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Title: The Right to the City
Date: 1968 (*Le Droit à la ville*), 1996 (English translation as *The Right to the City*)
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.
Authors: Henri Lefebvre
Topics: revolution, libertarian marxism, Marxism, not anarchist, dialectics, the city, urbanism, municipalism, community organizing, right to the city, grassroots organizing
Published: 2019-08-20 02:56:00Z

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.

<em>Urbanism,</em> 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

<em>mobile</em> 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’.

<em>Emerging industry tends to establish itself outside cities.</em> 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

<em>textile</em> industry, for mining, for <em>metallurgy.</em> 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

<em>offices</em> — 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

<em>urban fabric</em> 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’.

<em>Act One.</em> 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.

<em>Act Two.</em> 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.

<em>Act Three.</em> 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

<em>habitat.</em> 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).

<em>First period.</em> 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.

<em>Second period</em> (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.

<em>Third period.</em> 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.

<em>For all that, one should not conceive an urban life having at its disposal information provided by the sciences of society.</em> 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

<em>use value</em> (the city and urban life) and <em>exchange value</em> (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

<em>Physics</em> and the <em>Logos,</em> between theory and practice, and in practice,

the separations between between **praxis** (action on human groups),

<em>poiesis</em> (creation of <em>‘oeuvres’</em>), <em>techne</em> (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.

<em>Philosophy achieves itself</em> 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

<em>totality</em> 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

<em>practice</em> 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:

1. 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.

1. Partial knowledge concerning the city (its elements, functions,

structures).

1. The technical application of this knowledge (in a particular

context defined by strategic and political decisions).

1. 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

<em>written book,</em> 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

<em>writes</em> and <em>assigns,</em> 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

<em>near order.</em> However, the <em>near order</em> does not <em>reflect</em> transparently the

<em>far order.</em> 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

<em>oeuvre</em> 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

<em>urban,</em> 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

<em>urban,</em> 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

<em>oeuvre</em> 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.

<em>Isotopies</em> 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

<em>expose</em> 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

<em>orders.</em> The <em>far order</em> is projected into the <em>near order.</em> This <em>far order</em> 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

<em>semantemes</em> or signifying elements (straight or cured lines, writing,

elementary forms of entry, doors and windows, corners, angles, etc.),

<em>morphemes</em> 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

<em>appropriate</em> 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

<em>oeuvre.</em> This <em>oeuvre</em> 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

<em>the</em> 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.

[[h-l-henri-lefebvre-right-to-the-city-1.png f]]

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

<em>planning,</em> 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

<em>oeuvre,</em> 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

<em>urban</em> 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

<em>growth,</em> produces urbanization, providing it with conditions, and

possibilities. The problematic is displaced and becomes that of urban

<em>development.</em> The works of Marx (notably <em>Capital)</em> 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

<em>quality</em> born from quantities (spaces, objects, products). It is a <em>difference,</em>

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

<em>vis-a-vis</em> 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.

<center>

<em>I. Logical form</em>

</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> 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

<em>(designatum,</em> denoted). As Wittgenstein has shown, this tautology

A=A is the centre, emptied of substance of all enunciated, of all

propositions.

<em>Socially:</em> 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).

<center>

<em>II. Mathematical form</em>

</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> identity and difference, equality in difference. Enumeration

(of the elements of a whole, etc). Order and measure.

<em>Socially:</em> 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.

<center>

<em>III. Form of language</em>

</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> coherence, the capacity to articulate distinct elements, to

confer to them significations and meanings, to emit and decipher

messages according to their coded conventions.

<em>Socially:</em> the cohesion of relations, their subordination to the demands

and constraints of cohesion, the ritualization of relations, their formalization

and codification.

<center>

<em>IV. Form of exchange</em>

</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> confrontation and discussion, comparison and adjustments

of activities, needs, produces of labour, etc., that is, **equivalence.**

<em>Socially:</em> 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).

<center>

<em>V. Contractual form</em>

</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> reciprocity.

<em>Socially:</em> the codification of social relations based on murual engagement.

<center>

<em>VI. Form of the practico-material object</em>

</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> incernal equilibrium perceived and conceived as ‘objective’

(or ‘objectal’) property. **Symmetry.**

<em>Socially:</em> 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.

<center>

<em>VII. Written form</em>

</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> recurrence, synchronic fixation of what has occurred over

time, going backwards and returning along a fixed becoming.

<em>Socially:</em> 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.

<center>

<em>VIII. Urban form</em>

</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> simultaneity (of events, perceptions, and elements of a

whole in the ‘real’).

<em>Socially:</em> 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.

<br>

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

<em>ideology</em> and the class <em>strategy</em> 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,

<em>practice</em> 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

<em>democratic</em> 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

<em>malaise</em> — 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

<em>working class,</em> 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.

<em>Transduction.</em> 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.

<em>Experimental utopia.</em> Who is not a <em>utopian</em> 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

<em>oeuvre,</em> giving it multiple facets of <em>appropriated</em> 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

<em>generalized segregation</em>. 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:

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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.

4. 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

<em>limit.</em> 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

<em>playing</em> with words, one can say that there will be <em>play</em> 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

<em>accept</em> 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?

<em>Industrial production</em> 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

<em>oeuvre.</em> 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

<em>oeuvre.</em>

(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.

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Paris 1967 — centenary of **Capital**

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