the problematic and disorganized “precariat” must be reckoned with. How such disparate groups may become self-organized into a revolutionary force is the big political problem. And part of the task is to understand the origins and nature of their cries and demands.
I am not sure how Lefebvre would have responded to the Ecologistes’ poster vision. Like me, he would probably have smiled at its ludic vision, but his theses on the city, from The Right to the City to his book on La Révolution Urbaine (1970), suggest that he would have been critical of its nostalgia for an urbanism that had never been. For it was Lefebvre’s central conclusion that the city we had once known and imagined was fast disappearing and that it could not be reconstituted. I would agree with this, but assert it even more emphatically, because Lefebvre takes very little care to depict the dismal conditions of life for the masses in some of his favored cities of the past (those of the Italian Renaissance in Tuscany). Nor does he dwell on the fact that in 1945 most Parisians lived without indoor plumbing in execrable housing conditions (where they froze in winter and baked in summer) in crumbling neighborhoods, and that something had to be, and—at least during the 1960s—was being done to remedy that. The problem was that it was bureaucratically organized and implemented by a French dirigiste state without a whiff of democratic input or an ounce of playful imagination, and that it merely etched relations of class privilege and domination into the very physical landscape of the city.
Lefebvre also saw that the relation between the urban and the rural—or as the British like to call it, between the country and the city—was being radically transformed, that the traditional peasantry was disappearing and that the rural was being urbanized, albeit in a way that offered a new consumerist approach to the relation to nature (from weekends and leisure in the countryside to leafy, sprawling suburbs) and a capitalist, productivist approach to the supply of agricultural commodities to urban markets, as opposed to self-sustaining peasant agriculture. Furthermore, he presciently saw that this process was “going global,” and that under such conditions the question of the right to the city (construed as a distinctive thing or definable object) had to give way to some vaguer question of the right to urban life, which later morphed in his thinking into the more general question of the right to The Production of Space (1974).
The fading of the urban–rural divide has proceeded at a differential pace throughout the world, but there is no question that it has taken the direction that Lefebvre predicted. The recent pell-mell urbanization of China is a case in point, with the percentage of the population residing in rural areas decreasing from 74 percent in 1990 to about 50 percent in 2010, and the population of Chongqing increasing by 30 million over the past half-century. Though there are plenty of residual spaces in the global economy where the process is far from complete, the mass of humanity is thus increasingly being absorbed within the ferments and cross-currents of urbanized life.
This poses a problem: to claim the right to the city is, in effect, to claim a right to something that no longer exists (if it ever truly did). Furthermore, the right to the city is an empty signifier. Everything depends on who gets to fill it with meaning. The financiers and developers can claim it, and have every right to do so. But then so can the homeless and the sans-papiers. We inevitably have to confront the question of whose rights are being identified, while recognizing, as Marx puts it in Capital, that “between equal rights force decides.” The definition of the right is itself an object of struggle, and that struggle has to proceed concomitantly with the struggle to materialize it.
The traditional city has been killed by rampant capitalist development, a victim of the never-ending need to dispose of overaccumulating capital driving towards endless and sprawling urban growth no matter what the social, environmental, or political consequences. Our political task, Lefebvre suggests, is to imagine and reconstitute a totally different kind of city out of the disgusting mess of a globalizing, urbanizing capital run amok. But that cannot occur without the creation of a vigorous anti-capitalist movement that focuses on the transformation of daily urban life as its goal.
As Lefebvre knew full well from the history of the Paris Commune, socialism, communism, or for that matter anarchism in one city is an impossible proposition. It is simply too easy for the forces of bourgeois reaction to surround the city, cut its supply lines and starve it out, if not invade it and slaughter all who resist (as happened in Paris in 1871). But that does not mean we have to turn our backs upon the urban as an incubator of revolutionary ideas, ideals, and movements. Only when politics focuses on the production and reproduction of urban life as the central labor process out of which revolutionary impulses arise will it be possible to mobilize anti-capitalist struggles capable of radically transforming daily life. Only when it is understood that those who build and sustain urban life have a primary claim to that which they have produced, and that one of their claims is to the unalienated right to make a city more after their own heart’s desire, will we arrive at a politics of the urban that will make sense. “The city may be dead,” Lefebvre seems to say, but “long live the city!”
So is pursuit of the right to the city the pursuit of a chimera? In purely physical terms this is certainly so. But political struggles are animated by visions as much as by practicalities. Member groups within the Right to the City Alliance consist of low-income tenants in communities of color fighting for the kind of development that meets their desires and needs; homeless people organizing for their right to housing and basic services; and LGBTQ youth of color working for their right to safe public spaces. In the collective political platform they designed for New York, the coalition sought a clearer and broader definition of that public that not only can truly access so-called public space, but can also be empowered to create new common spaces for socialization and political action. The term “city” has an iconic and symbolic history that is deeply embedded in the pursuit of political meanings. The city of God, the city on a hill, the relationship between city and citizenship—the city as an object of utopian desire, as a distinctive place of belonging within a perpetually shifting spatio-temporal order—all give it a political meaning that mobilizes a crucial political imaginary. But Lefebvre’s point, and here he is certainly in league with if not indebted to the Situationists, is that there are already multiple practices within the urban that themselves are full to overflowing with alternative possibilities.
Lefebvre’s concept of heterotopia (radically different from that of Foucault) delineates liminal social spaces of possibility where “something different” is not only possible, but foundational for the defining of revolutionary trajectories. This “something different” does not necessarily arise out of a conscious plan, but more simply out of what people do, feel, sense, and come to articulate as they seek meaning in their daily lives. Such practices create heterotopic spaces all over the place. We do not have to wait upon the grand revolution to constitute such spaces. Lefebvre’s theory of a revolutionary movement is the other way round: the spontaneous coming together in a moment of “irruption,” when disparate heterotopic groups suddenly see, if only for a fleeting moment, the possibilities of collective action to create something radically different.
That coming together is symbolized by Lefebvre in the quest for centrality. The traditional centrality of the city has been destroyed. But there is an impulse towards and longing for its restoration which arises again and again to produce far-reaching political effects, as we have recently seen in the central squares of Cairo, Madrid, Athens, Barcelona, and even Madison, Wisconsin and now Zuccotti Park in New York City. How else and where else can we come together to articulate our collective cries and demands?
It is at this point, however, that the urban revolutionary romanticism that so many now attribute to and love about Lefebvre crashes against the rock of his understanding of capitalist realities and capital’s power. Any spontaneous alternative visionary moment is fleeting; if it is not seized at the flood, it will surely pass (as Lefebvre witnessed first-hand in the streets of Paris in ’68). The same is true of the heterotopic spaces of difference that provide the seed-bed for revolutionary movement. In The Urban Revolution he kept the idea of heterotopia (urban practices) in tension with (rather than as an alternative to) isotopy (the accomplished and rationalized spatial order of capitalism and the state), as well as with utopia as expressive
