without oeuvre or product. It adds to it and superimposes itself upon it

as a determination. It is thus that advertising of consumer goods

becomes the principal means of consumption; it tends to incorporate art,

literature, poetry and to supplant them by using them as rhetoric. It

thus becomes itself the ideology of society; each ‘object’, each ‘good’

splits itself into a reality and an image, this being an essential part

of consumption. One consumes signs as well as objects: signs of

happiness, of satisfaction, of power, of wealth, of science, of

technology, etc. The production of these signs is integrated to global

production and plays a major integrative role in relation to other

productive and organizing social activities. The sign is bought and

sold; language becomes exchange value. Under the appearance of signs and

significations in general, it is the significations of this society

which are handed over to consumption. Consequently, he who conceives the

city and urban reality as system of signs implicitly hands them over to

consumption as integrally consumable: as exchange value in its pure

state. Changing sites into signs and values, the practice — material

into formal significations, this theory also changes into pure consumer

of signs he who receives them. Would not the Paris bis or ter conceived

by developers be the centres of consumption promoted to a superior level

by the intensity of the consumption of signs? Urban semiology is in

danger of placing itself at their service if it loses its naivety.

In truth, semiological analysis must distinguish between multiple levels

and dimensions. There is the utterance of the city: what happens and

takes place in the street, in the squares, in the voids, what is said

there. There is the language of the city: particularities specific to

each city which are expressed in discourses, gestures, clothing, in the

words and use of words by the inhabitants. There is urban language,

which one can consider as language of connotations, a secondary system

and derived within the denotative system (to use here Hjemslev and

Greimas’s terminology). Finally, there is the writing of the city: what

is inscribed and prescribed on its walls, in the layout of places and

their linkages, in brief, the use of time in the city by its

inhabitants.

Semiological analysis must also distinguish between levels, that of

semantemes or signifying elements (straight or cured lines, writing,

elementary forms of entry, doors and windows, corners, angles, etc.),

morphemes or signifying objects (buildings, streets, ere.) and lastly,

significant ensembles or super-objects, of which the city irself.

One must study how the global is signified (the semiology of power), how

the city is signified (that is the properly urban semiology) and how are

signified ways of living and inhabiting (that is the semiology of daily

life, of to inhabit and habitat). One cannot confuse the city as it

apprehends and exposes significations coming from nature, the country

and the landscape (the tree for example) and the city as place of

consumption of signs. That would be to confuse festivities with ordinary

consumption.

Let us not forget dimensions. The city has a symbolic dimension;

monuments but also voids, squares and avenues, symbolizing the cosmos,

the world, society, or simply the State. It has a paradigmatical

dimension; it implies and shows oppositions, the inside and the outside,

the centre and the periphery, the integrated and non-integrated to urban

society. Finally, it also possesses the syntagmatic dimension: the

connection of elements, the ariculation of isotopies and heterotopies.

At its specific level, the city presents itself as a privileged

sub-system because it is able to reflect and expose the other

sub-systems and to present itself as a ‘world’, a unique whole, within

the illusion of the immediate and the lived. In this capacity resides

precisely the charm, the tonicity, and the tonality specific to urban

life. But analysis dissipates this impression and unveils a number of

systems hidden in the illusion of oneness. The analyst has no right to

share this illusion and to consolidate it by maintaining himself at an

urban level. He must uncover instead the features of a greater

knowledge.

We have not finished making an inventory of sub-systems of

significations, and therefore of what semiological analysis can bring to

an understanding of the city and the urban. If we consider the sector of

owner-occupation and that of new social housing estates, we already know

that each of them constitutes a (partial) system of significations, and

that another system which overdetermines each of them is established

from their opposition. This is how the owner-occupiers of small houses

perceive and conceive themselves in the make-believe of habitat, and in

turn, the estates establish the logic of habitat and perceive themselves

according to this coercive rationality. At the same time and at the same

stroke, the sector of owner-occupation becomes the reference by which

habitat and daily life are appreciated; that practice is cloaked in

make-believe and signs.

Among systems of significations, those of architects deserve the

greatest critical attention. It often happens that talented men believe

themselves to be at the centre of knowledge and experience whereas they

remain at the centre of systems of writing, projections on paper,

visualizations. Architects tending on their part towards a system of

significations which they often call ‘planning’, it is not impossible

for analysts of urban reality, grouping together their piecemeal facts,

to constitute a somewhat different system of significations that they

can also baptize planning while they leave its programming to machines.

Critical analysis dissipates the privilege of the lived in urban

society. It is only a ‘plane’, or a level. Yet analysis does not make

this plane disappear. It exists — as a book. Who reads this open book?

Who crosses over its writing? It is not a well-defined subject and yet a

succession of acts and encounters constitute on this plane itself urban

life, the urban. This urban life tends to turn against themselves the

messages, orders and constraints coming from above. It attempts to

appropriate time and space by foiling dominations, by diverting them

from their goal, by deceit. It also intervenes more or less at the level

of the city and the way of inhabiting. In this way the urban is more or

less the oeuvre of its citizens instead of imposing itself upon them as

a system, as an already dosed book.

Town and Country

A theme which has been used and over-used, hyperinflated and

extrapolated, namely, ‘nature and culture’, originates from the relation

between town and country and deflects it. There are three terms in this

relation. In the same way, there are three terminologies in existing

reality (rurality, urban fabric, centrality) whose dialectical relations

are hidden beneath term to term oppositions, but also come to reveal

themselves in them. Nature as such escapes the hold of rationally

pursued action, as well as from domination and appropriation. More

precisely, it remains outside of these influences: it ‘is’ what flees:

it is reached by the imaginary; one pursues it and it flees into the

cosmos, or in the underground depths of the world. The countryside is

the place of production and oeuvres. Agricultural production gives birth

to products: the landscape is an oeuvre. This oeuvre emerges from the

earth slowly moulded, linked originally to the groups which occupy it by

a reciprocal consecration, later to be desecrated by the city and urban

life (which capture this consecration, condense it, then dissolve it

over through the ages by absorbing it into rationalicy). Where does this

ancient consecration of the ground to the tribes, peoples and nations

come from? From the obscure and menacing presence/absence of nature?

From the occupation of the ground which excludes strangers from this

possessed ground? From the social pyramid, which has its basis on this

ground and which exacts many sacrifices for the maintenance of a

threatened edifice? One does not prevent the other. What is important is

the complex movement by which the political city uses this sacred-damned

character of the ground, so that the economic (commercial) city can

desecrate it.

Urban life includes original mediations between town, country and

nature. As the village, whose relationship with the city, in history and

in actuality, is far from being well known. As are parks, gardens,

channelled waters. These mediations cannot be understood as such by city

dwellers without symbolisms and representations (ideological and

imaginary) of nature and the countryside.

The town and country relation has changed deeply during the course of

history, according to different periods and to modes of production. It

has been sometimes profoundly conflictual, and at other times appeased

and close to an association. Moreover, during the same period, very

different kinds of relations are manifested. Thus in Western feudalism,

the territorial lord threatens the re-emerging city, where the merchants

find their meeting place, their homebase, the place of their strategy.

The city responds to this action of landed power, and a class struggle

ensues, sometimes quiescent, sometimes violent. The city liberates

itself, not by integrating itself by becoming an aristocracy of

commoners, but by integraring itself with the monarchic State (for which

it provided an essential condition). On the other hand, during the same

period, in so far as one can speak of an Islamic feudalism, the ‘lord’

rules over the city of craftsmen and shopkeepers and from it, over a

surrounding countryside, often reduced to gardens and to sparse and

insignificant cultivations. In such a relationship, there is neither the

kernel nor the possibility of a class struggle. From the outset this

takes away any historical dynamism and future from this social

structure, although not without conferring upon it other charms, those

of an exquisite urbanism. The class struggle, creative, productive of

oeuvres and new relations, takes place with a certain barbarism which

characterizes the West (including the most ‘beautiful’ of its cities).

Today, the town and country relation is changing, an important aspect of

a general transformation. In industrial countries, the old exploitation

by the city, centre of capital accumulation, of the surrounding

countryside, gives way to more subtle forms of domination and

exploitation, the city becoming centre of decision-making and apparently

also of association. However that may be, the expanding city attacks the

countryside, corrodes and dissolves it. This is not without the

paradoxical effects already mentioned. Urban life penetrates peasant

life, dispossessing it of its traditional features: crafts, small

centres which decline to the benefit of urban centres (commercial,

industrial, distribution networks, centres of decision-making, etc.).

Villages become ruralized by losing their peasant specificity. They

align themselves with the city but by resisting and sometimes by

fiercely keeping themselves to themselves.

Will the urban fabric, with its greater or lesser meshes, catch in its

nets all the territory of industrialized countries? Is this how the old

opposition between town and country is overcome? One can assume it, but

not without some critical reservations. If a generalized confusion is

thus perceived, the countryside losing itself into the heart of the

city, and the city absorbing the countryside and losing itself in it,

this confusion can be theoretically challenged. Theory can refute all

strategies resting on this conception of the urban fabric. Geographers

have coined to name this confusion an ugly but meaningful neologism: the

rurban. Within this hypothesis, the expansion of the city and

urbanization would cause the urban (the urban life) to disappear. This

seems inadmissible. In other words, the overcoming of opposition cannot

be conceived as a reciprocal neutralization. There is no theoretical

reason to accept the disappearance of centrality in the course of the

fusion of urban society with the countryside. The ‘urbanity-rurality’

opposition is accentuated rather than dissipated, while the town and

country opposition is lessened. There is a shifting of opposition and

conflict. What is more, we all know that worldwide, the town and country

conflict is far from being resolved. If it is true that the town and

country separation and contradiction (which envelops without reducing to

itself the opposition of the two terms) is part of the social division

of labour, it must be acknowledged that this division is neither

overcome nor mastered. Far from it. No more than the separation of

nature and society, and that of the material and the intellectual

(spiritual). Overcoming this today cannot not take place from the

opposition between urban fabric and centrality. It presupposes the

invention of new urban forms.

As far as industrial countries are concerned, one can conceive

polycentric cities, differentiated and renovated centralities, even

mobile centralities (cultural ones for example). The critique of

planning as ideology can be about such and such a conception of

centrality (for example, the distinction between the urban and the

centres of information and decision-making). Neither traditional city

(separated from the countryside to better dominate it), nor the

Megalopolis without form or fabric, without woof or warp, would be the

guiding idea. The disappearance of centrality is neither called for

theoretically nor practically. The only question that can be asked is

this one: ‘What social and political forms, what theory will one entrust

with the realization on the ground of a renovated centrality and fabric,

freed from their degradations?’

Around the Critical Point

Let us trace hypothetically from left to right an axis going from zero

point in urbanization (the non-existence of the city, the complete

predominance of agrarian life, agricultural production and the

countryside) to full urbanization (the absorption of the countryside by

the city and the total predominance of industrial production, including

agriculture). This abstract picture momentarily places the

discontinuities in parentheses. To a certain extent it will enable us to

locate the critical points, that is, the breaks and discontinuities

themselves. Quite quickly on the axis, quite near to the beginning, let

us mark the political city (in effect achieved and maintained in the

Asiatic mode of production) which organizes an agrarian environment by

dominating it. A little further, let us mark the appearance of the

commercial city, which begins by relegating commerce to its periphery (a

heterotopy of outlying areas, fairs and markets, places assigned to

foreigners, to strangers specialized in exchanges) and which later

integrates the market by integrating itself to a social structure based

on exchanges, expanded communications, money and movable wealth. There

then comes a decisive critical point, where the importance of

agriculrure retreats before the importance of craft and industrial

production, of the market, exchange value and a rising capitalism. This

critical point is located in Western Europe around the sixteenth

century. Soon it is the arrival of the industrial city, with its

implications (emigration of dispossed and disaggregated peasant

populations cowards the city — a period of great urban concentration).

Urban society is heralded long after society as a whole has tilted

towards the urban. Then there is the period when the expanding city

proliferates, produces far-flung peripheries (suburbs), and invades the

countryside. Paradoxically, in this period when the city expands

inordinately, the form (the practicomaterial morphology, the form of

urban life) of the traditional city explodes. This double process

(industrialization-urbanization) produces the double movement:

explosion-implosion, condensation-dispersion (the explosion already

mentioned). It is therefore around this critical point that can be found

the present problematic of the city and urban reality.

[]

The phenomena which unfold around the situation of crisis are nor less

complex than the physical phenomena which accompany the breaking of the

sound barrier (to use a simple metaphor). It is to this end — the

analysis in the proximity of the critical point — that we have

previously attempted to assemble the essential conceptual tools.

Knowledge which would dissociate itself from this situation would fall

back into blind speculation or myopic specialization.

Too badly placed, the critical points, breaks and lacunae can have as

serious consequences as organicist, evolutionist or continuist

negligence. Today, sociological thinking and political strategy, and

so-called planning thought, tend to jump from the level of habitat and

to inhabit (ecological level, housing, buildings, neighbourhood and thus

the domain of the architect), to the general level (scale of land use

planning, planned industrial production, global urbanization), passing

over the city and the urban. Mediation is placed into parentheses and

the specific level is omitted. Why? For significant reasons related

firstly to the disregard of the critical point.

The rational planning of production, land use planning, global

industrialization and urbanization are essential aspects of the

“socialization of society”. Let us pause for a moment on these words. A

Marxist tradition with reformist inflections uses them to designate the

complexification of society and social relations, the rupture of

cornpartimentalization, the growing multiplicity of connexions,

communications and information, the fact that an accentuated technical

and social division of labour implies a stronger unity in branches of

industry, market functions and production itself. This approach insists

on exchanges and places of exchange: it emphasizes the quantity of

economic exchanges and leaves aside quality, the essential difference

between use value and exchange value. In this perspective, the exchanges

of merchandise and of consumer goods level and align direct exchanges to

themselves, that is, communications which do not go through existing

networks, and through institutions (namely at the ‘inferior’ level, the

immediate relations, and at the ‘superior’ level, the political

relations resulting from knowledge). The answer given to reformist

continuism is the thesis of disconrinuism and radical revolutionary

voluntarism: a rupture, a break, are essential for the social character

of productive labour to abolish relations of production linked to

private ownership of these means of production. However, the thesis of

the ‘socialization of society’, an evolutionist, continuist and

reformist interpretation, takes on another meaning if one observes that

these words refer to, badly and incompletely, the urbanization of

society. The multiplication and complexification of exchanges in the

widest sense of the term cannot take place without the existence of

privileged places and moments, without these places and moments of

meeting freeing themselves from the constraints of the market, without

the law of exchange value being mastered, and without the relations

which condition profits be altered. Until then culture dissolves,

becoming an object of consumption, an opportunity for profit, production

for the market: the ‘cultural’ dissimulates more than one trap. Until

now a revolutionary interpretation has not taken into account these new

elements. Would it not be possible that the more rigorous definition of

the relations between industrialization and urbanization, in the

situation of crisis, and around the critical point, will help to

overcome the contradiction of absolute continuism and discontinuism, of

reformist evolutionism and total revolution? If one wants to go beyond

the market, the law of exchange value, money and profit, is it not

necessary to define the place of this possibility: urban society, the

city as use value?

The paradox of this critical situation, a crucial element of the

problem, is that the crisis of the city is world-wide. It presents

itself as a dominant aspect of universality in progress as do technology

and the rational organization of industry. Yet, the practical causes and

ideological reasons of this crisis vary according to political regimes,

the societies, and even the countries concerned. A critical analysis of

these phenomena could only be legitimated by comparison, but many

elements of this comparison are missing. In underdeveloped countries,

highly industrialized capitalist countries, socialist countries unevenly

developed, everywhere the city explodes. The traditional form of

agrarian society is transforming itself, but differently. 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.

How gather together the elements of such a comparison? In the United

States, the difficulties of Federal administration, its conflicts with

local authorities, the terms of reference of ‘urban government’, divided

among the manager, the political boss and the mayor and his

municipality, cannot be explained in the same way as the power conflicts

(administrative and juridical) in Europe and in France, where the

consequences of industrialization besiege and explode urban cores dating

from precapitalist or pre-industrial times. In the United States, the

urban core hardly exists except in some privileged cities, yer local

authorities have greater legal guarantees and more extensive powers than

in France where monarchical centralization attacked these urban

‘freedoms’ very early on. In Europe, as elsewhere, one cannot attribute

only to the growth of cities, or only to problems of traffic,

difficulties which are both different and comparable. Here and there,

from one part or another, the whole society is questioned one way or

another. As it is preoccupied (through ideologues and statesmen) to

principally plan industry and organize enterprise, modern society

appears little able to give solutions to the urban problematic and to

act otherwise than by small technical measures which only protract the

current state of affairs. Everywhere the relation between the three

levels analysed above becomes confused and conflictual, the dynamic

element of the contradiction changing according to the social and

political context. In so-called developing countries, the breakdown of

agrarian structure pushes dispossessed peasants, ruined and eager for

change, towards the cities. The shanty town welcomes them and becomes

the (inadequate) mediator between town and country, agricultural and

industrial production. It often consolidates itself and offers a

substitute of urban life, miserable and yet intense, to those which it

shelters. In other countries, particularly in socialist countries,

planned urban growth attracts labour to the cities recruited from the

countryside resulting in overcrowding, the construction of

neighbourhoods or residential sectors whose relation to urban life is

not always discernible. To sum up, a world-wide crisis in agriculture

and traditional peasant life accompanies, underlies and aggravates a

world-wide crisis of the traditional city. This is a change on a

planetary scale. The old rural animal and urban animal (Marx), disappear

together. Do they leave room to ‘man’? That is the basic problem. The

major theoretical and practical difficulty comes from the fact that the

urbanization of industrial society does not happen without the breakup

of what we still call ‘the city’. Given that urban society is built on

the ruins of the city, how can we grasp the breadth and manifold

contradictions of these phenomena? That is the critical point. The

distinction between the three levels (global process of

industrialization and urbanization — urban society, the specific scale

of the city-ways of living and conditions of daily life in the urban)

tends to become blurred as does the distinction between town and

country. And yet, this difference between the three levels is more than

ever crucial to avoid confusion and misunderstandings, to combat

strategies which find in this conjuncture an opportunity to disintegrate

the urban into industrial and or residential planning.

Yes, this city which has gone through so much adversity and so many

metamorphoses, since its archaic cores so dose to the village, this

admirable social form, this exquisite oeuvre of praxis and civilization,

unmakes and remakes itself under our very eyes. The urgency of the

housing question in conditions of industrial growth has concealed and

still conceals the problems of the city. Political strategists, more

attentive to the immediate, perceived and still perceive only these

issues. When these overall problems emerged, under the name of planning,

they have been subordinated to the general organization of industry.

Attacked both from above and below, the city is associated to industrial

enterprise: it figures in planning as a cog: it becomes the material

device apt to organize production, control the daily life of the

producers and the consumption of products. Having been reduced to the

status of device, it extends this management to the consumers and

consumption; it serves to regulate, to lay one over the other, the

production of goods and the destruction of products with that devouring

activity, ‘consumption’. It did not have, it has no meaning but as an

oeuvre, as an end, as place of free enjoyment, as domain of use value.

Or, it is subjugated to constraints, to the imperatives of an

‘equilibrium’ within narrowly restrictive conditions; it is no more than

the instrument of an organization which moreover is unable to

consolidate itself by determining its conditions of stability and

equilibrium, an organization according to whose catalogue and teleguide

individual needs are satisfied by annihilating catalogued objects whose

probability of durability (obsolescence) is itself a scientific field.

In the past, reason had its place of birth, its seat, its home in the

city. In the face of rurality, and of peasant life gripped by nature and

the sacralized earth full of obscure powers, urbanity asserted itself as

reasonable. Today, rationality seems to be (or appears to be, or

pretends to be) far from the city, above it, on a national or

continental scale. It refuses the city as a moment, as an element, as a

condition; it acknowledges it only as an instrument and a means. In

France and elsewhere, State bureaucratic rationalism and that of

industrial organization supported by the demands of large private

enterprises, are going the same way. Simultaneously there is enforced a

simplifying functionalism and social groups which go beyond the urban.

The organism disappears under the guise of organization, so that

organicism coming from the philosophers appears as an ideal model. The

statutes of urban ‘zones’ and ‘areas’ are reduced to a juxtaposition of

spaces, of functions, of elements on the ground. Sectors and functions

are tightly subordinated to centres of decision-making. Homogeneity

overwhelms the differences originating from nature (the site), from

peasant surroundings (territory and the soil), from history. The city,

or what remains of it, is built or is rearranged, in the likeness of a

sum or combination of elements. Now, as soon as the combination is

conceived, perceived and anticipated as such, combinations are not

easily recognizable; the differences fall into the perception of their

whole. So chat while one may rationally look for diversity, a feeling of

monotony covers these diversities and prevails, whether housing,

buildings, alleged urban centres, organized areas are concerned. The

urban, not conceived as such but attacked face on and from the side,

corroded and gnawed, has lost the features and characteristics of the

oeuvre, of appropriation. Only constraints are projected on the ground,

in a state of permanent dislocation. From the point of view of housing,

the ordering and arrangement of daily life, the massive use of the car

(‘private’ means of transpon), mobility (besides contained and

insufficient), and the influence of the mass media, have detached from

site and territory individuals and groups (families, organized bodies).

Neighbourhood and district fade and crumble away: the people (the

‘inhabitants’) move about in a space which tends towards a geometric

isotopy, full of instructions and signals, where qualitative differences

of places and moments no longer matter. Certainly these are inevitable

processes of dissolution of ancient forms, but which produce contempt,

mental and social misery. There is a poverty of daily life as soon as

nothing has replaced the symbols, the appropriations, the styles, the

monuments, the times and rhythms, the different and qualified spaces of

the traditional city. Urban society, because of the dissolution of this

city submitted to pressures which it cannot withstand, tends on the one

hand to blend with the planned land use of the territory into the ‘urban

fabric’ determined by the constraints of traffic, and on the other hand,

into dwelling units such as those of the detached house and the housing

estates. The extension of the city produced suburbs, then the suburb

engulfed the urban core. The problems have been inversed, when they are

not misunderstood. Would it not be more coherent, more rational and

agreeable to work in the suburbs and live in the city rather than work

in the city while living in a hardly habitable suburb? The centralized

management of ‘things’ and of ‘culture’ tries to avoid this intermediary

tier, the city. And more: the State, centres of decision-making, the

ideological, economic and political powers, can only consider with a

growing suspicion this social form which tends towards autonomy, which

can only live specifically, which comes between them and the

‘inhabitant’, worker or not, productive or unproductive worker, but man

and citizen as well as city dweller. Since the last century, what is the

essence of the city for power? It ferments, full of suspect activities,

of delinquence, a hotbed of agitation. State powers and powerful

economic interests can think only of one strategy: to devalorize,

degrade, destroy, urban society. In the course of these processes, there

are determinisms, there are strategies, spontaneities and concened acts.

Subjective and ideological contradictions, ‘humanist’ worries impede but

do not halt these strategic actions. The city prevents the powers that

be from manipulating at will the citizen-city dweller, individuals,

groups, bodies. As a result, the crisis of the city is linked not to

rationality as such, definable from a philosophical tradition, it

relates to explicit forms of rationality: state, bureaucratic, economic,

or rather, ‘economistic’, economism being an ideology endowed with an

apparatus. This crisis of the city is accompanied here and there with a

crisis of urban institutions (municipal) due to the double pressure from

the State and industrial enterprise. Sometimes the State, sometimes

private enterprise, sometimes both (rivals in competition, but often

associates) tend to commandeer the functions, duties, and prerogatives

of urban society. In certain capitalist countries, does ‘private’

enterprise leave to the State, to institutions, and ‘public’ bodies any

other thing than what it refuses to assume because it is too costly?

And yet, it is on this shaky foundation that urban society and the urban

persist and even intensify. Social relations continue to become more

complex, to multiply and intensify through the most painful

contradictions. The form of the urban, its supreme reason, namely

simultaneity and encounter, cannot disappear. Urban reality, at the very

heart of its dislocation, persists and becomes more dense in the centres

of decision-making and information. The inhabitants (which ones? — it’s

up to research and researchers to find them!) reconstitute centres,

using places to restitute even derisory encounters. The use (use value)

of places, monuments, differences, escape the demands of exchange, of

exchange value. A big game is played before us, with various episodes

whose meaning is not always evident. The satisfaction of basic needs is

unable to kill the disaffectation of fundamental desires (or of the

fundamental desire). As a place of encounters, focus of communication

and information, the urban becomes what it always was: place of desire,

permanent disequilibrium, seat of the dissolution of normalities and

constraints, the moment of play and of the unpredictable. This moment

includes the implosion-explosion of latent violence under the terrible

constraints of a rationality which identifies itself with the absurd.

From this situation is born a critical contradiction: a tendency towards

destruction of the city, as well as a tendency towards the

intensification of the urban and the urban problematic.

This critical analysis calls for a decisive addition. To attribute the

crisis of the city to a confining rationality, productivism and

economism, and to a planning centralization first and foremost concerned

with growth, to the bureaucracy of State and enterprise is not

incorrect. Yet, this viewpoint does not go much beyond the horizon of

the most classical philosophical rationalism, that of liberal humanism.

He who wishes to propose the form of a new urban society by

strengthening this kernel, the urban, which survives in the fissures of

planned and programmed order, must go further. If one wants to conceive

an ‘urban man’ no longer in the image of classical humanism, theoretical

elaboration owes it to itself to refine concepts. Until now, in theory

as in practice, the double process of industrialization and of

urbanization has not been mastered. The incomplete teachings of Marx and

Marxist thought have been misunderstood. For Marx himself,

industrialization contained its finality and meaning, later giving rise

to the dissociation of Marxist thought into economism and philosophism.

Marx did not show (and in his time he could not) that urbanization and

the urban contain the meaning of industrialization. He did not see that

industrial production implied the urbanization of society, and that the

mastery of industrial potentials required specific knowledge concerning

urbanization. Industrial production, after a certain growth, produces

urbanization, providing it with conditions, and possibilities. The

problematic is displaced and becomes that of urban development. The

works of Marx (notably Capital) contained precious indications on the

city and particularly on the historical relations between town and

country. They do not pose the urban problem. In Marx’s time, only the

housing problem was raised and studied by Engels. Now, the problem of

the city is immensely greater than that of housing. The limits of

Marxist thought have not been really understood. Supporters as well as

adversaries have sowned trouble, by poorly assimilating the

methodological and theoretical principles of this thought. Neither

criticism from the right, nor criticism from the left have assessed the

contributions and the limits. These limits have not yet been overtaken

by an approach which does not reject, but deepens acquired knowledge.

The implicit sense of industrialization has therefore been badly

clarified. In theoretical reflection chis process has not acquired its

meaning. Moreover, one has looked for meaning elsewhere, or one has

abandoned the meaning and the research of meaning.

The ‘socialization of society’, misunderstood by reformists has

prevented urban transformation (in, by, for, the city). It has not been

understood chat this socialization has urbanization as its essence. What

has been ‘socialized’? By turning them over to consumption, signs. Signs

of the city, of urban life, as the signs of nature and the countryside,

as those of joy and happiness, delivered to consumption without an

effective social practice enabling the urban to enter daily life. Urban

life faces needs only reluctantly, through the poverty of social needs

of ‘socialized society’, through daily consumption and its own signs in

advertising, fashion, aestheticism. At this new moment of analysis, is

thus conceived the dialectical movement which carries the forms, the

contours, the determinisms and the constraints, the servitudes and the

appropriations towards a troubled horizon.

Urban life, urban society and the urban, detached by a particular social

practice (whose analysis will continue) from their half ruined

morphological base, and searching for a new base, these are the contexts

of the critical point. The urban cannot be defined either as attached to

a material morphology (on the ground, in the practicomaterial), or as

being able to detach itself from it. It is not an intemporal essence,

nor a system among ocher systems or above other systems. It is a mental

and social form, that of simultaneity, of gathering, of convergence, of

encounter (or rather, encounters). It is a quality born from quantities

(spaces, objects, products). It is a difference, or rather, an ensemble

of differences. The urban contains the meaning of industrial production,

as appropriation contains the sense of technical domination over nature,

the latter becoming absurd without the former. It is a field of

relations including notably the relation of time (or of times; cyclical

rhythms and linear durations) with space (or spaces: isotopics and

heterotopies). As place of desire and bond of times, the urban could

present itself as signifiers whose signified we are presently looking

for (that is, practico-material ‘realities’ which would enable, with an

adequate morphological and material base, to realize it in space).

Lacking adequate theoretical elaboration, the double process

(industrialization- urbanization) has been severed and its aspects

separated, to be therefore consigned to the absurd. Grasped by a higher

and dialectical rationality, conceived in its duality and

contradictions, this process could not leave the urban aside. On the

contrary: it understands it. Therefore, what should be incriminated is

not reason, but a particular rationalism, a constricted rationality, and

its limits. The world of merchandise has its immanent logic of money and

exchange value generalized without limits. Such a form, that of exchange

and equivalence, is indifferent towards urban form; it reduces

simultaneity and encounters to those of the exchanges and the meeting

place to where the contract or quasi-contract of equivalent exchange is

concluded: the market. Urban society, a collection of acts taking place

in time, privileging a space (site, place) and privileged by it, in turn

signifiers and signified, has a logic different from that of

merchandise. It is another world. The urban is based on use value. This

conflict cannot be avoided. At most, economic and productivist

rationality seeks to push beyond all limits the production of products

(exchangeable objects of exchange value) by suppressing the oeuvre, this

productivist rationality makes itself out to be knowledge, while

containing an ideological component tied to its very essence. Maybe it

is only ideology, valorizing constraints, those which come from existing

determinisms, those of industrial production and the market of products,

those coming from its fetishism of policy. Ideology presents these real

constraints as rational. Such a rationality is not innocuous. The worse

danger which it harbours comes from it wanting itself and calling itself

synthetical. It purports to lead to synthesis and make ‘men of

synthesis’ (either from philosophy, or from science, or lastly, from an

‘interdisciplinary’ research). Now, this is an ideological illusion. Who

has right of synthesis? Certainly not a civil servant of synthesis,

accomplishing this function in a way guaranteed by institutions.

Certainly not he who extrapolates from an analysis or several analyses.

Only the practical capacity of realization has the right to collect the

theoretical elements of synthesis, by doing it. Is it the role of

political power? Maybe, but not any political force: not the political

State as an institution or sum of institutions, not statesmen as such.

Only the critical examination of strategies enables us to give an answer

to this questioning. The urban can only be confined to a strategy

prioritizing the urban problematic, the intensification of urban life,

the effective realization of urban society (that is, its morphological,

material and practice-material base).

On Urban Form

The ambiguity, or more exactly, the polysemy or plurality of meanings,

of this term, ‘form’, has already been remarked upon. It was not really

necessary, being obvious. The same goes for the polysemy of the terms

‘function’, ‘structure’ etc. None the less we cannot rest there and

accept the situation. How many people believe they have said and

resolved everything when they use one of these fetish words! The

plurality and confusion of the meanings serve an absence of thought and

poverty which takes itself for wealth.

The only way to clarify the meaning of the term is to begin from its

most abstract acceptance. Only scientific abstraction without contents,

distinguished from verbal abstraction and opposed to speculative

abstraction, enables transparent definitions. Therefore, to define form,

one must begin from formal logic and logico-mathematical structures. Not

so as to isolate or fetishize them, but, on the contrary, to catch their

relation to the ‘real’. This is not without some difficulties and

disadvantages. The transparency and clarity of ‘pure’ abstraction are

not accessible to all. Most people are either myopic or blind to it. A

‘culture’ is necessary not only to understand the abstract, but far more

to attain the disturbing frontiers which at one and the same time

distinguish and unite the concrete and the abstract, knowledge and art,

mathematics and poetry. To elucidate the meaning of the word ‘form’, one

will have to refer to a very general, very abstract theory, the theory

of forms. It is dose to a philosophical theory of knowledge, extending

it and yet very different, since on the one hand it designates its own

historical and ‘cultural’ conditions and on the other it rests upon

difficult logico-mathematical considerations.

Proceeding by stages a socially recognized ‘form’ will be examined; for

example, the contract. There are many kinds of contracts: the marriage

contract, the work contract, the sales contract, etc. The contents of

social acts defined as contractual are therefore very different.

Sometimes they relate to the regulation of relations between two

individuals of different sexes (the sexual relationship taking second

place in the social regulation of assets and their transmission as they

relate to children and inheritance). Sometimes they relate to the

regulation of relations between two individuals of different social and

even class status: employer and employee, boss and worker. Sometimes

what is involved is the submission to a social regularity of the

relationship between seller and buyer, etc. These particular situations

have none the less a common feature: reciprocity in a socially

constituted and instituted engagement. Each engages himself vis-a-vis

the other to accomplish a certain sort of action explicitly or

implicitly stipulated. Moreover, one knows that this reciprocity entails

some fiction, or rather, that as soon as it is concluded, it reveals

itself to be fictional, inasmuch as it does not fall into contractual

stipulation and under the rule of law. Sexual reciprocity between

spouses becomes social and moral fiction (the ‘conjugal duty’). The

reciprocity of engagement between boss and worker establishes them on

the same level only fictionally. And so on and so forth. Nevertheless,

these fictions have a social existence and influence. They are the

various contents of a general juridical form with which jurists operate

and which become the codification of social relations: the civil code.

It is the same for reflective thought which has extremely diverse

contents: objects, situations, activities. From this diversity emerge

more or less fictional or real domains: science, philosophy, art, etc.

These many objects, these domains somewhat small in number, relate to a

logical formulation. Reflection is codified by a form common to all

contents, which is born out of their differences.

Form detaches itself from content, or rather, contents. Thus freed, it

emerges pure and transparent: intelligible. That much more intelligible

as decanted from content, ‘purer’. Bte here is the paradox. As such, in

its purity, it has no existence. It is not real, it is not. By detaching

itself from its content, form detaches itself from the concrete. The

summit, the crest of the real, the key to the real (of its penetration

by knowledge and the action which changes it), it places itself outside

the real. Philosophers have tried to understand for two thousand years.

None the less, philosophy brings the theoretical elements to this

knowledge. The approach is in several stages and has a strategic

objective. That is to grasp through the movement of reflection which

purifies forms and its own form, and which codifies and formalizes the

inherent and hidden movement of the relation between form and content.

There is no form without content. No content without form. What offers

itself to analysis is always a unity of form and content. Analysis

breaks this unity. It allows the purity of form to appear, and form

refers back to content. Yet, this indissoluble unity, broken by

analysis, is conflictual (dialectical). By turns thought goes from

transparent form to the opacity of contents, of the substantiality of

these contents to the inexistence of ‘pure’ form, in a ceaseless if not

momentary movement. Nevertheless, on the one hand, reflection tends to

dissociate forms (and its own logical form) from contents, by

constituting absolute ‘essences’, by establishing the reign of essences.

And on the other hand, practice and empiricism tend to ascertain

contents, to be satisfied with such certitude, to sojourn in the opacity

of various contents, accepted in their differences. For dialectical

reason, contents overflow form and form gives access to contents. Thus

form has a double ‘existence’. It is and is not. It has reality only in

contents, and yet detaches itself from them. It has a mental and a

social existence. Mentally the contract is defined by a form quite close

to logic: reciprocity. Socially, this form regulates countless

situations and activities; it confers upon them a structure, it

maintains them and even valorizes them, including as form an evaluation

and involving a ‘consensus’. As for the logico-mathematical form, its

mental existence is obvious. What is less obvious is that it involves a

fiction: the purely reflective disembodied theoretical man. As for its

social existence, it should be shown at length. Indeed, to this form are

attached multitudinous social activities: to count, define, classify

(objects, situations, activities), rationally organized, predicted,

planned and even programmed.

Reflection which (in new terms) extends the long meditation and the

problematic of philosophers, can elaborate a scheme of forms. It is a

sort of analytical grid to decipher the relations between the real and

thought. This (provisional and modifiable) grid moves from the most

abstract to the most concrete, and therefore from the least to the most

immediate. Each form presents itself in its double existence as mental

and social.

I. Logical form

Mentally: it is the principle of identity: A=A. It is void essence

without content. In its absolute purity it is supreme transparency

(difficult to grasp, for reflection can neither hold it or keep itself

within it and yet it has tautology as its point of departure and

return). Indeed, this tautology is what all propositions have in common

which otherwise have nothing in common with each other by content, or

the designated (designatum, denoted). As Wittgenstein has shown, this

tautology A=A is the centre, emptied of substance of all enunciated, of

all propositions.

Socially: understanding and the conventions of understanding over and

above misunderstandings. The impossible possibility to make effective

stopping, to define everything, to say everything and to agree on the

rules of understanding. But also, verbalism, verbiage, repetitions, pure

talk. But again pleonasms, vicious circles (including the great social

pleonasms, for bureaucracy which engenders bureacracy to maintain the

bureaucratic form — social logics which tend towards their pure

maintenance to the extent of destroying their content and thus

themselves, showing their emptiness).

II. Mathematical form

Mentally: identity and difference, equality in difference. Enumeration

(of the elements of a whole, etc). Order and measure.

Socially: distributions and classifications (in space, generally

privileged as such, but also in time). Scheduling. Quantification and

quantitative rationality. Order and measure subordinating to themselves

desires and desire, quality and qualities.

III. Form of language

Mentally: coherence, the capacity to articulate distinct elements, to

confer to them significations and meanings, to emit and decipher

messages according to their coded conventions.

Socially: the cohesion of relations, their subordination to the demands

and constraints of cohesion, the ritualization of relations, their

formalization and codification.

IV. Form of exchange

Mentally: confrontation and discussion, comparison and adjustments of

activities, needs, produces of labour, etc., that is, equivalence.

Socially: exchange value, the commodity form (as identified, formulated

and formalized by Marx in chapter I of Capital, with an implicit

reference to formal logic and to logico-mathemacical formalism).

V. Contractual form

Mentally: reciprocity.

Socially: the codification of social relations based on murual

engagement.

VI. Form of the practico-material object

Mentally: incernal equilibrium perceived and conceived as ‘objective’

(or ‘objectal’) property. Symmetry.

Socially: the anticipation of this equilibrium and this symmetry,

demanded by objects or denied (including among living and thinking

‘being;’), as well as social objects such as houses, buildings, utensils

and instruments, etc.

VII. Written form

Mentally: recurrence, synchronic fixation of what has occurred over

time, going backwards and returning along a fixed becoming.

Socially: the accumulation in time on the basis of fixation and the

conversation of what is acquired, the constraint of writing and

writings, terror before the written and the scruggle of the spirit

against the letter, the power of speech against the inscribed and the

prescribed, the becoming against the immutable and the reified.

VIII. Urban form

Mentally: simultaneity (of events, perceptions, and elements of a whole

in the ‘real’).

Socially: the encounter and the concentration of what exists around, in

the environment (assets and products, acts and activities, wealth) and

consequently, urban society as privileged social site, as meaning of

productive and consuming activities, as meeting between the oeuvre and

the product.

We will leave aside repetition which some (among them Nietzsche), have

considered to be the supreme form, existential form, or form of

existence.

It is almost evident that in so~called modern society, simultaneity is

intensified and becomes more dense, that the capacities for encounter

and assembly become strengthened. Communications speed up to

quasi-instantaneity. Ascendent or descendent circuits of information

flow and are diffused from this centrality. This aspect of the

‘socialization of society’ has already been emphasized (reservations

having been made about the ‘reformist’ nature of this well-known

formulation).

It is just as evident that under the same conditions dispersion

increases: the division of labour is pushed to the extreme segregation

of social groups and material and spiritual separations. These

dispersions can only be conceived or appreciated by reference to the

form of simultaneity. Without this form, dispersion and separation are

purely and simply glimpsed, accepted, confirmed as facts. Thus form

enables us to designate the content, or rather, contents. Movement in

its emergence reveals a hidden movement, the dialectical (conflictual)

movement of content and urban form: the problematic. The form in which

is inscribed this problematic asks questions which are a part of it.

Before whom and for whom is simultaneity established, the contents of

urban life assembled?

Spectral Analysis

In fact, the rationality we see used in practice (including applied

planning), this limited rationality is exercised especially according to

the modalities of a very advanced and prepared analytical intelligence,

endowed with great means of pressure. This analytical intellect endows

itself with the privileges and prestige of synthesis. In this way it

hides what it conceals: strategies. One could impute it with the

peremptory concern of the functional, or rather, the unifunctional, as

well as the subordination of details minutely inventoried for the

representation of a social globality. Thus disappear mediations between

an ideological ensemble assumed to be rational (technologically or

economically) and detailed measures, objects of tactics and prediction.

This placing in parenthesis of theoretical, practical, social and mental

mediations does not lack black humour in a society where intermediaries

(shopkeepers, financiers, publicists, etc.) have immense privileges. One

covers the other! Thus a gulf is dug between the global (which hovers

over the void) and the manipulated and repressed partial, upon which

institutions weigh.

What is questioned here is not an uncertain ‘globality’, it is an

ideology and the class strategy which uses and supports this ideology.

After a sort of ‘spectral’ analysis of social elements, the already

mentioned use of analytical intelligence is related as much to extreme

fragmentation of work and specialization pushed to the limits (including

specialized planning studies), as projection on the ground. Segregation

must be highlighted, with its three aspects, sometimes simultaneous,

sometimes successive: spontaneous (coming from revenues and ideologies)

— voluntary (establishing separate spaces) — programmed: under the guise

of planning and the plan).

There are unquestionably strong tendencies in all countries opposing

segregationist tendencies. One cannot state that the segregation of

groups, ethnic groups, social strata and classes comes from a constant

and uniform strategy of the powers, nor that one should see in it the

efficient projection of institutions or the will of political leaders.

Moreover, there exist the will and organized actions to combat it. And

yet, even where separation of social groups does not seem to be patently

evident on the ground, such a pressure and traces of segregation appear

under examination. The extreme case, the last instance, the ghetto. We

can observe that there are several types of ghetto: those of Jews and

the blacks, and also those of intellectuals or workers. In their own way

residential areas are also ghettos; high status people because of wealth

or power isolate themselves in ghettos of wealth. Leisure has its

ghettos. Wherever an organized action has attempted to mix social strata

and classes, a spontaneous decantation soon follows. The phenomenon of

segregation must be analysed according to various indices and criteria:

ecological (shanty towns, slums, the rot in the heart of the city),

formal (the deterioration of signs and meanings of the city, the

degradation of the urban by the dislocation of its architectural

elements), and sociological (standards of living and life styles, ethnic

groups, cultures and sub-cultures, etc.)

Anti-segregationist tendencies would be rather more ideological. They

sometimes relate to liberal humanism, sometimes to a philosophy of the

city considered as ‘subject’ (as a community or social organism).

Despite good humanist intentions and philosophical goodwill, practice

tends towards segregation. Why? For theoretical reasons and by virtue of

social and political causes. At the theoretical level, analytical

thought separates and delineates. It fails when it wants to reach a

synthesis. Socially and politically (conscious or unconscious) class

strategies aim for segregation.

In democratic countries public powers cannot overtly decree segregation

as such. Therefore they often adopt a humanist ideology which in the

most old-fashioned sense becomes a utopia, when it does not become a

demagogy. Segregation always wins over, even in those parts of social

life more or less easily and more or less thoroughly controlled by

public powers. Let us say that the State and private enterprise strive

to absorb and suppress the city as such. The State proceeds rather from

above and private enterprise from below (by ensuring housing and the

function of inhabiting in workers’ towns and housing estates, which

depending on a ‘society’ and also assuring leisure, even culture and

social promotion). Despite their differences and sometimes their

conflicts, the State and private enterprise both converge towards

segregation.

Let us leave open the issue of knowing whether the political forms of

the State (capitalist, socialist or in transition, etc.), engender

different strategies cowards the city. Let us not attempt for the time

being to know where or how, at whom and with whom these strategies are

developed. We substantiate strategies by observing them as significant

orientations. Segregations which morphologically destroyed the city and

threaten urban life cannot be passed off as the effect of hazards or

local conjunctures. Let us be contented with the notion that the

democratic character of a regime is identifiable by its attitude towards

the city, urban ‘liberties’ and urban reality, and therefore towards

segregation. Among the criteria to retain would nor this one be one of

the most important? It is fundamental in what concerns the city and its

problematic. Nevertheless one must distinguish between political power

and social pressures which can annihilate the effects of (good or bad)

will of politicians. With regards to private enterprise, let us also

leave this an open question. What are the relations between (ideological

and practical) rationality in general, between (general and urban)

planning on the one hand, and on the other the rational management of

large firms? We can nevertheless put forward a hypothesis and research

direction. Rationality in the firm always implies an analysis pushed to

the extreme of tasks, operations and sequences. In addition, the reasons

and causes of class strategy are fully played out in the capitalist

firm. It is therefore highly probable that the firm as such favours the

extreme segregation, acts accordingly and applies social pressure when

this is not a decision.

The State and the firm seek to appropriate urban functions and to assume

and ensure them by destroying the form of the urban. Can they? Do not

these strategic objectives exceed their strengths, combined or not? It

would be most interesting to investigate this point. The conditions and

modalities of the crisis of the city are gradually uncovered and

accompanied by a city-wide institutional crisis of urban jurisdiction

and administration. What was specific to the city (the municipality,

local expenditures and investments, schools and educational programmes,

universities, etc.) fall increasingly under the control of the State,

and by institutionalizing itself in a global context, the city tends to

disappear as a specific institution. This abolishes it as an oeuvre of

original groups which were themselves specific. However, can the powers

and institutions at the top dispense with this relay, this mediation,

the city? This, of course, would need to be shown by researches into

juridical, economic, cultural and administrative sociology. Can they

abolish the urban? It is at this level that daily life, governed by

institutions which regulate it from above, consolidated and set up

according to multiple constraints, constitutes itself. Productivist

rationality which tends to suppress the city at the level of general

planning rediscovers it in the controlled and organized consumption of a

supervised market. After having been kept away from the global level of

decision-making, the city is reconstituted at the level of executions

and application, by institutions of power. The outcome — inasmuch as

such a situation in France and elsewhere can make sense — is an

incredible entanglement of measures (all reasonable), regulations (all

very complicated), and constraints (all motivated). The functioning of

bureaucratic rationality becomes confused with its own presuppositions

and consequences which overcome and elude it. Conflicts and

contradictions resurface, giving rise to ‘structuring’ activities and

‘concerted’ actions aimed at their revocation. It is here on the ground

that the absurdity of a limited rationality of bureaucracy and

technocracy becomes evident. Here is grasped the falsehood of an

illusory identification between the rational and the real in the State,

and the true identity between the absurd and a certain authoritarian

rationalism.

On our horizon, the city and the urban are outlined as virtual objects,

as projects of a synthetic reconstitution. Critical analysis confirms

the failure of an analytical but uncritical thought. What does chis

analytical practice retain of the city and the urban whose results one

can detect on the ground? Aspects, elements and fragments. It places

before our eyes the spectre, the spectral analysis of the city. When we

speak of spectral analysis, its meaning is almost literal and not

metaphorical. Before our eyes, under our gaze, we have the ‘spectre’ of

the city, that of urban society and perhaps simply of society. If the

spectre of Communism no longer haunts Europe, the shadow of the city,

the regret of what has died because it was killed, perhaps guilt, have

replaced the old dread. The image of urban hell in the making is not

less fascinating, and people rush cowards the ruins of ancient cities to

consume them touristically, in the belief that they will heal their

nostalgia. Before us, as a spectacle (for spectators ‘unconscious’ of

what is before their ‘conscience’) are the dissociated and inert

elements of social life and the urban. Here are ‘social housing estates’

without teenagers or old people. Here are women dozing while the men

work far away and come home exhausted. Here are private housing

developments which form a microcosm and yet remain urban because they

depend on centres of decision-making and each house has a television.

Here is a daily life well divided into fragments: work, transport,

private life, leisure. Analytical separation has isolated them as

ingredients and chemical elements, as raw materials (whereas they are

the outcome of a long history and imply an appropriation of

materiality). It is not finished. Here is the dismembered and

dissociated human being. Here are the senses of smell, taste, sight,

touch, hearing — some atrophied, some hypertrophied. Here is functioning

separately perception, intelligence and reason. Here is speech,

discourse and writing. Here is daily life and celebration, the latter

moribund. It is obvious, urgently. Synthesis then becomes an item on the

order of the day, the order of the century. But this synthesis, with its

analytical intellect, appears only as a combination of separate

elements. But combination is not and can never be synthesis. The city

and the urban cannot be recomposed from the signs of the city, the

semanthemes of the urban, although the city is a signifying whole. The

city is not only a language, but also a practice. Nobody therefore, and

we have no fear to repeat it, is entitled to pronounce or announce this

synthesis. No more is the sociologist or community worker than the

architect, the economist, the demographer, the linguist or semiologist.

Nobody has the power or the right. Only the philosopher might perhaps

have the right, if philosophy in the course of the centuries had not

demonstrated its incapacity to attain concentrate totalities (although

it has always aimed at totality and has posed global and general

questions). Only a praxis, under conditions to be determined, can take

charge of the possibility and demand of a synthesis this objective: the

gathering together of what gives itself as dispersed, dissociated,

separated, and this in the form of simultaneity and encounters.

We have here therefore before us, projected separately on the ground,

groups, ethnic groups, ages and sexes, activities, tasks and functions,

knowledge. Here is all that is necessary to create a world, an urban

society, or the developed urban. But this world is absent, this society

is before us only in a state of virtuality. It may perish in the bud.

Under existing conditions, it dies before being born. The conditions

which give rise to possibilities can also sustain them in a virtual

state, in presence-absence. Would this not be the root of this drama,

the point of emergence of nostalgia? The urban obsesses those who live

in need, in poverty, in the frustration of possibilities which remain

only possibilities. Thus the integration and participation obsess the

non-participants, the non-integrated, those who survive among the

fragments of a possible society and the ruins of the past: excluded from

the city, at the gates of the urban. The road travelled is staked out

with contradictions between the total (global) and the partial, between

analysis and synthesis. Here is a new one which reveals itself, high and

deep. It does interest theory but practice. The same social practice,

that of society today (in France, in the second half of the twentieth

century) offers to critical analysis a double character which cannot be

reduced to a significant opposition, although it signifies.

On the one hand, chis social practice is integrative. It attempts to

integrate its elements and aspects into a coherent whole. Integration is

accomplished at different levels and according to various modalities.

The market, the ‘world of commodities’, that is, by consumption and

ideology of consumption, by ‘culture’, put forward as unitary and

global; by ‘values’, including art; by the actions of the State,

including national consciousness and the political options and

strategies at national level. This integration is firstly aimed at the

working class, but also the intelligentsia and intellectuals, and

critical thought (not excluding Marxism). Planning could well become

essential to this integrative practice.

At the same time this society practices segregation. This same

rationality which sees itself as global (organizing, planning, unitary

and unifying) concretizes itself at the analytical level. On the ground

it projects separation. It tends (as in the United States), to form

ghettos or parking lots, those of workers, intellectuals, students (the

campus), foreigners, and so forth, not forgetting the ghetto of leisure

or ‘creativity’, reduced to miniaturization or hobbies. Ghetto in space

and ghetto in time. In planning, the term ‘zoning’ already implies

separation, segregation, isolation in planned ghettos. The fact becomes

rationality in the project.

This society wants itself and sees itself as coherent. It seeks

coherence, linked to rationality both as feature of efficient

organizational action, and as value and criterion. Under examination the

ideology of coherence reveals a hidden but none the less blatant

incoherence. Would coherence not be the obsession of an incoherent

society, which searches the way towards coherence by wishing to stop in

a conflictual situation denied as such?

This is not the only obsession. Integration also becomes an obsessional

theme, an aimless aspiration. The term ‘integration’ used in all its

meanings, appears in texts (newspapers, books, and speeches) with such

frequency that it must reveal something. On the one hand, this term

designates a concept concerning and enclosing social practice divulging

a strategy. On the other, it is a social connotator, without concept,

objective or objectivity, revealing an obsession with integrating (to

this or that, to a group, an ensemble or a whole). How could it be

otherwise in a society which superimposes the whole to the pans,

synthesis to analysis, coherence to incoherence, organization to

dislocation? It is from the city that the urban problematic reveals this

constitutive duality with its conflictual content. What results from

this? Without a doubt paradoxical phenomena of disintegrating

integration which refer particularly to urban reality.

This does not mean that this society is disintegrating and falling

apart. No. It is functionning. How? Why? That creates a problem. It must

also mean that this functioning is not without an enormous malaise — its

obsession. Another obsessional theme is participation, linked to

integration. This is not a simple obsession. In practice, the ideology

of participation enables us to have the acquiescence of interested and

concerned people at a small price. After a more or less elaborate

pretence at information and social activity, they return to their

tranquil passivity and retirement. Is it not clear that real and active

participation already has a name? It is called self-management. Which

poses other problems.

Very powerful forces tend to destroy the city. A particular kind of

planning projects on the ideological terrain a practice whose aim is the

death of the city. These social and political forces ravage the urban in

the making. This kernel, so powerful, in its own way, can it grow in the

cracks which still subsist between these masses? Does science, or

rather, scientificity, which puts itself at the service of existing

rationality, legitimize these masses of the State, private enterprise,

culture which allow the city to perish while offering its images and

“oeuvres” for consumption sentence. ‘Does science ... legitimize these

masses ... for consumption?’ Construction is? Could urban life recover

and strengthen its capacities of integration and participation of the

city, which are almost entirely lost, and which cannot be stimulated

either by authoritarian means or by administrative prescription, or by

the intervention of specialists? The foremost theoretical problem can be

formulated thus. The political meaning of class segregation is clear,

whether it is a ‘subject’ for analysis, whether it is the end result of

a series of unplanned actions, or whether it is the effect of a will.

For the working class, victim of segregation and expelled from the

traditional city, deprived of a present or possible urban life, there is

a practical and therefore political problem even if it is not posed

politically and even if until now the housing question has for it and

its representatives concealed the problematic of the city and the urban.

The Right to the City

Theoretical thought sees itself compelled to redefine the forms,

functions and structures of the city (economic, political, cultural,

etc.) as well as the social needs inherent to urban society. Until now,

only those individual needs, motivated by the so-called society of

consumption (a bureaucratic society of managed consumption) have been

prospected, and moreover manipulated rather than effectively known and

recognized. Social needs have an anthropological foundation. Opposed and

complimentary, they include the need for security and opening, the need

for certainty and adventure, that of organization of work and of play,

the needs for the predictable and the unpredictable, of similarity and

difference, of isolation and encounter, exchange and investments, of

independence (even solitude) and communication, of immediate and

long-term prospects. The human being has the need to accumulate energies

and to spend them, even waste them in play. He has a need to see, to

hear, to touch, to taste and the need to gather these perceptions in a

‘world’. To these anthropological needs which are socially elaborated

(that is, sometimes separated, sometimes joined together, here

compressed and there hypertrophied), can be added specific needs which

are not satisfied by those commercial and cultural infrastructures which

are somewhat parsimoniously taken into account by planners. This refers

to the need for creative activity, for the oeuvre (not only of products

and consumable material goods), of the need for information, symbolism,

the imaginary and play. Through these specified needs lives and survives

a fundamental desire of which play, sexuality, physical activities such

as sport, creative activity, art and knowledge are particular

expressions and moments, which can more or less overcome the fragmentary

division of tasks. Finally, the need of the city and urban life can only

be freely expressed within a perspective which here attempts to become

clearer and to open up the horizon. Would not specific urban needs be

those of qualified places, places of simultaneity and encounters, places

where exchange would not go through exchange value, commerce and profit?

Would there not also be the need for a time for these encounters, these

exchanges?

At present, an analytical science of the city, which is necessary, is

only at the outline stage. At the beginning of their elaboration,

concepts and theories can only move forward with urban reality in the

making, with the praxis (social practice) of urban society. Now, not

without effort, the ideologies and practices which blocked the horizon

and which were only bottlenecks of knowledge and action, are being

overcome.

The science of the city has the city as object. This science borrows its

methods, approaches and concepts from the fragmentary sciences, but

synthesis escapes it in two ways. Firstly, because this synthesis which

would wish itself as total, starting from the analytic, can only be

strategic systematization and programming. Secondly, because the object,

the city, as consummate reality is falling apart. Knowledge holds in

front of itself the historic city already modified, to cut it up and put

it together again from fragments. As social text, this historic city no

longer has a coherent set of prescriptions, of use of time linked to

symbols and to a style. This text is moving away. It takes the form of a

document, or an exhibition, or a museum. The city histocically

constructed is no longer lived and is no longer understood practically.

It is only an object of cultural consumption for tourists, for a

estheticism, avid for spectacles and the picturesque. Even for those who

seek to understand it with warmth, it is gone. Yet, the urban remains in

a state of dispersed and alienated actuality, as kernel and virtuality.

What the eyes and analysis perceive on the ground can at best pass for

the shadow of a future object in the light of a rising sun. It is

impossible to envisage the reconstitution of the old city, only the

construction of a new one on new foundations, on another scale and in

other conditions, in another society. The prescription is: there cannot

be a going back (towards the traditional city), nor a headlong flight,

towards a colossal and shapeless agglomeration. In other words, for what

concerns the city the object of science is not given. The past, the

present, the possible cannot be separated. What is being studied is a

virtual object, which thought studies, which calls for new approaches.

The career of the old classical humanism ended long ago and badly. It is

dead. Its mummified and embalmed corpse weighs heavily and does not

smell good. It occupies many spaces, public or otherwise, thus

transforms into cultural cemeteries under the guise of the human:

museums, universities, various publications, not to mention new towns

and planning procedures. Trivialities and platitudes are wrapped up in

this ‘human scale’, as they say, whereas what we should take charge of

are the excesses and create ‘something’ to the scale of the universe.

This old humanism died during the World Wars, during the demographic

growth which accompanied great massacres, and before the brutal demands

of economic growth and competition and the pressure of poorly controlled

techniques. It is not even an ideology, barely a theme for official

speeches.

Recently there have been great cries of ‘God is dead, man too’ as if the

death of classical humanism was that of man. These formulae spread in

best-sellers, and taken in by a publicity not really responsible, are

nothing new. Nietzschean meditation, a dark presage for Europe’s culture

and civilization, began a hundred years ago during the 1870–1

Franco-Prussian war. When Nietzsche announced the death of God and man,

he did not leave a gaping hole, or fill this void with makeshift

material, language or linguistics. He was also announcing the Superhuman

which he thought was to come. He was overcoming the nihilism he was

identifying. Authors transacting these theoretical and poetic treasures,

but with a delay of a century, plunge us back into nihilism. Since

Nietzsche, the dangers of the Superhuman have been cruelly evident.

Moreover, this ‘new man’ emerging from industrial production and

planning rationality has been more than disappointing. There is still

another way, that of urban society and the human as oeuvre in this

society which would be an oeuvre and not a product. There is also the

simultaneous overcoming of the old ‘social animal’ and man of the

ancient city, the urban animal, towards a polyvalent, polysensorial,

urban man capable of complex and transparent relations with the world

(the environment and himself). Or there is nihilism. If man is dead, for

whom will we build? How will we build? It does not matter that the city

has or has not disappeared, that it must be thought anew, reconstructed

on new foundations or overcome. It does not matter whether terror

reigns, that the atomic bomb is dropped or that Planet Earth explodes.

What is important? Who thinks? Who acts? Who still speaks and for whom?

If meaning and finality disappear and we cannot even declare them in a

praxis, nothing matters. And if the capacities of the ‘human being’,

technology, science, imagination and art, or their absence, are erected

as autonomous powers, and that reflective thought is satisfied with this

assessment, the absence of a ‘subject’, what to reply? What to do?

Old humanism moves away and disappears. Nostalgia lessens and we turn

back less and less often to see its shape lying across the road. It was

the ideology of the liberal bourgeoisie, with its Greek and Latin quotes

sprinkled with Judeo-Christianity, which bent over the people and human

sufferings and which covered and supported the rhetoric of the clear

consciences of noble feelings and of the sensitive souls. A dreadful

cocktail, a mixture to make you sick. Only a few intellectuals (from the

‘Left’ — but are there still any intellectuals on the ‘Right’?) who are

neither revolutionary nor openly reactionary, nor Dionysiacs or

Apollonians, still have a taste for this sad potion.

We thus must make the effort to reach out towards a new humanism, a new

praxis, another man, that of urban society. We must avoid those myths

which threaten this will, destroy those ideologies which hinder this

project and those strategies which divert this trajectory. Urban life

has yet to begin. What we are doing now is to complete an inventory of

the remains of a millenarian society where the countryside dominated the

city, and whose ideas, values, taboos and prescriptions were largely

agrarian, with rural and ‘natural’ dominant features. A few sporadic

cities hardly emerged from a rustic ocean. Rural society was (still is),

a society of scarcity and penury, of want accepted or rejected, of

prohibitions managing and regulating privations. It was also the society

of the fête, of festivities. But that aspect, the best, has been lost

and instead of myths and limitations, this is what must be revitalized!

A decisive remark: for the crisis of the traditional city accompanies

the world crisis of agrarian civilization, which is a so traditional. It

is up to us to resolve this double crisis, especially by creating with

the new city, a new life in the city. Revolutionary societies (among

which the USSR ten or fifteen years after the October Revolution),

intimated the development of society based on industry. But they only

intimated.

The use of ‘we’ in the sentences above has only the impact of a metaphor

to mean those concerned. The architect, the planner, the sociologist,

the economist, the philosopher or the politician cannot out of

nothingness create new forms and relations. More precisely, the

architect is no more a miracle-worker than the sociologist. Neither can

create social relations, although under certain favourable conditions

they help trends to be formulated (to take shape). Only social life

(praxis) in its global capacity possesses such powers — or does not

possess them. The people mentioned above can individually or in teams

dear the way; they can also propose, cry out and prepare forms. And also

(and especially), through a maieutic nurtured by science, assess

acquired experience, provide a lesson from failure and give birth to the

possible.

At the point we have arrived there is an urgent need to change

intellectual approaches and tools. It would be indispensable to take up

ideas and approaches from elsewhere and which are still not very

familiar.

Transduction. This is an intellectual operation which can be

methodically carried out and which differs from classical induction,

deduction, the construction of ‘models’, simulation as well as the

simple statement of hypothesis. Transduction elaborates and constructs a

theoretical object, a possible object from information related to

reality and a problematic posed by this reality. Transduction assumes an

incessant feed back between the conceptual framework used and empirical

observations. Its theory (methodology), gives shape to certain

spontaneous mental operations of the planner, the architect, the

sociologist, the politician and the philosopher. It introduces rigour in

invention and knowledge in utopia.

Experimental utopia. Who is not a utopian today? Only narrowly

specialized practitioners working to order without the slightest

critical examination of stipulated norms and constraints, only these not

very interesting people escape utopianism. All are utopians, including

those futurists and planners who project Paris in the year 2,000 and

those engineers who have made Brasilia! But there are several

utopianisms. Would not the worst be that utopianism which does not utter

its name, covers itself with positivism and on this basis imposes the

harshest constraints and the most derisory absence of technicity?

Utopia is to be considered experimentally by studying its implications

and consequences on the ground. These can surprise. What are and what

would be the most successful places? How can they be discovered?

According to which criteria? What are the times and rhythms of daily

life which are inscribed and prescribed in these ‘successful’ spaces

favourable to happiness? That is interesting.

There are other indispensable intellectual approaches to identify

without dissociating them the three fundamental theoretical concepts of

structure, function and form, and to know their import, the spheres of

their validity, their limits and their reciprocal relations. To know

that they make a whole bur that the elements of this whole have a

certain independence and relative autonomy. To not privilege one over

the other, otherwise this gives an ideology, that is, a closed and

dogmatic system of significations: structuralism, formalism,

functionalism. To be used equally and in turn for the analysis of the

real (an analysis which is never exhaustive or without residue), as well

as for that operation known as ‘transduction’. It is important to

understand chat a function can be accomplished by means of different

structures, and that there is no unequivocal link between the terms.

That is, that functions and structures clothe themselves with forms

which reveal and veil them — chat the triplicity of these aspects make a

whole which is more than these aspects, elements and parts.

We have among our intellectual tools one which deserves neither disdain

nor privilege of the absolute: that of system (or rather sub-system of

significations.

Policies have their systems of significations — ideologies — which

enable them to subordinate to their strategies social acts and events

influenced by them. Ac the ecological level, the humble inhabitant has

his system (or rather, his sub-system) of significations. The fact of

living here or there involves the reception, adoption and transmission

of such a system, for example that of owner-occupied housing. The system

of significations of the inhabitant cells of his passivities and

activities: he is received but changed by practice. He is perceived.

Architects seem to have established and dogmatized an ensemble of

significations, as such poorly developed and variously labelled as

‘function’, ‘form’, ‘structure’, or rather, functionalism, formalism,

and structuralism. They elaborate them not from the significations

perceived and lived by those who inhabit, but from their interpretation

of inhabiting. It is graphic and visual, tending towards metalanguage.

It is graphism and visualization. Given that these architects form a

social body, they attach themselves to institutions, their system tends

to close itself off, impose itself and elude all criticism. There is

cause to formulate this system, often put forward without any other

procedure or precaution, as planning by extrapolation.

This theory which one could legitimately call planning. dose to the

meanings of that old practice of to to inhabit (that is, the human)

which would add to these partial facts a general theory of urban

time-spaces, which would reveal a new practice emerging from this

elaboration can be envisaged only as the practical application of a

comprehensive theory of the city and the urban which could go beyond

current scissions and separations, particularly those existing between

philosophy and the sciences of the city, the global and the partial.

Current planning projects could figure in this development — but only

within an unwavering critique of their ideological and strategic

implications. Inasmuch as we can define it, our object — the urban —

will never today be entirely present in our reflections. More than any

another object, it possesses a very complex quality of totality in act

and potential the object of research gradually uncovered, and which will

be either slowly or never exhausted. To take this object as a given

truth is operate a mythifying ideology. Knowledge must envisage a

considerable number of methods to grasp this object, and cannot fasten

itself onto a particular approach. Analytical configurations will follow

as closely as possible the internal articulations of this ‘thing’ which

is not a thing; they will be accompanied by reconstructions which will

never be realized. Descriptions, analyses and attempts at synthesis can

never be passed off as being exhaustive or definitive. All these

notions, all these batteries of concepts will come into play: form,

structure, function, level, dimension, dependent and independent

variables, correlations, totality, ensemble, system, etc. Here as

elsewhere, but more than elsewhere, the residue reveals itself to be

most precious. Each ‘object’ constructed will in turn be submitted to

critical examination. Within the possible, this will be accomplished and

submitted to experimental verification. The science of the city requires

a historical period to make itself and to orient social practice.

This science is necessary but not sufficient. We can perceive its limits

at the same time as its necessity. Planning thought proposes the

establishment or reconstitution of highly localized, highly

particularized and centralized social units whose linkages and tensions

would re-establish an urban unity endowed with a complex interior order,

with its hierarchy and a supple structure. More specifically,

sociological thought seeks an understanding and reconstitution of the

integrative capacities of the urban as well as the conditions of

practical participation. Why not? But only under one condition: never to

protect these fragmented and therefore partial attempts from criticism,

practical assessment and global preoccupation.

Knowledge can therefore construct and propose models. In this sense each

object is but a model of urban reality. Nevertheless, such a reality

will never become manageable as a thing and will never become

instrumental even for the most operational knowledge. Who would not hope

that the city becomes again what it was — the act and oeuvre of a

complex thought? But it cannot remain at the level of wishes and

aspirations and an urban strategy is not defined. An urban strategy

cannot cake into account existing strategies and acquired knowledge:

science of the city, with its disposition towards the planning of growth

and the control of development. Whoever says ‘strategies’ says the

hierarchy of ‘variables’ to be considered, some having a strategic

capacity and others remaining at the tactical level — and says also the

power to realize these strategies on the ground. Only groups, social

classes and class fractions capable of revolutionary initiative can take

over and realize to fruition solutions to urban problems. It is from

these social and political forces that the renewed city will become the

oeuvre. The first thing to do is to defeat currently dominant strategies

and ideologies. In the present society that there exist many divergent

groups and strategies (for example between the State and the private)

does not alter the situation. From questions of landed property to

problems of segregation, each project of urban reform questions the

structures, the immediate (individual) and daily relations of existing

society, but also those that one purports to impose by the coercive and

institutional means of what remains of urban reality. In itself

reformist, the strategy of urban renewal becomes ‘inevitably’

revolutionary, not by force of circumstance, but against the established

order. Urban strategy resting on the science of the city needs a social

support and political forces to be effective. It cannot act on its own.

It cannot but depend on the presence and action of the working class,

the only one able to put an end to a segregation directed essentially

against it. Only this class, as a class, can decisively contribute to

the reconstruction of centrality destroyed by a strategy of segregation

and found again in the menacing form of centres of decision-making. This

does not mean that the working class will make urban society all on its

own, but that without it nothing is possible. Without it integration has

no meaning and disintegration will continue under the guise of nostalgia

and integration. There is there not only an option but an horizon which

opens or doses. When the working class is silent, when it is quiescent

and cannot accomplish what theory has defined as its ‘historical

mission’, then both the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are lacking. Reflection

confirms this absence, which means that it is appropriate to consider

two series of propositions:

1. A political programme of urban reform not defined by the framework

and the possibilities of prevailing society or subjugated to a

‘realism’, although based on the study of realities. In other words,

reform thus understood is not limited to reformism. This programme will

therefore have a singular and even paradoxical character. It will be

established to be proposed to political forces, parties. One could even

add that preferentially it would be presented to ‘left’ parties,

political formations representing or wishing to represent the working

class. But it would not be established as a function of these forces and

formations. It will have in relation to them a specific character which

comes from knowledge, a scientific part. It will be proposed (free to be

altered) by those who take control of it. Let political forces take

their responsibilities. In this domain which engages the future of

modern society and that of producers, ignorance and misunderstanding

entail responsibilities before history.

2. Mature planning projects which consist of models and spatial forms

and urban times without concern for their current feasibility or their

utopian aspect. It does not seem possible that these models result

either from a simple study of existing cities and urban typologies, or

from a combination of elements. Other than contrary to experience, the

forms of space and time will be invented and proposed to praxis. That

imagination be deployed, not the imaginary of escape and evasion which

conveys ideologies, but the imaginary which invests itself in

appropriation (of time, space, physiolocal life and desire). Why not

oppose ephemeral cities to the eternal city, and movable centrality to

stable centres? All audacities can be premissed. Why limit these

propositions only to the morphology of time and space? They could also

include the way of living in the city and the development of the urban

on this basis.

In these two series there will also be long, medium and short-term

propositions constituting urban strategy understood as such.

The society in which we live appears to tend towards plenitude — or at

least towards fullness (durable goods and objects, quantity,

satisfaction and rationality). In face it allows a colossal gulf to be

dug into which ideologies agitate themselves and the fog of rhetoric

spreads. Having left speculation and contemplation, incomplete knowledge

and fragmentary divisions, one of the greatest projects active thought

can propose for itself is to fill this lacuna — and not only with

language.

In a period during which ideologists pronounce abundantly on structures,

the destructuration of the city manifests the depth of phenomena, of

social and cultural disintegration. Considered as a whole, this society

finds itself incomplete. Between the sub-systems and the structures

consolidated by various means (compulsion, terror, and ideological

persuasion), there are holes and chasms. These voids are not there due

to chance. They are the places of the possible. They contain the

floating and dispersed elements of the possible, but not the power which

could assemble them. Moreover, structuring actions and the power of the

social void tend to prohibit action and the very presence of such a

power. The conditions of the possible can only be realized in the course

of a radical metamorphosis.

In this conjuncture, ideology claims to provide an absolute quality to

‘scientificity’, science appertaining to the real, dissecting it,

reconstituting it, and by this fact isolating it from the possible and

closing the way. Now, in such a conjuncture science which is fragmentary

science can only have a programmatic impact. It brings elements to a

programme. If one concedes that these elements already constitute a

totality, and one wishes to execute this programme literally, one treats

the virtual object as a pre-existent technical object. A project is

accomplished without criticism and this project fulfills an ideology by

projecting it on the ground — that of the technocrats. Although

necessary, policy is not enough. It changes during the course of its

implementation. Only social force, capable of investing itself in the

urban through a long political experience, can take charge of the

realization of a programme concerning urban society. Conversely, the

science of the city brings to this perspective a theoretical and

critical foundation, a positive base. Utopia controlled by dialectical

reason serves as a safe-guard supposedly scientific fictions and visions

gone astray. Besides, this foundation and base prevent reflection from

losing itself in pure policy. Here the dialectical movement presents

itself as a relation between science and political power, as a dialogue

which actualizes relations of ‘theory-practice’ and ‘critical

positive-negative’.

As necessary as science, but not sufficient, art brings to the

realization of urban society its long meditation on life as drama and

pleasure. In addition and especially, art resticutes the meaning of the

oeuvre, giving it multiple facets of appropriated time and space;

neither endured nor accepted by a passive resignation, metamorphosed as

oeuvre. Music shows the appropriation of time, painting and sculpture

that of space. If the sciences discover partial determinisms, art and

philosophy show how a totality grows out of partial determinisms. It is

incumbent on the social force capable of creating urban society to make

efficient and effective the unity of art, technique and knowledge. As

much the science of the city, art and the history of art are part of a

meditation on the urban which wants to make efficient the images which

proclaim it. By overcoming this opposition, chis meditation striving for

action would thus be both utopian and realistic. One could even assert

that the maximum of utopianism could unite with the optimum of realism.

Among the contradictions characteristic of our time there are those

(particularly difficult ones) between the realities of society and the

facts of civilization. On the one hand, genocide, and on the other,

medical and other interventions which enable a child to be saved or an

agony prolonged. One of the latest but not lease contradictions has been

shown in this essay: between the socialization of society and

generalized segregation. There are many others, for example, the

contradiction between the label of revolutionary and the attachment to

an obsolete productivist rationalism. The individual, at the centre of

social forces due to the pressure of the masses, asserts himself and

does not die. Rights appear and become customs or prescriptions, usually

followed by enactments. And we know how, through gigantic destructions,

World Wars, and the terror of nuclear threats, that these concrete

rights come to complete the abstract rights of man and the citizen

inscribed on the front of buildings by democracy during its

revolutionary beginnings: the rights of ages and sexes (the woman, the

child and the elderly), rights of conditions (the proletarian, the

peasant), rights to training and education, to work, to culture, to

rest, to health, to housing. The pressure of the working class has been

and remains necessary (but not sufficient) for the recognition of these

rights, for their entry into customs, for their inscription into codes

which are still incomplete.

Over the last few years and rather strangely, the right to nature

entered into social practice thanks to leisure, having made its way

through protestations becoming commonplace against noise, fatigue, the

concentrationary universe of cities (as cities are rotting or

exploding). A strange journey indeed! Nature enters into exchange value

and commodities, to be bought and sold. This ‘naturality’ which is

counterfeited and traded in, is destroyed by commercialized,

industrialized and institutionally organized leisure pursuits. ‘Nature’,

or what passes for it, and survives of it, becomes the ghetto of leisure

pursuits, the separate place of pleasure and the retreat of

‘creativity’. Urban dwellers carry the urban with them, even if they do

not bring planning with them! Colonized by them, the countryside has

lost the qualities, features and charms of peasant life. The urban

ravages the countryside: this urbanized countryside opposes itself to a

dispossessed rurality, the extreme case of the deep misery of the

inhabitant, the habitat, of to inhabit. Are the rights to nature and to

the countryside not destroying themselves?

In the face of this pseudo-right, the right to the city is like a cry

and a demand. This right slowly meanders through the surprising detours

of nostalgia and tourism, the return to the heart of the traditional

city, and the Call of existent or recently developed centralities. The

claim to nature, and the desire to enjoy it displace the right to the

city. This latest claim expresses itself indirectly as a tendency to

flee the deteriorated and unrenovated city, alienated urban life before

at last, ‘really’ living. The need and the ‘right’ to nature contradict

the right to the city without being able to evade it. (This does not

mean that it is not necessary to preserve vase ‘natural’ spaces).

The right to the city cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting right

or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a

transformed and renewed right to urban life. It does not matter whether

the urban fabric encloses the countryside and what survives of peasant

life, as long as the ‘urban’, place of encounter, priority of use value,

inscription in space of a time promoted to the rank of a supreme

resource among all resources, finds its morphological base and its

practico-material realization. Which presumes an integrated theory of

the city and urban society, using the resources of science and art. Only

the working class can become the agent, the social carrier or support of

this realization. Here again, as a century ago, it denies and contests,

by its very existence, the class strategy directed against it. As a

hundred years ago, although under new conditions, it gathers the

interests (overcoming the immediate and the superficial) of the whole

society and firstly of all those who inhabit. 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. Is it essential to describe at length, besides the condition of

youth, students and intellectuals, armies of workers with or without

white collars, people from the provinces, the colonized and

semi-colonized of all sorts, all those who endure a well-organized daily

life, is it here necessary to exhibit the derisory and untragic misery

of the inhabitant, of the suburban dweller and of the people who stay in

residential ghettos, in the mouldering centres of old cities and in the

proliferations lost beyond them? One only has to open one’s eyes to

understand the daily life of the one who runs from his dwelling to the

station, near or far away, to the packed underground train, the office

or the factory, to return the same way in the evening and come home to

recuperate enough to start again the next day. The picture of this

generalized misery would not go without a picture of ‘satisfactions’

which hides it and becomes the means to elude it and break free from it.

Perspective or Prospective?

Since its beginnings, classical philosophy, which has had as social base

and theoretical foundation the city, thought the city, and endeavours to

determine the image of the ideal city. The Critias of Plato sees in the

city an image of the world, or rather of the cosmos, a microcosm. Urban

time and space reproduce on earth the configuration of the universe as

the philosopher discovers it.

If today one wants a representation of the ‘ideal’ city and of its

relations to the universe, one will not find this image with the

philosophers and even less in an analytical vision which divides urban

reality into fractions, sectors, relations and correlations. One has to

find it among the writers of science fiction. In science fiction novels,

every possible and impossible variation of future urban society has been

foreseen. Sometimes the old urban cores agonize, covered with an urban

fabric more or less thick, more or less sclerosed or cancerous, which

proliferates and spreads over the planet. In these cores destined to

disappearance after a long decline, live or vegetate failures, artists,

intellectuals and gangsters. Sometimes colossal cities reconstitute

themselves and carry onto a higher level former struggles for power. In

Azimov’s magistral work, The Foundation, an entire planet is covered by

a giant city, Tremor, which has all the means of knowledge and power

with which it dominates, as a centre of decision·making, a whole galaxy.

After many gigantic episodes, Trentor saves the universe and brings it

to its end, that is, to the ‘reign of endings’, joy and happiness, for

excesses are finally overcome and the time of the world finally

appropriated in a cosmic space. Between these two extremes, the

visionaries of science fiction have also their intermediary versions:

the city ruled by a powerful computer, the city of a highly specialized

and vital production which moves among planetary systems and galaxies,

etc.

Is it necessary to explore so far ahead the horizon of horizons? 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. We already know that this decision-making centre includes

all the channels of information and means of cultural and scientific

development. Coercion and persuasion converge with the power of

decision-making 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. Especially, they have the privilege to possess

time. Around them, distributed in space according to formalized

principles, there are human groups which can no longer bear the name of

slaves, serfs, vassals or even proletarians. What could they be called?

Subjugated, they provide a multiplicity of services for the Masters of

this State solidly established on the city. These Masters have around

for them every cultural and other pleasure, from nightclubs to the

splendours of the opera — not excluding remote controlled amusements.

Could this not be the true New Athens, with its minority of free

citizens, possessing and enjoying social spaces, dominating an enormous

mass of subjugated people, in principle free, genuinely and perhaps

voluntarily servants, treated and manipulated according to rational

methods? Are not the scholars, sociologists leading, in this very

different from ancient philosophers, not themselves the servants of

State and Order, under the pretence of empiricism and rigour, of

scientificity? The possibilities can even be assessed. Directors, heads,

presidents of this and that, elites, leading writers and artists,

well-known entertainers and media people, make up one per cent, or just

under half a million of the new notables in France in the twenty-first

century, each with their family and their following, and their own

‘firm’. The domination of and by centrality in no way denies the

possession of secondary domains — the enjoyment of nature, the sea, the

mountains, ancient cities (available through trips, hotels, etc.). Next

are about four per cent of executives, administrators, engineers and

scholars. After selection, the most eminent of these are admitted into

the heart of the city. For this selection, incomes and society rituals

might be sufficient. State capitalism has carefully organized for other

privileged subordinates domains distributed according to a rational

plan. Before reaching this goal State capitalism has carefully prepared

it. Without omitting the realization of several urban ghettos, it has

organized for scholars and for science a severely competitive sector: in

the universities and laboratories, scholars and intellectuals have

confronted each other on a purely competitive basis, with a zeal worthy

of a better job, for the best interest of the Masters, the economic and

political, for the glory and joy of the Olympians. Indeed, these

secondary elites are assigned to residence in science parks, university

campuses — ghettos for intellectuals. The mass, under pressure from many

constraints, spontaneously houses itself in satellite cities, planned

suburbs, and other more or less residential ghettos. There is for it

only carefully measured space. Time eludes it. It leads it daily life

bound (perhaps unwittingly), to the requirement of the concentration of

powers. But this is not a concentrationary universe. All this can quite

do without the ideology of freedom under the pretence of rationality,

organization, and programming. These masses who do not deserve the name

of people, or popular classes, or working class live relatively well.

Apart from the fact that their daily life is remote-controlled and the

permanent threat of unemployment weighs heavily on them, contributing to

a latent and generalized terror.

If someone smiles at this utopia, he is wrong. But how to prove it? When

his eyes will open, it will be too late. He demands proof. How do you

show light to a blind person, or the horizon to a myopic one — even if

he knows the theory of wholes, or of ‘clusters’, the finesses of

variance analysis, or the precise charms of linguistics?

Since the Middle Ages, each epoch of European civilization has had its

image of the possible, its dream, its fantasies of hell and paradise.

Each period, and perhaps each generation has had its representation of

the best of all possible worlds, or of a new life, an important, if not

essential part of all ideologies. In order to accomplish this function,

the eighteenth century, seemingly so rich, had only the rather feeble

image of the noble savage and exotic islands. To this exoticism, some

men of that century added a closer but somewhat prettified

representation of England. In relation to them, we are richly endowed.

By we is meant a poorly defined crowd, generally intellectuals, living

and thinking in France at the beginning of the second half of the

twentieth-century. We have many models, horizons, and avenues which do

not converge to imagine the future: the USSR and the United States,

China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Israel, even Sweden or Switzerland — and

without forgetting the Bororos.

While French society is becoming urbanized and Paris is being

transformed, and certain powers, if not State power, are modelling

France of the year 2,000, nobody is thinking about the ideal city or

what is happening to the real city. Utopia attaches itself to numerous

more or less distant and unknown or misunderstood realities, but no

longer to real and daily life. It is no longer begotten in the absences

and lacunae which cruelly puncture surrounding reality. The gaze turns

away, leaves the horizon, loses itself in the clouds, elsewhere. Such is

the power of diversion of ideologies, at the exact moment when we no

longer believe in ideology, but in realism and rationalism!

Previously, by refuting partial disciplines and their interdisciplinary

attempts, one was also asserting that synthesis belongs to the political

(that is, that all synthesis of analytical faces about urban reality

conceals under philosophy or an ideology a strategy). Statesmen, experts

and specialists should certainly not be given control of decision-

making. The term political is not here used so narrowly. Such a

proposition must be understood in the opposite way to what has been

expressed here. The capacity of synthesis belongs to political forces

which are in fact social forces (classes and fractions of classes,

groupings or class alliances). They exist or not, they manifest and

express themselves or not. They speak or do not speak. It is up to them

to indicate social needs, to influence existing institutions, to open

the horizon and lay claims to a future which will be their oeuvre. If

the inhabitants of various categories and strata allow themselves to be

manoeuvred and manipulated, displaced anywhere under the pretext of

social mobility, if they accept the conditions of an exploitation more

refined and extensive than before, too bad for them. If the working

class is silent, if it does not act, either spontaneously or by the

mediation of its institutional representatives and mandatories,

segregation will continue resulting again in a vicious circle.

Segregation is inclined to prohibit protest, contest, action, by

dispersing those who protest, contest, and act. In this perspective

political life will either challenge or reaffirm the centre of political

decision-making. For parties and men, this option is the criterion of

democracy.

The politician needs a theory to help him determine its course but this

presents some great difficulties. How can there be a theory of urban

society, the city and the urban, of realities and possibilities, without

synthesis?

Two dogmatic disciplines, philosophical systematization and

systematization from partial analyses under the pretence of such

disciplines or of so-called interdisciplinary research have already been

rejected. There can be no possibility of an analysis accomplished in the

context of knowledge. The unity outlined is defined by a convergence

which only practice can actualize between:

the goals, spread over time of political action, from the possible to

the impossible, that is, what is possible here and now, to what is

impossible today, but will become possible tomorrow in the course of

this very action

the theoretical elements brought to the analysis of urban reality,

that is, the ensemble of knowledge brought into play during the course

of political action, ordered, used and dominated by this action

the theoretical elements contributed by philosophy, which appear in a

new light, as its history inscribes itself in another perspective —

philosophical meditation transforming itself according to reality or

rather, the realization to accomplish.

the theoretical elements brought by art, conceived as a capacity to

transform reality, to appropriate at the highest level the facts of the

‘lived’, of time, space, the body and desire.

From this convergence, one can define the preceding conditions. It is

essential to consider no longer industrialization and urbanization

separately, but to perceive in urbanization the meaning, the goal and

the finality of industrialization. In other words, it is essential to

aim no longer for economic growth for its own sake, and economistic

ideology which entails strategic objectives, namely, superprofit and

capitalist overexploitation, the control of the economic (which fails

precisely because of this) to the advantage of the State. Concepts of

economic equilibrium, harmonious growth, structural maintenance

(structured–structuring relations being existing relations of production

and property) must be subordinated to more powerful concepts potentially

of development, and of concrete rationality emerging from conflicts.

In other words, growth must be guided. Very common formulations which

pass for democratic (growth, well-being for all, the general interest)

lose their meaning and this applies to liberalism as economistic

ideology as much as to centralized State planning. Such an ideology,

whether or not prospective, reduces the outlook on such issues as the

increase of wages and the better distribution of national revenue, or

even on the review and adjustment of the capital-labour relation.

To direct growth towards development, therefore towards urban society,

means firstly to prospect new needs, knowing chat such needs are

discovered in the course of their emergence and are revealed in the

course of their prospection. They do not pre-exist as objects. They do

not feature in the ‘real’ described by market studies and studies of

‘individual’ motivation. Consequently, this means substituting social

planning whose theory is hardly elaborated. Social needs lead to the

production of new ‘goods’ which are not this or that object, but social

objects in space and time. Man of urban society is already a man rich in

needs: the man of rich needs awaiting their objectification and

realization. Urban society overtakes the old and the new poverty, as

much the destitution of isolated subjectivity as that humdrum old need

for money with its worn symbols of the ‘pure’ gaze, the ‘pure’ sign, the

‘pure’ spectacle.

Thus, direction is not defined by an effective synthesis, but by a

convergence, a virtuality which is outlined but realized only at the

limit. This limit is not somewhere in the infinite, and yet it be can

reached by successive leaps and bounds. It is impossible to settle in it

and to establish it as an accomplished reality. Hence this is the

essential feature of the method already considered and named

‘transduction’, the construction of a virtual object approached from

experimental facts. The horizon opens up and calls for actualization.

The orientation reacts upon researched facts. In this way research

ceases to be either indeterminate, that is, empiricist, or a simple

confirmation of a thesis, that is, dogmatist. In this light, philosophy

and its history, art and its metamorphoses appear transformed.

As for the analytical aspect of urban research, it modifies itself by

the fact that research has already found ‘something’ at the outset and

that the direction or orientation influences the hypothesis. There is no

more question of isolating the points of space and time, of considering

separately activities and functions, or of studying apart from each

other behaviours or images, distributions and relations. These various

aspects of social production, that of the city and urban society, are

situated in relation to a framework of explanation and forecasting.

Since method consists as much in overcoming ecological description as

structural and functional analysis, in order to reach out to the

concrete of urban drama, formal evidence could be provided by the

general theory of forms. According to this theory, there is a form of

the city: assembly, simultaneity, encounter. Transduction is the

intellectual approach linked to these operations which codifies them or

supports them methodologically.

Scientifically speaking, the distinction between strategic variables and

tactical variables seems fundamental. The first ones, as soon as they

are identified, subordinate the second. Increase of wages? Better

distribution of national revenue? Nationalization of this or that? Very

well. But these are tactical variables. In the same way the suppression

of urban related constraints would affect the municipalization,

nationalization or socialization of building plots. Fine and well. But

for what purpose? The increase of rates and rhythms of growth between

strategic variables, given that quantitative growth already poses

qualitative problems of finality and development. The issue is not only

rates of growth, production and revenues, bur distribution. Which part

of increased production and global revenue will be attributed to social

needs, to ‘culture’, to urban reality? Is not the transformation of

daily life part of strategic variables? One could think it so. To take

an example, flexible working hours are of interest. This is only a

minuscule tactical action. The creation of new networks concerning the

life of children and adolescents (crèches, playing fields and sports,

etc.), the constitution of a very simple apparatus of social pedagogy,

which would inform as much social life itself as sexual life, the art of

living and art tout court. Such an institution would have much more

impact: it would mark the passage from the tactical to the strategic in

this field.

The variables of projects elaborated by economists also depend on

generally poorly defined strategies. Against class strategies which

often use very powerful scientific instruments and which tend to abuse

science (no: scientificity — a rigid and coercive ideological apparatus)

as means to persuade and impose, what is needed is to turn knowledge

around by putting it back on its feet.

Socialism? Of course, that is what it is about. But what socialism?

According to which concept and theory of socialist society? Is the

definition of this society by the planned organization of production

enough? No. Socialism today can only be conceived as production oriented

towards social needs, and consequently, towards the needs of urban

society. The goals borrowed from simple industrialization are being

overtaken and transformed. Such is the thesis or hypothesis formulated

here. Conditions and preconditions? We know them: a high level of

production and productivity (by breaking with an exploitation reinforced

by a relatively decreasing minority of highly productive manual and

intellectual workers), and a high technical and cultural level. In

addition, the institution of new social relations, especially between

governing and governed, between ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ of

decision-making. These conditions have virtually been realized in

advanced industrial countries. Their formulation does not arise from the

possible, even if this possible seems far from real and is really far

away.

Possibilities relate to a double examination: the scientific (project

and projection, variations of projects, predictions) and the imaginary

(at the limit, science fiction). Why should the imaginary enter only

outside the real instead of nurturing reality? When there is a loss of

thought in and by the imaginary, it is being manipulated. The imaginary

is also a social fact. Do not specialists claim for themselves the

intervention of imagination and the imaginary when they acclaim the ‘man

of synthesis’, or when they are disposed to welcome the ‘nexialist’ or

the ‘generalist’?

For two centuries, industrialization has been promoting commodities —

which although they pre-existed, were limited by agrarian and urban

structures. It has enabled the virtually unlimited extension of exchange

value. It has shown how merchandise is not only a way of putting people

in relation to each other, but also a logic, a language, and a world.

Commodities have swept away barriers. And this process is not over: the

car, the current pilot-object in the world of commodities, is overcoming

this last barrier — the city. It was therefore the time of political

economy and the two variations of its rule: liberal and state economis.

Today the overtaking of economism is being outlined. Towards what?

Towards an ethic or an aesthetic, a moralism or an aestheticism? Towards

new ‘values’? No. What is at stake is an overtaking by and in practice

of a change in social practice. Use value, subordinated for centuries to

exchange value, can now come first again. How? By and in urban society,

from this reality which still resists and preserves for us use value,

the city. A weakened but true vision of this truth is an urban reality

for ‘users’ and not for capitalist speculators, builders and

technicians.

Here we can envisage a strategic variable: to limit the importance of

the car industry in the economy of a country and the place of the

‘car-object’ in daily life. To substitute the car for other techniques,

other objects, other means of transport such as public ones. This is a

rather simple and trivial example but demonstrates the subordination of

the ‘real’ to a strategy.

The problem of leisure forces one to think even more dearly of a

strategy. To define it in its full scope, it is important to firstly

destroy a few fantasies mixed up with ideology. The social imaginary

furnished by ideology and advertising, as well as the sad reality of

‘hobbies’ and miniaturized ‘creativity’ blocks the horizon. Neither

holidays, nor industrialized cultural production, nor leisure in or

outside daily life resolve this problem. Their images prevent it from

being posed. The problem is to put an end to the separations of ‘daily

life — leisure’ or ‘daily life — festivity’. It is to restitute the fête

by changing daily life. The city was a space occupied at one and the

same time by productive labour, by oeuvres, and by festivities. It

should find again this function beyond functions, in a metamorphosed

urban society. One of the strategic aims can be formulated in this way,

although it is only a formulation of what is happening today without

grace or splendour in cities which attempt to recreate the fête with

festivities and festivals.

Each type of society and each mode of production has had its type of

city. The relative discontinuity of modes of production defines the

history of urban reality, although this is not exclusive and other

periodization are possible. Another periodization resting on a specific

centrality would show more closely the succession of urban types but

would not coincide completely with the primary periodization.

The oriental city, reason and result of the Asiatic mode of production,

offers its triumphal way for gatherings and meetings. Armies which

protect and oppress the agricultural territories administered by the

city leave and return through chis way on which are deployed military

parades and religious processions. The palace of the prince, the

umbilical, the omphalos, is the centre of the world, the point of

departure and arrival. The sacred enclosure captures and condenses

sacredness diffused over the whole of the territory. It manifests the

eminent right of the sovereign, inseparable possession and sacredness.

The triumphal way penetrates into the enclosure through a door, monument

among monuments. It is the door of the true urban centre, the centre of

the world not open to gatherings. Around the door are gathered guards,

caravaneers, vagrants and robbers. The tribunal sits here and gathers

the inhabitants for spontaneous assemblies. It is the place of urban

order and disorder, of revolts and repressions.

In the Greek and Roman antique city, centrality is attached to an empty

space, the agora and the forum. It is a place for assembly. There is an

important difference between the agora and the forum. Prohibitions

characterize the latter and buildings will quickly cover it up, taking

away from it its character of open space. It is not disjointed from the

centre of the world: the hole, the sacred–damned mundus, the place from

which souls leave, where the condemned and unwanted children are thrown.

The Greeks did not put emphasis on horror, on the links between urban

centrality and the underworld of the dead and the souls. Their thought

of their city is related to the Cosmos, a luminous distribution of

places in space, rather than to the world, passage to darkness and of

underworld wanderings. This shadow, more Roman than Hellenic, weighs

over the West.

For its part, the medieval city soon integrated merchants and

commodities and established them in its centre; the market-place. A

commercial centre characterized by the proximity of the church and the

exclusion of the enclosure — a heterotopy of territory. The symbolism

and the functions of this enclosure are different from that of the

oriental or antique city. The territory belongs to the lords, peasants,

vagrants and plunderers. Urban centrality welcomes produce and people.

It forbids its access to those who threaten its essential and economic

function, thus heralding and preparing capitalism. Nevertheless,

centrality thus functionalized and structured remains the object of all

attentions. It is embellished. The smallest hamlet, the smallest

barbican have their arcades, the possibly sumptuous monumental hall and

municipal buildings which are places of pleasure. The church blesses

commerce and gives a good conscience to the busy citizens. Within the

limits of commercial rationality, gatherings which are part of this

double feature of the religious and the rational take place in the

square, between the church and the market. How these two features

associate by colliding together in combination or in conflict, is

another story.

The capitalist city has created the centre of consumption. Industrial

production did not constitute centrality as such, except in the special

cases — if one can say that — of big enterprise around which a workers’

city was erected. We already know the double character of the capitalist

city: place of consumption and consumption of place. Businesses densify

in the centre, and attract expensive shops, luxury foodstuffs and

products. The establishment of this centraliry is partial to the old

cores, the spaces appropriated during the course of a previous history.

It cannot go without it. In these privileged sites, the consumer also

comes to consume space; the collection of objects in the windows of

boutiques becomes the reason and the pretext for the gathering of

people. They look, they see, they talk and talk with each other. And it

is the place of encounters amongst the collection of things. What is

said and written, comes before everything else: it is the world of

commodities, of the language of commodities, of the glory and the

extension of exchange value. It tends to absorb use value in exchange

and exchange value. Yet, use and use value resist irreducibly. This

irreducibility of the urban centre plays an essential role in this

argument.

It is neo-capitalism which superimposes, without denying or destroying

it, the centre of consumption upon the centre of decision-making It no

longer gathers together people and things, but data and knowledge. It

inscribes in an eminently elaborated form of simultaneity the conception

of the whole incorporated into an electronic brain, using the

quasi-instantaneity of communications, thus overcoming obstacles such as

the loss of information, the meaningless accumulations of elements,

redundancies, etc. With a disinterested aim? Certainly not. Since the

problem is political, those who constitute specific centrality aim for

power or are its instruments. The issue is not simply to ‘master

technique’ in general, but to master clearly defined techniques with

socio-political implications. What is at stake is to control the

potential masters: those whose power appropriates all possibilities.

The controversy has been taken up again and pushed towards new

conclusions to propose and defend another centrality. The possibility of

an urban society here outlined cannot be satisfied with centralities of

the past, although it does not destroy them and appropriates them by

altering them. What to project? There is something barren about cultural

centrality. It easily allows itself to be organized, institutionalized,

and later, bureaucratized. There is nothing more derisive than the

bureaucrat of culture. The educational is attractive, but neither

seduces nor enchants. Pedagogy implies localized practices, not

socialized centrality. Moreover, there is nothing to prove chat there is

‘one’ or ‘a’ culture. Subordinated to this entity, ‘culture’ and its

ideology, ‘culturalism’, theatre, the greatest of games, is threatened

with boredom. The elements of a superior unit, the fragments and aspects

of ‘culture’, the educational, the formative and the informational, can

be collected together. But from where can the contents of the principle

of assembly be derived? From play, ludo, a term which muse be understood

here in its broadest and deepest meaning. Sport is play and so is the

theatre, in a way more involving than the cinema. Fairs, collective

games of all sorts, survive at the interfaces of an organized consumer

society, in the holes of a serious society which perceives itself as

structured and systematical and which claims to be technical. As for the

old places of assembly, they are largely devoid of meaning: the fête

dies or leaves it. That they should find a meaning again does not

preclude the creation of places appropriate to a renewed fête

fundamentally linked to play.

No doubt that so-called consumer society suggests this direction.

Leisure centres, leisure societies, cities of luxury and pleasures,

holiday places, show this eloquently with the particular rhetoric of

advertising. Therefore, all that is needed is to give form to this

tendency which is still subordinated to the industrial and commercial

production of culture in this society. The proposition of this project

is to gather together by subordinating to play rather than to

subordinate play to the ‘seriousness’ of culturalism and scientificism,

although this does not exclude ‘cultural’ elements. On the contrary. It

collects them together by restoring them in their truth. Only relatively

recently and through institutions has the theatre become ‘cultural’,

while play has lost its place and value in society. Would culture not be

the accommodation of the oeuvre and style to exchange value, thus

allowing for its commercialization, its production and consumption as

specific product?

There are implications to the centrality of play which is the

restoration of the meaning of the oeuvre that philosophy and art can

bring so as to prioritize time over space, not forgetting that time

comes to inscribe itself and to be written in a space — and thus replace

domination by appropriation.

The space of play has coexisted and still coexists with spaces of

exchange and circulation, political space and cultural space. Projects

within quantified and accounted ‘social space’ which lose their

qualitative and differentiated spaces relate to a schizophrenia which is

concealed under the veils of precision, scientificity and rationality.

We have shown above the inevitable outcome of an analytical thought

which without safeguards perceives itself as global. This globality is

the formalized space of social pathology. There is a continuous path

from the concept of habitat to schizophrenic space projected as social

model. The orientation envisaged here does not consist in suppressing

qualified spaces as existing historical differences. On the contrary.

These already complex spaces can be further articulated, by emphasizing

differences and contrasts, and by stressing quality which implies and

overdetermines quantities. To these spaces, one can apply formalized

principles of differences and articulation, of superimpositions of

contrasts. Thus conceived, social spaces are related to social times and

rhythms which are prioritized. One understands more clearly how and up

to what point in urban reality elements distribute themselves over a

period of time. It is the truth of urban time which lucidly reclaims

this role. To inhabit finds again its place over habitat. The quality

which is promoted presents and represents as playful. By playing with

words, one can say that there will be play between the parts of the

social whole (plasticity) — to the extent that play is proclaimed as

supreme value, eminently solemn, if not serious, overtaking use and

exchange by gathering them together. And if someone cries out that this

utopia has nothing in common with socialism, the answer is that today

only the working class still knows how to really play, feels like

playing, over and above the claims and programmes, of economism, and

political philosophy. How is this shown? Sport and the interest shown in

sport and games, including, in television and elsewhere, the degraded

forms of ludic life. Already, to city people the urban centre is

movement, the unpredictable, the possible and encounters. For them, it

is either ‘spontaneous theatre’ or nothing.

To the extent that the contours of the future city can be outlined, it

could be defined by imagining the reversal of the current situation, by

pushing to its limits this inverted image of the world upside down.

There are currently attempts to establish fixed structures, ‘equilibrium

structures’, stabilities submitted to systematization, and therefore to

existing power, At the same time there is a tactical wager on the

accelerated obsolescence of consumer goods, ironically known as

‘durables’. The ideal city would involve the obsolescence of space: an

accelerated change of abode, emplacements and prepared spaces. It would

be the ephemeral city, the perpetual oeuvre of the inhabitants,

themselves mobile and mobilized for and by this oeuvre. Time comes

first. There is no doubt that technology makes possible the ephemeral

city, the apogee of play and supreme oeuvre and luxury. One can cite the

world exhibition in Montreal among other examples! In Montreal.

To put art at the service of the urban does not mean to prettify urban

space with works of arc. This parody of the possible is a caricature.

Rather, this means that time-spaces become works of art and that former

art reconsiders itself as source and model of appropriation of space and

rime. Art brings cases and examples of appropriate ‘topics’: of temporal

qualities inscribed in spaces. Music shows how expression and lyricism

uses numbering, order and measure. fr shows that time, tragic or

serious, can absorb and reabsorb calculation. With less force but more

precision than music, this is the same for sculpture and painting. Let

us not forget that gardens, parks, and landscapes were part of urban

life as much as the fine arts, or that the landscape around cities were

the works of art of these cities. For example, the Tuscan landscape

around Florence, inseparable from its architecture, plays an immense

role in Renaissance arts. Leaving aside representation, ornamentation

and decoration, art can become praxis and poiesis on a social scale: the

art of living in the city as work of art. Coming back to style and m the

oeuvre, that is, to the meaning of the monument and the space

appropriated in the fête, art can create ‘structures of enchantment’.

Architecture taken separately and on its own, could neither restrict nor

create possibilities. Something more, something better, something else,

is needed. Architecture as art and technique also needs an orientation.

Although necessary, it could not suffice. Nor could architecture set and

define its own aims and strategy. In other words, the future of art is

not artistic, but urban, because the future of ‘man’ is not discovered

in the cosmos, or in the people, or in production, but in urban society.

In the same way art and philosophy must reconsider itself in relation to

this perspective. The problematic of the urban renews the problematic of

philosophy, its categories and methods. Without a need to break or

reject them, these categories accept something else new: a meaning.

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.

With regards to philosophy, three periods are identifiable. This is a

periodization which is particular among those which mark the continuum

of becoming. In the first stage, philosophy meditates on the city as

partial whole at the heart of totality, world and cosmos. In the second,

philosophy reflects on a transcending totality of the city: history,

‘man’, society, State. It accepts and even confirms several separations

in the name of totalicy. It sanctions the analytical hold by believing

it is refuting or overcoming it. In the third period philosophy competes

for the promotion of a rationality and a practice which transform

themselves into urban rationality and planning practice.

The Realization of Philosophy

Let us take up again the thread of the argument and show its continuity

to its conclusions. Knowledge is in an untenable situation. Philosophy

wanted to reach the total but passed by it, unable to grasp it and even

less to realize it. By giving it a representation which was

systematized, speculative and contemplative, in its own way it mutilated

totality. And yet, only philosophy had and still has the sense of the

total. Partial and fragmentary knowledge claimed to have achieved

certainties and realities, but have only delivered fragments. They

cannot go without synthesis, yet cannot legitimize their right to it.

From its beginnings Greek philosophy linked itself to greatness, and

also the miseries and limitations of the Greek city — slavery and the

subordination of the individual to the Polis. Two thousand years later,

Hegel declared the realization of philosophical rationality released by

centuries of reflection and meditation, but in and by the State. How to

get our of these quandaries? How to resolve contradictions? Industrial

production has upset notions concerning the social capacity to act, to

create anew, and to master material nature. Philosophy could no longer

sustain its traditional mission, nor the philosopher his vocation, to

define man, the human, society and the world while taking charge of the

creation of man by his effort, his will, his struggle against

determinisms and hazards. Science and the sciences, technology, the

organization and rationalization of industry were coming onto the scene.

Were 2,000 years of philosophy to go to the grave? No. Industry

contributes new means but has no purpose or meaning in itself. it throws

products into the world. Philosophy (with art and works of art), a

supreme oeuvre, says what is appropriation, nor the technical mastery of

material nature which produces products and exchange values. Therefore,

the philosopher must speak, say the meaning of industrial production, as

long as he does not speculate on it and use it as a theme to prolong the

old manner of philosophizing. Instead he must take it as means of

realizing philosophy, that is, the philosophical project of man in the

world: desire and reason, spontaneity and reflection, vitality and

containment, domination and appropriation, determinisms and liberties.

Philosophy cannot realize itself without art (as model of appropriation

of time and space), accomplishing itself fully in social practice and

without science and technology, as means, not being fully used, without

the proletarian condition being overcome.

This theoretical revolution begun by Marx was later obscured, industrial

production, economic growth, organizational rationality, the consumption

of products, becoming ends rather than means, subordinated to a superior

end. Today, the realization of philosophy can take up again its meaning,

that is, give a meaning as much to history as to actuality. The thread

interrupted for a century is renewed. The theoretical situation is

released and the gulf is filled between the total and the partial or

fragmentary, between the uncertain whole and the all too certain

fragments. From the moment that urban society reveals the meaning of

industrialization, these concepts play a new role. Theoretical

revolution continues and urban revolution (the revolutionary side of

urban reform and urban strategy), comes to the fore. Theoretical

revolution and political change go together.

Theoretical thought aims at the realization of humanity ocher than that

of a society of low productivity (chat of the epochs of non-abundance,

or rather, of the non-possibility of abundance), and that of a

productivist society. In a society and an urban life delivered from its

ancient limitations, those of rarity and economism, technologies, art

and knowledge come to the service of daily life so as to metamorphose

it. Thus can be defined the realization of philosophy. It is no longer a

question of a philosophy of the city and of an historico-social

philosophy alongside a science of the city. The realization of

philosophy gives a meaning to the sciences of social reality. At the

outset, it refutes the accusation of ‘sociologism’ which will no doubt

be made against the hypotheses and theses expressed here. Neither

philosophism, nor scienticism, nor pragmatism nor sociologism, nor

psychologism, nor economism. Something else is proclaimed.

Theses on the City, the Urban and Planning

(1) Two groups of questions and two orders of urgency have disguised the

problems of the city and urban society: questions of housing and the

‘habitat’ (related to a housing policy and architectural technologies)

and those of industrial organization and global planning. The first from

below, the second from above, have produced, hidden from attention, a

rupture of the traditional morphology of cities, while the urbanization

of society was taking place. Hence, a new contradiction adding to other

unresolved contradictions of existing society, aggravating them and

giving them another meaning.

(2) These two groups of problems have been and are posed by economic

growth and industrial production. Practical experience shows that there

can be growth without social development (that is, quantitative growth

without qualitative development). In these conditions, changes in

society are more apparent than real. ·Fetishism and ideology of change

(in other words, the ideology of modernity) conceal the stagnation of

essential social relations. The development of society can only be

conceived in urban life, by the realization of urban society.

(3) The double process of industrialization and urbanization loses all

meaning if one does not conceive urban society as aim and finality of

industrialization, and if urban life is subordinated to industrial

growth. The latter provides the conditions and the means of urban

society. To proclaim industrial rationality as necessary and sufficient

is to destroy the sense (the orientation, the goal) of the process. At

first industrialization produces urbanization negatively (the breakup of

the traditional city, of its morphology, of its practico-material

reality) and then is ready to get down to work. Urban society begins on

the ruins of the ancient city and its agrarian environment. During these

changes, the relation between industrialization and urbanization is

transformed. The city ceases to be the container the passive receptacle

of products and of production. What subsists and is strengthened of

urban reality in its dislocation, the centre of decision-making,

henceforth enters into the means of production and the systems of

exploitation of social labour by those who control information, culture

and the powers of decision-making themselves. Only one theory enables

the use of these practical facts and the effective realization of urban

society.

(4) For this realization, neither the organization of private

enterprise, nor global planning, although necessary, suffice. A leap

forward of rationality is accomplished. Neither the State, nor private

enterprise can provide indispensable models of rationality and reality.

(5) The realization of urban society calls for a planning oriented

towards social needs, chose of urban society. It necessitates a science

of the city (of relations and correlations in urban life). Although

necessary, these conditions are not sufficient. A social and political

force capable of putting these means into oeuvres is equally

indispensable.

(6) The working class suffers the consequences of the rupture of ancient

morphologies. It is victim of a segregation, a class strategy licensed

by this rupture. Such is the present form of the negative situation of

the proletariat. In the major industrial countries the old proletarian

immiseration declines and tends to disappear. But a new misery spreads,

which mainly affects the proletariat without sparing other social strata

and classes: the poverty of the habitat that of the inhabitant submitted

to a daily life organized (in and by a bureaucratized society of

organized consumption). To those who would still doubt its existence as

class, what identifies the working class on the ground is segregation

and the misery of its ‘to inhabit’ .

(7) In these difficult conditions, at the heart of a society which

cannot completely oppose them and yet obstructs them, rights which

define civilization (in, but often against society — by, but often

against culture) find their way. These rights which are not well

recognized, progressively become customary before being inscribed into

formalized codes. They would change reality if they entered into social

practice: right to work, to training and education, to health, housing,

leisure, to life. Among these rights in the making features the right to

the city (not to the ancient city, but to urban life, to renewed

centrality, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and

time uses, enabling the full and complete usage of these moments and

places, etc.). The proclamation and realization of urban life as the

rule of use (of exchange and encounter disengaged from exchange value)

insist on the mastery of the economic (of exchange value, the market,

and commodities) and consequently is inscribed within the perspectives

of the revolution under the hegemony of the working class.

(8) For the working class, rejected from the centres towards the

peripheries, dispossessed of the city, expropriated thus from the best

outcomes of its activity, this right has a particular bearing and

significance. It represents for it at one and the same time a means and

an end, a way and a horizon: but this virtual action of the working

class also represents the general interests of civilization and the

particular interests of all social groups of ‘inhabitants’, for whom

integration and participation become obsessional without making their

obsession effective.

(9) The revolutionary transformation of society has industrial

production as ground and lever. This is why it had to be shown that the

urban centre of decision-making can no longer consider itself in the

present society (of neo-capitalism or of monopoly capilaism associated

to the State), outside the means of production, their property and their

management. Only the taking in charge by the working class of planning

and its political agenda can profoundly modify social life and open

another era: that of socialism in neo-capitalist countries. Until then

transformations remain superficial, at the level of signs and the

consumption of signs, language and metalanguage, a secondary discourse,

a discourse on previous discourses. Therefore, it is not without

reservations that one can speak of urban revolution. Nevertheless, the

orientation of industrial production on social needs is not a secondary

fact. The finality thus brought to plans transforms them. In this way

urban reform has a revolutionary bearing. As in the twentieth century

agrarian reform gradually disappears from the horizon, urban reform

becomes a revolutionary reform. It gives rise to a strategy which

opposes itself to class strategy dominant today.

(10) Only the proletariat can invest its social and political activity

in the realization of urban society. Equally, only it can renew the

meaning of productive and creative activity by destroying the ideology

of consumption. It therefore has the capacity to produce a new humanism,

different from the old liberal humanism which is ending its course — of

urban man for whom and by whom the city and his own daily life in it

become oeuvre, appropriation, use value (and not exchange value), by

using all the means of science, art, technology and the domination over

material nature.

(11) Nevertheless, difference persists between product and oeuvre. To

the meaning of the production of products (of the scientific and

technical mastery of material nature) must be added, to later

predominate, the meaning of the oeuvre, of appropriation (of time,

space, the body and desire). And this in and by urban society which is

beginning. Now, the working class does not spontaneously have the sense

of the oeuvre. It is dimmed, having almost disappeared along with crafts

and skills and ‘quality’. Where can be found this precious deposit, this

sense of the oeuvre? From where can the working class receive it to

carry it to a superior degree by uniting it with productive intelligence

and dialectic practical reason? Philosophy and the whole of

philosophical tradition on one hand, and on the other all of art (not

without a radical critique of their gifts and presents) contain the

sense of the oeuvre.

(12) This calls for, apart from the economic and political revolution

(planning oriented towards social needs and democratic control of the

State and self-management), a permanent cultural revolution.

There is no incompatibility between these levels of total revolution, no

more than between urban strategy (revolutionary reform aiming at the

realization of urban society on the basis of an advanced and planned

industrialization) and strategy aiming at the transformation of

traditional peasant life by industrialization. Moreover in most

countries today the realization of urban society goes through the

agrarian form and industrialization. There is no doubt that a world

front is possible, and equally that it is impossible today. This utopia

projects as it often does on the horizon a ‘possible-impossible’.

Happily, or otherwise, rime, that of history and social practice,

differs from the time of philosophies. Even if it does not produce the

irreversible, it can produce the difficult to repair. Marx wrote that

humanity does not only ask itself problems that it can resolve. Some

today believe chat men now only ask themselves insoluble problems. They

deny reason. None the less, there are perhaps problems which are easy to

resolve, whose solutions are near, very near, and that people do not ask

themselves.

Paris 1967 — centenary of Capital