create an alternative urban life that is less alienated, more meaningful and playful but, as always with Lefebvre, conflictual and dialectical, open to becoming, to encounters (both fearful and pleasurable), and to the perpetual pursuit of unknowable novelty.1
We academics are quite expert at reconstructing the genealogy of ideas. So we can take Lefebvre’s writings of this period and excavate a bit of Heidegger here, Nietzsche there, Fourier somewhere else, tacit critiques of Althusser and Foucault, and, of course, the inevitable framing given by Marx. The fact that this essay was written for the centennial celebrations of the publication of Volume 1 of Capital bears mentioning because it has some political significance, as we shall see. But what we academics so often forget is the role played by the sensibility that arises out of the streets around us, the inevitable feelings of loss provoked by the demolitions, what happens when whole quarters (like Les Halles) get re-engineered or grands ensembles erupt seemingly out of nowhere, coupled with the exhilaration or annoyance of street demonstrations about this or that, the hopes that lurk as immigrant groups bring life back into a neighborhood (those great Vietnamese restaurants in the 13th arrondissement in the midst of the HLMs), or the despair that flows from the glum desperation of marginalization, police repressions and idle youth lost in the sheer boredom of increasing unemployment and neglect in the soulless suburbs that eventually become sites of roiling unrest.
Lefebvre was, I am sure, deeply sensitive to all of that—and not merely because of his evident earlier fascination with the Situationists and their theoretical attachments to the idea of a psychogeography of the city, the experience of the urban dérive through Paris, and exposure to the spectacle. Just walking out of the door of his apartment in the Rue Rambuteau was surely enough to set all his senses tingling. For this reason I think it highly significant that The Right to the City was written before The Irruption (as Lefebvre later called it) of May 1968. His essay depicts a situation in which such an irruption was not only possible but almost inevitable (and Lefebvre played his own small part at Nanterre in making it so). Yet the urban roots of that ’68 movement remain a much neglected theme in subsequent accounts of that event. I suspect that the urban social movements then existing—the Ecologistes for example—melded into that revolt and helped shape its political and cultural demands in intricate if subterranean ways. And I also suspect, though I have no proof at all, that the cultural transformations in urban life that subsequently occurred, as naked capital masked itself in commodity fetishism, niche marketing, and urban cultural consumerism, played a far from innocent role in the post-’68 pacification (for instance, the newspaper Libération, which was founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and others, gradually shifted from the mid ’70s to become culturally radical and individualistic but politically lukewarm, if not antagonistic to serious left and collectivist politics).
I make these points because if, as has happened over the last decade, the idea of the right to the city has undergone a certain revival, then it is not to the intellectual legacy of Lefebvre that we must turn for an explanation (important though that legacy may be). What has been happening in the streets, among the urban social movements, is far more important. And as a great dialectician and immanent critic of urban daily life, surely Lefebvre would agree. The fact, for example, that the strange collision between neoliberalization and democratization in Brazil in the 1990s produced clauses in the Brazilian Constitution of 2001 that guarantee the right to the city has to be attributed to the power and significance of urban social movements, particularly around housing, in promoting democratization. The fact that this constitutional moment helped consolidate and promote an active sense of “insurgent citizenship” (as James Holston calls it) has nothing to do with Lefebvre’s legacy, but everything to do with ongoing struggles over who gets to shape the qualities of daily urban life.2 And the fact that something like “participatory budgeting,” in which ordinary city residents directly take part in allocating portions of municipal budgets through a democratic decision-making process, has been so inspirational has everything to do with many people seeking some kind of response to a brutally neoliberalizing international capitalism that has been intensifying its assault on the qualities of daily life since the early 1990s. No surprise either that this model developed in Porto Alegre, Brazil—the central place for the World Social Forum.
When all manner of social movements came together at the US Social Forum in Atlanta in June 2007, to take another example, and decided to form a national Right to the City Alliance (with active chapters in cities such as New York and Los Angeles), in part inspired by what the urban social movements in Brazil had accomplished, they did so without for the most part knowing Lefebvre’s name. They had individually concluded after years of struggling on their own particular issues (homelessness, gentrification and displacement, criminalization of the poor and the different, and so on) that the struggle over the city as a whole framed their own particular struggles. Together they thought they might more readily make a difference. And if various movements of an analogous kind can be found elsewhere, it is not simply out of some fealty to Lefebvre’s ideas but precisely because Lefebvre’s ideas, like theirs, have primarily arisen out of the streets and neighborhoods of ailing cities. Thus in a recent compilation, right to the city movements (though of diverse orientation) are reported as active in dozens of cities around the world.3
So let us agree: the idea of the right to the city does not arise primarily out of various intellectual fascinations and fads (though there are plenty of those around, as we know). It primarily rises up from the streets, out from the neighborhoods, as a cry for help and sustenance by oppressed peoples in desperate times. How, then, do academics and intellectuals (both organic and traditional, as Gramsci would put it) respond to that cry and that demand? It is here that a study of how Lefebvre responded is helpful—not because his responses provide blueprints (our situation is very different from that of the 1960s, and the streets of Mumbai, Los Angeles, São Paulo and Johannesburg are very different from those of Paris), but because his dialectical method of immanent critical inquiry can provide an inspirational model for how we might respond to that cry and demand.
Lefebvre understood very well, particularly after his study of The Paris Commune, published in 1965 (a work inspired to some degree by the Situationists’ theses on the topic), that revolutionary movements frequently if not always assume an urban dimension. This immediately put him at odds with the Communist Party, which held that the factory-based proletariat was the vanguard force for revolutionary change. In commemorating the centennial of the publication of Marx’s Capital with a tract on The Right to the City, Lefebvre was certainly intending a provocation to conventional Marxist thinking, which had never accorded the urban much significance in revolutionary strategy, even though it mythologized the Paris Commune as a central event in its history.
In invoking the “working class” as the agent of revolutionary change throughout his text, Lefebvre was tacitly suggesting that the revolutionary working class was constituted out of urban rather than exclusively factory workers. This, he later observed, is a very different kind of class formation—fragmented and divided, multiple in its aims and needs, more often itinerant, disorganized and fluid rather than solidly implanted. This is a thesis with which I have always been in accord (even before I read Lefebvre), and subsequent work in urban sociology (most notably by one of Lefebvre’s erstwhile but errant students, Manuel Castells) amplified that idea. But it is still the case that much of the traditional left has had trouble grappling with the revolutionary potential of urban social movements. They are often dismissed as simply reformist attempts to deal with specific (rather than systemic) issues, and therefore as neither revolutionary nor authentically class movements.
There is, therefore, a certain continuity between Lefebvre’s situational polemic and the work of those of us who now seek to address the right to the city from a revolutionary as opposed to reformist perspective. If anything, the logic behind Lefebvre’s position has intensified in our own times. In much of the advanced capitalist world the factories have either disappeared or been so diminished as to decimate the classical industrial working class. The important and ever-expanding labor of making and sustaining urban life is increasingly done by insecure, often part-time and disorganized low-paid labor. The so-called “precariat” has displaced the traditional “proletariat.” If there is to be any revolutionary movement in our times, at
