Canadian Journal of Sociology Online September-October 2003

Henri Lefebvre. The Urban Revolution. Foreword by Neil Smith. Translated by Robert Bononno.
University of Minnesota Press, 2003, 196 pp. $US 18.95 paper (0-8166-4160-9), $US 52.95 hardcover (0-8166-4159-5) The English translation of The Urban Revolution has come long after its original publication in French (1970), following many years of reviews and interpretation, and after several other English translations of Lefebvres later works such as The Production of Space (1991). It is impossible to read this book without the influence of that history. For those unfamiliar with it, Neil Smiths introduction provides a useful precis of the political events (the revolution of May 1968) and intellectual debates (empiricism, positivism, marxism) that influenced Lefebvres writing, as well as the subsequent critiques by two other prominent urbanists, Manuel Castells and David Harvey. The critiques focused on Lefebvres main point of departure from Marxist analyses: he asserts that the urban phenomenon supplants industrialization as the force of historical change and motor of capital accumulation. The process of urbanization creates the conditions for capitalism rather than urbanization being the excrescence of the circulation of capital. While Marxist and post-Marxist critiques have focused on this point, Lefebvre demands much more reflexive thought about the intellectual, professional and bureaucratic practices through which the urban itself has been produced as an object. Lefebvre begins with the hypothesis that society has been completely urbanized and an urban society results from a process of complete urbanization. To speak of the urban then is to look beyond the city, to encompass an entire way of being, thinking and acting. Urban society is not just in the city, it is in and of all of society. The urban is a totality, a global phenomenon, shaping and influencing all of society. His book tests this hypothesis through a number of propositions and conceptual devices. But his project is not just intellectual illumination, for urbanization is not yet complete and its current trajectory not inevitable. It is therefore full of possibility. But to capture this possibility we need to change from old ways of thinking, being and acting that correspond to agrarian and industrial revolutions to ones that open our eyes and enable us to see the particularities, contradictions and possibilities of our current revolution, the urban. If the urban is totality, then the urban revolution is also a revolution in how we understand and conceptualize the urban. And, if we are to take hold of the revolution then it is none other than a revolution of thought that is required. But, there is a major barrier to the possibilities of the urban revolution: this he names our blind field. While the agrarian, industrial and urban are to some extent simultaneous, Lefebvre identifies the current moment as a space between these phases, a space of force and conflict, a black box. The blindness is a result of seeing it with eyes, with concepts, that were shaped by the practices and theories of industrialization.and so the urban remains unseen (29). One of the blinders is the conceptualization of space-time: the urban is not based on the agrarian (cyclic, juxtaposed particularities) or industrial (rational, homogenized) space-time but on a differential space-time with each place and each moment existing only within a whole, through contrasts and oppositions that connect it to, and distinguish it from, other places and moments (37).

distinguish it from, other places and moments (37).

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Another of his conceptualizations for bringing the urban to light (which is his main objective) conceives of society as the product of three blurred and overlapping levels organized by relative importance. The global is the dominant level, the site of power, the state, of representation, of the built domains of institutions, ministries, cathedrals and monuments. The urban level is the built and unbuilt domains of avenues, squares, schools and local public buildings, a mixed level between the global and private. It consists of the spaces of unity, the terrain for defense, attack or struggle (public spaces). It is the place where differences know one another and, through their mutual recognition, test one another, and in this way are strengthened or weakened. The private is of lived experience, places of habiting and habitat where one can dwell poetically, where meaning is supplied, but which is wrongly confined to a position of subordination to the dictates of superior levels. This formulation is not as well developed and coherent as it is in later texts, but unlike them, The Urban Revolution illuminates the epistemological and political reasons we are unable to conceive of society in a way that enables us to commandeer our urban revolution(s). First, there is the lack of an urban epistemology. The urban phenomenon is based on descriptive methods (ecology, phenomenology) produced by specialized sciences that cut from the global phenomenon a field, or domain which it illuminates in its own way (48) with a division of labor in knowledge transformed into institutions and superstructures erected during industrialization. While his description of urbanists and the academy as superstructure and ideology invoke the ghosts of structuralist and Marxist analyses (as do his descriptions of a revolution of thought sometimes invoke idealism), his analysis is more nuanced and discomfiting. For the blind field is not so much underpinned by ideology, but a product of disciplinary boundaries and academic departments that build conceptual blinders. In these ways the book is not just about the urban but our academic practice. To illuminate the blind field requires concepts for bridging the data of lived experience (of the private level), that is, the data of social practice, and the discourses used to articulate them (52). Drawing on examples from semiology, philosophy and phenomenology, he argues that this can only be possible with interdisciplinary cooperation. The urban phenomenon cannot be grasped by any specialized science. Inter- and multi- disciplinary efforts have largely failed and produced some artificial synthesis, he says. One of conceptual barriers that disciplines create is their constitution of objects as givens. By constituting their objects they constitute themselves and the constituted object then legitimates the system: In other words, the real sociological object is an image and an ideology! (57). For Lefebvre, the urban revolution is not about the city (a clearly defined object) but of urban society (a virtual or possible object). Urban society is not an empirical fact, but a possible object. It is a conceptual formulation, an intellectual approach toward a possible object, a movement of thought toward a certain concrete. While virtual, it is also real in that the possible is also part of the real and gives it a sense of direction, an orientation, a clear path to the horizon (45). It is hard not to feel a sense of disappointment about our present after reading the political and intellectual optimism that Lefebvre expressed about the liberating possibilities of the urban. But he also expresses a radical doubt. Indeed, one of the most disturbing problems according to Lefebvre is the extraordinary passivity of the people most directly involvedthe users of urban space. The

the extraordinary passivity of the people most directly involvedthe users of urban space. The

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reason for this, he argues, is that the abstract space of the global level dominates, and its practitioners (architects and urbanists) unknowingly impose ideological, repressive and so-called objective abstractions back onto lived experience. As for urbanists, their theoretical passivity is a product of disciplinary fragmentation and objectivism leading to partial descriptions and analyses. And finally there is a sociological passivity caused by a long history of authority being delegated to political and expert representatives. Rather than critiquing this book then, perhaps the review to be written is of our failures. Sure we have had attempts to rethink time-space, transcend imagined dichotomies of objective-subjective to embrace third spaces, etc. But have we reflexively addressed how the constitution of the urban object is bound up with the constitution and legitimacy of disciplines and how conceptualizations get bound up with the real? Evelyn S. Ruppert York University ruppert@yorku.ca.
Evelyn Ruppert is currently Ontario Coordinator for the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI/IRCS), York University Centre. Her current research examines the constitution of professions and knowledge economy in twentieth century in Canada.
http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/cjscopy/reviews/urbanrev.html September 2003 Canadian Journal of Sociology Online