1 Art, urbanism, cultural critique: LeFebvrean shades*i

Let us begin with the Parisian critical friendshipii that existed between the Marxist sociologist Henri LeFebvre and Situationist artists such as Guy DeBord and Raoul Vaneigem. These quarrelsome allies shared a fascination and critique of the colonisation and fragmentation of everyday life in the Western European city of the 1960s.iii Their works demonstrated the ways in which urban space is suffused with the demands and desires of economy and empire, and taken with the earlier flneurie of Walter Benjaminiv and the foundational spatial sociology of Georg Simmelv they re-member us to the segregation, alienation and persistent promise of play that is bound up in the city as we know it.vi This is a space forged by industry, accumulation and what Gayatri Spivak, theorist of post-coloniality and economic migration, refers to as hopes for justice under capitalism.vii Indeed, Australian urbanist Leonie Sandercock conceptualises contemporary city planning as the organisation of hope.viii

These theoretical nodes deliver the notion of the urban as a moment and a form of sociability.ix In LeFebvrean and Situationist time, urbanisation is a social phenomenon, a practice that moves through social relationships; a process more than an agenda. Urban experience cannot be overlaid upon the time-space grid of western rationality without there being productions of its own wrinkles in time, time out of joint, hauntings,x shadows, skeletons and other non-linear ephemera. It was the compression and metering of time and space that LeFebvre saw as an imperative for urban planning to undo: The masses, he noted, are temporally controlled through carefully measured space; time eludes them.xi

It is this troubled relationship of space to time that aesthetic practices can reveal, query and subvert - aesthesis is not chronological, though it may be chronic. We arrive, in this way, at LeFebvres right to the city: echoed in the contemporary work of David Harvey and Mike Davis, among others.xii If we are all to live in the city then it must be a space

2 where we can all live. The right to the city, LeFebvre declares 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 lifexiii direct democracy, civil society, games, fairs, art, philosophy a civil society based not on an abstraction but on space and time as they are lived.xiv The force of his ideas as a political platform in his own city may be felt in a slogan of the 1970s Parisian Left: changer la ville, changer la vie change the city, change life. xv

This utopian aspect of urbanism as led by LeFebvre is important in projecting its relationship to art/ists and cultural critique. Both require a capacity to imagine and perform difference (for LeFebvre it was living differentiallyxvi ), transformation and futurity; to incarnate non-linear time. It is in this vein that we may consider LeFebvres regular meditations upon thinking the city as a structurable, sociable phenomenon. The city comprised of the local and the global, the near and far order is a text in a context so vast and ungraspable as such except by reflection.xvii This reflection is the work of artists and it is not a matter of mere illustration; the artist mediates the city, hers is an act of interpretation, a negotiation of space. It is at this point that urbanism meets art-as-cultural-critique, where there becomes a distinction between the city, a present and immediate reality, a practico-material and architectural fact, and the urban, a social reality made up of relations which are to be conceived of, constructed or reconstructed by thought.xviii Culture is produced in the space between the two and they must be thought together if this production is to be critical: urban life, urban society, in a word, the urban, cannot go without a practico-material base, a morphology.xix LeFebvre pushes the artist-as-mediator to act upon the city, to see it as socially and physically constructed. There is an important difference between this artistic practice of aesthesis over one of cognitive synthesis: the synthesis that is attempted by analytical thought hides what it conceals: strategies strategies of social stratification which are reflected so starkly in most modern cities and all too often represented as a dimorph of slum dwellers and gentry. Certain aesthetic practices, as praxis, may yet

3 reveal these strategies through the gathering together of what gives itself as dispersed, dissociated, separated, and this in the form of simultaneity and encounters. xx

Scott Lash and John Urry, contemporary interlocutors of LeFebvre, think of the process at play here as aesthetic reflexivity: the negotiation of symbol and allegory, a process privileged over public sphere politicking.xxi In this way the sensibilities of art suggest other ways of knowing the city: experiential, intuitive, local knowledges; knowledges based on practices of talking, listening, seeing, contemplating, sharing; knowledges expressed in visual and other symbolic, ritual, and artistic ways rather than in quantitative or analytical modes based on technical jargons that by definition exclude those without professional training, as Sandercock puts it.xxii

Contemporarily, artist-urbanists engage this sensibility and mount cultural critiques through mapping, archiving, public performance and other such vehicles for critical exchange, encounter and engagement with urban policy and spatial politics. These projects demonstrate urban theories and cultural productions that live for and respond to local futures. They particularise the globally promulgated and abstracted phenomena of urbanisation, slumification and gentrification. Here, they are Coloco, Delocator, Fallen Fruit and Better than Living.

Transnational artist-architectural team Coloco maps skeletons abandoned building sites consisting of the frames for houses, flats, offices or warehouses and then uses this as a basis for creating new housing in urban spaces. They have founded the concept of urbanodiversity which, as Coloco member Pablo Georgieff describes it in an interview at the 2008 Venice Biennale, is the idea that the citys richness depends on [a] variety of activities, situations, living beings that can be hosted in it, and it is the opposite of the generic, monotonous, functionalist city.xxiii As he continues, we see urbanism as an aerodynamic discipline, based on movement, fluxes and energy.we think it is necessary now to work seriously on the living, human material of the city.its about

4 creating the living conditions for life forms and the relationships between them. In such a way, Coloco have worked with local communities to create housing in cities within the borders of France, Indonesia, Brazil, Libya and Hong Kong.

From the intercity housing imperative we move to that of localised production and consumption, practices which have been epically challenged through the globalisation of capital. Delocator, by North American media artist Xtine, is a physical and virtual map that enables users to find a caf, bookstore, or movie theatre that is not owned by a public corporation. Initially created for the United States, the code can be downloaded to enable the delocation to take place in any location.xxiv This has created a defiant cyberopolis of content generated by empowered users of urban space who fully engage the consumer choice part of the global citys promise to realise our desires.

And then, Fallen Fruit is an activist art project recently reviewed by Xtinexxv and dreamed up by Texan artists David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. This is another mapping exercise where the object is public fruit, or all fruit overhanging public spaces such as sidewalks, streets or parking lots. xxvi Referencing the medieval western practice of gleaning, xxvii fruit is a lens to:

[investigate] urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. From protests to proposals for new urban green spaces, we aim to reconfigure the relation between those who have resources and those who do not, to examine the nature of & in the city, and to investigate new, shared forms of land use and property.xxviii

Their vision of fruit-bearing trees in public parks and streets.lined with apples and pearsxxix synergises with the ecofeminist writer, witch and activist Starhawks vision of a refurbished San Francisco Bay Area in her 1993 novel The Fifth Sacred Thing:

5 The streets have been dug up, leaving narrow snakes of asphalt for the skates and bicycles, and a few delivery and emergency routes that are larger. Buried streams have been opened up and now run freely through the city. The streams are lined with fruit trees, shade trees, and native shrubs that provide bird and wildlife habitat.The streams are crisscrossed by little bridges and footpaths, many of them accented by colorful mosaics or carefully set patterns of stone. Gardens replace pavement, for much of the citys food is grown within the city.xxx

The agency of fruit has a linkage here to notions of urban beauty, which is continually invoked in debates about the composition and inhabitability of cityscapes. In this vein, Adriana Valdez Young is an artist whose work engages with urban living in metropolitan New York and postcolonial Mumbai. Her work maps spaces that have been corporatised and closed she looks for the uninhabited, under-utilised and undecorated. This has included constructing and living in an apartment at the Providence Place Mall for four years (it took this long for Young and collaborators to be intercepted by mall security, leading to one arrest) and the production of the visual document Self and Other in the Mall, which illuminates the similarities between the marketing of imperial lifestyles in the British colonies in India and that promoted by urban shopping megaplexes. Better than Living, her recent production of an advertisement for an eco-lifestyle mall in Mumbai draws attention to the contemporary manifestations of spatial repression in the co-existence of slums and lifestyle villages.xxxi Youngs uncommissioned architectural interventions are not overdetermined critiques so much as they simply take the promises of corporate urbanism in naturally occurring directions. Along with each of the artisturbanists discussed here, such work demonstrates how our spaces for living have become centralised (gated community, Starbucks, shopping mall) in order to stabilise globally decentralised flows of capital (work-from-home, franchise, downsize). The striation of physical and psychological space and the possibilities for public space and selfdetermined community life are marked as contestable and contested.

6 Indeed, the compression of living space is a problem here in Sydney, particularly for those of us who fall into the lower echelons of the income bracket. When I was looking for a single persons rental dwelling recently I was compelled to consider moving out of my self-consciously trendy inner-west neighbourhood. After six weeks of looking at laundries converted into studios that averaged $200 per week I eventually found a place which could once have been a boarding house: my six neighbours live in tiny flats in a large, old terrace. I share a bathroom with them and live in two spacious rooms in the roof for which I pay $150/week. Im white and well-spoken, I have friends and family, my mental and physical health is generally robust. I have no dependents. In many ways I have consciously chosen my income stream. How many people who are not in possession of this social capital needed housing too (and who would, perhaps, have been favoured by boarding house accommodation over a tenancy agreement)? To be sure, approximately 60,000 people considered to be disadvantaged in the private rental market on account of low income as well as other support needs currently await public housing in New South Wales.xxxii

Certainly, if LeFebvre believed in the capacity of art to positively transform socio-spatial relations in the city, he also hinted at the equal possibility of its complicity in spatial repression and the way in which this occurs through rhetorics of democracy, urban renewal and/or the proliferation of culture. xxxiii Art is not separate to society, it has a political economy and it can be used for both progressive and reactionary ends. It delivers a cultural dividend in the gentrification of suburbiaxxxiv and the fetishisation of slums.xxxv Spaces for living and art making are secured through the social and cultural capital that art and artists purportedly bring. The urban may generate spaces of encounter and exchange that take place outside of the relations of production but are simultaneously fully present within their own conditions of production.

Within this, ghettoisation and segregation may be just as imposing upon the rich as on the poor, as foreshadowed above. In LeFebvres words:

Here are social housing estates without teenagers or old people. 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.xxxvi

Of course, the difference here is that those more empowered by (capitalist, liberal) democracy may control this process. North American urbanist Bryan Finoki documents the upper class exploitation of a culture of fear to justify urbanizing spaces of exclusion and enclosure, such as gated communities, closed condominiums, secured shopping malls, restricted office space, neighbourhood checkpoints, private security outposts, etc. That this has been able to occur through the postures of democratisation i.e. rhetorics of choice, aspiration and achievability demands a recognition by the critic of how the urban and political form is inextricably linked, and the ways the built environment serves as an arena for political contest and democracys reproduction of social inequality.xxxvii Finoki is talking here about megalopolises such as So Paulo, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Johannesburg where socio-economic segregation is distributed in such as way as to create an urban blotter of material division throughout, as opposed to previous markings of a rich centre and a poor periphery.

Assuredly, spatial politics in Australia are always already unsettled by the (post)colonial condition, over and above extant measures of wealth and poverty. Our originary urbanism is a violent one: the taking of the land by force; the invaders crafting it in their own image or to their own ends.xxxviii This legacy peaks at regular points on Australias urban topography: the contest over Aboriginal community housing in Redfern and anxieties about Native Title law in the suburbs riff off projections of rack and ruin in Northern Territory towns. This is the foundational mode by which Australian spaces labour difference, and thereby also memory, trauma, forgiveness, fear and hope. Urbanism, art

8 practice, architecture and town planning are positioned to reveal, assist and/or erase this labour.

We zero in now on inner city Sydney. Here is a space where the colonial reflexes of shoring up borders and quelling setter anxiety are echoed in the willingness of government and planning professionals to capitulate to the distant demands of finance capital a phenomenon described by Sandercock as urban political regimes rushing to embrace the global investors, terrified that their city/region will drop off all the relevant maps.xxxix The contest over spaces for living for staying alive, for conviviality is fierce, and may be intricated in an urbanism that is intersected by the practice of art-ascultural-critique.

Sandercock poses five qualities or sensibilities of a 21st century urban imagination: political, therapeutic, audacious, creative and critical. xl These sensibilities animate a construction site of the mind and heartxli when engaged in urban planning. And, in a process reflecting LeFebvrean/Situationist currents, they are already at work in the contemporary global city, in the resurgence of indigenous peoples and an associated politics of reclaiming their land; the rise of organized civil society and the new politics of social movements.xlii LeFebvres differentialism is ebbs Sandercocks cultural politics of difference,xliii which have provided a regular and fundamental challenge to the homogenising market determinism of our latter-day living spaces. These are all moment(a) of the attempt to create the space, in one place, at one point in time, where perceptions might shift, where public learning might occur, and some larger transformation take place, where the previously unthinkable shifts into possibility.xliv Here, art-as-cultural-critique has vibrant, complicit, processual, political meaning for the development of urban space. As LeFebvre thought it should.

* This essay was written for There goes the neighbourhood: Redfern and the politics of urban space, eds Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg. An edited version appears in that publication. See http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org
i ii

By Ann Deslandes: a writer who lives, unsurprisingly, in the inner western suburbs of Sydney.

Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, Lost in Transposition in Henri LeFebvre, Writings on Cities, translated and edited by Kofman and Lebas, Blackwell, Cambridge, 1996, p.13. See the critique of this publication at http://notbored.org/writings-on-cities.html
iii iv v vi

Kofman and Lebas p.11 1892-1940. See for example The Arcades Project. 1858-1918. See for example The Metropolis and Mental Life.

Consider, too, Friedrich Engels Condition of the Working Class in England 1844, mile Durkheims anomie and Max Webers iron cage.
vii

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Teaching for the Times, in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, edited by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997.
viii

Leonie Sandercock,Practicing Utopia: sustaining cities, in The Contested Metropolis: Six cities at the Beginning of the 21st Century, International Network of Urban Research and Action (INURA), Birkhuser, Berlin, 2001, p.20
ix x

Kofman and Lebas, p.14

Borrowed out of turn from Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, New York, 1994.
xi xii

Kofman and Lebas, p.21

See for example Harveys Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography and Mike Davis Planet of Slums.
xiii xiv xv xvi xvii xviii xix xx xxi xxii

The Right to the City in Writings on Cities, p.158. Qtd. in Kofman and Lebas, p.33 Ibid., p.35 See Le manifeste diffrentialiste (The differentialist manifesto). The Right to the City, p.101 Ibid., p.103

Ibid. Spectral Analysis in Writings on Cities, p.139 Lash and Urry, Economies of Signs and Space, Sage, London. 1994.

Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities in the 21st Century, Continuum, London and New York, 2003, p.6

10
xxiii Available xxiv xxv

at http://sustainabilityreloaded.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/interview-with-pablo-georgieff/

See http://www.delocator.net

xtine, Delocator, Couchsurfing, and Fallen Fruit: Websites Respond to a Crisis of Democracy, M/C Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2008. Available at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/ viewArticle/24
xxvi xxvii xxviii

See http://www.fallenfruit.org See for example Angs Vardas film Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), 2000. From the Fallen Fruit group on Facebook. Ibid. described by Starhawk at http://www.starhawk.org/writings/fifth_sacred_SFvision.html

xxix

xxx As xxxi xxxii

See www.betterthanliving.com. Youngs other works can also be viewed on this site.

Shelter NSW, NSW Housing Factsheet, Sydney, 2008. Available at http:// www.shelternsw.infoxchange.net.au/publications.shtml
xxxiii xxxiv

Spectral Analysis, pp.140-141

Such as Richard Floridas bohemian index: see for example his article The Rise of the Creative Class, Washington Monthly, May 2002, available at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/ 2001/0205.florida.html
xxxv

See for example Melanie Gilligan, Slumsploitation The Favela on Film and TV, Mute, September 2006. Available at http://www.metamute.org/en/Slumsploitation-Favela-on-Film-and-TV
xxxvi xxxvii

Spectral Analysis, p. 143

Occupying Slum, Subtopia: a field guide to military urbanism (Finokis weblog), 22 January 2009. Available at http://subtopia.blogspot.com/2009/01/occupying-slum.html
xxxviii As

Indigenous professor and academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out, Coupled with overt acts of violence the development of a new hegemonic ideology born out of a patriarchal society whose imperative was the establishment of a capitalist mode of production. From her Talkin Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism, University of Queensland Press, 2000, p. 5.
xxxix xl xli xlii xliii xliv

Cosmopolis II, p.3

Ibid., p.xiv Ibid. Of which There Goes The Neighbourhood, the exhibition, may yet be an example. Cosmopolis II, p.3

Sandercock in fact refers here to a planning process undertaken by South Sydney Council with the Redfern community in the 1980s over land use in the neighbourhood. Cosmopolis II, p.161.