Berlin Ostkreuz - Photo Manuela Conti
While in this project I am primarily concerned with recounting a first-and experience of public space, its conflicts and contradictions, my practice of traversing and, so to speak, body-to-body with the globalising city has been nourished by readings and references to a complex multidisciplinary literature: a bibliography comprising essential classics as well as fortuitous discoveries, coup de foudres, minor digressions, and neglected works. There is one constant in the constellation of readings that has accompanied my journey: Henri Lefebvre's work has always served as an inexhaustible source of inspiration, as well as doubts, enigmas, and intellectual challenges for me. To him, I deem it necessary to dedicate a brief, digressive introduction before continuing down the pavements of the contemporary metropolis.
I do not consider myself either a Lefebvre scholar or a meticulous exegete of the academic literature around his work; but, even in the partial reconstruction, instrumental hijacking, and creative misinterpretation I have made of it, I can say that at every stage of my journey Lefebvre's work has suggested interpretive keys and decisive analytical tools. As will become evident in the course of my writing, most of the ideas I venture to propose as a modest contribution to a theory of cinematic urbanism and what I propose to call 'urbiquity' are inspired by the French thinker.
Henri Lefebvre's influence on urban disciplines has deepened over the years and nurtures a massive wave of re-readings and interpretations today. His oeuvre is monumental: over 60 books and 300 articles, crossing disciplinary distinctions and ideological fences. Initially almost ignored, Lefebvre was later criticised above all, often in a partial and misrepresented manner, until he slowly made his way through the demanding and systematic rereading of a cohort of Lefebvrians from different fields, converging towards an overall project of valorisation of the author's conceptual framework. Ambitious and labyrinthine, Lefebvre has been reproached for inconsistency, or even contradiction; his formulations accused of being pompous and amateurish. His followers, on the other hand (among whom I count myself without hesitation), find that these flaws, although to some extent found in his personality, rather constitute strengths, contributing to the realisation of a ductile and open-minded apparatus of thought with a profoundly generative capacity.
Lefebvre's work is rooted in modern philosophy - the pillars of his training are in fact Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche - yet he consciously rejects any ontological temptation, any recourse to the a-priori; on the contrary, he understands his practice as a metaphilosophy geared towards producing social change, where analysis is both a critique of what exists and a project for change.1 For him, the role of philosophy is not to establish assumptions and principles but to confront practice and action. It is no coincidence that the first to grasp the power of Lefebvre's discourse were activists, artists, companions in the struggles and path of a man who always situated himself within events and situations, lending his theory to action before the academy. Lefebvre was personally involved in the practice of movements: from his youthful participation in the resistance to his membership of the Communist Party (which was short-lived, given his refractoriness to ideological orthodoxy), from his frequentation of Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists to his influence on urban movements on a global scale. This explains why his thought and works have become effective tools in the hands of activists and change makers before becoming the subject of academic debate and criticism. His language, erudite and circumvoluted, always has a poetic breath, claiming a poetic dimension that knowingly destabilises analytical rigour, yet is rigorous in its ambition to integrate the poetic and epistemological dimensions. The more conflicting the reception in the academic environment, characterised by misunderstandings, foreclosures, equivocal and biased interpretations, the more his thought has demonstrated an unleashing force in liberating the urban imagination during everyday battles and creative practices, as well as in redefining the disciplinary fields concerning the relationship between space and society. One thinks of geography, sociology and urbanism: disciplines that from the 1970s onwards tried to redefine themselves in a participatory key and apply con-research approaches, finding in Lefebvre the prodromes of a theory of urban practice. But Lefebvre was also able to install in social theory a series of recognised and definitively acquired concepts: exemplary, among many, the 'critique of everyday life', the concept of 'planetary urbanisation', the claim of the 'right to the city', 'spatial production' as a central element of the political economy, the 'right to difference', 'self-management', 'rhythmanalysis', to name the most famous. Retracing Lefebvre's work we find these concepts in nuce, forming and reforming through successive waves of intuitions, hypotheses, refutations and clarifications, taking shape in dialogue with the reader through his typically impetuous and shared dialectic (or trialectic), settling into entire new branches of critical literature and schools of thought. I will try to condense into brief hints some of the ideas that have inspired me in the practice of urban exploration and that settle as foundations for the urbiquitarian hypotheses.
Rio de Janeiro, favela de Maré: right to dignity - Photo Manuela Conti 2018
The first pillar, central in its immediacy, is the ‘right to the city’. Published as a book in the midst of 1968, Le droit a la ville immediately manifests itself as a revolutionary proposition: the claim of a model of active citizenship based on the appropriation of the city, the right to inhabit it, to stay put, to decide about it. Until then, the city had been thought of as a privileged place of formation and claim to fundamental rights, to health, work, housing, education; never had the city itself been conceived as an overall right. With Le droit a la ville, the modern city is substantiated as the spatialisation of an idea of social progress based on universal rights. At once symbolic and functional embodiment of access to universal rights, and paradoxically also its negation, is the idea of the centre. The right to the city is understood primarily as a right to centrality. As Andy Merryfield notes,
Lefebvre was a man of the margins. His right to the city is an ideal conceived from the periphery. It aims to empower outsiders to get inside.2
But it is a centrality of the city already under pressure in the face of the wavering universalist promises of the bourgeois city and its reconfiguration and fragmentation in sprawl. Lefebvre's claim is at the same time a declaration of the city's impossibility to exist in its recognised and consolidated form: if already in the 1960s morphological centrality was beginning to lose meaning and legibility, as in the doughnut effect of American cities, in which decayed and plundered centres were abandoned to the dispossessed while the middle class retreated to the suburbs, the concept of the right to centrality became increasingly existential and political, rather than geographical.3 In a context of widespread disorientation and insurgency affecting western urban landscapes, the Lefevrian cri et demande is spreading as a watchword capable of representing diverse demands and transversal claims, being increasingly captured by urban movements and gradually gaining institutional dignity as well. In recent years, I have been part of a project aimed at documenting how the concept of the right to the city has been appropriated and adapted in the most diverse contexts worldwide as an instrument of empowerment and claim.4 Case in point, in Mexico City I found myself interviewing first in a cramped and dark backroom Jaime Rello, spokesperson for the Movimiento Urbano Popular, on how El derecho a la ciudad served the grassroots demands of a constellation of Mexican popular initiatives and committees; then, in a villa in the residential area, we interviewed Clara Jusidman, jurist and MP, who in 2007 participated in the drafting of La Carta de la Ciudad de México por el Derecho a la Ciudad, a document later included as an article in the autonomous constitution of the state of Mexico City. This is the first but not the last case in which the right to the city has been integrated as a constitutional right within institutional laws and programme documents. More recently, the UN Habitat III Urban Agenda included explicit reference to the right to the city, while this formulation has become customary in the language of European sustainable urban development policies.5
Mexico City, remembering the 1968 Tlatelolco students’ massacre - Photo Manuela Conti 2018
The next step, in 1970, Lefebvre takes with La révolution urbaine, in which he confronts a general theory of urban society. The starting proposition is that we have entered a new epoch, in which the role that industry had played at the end of the 18th century in determining the industrial revolution is now taken over by the city, which determines the urban revolution. The book expounds theses that are revolutionary in many respects, starting with the concept of the total urbanisation of society, which may be familiar to us by now but which was never expounded before with such lucidity. Lefebvre's urban revolution is not a revolution that takes place in the streets of the city, it is a revolution in which urbanisation becomes the process that radically transforms society on a planetary scale. The shift from the city object to the process of urbanisation is a fundamental point from which all of Lefebvre's socio-spatial theory descends.
The thesis of the urban revolution will have wide consequences, generating a wave of re-readings of Marxist theory applied to the urban dimension, decisively influencing the birth of critical urban theory in the Anglo-Saxon milieu. The main protagonist of this reinterpretation of Marx in a spatial key is the geographer David Harvey, who takes his cue from a passage in La révolution urbaine in which Lefebvre hypothesises a secondary circuit of capital that proceeds parallel to the circulation of capital in industrial production and is fed by productive investments in space.6 Harvey would develop over the years a critical theory of the political economy of urbanisation based on Marxist foundations, in which he analyses the mechanisms of production and reproduction of capital through the built environment. The core of the theory, and of the militant critique that derives from it, lies in the conflictual dialectic between urban space as a fundamental right, already enunciated in Right to the City, and space as product and commodity in the emerging capitalist system: a dynamic whose scope is now evident to all in an era of housing crisis, global investment and financialisation. But above all, the fundamental idea that Lefebvre expounds in La révolution urbaine, through the concept of the total urbanisation of society, is that of the dissolution of the city in the process of urbanisation: an idea that will make its way in a troubled manner through multiple fragmented theoretical perspectives, which have outlined it through themes such as globalisation, sprawl, edge-city, non-places, infrastructure, special zones and extra-statecraft, to find a comprehensive formulation, however hotly debated, in the hypothesis of planetary urbanism put forward by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmidt, and finally land at the centre of this project, formulated through the notion of urbiquity.
The capacity for intellectual pollination through the flowering of suggestive concepts that Lefebvre dispenses in the two books referred to so far does not stop here, but provokes a fundamental paradigm shift that leads spatial thinking to assume renewed relevance in contemporary philosophical perspectives. Lefebvre asks how one can think about the city without clearly conceiving the space it occupies, of which it appropriates or 'disappropriates'.7 This requires the development of a general theory of the relationship between space and society. Lefevbre grasps a need that emerges in urban planning discourse around the spatial categories necessary for understanding the social and economic order. This is what, as a consequence of the urban crisis of the 1970s, will later be identified with the term ‘spatial turn’.
Museo Vila Autodromo, Rio de Janeiro 2018 - Photo Manuela Conti
Consequently, Lefebvre gave birth to another milestone in 1974: La production de l'espace. Upon its release, the work had a relatively limited reception in the French debate, but slowly began to gain prominence starting with the English translation of 1991, also generating numerous misunderstandings, partial re-readings and misappropriations derived from ignorance of the broader theoretical context and background on which the text was built. The Production of Space is objectively a difficult book to read, challenging the reader in a discussion of the nature of the concept of space that originates in Greek thought, leading to the central formulation of a concept of space as product. Lefebvre's fundamental thesis is that society produces its space and therefore that space is a social product. The ambitious goal of the book is to define a theory of spatial production as a fundamental element for understanding society, analysing it not only as a process of material production, but also and above all as a process of production of meaning, and consequently of social and economic value. In an attempt to create a unified theory of space, Lefebvre ventures to coherently combine the overlapping of three ideas or dimensions of space, the physical, the mental and the social. This leads him to build the focus of the book on the articulation of a three-dimensional dialectic (trialectics) of space, which is presented through two famous triads: the first relates spatial practices, representations of space and spaces of representation; the second expresses it more succinctly as perceived space (espace perçu), conceived space (espace conçu) and experienced space (espace vécu). The central point is the simultaneity of the three moments. In the Lefebvrian construct, the production of space can be analytically grasped as a combination of three dialectically connected production processes that imply one another: material production, i.e. a spatial practice that determines the perceivable aspect of space; knowledge production, which creates representations of space and thus a ‘conceived’ space; and the production of meaning, which is linked to spaces of representation and which produces an experienced or ‘lived’ space.
La production de l'espace is a complex, at times cryptic book in which, as Christian Schmidt notes, the three categories are "dropped from above" without explaining their genesis.8 Which explains the number of discordant and partial interpretations, misrepresentations and hijackings, that have followed in the post-modern geography of the 1990s,9 up to the more recent and systematic interpretations of critical geographers, starting with Schmidt himself. At the same time, La production proves to be a fascinating and fertile 'thinking machine' for space and the urban dimension, capable of generating many attempts at interpretation and application. I myself personally made improper and openly provocative use of it in the experimental video project by the ogino:knauss collective entitled Triplicity.10 But beyond the remix in the key of cultural jamming, Lefebvrian trialectics provides a conceptual framework to analyse the progressive shift of the urban dimension from the material, contained and circumscribed sphere to a diffuse and fluid process of signification, grasping the interpenetration at once distinctive and indissoluble between the material, abstract and relational nature of the city, and the fundamental shift from the unsustainable object-city to the process of urbanisation and the need for new tools to understand and govern it.
The final piece that completes the supporting apparatus that Lefebvre provides first to a project of exploration of public space, then to a theory of cinematic urbanism, is his last book, published posthumously in 1992 as the fourth volume, or postilla, to another monumental cycle dedicated to the Critique of Everyday Life. It is Éléments de rythmanalyse,11 in which the focus is finally shifted from the spatial to the temporal dimension, while maintaining the focus on the multidimensional articulation of the concept of rhythm. The complexity, at once immediately comprehensible to the body and yet elusive to rational and disciplinary analysis, of the concept of rhythm lies at the heart of this short booklet. The tone and language present a more pronounced poetic afflatus than before, adapting to the ambition of capturing rhythm as if it were the breath of the city, whose qualities and manifestations are at once universally and immediately experienceable - like music - and impossible to capture in their entirety within strictly disciplinary parameters and instruments. Lefebvre calls for the creation of a new hybrid, multidisciplinary figure, the rhythmanalist: the portrait he proposes of him is that of a wanderer 'with his thoughts and emotions, his impressions and his astonishments (...) more sensitive to time than to space, to impressions than to images, to atmosphere than to particular events; strictly speaking he is neither a psychologist nor a sociologist, an anthropologist nor an economist, yet he goes along with each of these instruments and draws on the tools that specialists use'.12
I confess that I took up his invocation almost literally, as a personal mission, giving me an elegant and incisive definition of the way I have tried to interpret my job as an 'urban explorer'. The contemporary city, contaminated, imbastardised, overexcited, dilated in its planetary and connective dimension, multiplied in its semantic and digital dimension, in its financial and political dimension, responds to a composition made up of interwoven, overlapping, stratified rhythms, sometimes harmonic, sometimes disharmonic, which, while tending towards eurythmy, often falls into arrhythmia: a composition at once of immediate perception and complex comprehension that demands an appropriate rhythmanalysis, with the aim, as Lefebvre writes, of separating the scientific from the poetic as little as possible. Elements of Rhythmanalysis profoundly inspired the project of the Exercises Urban Reconnaissance, which I later developed as a methodological device for exploring the urban continuum both geographically and semiotically, and instigated the ultimate aspiration of this book, which is to capture the condition of urbiquity as an oscillatory frequency, a bundle of fluxes, a vibration that traverses planetary territory.
Lefebvre, H. (1965) Métaphilosophie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
in The Right to the City: A Verso Report.
Ibidem p.20
The Right to the City Reloaded is a project by Tesserae and ogino:knauss involving Laura Colini and Manuela Conti that aims to document through interviews with urban movement activists, academics and public officials the use and relevance of the concept of the right to the city as a tool for emancipation and planning. Accessible online http://www.tesserae.eu/project/right-to-the-city-1968-2018/
United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, Habitat III Policy Papers: Policy Paper 1 The Right to the City and Cities for All (New York: United Nations, 2017), www.habitat3.org
Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice and the city. Athens: University of Georgia Press; Harvey, D. (1982) Limits to Capital. Verso.
Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, preface to the third Edition. Quoted in Schmidt, C. (2023) Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space. Verso.
Schmidt, C. (2023) Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space. Verso.
Soja, E (1996) Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
This is an interactive video project presented in different publication formats and events in the years 2003 -2006. 36 different adjectives attributed by Lefebvre in the text of the book to the noun 'space' were associated with as many video fragments captured in the public space of the global city that aspired to render the nuances of each locution. Subsequently, an interactive video device published on CD ROM allowed the series of video fragments/adjectives to be recombined, generating recombinant phrases/video montages of almost infinite possibilities. The device was used to generate video installations and to perform live media at various events.
Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythmanalysis: space, time, and everyday life. Continuum.
Lefebvre 2004, p.87. My translation