#cover h-l-henri-lefebvre-right-to-the-city-2.png
#title The Right to the City
#author Henri Lefebvre
#LISTtitle Right to the City
#SORTauthors Henri Lefebvre
#SORTtopics right to the city, urbanism, Marxism, municipalism, grassroots organizing, community organizing, right to the city, dialectics, the city, revolution, libertarian marxism, not anarchist
#date 1968 (*Le Droit à la ville*), 1996 (English translation as *The Right to the City*)
#source Chapters 2–17 from *Writings on Cities*, Selected, translated and introduced by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas.
#lang en
#pubdate 2019-08-20T02:56:00
#notes The ‘right to the city’ is an idea and a slogan that was first proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book *Le Droit à la ville*  and that has been reclaimed more recently by social movements, thinkers and several progressive local authorities alike as a call to action to reclaim the city as a to-created space — a place for life detached from the growing effects that commodification and capitalism have had over social interaction and the rise of spatial inequalities in worldwide cities throughout the last two centuries. While Lefebvre never identified with libertarian Marxism, his conceptual framework of Right to the City is of use to a libertarian Marxist reading.

** Preface

<quote>
Great things must be silenced or talked about with grandeur, that is, with cynicism and innocence...<br>
I would claim as property and product of man all the beauty, nobility, which we have given to real or imaginary things...

— Frederic Nietzsche
</quote>

This work will take an offensive form (that some will perhaps find
offending). Why?

Because conceivably each reader will already have in mind a set of
ideas systematized or in the process of being systematized. Conceivably, each reader is looking for a ‘system’ or has found his ‘system’.
The System is fashionable, as much in thought as in terminologies and
language.

Now all systems tend to <em>close off</em> reflection, to block off horizon.
This work wants to break up systems, not to substitute another
system, bur to <em>open up</em> through thought and action towards <em>possibilities</em> by showing the horizon and the road. Against a form of
reflection which tends towards formalism, a thought which tends
towards an opening leads the struggle.

<em>Urbanism,</em> almost as much as the system, is fashionable. Urbanistic
questions and reflections are coming out of circles of technicians,
specialists, intellectuals who see themselves as at the ‘avant-garde’.
They enter the public domain through newspaper articles and writings
of diverse import and ambitions. At one and the same time urbanism
becomes ideology and practice. Meanwhile, questions relative to the
city and to urban reality are not fully known and recognized, they
have not yet acquired <em>politically</em> the importance and the meaning that
they have in <em>thought</em> (in ideology) and in <em>practice</em> (we shall show an
urban strategy already at work and in action). This little book does
not only propose to critically analyse thoughts and activities related to
urbanism. It’s aim is to allow its problems to enter into consciousness
and political policies.

From the theoretical and practical situation of problems (from the
problematic) concerning the city, reality and possibilities of urban life,
let us begin by taking what used to the called a ‘cavalier attitude’.

** Industrialization and Urbanization

To present and give an account of the ‘urban problematic’, the point of
departure must be the process of industrialization. Beyond any doubt
this process has been the dynamic of transformations in society for the
last century and a half. If one distinguishes between the <em>inductor</em> and
the <em>induced,</em> one can say that the process of industrialization is inductive
and that one can count among the induced, problems related to
growth and planning, questions concerning the city and the development
of the urban reality, without omitting the growing importance of
leisure activities and questions related in ‘culture’. Industrialization
characterizes modern society. This does not inevitably carry with it
terms of ‘industrial society’, if we want to define it. Although urbanization
and the problematic of the urban figure among the induced effects
and not among the causes or inductive reason, the preoccupation these
words signify accentuate themselves in such a way that one can define
as an urban society the social reality which arises around us. This
definition retains a feature which becomes capital.

Industrialization provides the point of departure for reflection upon
our time. Now the city existed prior to industrialization. A remark
banal in itself but whose implications have not been fully formulated.
The most eminent urban creations, the most ‘beautiful’ <em>oeuvres</em> of
urban life (we say <em>‘beautiful,’</em> because they are <em>oeuvres</em> rather than
products) date from epochs previous to that of industrialization.
There was the oriental city (linked to the Asiatic mode of production),
the antique city (Greek and Roman associated with the possession of
slaves) and then the medieval city (in a complex situation embedded
in feudal relations but struggling against a landed feudalism). The
oriental and antique city was essentially political; the medieval city,
without losing its political character, was principally related to commerce,
crafts and banking. It absorbed merchants, who had previously
been quasi nomadic and relegated outside the city.

When industrialization begins, and capitalism in competition with a
specifically industrial bourgeoisie is born, the city is already a powerful
reality. In Western Europe, after the virtual disappearance of the
antique city, the decay of Roman influence, the city took off again.
More or less nomadic merchants elected as centre of their activities
what remained of the antique urban cores. Conversely, one can suppose
that these degraded cores functioned as accelerators for what
remained of exchange economies maintained by wandering merchants.
From the growing surplus product of agriculture, to the
detriment of feudal lords, cities accumulate riches: objects, treasures,
virtual capitals. There already existed in these urban centres a great
monetary wealth, acquired through usury and and commerce. Crafts
prosper there, a production clearly distinct from agriculture. Cities
support peasant communities and the enfranchisement of the peasants,
not without benefit for themselves. In short, they are centres of
social and political life where not only wealth is accumulated, but
knowledge <em>(connaissances),</em> techniques, and <em>oeuvres</em> (works of art,
monuments). This city is itself <em>‘oeuvre’,</em> a feature which contrasts with
the irreversible tendency towards money and commerce, towards
exchange and <em>products.</em> Indeed the *oeuvre* is use value and the the product is  exchange value. The eminent use of the city, that is, of its
streets and squares, edifices and monuments, is <em>la fête</em> (a celebration
which consumes unproductively, without other advantage but pleasure
and prestige and enormous riches in money and objects).

A complex, but contradictory, reality. Medieval cities at the height
of their development centralize wealth: powerful groups invest unproductively
a large part of their wealth in the cities they dominate. At the
same time, banking and commercial capital have already made wealth
<em>mobile</em> and has established exchange networks enabling the transfer
of money. When industrialization begins with the pre-eminence of a
specific bourgeoisie (the entrepreneurs), wealth has ceased to be
mainly in real estate. Agricultural production is no longer dominant
and nor is landed property. Estates are lost to the feudal lords and pass
into the hands of urban capitalises enriched by commerce, banking,
usury. The outcome is that ‘society’ as a whole, made up of the city,
the country and the institutions which regulate their relations, tend to
constitute themselves as a <em>network of cities,</em> with a certain division of
labour (technically, socially, politically) between cities linked together
by road, river and seaways and by commercial and banking relations.
One can think that the division of labour between cities was neither
sufficiently advanced nor sufficiently aware to determine stable associations
and put an end to to rivalries and competition. This urban
system was not able to establish itself. What is erected on chis base is
the State, or centralized power. Cause and effect of this particular
centrality, that of power, one city wins over the others: the capital.

Such a process takes place very unevenly, very differently in Italy,
Germany, France, Flanders, England, and Spain. The city predominates
and yet it is no longer the City-State of antiquity. There are three
different terms: society, State and city. In this urban system each city
tends to constitute itself as an enclosed self-contained, self-functioning
system. The city preserves the organic character of community which
comes from the village and which translates itself into a corporate
organization (or guild). Community life (comprising general or partial
assemblies) does not prohibit class struggle. On the contrary. Violent
contrasts between wealth and poverty, conflicts between the powerful
and the oppressed, do not prevent either attachment to the city nor an
active contribution to the beauty of the <em>oeuvre.</em> In the urban context,
struggles between fractions, groups and classes strengthen the feeling
of belonging. Political confrontations between the ‘minuto popolo’ the
‘popolo grosso’, the aristocracy and the oligarchy, have the city as
their battle ground, their stake. These groups are rivals in their love of
the city. As for the rich and powerful, they always feel threatened.
They justify their privilege in the community by somptuously spending
their fortune: buildings, foundations, palaces, embellishments, festivities.
It is important to emphasize this paradox, for it is not a well
understood historical fact: very oppressive societies were very creative
and rich in producing <em>oeuvres.</em> Later, the production of products
replaced the production of <em>oeuvres</em> and the social relations attached to
them, notably the city. When exploitation replaces oppression, creative
capacity disappears. The very notion of ‘creation’ is blurred or
degenerates by miniaturizing itself into ‘making’ and ‘creativity’ (the
‘do-it-yourself,’ etc.). Which brings forth arguments to back up a
thesis: <em>city and urban reality are related to use value. Exchange value and the generalization of commodities by industrialization tend to destroy it by subordinating the city and urban reality</em> which are
refuges of use value, the origins of a virtual predominance and revalorization
of use.

In the urban system we are attempting to analyse, action is exercized
over specific conflicts: between use value and exchange value, between
mobilization of wealth (in silver and in money) and unproductive
investment in the city, between accumulation of capital and its squandering
on festivities, between the extension of the dominated territory
and the demands of a strict organization of this territory around the
dominating city. The latter protects itself against all eventualities by a
corporate organization which paralyses the initiatives of banking and
commercial capitalism. The coporarion does not only regulate a craft.
Each enters into an organic whole: the corporate system regulates the
distribution of actions and activities over urban space (streets and
neighbourhoods) and urban time (timetables and festivities). This
whole tends to congeal itself into an immutable structure. The outcome
of which is that industrialization supposes the destructuration
of existing structures. Historians (since Marx) have showed the
fixed nature of guilds. What perhaps remains to be shown is the
tendency of the whole urban system towards a sort of crystallization
and fixation. Where this system consolidated itself, capitalism and
industrialization came late: in Germany, in Italy, a delay full of
consequences.

There is therefore a certain discontinuity between an emerging
industry and its historical conditions. They are neither the same thing
nor the same people. The prodigious growth of exchanges, of a
monetary economy, of merchant production, of the ‘world of commodities’
which will result from industrialization, implies a radical
change. The passage of commercial and banking capitalism as well as
craft production to industrial production and competitive capitalism
is accompanied by a gigantic crisis, well studied by historians, except
for what relates to the city and the ‘urban system’.

<em>Emerging industry tends to establish itself outside cities.</em> Not that it
is an absolute law. No law can be totally general and absolute. This
setting up of industrial enterprises, at first sporadic and dispersed,
depended on multiple local regional and national circumstances. For
example, <em>printing</em> seems to have been able in an urban context to go
from a craft to the private enterprise stage. It was, otherwise for the
<em>textile</em> industry, for mining, for <em>metallurgy.</em> The new industry establishes
itself near energy sources (rivers, woods then charcoal), means
of transport (rivers and canals, then railways), raw materials (minerals),
pools of labour power (peasant crahmen, weavers and blacksmiths
already providing skilled labour).

There still exist today in France numerous small textile centres
(valleys in Normandy and the Vosges, etc.) which survive sometimes
with difficulty. Is it not remarkable that a part of the heavy metallurgical
industry was established in the valley of the Moselle, between
two old cities, Nancy and Metz, the only real urban centres of this
industrial region? At the same time old cities are markets, sources of
available capital, the place where these capitals are managed (banks),
the residences of economic and political leaders, reservoirs of labour
(that is, the places where can subsist ‘the reserve army of labour’ as
Marx calls it, which weighs on wages and enables the growth of
surplus value). Moreover, the city, as workshop, allows the concentration
over a limited space of the means of production: cools, raw
materials, labour.

Since settlement outside of cities is not satisfactory for ‘entrepreneurs’,
as soon as it is possible industry comes closer to urban centres.
Inversely, the city prior to industrialization accelerates the process (in
particular, it enables the rapid growth of productivity). The city has
therefore played an important role in the <em>take-off</em> of industry. As
Marx explained, urban concentrations have accompanied the concentration
of capital. Industry was to produce its own urban centres,
sometimes small cities and industrial agglomerations (le Creusot), at
times medium-sized (Saint-Etienne) or gigantic (the Ruhr, considered
as a ‘conurbation’). We shall come back to the deterioration of the
centrality and urban character in these cities.

This process appears, in analysis, in all its complexity, which the
word ‘industrialization’ represents badly. This complexity becomes
apparent as soon as one ceases to think in terms of private <em>enterprise</em>
on the one hand and global production statistics (so many tons of coal,
steel) on the other — as soon as one reflects upon the distinction
between the <em>inductor</em> and the <em>induced,</em> by observing the importance of
the phenomena induced and their interaction with the inductors.
Industry can do without the old city (pre-industrial, precapitalist) but
does so by constituting agglomerations in which urban features are
deteriorating. Is this not the case in North America where ‘cities’ in the
way they are understood in France and in Europe, are few: New York,
Montreal, San Francisco? Nevertheless, where there is a pre-existent
network of old cities, industry assails it. It appropriates this network
and refashions it according to its needs. It also attacks the city (each
city), assaults it, takes it, ravages it. It tends to break up the old cores
by taking them over. This does not prevent the extension of urban
phenomena, cities and agglomerations, industrial towns and suburbs
(with the addition of shanty towns where industrialization is unable
to employ and fix available labour).

We have before us a <em>double process</em> or more precisely, a process with
two aspects: industrialization and urbanization, growth and development,
economic production and social life. The two ‘aspects’ of this
inseparable process have a unity, and yet it is a conflictual process.
Historically there is a violent clash between urban reality and industrial
reality. As for the complexity of the process, it reveals itself more
and more difficult to grasp, given that industrialization does not only
produce firms (workers and leaders of private enterprises), but various
<em>offices</em> — banking, financial, technical and political.

This <em>dialectical</em> process, far from being clear, is also far from over.
Today it still provokes ‘problematic’ situations. A few examples
would be sufficient here. In Venice, the active population leaves the
city for the industrial agglomeration which parallels it on the mainland:
Mestre. This city among the most beautiful cities bequeathed to
us from pre-industrial times is threatened not so much by physical
deterioration due to the sea or to its subsidence, as by the exodus of
its inhabitants. In Athens a quite considerable industrialization has
attracted to the capital people from small towns and peasants. Modern
Athens has nothing more in common with the antique city covered
over, absorbed, extended beyond measure. The monuments and sites
(agora, Acropolis) which enable to locate ancient Greece are only
places of tourist consumption and aesthetic pilgrimage. Yet the organizational
core of the city remains very strong. Its surroundings of new
neighbourhoods and semi-shanty towns inhabited by uprooted and
disorganized people confer it an exorbitant power. This almost shapeless
gigantic agglomeration enables the holders of decision-making
centres to carry out the worst political ventures. All the more so that
the economy of the country closely depends on this network: property
speculation, the ‘creation’ of capitals by this means, investments of
these capitals into construction and so on and so forth. It is this fragile
network, always in danger of breaking, which defines a <em>type</em> of
urbanization, without or with a weak industrialization, but with a
rapid extension of the agglomeration, of property and speculation; a
prosperity falsely maintained by the network.

We could in France cite many cities which have been recently
submerged by industrialization: Grenoble, Dunkirk, etc. In other
cases, such as Toulouse, there has been a massive extension of the city
and urbanization (understood in the widest sense of the term) with
little industrialization. Such is also the general case of Latin American
and African cities encircled by shanty towns. In these regions and
countries old agrarian structures are dissolving: dispossessed or ruined
peasants crowd into these cities to find work and subsistence. Now
these peasants come from farms destined to disappear because of
world commodity prices, these being closely linked to industrialized
countries and ‘growth poles’. These phenomena are still dependent on
industrialization.

An induced process which one could call the ‘implosion-explosion’
of the city is at present deepening. The urban phenomenon extends
itself over a very large part of the territory of great industrial countries.
It happily crosses national boundaries: the Megalopolis of
Northern Europe extends from the Ruhr to the sea and even to English
cities, and from the Paris region to the Scandinavian countries. The
<em>urban fabric</em> of this territory becomes increasingly tight, although not
without its local differentiations and extension of the (technical and
social) division of labour to the regions, agglomerations and cities. At
the same time, there and even elsewhere, urban concentrations
become gigantic: populations are heaped together reaching worrying
densities (in surface and housing units). Again at the same time many
old urban cores are deteriorating or exploding. People move to distant
residential or productive peripheries. Offices replace housing in urban
centres. Sometimes (in the United States) these centres are abandoned
to the ‘poor’ and become ghettos for the underprivileged. Sometimes
on the contrary, the most affluent people retain their strong positions
at the heart of the city (around Central Park in New York, the Marais
in Paris).

Let us now examine the <em>urban fabric.</em> This metaphor is not clear.
More than a fabric thrown over a territory, these words designate a
kind of biological proliferation of a net of uneven mesh, allowing
more or less extended sectors to escape: hamlets or villages, entire
regions. If these phenomena are placed into the perspective of the
countryside and old agrarian structures, one can analyse a general
movement of concentration: from populations in boroughs and small
and large towns — of property and exploitation — of the organization
of transports and commercial exchanges, etc. This leads at the same
time to the depopulation and the ‘loss of the peasantry’ from the
villages which remain rural while losing what was peasant life: crafts,
small local shops. Old ‘ways of life’ become folklore. If the same
phenomena are analysed from the perspective of cities, one can observe
not only the extension of highly populated peripheries but also
of banking, commercial and industrial networks and of housing (second
homes, places and spaces of leisure, etc.).

The urban fabric can be described by using the concept of <em>ecosystem,</em>
a coherent unity constituted around one or several cities, old and
recent. Such a description may lose what is essential. Indeed, the
significance of the urban fabric is not limited to its morphology. It is
the support of a more or less intense, more or less degraded, ‘way of
life’: <em>urban society.</em> On the economic base of the <em>urban fabric</em> appear
phenomena of another order, that of social and ‘cultural’ life. Carried
by the <em>urban fabric,</em> urban society and life penetrate the countryside.
Such a way of living entails systems of objects and of values. The best
known elements of the urban system of objects include water, electricity,
gas (butane in the countryside), not to mention the car, the
television, plastic utensils, ‘modern’ furniture, which entail new demands
with regard to ‘services’. Among the elements of the system of
values we can note urban leisure (dance and song), suits, the rapid
adoption of fashions from the city. And also, preoccupations with
security, the need to predict the future, in brief, a rationality communicated
by the city. Generally youth, as an age group, actively contributes
to this rapid assimilation of things and representations
coming from the city. These are sociological trivialities which are
useful to remember to show their implications. Within the mesh of the
urban fabric survive islets and islands of ‘pure’ <em>rurality,</em> often (but not
always) poor areas peopled with ageing peasants, badly ‘integrated’,
stripped of what had been the nobility of peasant life in times of
greatest misery and of oppression. The ‘urban-rural’ relation does not
disappear. On the contrary, it intensifies itself down to the most
industrialized countries. It interferes with other representations and
other real relations: town and country, nature and artifice, etc. Here
and there tensions become conflicts, latent conflicts are accentuated,
and then what was hidden under the <em>urban fabric</em> appears in the open.

Moreover, urban cores do not disappear. The fabric erodes them or
integrates them to its web. These cores survive by transforming themselves.
There are still centres of intense urban life such as the Latin
Quarter in Paris. The aesthetic qualities of these urban cores play an
important role in their maintenance. They do not only contain monuments
and institutional headquarters, but also spaces appropriated
for entertainments, parades, promenades, festivities. In this way
the urban core becomes a high quality consumption product for foreigners,
tourists, people from the outskirts and suburbanites. It survives
because of this double role: as place of consumption and
consumption of place. Thus centres enter more completely into exchange
and exchange value, not without retaining their use value due
to spaces provided for specific activities. They become centres of
consumption. The architectural and urbanistic resurgence of the <em>commercial</em>
centre only gives a dull and mutilated version of what was the
core of the old city, at one and the same time commercial, religious,
intellectual, political and economic (productive). The notion and
image of the commercial centre in fact date from the Middle Ages.
It corresponds to the small and medium-sized medieval city. But today
exchange value is so dominant over use and use value that it more
or less suppresses it. There is nothing original in this notion. The
creation which corresponds to our times, to their tendencies and
(threatening) horizons is it not the <em>centre of decision-making?</em> This
centre, gathering together training and information, capacities of
organization and institutional decision-making, appears as a project in
the making of a new centrality, chat of <em>power.</em> The greatest attention
must be paid to this concept, the practice which it denotes and
justifies.

We have in fact a number of terms (at least three) in complex
relations with each other, definable <em>by</em> oppositions each on their own
terms, although not exhausted <em>by</em> these oppositions. There is the rural
and the urban (urban society). There is the urban fabric which carries
this ‘urbanness’ and centrality, old, renovated, new. Hence a disquieting
problematic, particularly if one wishes to go from analysis to
synthesis, from observations to a project (the ‘normative’). Must one
allow the urban fabric (what does this word mean?) to proliferate
spontaneously? Is it appropriate to capture this force, direct this
strange life, savage and artificial at the same time? How can one
strengthen the centres? Is it useful or necessary? And which centres,
which centralities? Finally, what is to be done about islands of ruralism?

Thus the <em>crisis</em> of the city can be perceived through distinct problems
and problematical whole. This is a theoretical and practical crisis. In
theory, the <em>concept of the city</em> (of urban reality) is made up of facts,
representations and images borrowed from the ancient pre-industrial
and precapitalist city, but in a process of transformation and new
elaboration. In practice the <em>urban core</em> (an essential part of the image
and the concept of the city) splits open and yet maintains itself:
overrun, often deteriorated, sometimes rotting, the urban core does
not disappear. If someone proclaims its end and its reabsorption into
the fabric, this is a postulate, a statement without proof. In the same
way, if someone proclaims the urgency of a restitution or reconstitution
of urban cores, it is again a postulate, a statement without proof.
The urban core has not given way to a new and well-defined ‘reality’,
as the village allowed the city to be born. And yet its reign seems to be
ending. Unless it asserts itself again even more strongly as centre of
power...

Until now we have shown how the city has been attacked by
industrialization, giving a dramatic and globally considered picture of
this process. This analytical attempt could lead us to believe that it is
a natural process, without intentions or volitions. There is something
like this, but that vision would be truncated. The ruling classes or
fractions of the ruling classes intervene actively and voluntarily in this
process, possessing capital (the means of production) and managing
not only the economic use of capital and productive investments, but
also the whole society, using part of the wealth produced in ‘culture’,
art, knowledge, ideology. Beside, or rather, in opposition to, dominant
social groups (classes and class fractions), there is the working
class: the proletariat, itself divided into strata, partial groups, various
tendencies, according to industrial sectors and local and national
traditions.

In the middle of the nineteenth century in Paris the situation was
somewhat like this. The ruling bourgeoisie, a non-homogenous class,
after a hard-fought struggle, has conquered the capital. Today the
Marais is still a visible witness to this: before the Revolution it is an
aristocratic quarter (despite the tendency of the capital and the
wealthy to drift towards the west), an area of gardens and private
mansions. It took but a few years, during the 1830s, for the Third
Estate to appropriate it. A number of magnificem houses disappear,
workshops and shops occupy others, tenements, stores, depots and
warehouses, firms replace parks and gardens. Bourgeois ugliness, the
greed for gain visible and legible in the streets takes the place of a
somewhat cold beauty and aristocratic luxury. On the walls of the
Marais can be read class struggle and the hatred between classes, a
victorious meanness. It is impossible to make more perceptible this
paradox of history which partially escaped Marx. The ‘progressive’
bourgeoisie taking charge of economic growth, endowed with ideological
instruments suited to rational growth, moves towards democracy
and replaces oppression by exploitation, this class as such no
longer creates — it replaces the *oeuvre*, by the product. Those who
retain this sense of the <em>oeuvre</em>, including writers and painters, think
and see themselves as ‘non bourgeois’. As for oppressors, the masters
of societies previous to the democratic bourgeoisie — princes, kings,
lords, emperors — they had a sense and a taste of the <em>oeuvre,</em> especially
in architecture and urban design. In fact the <em>oeuvre</em> is more closely
related to use value than to exchange value.

After 1848, the French bourgeoisie solidly entrenched in the city
(Paris) possesses considerable influence, but it sees itself hemmed in by
the working class. Peasants flock in, settling around the ‘barriers’ and
entrances of the fortifications, the immediate periphery. Former craftsmen
and new proletarians penetrate right up to the heart of the city.
They live in slums but also in tenements, where the better-off live on
the ground floors and the workers on the upper ones. In this ‘disorder’
the workers threaten the <em>‘parvenus’,</em> a danger which became obvious
during the days of June 1848 and which the Commune was to
confirm. <em>A class strategy</em> is elaborated, aimed at the replanning of the
city, without any regard for reality, for its own life.

The life of Paris reaches its greatest intensity between 1848 and the
Haussmann period — not what is understood by ‘la vie parisienne’, but
the urban life of the capital. It engages itself into literature and poetry
with great vigour and power. Then it will be over. Urban life suggests
meetings, the confrontation of differences, reciprocal knowledge and
acknowledgement (including ideological and political confrontation),
ways of living, ‘patterns’ which coexist in the city. During the nineteenth
century, a democracy of peasant origins which drove the
revolutionaries could have transformed itself into an urban democracy.
It was and it is still for history one of the beliefs of the
Commune. As urban democracy threatened the privileges of the new
ruling class, that class prevented it from being born. How? By expelling
from the urban centre and the city itself the proletariat, by
destroying ‘urbanity’.

<em>Act One.</em> Baron Haussmann, man of this Bonapartist State which
erects itself over society to treat it cynically as the booty (and not only
the stake) of the struggles for power. Haussmann replaces winding but
lively streets by long avenues, sordid but animated ‘quartiers’ by
bourgeois ones. If he forces through boulevards and plans open
spaces, it is not for the beauty of views. It is to ‘comb Paris with
machine guns’. The famous Baron makes no secret of it. Later we will
be greateful to him for having opened up Paris to traffic. This was not
the aim, the finality of Haussmann ‘planning’. The voids have a
meaning: they cry out loud and dear the glory and power of the State
which plans them, the violence which could occur. Later transfers
towards other finalities take place which justify in another way these
gashes into urban life. It should be noted that Haussmann did not
achieve his goal. One strong aspect of the Paris Commune (1871) is
the strength of the return towards the urban centre of workers pushed
out towards the outskirts and peripheries, their reconquest of the city,
this belonging among other belongings, this value, this <em>oeuvre</em> which
had been torn from them.

<em>Act Two.</em> The goal was to be attained by a much vaster manoeuvre
and with more important results. In the second half of the century,
influential people, that is rich or powerful, or both, sometimes ideologues
(Le Play) with ideas strongly marked by religions (Catholic and
Protestant), sometimes informed politicians (belonging to the centre
right) and who moreover do not constitute a coherent and unique
group, in brief, a few notables, discover a new notion. The Third
Republic will insure its fortune, that is, its realization on the ground.
It will conceive the notion of <em>habitat.</em> Until then, ‘to inhabit’ meant to
take part in a social life, a community, village or city. Urban life had,
among other qualities, this attribute. It gave the right to inhabit, it
allowed townsmen-citizens to inhabit. It is thus that ‘mortals inhabit
while they save the earth, while they wait for the gods ... while they
conduct their lives in preservation and use’. Thus speaks the poet and
philosopher Heidegger of the concept <em>to inhabit.</em> Outside philosophy
and poetry the same things have been said sociologically in prose. At
the end of the nineteenth century the notables isolate a function,
detach it from a very complex whole which was and remains the city,
to project it over the ground, not without showing and signifying in
this manner the society for which they provide an ideology and a
practice. Certainly suburbs were created under the pressure of circumstances
to respond to the blind (although motivated and directed)
growth of industrialization, the massive arrival of peasants led to the
urban centres by ‘rural exodus’. The process has none the less been
oriented by a strategy.

A typical <em>class strategy,</em> does that mean a series of concerted actions,
planned with a single aim? No. Class character seems that much deeper
than several concerted actions, centered around several objectives, has
nevertheless converged towards a final result. It goes without saying
that all these notables were not proposing to open up a means to
speculation: some of them, men of good will, philanthropists, humanists,
seem even to wish the opposite. They have none the less mobilized
property wealth around the city, the entrance without restriction into
exchange and exchange value of the ground and housing. This had
speculative implications. They were not proposing to demoralize the
working classes, but on the contrary, to moralize it. They considered it
beneficial to involve the workers (individuals and families) into a
hierarchy clearly distinct from that which rules in the firm, that of
property and landlords, houses and neighbourhoods. They wanted to
give them another function, another status, other roles than those
attached to the condition of the salaried producers. They meant in this
way to give them a better everyday life than that of work. In this way
they conceived the role of owner-occupied housing. A remarkably
successful operation (although its political consequences were not
always those anticipated by its promoters). Nevertheless, a result was
achieved, predicted or otherwise, conscious or unconscious. Society
orients itself ideologically and practically towards other problems than
that of production. Little by little social consciousness ceased to refer
to production and to focus on everyday life and consumption. With
‘suburbanization’ a process is set into motion which decentres the city.
Isolated from the city, the proletariat will end its sense of the <em>oeuvre.</em>
Isolated from places of production, available from a sector of habitation
for scattered firms, the proletariat will allow its creative capacity
to diminish in its conscience. Urban consciousness will vanish.

In France the beginnings of the suburb are also the beginnings of
a violently anti-urban planning approach; a singular paradox. For
decades during the Third Republic appeared documents authorizing
and regulating owner-occupied suburbs and plots. What could be
more accurately referred to here is the <em>banlieue pavillonaire,</em> a type of
suburbanization begun in this period in France characterized by small
owner-occupied houing whose nearest Anglo-Saxon equivalent in
terms of typology and social relations is the <em>‘bungalow’.</em>

A de-urbanized, yet dependent periphery is established around the
city. Effectively, these new suburban dwellers are still urban even
though they are unaware of it and believe themselves to be close to
nature, to the sun and to greenery. One could call it a de-urbanizing
and de-urbanized urbanization to emphasize the paradox.

Its excesses will slow this extension down. The movement it engenders
will carry along the bourgeoisie and the well-off who will establish
residential suburbs. City centres empty themselves for offices. The whole
then begins to struggle with the inextricable. But it is not finished.

<em>Act Three.</em> After the Second World War it becomes evident that the
picture changes according to various emergencies and constraints
related to demographic and industrial growth and the influx of people
from the provinces to Paris. The housing crisis, acknowledged and
proven, turns into a catastrophe and threatens to worsen the political
situation which is still unstable. ‘Emergencies’ overwhelm the initiatives
of capitalism and ‘private’ enterprise, especially as the latter is not
interested in construction, considered to be insufficiently profitable.
The State can no longer be content with simply regulating land plots
and the construction of informal suburban housing or fighting (badly)
property speculation. By means of intermediary organisms it takes
charge of housing construction and an era of <em>‘nouveaux ensembles’</em>
(large-scale housing estates) and ‘new towns’ begins.

It could be said that public powers take charge of what hitherto was
part of a market economy. Undoubtedly. But housing does not necessarily
become a public service. It surfaces into social consciousness as
a right. It is acknowledged in fact by the indignation raised by
dramatic cases and by the discontent engendered by the crisis. Yet it is
not formally or practically acknowledged except as an appendix to the
‘rights of man’. Construction taken in charge by the State does not
change the orientations and conceptions adopted by the market economy.
As Engels had predicted, the housing question, even aggravated,
has politically played only a minor role. Groups and parties on
the Left will be satisfied with demanding ‘more housing’.  Moreover,
what guides public and semi-public initiatives is not a conception of
urban planning, it is simply the goal of providing as quickly as possible
at the least cost, the greatest possible number of housing units. The
new housing estates  will be characterized by an abstract and functional
character: the concept of <em>habitat</em> brought to its purest form by
a State bureaucracy.

This notion of <em>habitat</em> is still somewhat ‘uncertain’. Individual
owner-occupation will enable variations, particular or individual interpretations
of <em>habitat.</em> There is a sort of plasticity which allows for
modifications and appropriations. The space of the house — fence,
garden, various and available corners — leaves a margin of initiative
and freedom to <em>inhabit,</em> limited but real. State rationality is pushed to
the limit. In the new housing estate <em>habitat</em> is established in its purest
form, as a burden of constraints. Certain philosophers will say that
large housing estates achieve the concept of <em>habitat</em> by excluding the
notion of <em>inhabit,</em> that is, the plasticity of space, its modelling and the
appropriation by groups and individuals of the conditions of their
existence. It is also a complete way of living (functions, prescriptions,
daily routine) which is inscribed and signifies itself in this <em>habitat.</em>

The villa <em>habitat</em> has proliferated in the suburban communes around
Paris, by extending the built environment in a disorderly fashion. This
urban, and at the same time non-urban, growth has only one law:
speculation on plots and property. The interstices !eh by this growth
have been filled by large social housing estates. To the speculation on
plots, badly opposed, was added speculation in apartments when
these were in to-ownership. Thus housing entered into property
wealth and urban land into exchange value. Restrictions were disappearing.

If one defines urban reality by dependency <em>vis-a-vis</em> the centre,
suburbs are urban. If one defines urban order by a perceptible (legible)
relationship between centrality and periphery, suburbs are de-urbanized.
And one can say that the ‘planning thought’ of large social housing
estates has literally set itself against the city and the urban to eradicate
them. All perceptible, legible urban reality has disappeared: streets,
squares, monuments, meeting places. Even the cafe (the bistro) has
encountered the resentment of the builders of those large housing
estates, their taste for asceticism, the reduction of <em>‘to inhabit’</em> to
<em>habitat.</em> They had to go to the end of their destruction of palpable
urban reality before there could appear the demand for a restitution.
Then one saw the timid, slow reappearance of the cafe, the commercial,
centre, the street, ‘cultural’ amenities, in brief, a few elements of
urban reality.

Urban order thus decomposes into two stages: individual and
owner-occupied houses and housing estates. But there is no society
without order, signified, perceptible, legible on the ground. Suburban
disorder harbours an order: a glaring opposition of individually
owner-occupied detached houses and housing estates. This opposition
tends to constitute a <em>system</em> of <em>significations</em> still urban even into
de-urbanization. Each sector defines itself (by and in the consciousness
of the inhabitants) in relation to the other, against the ocher. The
inhabitants themselves have little consciousness of the internal order of
their sector, but the people from the housing estates see and perceive
themselves as not being villa dwellers. This is reciprocal. At the heart of
this opposition the people of the housing estates entrench themselves
into the <em>logic of the habitat</em> and the people of owner-occupied houses
entrench themselves into the <em>make-believe of habitat.</em> For some it is the
rational organization (in appearance) of space. For others it is the
presence of the dream, of nature, health, apart from the bad and
unhealthy city. But the logic of the <em>habitat</em> is only perceived in relation
to make-believe, and make-believe in relation to logic. People represent
themselves to themselves by what they are lacking or believe to be
lacking. In this relationship, the imaginary has more power. It overdetermines
logic: the fact of <em>inhabiting</em> is perceived by reference to the
owner-occupation of detached dwellings. These dwellers regret the
absence of a spatial logic while the people of the housing estates regret
not knowing the joys of living in a detached house. Hence the surprising
results of surveys. More than 80 per cent of French people aspire to
be owner-occupiers of a house, while a strong majority also declare
themselves to be ‘satisfied’ with social housing estates. The outcome is
not important here. What should be noted is that <em>consciousness of</em> <em>the city and of urban reality is dulled</em> for one or the other, so as to
disappear. The practical and theoretical (ideological) destruction of the
city cannot but leave an enormous emptiness, not including administrative
and other problems increasingly difficult to resolve. This emptiness
is less important for a critical analysis than the source of conflict
expressed by the end of the city and by the extension of a mutilated
and deteriorated, but real, urban society. The suburbs are urban,
within a dissociated morphology, the empire of separation and
scission between the elements of what had been created as unity and
simultaneity.

Within this perspective critical analysis can distinguish three periods
(which do not exactly correspond to the distinctions previously made
in three acts of the drama of the city).

<em>First period.</em> Industry and the process of industrialization assault
and ravage pre-existing urban reality, destroying it through practice
and ideology, to the point of extirpating it from reality and consciousness.
Led by a class strategy, industrialization acts as a <em>negative</em> force
over urban reality: the urban social is denied by the industrial economic.

<em>Second period</em> (in part juxtaposed to the first). Urbanization spreads
and urban society becomes general. Urban reality, in and by its own
destruction makes itself acknowledged as socio-economic reality. One
discovers that the whole society is liable to fall apart if it lacks the city
and centrality: an essential means for the planned organization of
production and consumption has disappeared.

<em>Third period.</em> One finds or reinvents urban reality, but not without
suffering from its destruction in practice or in thinking. One attempts
to restitute centrality. Would this suggest that class strategy has
disappeared? This is not certain. It has changed. To the old centralities, to the decomposition of centres, it substitutes the *centre of decision-making*.

Thus is born or reborn urban thought. It follows an urbanism
without thought. The masters of old had no need for an urban theory
to embellish their cities. What sufficed was the pressure exercised by
the people on their masters and the presence of a civilization and style
which enabled the wealth derived from the labour of the people to be
invested into <em>‘oeuvres’.</em> The bourgeois period puts an end to this
age-old tradition. At the same time this period brings a new <em>rationality,</em>
different from the rationality elaborated by philosophers since
ancient Greece.

Philosophical Reason proposed definitions of man, the world, history
and society which were questionable but also underpinned by
reasonings which had been given shape. Its democratic generalizations
later gave way to a rationalism of opinions and attitudes. Each citizen
was expected to have a reasoned opinion on every fact and problem
concerning him, this wisdom spurning the irrational. From the confrontation
of ideas and opinions, a superior reason was to emerge, a
general wisdom inciting the general will. It is fruitless to insist upon
the difficulties of this classical rationalism, linked to the political difficulties
of democracy, and to the practical difficulties of humanism. In
the nineteenth and especially in the twentieth century, organizing
rationality, operation at various levels of social reality, takes shape. Is
it coming from the capitalist firm and the management of units of
production? Is it born at the level of the State and planning? What is
important is that it is an <em>analytical reason</em> pushed to its extreme
consequences. It begins from a most detailed methodical analysis of
elements — productive operation, social and economic organization,
structure and function. It then subordinates these elements to a finality.
Where does this finality come from? Who formulates it and stipulates
it? How and why? This is the gap and the failure of this operational
rationalism. Its tenets purport to extract finality from the sequence of
operations. Now, this is not so. Finality, that is, the whole and the
orientation of the whole, decides itself. To say that it comes from the
operations themselves, is to be locked into a vicious circle: the analysis
giving itself as its own aim, for its own meaning. Finality is an object
of decision. It is a <em>strategy,</em> more or less justified by an <em>ideology.</em>
Rationalism which purports to extract from its own analyses the aim
pursued by these analyses is itself an <em>ideology.</em> The notion of <em>system</em>
overlays that of strategy. To critical analysis the system reveals itself
as strategy, is unveiled as decision, that is, as decided finality. It has
been shown above how a <em>class strategy</em> has oriented the analysis and
division of urban reality, its destruction and restitution; and projections
on the society where such strategic decisions have been taken.

However, from the point of view of a technicist rationalism, the
results on the ground of the processes examined above represent only
chaos. In the ‘reality’, which they critically observe — suburbs, urban
fabric and surviving cores — these rationalists do not recognize the
conditions of their own existence. What is before them is only contradiction
and disorder. Only, in fact, <em>dialectical</em> reason can master (by
reflective thought, by practice) multiple and paradoxically contradictory
processes.

How to impose order in this chaotic confusion? It is in this way that
organizational rationalism poses its problem. This is not a normal
disorder. How can it be established as norm and normality? This is
unconceivable. This disorder is unhealthy. The physician of modern
society see himself as the physician of a sick social space. Finality? The
cure? It is <em>coherence.</em> The rationalist will establish or re-establish
coherence into a chaotic reality which he observes and which offers
itself up to his action. This rationalist may not realize that coherence
is a form, therefore a means rather than an end, and that he will
systematize the <em>logic of the habitat</em> underlying the disorder and apparent
incoherence, that he will take as point of departure towards the
coherence of the real, his coherent approaches. There is in fact no
single or unitary approach in planning thought, but several tendencies
identifiable according to this operational rationalism. Among these
tendencies, some assert themselves <em>against,</em> others <em>for</em> rationalism by
leading it to extreme formulations. What interferes with the general
tendencies of those involved with planning is understanding only what
they can translate in terms of graphic operations: seeing, feeling at the
end of a pencil, drawing.

One can therefore identify the following:

(1) The planning of men of good will (architects and writers). Their
thinking and projects imply a certain philosophy. Generally they associate
themselves to an old classical and liberal humanism. This not without
a good dose of nostalgia. One wishes to build to the ‘human scale’, for
‘people’. These humanists present themselves at one and the same time as
doctors of society and creators of new social relations. Their ideology, or
rather, their idealism often come from agrarian models, adopted without
reflection: the village, the community, the neighbourhood, the townsman-
citizen who will be endowed with civic buildings, etc. They want to
build buildings and cities to the ‘human scale’, ‘to its measure’, without
conceiving that in the modern world ‘man’ has changed scale and the
measure of yesteryear (village and city) has been transformed beyond
measure. At best, this tradition leads to a <em>formalism</em> (the adoption of
models which had neither content or meaning), or to an <em>aestheticism,</em>
that is, the adoption for their beauty of ancient models which are then
thrown as fodder to feed the appetites of consumers.

(2) The planning of these administrators linked to the public (State)
sector. It sees itself as scientific. It relies sometimes on a science,
sometimes on studies which call themselves synthetic (pluri or multidisciplinary).
This scientism, which accompanies the deliberate forms
of operational rationalism, tends to neglect the so-called ‘human
factor’. It divides itself into tendencies. Sometimes through a particular science, a technique takes over and becomes the point of departure;
it is generally a technique of communication and circulation. One
extrapolates from a science, from a fragmentary analysis of the reality
considered. One optimizes information and communication into a
model. This technocratic and systematized planning, with its myths
and its ideology (namely, the primacy of technique), would not hesitate
to raze to the ground what is left of the city to leave way for cars,
ascendant and descendant networks of communication and information.
The models elaborated can only be put into practice by eradicating
from social existence the very ruins of what was the city.

Sometimes, on the contrary, information and analytical knowledge
coming from different sciences are oriented towards a synthetic finality.
<em>For all that, one should not conceive an urban life having at its disposal information provided by the sciences of society.</em> These two
aspects are confounded in the conception of <em>centres of decision-making,</em>
a global vision, planning already unitary in its own way, linked to
a philosophy, to a conception of society, a political strategy, that is, a
global and total system.

(3) The planning of developers. They conceive and realize without
hiding it, for the market, with profit in mind. What is new and recent
is that they are no longer selling housing or buildings, but <em>planning.</em>
With or without ideology, planning becomes an exchange value. The
project of developers presents itself as opportunity and place of privilege:
the place of happiness in a daily life miraculously and marvellously
transformed. The make-believe world of <em>habitat</em> is inscribed in
the logic of <em>habitat</em> and their unity provides a social practice which
does not need a system. Hence these advertisements, which are already
famous and which deserve posterity because publicity itself becomes
ideology. Parly II (a new development) ‘gives birth to a new an of
living’, a ‘new lifestyle’. Daily life resembles a fairy tale. ‘Leave your
coat in the cloakroom and feeling lighter, do your shopping after
having left the children in the nurseries of the shopping mall, meet
your friends, have a drink together at the drugstore ...’ Here is the
fulfilled make-believe of the joy of living. Consumer society is expressed
by orders: the order of these elements on the ground, the order
to be happy. Here is the context, the setting, the means of your
happiness. If you do not know how to grasp the happiness offered so
as to make it your own — don’t insist!

A <em>global strategy,</em> that is, what is already an unitary system and total
planning, is outlined through these various tendencies. Some will put
into practice and will concertize a directed consumer society. They will
build not only commercial centres, but also centres of privileged
consumption: the renewed city. They will by making ‘legible’ an
ideology of happiness through consumption, joy by planning adapted
to its new mission. This planning programmes a daily life generating
satisfactions — (especially for receptive and participating women). A
programmed and computerized consumption will become the rule and
norm for the whole society. Others will erect <em>decision-making</em> centres,
concentrating the means of power: information, training, organization,
operation. And still: repression (constraints, including violence)
and persuasion (ideology and advertising). Around these centres will
be apportioned on the ground, in a dispersed order, according to the
norms of foreseen constraints, the peripheries, de-urbanized urbanization.
All the conditions come together thus for a perfect domination,
for a refined exploitation of people as producers, consumers of products,
consumers of space.

The convergence of these projects therefore entails the greatest
dangers, for it raises <em>politically</em> the problem of urban society. It
is possible that new contradictions will arise from these projects,
impeding convergence. If a unitary strategy was to be successfully
constituted, it might prove irretrievable.

** Philosophy and the City

Having contextualized the ‘cavalier’ attitude mentioned at the beginning, particular aspects and problems concerning the urban can now
be emphasized. In order to take up a radically critical analysis and to
deepen the urban problematic, philosophy will be the starting point.
This will come as a surprise. And yet, has not frequent reference to
philosophy been made in the preceding pages? The purpose is not to
present a <em>philosophy of the city,</em> but on the contrary, to refute such an
approach by giving back to the whole of philosophy its place in
history: that of a <em>project</em> of synthesis and totality which philosophy as
such cannot accomplish. After which the <em>analytical</em> will be examined,
that is, the ways fragmentary sciences have highlighted or partitioned
urban reality. The rejection of the synthetic propositions of these
specialized, fragmentary, and particular sciences will enable us — to
pose better — in <em>political</em> terms — the problem of synthesis. During the
course of this progress one will find again features and problems
which will reappear more dearly. In particular, the opposition between
<em>use value</em> (the city and urban life) and <em>exchange value</em> (spaces
bought and sold, the consumption of products, goods, places and
signs) will be highlighted.

For philosophical meditation aiming at a totality through speculative
systematization, that is, classical philosophy from Plato to Hegel, the city
was much more than a secondary theme, an object among others. The
links between philosophical thought and urban life appear clearly upon
reflection, although they need to be made explicit. The city and the town
were not for philosophers and philosophy a simple objective condition, a
sociological context, an exterior element. Philosophers have thought the
city: they have brought to language and concept urban life.

Let us leave aside questions posed by the oriental city, the Asiatic
mode of production, ‘town and country’ relations in this mode of
production, and lastly the formation of ideologies (philosophies) on
this base. Only the Greek and Roman antique city from which are
derived societies and civilizations known as ‘Western’ will be considered.
This city is generally the outcome of a <em>synoecism,</em> the coming
together of several villages and tribes established on this territory. This
unit allows the development of division of labour and landed property
(money) without however destroying the collective, or rather ‘communal’ property of the land. In this way a community is constituted at the
heart of which is a minority of free citizens who exercise power over
other members of the city: women, children, slaves, foreigners. The
city links its elements associated with the form of the communal
property (‘common private property’, or ‘privatized appropriation’)
of the active citizens, who are in opposition to the slaves. This form of
association constitutes a democracy, the elements, of which are strictly
hierarchical and submitted to the demands of the oneness of the city
itself. It is the democracy of non-freedom (Marx). During the course
of the history of the antique city, private property pure and simple (of
money, land and slaves) hardens, concentrates, without abolishing the
rights of the city over its territory.

The separation between town and country takes place among the
first and fundamental divisions of labour, with the distribution of
tasks according to age and sex (the biological division of labour), with
the organization of labour according to tools and skills (technical
division). The social division of labour between town and country
corresponds to the separation between material and intellectual labour,
and consequently, between the natural and the spiritual. Intellectual
labour is incumbent upon the city: functions of organization
and direction, political and military activities, elaboration of theoretical
knowledge (philosophy and sciences). The whole divides itself,
separations are established, including the separation between the
<em>Physics</em> and the <em>Logos,</em> between theory and practice, and in practice,
the separations between between <em>praxis</em> (action on human groups),
<em>poiesis</em> (creation of <em>‘oeuvres’</em>), <em>techne</em> (activities endowed with techniques
and directed towards product). The countryside, both practical
reality and representation, will carry images of nature, of being, of the
innate. The city will carry images of effort, of will, of subjectivity, of
contemplation, without these representations becoming disjointed
from real activities. From these images confronted against each other
great symbolisms will emerge. Around the Greek city, above it, there
is the *cosmos*, luminous and ordered spaces, the apogee of place. The
city has as centre a hole which is sacred and damned, inhabited by the
forces of death and life, times dark with effort and ordeals, the <em>world.</em>
The Apollonian spirit triumphs in the Greek city, although not without
struggle, as the luminous symbol of reason which regulates, while
in the Etruscan-Roman city what governs is the demonic side of the
urban. But the philosopher and philosophy attempt to reclaim or
create totality. The philosopher does not acknowledge separation, he
does not conceive that the world, life, society, the cosmos (and later,
history) can no longer make a Whole.

Philosophy is thus born from the city, with its division of labour and
multiple modalities. It becomes itself a specialized activity in its own
right. But it does not become fragmentary, for otherwise it would
blend with science and the sciences, themselves in a process of emerging.
just as philosophy refuses to engage in the opinions of craftsmen,
soldiers and politicians, it refutes the reasons and arguments of specialists.
It has totality as fundamental interest for its own sake, which
is recovered or created by the system, that is, the oneness of thought
and being, of discourse and act, of nature and contemplation, of the
world (or the cosmos) and human reality. This does not exclude but
includes meditation on <em>differences</em> (between Being and thought, between
what comes from nature and what comes from the city, etc.). As
Heidegger expressed it, the logos (element, context, mediation and
end for philosophers and urban life) was simultaneously the following:
to put forward, gather together and collect, then to recollect and
collect oneself, speak and say, disclose. This gathering is the harvest
and even its conclusion. ‘One goes to collect things and brings them
back. Here sheltering dominates and with it in turn dominates the
wish to preserve ... The harvest is in itself a choice of what needs a
shelter.’ Thus, the harvest is already <em>thought out.</em> That which is
gathered is put in reserve. To say is the act of collection which gathers
together. This assumes the presence of ‘somebody’ before which, for
whom and by whom is expressed the being of what is thus successful.
This presence is produced with clarity (or as Heidegger says, with
‘non-mystery’). The city linked to philosophy thus gathers by and in
its logos the wealth of the territory, dispersed activities and people, the
spoken and the written (of which each assumes already its collection
and recollection). It makes <em>simultaneous</em> what in the countryside and
according to nature takes place and passes, and is distributed according
to cycles and rhythms. It grasps and defends ‘everything’. If
philosophy and the city are thus associated in the dawning logos
(reason), it is not within a subjectivity akin to the Cartesian <em>‘cogito’.</em>
If they constitute a system, it is not in the usual way and in the current
meaning of the term.

To the organization of the city itself can be linked the primordial
whole of urban form and its content, of philosophical form and its
meaning: a privileged centre, the core of a political space, the seat of
the logos governed by the logos before which citizens are ‘equal’, the
regions and distributions of space having a rationality justified before
the logos (for it and by it).

The logos of the Greek city cannot be separated from the philosophical
logos. The <em>oeuvre</em> of the city continues and is focused in the work
of philosophers, who gather opinions and viewpoints, various <em>oeuvres,</em>
and think them simultaneously and collect differences into a totality:
urban places in the cosmos, times and rhythms of the city and that of
the world (and inversely). It is therefore only for a superficial historicity
that philosophy brings to language and concept urban life, that of the
city. In truth, the city as emergence, language, meditation comes to
theoretical light by means of the philosopher and philosophy.

After this first interpretation of the internal link between the city and
philosophy, let us go to the European Middle Ages. <em>It begins from the countryside.</em> The Roman city and the Empire have been destroyed by
Germanic tribes which are both primitive communities and military
organizations. The feudal property of land is the outcome of the
dissolution of this sovereignty (city, property, relations of production).
Serfs replace slaves. With the rebirth of cities there is on the one
hand the feudal organization of property and possession of land
(peasant communities having a customary possession and lords having
an ‘eminent’ domain as it will later be called), and on the other hand,
a corporate organization of crafts and urban property. Although at
the beginning seigneurial tenure of land dominates it, this double
hierarchy contains the demise of this form of property and the supremacy
of wealth in urban property from which arises a deep conflict,
basic to medieval society. ‘The necessity to ally themselves against the
plunderer lords associated themselves together; the need for common
market halls at a time when industry was craft, when serfs in breach
of their bondage and in competition with each other were flooding to
the increasingly rich cities, the whole of feudal organization was giving
birth to the corporations (or guilds). Small capitals, slowly saved by
isolated craftsmen, their numbers stable in the middle of a growing
population, developed a system of journeymen and apprentices which
established in the cities a hierarchy similar to that of the countryside’
(Marx). In these conditions theology subordinates philosophy. The
latter no longer meditates on the city. The philosopher (the theologian)
deliberates upon the <em>double hierarchy.</em> He gives it shape, with or
without raking conflicts into account. The symbols and notions
relative to the <em>cosmos</em> (spaces, the hierarchy of matter in that space)
and to the <em>world</em> (the actualization of finished matter, hierarchies in
time, descent or fall, ascension and redemption) erase the consciousness
of the city. From the moment when there are not two but three
hierarchies (feudal landed property, guild organization, the king and
his State apparatus), thought takes again a critical dimension. The
philosopher and philosophy find themselves again, no longer having
to choose between the Devil and the Lord. Philosophy will not however
recognize its link to the city, although the rise of rationalism
accompanies the rise of capitalism (commercial and banking, then
industrial), and the development of cities. This rationalism is attached
either to the State or to the individual.

For Hegel, at the height of speculative, systematic and contemplative
philosophy, the unity between the perfect Thing, chat is, the Greek
city, and the Idea, which animates society and the State, this admirable
whole, has been irremediably broken by historic becoming. In modern
society, the State subordinates these elements and materials, including
the city. The latter, however remains as a sort of subsystem in the total
philosophico-political system, with the system of needs, that of rights
and obligations, and that of the family and estates (crafts and guilds),
that of art and aesthetics, etc.

For Hegel, philosophy and the ‘real’ (practical and social) are not, or
rather, are no longer external to each other. Separations disappear.
Philosophy is not satisfied to meditate upon the real, to attempt the
link up of the real and the ideal: it fulfills itself by achieving the ideal:
the rational. The real is not satisfied with giving excuse to reflection,
to knowledge, to consciousness. During a history which has a meaning
— which has this meaning — it becomes rational. Thus the real and the
rational tend towards each other; each from their own side moves
towards an identity thus acknowledged. The rational is basically
philosophy, the philosophical system. The real is society and law and
the State which cements the edifice by crowning it. Consequently, in
the modern State, the philosophical system, becomes real: in Hegel’s
philosophy, the real acknowledge the rational. The system has a
double side, philosophical and political. Hegel discovers the historical
moment of this shift from the rational into the real and vice versa. He
brings to light identity at the moment when history produces it.
<em>Philosophy achieves itself</em> There is for Hegel, as Marx will articulate
it, at one and the same time a becoming of a philosophy of the world
and a becoming of the world of philosophy. An initial repercussion:
there can no longer be a divide between philosophy and reality
(historical, social, political). A second repercussion: the philosopher
no longer has independence: he accomplishes a public function, as do
other officials. Philosophy and the philosopher integrate themselves
(by mediation of the body of civil servants and the middle class) in this
rational reality of the State — no longer in the city, which was only a
thing (perfect, it is true, but only thing), denied by a higher and more
inclusive rationality.

One knows that Marx neither refuted nor refused the essential
Hegelian affirmation: <em>Philosophy achieves itself.</em> The philosopher no
longer has a right to independence <em>vis-a-vis</em> social practice. Philosophy
inserts itself into it. There is indeed a simultaneous becoming-philosophy
of the world and a becoming-world of philosophy, and
therefore a tendency towards wholeness (knowledge and acknowledgement
of non-separation). And yet Marx thrusts Hegelianism
aside. History does not achieve itself. Wholeness is not reached, nor
are contradictions resolved. It is not by and in the State, with bureaucracy
as social support, that philosophy can be realized. The proletariat
has this historic mission: only it can put an end to separations
(alienations). Its mission has a double facet: to destroy bourgeois
society by building another society — abolish philosophical speculation
and abstraction, the alienating contemplation and systematization, to
accomplish the philosophical project of the human being. It is from
industry, from industrial production, from its relation with productive
forces and labour, not from a moral or philosophical judgement, that
the working class gets its possibilities. One must tum this world
upside down: the meeting of the rational and the real will happen in
another society.

The history of philosophy in relation to the city is far from being
accomplished within this perspective. Indeed, this history would also
suggest the analysis of themes whose emergence are linked to the
representation of nature and the earth, to agriculture, to the sacralization
of the land (and to its desacralization). Such themes, once born,
are displaced and represented sometimes far from their starting points
in time and space. The points of imputation and impact, conditions,
implications, consequences do not coincide. The themes are enunciated
and inserted into social contexts and categories different from
those which distinguish their emergence, inasmuch as one can speak
of ‘categories’. The urban problematic, for example that which refers
to the destiny of the Greek city, used to disengage itself or hide itself,
cosmic themes anterior or exterior to this city; the visions of a cyclical
becoming or of the hidden immobility of the human being. The
purpose of these remarks is to show that the relation considered has
yet to receive an explicit formulation.

What relation is there today between philosophy and the city? An
ambiguous one. The most emminent contemporary philosophers do
not borrow their themes from the city. Bachelard has left wonderful
pages on the house. Heidegger has meditated on the Greek city and the
logos, and on the Greek temple. Nevertheless the metaphors which
resume Heideggerian thought do not come from the city but from a
primary and earlier life: the ‘shepherds of being’, the ‘forest paths’. It
seems that it is from the Dwelling and the opposition between <em>Dwelling</em>
and <em>Wandering</em> that Heidegger borrows his themes. As for so-called
‘existential’ thought, it is based on individual consciousness, on
the subject and the ordeals of subjectivity, rather than on a practical,
historical and social reality.

However, it is not proven that philosophy has said its last word on
the city. For example, one can perfectly conceive of a <em>phenomenological</em>
description of urban life. Or construct a <em>semiology</em> of urban
reality which would correspond for the present city to what was the
logos in the Greek city. Only philosophy and the philosopher propose
a <em>totality,</em> the search for a global conception or vision. To consider ‘the
city’ is it not already to extend philosophy, to reintroduce philosophy
into the city or the city into philosophy? It is true that the concept of
<em>totality</em> is in danger of remaining empty if it is only philosophical.
Thus is formulated a problematic which does not reduce itself to the
city but which concerns the world, history, ‘man’.

Moreover, a certain number of contemporary thinkers have pondered
on the city. They see themselves, more or less clearly, as philosophers
of the city. For this reason these thinkers want to inspire
architects and planners, and make the link between urban preoccupations
and the old humanism. But these philosophers lack breadth. The
philosophers who claim to think the city and put forward a philosophy
of the city by extending traditional philosophy, discourse on the
‘essence’ of the city or on the city as ‘spirit’, as ‘life’ or ‘life force’, as
being or ‘organic whole’. In brief, sometime as subject, sometime as
abstract system. This leads to nothing, thus a double conclusion.
Firstly, the history of philosophical thought can and must reclaim
itself from its relation with the city (the condition and content of this
thought). It is a way of putting this history into perspective. Secondly,
this articulation figures in the problematic of philosophy and the city
(knowledge, the formulation of the urban problematic, a notion of
this context, a strategy to envisage). Philosophical concepts are not
operative and yet they situate the city and the urban — and the whole
of society — as a totality, over and above analytical fragmentations.
What is proclaimed here of philosophy and its history could equally
be asserted for art and its history.

** Fragmentary Sciences and Urban Reality

During the course of the nineteenth century, the sciences of social
reality are constituted against philosophy which strives to grasp the
global (by enclosing a real totality into a rational systematization).
These sciences fragment reality in order to analyse it, each having their
method or methods, their sector or domain. After a century, it is still
under discussion whether these sciences bring distinct enlightenment
to a unitary reality, or whether the analytical fragmemation chat they
use corresponds to objective differences, articulations, levels and
dimensions.

One cannot claim that the city has escaped the researches of historians,
economists, demographers and sociologists. Each of these
specialities contributes to a science of the city. It has already been
ascertained and corroborated that history elucidates better the genesis
of the city, and especially identifies better than any other science, the
problematic of urban sociecy. Inversely, there is also no doubt that the
knowledge of urban reality can relate to the possible (or possibilities)
and not only to what is finished or from the past. If one wishes to build
a commercial or cultural centre, taking into account functional and
functioning needs, the economist has his word to say. In the analysis
of urban reality, the geographer, the climatologist, the botanist also
intervene. The environment, global and confused concept, fragments
itself according to these specialities. In relation to the future and the
conditions of the future, mathematical calculations provide essential
evidence. Yet, what gathers these facts together? A project, or in other
words, a strategy. On the other hand, a doubt remains and is even
confirmed. Is the city the sum of indices and facts, of variables and
parameters, of correlations, this collection of facts, of descriptions, of
fragmentary analyses, because it is fragmentary? These analytical
divisions do not lack rigour, but as has already been said, rigour is
uninhabitable. The problem coincides with the general questioning of
the specialist sciences. On the one hand, the only approach which
seeks to find the global reminds us strangely of philosophy when it is
not openly philosophical. On the ocher hand, the partial offers more
positive but scattered facts. Is it possible to extract from fragmentary
sciences a science of the city? No more than a holistic science of
society, or of ‘man’, or of human and social reality. On the one hand,
a concept without content, on the other, content or contents without
concept. Either one declares that the ‘city’, the urban reality as such,
does not exist but is only a series of correlations. The ‘subject’ is
suppressed. Or the continues to assert the existence of the global: one
approaches and locates it, either by extrapolations in the name of a
discipline, or by wagering on an ‘interdisciplinary’ tactic. One does
not grasp it except by an approach which transcends divisions.

Upon closer examination, one realizes that specialists who have
studied urban reality have almost always (except in the case of a
logically extremist positivism) introduced a global representation.
They can hardly go without a synthesis, settling for a quantity of
knowledge, of dividing and splitting urban reality. As specialists, they
then claim to be able to go legitimately from their analyses to a final
synthesis whose principle is borrowed from their speciality. By means
of a discipline or interdisciplinary endeavour, they see themselves as
‘men of synthesis’. More often, they conceptualize the city (and society)
as an <em>organism.</em> Historians have frequently linked these entities
to an ‘evolution’ or to an ‘historical development’: cities. Sociologists
have conceptualized them as a ‘collective being’, as a ‘social organism’.
Organicism, evolutionism, continuism, have therefore dominated representations
of the city elaborated by specialists who believed themselves
to be scholars and only scholars. Philosophers without knowing
it, they leapt, without legitimizing their approach, from the partial to
the global as well as from fact to right.

Is there a dilemma? An impasse? Yes and no. Yes, there is an
obstacle, or if one wants another metaphor, a hole is dug. No. One
should be able to cross the obstacle because there is a quite recent
<em>practice</em> which already spills over the speculative problem, or the
partial facts of the real problem, and which tends to become global by
gathering all the facts of experience and knowledge, namely, <em>planning.</em>
What is involved here is nor a philosophical view on <em>praxis,</em> but the
face that so-called planning thought becomes practice at a global level.
For a few years now planning has gone beyond partial techniques and
applications (regulation and administration of built space) to become
a social practice concerning and of interest to the whole of society. <em>The critical examination of this social practice (the focus being on critique) cannot not allow theory to resolve a theoretical difficulty arising from a theory which has separated itself from practice.</em>

As <em>social practice,</em> planning (which it becomes without having
reached a level of elaboration and action, which indeed it can only
reach through confrontation with <em>political</em> strategies) has already
crossed the initial stage, namely, the confrontation and communication
of experts, and the gathering of fragmentary analyses, in brief,
what is called the <em>interdisciplinary.</em> Either the planner is inspired by
the practice of partial knowledge which he applies, or he puts into
action hypotheses or projects at the level of a global reality. In the first
case, the application of partial knowledge gives results which can
determine the relative importance of this knowledge: these results,
experimentally revealing absences and lacunae, enable us to specify on
the ground what is lacking. In the second case, the failure (or success)
allows the discernment of what is ideological in the presuppositions,
and to identify what they define at the global level. Thus, what is
effectively involved is a <em>critical examination</em> of the activity called
‘planning’, and not a belief in the word of planners or the unchallenged
acceptance of their propositions and decisions. In particular,
the displacements and distortions between practice and theory (ideology),
between partial knowledge and results, come to the fore instead
of being hidden. As does the questioning over <em>use</em> and <em>users.</em>

** Philosophy of the City and Planning Ideology

In order to formulate the problematic of the city (to articulate problems
by linking them), the following must be clearly distinguished:

 1. The philosophers and philosophies of the city who define it
speculatively as whole by defining the ‘homo urbanicus’ as
man in general, the world or the cosmos, society, history.
 1. Partial knowledge concerning the city (its elements, functions,
structures).
 1. The technical application of this knowledge (in a particular
context defined by strategic and political decisions).
 1. Planning as doctrine, that is, as ideology, interpreting partial
knowledge, justifying its application and raising these (by
extrapolation) to a poorly based or legitimated totality.

The aspects or elements which this analysis distinguishes do not
appear separately in various works; they interest, reiforcing or neutralizing each other. Plato proposes a concept of the city and ideal town
in <em>Critias.</em> In <em>The Republic</em> and <em>The Laws,</em> Platonic utopia is tempered
by very concrete analyses. It is the same for Aristode’s political
writings which study the constitution of Athens and other Greek
cities.

Today, Lewis Mumford and G. Bardet among others still imagine a
city made up not of townspeople, but of free citizens, free from the
division of labour, social classes and class struggles, making up a
community, freely associated for the management of this community.
As philosophers, they make up a model of the ideal city. They conceive
freedom in the twentieth century according to the freedom of
the Greek city (this is an ideological travesty: only the city as such
possessed freedom and not individuals and groups). Thus they think
of the modern city according to a model of the antique city, which is
at the same time identified with the ideal and rational city. The agora,
place and symbol of a democracy limited to its citizens, and excluding
women, slaves and foreigners, remains for a particular philosophy of
the city the symbol of urban society in general. This is a typically
ideological extrapolation. To this ideology these philosophers add
partial knowledge, this purely ideological operation consisting in a
passage (a leap), from the partial to the whole, from the elementary to
the total, from the relative to the absolute. As for Le Corbusier, as
philosopher of the city he describes the relationship between the urban
dweller and dwelling with nature, air, sun, and trees, with cyclical time
and the rhythms of the cosmos. To this metaphysical vision, he adds
an unquestionable knowledge of the real problems of the modern city,
a knowledge which gives rise to a planning practice and an ideology,
a functionalism which reduces urban society to the achievement of a
few predictable and prescribed functions laid out on the ground by the
architecture. Such an architect sees himself as a ‘man of synthesis’,
thinker and practitioner. He believes in and wants to create human
relations by defining them, by clearing their environment and decor.
Within this well-worn perspective, the architect perceives and imagines
himself as architect of the world, human image of God the Creator.

Philosophy of the city (or if one wanes, urban ideology), was born as
a superstructure of society into which structures entered a certain type
of city. This philosophy, precious heritage of the past, extends itself
into speculations which often are travesties of science just because they
integrate a few bits of real knowledge.

Planning as ideology has acquired more and more precise definitions.
To study the problems of circulation, of the conveying of orders and
information in the great modern city, leads to real knowledge and to
technical applications. To claim that the city is defined as a network of
circulation and communication, as a centre of information and decision-making, is an absolute ideology; this ideology proceeding from a
particularly arbitrary and dangerous reduction-extrapolation and
using terrorist means, see itself as total truth and dogma. It leads to a
planning of pipes, of roadworks and accounting, which one claims to
impose in the name of science and scientific rigour. Or even worse!

This ideology has two interdependent aspects, mental and social.
Mentally, it implies a theory of rationality and organization whose
expression date from around 1910, a transformation in contemporary
society (characterized by the beginning of a deep crisis and attempts to
resolve it by organizational methods, firstly the scale of the firm, and
then on a global scale). It is then that socially the notion of space
comes to the fore, relegating into shadow time and becoming. Planning as ideology formulates all the problems of society into questions
of space and transposes all that comes from history and consciousness
into spatial terms. It is an ideology which immediately divides up.
Since society does not function in a satisfactory manner, could there
not be a pathology of space? Within this perspective, the virtually
official recognition of the priority of space over time is not conceived
of as indication of social pathology, as symptom among others of a
reality which engenders social disease. On the contrary, what are
represented are healthy and diseased spaces. The planner should be
able to distinguish between sick spaces and spaces linked to mental
and social health which are generators of this health. As physician of
space, he should have the capacity to conceive of an harmonious social
space, normal and normalizing. Its function would then be to grant to
this space (perchance identical to geometrical space, that of abstract
topologies) preexisting social realities.

The radical critique of philosophies of the city as well as of ideology
is vital, as much on the theoretical as on the practical level. It can be
made in the name of public health. However, it cannot be carried out
without extensive research, rigorous analyses and the patient study of
texts and contexts.

** The Specificity of the City

A philosophy of the city answered questions raised by social practice
in precapiralisr societies (or if one prefers this terminology, in pre-industrial
societies). Planning as technique and ideology responds to
demands arising from this vast crisis of the city already referred to,
which starts with the rise of competitive and industrial capitalism and
which has never stopped getting deeper. This <em>world</em> crisis gives rise to
new aspects of urban reality. It sheds light on what was little or poorly
understood; it unveils what had been badly perceived. It forces the
reconsideration of not only the history of the city and knowledge of the
city, but also of the history of philosophy and that of an. Until recently,
theoretical thinking conceived the city as an entity, as an organism and a
whole among others, and this in the best of cases when it was not being
reduced to a partial phenomenon, to a secondary, elementary or accidental
aspect, of evolution and history. One would elms see in it a simple
result, a local effect reflecting purely and simply general history. These
representations, which are classified and are given well-known terms
(organicism, evolutionism, continuism), have been previously criticized.
They did not contain theoretical knowledge of the city and did not lead
to this knowledge; moreover, they blocked at a quite basic level the
enquiry; they were ideologies rather than concepts and theories.

Only now are we beginning to grasp the <em>specificity</em> of the city (of
urban phenomena). The city always had relations with society as a
whole, with its constituting elements (countryside and agriculture,
offensive and defensive force, political power, States, etc.), and with
its history. it changes when society as a whole changes. Yet, the city’s
transformations are not the passive outcomes of changes in the social
whole. The city also depends as essentially on relations of immediacy,
of direct relations between persons and groups which make up society
(families, organized bodies, crafts and guilds, etc.). Furthermore, it is
not reduced to the organization of these immediate and direct relations,
nor its metamorphoses to their changes. It is situated at an
interface, half-way between what is called the *near order*
(relations of
individuals in groups of variable size, more or less organized and
structured and the relations of these groups among themselves), and
the <em>far order</em>, that of society, regulated by large and powerful institutions
(Church and State), by a legal code formalized or not, by a
‘culture’ and significant ensembles endowed with powers, by which
the <em>far order</em> projects itself at this ‘higher’ level and imposes itself.
Abstract, formal, supra-sensible and transcending in appearances, it is
not conceptualized beyond ideologies (religious and political). It includes
moral and legal principles. This <em>far order</em> projects itself into the
practico-material reality and becomes visible by writing itself within
this reality. It persuades through and by the <em>near order,</em> which confirms
its compelling power. It becomes apparent by and in immediacy.
The city is a <em>mediation</em> among mediations. Containing the <em>near order,</em>
it supports it; it maintains relations of production and property; it is
the place of their reproduction. Contained in the <em>far order,</em> it supports
it; it incarnates it; it projects it over a terrain (the site) and on a plan,
that of immediate life; it inscribes it, prescribes it, <em>writes</em> it. A text in a
context so vast and ungraspable as such except by reflection.

And thus the city is an <em>oeuvre,</em> closer to a work of art than to a
simple material product. If there is production of the city, and social
relations in the city, it is a production and reproduction of human
beings by human beings, rather than a production of objects. The city
has a history; it is the work of a history, chat is, of dearly defined
people and groups who accomplish this <em>oeuvre,</em> in historical conditions.
Conditions which simultaneously enable and limit possibilities,
are never sufficient to explain what was born of them, in them, by
them. It was in this way that the city created by the Western Middle
Ages was animated and dominated by merchants and bankers, this
city was their <em>oeuvre.</em> Can the historian consider it as a simple object
of commerce, a simple opportunity for lucre? Absolutely not, precisely
not. These merchants and bankers acted to promote exchange and
generalize it, to extend the domain of exchange value; and yet for them
the city was much more use value than exchange value. These merchants
of Italian, Flemish, English and French cities loved their cities
like a work of art and adorned them with every kind of works of an. So
that, paradoxically, the city of merchants and bankers remains for us the
type and model of an urban real icy whereby <em>use</em> (pleasure, beauty, ornamentation
of meeting places) still wins over lucre and profit, exchange
value, the requirements and constraints of markets. At the same time,
wealth arising from commerce in goods and money, the power of gold, the
cynicism of this power, are also inscribed in this city and in it prescribe an
order. So that, as such it still remains for some model and prototype.

By taking ‘production’ in its widest sense (the production of <em>oeuvres</em>
and of social relations), there has been in history the production of
cities as there has been production of knowledge, culture, works of art
and civilization, and there also has been, of course, production of
material goods and practico-material objects. These modalities of
production cannot be disjointed unless one has the right to confuse
them by reducing differences. The city was and remains <em>object,</em> but not
in the way of particular, pliable and instrumental object: such as a
pencil or a sheet of paper. Its objectivity, or ‘objectality’, might rather
be closer to that of the <em>language</em> which individuals and groups receive
before modifying it, or of <em>language</em> (a particular language, the work of
a particular society, spoken by particular groups). One could also
compare this ‘objectality’ to that of a cultural reality, such as the
<em>written book,</em> instead of old abstract object of the philosophers or
the immediate and everyday object. Moreover, one must take precautions.
If I compare the city to a book, to a writing (a semiological
system), I do not have the right to forget the aspect of mediation. I can
separate it neither from what it contains nor from what contains it, by
isolating it as a complete system. Moreover, at best, the city constitutes a sub-system, a sub-whole. On this book, with this writing, are
projected mental and social forms and structures. Now, analysis can
achieve this context from the text, but it is not given. Intellectual
operations and reflective approaches are necessary to achieve it (deduction,
induction, translation and transduction). The whole is not
immediately present in this wrinen text, the city. There are other levels
of reality which do not become <em>transparent</em> by definition. The city
<em>writes</em> and <em>assigns,</em> that is, it signifies, orders, stipulates. What? That
is to be discovered by reflection. This text has passed through idealogies, as it also ‘reflects’ them. The <em>far order</em> projects itself in/on the
<em>near order.</em> However, the <em>near order</em> does not <em>reflect</em> transparently the
<em>far order.</em> The later subordinates the immediate through mediations.
it does not yield itself up. Moreover, it hides itself without discovering
itself. This is how it acts without one having the right to speak of a
transcendence of order, the Global or the Total.

If one considers the city as <em>oeuvre</em> of certain historical and social
‘agents’, the action and the result, the group (or groups) and their
‘product’ can be clearly identified without separating them. There is no
<em>oeuvre</em> without a regulated succession of acts and actions, of decisions
and conduces, messages and codes. Nor can an <em>oeuvre</em> exist without
things, without something to shape, without practico-material reality,
without a site, without a ‘nature’, a countryside, an environment.
Social relations are achieved from the sensible. They cannot be reduced
to this sensible world, and yet they do not float in air, they do not
disappear into transcendence. If social reality suggests forms and relations,
if it cannot be conceived in a way homologous to the isolated,
sensible or technical object, it does not survive without ties, without
attachment to objects and things. We must insist on this methodologically
and theoretically important point. There is cause and reason to
distinguish between material and social morphologies. We should
perhaps here introduce a distinction between the *city*, a present and
immediate reality, a practico-material and architectural fact, and the
<em>urban,</em> a social reality made up of relations which are to be conceived
of,  conscructed or reconstructed by thought. This distinction none the
less reveals itself to be dangerous and the designation proposed cannot
be handled without risk. Thus designated, the <em>urban</em> seems not to need
land and material morphology and is outlined according to a speculative
mode of existence of entities, spirits and souls, freed from attachments
and inscriptions; a kind of imaginary transcendence. If one
adopts this terminology, the relations between the <em>city</em> and the <em>urban</em>
will have to be determined with the greatest care, by avoiding separation
as well as confusion, and metaphysics as well as reduction to the
immediate and tangible. Urban life, urban sociecy, in a word, the
<em>urban,</em> cannot go without a practico-material base, a morphology.
They have it and do not have it. If they do not have it, if the <em>urban</em> and
urban society are conceived without this basis, it is that they are
perceived as possibilities, it is chat the virtualities of actual society are
seeking, so to speak, their incorporation and incarnation through
knowledge and planning thought: through our ‘reflections’. If they do
not find them, these possibilities go into decline and are bound to
disappear. The <em>urban</em> is not a soul, a spirit, a philosophical entity.

** Continuities and Discontinuities

Organicism and its implications, namely the simplifying evolutionism
of many historians and the naive continuism of many sociologists, has
disguised the specific features of urban reality. The acts or events
‘producers’ of this reality as formation and social <em>oeuvre</em> escaped
knowledge. In this sense, to produce is to create: to bring into being
‘something’ which did nor exist before the productive activity. For a
long time knowledge has hesitated in the face of creation. Either
creation appears to be irrational, spontaneity swelling up from the
unknown and the unknowable. Or else it is denied and what comes to
be is reduced to what was already existing. Science wants itself to be
a science of determinisms, a knowledge of constraints. It abandons to
philosophers the exploration of births, of decline, transitions, disappearances.
In this, those who challenge philosophy abandon the idea
of creation. The study of urban phenomena is linked to overcoming
these obstacles and dilemmas, to the solution of these internal conflicts
by reason which knows.

As much in the past as now, history and sociology conceived as an
organicist model have not known better how to apprehend <em>differences.</em>
Abusive reductions take place to the detriment of these differences
and to the detriment of creation. It is quite easy to grasp the link
between these reductive operations. The <em>specific</em> flees before simplifying
schematas. In the rather troubled light shed by many confused
crises (such as the city and the urban), among the crevices of a ‘reality’
which too often one believes to be as full as an egg or as a entirely
written page, analysis can now perceive why and how global processes
(economic, social, political, cultural) have formed urban space and
shaped the city, without creative action arising instantaneously and
deductively from these processes. Indeed, if they have influenced
urban rhythms and spaces, it is by enabling groups to insert themselves,
to cake charge of them, to <em>appropriate</em> them; and this by
inventing, by sculpting space (to use a metaphor), by giving themselves
rhythms. Such groups have also been innovative in how to live, to have
a family, to raise and educate children, to leave a greater or lesser place
to women, to use and transmit wealth. These transformations of
everyday life modified urban reality, not without having from it their
motivations. The city was at one and the same rime the place and the
milieu, the theatre and the stake of these complex interactions.

The introduction of temporal and spatial discontinuities in the
theory of the city (and the urban), in history and sociology, does not
give one the right to abuse it. Separations must not be substituted for
organicism and continuism by consecrating them by theory. If the city
appears as a <em>specific level</em> of social reality, general processes (of which
the most important and accessible were the generalization of commercial
exchanges, industrialization in such a global context, the formation
of competitive capitalism), did not take place above this specific
mediation. Moreover, the level of immediate relations, personal and
interpersonal (the family, the neighbourhood, crafts and guilds, the
division of labour between crafts, etc.) is only separated from urban
reality through an abstraction: the correct approach of knowledge
cannot change this abstraction into separation. Reflection emphasizes
articulations so that delineations do not disarticulate the real but
follow articulations. The methodological rule is to avoid confusion in
an illusory continuity as well as separations or absolute discontinuities.
Consequently, the study of articulations between the levels of reality
enables us to demonstrate the distortions and discrepancies between
levels rather than to blurr them.

The city is transformed not only because of relatively continuous
‘global processes’ (such as the growth of material production over a
long period of time with its consequences for exchanges, or the
development of rationality) but also in relation to profound transformations
in the mode of production, in the relations between •town and
country’, in the relations of class and property. The correct approach
consists in going from the most general knowledge to that which
concerns historical processes and discontinuities, their projection or
refraction onto the city and conversely, particular and specific knowledge
of urban reality to its global context.

The city and the urban cannot be understood without <em>institutions</em>
springing from relations of class and property. The city itself, perpetual
<em>oeuvre</em> and act, gives rise to specific institutions: that is, municipal
institutions. The most general institutions, those which belong to the
State, to the dominant religion and ideology have their seat in the
political, military and religious city. They coexist with properly urban,
administrative, and cultural institutions. Hence a number of remarkable
continuities through changes in society.

One knows that there was and there still is the oriental city, expression
and projection on the ground, effect and cause, of the Asiatic
mode of production; in this mode of production State power, resting
on the city, organizes economically a more or less extensive agrarian
zone, regulates and controls water, irrigation and drainage, the use of
land, in brief, agricultural production. There was in the era of slavery,
a city which organized its agricultural zone through violence and by
juridical rationality, but which undermined its own base by replacing
free peasants (landowners) with latifundial type properties. In the
West there was also the medieval city, rooted in a feudal mode of
production where agriculture was predominant, but which was also
place of commerce, theatre of class struggle between an emerging
bourgeoisie and territorial feudalism, the point of impact and lever of
royal State action. Finally, in the West, and in North America, there
has been the capitalist, commercial and industrial city, more or less
delimited by the political State whose formation accompanied the rise
of capitalism and whose bourgeoisie knew how to appropriate the
management of the whole of society.

Discontinuities are not only situated between urban formations, but
also between the most general of social relations, and the immediate
relations of individuals and groups (between codes and sub-codes).
The medieval city has however lasted for almost eight centuries. The
rupture of the big city tends to disintegrate urban cores of medieval
origins, although these persist in many small or medium-sized towns.
Many urban centres, which today perpetuate or protect the image of *centrality* (which might have disappeared without them) are of very
ancient origins. This can explain without inasmuch legitimizing the
illusion of continuism and evolutionary ideology. This illusion and
this ideology have disguised the dialectical movement in the metamorphoses
of cities and the urban, and particularly in the relations of
‘continuity-discontinuity’. In the course of development some <em>forms</em>
change themselves into <em>functions</em> and enter structures <em>which take them back and transform them. Thus the extension of commercial exchanges from the European Middle Ages</em> onwards, contributes to this
extraordinary formation, the merchant city (integrating completely
the merchants established around the market square and market hall).
Since industrialization these local and localized markets have only one
function in urban life, in the relations of the city with the surrounding
countryside. <em>A form which has become function enters into new structures.</em> And yet, planners have recently come to believe that they
have invented the commercial centre. Their thinking progressed from
that of a denuded space, reduced to a residential function, to that of a
commercial centrality which brought a difference, an enrichment. But
planners were only rediscovering the medieval city laid bare of its
historical relation to the countryside, of the struggle between the
bourgeoisie and feudalism, of the political relation with a royal and
despotic State, and as a consequence reduced to the unifunctionality
of local exchanges.

Forms, structures, urban functions (in the city, in the relations of the
city to the territory influenced or managed by it, in the relations with
society and State) acted upon each other modifying themselves, a
movement which thought can now reconstruct and master. Each
urban formation knew an ascent, an apogee, a decline. Its fragments
and debris were later used for/in other formations. Considered in its
historical movement, at its specific level (above and beyond global
transformations, hut above immediate and locally rooted relations,
often linked to the consecration of the ground, and therefore durable
and quasi-permanent in appearance), the city has gone through critical
periods. Destructurations and restructurations are followed in time
and space, always translated on the ground, inscribed in the practico-material,
written in the urban text, but coming from elsewhere: from
history and becoming. Not from the supersensible, but from another
level. Local acts and agents left their mark on cities, but also impersonal
relations of production and property, and consequently, of
classes and class struggles, that is, ideologies (religious and philosophical,
that is, ethical, a esthetical, legal, etc.). The projection of the
global on the ground and on the specific plane of the city were
accomplished only through mediations. In itself mediation, the city
was the place, the product of mediations, the terrain of their activities,
the object and objective of their propositions. Global processes,
general relations inscribed themselves in the urban text only as transcribed
by ideologies, interpreted by tendencies and political
strategies. It is this difficulty upon which one must now insist, that of
conceiving the city as a semantic system, semiotic or semiological
system arising from linguistics, urban language or urban reality considered
as grouping of signs. In the course of its projection on a
specific level, the general code of society is modified: the specific code
of the urban is an incomprehensible modulation, a version, a translation
without the original or origins. Yes, the city can be read because
it writes, because it was writing. However, it is not enough to examine
this without recourse to context. To write on this writing or language,
to elaborate the <em>metalanguage of the city</em> is not to know the city and
the urban. The context, what is <em>below</em> the text to decipher (daily life,
immediate relations, the <em>unconscious</em> of the urban, what is little said
and of which even less is written), hides itself in the inhabited spaces
— sexual and family life — and rarely confronts itself, and what is <em>above</em>
this urban text (institutions, ideologies), cannot be neglected in the
deciphering. A book is not enough. That one reads and re-reads it,
well enough. That one goes as far as to undertake a critical reading of
it, even better. It asks from knowledge questions such as ‘who and
what? how? why? for whom?’ These questions announce and demand
the restitution of the context. The city cannot therefore be conceived
as <em>a</em> signifying system, determined and closed as a system. The taking
into consideration the <em>levels</em> of reality forbids, here as elsewhere, this
sytematization. None the less, the city has this singular capacity of
appropriating all significations for saying them, for writing them (to
stipulate and to ‘signify’ them), including those from the countryside,
immediate life, religion and political ideology. In the cities, monuments
and festivities had this <em>meaning.</em>

During each critical period, when the spontaneous growth of the city
stagnates and when urban development oriented and characterized by
hitherto dominant social relations ends, then appears a planning
thought. This is more a symptom of change than of a continuously
mounting rationality or of an internal harmony (although illusions on
these points regularly reproduce themselves), as this thinking merges
the philosophy of the city in search of a with the divisive schemes for
urban space. To confuse this anxiety with rationality and organization
it is the <em>ideology</em> previously denounced. Concepts and theories make
a difficult path through this ideology.

At this point the city should be defined. If it is true that the concept
emerges little by little from these ideologies which convey it, it must be
conceived during this progress. We therefore here propose a first
definition of the city as a <em>projection of society on the ground,</em> chat is,
not only on the actual site, but at a specific level, perceived and
conceived by thought, which determines the city and the urban.
Long-term controversies over this definition have shown its lacunae.
Firstly, it requires more accuracy. What is inscribed and projected is
not only a <em>far order,</em> a social whole, a mode of production, a general
code, it is also a time, or rather, times, rhythms. The city is heard as
much as music as it is read as a discursive writing. Secondly, the
definition calls for supplements. It brings to light certain historical
and generic or genetic differences, but leaves aside other real differences:
between the cypes of cities resulting from history, between the
effects of the division of labour in the cities, between the persistent
‘city-territory’ relations. Hence another definition which perhaps does
not destroy the first: the city <em>as the ensemble of differences</em> between
cities. In turn, this definition reveals itself to be insufficient, as it places
emphasis on particularities rather than on generalities, neglecting the
singularities of urban life, the ways of living of the city, more properly
understood as <em>to inhabit.</em> Hence another definition, of plurality, coexistence
and simultaneity in the urban of <em>patterns,</em> ways of living urban
life (the small house, the large social housing estates, to-ownership,
location, daily life and its changes for intellectuals, craftsmen, shopkeepers,
workers, etc.).

These definitions (relative to the levels of social reality), are not in
themselves exhaustive and do not exclude other definitions. If a theoretician
sees in the city the place of confrontations and of (conflictual)
relations between <em>desire</em> and <em>need,</em> between satisfactions and dissatisfactions,
if he goes as far as to describe the city as ‘site of desire’, these
determinations will be examined and taken into consideration. It is not
certain that they have a meaning limited to the fragmentary science of
psychology. Moreover, there would be the need to emphasize the
historical role of the city: the quickening of processes (exchange and the
market, the accumulation of knowledge and capitals, the concentration
of these capitals) and site of revolutions.
Today, by becoming a centre of decision-making, or rather, by
grouping centres of decision-making, the modern city intensifies by
organizing the <em>exploitation</em> of the whole society (not only the working
classes, but also other non-dominant social classes). This is not the
passive place of production or the concentration of capitals, but that
of the <em>urban</em> intervening as such in production (in the <em>means</em> of
production).

** Levels of Reality and Analysis

The preceding considerations are sufficient to show that the analysis
of urban phenomena (the physical and social morphology of the city,
or if one prefers, the <em>city,</em> the <em>urban</em> and their connexion) requires the
use of all the methodological tools: form, function, structure, levels,
dimensions, text, context, field and whole, writing and reading, system,
signified and signifier, language and metalanguage, institutions,
etc. One also knows that none of these terms can attain a rigorous
purity, be defined without ambiguity, or escape multiple meaning.
Thus the word <em>form</em> takes on various meanings for the logician, for
the literary critic, for the aesthetician, and for the linguist.

The theoretician of the city and the urban will say that these terms
are defined as <em>form of simultaneity,</em> as field of encounters and exchanges.
This acceptance of the word <em>form</em> must be clarified. Let us
again consider the term <em>function.</em> The analysis distinguishes the functions
internal to the city, the functions of the city in relation to
territory (countryside, agriculture, villages and hamlets, smaller towns
subordinated within a network), and lastly, the functions of the city —
each city — in the social whole (the technical and social division of
labour between cities, various networks of relations, administrative
and political hierarchies). It is the same for <em>structures.</em> There is the
structure of the city (of each city, morphologically, socially, topologically
and topically), then the urban structure of society, and finally the
social structure of town-country relations. Hence a muddle of analytical
and partial determinations and the difficulties of a global conception.
Here as elsewhere <em>three</em> terms most often meet, whose conflictual and
(dialectical) relations are hidden under <em>term by term oppositions.</em>
There is the countryside, and the city and society with the State which
manages and dominates it (in its relations with the class structure of
that society). There is also as we have attempted to show, general (and
global) processes, the city as specificity and intermediary level, then
relations of immediacy (linked to a way of life, to inhabiting, and to
regulating daily life). This requires therefore more precise definitions
of each level, which we will not be able to separate or confuse, but of
which we shall have to show the articulations and disarticulations, the
projections of one upon the other, and the different connections.

The highest level is found <em>at the same time</em> above and in the city.
This does not simplify the analysis. The social structure exists in the
city, makes itself apparent, signifies an order. Inversely, the city is a
part of the social whole; it reveals, because contains and incorporates
them within sentient matter, institutions and ideologies. Royal, imperial
and presidential buildings are a part of the city: the political part
(the capital). These buildings do not coincide with institutions, with
dominant social relations. And yet, these relations act upon them, by
representing social efficacy and ‘presence’. At its specific level, the city
also contains the projection of these relations. To elucidate this analysis
by a particular case, social order in Paris is represented at the
highest level in/by the Ministry of the Interior, and at the specific level
by the prefecture of police and also by neighbourhood police stations,
without forgetting various police agencies acting either at a global
level, or in the subterranean shadow. Religious ideology is signified at
the highest level by the cathedral, by seats of large religious organizations
of the Church, and also by neighbourhood churches and presbyteries,
various local investments of institutionalized religious
practice.

At this level, the city manifests itself as a group of groups, with iu
double morphology (practico-sensible or material, on the one hand,
social on the other), It has a code of functioning focused around
particular institutions, such as the municipality with its services and its
problems, with its channels of information, its networks, its powers of
decision-making. The social structure is projected on this plane, but
this does not exclude phenomena unique to the city, to a particular
city, and the most diverse manifestations of urban life. Paradoxically,
taken at this level, the city is made up of uninhabited and even
uninhabitable spaces: public buildings, monuments, squares, streets,
large or small voids. It is so true that ‘habitat’ does not make up the
city and that it cannot be defined by this isolated function.

At the ecological level, <em>habitation</em> becomes essential. The city envelops
it; it is form, enveloping chis space of ‘private’ life, arrival and
departure of networks of information and the communication of
orders (imposing the <em>far order</em> to the <em>near order).</em>

Two approaches arc possible. The first goes from the most general
to the most specific (from institutions to daily life) and then uncovers
the city as specific and (relatively) privileged mediation. The second
starts from this plan and constructs the general by identifying the
elements and significations of what is observable in the urban. It
proceeds in this manner to reach, from the observable, ‘private’, the
concealed daily life: its rhythms, its occupations, its spatio-temporal
organization, its clandestine ‘culture’, its underground life.

<em>Isotopies</em> are defined at each level: political, religious, commercial, etc.
space. In relation to these isotopies, other levels are uncovered as
*heterotopies*. Meanwhile, at each level spatial oppositions are uncovered
which enter in chis relationship of isotopy-heterotopy. For
example, the opposition between social and owner-occupied housing.
Spaces at the specific level can also be classified according to the
criterion of isotopy-heterotopy, the city as a whole being the most
expanded isotopy, embracing others, or rather, superimposing itself
over others (over the spatial sub-wholes which are at one and the same
time subordinated and constitutive). Such a classification by opposition
should not exclude the analysis of levels, nor that of the movement of
the whole with its conflictual aspects (class relations among others), At
the ecological level, that of inhabiting, are constituted significant ensembles,
partial systems of signs, of which the ‘world of the detached
house’ offers a particularly interesting case. The distinction between
levels (each level implying in tum secondary levels) has the greatest use
in the analysis of essential relations, for example in understanding how
the ‘values of detached housing’ in France become the reference point
of social consciousness and the ‘values’ of other types of housing. Only
the analysis of relations of inclusion-exclusion, of belonging or non-belonging
to a particular space of the city enables us <em>to</em> approach these
phenomena of great importance for a theory of the city.

On its specific plane the city can appropriate existing political,
religious and philosophical meanings. It seizes them to say them, to
<em>expose</em> them by means — or through the voice — of buildings, monuments,
and also by streets and squares, by voids, by the spontaneous
theatricalization of encounters which take place in it, not forgetting
festivities and ceremonies (with their appropriate and designated
places). Beside the writing, there is also the even more important
utterance of the urban, these utterances speaking of life and death, joy
or sorrow. The city has this capacity which makes of it a significant
whole. None the less, to stress a previous remark, the city does not
accomplish this task gracefully or freely. One does not ask it. Aestheticism,
phenomenon of decline, comes later. Such as planning! In the
form of meaning, in the form of simultaneity and encounters, in the
form, finally of an ‘urban’ language and writing, the city dispatches
<em>orders.</em> The <em>far order</em> is projected into the <em>near order.</em> This <em>far order</em> is
never or almost never unitary. There is religious order, political order,
moral order, each referring to an ideology with its practical implications.
Among these orders the city realizes on its plane a unity, or
rather, a syncretism. It dissimulates and veils their rivalries and conflicts
by making them imperative. It translates them as <em>instructions</em> for
action, as time management. It stipulates (signifies) with the management
of time a meticulous hierarchy of place, moments, occupations,
people. Moreover, it refracts these imperatives in a style, inasmuch as
there is a genuine urban life. This style characterizes itself as <em>architectural</em>
and is associated to art and the study of art objects.

Therefore the semiology of the city is of greatest theoretical and
practical interest. The city receives and emits messages. These messages
are or are not understood (that is, are or are not coded or
decoded). Therefore, it can be apprehended from concepts derived
from linguistics: signifier and signified, signification and meaning.
Nevertheless, it is not without the greatest reservation or without
precautions that one can consider the city as a <em>system,</em> as a unique
system of significations and meanings and therefore of values. Here
as elsewhere, there are several systems (or if one prefers, several
sub-systems). Moreover, semiology does not exhaust the practical and
ideological reality of the city. The theory of the city as system of
significations tends towards an ideology; it separates the <em>urban</em> from
its morphological basis and from social practice, by reducing it to a
‘signifier-signified’ relation and by extrapolating from actually perceived
significations. This is not without a great naivety. If it is true
that a Bororo village signifies, and that the Greek city is full of
meaning, are we to build vast Bororo villages full of signs of Modernity?
Or restore the agora with its meaning at the centre of the new
town?

The fetishization of the formal ‘signifier-signified’ relationship entails
more serious inconveniences. It passively accepts the ideology of
organised consumption. Or rather, it contributes to it. In the ideology
of consumption and in ‘real’ consumption (in quotations), the consumption
of <em>signs</em> plays an increasing role. It does not repress the
consumption of ‘pure’ spectacles, without activity and participation,
without <em>oeuvre</em> or product. It adds to it and superimposes itself upon
it as a determination. It is thus that advertising of consumer goods
becomes the principal means of consumption; it tends to incorporate
art, literature, poetry and to supplant them by using them as rhetoric.
It thus becomes itself the ideology of society; each ‘object’, each ‘good’
splits itself into a reality and an image, this being an essential part of
consumption. One consumes signs as well as objects: signs of happiness,
of satisfaction, of power, of wealth, of science, of technology,
etc. The production of these signs is integrated to global production
and plays a major integrative role in relation to other productive and
organizing social activities. The sign is bought and sold; language
becomes exchange value. Under the appearance of signs and significations
in general, it is the significations of this society which are handed
over to consumption. Consequently, he who conceives the city and
urban reality as system of signs implicitly hands them over to consumption
as integrally consumable: as exchange value in its pure state.
Changing sites into signs and values, the practice — material into formal
significations, this theory also changes into pure consumer of signs he
who receives them. Would not the Paris <em>bis</em> or <em>ter</em> conceived by
developers be the centres of consumption promoted to a superior level
by the intensity of the consumption of signs? Urban semiology is in
danger of placing itself at their service if it loses its naivety.

In truth, semiological analysis must distinguish between multiple
levels and dimensions. There is the <em>utterance</em> of the city: what happens
and takes place in the street, in the squares, in the voids, what is said
there. There is the <em>language</em> of the city: particularities specific to each
city which are expressed in discourses, gestures, clothing, in the words
and use of words by the inhabitants. There is <em>urban language,</em> which
one can consider as language of connotations, a secondary system and
derived within the denotative system (to use here Hjemslev and Greimas’s
terminology). Finally, there is the <em>writing</em> of the city: what is
inscribed and prescribed on its walls, in the layout of places and their
linkages, in brief, the <em>use of time</em> in the city by its inhabitants.

Semiological analysis must also distinguish between levels, that of
<em>semantemes</em> or signifying elements (straight or cured lines, writing,
elementary forms of entry, doors and windows, corners, angles, etc.),
<em>morphemes</em> or signifying objects (buildings, streets, ere.) and lastly,
significant ensembles or super-objects, of which the city irself.

One must study how the global is signified (the semiology of <em>power),</em>
how the city is signified (that is the properly <em>urban</em> semiology) and
how are signified ways of living and inhabiting (that is the <em>semiology of daily life,</em> of to inhabit and habitat). One cannot confuse the city as
it apprehends and exposes significations coming from nature, the
country and the landscape (the tree for example) and the city as place
of consumption of signs. That would be to confuse festivities with
ordinary consumption.

Let us not forget <em>dimensions.</em> The city has a <em>symbolic</em> dimension;
monuments but also voids, squares and avenues, symbolizing the
cosmos, the world, society, or simply the State. It has a <em>paradigmatical</em>
dimension; it implies and shows oppositions, the inside and the outside,
the centre and the periphery, the integrated and non-integrated to
urban society. Finally, it also possesses the <em>syntagmatic</em> dimension: the
connection of elements, the ariculation of isotopies and heterotopies.
At its specific level, the city presents itself as a privileged sub-system
because it is able to reflect and expose the other sub-systems and to
present itself as a ‘world’, a unique whole, within the illusion of the
immediate and the lived. In this capacity resides precisely the charm,
the tonicity, and the tonality specific to urban life. But analysis dissipates
this impression and unveils a number of systems hidden in the
illusion of oneness. The analyst has no right to share this illusion and
to consolidate it by maintaining himself at an <em>urban</em> level. He must
uncover instead the features of a greater knowledge.

We have not finished making an inventory of sub-systems of significations,
and therefore of what semiological analysis can bring to an
understanding of the city and the urban. If we consider the sector of
owner-occupation and that of new social housing estates, we already
know that each of them constitutes a (partial) system of significations,
and that another system which overdetermines each of them is established
from their opposition. This is how the owner-occupiers of small
houses perceive and conceive themselves in the make-believe of habitat,
and in turn, the estates establish the logic of habitat and perceive
themselves according to this coercive rationality. At the same time and
at the same stroke, the sector of owner-occupation becomes the
reference by which habitat and daily life are appreciated; that practice
is cloaked in make-believe and signs.

Among systems of significations, those of <em>architects</em> deserve the
greatest critical attention. It often happens that talented men believe
themselves to be at the centre of knowledge and experience whereas
they remain at the centre of systems of writing, projections on paper,
visualizations. Architects tending on their part towards a system of
significations which they often call ‘planning’, it is not impossible for
analysts of urban reality, grouping together their piecemeal facts, to
constitute a somewhat different system of significations that they can
also baptize planning while they leave its programming to machines.

Critical analysis dissipates the privilege of the lived in urban society.
It is only a ‘plane’, or a level. Yet analysis does not make this plane
disappear. It exists — as a book. Who reads this open book? Who
crosses over its writing? It is not a well-defined subject and yet a
succession of acts and encounters constitute on this plane itself urban
life, the <em>urban.</em> This urban life tends to turn against themselves the
messages, orders and constraints coming from above. It attempts to
<em>appropriate</em> time and space by foiling dominations, by diverting them
from their goal, by deceit. It also intervenes more or less at the level of
the city and the way of inhabiting. In this way the <em>urban</em> is more or
less the <em>oeuvre</em> of its citizens instead of imposing itself upon them as a
system, as an already dosed book.

** Town and Country

A theme which has been used and over-used, hyperinflated and extrapolated,
namely, ‘nature and culture’, originates from the relation between
town and country and deflects it. There are three terms in this
relation. In the same way, there are three terminologies in existing reality
(rurality, urban fabric, centrality) whose dialectical relations are hidden
beneath term to term oppositions, but also come to reveal themselves in
them. Nature as such escapes the hold of rationally pursued action, as
well as from domination and appropriation. More precisely, it remains
outside of these influences: it ‘is’ what flees: it is reached by the imaginary;
one pursues it and it flees into the cosmos, or in the underground depths
of the world. The countryside is the place of production and <em>oeuvres.</em>
Agricultural production gives birth to products: the landscape is an
<em>oeuvre.</em> This <em>oeuvre</em> emerges from the earth slowly moulded, linked
originally to the groups which occupy it by a reciprocal consecration,
later to be desecrated by the city and urban life (which capture this
consecration, condense it, then dissolve it over through the ages by
absorbing it into rationalicy). Where does this ancient consecration of the
ground to the tribes, peoples and nations come from? From the obscure
and menacing presence/absence of nature? From the occupation of the
ground which excludes strangers from this possessed ground? From the
social pyramid, which has its basis on this ground and which exacts many
sacrifices for the maintenance of a threatened edifice? One does not
prevent the other. What is important is the complex movement by which
the political city uses this sacred-damned character of the ground, so that
the economic (commercial) city can desecrate it.

Urban life includes original mediations between town, country and
nature. As the village, whose relationship with the city, in history and
in actuality, is far from being well known. As are parks, gardens,
channelled waters. These mediations cannot be understood as such by
city dwellers without symbolisms and <em>representations</em> (ideological and
imaginary) of nature and the countryside.

The town and country relation has changed deeply during the course
of history, according to different periods and to modes of production.
It has been sometimes profoundly conflictual, and at other times
appeased and close to an association. Moreover, during the same
period, very different kinds of relations are manifested. Thus in Western
feudalism, the territorial lord threatens the re-emerging city, where
the merchants find their meeting place, their homebase, the place of
their strategy. The city responds to this action of landed power, and a
class struggle ensues, sometimes quiescent, sometimes violent. The city
liberates itself, not by integrating itself by becoming an aristocracy of
commoners, but by integraring itself with the monarchic State (for
which it provided an essential condition). On the other hand, during
the same period, in so far as one can speak of an Islamic feudalism, the
‘lord’ rules over the city of craftsmen and shopkeepers and from it,
over a surrounding countryside, often reduced to gardens and to
sparse and insignificant cultivations. In such a relationship, there is
neither the kernel nor the possibility of a class struggle. From the
outset this takes away any historical dynamism and future from this
social structure, although not without conferring upon it other
charms, those of an exquisite urbanism. The class struggle, creative,
productive of <em>oeuvres</em> and new relations, takes place with a certain
barbarism which characterizes the West (including the most ‘beautiful’
of its cities).

Today, the town and country relation is changing, an important
aspect of a general transformation. In industrial countries, the old
exploitation by the city, centre of capital accumulation, of the surrounding
countryside, gives way to more subtle forms of domination
and exploitation, the city becoming centre of decision-making and
apparently also of association. However that may be, the expanding
city attacks the countryside, corrodes and dissolves it. This is not
without the paradoxical effects already mentioned. Urban life penetrates
peasant life, dispossessing it of its traditional features: crafts,
small centres which decline to the benefit of urban centres (commercial,
industrial, distribution networks, centres of decision-making,
etc.). Villages become ruralized by losing their peasant specificity.
They align themselves with the city but by resisting and sometimes by
fiercely keeping themselves to themselves.

Will the urban fabric, with its greater or lesser meshes, catch in its
nets all the territory of industrialized countries? Is this how the old
opposition between town and country is overcome? One can assume
it, but not without some critical reservations. If a generalized confusion
is thus perceived, the countryside losing itself into the heart of the
city, and the city absorbing the countryside and losing itself in it, this
confusion can be theoretically challenged. Theory can refute all
strategies resting on this conception of the urban fabric. Geographers
have coined to name this confusion an ugly but meaningful neologism:
the rurban. Within this hypothesis, the expansion of the city and
urbanization would cause the urban (the urban life) to disappear. This
seems inadmissible. In other words, the overcoming of opposition
cannot be conceived as a reciprocal neutralization. There is no theoretical
reason to accept the disappearance of centrality in the course of
<em>the</em> fusion of urban society with the countryside. The ‘urbanity-rurality’
opposition is accentuated rather than dissipated, while the
town and country opposition is lessened. There is a shifting of opposition
and conflict. What is more, we all know that worldwide, the
town and country conflict is far from being resolved. If it is true that
the town and country separation and contradiction (which envelops
without reducing to itself the opposition of the two terms) is part of
the social division of labour, it must be acknowledged that this
division is neither overcome nor mastered. Far from it. No more than
the separation of nature and society, and that of the material and the
intellectual (spiritual). Overcoming this today cannot not take place
from the opposition between urban fabric and centrality. It presupposes
the invention of new urban forms.

As far as industrial countries are concerned, one can conceive
polycentric cities, differentiated and renovated centralities, even
mobile centralities (cultural ones for example). The critique of planning
as ideology can be about such and such a conception of centrality
(for example, the distinction between the <em>urban</em> and the centres of
information and decision-making). Neither traditional city (separated
from the countryside to better dominate it), nor the Megalopolis
without form or fabric, without woof or warp, would be the guiding
idea. The disappearance of centrality is neither called for theoretically
nor practically. The only question that can be asked is this one: ‘What
social and political forms, what theory will one entrust with the
realization on the ground of a renovated centrality and fabric, freed
from their degradations?’

** Around the Critical Point

Let us trace hypothetically from left to right an axis going from zero
point in urbanization (the non-existence of the city, the complete
predominance of agrarian life, agricultural production and the
countryside) to full urbanization (the absorption of the countryside by
the city and the total predominance of industrial production, including
agriculture). This abstract picture momentarily places the discontinuities
in parentheses. To a certain extent it will enable us to locate
the critical points, that is, the breaks and discontinuities themselves.
Quite quickly on the axis, quite near to the beginning, let us mark the
political city (in effect achieved and maintained in the Asiatic mode of
production) which organizes an agrarian environment by dominating
it. A little further, let us mark the appearance of the commercial city,
which begins by relegating commerce to its periphery (a heterotopy of
outlying areas, fairs and markets, places assigned to foreigners, to
strangers specialized in exchanges) and which later integrates the
market by integrating itself to a social structure based on exchanges,
expanded communications, money and movable wealth. There then
comes a decisive critical point, where the importance of agriculrure
retreats before the importance of craft and industrial production, of
the market, exchange value and a rising capitalism. This critical point
is located in Western Europe around the sixteenth century. Soon it is
the arrival of the industrial city, with its implications (emigration of
dispossed and disaggregated peasant populations cowards the city — a
period of great urban concentration). Urban society is heralded long
after society as a whole has tilted towards the urban. Then there is the
period when the expanding city proliferates, produces far-flung peripheries
(suburbs), and invades the countryside. Paradoxically, in this
period when the city expands inordinately, the form (the practicomaterial
morphology, the form of urban life) of the traditional city
explodes. This double process (industrialization-urbanization) produces
the double movement: explosion-implosion, condensation-dispersion
(the explosion already mentioned). It is therefore around this
critical point that can be found the present problematic of the city and
urban reality.


[[h-l-henri-lefebvre-right-to-the-city-1.png f]]


The phenomena which unfold around the situation of crisis are nor
less complex than the physical phenomena which accompany the
breaking of the sound barrier (to use a simple metaphor). It is to this
end — the analysis in the proximity of the critical point — that <em>we</em> have
previously attempted to assemble the essential conceptual tools.
Knowledge which would dissociate itself from this situation would fall
back into blind speculation or myopic specialization.

Too badly placed, the critical points, breaks and lacunae can
have as serious consequences as organicist, evolutionist or continuist
negligence. Today, sociological thinking and political strategy, and
so-called planning thought, tend to jump from the level of habitat and
to inhabit (ecological level, housing, buildings, neighbourhood and
thus the domain of the architect), to the general level (scale of land use
planning, planned industrial production, global urbanization), passing
over the city and the urban. Mediation is placed into parentheses
and the specific level is omitted. Why? For significant reasons related
firstly to the disregard of the critical point.

The rational planning of production, land use planning, global
industrialization and urbanization are essential aspects of the “socialization
of society”. Let us pause for a moment on these words. A
Marxist tradition with reformist inflections uses them to designate the
complexification of society and social relations, the rupture of cornpartimentalization,
the growing multiplicity of connexions, communications
and information, the fact that an accentuated technical and
social division of labour implies a stronger unity in branches of
industry, market functions and production itself. This approach insists
on <em>exchanges</em> and places of exchange: it emphasizes the quantity of
economic exchanges and leaves aside quality, the essential difference
between use value and exchange value. In this perspective, the exchanges
of merchandise and of consumer goods level and align direct
exchanges to themselves, that is, communications which do not go
through existing networks, and through institutions (namely at the
‘inferior’ level, the immediate relations, and at the ‘superior’ level, the
political relations resulting from knowledge). The answer given to
reformist continuism is the thesis of disconrinuism and radical revolutionary
voluntarism: a rupture, a break, are essential for the social
character of productive labour to abolish relations of production
linked to private ownership of these means of production. However,
the thesis of the ‘socialization of society’, an evolutionist, continuist
and reformist interpretation, takes on another meaning if one observes
that these words refer to, badly and incompletely, the <em>urbanization of society.</em> The multiplication and complexification of exchanges in the
widest sense of the term cannot take place without the existence of
privileged places and moments, without these places and moments of
meeting freeing themselves from the constraints of the market, without
the law of exchange value being mastered, and without the
relations which condition profits be altered. Until then culture dissolves,
becoming an object of consumption, an opportunity for profit,
production for the market: the ‘cultural’ dissimulates more than one
trap. Until now a revolutionary interpretation has not taken into
account these new elements. Would it not be possible that the more
rigorous definition of the relations between industrialization and
urbanization, in the situation of crisis, and around the critical point,
will help to overcome the contradiction of absolute continuism and
discontinuism, of reformist evolutionism and total revolution? If one
wants to go beyond the market, the law of exchange value, money and
profit, is it not necessary to define the place of this possibility: urban
society, the city as use value?

The paradox of this critical situation, a crucial element of the
problem, is that the crisis of the city is world-wide. It presents itself as
a dominant aspect of universality in progress as do technology and the
rational organization of industry. Yet, the practical causes and ideological
reasons of this crisis vary according to political regimes, the
societies, and even the countries concerned. A critical analysis of these
phenomena could only be legitimated by comparison, but many elements
of this comparison are missing. In underdeveloped countries,
highly industrialized capitalist countries, socialist countries unevenly
developed, everywhere the city explodes. The traditional form of
agrarian society is transforming itself, but differently. In a number of
poor countries, shanty towns are a characteristic phenomenon, while
in highly industrialized countries, the proliferation of the city into
‘urban fabric’, suburbs, residential areas, and its relation with urban
life is what causes the problem.

How gather together the elements of such a comparison? In the
United States, the difficulties of Federal administration, its conflicts
with local authorities, the terms of reference of ‘urban government’,
divided among the manager, the political boss and the mayor and his
municipality, cannot be explained in the same way as the power
conflicts (administrative and juridical) in Europe and in France, where
the consequences of industrialization besiege and explode urban cores
dating from precapitalist or pre-industrial times. In the United States,
the urban core hardly exists except in some privileged cities, yer local
authorities have greater legal guarantees and more extensive powers
than in France where monarchical centralization attacked these urban
‘freedoms’ very early on. In Europe, as elsewhere, one cannot attribute
only to the growth of cities, or only to problems of traffic, difficulties
which are both different and comparable. Here and there, from one
part or another, the whole society is questioned one way or another.
As it is preoccupied (through ideologues and statesmen) to principally
plan industry and organize enterprise, modern society appears little
able to give solutions to the urban problematic and to act otherwise
than by small technical measures which only protract the current state
of affairs. Everywhere the relation between the three levels analysed
above becomes confused and conflictual, the dynamic element of the
contradiction changing according to the social and political context.
In so-called developing countries, the breakdown of agrarian structure
pushes dispossessed peasants, ruined and eager for change, towards
the cities. The shanty town welcomes them and becomes the (inadequate)
mediator between town and country, agricultural and industrial
production. It often consolidates itself and offers a substitute of urban
life, miserable and yet intense, to those which it shelters. In other
countries, particularly in socialist countries, planned urban growth
attracts labour to the cities recruited from the countryside resulting in
overcrowding, the construction of neighbourhoods or residential sectors
whose relation to urban life is not always discernible. To sum up,
a world-wide crisis in agriculture and traditional peasant life accompanies,
underlies and aggravates a world-wide crisis of the traditional
city. This is a change on a planetary scale. The old rural animal and
urban animal (Marx), disappear together. Do they leave room to
‘man’? That is the basic problem. The major theoretical and practical
difficulty comes from the fact that the urbanization of industrial
society does not happen without the breakup of what we still call ‘the
city’. Given that urban society is built on the ruins of the city, how
can we grasp the breadth and manifold contradictions of these phenomena?
That is the <em>critical point.</em> The distinction between the three
levels (global process of industrialization and urbanization — urban
society, the specific scale of the city-ways of living and conditions of
daily life in the urban) tends to become blurred as does the distinction
between town and country. And yet, this difference between the three
levels is more than ever crucial to avoid confusion and misunderstandings,
to combat strategies which find in this conjuncture an opportunity
to disintegrate the urban into industrial and or residential
planning.

Yes, this city which has gone through so much adversity and so
many metamorphoses, since its archaic cores so dose to the village,
this admirable social form, this exquisite <em>oeuvre</em> of praxis and civilization,
unmakes and remakes itself under our very eyes. The urgency of
the housing question in conditions of industrial growth has concealed
and still conceals the problems of the city. Political strategists, more
attentive to the immediate, perceived and still perceive only these
issues. When these overall problems emerged, under the name of
<em>planning,</em> they have been subordinated to the general organization of
industry. Attacked both from above and below, the city is associated
to industrial enterprise: it figures in planning as a cog: it becomes the
material device apt to organize production, control the daily life of the
producers and the consumption of products. Having been reduced to
the status of device, it extends this management to the consumers and
consumption; it serves to regulate, to lay one over the other, the
production of goods and the destruction of products with that devouring
activity, ‘consumption’. It did not have, it has no meaning but as
an <em>oeuvre,</em> as an end, as place of free enjoyment, as domain of use
value. Or, it is subjugated to constraints, to the imperatives of an
‘equilibrium’ within narrowly restrictive conditions; it is no more than
the instrument of an organization which moreover is unable to consolidate
itself by determining its conditions of stability and equilibrium,
an organization according to whose catalogue and teleguide
individual needs are satisfied by annihilating catalogued objects whose
probability of durability (obsolescence) is itself a scientific field. In the
past, reason had its place of birth, its seat, its home in the city. In
the face of rurality, and of peasant life gripped by nature and the
sacralized earth full of obscure powers, urbanity asserted itself as
reasonable. Today, rationality seems to be (or appears to be, or
pretends to be) far from the city, above it, on a national or continental
scale. It refuses the city as a moment, as an element, as a condition; it
acknowledges it only as an instrument and a means. In France and
elsewhere, State bureaucratic rationalism and that of industrial organization
supported by the demands of large private enterprises, are
going the same way. Simultaneously there is enforced a simplifying
functionalism and social groups which go beyond the urban. The
organism disappears under the guise of organization, so that organicism
coming from the philosophers appears as an ideal model. The
statutes of urban ‘zones’ and ‘areas’ are reduced to a juxtaposition of
spaces, of functions, of elements on the ground. Sectors and functions
are tightly subordinated to centres of decision-making. Homogeneity
overwhelms the differences originating from nature (the site), from
peasant surroundings (territory and the soil), from history. The city,
or what remains of it, is built or is rearranged, in the likeness of a sum
or combination of elements. Now, as soon as the combination is
conceived, perceived and anticipated as such, combinations are not
easily recognizable; the differences fall into the perception of their
whole. So chat while one may rationally look for diversity, a feeling of
monotony covers these diversities and prevails, whether housing,
buildings, alleged urban centres, organized areas are concerned. The
urban, not conceived as such but attacked face on and from the side,
corroded and gnawed, has lost the features and characteristics of the
<em>oeuvre,</em> of appropriation. Only constraints are projected on the ground,
in a state of permanent dislocation. From the point of view of housing,
the ordering and arrangement of daily life, the massive use of the car
(‘private’ means of transpon), mobility (besides contained and insufficient),
and the influence of the mass media, have detached from site
and territory individuals and groups (families, organized bodies).
Neighbourhood and district fade and crumble away: the people (the
‘inhabitants’) move about in a space which tends towards a geometric
isotopy, full of instructions and signals, where qualitative differences
of places and moments no longer matter. Certainly these are inevitable
processes of dissolution of ancient forms, but which produce contempt,
mental and social misery. There is a poverty of daily life as soon
as nothing has replaced the symbols, the appropriations, the styles, the
monuments, the times and rhythms, the different and qualified spaces
of the traditional city. Urban society, because of the dissolution of this
city submitted to pressures which it cannot withstand, tends on the
one hand to blend with the planned land use of the territory into
the ‘urban fabric’ determined by the constraints of traffic, and on the
other hand, into dwelling units such as those of the detached house
and the housing estates. The extension of the city produced suburbs,
then the suburb engulfed the urban core. The problems have been
inversed, when they are not misunderstood. Would it not be more
coherent, more rational and agreeable to work in the suburbs and live
in the city rather than work in the city while living in a hardly
habitable suburb? The centralized management of ‘things’ and of
‘culture’ tries to avoid this intermediary tier, the city. And more: the
State, centres of decision-making, the ideological, economic and political
powers, can only consider with a growing suspicion this social
form which tends towards autonomy, which can only live specifically,
which comes between them and the ‘inhabitant’, worker or not,
productive or unproductive worker, but man and citizen as well as city
dweller. Since the last century, what is the essence of the city for
power? It ferments, full of suspect activities, of delinquence, a hotbed
of agitation. State powers and powerful economic interests can think
only of one strategy: to devalorize, degrade, destroy, urban society. In
the course of these processes, there are determinisms, there are
strategies, spontaneities and concened acts. Subjective and ideological
contradictions, ‘humanist’ worries impede but do not halt these
strategic actions. The city prevents the powers that be from manipulating
at will the citizen-city dweller, individuals, groups, bodies. As a
result, the crisis of the city is linked not to rationality as such,
definable from a philosophical tradition, it relates to explicit forms of
rationality: state, bureaucratic, economic, or rather, ‘economistic’,
economism being an ideology endowed with an apparatus. This crisis
of the city is accompanied here and there with a crisis of urban
institutions (municipal) due to the double pressure from the State and
industrial enterprise. Sometimes the State, sometimes private enterprise,
sometimes both (rivals in competition, but often associates) tend
to commandeer the functions, duties, and prerogatives of urban society.
In certain capitalist countries, does ‘private’ enterprise leave to
the State, to institutions, and ‘public’ bodies any other thing than what
it refuses to assume because it is too costly?

And yet, it is on this shaky foundation that urban society and the
<em>urban</em> persist and even intensify. Social relations continue to become
more complex, to multiply and intensify through the most painful
contradictions. The form of the urban, its supreme reason, namely
simultaneity and encounter, cannot disappear. Urban reality, at the
very heart of its dislocation, persists and becomes more dense in the
centres of decision-making and information. The inhabitants (which
ones? — it’s up to research and researchers to find them!) reconstitute
centres, using places to restitute even derisory encounters. The use (use
value) of places, monuments, differences, escape the demands of
exchange, of exchange value. A big game is played before us, with
various episodes whose meaning is not always evident. The satisfaction
of basic needs is unable to kill the disaffectation of fundamental
desires (or of the fundamental desire). As a place of encounters, focus
of communication and information, the <em>urban</em> becomes what it always
was: place of desire, permanent disequilibrium, seat of the dissolution
of normalities and constraints, the moment of play and of the unpredictable.
This moment includes the implosion-explosion of latent
violence under the terrible constraints of a rationality which identifies
itself with the absurd. From this situation is born a critical contradiction:
a tendency towards destruction of the city, as well as a tendency
towards the intensification of the urban and the urban problematic.

This critical analysis calls for a decisive addition. To attribute the
crisis of the city to a confining rationality, productivism and economism,
and to a planning centralization first and foremost concerned
with growth, to the bureaucracy of State and enterprise is not incorrect.
Yet, this viewpoint does not go much beyond the horizon of the
most classical philosophical rationalism, that of liberal humanism. He
who wishes to propose the form of a new urban society by strengthening
this kernel, the <em>urban,</em> which survives in the fissures of planned and
programmed order, must go further. If one wants to conceive an
‘urban man’ no longer in the image of classical humanism, theoretical
elaboration owes it to itself to refine concepts. Until now, in theory as
in practice, the double process of industrialization and of urbanization
has not been mastered. The incomplete teachings of Marx and Marxist
thought have been misunderstood. For Marx himself, industrialization
contained its finality and meaning, later giving rise to the
dissociation of Marxist thought into economism and philosophism.
Marx did not show (and in his time he could not) that urbanization
and the <em>urban</em> contain the <em>meaning</em> of industrialization. He did not see
that industrial production implied the urbanization of society, and
that the mastery of industrial potentials required specific knowledge
concerning urbanization. Industrial production, after a certain
<em>growth,</em> produces urbanization, providing it with conditions, and
possibilities. The problematic is displaced and becomes that of urban
<em>development.</em> The works of Marx (notably <em>Capital)</em> contained
precious indications on the city and particularly on the historical
relations between town and country. They do not pose the urban
problem. In Marx’s time, only the housing problem was raised and
studied by Engels. Now, the problem of the city is immensely greater
than that of housing. The limits of Marxist thought have not been
really understood. Supporters as well as adversaries have sowned
trouble, by poorly assimilating the methodological and theoretical
principles of this thought. Neither criticism from the right, nor criticism
from the left have assessed the contributions and the limits. These
limits have not yet been overtaken by an approach which does not
reject, but deepens acquired knowledge. The implicit sense of industrialization
has therefore been badly clarified. In theoretical reflection
chis process has not acquired its meaning. Moreover, one has looked
for meaning elsewhere, or one has abandoned the meaning and the
research of meaning.

The ‘socialization of society’, misunderstood by reformists has
prevented urban transformation (in, by, for, the city). It has not been
understood chat this socialization has urbanization as its essence.
What has been ‘socialized’? By turning them over to consumption,
signs. Signs of the city, of <em>urban</em> life, as the signs of nature and the
countryside, as those of joy and happiness, delivered to consumption
without an effective social practice enabling the <em>urban</em> to enter daily
life. Urban life faces needs only reluctantly, through the poverty of
social needs of ‘socialized society’, through daily consumption and its
own signs in advertising, fashion, aestheticism. At this new moment of
analysis, is thus conceived the dialectical movement which carries the
forms, the contours, the determinisms and the constraints, the servitudes
and the appropriations towards a troubled horizon.

Urban life, urban society and the <em>urban,</em> detached by a particular
social practice (whose analysis will continue) from their half ruined
morphological base, and searching for a new base, these are the
contexts of the critical point. The <em>urban</em> cannot be defined either
as attached to a material morphology (on the ground, in the practicomaterial),
or as being able to detach itself from it. It is not an
intemporal essence, nor a system among ocher systems or above other
systems. It is a mental and social form, that of simultaneity, of
gathering, of convergence, of encounter (or rather, encounters). It is a
<em>quality</em> born from quantities (spaces, objects, products). It is a <em>difference,</em>
or rather, an ensemble of differences. The <em>urban</em> contains the
meaning of industrial production, as <em>appropriation</em> contains the sense
of <em>technical domination over nature,</em> the latter becoming absurd without
the former. It is a <em>field</em> of relations including notably the relation
of time (or of times; cyclical rhythms and linear durations) with space
(or spaces: isotopics and heterotopies). As place of desire and bond of
times, the <em>urban</em> could present itself as <em>signifiers</em> whose <em>signified</em> we
are presently looking for (that is, practico-material ‘realities’ which
would enable, with an adequate morphological and material base, to
realize it in space).

Lacking adequate theoretical elaboration, the double process (industrialization-
urbanization) has been severed and its aspects separated,
to be therefore consigned to the absurd. Grasped by a higher and
dialectical rationality, conceived in its duality and contradictions, this
process could not leave the <em>urban</em> aside. On the contrary: <em>it understands it.</em> Therefore, what should be incriminated is not reason, but a
particular rationalism, a constricted rationality, and its limits. The
world of merchandise has its immanent logic of money and exchange
value generalized without limits. Such a form, that of exchange and
equivalence, is indifferent towards urban form; it reduces simultaneity
and encounters to those of the exchanges and the meeting place to
where the contract or quasi-contract of equivalent exchange is concluded:
the market. Urban society, a collection of acts taking place in
time, privileging a space (site, place) and privileged by it, in turn
signifiers and signified, has a logic different from that of merchandise.
It is another world. The <em>urban</em> is based on use value. This conflict
cannot be avoided. At most, economic and productivist rationality
seeks to push beyond all limits the production of products (exchangeable
objects of exchange value) by suppressing the <em>oeuvre,</em> this productivist
rationality makes itself out to be knowledge, while
containing an ideological component tied to its very essence. Maybe it
is only ideology, valorizing constraints, those which come from existing
determinisms, those of industrial production and the market of
products, those coming from its fetishism of policy. Ideology presents
these real constraints as rational. Such a rationality is not innocuous.
The worse danger which it harbours comes from it wanting itself and
calling itself <em>synthetical.</em> It purports to lead to synthesis and make
‘men of synthesis’ (either from philosophy, or from science, or lastly,
from an ‘interdisciplinary’ research). Now, this is an ideological illusion.
Who has <em>right of synthesis?</em> Certainly not a civil servant of
synthesis, accomplishing this function in a way guaranteed by institutions.
Certainly not he who extrapolates from an analysis or several
analyses. Only the practical capacity of realization has the right to
collect the theoretical elements of synthesis, by doing it. Is it the role
of political power? Maybe, but not any political force: not the political
State as an institution or sum of institutions, not statesmen as such.
Only the critical examination of strategies enables us to give an answer
to this questioning. The <em>urban</em> can only be confined to a strategy
prioritizing the urban problematic, the intensification of urban life,
the effective realization of urban society (that is, its morphological,
material and practice-material base).

** On Urban Form

The ambiguity, or more exactly, the <em>polysemy</em> or plurality of
meanings, of this term, ‘form’, has already been remarked upon. It was
not really necessary, being obvious. The same goes for the polysemy
of the terms ‘function’, ‘structure’ etc. None the less we cannot rest
there and accept the situation. How many people believe they have
said and resolved everything when they use one of these fetish words!
The plurality and confusion of the meanings serve an absence of
thought and poverty which takes itself for wealth.

The only way to clarify the meaning of the term is to begin from
its most abstract acceptance. Only scientific abstraction without contents,
distinguished from verbal abstraction and opposed to speculative
abstraction, enables transparent definitions. Therefore, to define
form, one must begin from formal logic and logico-mathematical
structures. Not so as to isolate or fetishize them, but, on the contrary,
to catch their relation to the ‘real’. This is not without some difficulties
and disadvantages. The transparency and clarity of ‘pure’ abstraction
are not accessible to all. Most people are either myopic or blind
to it. A ‘culture’ is necessary not only to understand the abstract,
but far more to attain the disturbing frontiers which at one and
the same time distinguish and unite the concrete and the abstract,
knowledge and art, mathematics and poetry. To elucidate the meaning
of the word ‘form’, one will have to refer to a very general, very
abstract theory, the <em>theory of forms.</em> It is dose to a philosophical
theory of knowledge, extending it and yet very different, since
on the one hand it designates its own historical and ‘cultural’ conditions
and on the other it rests upon difficult logico-mathematical
considerations.

Proceeding by stages a socially recognized ‘form’ will be examined;
for example, the <em>contract.</em> There are many kinds of contracts: the
marriage contract, the work contract, the sales contract, etc. The
contents of social acts defined as contractual are therefore very different. Sometimes they relate to the regulation of relations between two
individuals of different sexes (the sexual relationship taking second
place in the social regulation of assets and their transmission as
they relate to children and inheritance). Sometimes they relate to the
regulation of relations between two individuals of different social
and even class status: employer and employee, boss and worker.
Sometimes what is involved is the submission to a social regularity
of the relationship between seller and buyer, etc. These particular
situations have none the less a common feature: <em>reciprocity</em> in a
socially constituted and instituted engagement. Each engages himself
<em>vis-a-vis</em> the other to accomplish a certain sort of action explicitly
or implicitly stipulated. Moreover, one knows that this reciprocity
entails some fiction, or rather, that as soon as it is concluded, it reveals
itself to be fictional, inasmuch as it does not fall into contractual
stipulation and under the rule of law. Sexual reciprocity between
spouses becomes social and moral fiction (the ‘conjugal duty’). The
reciprocity of engagement between boss and worker establishes
them on the same level only fictionally. And so on and so forth.
Nevertheless, these fictions have a social existence and influence. They
are the various contents of a general juridical <em>form</em> with which jurists
operate and which become the <em>codification</em> of social relations: the civil
code.

It is the same for reflective thought which has extremely diverse
contents: objects, situations, activities. From this diversity emerge
more or less fictional or real domains: science, philosophy, art, etc.
These many objects, these domains somewhat small in number, relate
to a logical formulation. Reflection is codified by a form common to
all contents, which is born out of their differences.

Form detaches itself from content, or rather, contents. Thus freed,
it emerges pure and transparent: intelligible. That much more intelligible
as decanted from content, ‘purer’. Bte here is the paradox. As
such, in its purity, it has no existence. It is not real, it is not. By
detaching itself from its content, form detaches itself from the concrete.
The summit, the crest of the real, the key to the real (of its
penetration by knowledge and the action which changes it), it places
itself outside the real. Philosophers have tried to understand for two
thousand years.

None the less, philosophy brings the theoretical elements to this
knowledge. The approach is in several stages and has a strategic
objective. That is to grasp through the movement of reflection which
purifies forms and its own form, and which codifies and formalizes the
inherent and hidden movement of the relation between form and
content. There is no form without content. No content without form.
What offers itself to analysis is always a <em>unity</em> of form and content.
Analysis breaks this unity. It allows the purity of form to appear, and
form refers back to content. Yet, this indissoluble unity, broken by
analysis, is conflictual (dialectical). By turns thought goes from transparent
form to the opacity of contents, of the substantiality of these
contents to the inexistence of ‘pure’ form, in a ceaseless if not momentary
movement. Nevertheless, on the one hand, reflection tends to
dissociate forms (and its own logical form) from contents, by constituting
absolute ‘essences’, by establishing the reign of essences. And on the
other hand, practice and empiricism tend to ascertain contents, to be
satisfied with such certitude, to sojourn in the opacity of various
contents, accepted in their differences. For dialectical reason, contents
overflow form and form gives access to contents. Thus form has a
double ‘existence’. It is and is not. It has reality only in contents, and
yet detaches itself from them. It has a mental and a social existence.
Mentally the contract is defined by a form quite close to logic:
reciprocity. Socially, this form regulates countless situations and activities;
it confers upon them a structure, it maintains them and even
valorizes them, including as form an evaluation and involving a
‘consensus’. As for the logico-mathematical form, its mental existence
is obvious. What is less obvious is that it involves a fiction: the purely
reflective disembodied theoretical man. As for its social existence, it
should be shown at length. Indeed, to this form are attached multitudinous
social activities: to count, define, classify (objects, situations,
activities), rationally organized, predicted, planned and even programmed.

Reflection which (in new terms) extends the long meditation and the
problematic of philosophers, can elaborate a <em>scheme of forms.</em> It is a
sort of analytical grid to decipher the relations between the real and
thought. This (provisional and modifiable) grid moves from the most
abstract to the most concrete, and therefore from the least to the
most immediate. Each form presents itself in its double existence as
mental and social.

<center>
<em>I. Logical form</em>
</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> it is the principle of identity: A=A. It is void essence without
content. In its absolute purity it is supreme transparency (difficult to
grasp, for reflection can neither hold it or keep itself within it and yet
it has <em>tautology</em> as its point of departure and return). Indeed, this
tautology is what all propositions have in common which otherwise
have nothing in common with each other by content, or the designated
<em>(designatum,</em> denoted). As Wittgenstein has shown, this tautology
A=A is the centre, emptied of substance of all enunciated, of all
propositions.

<em>Socially:</em> understanding and the conventions of understanding
over and above misunderstandings. The impossible possibility to
make effective stopping, to define everything, to say everything and
to agree on the rules of understanding. But also, verbalism, verbiage,
repetitions, pure talk. But again pleonasms, vicious circles (including
the great social pleonasms, for bureaucracy which
engenders bureacracy to maintain the bureaucratic form — social logics
which tend towards their pure maintenance to the extent of
destroying their content and thus themselves, showing their emptiness).

<center>
<em>II. Mathematical form</em>
</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> identity and difference, equality in difference. Enumeration
(of the elements of a whole, etc). Order and measure.

<em>Socially:</em> distributions and classifications (in space, generally privileged
as such, but also in time). Scheduling. Quantification and
quantitative rationality. Order and measure subordinating to themselves
desires and desire, quality and qualities.

<center>
<em>III. Form of language</em>
</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> coherence, the capacity to articulate distinct elements, to
confer to them significations and meanings, to emit and decipher
messages according to their coded conventions.

<em>Socially:</em> the cohesion of relations, their subordination to the demands
and constraints of cohesion, the ritualization of relations, their formalization
and codification.

<center>
<em>IV. Form of exchange</em>
</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> confrontation and discussion, comparison and adjustments
of activities, needs, produces of labour, etc., that is, <em>equivalence.</em>

<em>Socially:</em> exchange value, the commodity form (as identified, formulated
and formalized by Marx in chapter I of <em>Capital,</em> with an implicit
reference to formal logic and to logico-mathemacical formalism).

<center>
<em>V. Contractual form</em>
</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> reciprocity.

<em>Socially:</em> the codification of social relations based on murual engagement.

<center>
<em>VI. Form of the practico-material object</em>
</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> incernal equilibrium perceived and conceived as ‘objective’
(or ‘objectal’) property. <em>Symmetry.</em>

<em>Socially:</em> the anticipation of this equilibrium and this symmetry, demanded
by objects or denied (including among living and thinking ‘being;’), as well
as social objects such as houses, buildings, utensils and instruments, etc.

<center>
<em>VII. Written form</em>
</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> recurrence, synchronic fixation of what has occurred over
time, going backwards and returning along a fixed becoming.

<em>Socially:</em> the accumulation in time on the basis of fixation and the
conversation of what is acquired, the constraint of writing and writings,
terror before the written and the scruggle of the spirit against the
letter, the power of speech against the inscribed and the prescribed, the
becoming against the immutable and the reified.

<center>
<em>VIII. Urban form</em>
</center>

<em>Mentally:</em> simultaneity (of events, perceptions, and elements of a
whole in the ‘real’).

<em>Socially:</em> the encounter and the concentration of what exists around,
in the environment (assets and products, acts and activities, wealth)
and consequently, urban society as privileged social site, as meaning
of productive and consuming activities, as meeting between the <em>oeuvre</em>
and the product.

<br>

We will leave aside <em>repetition</em> which some (among them Nietzsche), have
considered to be the supreme form, existential form, or form of existence.

It is almost evident that in so~called modern society, simultaneity is
intensified and becomes more dense, that the capacities for encounter
and assembly become strengthened. Communications speed up to
quasi-instantaneity. Ascendent or descendent circuits of information
flow and are diffused from this <em>centrality.</em> This aspect of the ‘socialization
of society’ has already been emphasized (reservations having
been made about the ‘reformist’ nature of this well-known formulation).

It is just as evident that under the same conditions dispersion
increases: the division of labour is pushed to the extreme segregation
of social groups and material and spiritual separations. These dispersions
can only be conceived or appreciated by reference to the form of
simultaneity. Without this form, dispersion and separation are purely
and simply glimpsed, accepted, confirmed as facts. Thus form enables
us to designate the content, or rather, contents. Movement in its
emergence reveals a hidden movement, the dialectical (conflictual)
movement of content and urban form: the problematic. The form in
which is inscribed this problematic asks questions which are a part of
it. Before whom and for whom is simultaneity established, the contents
of urban life assembled?

** Spectral Analysis

In fact, the rationality we see used in practice (including applied
planning), this limited rationality is exercised especially according to
the modalities of a very advanced and prepared analytical intelligence,
endowed with great means of pressure. This analytical intellect endows
itself with the privileges and prestige of synthesis. In this way it
hides what it conceals: strategies. One could impute it with the peremptory
concern of the functional, or rather, the <em>unifunctional,</em> as
well as the subordination of details minutely inventoried for the
representation of a social globality. Thus disappear <em>mediations</em> between
an ideological ensemble assumed to be rational (technologically
or economically) and detailed measures, objects of tactics and prediction.
This placing in parenthesis of theoretical, practical, social and
mental mediations does not lack black humour in a society where
intermediaries (shopkeepers, financiers, publicists, etc.) have immense
privileges. One covers the other! Thus a gulf is dug between the global
(which hovers over the void) and the manipulated and repressed
partial, upon which institutions weigh.

What is questioned here is not an uncertain ‘globality’, it is an
<em>ideology</em> and the class <em>strategy</em> which uses and supports this ideology.
After a sort of ‘spectral’ analysis of social elements, the already
mentioned use of analytical intelligence is related as much to extreme
fragmentation of work and specialization pushed to the limits (including
specialized planning studies), as projection on the ground. <em>Segregation</em>
must be highlighted, with its three aspects, sometimes
simultaneous, sometimes successive: <em>spontaneous</em> (coming from
revenues and ideologies) — <em>voluntary</em> (establishing separate spaces) —
programmed: under the guise of planning and the plan).

There are unquestionably strong tendencies in all countries opposing
segregationist tendencies. One cannot state that the segregation of
groups, ethnic groups, social strata and classes comes from a constant
and uniform strategy of the powers, nor that one should see in it the
efficient projection of institutions or the will of political leaders.
Moreover, there exist the will and organized actions to combat it. And
yet, even where separation of social groups does not seem to be
patently evident on the ground, such a pressure and traces of segregation
appear under examination. The extreme case, the last instance,
the ghetto. We can observe that there are several types of ghetto: those
of Jews and the blacks, and also those of intellectuals or workers. In
their own way residential areas are also ghettos; high status people
because of wealth or power isolate themselves in ghettos of wealth.
Leisure has its ghettos. Wherever an organized action has attempted
to mix social strata and classes, a spontaneous decantation soon
follows. The phenomenon of segregation must be analysed according
to various indices and criteria: <em>ecological</em> (shanty towns, slums, the rot
in the heart of the city), <em>formal</em> (the deterioration of signs and
meanings of the city, the degradation of the <em>urban</em> by the dislocation
of its architectural elements), and <em>sociological</em> (standards of living and
life styles, ethnic groups, cultures and sub-cultures, etc.)

Anti-segregationist tendencies would be rather more ideological.
They sometimes relate to liberal humanism, sometimes to a philosophy
of the city considered as ‘subject’ (as a community or social
organism). Despite good humanist intentions and philosophical goodwill,
<em>practice</em> tends towards segregation. Why? For theoretical reasons
and by virtue of social and political causes. At the theoretical level,
analytical thought separates and delineates. It fails when it wants to
reach a synthesis. Socially and politically (conscious or unconscious)
class strategies aim for segregation.

In democratic countries public powers cannot overtly decree segregation
as such. Therefore they often adopt a humanist ideology which
in the most old-fashioned sense becomes a utopia, when it does not
become a demagogy. Segregation always wins over, even in those
parts of social life more or less easily and more or less thoroughly
controlled by public powers. Let us say that the State and private
enterprise strive to absorb and suppress the city as such. The State
proceeds rather from above and private enterprise from below (by
ensuring housing and the function of inhabiting in workers’ towns and
housing estates, which depending on a ‘society’ and also assuring
leisure, even culture and social promotion). Despite their differences
and sometimes their conflicts, the State and private enterprise both
converge towards segregation.

Let us leave open the issue of knowing whether the political forms
of the State (capitalist, socialist or in transition, etc.), engender different
strategies cowards the city. Let us not attempt for the time being to
know where or how, at whom and with whom these strategies are
developed. We substantiate strategies by observing them as significant
orientations. Segregations which morphologically destroyed the city
and threaten urban life cannot be passed off as the effect of hazards or
local conjunctures. Let us be contented with the notion that the
<em>democratic</em> character of a regime is identifiable by its attitude towards the city, urban  ‘liberties’ and urban reality, and therefore towards *segregation*.
Among the criteria to retain would nor this one be one of
the most important? It is fundamental in what concerns the city and
its problematic. Nevertheless one must distinguish between political
power and social pressures which can annihilate the effects of (good
or bad) will of politicians. With regards to private enterprise, let us
also leave this an open question. What are the relations between
(ideological and practical) rationality in general, between (general and
urban) planning on the one hand, and on the other the rational
management of large firms? We can nevertheless put forward a hypothesis
and research direction. Rationality in the firm always implies an
analysis pushed to the extreme of tasks, operations and sequences. In
addition, the reasons and causes of class strategy are fully played out
in the capitalist firm. It is therefore highly probable that the firm as
such favours the extreme segregation, acts accordingly and applies
social pressure when this is not a decision.

The State and the firm seek to appropriate urban functions and to
assume and ensure them by destroying the form of the <em>urban.</em> Can
they? Do not these strategic objectives exceed their strengths, combined
or not? It would be most interesting to investigate this point.
The conditions and modalities of the crisis of the city are gradually
uncovered and accompanied by a city-wide institutional crisis of
urban jurisdiction and administration. What was specific to the city
(the municipality, local expenditures and investments, schools and
educational programmes, universities, etc.) fall increasingly under the
control of the State, and by institutionalizing itself in a global context,
the city tends to disappear as a specific institution. This abolishes it as
an <em>oeuvre</em> of original groups which were themselves specific. However,
can the powers and institutions at the top dispense with this
relay, this mediation, the city? This, of course, would need to be
shown by researches into juridical, economic, cultural and administrative sociology. Can they abolish the <em>urban?</em> It is at this level that daily
life, governed by institutions which regulate it from above, consolidated
and set up according to multiple constraints, constitutes itself.
Productivist rationality which tends to suppress the city at the level of
general planning rediscovers it in the controlled and organized consumption
of a supervised market. After having been kept away from
the global level of decision-making, the city is reconstituted at the level
of executions and application, by institutions of power. The outcome
— inasmuch as such a situation in France and elsewhere can make sense
— is an incredible entanglement of measures (all reasonable), regulations
(all very complicated), and constraints (all motivated). The
functioning of bureaucratic rationality becomes confused with its own
presuppositions and consequences which overcome and elude it. Conflicts
and contradictions resurface, giving rise to ‘structuring’ activities
and ‘concerted’ actions aimed at their revocation. It is here on the
ground that the absurdity of a limited rationality of bureaucracy and
technocracy becomes evident. Here is grasped the falsehood of an
illusory identification between the rational and the real in the State,
and the true identity between the absurd and a certain authoritarian
rationalism.

On our horizon, the city and the <em>urban</em> are outlined as virtual
objects, as projects of a synthetic reconstitution. Critical analysis
confirms the failure of an analytical but uncritical thought. What does
chis analytical practice retain of the city and the urban whose results
one can detect on the ground? Aspects, elements and fragments. It
places before our eyes the spectre, the spectral analysis of the city.
When we speak of <em>spectral analysis,</em> its meaning is almost literal and
not metaphorical. Before our eyes, under our gaze, we have the
‘spectre’ of the city, that of urban society and perhaps simply of
society. If the spectre of Communism no longer haunts Europe, the
shadow of the city, the regret of what has died because it was killed,
perhaps guilt, have replaced the old dread. The image of urban hell in
the making is not less fascinating, and people rush cowards the ruins
of ancient cities to consume them touristically, in the belief that they
will heal their nostalgia. Before us, as a spectacle (for spectators
‘unconscious’ of what is before their ‘conscience’) are the dissociated
and inert elements of social life and the <em>urban.</em> Here are ‘social housing
estates’ without teenagers or old people. Here are women dozing
while the men work far away and come home exhausted. 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. Analytical separation
has isolated them as ingredients and chemical elements, as raw materials
(whereas they are the outcome of a long history and imply an
appropriation of materiality). It is not finished. Here is the dismembered
and dissociated human being. Here are the senses of smell, taste,
sight, touch, hearing — some atrophied, some hypertrophied. Here is
functioning separately perception, intelligence and reason. Here
is speech, discourse and writing. Here is daily life and celebration, the
latter moribund. It is obvious, urgently. <em>Synthesis</em> then becomes an
item on the order of the day, the order of the century. But this
synthesis, with its analytical intellect, appears only as a <em>combination</em>
of separate elements. But combination is <em>not</em> and can never be synthesis.
The city and the <em>urban</em> cannot be recomposed from the signs of
the city, the <em>semanthemes</em> of the <em>urban,</em> although the city is a signifying
whole. The city is not only a language, but also a practice.
Nobody therefore, and we have no fear to repeat it, is entitled to pronounce
or announce this synthesis. No more is the sociologist or community
worker than the architect, the economist, the demographer, the linguist
or semiologist. Nobody has the power or the right. Only the
philosopher might perhaps have the right, if philosophy in the course
of the centuries had not demonstrated its incapacity to attain concentrate
totalities (although it has always aimed at totality and has posed
global and general questions). Only a <em>praxis,</em> under conditions to be
determined, can take charge of the possibility and demand of a
synthesis this objective: the gathering together of what gives itself as
dispersed, dissociated, separated, and this in the form of simultaneity
and encounters.

We have here therefore before us, projected separately on the
ground, groups, ethnic groups, ages and sexes, activities, tasks and
functions, knowledge. Here is all that is necessary to create a world,
an urban society, or the developed <em>urban.</em> But this world is absent, this
society is before us only in a state of virtuality. It may perish in the
bud. Under existing conditions, it dies before being born. The conditions
which give rise to possibilities can also sustain them in a virtual
state, in presence-absence. Would this not be the root of this drama,
the point of emergence of nostalgia? The urban obsesses those who
live in need, in poverty, in the frustration of possibilities which remain
only possibilities. Thus the integration and participation obsess the
non-participants, the non-integrated, those who survive among the
fragments of a possible society and the ruins of the past: excluded
from the city, at the gates of the <em>urban.</em> The road travelled is staked
out with contradictions between the total (global) and the partial,
between analysis and synthesis. Here is a new one which reveals itself,
high and deep. It does interest theory but practice. The same <em>social practice,</em> that of society today (in France, in the second half of the
twentieth century) offers to critical analysis a double character which
cannot be reduced to a significant opposition, although it signifies.

On the one hand, chis social practice is <em>integrative.</em> It attempts to
integrate its elements and aspects into a coherent whole. Integration is
accomplished at different levels and according to various modalities. The
market, the ‘world of commodities’, that is, by consumption and ideology
of consumption, by ‘culture’, put forward as unitary and global; by
‘values’, including art; by the actions of the State, including national
consciousness and the political options and strategies at national level.
This integration is firstly aimed at the working class, but also the
intelligentsia and intellectuals, and critical thought (not excluding Marxism).
Planning could well become essential to this integrative practice.

At the same time this society practices <em>segregation.</em> This same rationality
which sees itself as global (organizing, planning, unitary and
unifying) concretizes itself at the analytical level. On the ground it
projects separation. It tends (as in the United States), to form ghettos
or parking lots, those of workers, intellectuals, students (the campus),
foreigners, and so forth, not forgetting the ghetto of leisure or ‘creativity’,
reduced to miniaturization or hobbies. Ghetto in space and
ghetto in time. In planning, the term ‘zoning’ already implies separation,
segregation, isolation in planned ghettos. The fact becomes
rationality in the project.

This society wants itself and sees itself as <em>coherent.</em> It seeks coherence,
linked to rationality both as feature of efficient organizational
action, and as value and criterion. Under examination the
ideology of coherence reveals a hidden but none the less blatant
incoherence. Would coherence not be the obsession of an incoherent
society, which searches the way towards coherence by wishing to stop
in a conflictual situation denied as such?

This is not the only obsession. *Integration*  also becomes an obsessional
theme, an aimless aspiration. The term ‘integration’ used in all
its meanings, appears in texts (newspapers, books, and speeches) with
such frequency that it must reveal something. On the one hand, this
term designates a <em>concept</em> concerning and enclosing social practice
divulging a strategy. On the other, it is a <em>social connotator,</em> without
concept, objective or objectivity, revealing an obsession with integrating
(to this or that, to a group, an ensemble or a whole). How could it
be otherwise in a society which superimposes the whole to the pans,
synthesis to analysis, coherence to incoherence, organization to dislocation?
It is from the city that the urban problematic reveals this
constitutive duality with its conflictual content. What results from
this? Without a doubt paradoxical phenomena of disintegrating integration
which refer particularly to urban reality.

This does not mean that this society is disintegrating and falling
apart. No. It is functionning. How? Why? That creates a problem. It
must also mean that this functioning is not without an enormous
<em>malaise</em> — its obsession.
Another obsessional theme is <em>participation,</em> linked to integration.
This is not a simple obsession. In practice, the ideology of participation enables us to have the acquiescence of interested and concerned
people at a small price. After a more or less elaborate pretence at
information and social activity, they return to their tranquil passivity
and retirement. Is it not clear that real and active participation already
has a name? It is called <em>self-management.</em> Which poses other problems.

Very powerful forces tend to destroy the city. A particular kind of
planning projects on the ideological terrain a practice whose aim is the
death of the city. These social and political forces ravage the <em>urban</em> in
the making. This kernel, so powerful, in its own way, can it grow in
the cracks which still subsist between these masses? Does science, or
rather, scientificity, which puts itself at the service of existing rationality,
legitimize these masses of the State, private enterprise, culture
which allow the city to perish while offering its images and <em>“oeuvres”</em>
for consumption sentence. ‘Does science ... legitimize these masses ...
for consumption?’ Construction is? Could urban life recover and
strengthen its capacities of <em>integration</em> and <em>participation</em> of the city,
which are almost entirely lost, and which cannot be stimulated either
by authoritarian means or by administrative prescription, or by the
intervention of specialists? The foremost theoretical problem can be
formulated thus. The political meaning of class segregation is clear,
whether it is a ‘subject’ for analysis, whether it is the end result of a
series of unplanned actions, or whether it is the effect of a will. For the
<em>working class,</em> victim of segregation and expelled from the traditional
city, deprived of a present or possible urban life, there is a practical
and therefore <em>political</em> problem even if it is not posed politically and
even if until now the housing question has for it and its representatives
concealed the problematic of the city and the <em>urban.</em>

** The Right to the City

Theoretical thought sees itself compelled to redefine the forms, functions
and structures of the city (economic, political, cultural, etc.) as
well as the social needs inherent to urban society. Until now, only
those individual needs, motivated by the so-called society of consumption
(a bureaucratic society of managed consumption) have been
prospected, and moreover manipulated rather than effectively known
and recognized. Social needs have an anthropological foundation.
Opposed and complimentary, they include the need for security and
opening, the need for certainty and adventure, that of organization of
work and of play, the needs for the predictable and the unpredictable,
of similarity and difference, of isolation and encounter, exchange and
investments, of independence (even solitude) and communication, of
immediate and long-term prospects. The human being has the need to
accumulate energies and to spend them, even waste them in play. He
has a need to see, to hear, to touch, to taste and the need to gather
these perceptions in a ‘world’. To these
anthropological needs which
are socially elaborated (that is, sometimes separated, sometimes joined
together, here compressed and there hypertrophied), can be added
specific needs which are not satisfied by those commercial and cultural
infrastructures which are somewhat parsimoniously taken into account
by planners. This refers to the need for creative activity, for the
*oeuvre* (not only of products and consumable material goods), of the
need for information, symbolism, the imaginary and play. Through
these specified needs lives and survives a fundamental desire of which
play, sexuality, physical activities such as sport, creative activity, art
and knowledge are particular expressions and <em>moments,</em> which can
more or less overcome the fragmentary division of tasks. Finally, the
need of the city and urban life can only be freely expressed within a
perspective which here attempts to become clearer and to open up the
horizon. Would not specific urban needs be those of qualified places,
places of simultaneity and encounters, places where exchange would
not go through exchange value, commerce and profit? Would there
not also be the need for a time for these encounters, these exchanges?

At present, an analytical science of the city, which is necessary, is only
at the outline stage. At the beginning of their elaboration, concepts and
theories can only move forward with urban reality in the making, with
the <em>praxis</em> (social practice) of urban society. Now, not without effort,
the ideologies and practices which blocked the horizon and which were
only bottlenecks of knowledge and action, are being overcome.

The <em>science of the city</em> has the city as object. This science borrows its
methods, approaches and concepts from the fragmentary sciences, but
synthesis escapes it in two ways. Firstly, because this synthesis which
would wish itself as total, starting from the analytic, can only be
strategic systematization and programming. Secondly, because the
object,
the city, as consummate reality is falling apart.
Knowledge
holds in front of itself the historic city already modified, <em>to</em> cut it up
and put it together again from fragments. As social text, this historic
city no longer has a coherent set of prescriptions, of use of time linked
to symbols and <em>to</em> a style. This text is moving away. It takes the form
of a document, or an exhibition, or a museum. The city histocically
constructed is no longer lived and is no longer understood practically.
It is only an object of cultural consumption for tourists, for a estheticism,
avid for spectacles and the picturesque. Even for those who seek
to understand it with warmth, it is gone. Yet, the <em>urban</em> remains in a
state of dispersed and alienated actuality, as kernel and virtuality.
What the eyes and analysis perceive on the ground can at best pass for
the shadow of a future object in the light of a rising sun. It is
impossible to envisage the reconstitution of the old city, only the
construction of a new one on new foundations, on another scale and
in other conditions, in another society. The prescription is: there
cannot be a going back (towards the traditional city), nor a headlong
flight, towards a colossal and shapeless agglomeration. In other
words, for what concerns the city the object of science is not given.
The past, the present, the possible cannot be separated. What is being
studied is a <em>virtual object,</em> which thought studies, which calls for new
approaches.

The career of the old classical humanism ended long ago and badly.
It is dead. Its mummified and embalmed corpse weighs heavily and
does not smell good. It occupies many spaces, public or otherwise,
thus transforms into cultural cemeteries under the guise of the human:
museums, universities, various publications, not to mention new
towns and planning procedures. Trivialities and platitudes are wrapped
up in this ‘human scale’, as they say, whereas what we should take charge
of are the excesses and create ‘something’ to the scale of the universe.

This old humanism died during the World Wars, during the demographic
growth which accompanied great massacres, and before the
brutal demands of economic growth and competition and the pressure
of poorly controlled techniques. It is not even an ideology, barely a
theme for official speeches.

Recently there have been great cries of ‘God is dead, man too’ as if
the death of classical humanism was that of man. These formulae
spread in best-sellers, and taken in by a publicity not really responsible,
are nothing new. Nietzschean meditation, a dark presage for
Europe’s culture and civilization, began a hundred years ago during
the 1870–1 Franco-Prussian war. When Nietzsche announced the
death of God and man, he did not leave a gaping hole, or fill this void
with makeshift material, language or linguistics. He was also announcing
the Superhuman which he thought was to come. He was
overcoming the nihilism he was identifying. Authors transacting these
theoretical and poetic treasures, but with a delay of a century, plunge
us back into nihilism. Since Nietzsche, the dangers of the Superhuman
have been cruelly evident. Moreover, this ‘new man’ emerging from
industrial production and planning rationality has been more than
disappointing. There is still another way, that of urban society and the
human as <em>oeuvre</em> in this society which would be an <em>oeuvre</em> and not a
product. There is also the simultaneous overcoming of the old ‘social
animal’ and man of the ancient city, the urban animal, towards a
polyvalent, polysensorial, urban man capable of complex and transparent
relations with the world (the environment and himself). Or
there is nihilism. If man is dead, for whom will we build? How will we
build? It does not matter that the city has or has not disappeared, that
it must be thought anew, reconstructed on new foundations or overcome.
It does not matter whether terror reigns, that the atomic bomb
is dropped or that Planet Earth explodes. What is important? Who
thinks? Who acts? Who still speaks and for whom? If meaning and
finality disappear and we cannot even declare them in a praxis,
nothing matters. And if the capacities of the ‘human being’, technology,
science, imagination and art, or their absence, are erected as
autonomous powers, and that reflective thought is satisfied with this
assessment, the absence of a ‘subject’, what to reply? What to do?

Old humanism moves away and disappears. Nostalgia lessens and
we turn back less and less often to see its shape lying across the road.
It was the ideology of the liberal bourgeoisie, with its Greek and Latin
quotes sprinkled with Judeo-Christianity, which bent over the people
and human sufferings and which covered and supported the rhetoric
of the clear consciences of noble feelings and of the sensitive souls. A
dreadful cocktail, a mixture to make you sick. Only a few intellectuals
(from the ‘Left’ — but are there still any intellectuals on the ‘Right’?)
who are neither revolutionary nor openly reactionary, nor Dionysiacs
or Apollonians, still have a taste for this sad potion.

We thus must make the effort to reach out towards a new humanism,
a new praxis, another man, that of urban society. We must avoid
those myths which threaten this will, destroy those ideologies which
hinder this project and those strategies which divert this trajectory.
Urban life has yet to begin. What we are doing now is to complete
an inventory of the remains of a millenarian society where the
countryside dominated the city, and whose ideas, values, taboos and
prescriptions were largely agrarian, with rural and ‘natural’ dominant
features. A few sporadic cities hardly emerged from a rustic ocean.
Rural society was (still is), a society of scarcity and penury, of want
accepted or rejected, of prohibitions managing and regulating privations.
It was also the society of the <em>fête,</em> of festivities. But that aspect,
the best, has been lost and instead of myths and limitations, this is
what must be revitalized! A decisive remark: for the crisis of the
traditional city accompanies the world crisis of agrarian civilization,
which is a so traditional. It is up to us to resolve this double crisis,
especially by creating with the new city, a new life in the city. Revolutionary
societies (among which the USSR ten or fifteen years after the
October Revolution), intimated the development of society based on
industry. But they only intimated.

The use of ‘we’ in the sentences above has only the impact of a
metaphor to mean those concerned. The architect, the planner, the
sociologist, the economist, the philosopher or the politician cannot
out of nothingness create new forms and relations. More precisely, the
architect is no more a miracle-worker than the sociologist. Neither can
create social relations, although under certain favourable conditions
they help trends to be formulated (to take shape). Only social life
(praxis) in its global capacity possesses such powers — or does not
possess them. The people mentioned above can individually or in
teams dear the way; they can also propose, cry out and prepare forms.
And also (and especially), through a maieutic nurtured by science,
assess acquired experience, provide a lesson from failure and give
birth to the possible.

At the point we have arrived there is an urgent need to change
intellectual approaches and tools. It would be indispensable to take up
ideas and approaches from elsewhere and which are still not very
familiar.

<em>Transduction.</em> This is an intellectual operation which can be methodically
carried out and which differs from classical induction, deduction,
the construction of ‘models’, simulation as well as the simple
statement of hypothesis. Transduction elaborates and constructs a
theoretical object, a <em>possible</em> object from information related to reality
and a problematic posed by this reality. Transduction assumes an
incessant feed back between the conceptual framework used and
empirical observations. Its theory (methodology), gives shape to certain
spontaneous mental operations of the planner, the architect, the
sociologist, the politician and the philosopher. It introduces rigour in
invention and knowledge in utopia.

<em>Experimental utopia.</em> Who is not a <em>utopian</em> today? Only narrowly
specialized practitioners working to order without the slightest critical
examination of stipulated norms and constraints, only these not very
interesting people escape utopianism. All are utopians, including those
futurists and planners who project Paris in the year 2,000 and those
engineers who have made Brasilia! But there are several utopianisms.
Would not the worst be that utopianism which does not utter its
name, covers itself with positivism and on this basis imposes the
harshest constraints and the most derisory absence of technicity?

Utopia is to be considered experimentally by studying its implications
and consequences on the ground. These can surprise. What are
and what would be the most successful places? How can they be
discovered? According to which criteria? What are the times and
rhythms of daily life which are inscribed and prescribed in these
‘successful’ spaces favourable to happiness? That is interesting.

There are other indispensable intellectual approaches to identify
without dissociating them the three fundamental theoretical concepts
of structure, function and form, and to know their import, the spheres
of their validity, their limits and their reciprocal relations. To know
that they make a whole bur that the elements of this whole have a
certain independence and relative autonomy. To not privilege one
over the other, otherwise this gives an ideology, that is, a closed and
dogmatic system of significations: structuralism, formalism, functionalism.
To be used equally and in turn for the analysis of the real (an
analysis which is never exhaustive or without residue), as well as for
that operation known as ‘transduction’. It is important to understand
chat a function can be accomplished by means of different structures,
and that there is no unequivocal link between the terms. That is, that
functions and structures clothe themselves with forms which reveal
and veil them — chat the triplicity of these aspects make a whole which
is more than these aspects, elements and parts.

We have among our intellectual tools one which deserves neither
disdain nor privilege of the absolute: that of <em>system</em> (or rather <em>sub-system</em>
of significations.

Policies have their systems of significations — ideologies — which
enable them to subordinate to their strategies social acts and events
influenced by them. Ac the ecological level, the humble inhabitant
has his system (or rather, his sub-system) of significations. The fact
of living here or there involves the reception, adoption and transmission
of such a system, for example that of owner-occupied housing.
The system of significations of the inhabitant cells of his passivities
and activities: he is received but changed by practice. He is
perceived.

Architects seem to have established and dogmatized an ensemble of
significations, as such poorly developed and variously labelled as
‘function’, ‘form’, ‘structure’, or rather, functionalism, formalism, and
structuralism. They elaborate them not from the significations perceived
and lived by those who inhabit, but from their interpretation of
inhabiting. It is graphic and visual, tending towards metalanguage. It
is graphism and visualization. Given that these architects form a social
body, they attach themselves to institutions, their system tends to close
itself off, impose itself and elude all criticism. There is cause to
formulate this system, often put forward without any other procedure
or precaution, as <em>planning</em> by extrapolation.

This theory which one could legitimately call planning. dose to the
meanings of that old practice of to <em>to inhabit</em> (that is, the human) which
would add to these partial facts a general theory of urban <em>time-spaces,</em>
which would reveal a new practice emerging from this elaboration can
be envisaged only as the practical application of a comprehensive
theory of the city and the urban which could go beyond current
scissions and separations, particularly those existing between philosophy
and the sciences of the city, the global and the partial. Current
planning projects could figure in this development — but only within
an unwavering critique of their ideological and strategic implications.
Inasmuch as we can define it, our object — the urban — will never today
be entirely present in our reflections. More than any another object, it
possesses a very complex quality of totality in act and potential the
object of research gradually uncovered, and which will be either
slowly or never exhausted. To take this object as a given truth is
operate a mythifying ideology. Knowledge must envisage a considerable
number of methods to grasp this object, and cannot fasten itself
onto a particular approach. Analytical configurations will follow as
closely as possible the internal articulations of this ‘thing’ which is not
a thing; they will be accompanied by reconstructions which will never
be realized. Descriptions, analyses and attempts at synthesis can never
be passed off as being exhaustive or definitive. All these notions, all
these batteries of concepts will come into play: form, structure, function,
level, dimension, dependent and independent variables, correlations,
totality, ensemble, system, etc. Here as elsewhere, but more than
elsewhere, the residue reveals itself to be most precious. Each ‘object’
constructed will in turn be submitted to critical examination. Within
the possible, this will be accomplished and submitted to experimental
verification. The science of the city requires a historical period to make itself and  to orient social practice.

This science is necessary but not sufficient. We can perceive its limits
at the same time as its necessity. Planning thought proposes the
establishment or reconstitution of highly localized, highly particularized
and centralized social units whose linkages and tensions would
re-establish an urban unity endowed with a complex interior order,
with its hierarchy and a supple structure. More specifically, sociological
thought seeks an understanding and reconstitution of the integrative
capacities of the urban as well as the conditions of practical
participation. Why not? But only under one condition: never to
protect these fragmented and therefore partial attempts from criticism,
practical assessment and global preoccupation.

Knowledge can therefore construct and propose models. In this
sense each object is but a model of urban reality. Nevertheless, such a
reality will never become manageable as a thing and will never become
instrumental even for the most operational knowledge. Who would
not hope that the city becomes again what it was — the act and *oeuvre*
of a complex thought? But it cannot remain at the level of wishes and
aspirations and an <em>urban strategy</em> is not defined. An urban strategy
cannot cake into account existing strategies and acquired knowledge:
science of the city, with its disposition towards the planning of growth
and the control of development. Whoever says ‘strategies’ says the
hierarchy of ‘variables’ to be considered, some having a strategic
capacity and others remaining at the tactical level — and says also the
power to realize these strategies on the ground. Only groups, social
classes and class fractions capable of revolutionary initiative can take
over and realize to fruition solutions to urban problems. It is from these
social and political forces that the renewed city will become the <em>oeuvre.</em>
The first thing to do is to defeat currently dominant strategies and
ideologies. In the present society that there exist many divergent groups
and strategies (for example between the State and the private) does not
alter the situation. From questions of landed property to problems of
segregation, each project of <em>urban reform</em> questions the structures, the
immediate (individual) and daily relations of existing society, but also
those that one purports to impose by the coercive and institutional means
of what remains of urban reality. In itself *reformist*, the strategy of urban renewal becomes ‘inevitably’ revolutionary, not by force of circumstance,
but against the established order. Urban strategy resting on the science of
the city needs a social support and political forces to be effective. It
cannot act on its own. It cannot but depend on the presence and action
of the
working class, the only one able to put an end to a segregation
directed essentially against it. Only this class, as a class, can decisively
contribute to the reconstruction of centrality destroyed by a strategy of
segregation and found again in the menacing form of <em>centres of decision-making.</em>
This does not mean that the working class will make urban
society all on its own, but that without it nothing is possible. Without it
integration has no meaning and disintegration will continue under the
guise of nostalgia and integration. There is there not only an option but
an horizon which opens or doses. When the working class is silent, when
it is quiescent and cannot accomplish what theory has defined as its
‘historical mission’, then both the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are lacking.
Reflection confirms this absence, which means that it is appropriate to
consider two series of propositions:

1. <em>A political programme of urban reform</em> not defined by the framework
and the possibilities of prevailing society or subjugated to a
‘realism’, although based on the study of realities. In other words,
reform thus understood is not limited to reformism. This programme
will therefore have a singular and even paradoxical character. It will
be established to be proposed to political forces, parties. One could
even add that preferentially it would be presented to ‘left’ parties,
political formations representing or wishing to represent the working
class. But it would not be established as a function of these forces and
formations. It will have in relation to them a specific character which
comes from knowledge, a scientific part. It will be <em>proposed</em> (free to be
altered) by those who take control of it. Let political forces take their
responsibilities. In this domain which engages the future <em>of</em> modern
society and that of producers, ignorance and misunderstanding entail
responsibilities before history.

2. Mature <em>planning projects</em> which consist of models and spatial
forms and urban times without concern for their current feasibility or
their utopian aspect. It does not seem possible that these models result
either from a simple study of existing cities and urban typologies, or
from a combination of elements. Other than contrary to experience,
the forms of space and time will be invented and proposed to praxis.
That imagination be deployed, not the imaginary of escape and evasion
which conveys ideologies, but the imaginary which invests itself
in <em>appropriation</em> (of time, space, physiolocal life and desire). Why not
oppose ephemeral cities <em>to</em> the eternal city, and movable centrality to
stable centres? All audacities can be premissed. Why limit these propositions
only to the morphology of time and space? They could also
include the way of living in the city and the development of the urban
on this basis.

In these two series there will also be long, medium and short-term
propositions constituting urban strategy understood as such.

The society in which we live appears to tend towards plenitude — or
at least towards fullness (durable goods and objects, quantity, satisfaction
and rationality). In face it allows a colossal gulf to be dug into
which ideologies agitate themselves and the fog of rhetoric spreads.
Having left speculation and contemplation, incomplete knowledge
and fragmentary divisions, one of the greatest projects active thought
can propose for itself is to fill this lacuna — and not only with language.

In a period during which ideologists pronounce abundantly on
structures, the destructuration of the city manifests the depth of
phenomena, of social and cultural disintegration. Considered as a
whole, this society finds itself <em>incomplete.</em> Between the sub-systems
and the structures consolidated by various means (compulsion, terror,
and ideological persuasion), there are holes and chasms. These voids
are not there due to chance. They are the places of the possible. They
contain the floating and dispersed elements of the possible, but not the
power which could assemble them. Moreover, structuring actions and
the power of the social void tend to prohibit action and the very
presence of such a power. The conditions of the possible can only be
realized in the course of a radical metamorphosis.

In this conjuncture, ideology claims to provide an absolute quality
to ‘scientificity’, science appertaining to the real, dissecting it, reconstituting
it, and by this fact isolating it from the possible and closing
the way. Now, in such a conjuncture science which is fragmentary
science can only have a <em>programmatic</em> impact. It brings elements to a
programme. If one concedes that these elements already constitute a
totality, and one wishes to execute this programme literally, one treats
the virtual object as a pre-existent technical object. A project is accomplished
without criticism and this project fulfills an ideology by projecting
it on the ground — that of the technocrats. Although necessary,
policy is not enough. It changes during the course of its implementation.
Only social force, capable of investing itself in the urban through
a long political experience, can take charge of the realization of a
programme concerning urban society. Conversely, the science of the
city brings to this perspective a theoretical and critical foundation, a positive base. Utopia controlled by dialectical reason serves as a safe-guard supposedly scientific fictions and visions gone astray.
Besides, this foundation and base prevent reflection from losing itself in
pure policy. Here the dialectical movement presents itself as a relation
between science and political power, as a dialogue which actualizes
relations of ‘theory-practice’ and ‘critical positive-negative’.

As necessary as science, but not sufficient, <em>art</em> brings to the realization
of urban society its long meditation on life as drama and
pleasure. In addition and especially, art resticutes the meaning of the
<em>oeuvre,</em> giving it multiple facets of <em>appropriated</em> time and space;
neither endured nor accepted by a passive resignation, metamorphosed
as <em>oeuvre.</em> Music shows the appropriation of time, painting
and sculpture that of space. If the sciences discover partial determinisms,
art and philosophy show how a totality grows out of partial
determinisms. It is incumbent on the social force capable of creating
urban society to make efficient and effective the unity of art, technique
and knowledge. As much the science of the city, art and the history of
art are part of a meditation on the urban which wants to make
efficient the images which proclaim it. By overcoming this opposition,
chis meditation striving for action would thus be both utopian and
realistic. One could even assert that the maximum of utopianism could
unite with the optimum of realism.

Among the contradictions characteristic of our time there are those
(particularly difficult ones) between the realities of society and the
facts of civilization. On the one hand, genocide, and on the other,
medical and other interventions which enable a child to be saved or an
agony prolonged. One of the latest but not lease contradictions has
been shown in this essay: between the *socialization of society* and
<em>generalized segregation</em>. There are many others, for example, the
contradiction between the label of <em>revolutionary</em> and the attachment
to an obsolete productivist rationalism. The individual, at the centre
of social forces due to the pressure of the masses, asserts himself and
does not die. <em>Rights</em> appear and become customs or prescriptions,
usually followed by enactments. And we know how, through gigantic
destructions, World Wars, and the terror of nuclear threats, that these
concrete rights come to complete the abstract rights of man and the
citizen inscribed on the front of buildings by democracy during its
revolutionary beginnings: the rights of ages and sexes (the woman, the
child and the elderly), rights of conditions (the proletarian, the peasant),
rights to training and education, to work, to culture, to rest, to
health, to housing. The pressure of the working class has been and
remains necessary (but not sufficient) for the recognition of these
rights, for their entry into customs, for their inscription into codes
which are still incomplete.

Over the last few years and rather strangely, the <em>right to nature</em>
entered into social practice thanks to <em>leisure,</em> having made its way
through protestations becoming commonplace against noise, fatigue,
the concentrationary universe of cities (as cities are rotting or exploding).
A strange journey indeed! Nature enters into exchange value and
commodities, to be bought and sold. This ‘naturality’ which is
counterfeited and traded in, is destroyed by commercialized, industrialized
and institutionally organized leisure pursuits. ‘Nature’, or
what passes for it, and survives of it, becomes the ghetto of leisure
pursuits, the separate place of pleasure and the retreat of ‘creativity’.
Urban dwellers carry the urban with them, even if they do not bring
planning with them! Colonized by them, the countryside has lost the
qualities, features and charms of peasant life. The urban ravages the
countryside: this urbanized countryside opposes itself to a dispossessed
rurality, the extreme case of the deep misery of the inhabitant,
the habitat, of to inhabit. Are the rights to nature and to the countryside not destroying themselves?

In the face of this pseudo-right, the <em>right to the city</em> is like a cry and
a demand. This right slowly meanders through the surprising detours
of nostalgia and tourism, the return to the heart of the traditional city,
and the Call of existent or recently developed centralities. The claim to
nature, and the desire to enjoy it displace the right to the city. This
latest claim expresses itself indirectly as a tendency to flee the deteriorated
and unrenovated city, alienated urban life before at last, ‘really’
living. The need and the ‘right’ to nature contradict the right to the city
without being able to evade it. (This does not mean that it is not
necessary to preserve vase ‘natural’ spaces).

The <em>right to the city</em> 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 <em>right to urban life.</em> It does not matter
whether the urban fabric encloses the countryside and what survives
of peasant life, as long as the ‘urban’, place of encounter, priority of
use value, inscription in space of a time promoted to the rank of a
supreme resource among all resources, finds its morphological base
and its practico-material realization. Which presumes an integrated
theory of the city and urban society, using the resources of science and
art. Only the working class can become the agent, the social carrier or
support of this realization. Here again, as a century ago, it denies and
contests, by its very existence, the class strategy directed against it. As
a hundred years ago, although under new conditions, it gathers the
interests (overcoming the immediate and the superficial) of the whole
society and firstly of all those who <em>inhabit.</em> Who can ignore that the
Olympians of the new bourgeois aristocracy no longer inhabit. They
go from grand hotel to grand hotel, or from castle to castle, commanding
a fleet or a country from a yacht. They are everywhere and
nowhere. That is how they fascinate people immersed into everyday
life. They transcend everyday life, possess nature and leave it up to the
cops to contrive culture. Is it essential to describe at length, besides the
condition of youth, students and intellectuals, armies of workers with
or without white collars, people from the provinces, the colonized and
semi-colonized of all sorts, all those who endure a well-organized daily
life, is it here necessary to exhibit the derisory and untragic misery of
the inhabitant, of the suburban dweller and of the people who stay in
residential ghettos, in the mouldering centres of old cities and in the
proliferations lost beyond them? One only has to open one’s eyes to
understand the daily life of the one who runs from his dwelling to the
station, near or far away, to the packed underground train, the office
or the factory, to return the same way in the evening and come home
to recuperate enough to start again the next day. The picture of this
generalized misery would not go without a picture of ‘satisfactions’
which hides it and becomes the means to elude it and break free from
it.

** Perspective or Prospective?

Since its beginnings, classical philosophy, which has had as social base
and theoretical foundation the city, thought the city, and endeavours
to determine the image of the ideal city. The <em>Critias</em> of Plato sees in the
city an image of the world, or rather of the cosmos, a microcosm.
Urban time and space reproduce on earth the configuration of the
universe as the philosopher discovers it.

If today one wants a representation of the ‘ideal’ city and of its
relations to the universe, one will not find this image with the philosophers
and even less in an analytical vision which divides urban
reality into fractions, sectors, relations and correlations. One has to
find it among the writers of science fiction. In science fiction novels,
every possible and impossible variation of future urban society has
been foreseen. Sometimes the old urban cores agonize, covered with
an urban fabric more or less thick, more or less sclerosed or cancerous,
which proliferates and spreads over the planet. In these cores destined
to disappearance after a long decline, live or vegetate failures, artists,
intellectuals and gangsters. Sometimes colossal cities reconstitute
themselves and carry onto a higher level former struggles for power.
In Azimov’s magistral work, <em>The Foundation,</em> an entire planet is
covered by a giant city, Tremor, which has all the means of knowledge
and power with which it dominates, as a centre of decision·making, a
whole galaxy. After many gigantic episodes, Trentor saves the
universe and brings it to its end, that is, to the ‘reign of endings’, joy
and happiness, for excesses are finally overcome and the time of the
world finally appropriated in a cosmic space. Between these two
extremes, the visionaries of science fiction have also their intermediary
versions: the city ruled by a powerful computer, the city of a highly
specialized and vital production which moves among planetary systems
and galaxies, etc.

Is it necessary to explore so far ahead the horizon of horizons? The
ideal city, the New Athens, is already there to be seen in the image
which Paris and New York and some other cities project. The centre
of decision-making and the centre of consumption meet. Their alliance
on the ground based on a strategic convergence creates an inordinate
centrality. We already know that this decision-making centre includes
all the channels of information and means of cultural and scientific
development. Coercion and persuasion converge with the power of
decision-making and the capacity to consume. Strongly occupied and
inhabited by these new Masters, this centre is held by them. Without
necessarily owning it all, they possess this privileged space, axis of a
strict spatial policy. Especially, they have the privilege to possess time.
Around them, distributed in space according to formalized principles,
there are human groups which can no longer bear the name of slaves,
serfs, vassals or even proletarians. What could they be called? Subjugated,
they provide a multiplicity of services for the Masters of this
State solidly established on the city. These Masters have around for
them every cultural and other pleasure, from nightclubs to the splendours
of the opera — not excluding remote controlled amusements.
Could this not be the true New Athens, with its minority of free
citizens, possessing and enjoying social spaces, dominating an enormous
mass of subjugated people, in principle free, genuinely and
perhaps voluntarily servants, treated and manipulated according to
rational methods? Are not the scholars, sociologists leading, in this
very different from ancient philosophers, not themselves the servants
of State and Order, under the pretence of empiricism and rigour, of
scientificity? The possibilities can even be assessed. Directors, heads,
presidents of this and that, elites, leading writers and artists, well-known
entertainers and media people, make up one per cent, or just
under half a million of the new notables in France in the twenty-first
century, each with their family and their following, and their own
‘firm’. The domination of and by centrality in no way denies the
possession of secondary domains — the enjoyment of nature, the sea,
the mountains, ancient cities (available through trips, hotels, etc.).
Next are about four per cent of executives, administrators, engineers
and scholars. After selection, the most eminent of these are admitted
into the heart of the city. For this selection, incomes and society rituals
might be sufficient. State capitalism has carefully organized for other
privileged subordinates domains distributed according to a rational
plan. Before reaching this goal State capitalism has carefully prepared
it. Without omitting the realization of several urban ghettos, it has
organized for scholars and for science a severely competitive sector: in
the universities and laboratories, scholars and intellectuals have confronted
each other on a purely competitive basis, with a zeal worthy
of a better job, for the best interest of the Masters, the economic and
political, for the glory and joy of the Olympians. Indeed, these secondary
elites are assigned to residence in science parks, university campuses
— ghettos for intellectuals. The mass, under pressure from many
constraints, spontaneously houses itself in satellite cities, planned
suburbs, and other more or less residential ghettos. There is for it only
carefully measured space. Time eludes it. It leads it daily life bound
(perhaps unwittingly), to the requirement of the concentration of
powers. But this is not a concentrationary universe. All this can quite
do without the ideology of freedom under the pretence of rationality,
organization, and programming. These masses who do not deserve the
name of people, or popular classes, or working class live relatively
well. Apart from the fact that their daily life is remote-controlled and
the permanent threat of unemployment weighs heavily on them, contributing
to a latent and generalized terror.

If someone smiles at this utopia, he is wrong. But how to prove it?
When his eyes will open, it will be too late. He demands proof. How
do you show light to a blind person, or the horizon to a myopic one —
even if he knows the theory of wholes, or of ‘clusters’, the finesses of
variance analysis, or the precise charms of linguistics?

Since the Middle Ages, each epoch of European civilization has had its
image of the possible, its dream, its fantasies of hell and paradise. Each
period, and perhaps each generation has had its representation of the best
of all possible worlds, or of a new life, an important, if not essential part
of all ideologies. In order to accomplish this function, the eighteenth
century, seemingly so rich, had only the rather feeble image of the noble
savage and exotic islands. To this exoticism, some men of that century
added a closer but somewhat prettified representation of England. In
relation to them, <em>we</em> are richly endowed. By <em>we</em> is meant a poorly defined
crowd, generally intellectuals, living and thinking in France at the beginning
of the second half of the twentieth-century. We have many models,
horizons, and avenues which do not converge to imagine the future: the
USSR and the United States, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Israel, even
Sweden or Switzerland — and without forgetting the Bororos.

While French society is becoming urbanized and Paris is being
transformed, and certain powers, if not State power, are modelling
France of the year 2,000, nobody is thinking about the ideal city
or what is happening to the real city. Utopia attaches itself to numerous more or less distant and unknown or misunderstood realities,
but no longer to real and daily life. It is no longer begotten in the
absences and lacunae which cruelly puncture surrounding reality. The
gaze turns away, leaves the horizon, loses itself in the clouds, elsewhere. Such is the power of diversion of ideologies, at the exact
moment when we no longer believe in ideology, but in realism and
rationalism!

Previously, by refuting partial disciplines and their interdisciplinary
attempts, one was also asserting that <em>synthesis belongs to the political</em>
(that is, that all synthesis of analytical faces about urban reality
conceals under philosophy or an ideology a <em>strategy).</em> Statesmen,
experts and specialists should certainly not be given control of decision-
making. The term <em>political</em> is not here used so narrowly. Such a
proposition must be understood in the opposite way to what has been
expressed here. The capacity of synthesis belongs to political forces
which are in fact social forces (classes and fractions of classes, groupings
or class alliances). They exist or not, they manifest and express
themselves or not. They speak or do not speak. It is up to them to
indicate social needs, to influence existing institutions, to open the
horizon and lay claims to a future which will be their <em>oeuvre.</em> If the
inhabitants of various categories and strata allow themselves to be
manoeuvred and manipulated, displaced anywhere under the pretext
of social mobility, if they accept the conditions of an exploitation
more refined and extensive than before, too bad for them. If the
working class is silent, if it does not act, either spontaneously or by the
mediation of its institutional representatives and mandatories, segregation
will continue resulting again in a vicious circle. Segregation is
inclined to prohibit protest, contest, action, by dispersing those who
protest, contest, and act. In this perspective political life will either
challenge or reaffirm the centre of political decision-making. For
parties and men, this option is the <em>criterion of democracy.</em>

The politician needs a <em>theory</em> to help him determine its course but
this presents some great difficulties. How can there be a theory of
urban society, the city and <em>the urban,</em> of realities and possibilities,
without synthesis?

Two dogmatic disciplines, philosophical systematization and systematization
from partial analyses under the pretence of such disciplines
or of so-called interdisciplinary research have already been rejected.
There can be no possibility of an analysis accomplished in the context
of knowledge. The unity outlined is defined by a convergence which
only practice can actualize between:

 1. the goals, spread over time of political action, from the
possible to the impossible, that is, what is possible here and
now, to what is impossible today, but will become possible
tomorrow in the course of this very action
 2. the theoretical elements brought to the analysis of urban reality,
that is, the ensemble of knowledge brought into play
during the course of political action, ordered, used and dominated
by this action
 3. the theoretical elements contributed by philosophy, which appear
in a new light, as its history inscribes itself in another
perspective — philosophical meditation transforming itself according
to reality or rather, the realization to accomplish.
 4. the theoretical elements brought by art, conceived as a capacity
to transform reality, to <em>appropriate</em> at the highest level the facts
of the ‘lived’, of time, space, the body and desire.

From this convergence, one can define the preceding conditions. It is
essential to consider no longer industrialization and urbanization separately,
but to perceive in urbanization the meaning, the goal and the
finality of industrialization. In other words, it is essential to aim no longer
for economic growth for its own sake, and economistic ideology which
entails strategic objectives, namely, superprofit and capitalist overexploitation,
the control of the economic (which fails precisely because of
this) to the advantage of the State. Concepts of economic equilibrium,
harmonious growth, structural maintenance (structured–structuring relations
being existing relations of production and property) must be
subordinated to more powerful concepts potentially of development, and
of concrete rationality emerging from conflicts.

In other words, <em>growth must be guided.</em> Very common formulations
which pass for democratic (growth, well-being for all, the general
interest) lose their meaning and this applies to liberalism as economistic
ideology as much as to centralized State planning. Such an ideology,
whether or not prospective, reduces the outlook on such issues
as the increase of wages and the better distribution of national
revenue, or even on the review and adjustment of the capital-labour
relation.

To direct growth towards development, therefore towards <em>urban society,</em> means firstly to prospect <em>new needs,</em> knowing chat such needs
are discovered in the course of their emergence and are revealed in the
course of their prospection. They do not pre-exist as objects. They do
not feature in the ‘real’ described by market studies and studies of
‘individual’ motivation. Consequently, this means substituting social
planning whose theory is hardly elaborated. Social needs lead to the
production of new ‘goods’ which are not this or that <em>object,</em> but social
objects in space and time. Man of urban society is <em>already</em> a man rich
in needs: the man of rich needs awaiting their objectification and
realization. Urban society overtakes the old and the new poverty, as
much the destitution of isolated subjectivity as that humdrum old need
for money with its worn symbols of the ‘pure’ gaze, the ‘pure’ sign, the
‘pure’ spectacle.

Thus, direction is not defined by an effective synthesis, but by a
convergence, a virtuality which is outlined but realized only at the
<em>limit.</em> This limit is not somewhere in the infinite, and yet it be can
reached by successive leaps and bounds. It is impossible to settle in it
and to establish it as an accomplished reality. Hence this is the
essential feature of the method already considered and named ‘transduction’,
the construction of a virtual object approached from experimental
facts. The horizon opens up and calls for actualization.

The orientation reacts upon researched facts. In this way research
ceases to be either indeterminate, that is, empiricist, or a simple
confirmation of a thesis, that is, <em>dogmatist.</em> In this light, philosophy
and its history, art and its metamorphoses appear transformed.

As for the analytical aspect of urban research, it modifies itself by
the fact that research has already found ‘something’ at the outset and
that the direction or orientation influences the hypothesis. There is no
more question of isolating the points of space and time, of considering
separately activities and functions, or of studying apart from each
other behaviours or images, distributions and relations. These various
aspects of social production, that of the city and urban society, are
situated in relation to a framework of explanation and forecasting.
Since method consists as much in overcoming ecological description as
structural and functional analysis, in order to reach out to the concrete
of urban drama, formal evidence could be provided by the general
theory of forms. According to this theory, there is a form of the city:
assembly, simultaneity, encounter. Transduction is the intellectual
approach linked to these operations which codifies them or supports
them methodologically.

Scientifically speaking, the distinction between <em>strategic variables</em>
and <em>tactical variables</em> seems fundamental. The first ones, as soon as
they are identified, subordinate the second. Increase of wages? Better
distribution of national revenue? Nationalization of this or that? Very
well. But these are tactical variables. In the same way the suppression
of urban related constraints would affect the municipalization, nationalization
or socialization of building plots. Fine and well. But for what
purpose? The increase of rates and rhythms of growth between
strategic variables, given that quantitative growth already poses qualitative
problems of finality and development. The issue is not only rates
of growth, production and revenues, bur distribution. Which part of
increased production and global revenue will be attributed to social
needs, to ‘culture’, to urban reality? Is not the transformation of daily
life part of strategic variables? One could think it so. To take an
example, flexible working hours are of interest. This is only a minuscule
tactical action. The creation of new networks concerning the life
of children and adolescents (crèches, playing fields and sports, etc.),
the constitution of a very simple apparatus of social pedagogy, which
would inform as much social life itself as sexual life, the art of living
and art <em>tout court.</em> Such an institution would have much more impact:
it would mark the passage from the tactical to the strategic in this
field.

The variables of projects elaborated by economists also depend on
generally poorly defined strategies. Against class strategies which
often use very powerful scientific instruments and which tend to abuse
science (no: scientificity — a rigid and coercive ideological apparatus)
as means to persuade and impose, what is needed is to turn knowledge
around by putting it back on its feet.

Socialism? Of course, that is what it is about. But what socialism?
According to which concept and theory of socialist society? Is the
definition of this society by the planned organization of production
enough? No. Socialism today can only be conceived as production
oriented towards social needs, and consequently, towards the needs of
urban society. The goals borrowed from simple industrialization are
being overtaken and transformed. Such is the thesis or hypothesis
formulated here. Conditions and preconditions? We know them: a
high level of production and productivity (by breaking with an exploitation
reinforced by a relatively decreasing minority of highly productive
manual and intellectual workers), and a high technical and cultural
level. In addition, the institution of new social relations, especially
between governing and governed, between ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ of
decision-making. These conditions have virtually been realized in
advanced industrial countries. Their formulation does not arise from
the <em>possible,</em> even if this possible seems far from real and is really far
away.

Possibilities relate to a double examination: the <em>scientific</em> (project
and projection, variations of projects, predictions) and the <em>imaginary</em>
(at the limit, science fiction). Why should the imaginary enter only
outside the real instead of nurturing reality? When there is a loss of
thought in and by the imaginary, it is being manipulated. The imaginary
is also a social fact. Do not specialists claim for themselves the
intervention of imagination and the imaginary when they acclaim the
‘man of synthesis’, or when they are disposed to welcome the ‘nexialist’
or the ‘generalist’?

For two centuries, industrialization has been promoting commodities
— which although they pre-existed, were limited by agrarian
and urban structures. It has enabled the virtually unlimited extension
of exchange value. It has shown how merchandise is not only a way
of putting people in relation to each other, but also a logic, a language,
and a world. Commodities have swept away barriers. And this process
is not over: the car, the current pilot-object in the world of commodities,
is overcoming this last barrier — the city. It was therefore the
time of political economy and the two variations of its rule: liberal and
state economis. Today the overtaking of economism is being outlined.
Towards what? Towards an ethic or an aesthetic, a moralism or an
aestheticism? Towards new ‘values’? No. What is at stake is an
overtaking by and in practice of a change in social practice. Use value,
subordinated for centuries to exchange value, can now come first
again. How? By and in urban society, from this reality which still
resists and preserves for us use value, the city. A weakened but true
vision of this truth is an urban reality for ‘users’ and not for capitalist
speculators, builders and technicians.

Here we can envisage a strategic variable: to limit the importance of
the car industry in the economy of a country and the place of the
‘car-object’ in daily life. To substitute the car for other techniques,
other objects, other means of transport such as public ones. This is a
rather simple and trivial example but demonstrates the subordination
of the ‘real’ to a strategy.

The problem of <em>leisure</em> forces one to think even more dearly of a
strategy. To define it in its full scope, it is important to firstly destroy
a few fantasies mixed up with ideology. The social imaginary furnished
by ideology and advertising, as well as the sad reality of
‘hobbies’ and miniaturized ‘creativity’ blocks the horizon. Neither
holidays, nor industrialized cultural production, nor leisure in or
outside daily life resolve this problem. Their images prevent it from
being posed. The problem is to put an end to the separations of ‘daily
life — leisure’ or ‘daily life — festivity’. It is to restitute the <em>fête</em> by
changing daily life. The city was a space occupied at one and the same
time by productive labour, by <em>oeuvres,</em> and by festivities. It should find
again this function beyond functions, in a metamorphosed urban
society. One of the strategic aims can be formulated in this way,
although it is only a formulation of what is happening today without
grace or splendour in cities which attempt to recreate the <em>fête</em> with
festivities and festivals.

Each type of society and each mode of production has had its type
of city. The relative discontinuity of modes of production defines the
history of urban reality, although this is not exclusive and other
periodization are possible. Another periodization resting on a specific
centrality would show more closely the succession of urban types but
would not coincide completely with the primary periodization.

The oriental city, reason and result of the Asiatic mode of production,
offers its triumphal way for gatherings and meetings. Armies
which protect and oppress the agricultural territories administered by
the city leave and return through chis way on which are deployed
military parades and religious processions. The palace of the prince,
the <em>umbilical,</em> the <em>omphalos,</em> is the centre of the world, the point of
departure and arrival. The sacred enclosure captures and condenses
sacredness diffused over the whole of the territory. It manifests the
eminent right of the sovereign, inseparable possession and sacredness.
The triumphal way penetrates into the enclosure through a door,
monument among monuments. It is the door of the true urban centre,
the centre of the world not open to gatherings. Around the door are
gathered guards, caravaneers, vagrants and robbers. The tribunal sits
here and gathers the inhabitants for spontaneous assemblies. It is the
place of urban order and disorder, of revolts and repressions.

In the Greek and Roman antique city, centrality is attached to an
empty space, the agora and the forum. It is a place for assembly. There
is an important difference between the agora and the forum. Prohibitions characterize the latter and buildings will quickly cover it up,
taking away from it its character of open space. It is not disjointed
from the centre of the world: the hole, the sacred–damned <em>mundus,</em>
the place from which souls leave, where the condemned and unwanted
children are thrown. The Greeks did not put emphasis on horror, on
the links between urban centrality and the underworld of the dead and
the souls. Their thought of their city is related to the Cosmos, a
luminous distribution of places in space, rather than to the world,
passage to darkness and of underworld wanderings. This shadow,
more Roman than Hellenic, weighs over the West.

For its part, the medieval city soon integrated merchants and commodities
and established them in its centre; the market-place. A commercial
centre characterized by the proximity of the church and the exclusion
of the enclosure — a heterotopy of territory. The symbolism and the
functions of this enclosure are different from that of the oriental or
antique city. The territory belongs to the lords, peasants, vagrants and
plunderers. Urban centrality welcomes produce and people. It forbids its
access to those who threaten its essential and economic function, thus
heralding and preparing capitalism. Nevertheless, centrality thus functionalized
and structured remains the object of all attentions. It is embellished.
The smallest hamlet, the smallest barbican have their arcades, the
possibly sumptuous monumental hall and municipal buildings which are
places of pleasure. The church blesses commerce and gives a good
conscience to the busy citizens. Within the limits of commercial rationality,
gatherings which are part of this double feature of the religious and
the rational take place in the square, between the church and the market.
How these two features associate by colliding together in combination or
in conflict, is another story.

The capitalist city has created the centre of consumption. Industrial
production did not constitute centrality as such, except in the special
cases — if one can say that — of big enterprise around which a workers’
city was erected. We already know the double character of the capitalist
city: place of consumption and consumption of place. Businesses
densify in the centre, and attract expensive shops, luxury foodstuffs
and products. The establishment of this centraliry is partial to the old
cores, the spaces appropriated during the course of a previous history.
It cannot go without it. In these privileged sites, the consumer also
comes to consume space; the collection of objects in the windows of
boutiques becomes the reason and the pretext for the gathering of
people. They look, they see, they talk and talk with each other. And it
is the place of encounters amongst the collection of things. What is
said and written, comes before everything else: it is the world of
commodities, of the language of commodities, of the glory and the
extension of exchange value. It tends to absorb use value in exchange
and exchange value. Yet, use and use value resist irreducibly. This
irreducibility of the urban centre plays an essential role in this argument.

It is neo-capitalism which superimposes, without denying or destroying
it, the centre of consumption upon the centre of decision-making
It no longer gathers together people and things, but data
and knowledge. It inscribes in an eminently elaborated form of simultaneity
the conception of the whole incorporated into an electronic
brain, using the quasi-instantaneity of communications, thus overcoming
obstacles such as the loss of information, the meaningless
accumulations of elements, redundancies, etc. With a disinterested
aim? Certainly not. Since the problem is political, those who constitute
specific centrality aim for power or are its instruments. The issue is not
simply to ‘master technique’ in general, but to master clearly defined
techniques with socio-political implications. What is at stake is to
control the potential masters: those whose power appropriates all
possibilities.

The controversy has been taken up again and pushed towards new
conclusions to propose and defend another centrality. The possibility
of an urban society here outlined cannot be satisfied with centralities
of the past, although it does not destroy them and appropriates them
by altering them. What to project? There is something barren about
cultural centrality. It easily allows itself to be organized, institutionalized,
and later, bureaucratized. There is nothing more derisive than
the bureaucrat of culture. The educational is attractive, but neither
seduces nor enchants. Pedagogy implies localized practices, not socialized
centrality. Moreover, there is nothing to prove chat there is
‘one’ or ‘a’ culture. Subordinated to this entity, ‘culture’ and its
ideology, ‘culturalism’, theatre, the greatest of games, is threatened
with boredom. The elements of a superior unit, the fragments and
aspects of ‘culture’, the educational, the formative and the informational,
can be collected together. But from where can the contents of
the principle of assembly be derived? From play, <em>ludo,</em> a term which
muse be understood here in its broadest and deepest meaning. Sport is
play and so is the theatre, in a way more involving than the cinema.
Fairs, collective games of all sorts, survive at the interfaces of an
organized consumer society, in the holes of a serious society which
perceives itself as structured and systematical and which claims to be
technical. As for the old places of assembly, they are largely devoid of
meaning: the <em>fête</em> dies or leaves it. That they should find a meaning
again does not preclude the creation of places appropriate to a
renewed <em>fête</em> fundamentally linked to play.

No doubt that so-called consumer society suggests this direction.
Leisure centres, leisure societies, cities of luxury and pleasures, holiday
places, show this eloquently with the particular rhetoric of advertising.
Therefore, all that is needed is to give form to this tendency which
is still subordinated to the industrial and commercial production of
culture in this society. The proposition of this project is to gather
together by subordinating to play rather than to subordinate play to
the ‘seriousness’ of culturalism and scientificism, although this does
not exclude ‘cultural’ elements. On the contrary. It collects them
together by restoring them in their truth. Only relatively recently and
through institutions has the theatre become ‘cultural’, while play
has lost its place and value in society. Would culture not be the accommodation
of the <em>oeuvre</em> and style to exchange value, thus allowing for
its commercialization, its production and consumption as specific
product?

There are implications to the <em>centrality of</em> <em>play</em> which is the restoration
of the meaning of the <em>oeuvre</em> that philosophy and art can bring so
as to prioritize time over space, not forgetting that time comes to
inscribe itself and to be written in a space — and thus replace domination
by appropriation.

The space of play has coexisted and still coexists with spaces of
exchange and circulation, political space and cultural space. Projects
within quantified and accounted ‘social space’ which lose their qualitative
and differentiated spaces relate to a schizophrenia which is
concealed under the veils of precision, scientificity and rationality. We
have shown above the inevitable outcome of an analytical thought
which without safeguards perceives itself as global. This globality is
the formalized space of social pathology. There is a continuous path
from the concept of <em>habitat</em> to schizophrenic space projected as social
model. The orientation envisaged here does not consist in suppressing
qualified spaces as existing historical differences. On the contrary.
These already complex spaces can be further articulated, by emphasizing
differences and contrasts, and by stressing quality which implies
and overdetermines quantities. To these spaces, one can apply formalized
principles of differences and articulation, of superimpositions
of contrasts. Thus conceived, social spaces are related to social times
and rhythms which are prioritized. One understands more clearly how
and up to what point in urban reality elements distribute themselves
over a period of time. It is the truth of urban time which lucidly
reclaims this role. To <em>inhabit</em> finds again its place over habitat. The
quality which is promoted presents and represents as <em>playful.</em> By
<em>playing</em> with words, one can say that there will be <em>play</em> between the
parts of the social whole (plasticity) — to the extent that <em>play</em> is
proclaimed as supreme value, eminently solemn, if not serious, overtaking
use and exchange by gathering them together. And if someone
cries out that this utopia has nothing in common with socialism, the
answer is that today only the working class still knows how to really
play, feels like playing, over and above the claims and programmes, of
economism, and political philosophy. How is this shown? Sport and
the interest shown in sport and games, including, in television and
elsewhere, the degraded forms of ludic life. Already, to city people the
urban centre is movement, the unpredictable, the possible and encounters.
For them, it is either ‘spontaneous theatre’ or nothing.

To the extent that the contours of the future city can be outlined, it
could be defined by imagining the reversal of the current situation, by
pushing to its limits this inverted image of the world upside down.
There are currently attempts to establish fixed structures, ‘equilibrium
structures’, stabilities submitted to systematization, and therefore to
existing power, At the same time there is a tactical wager on the
accelerated obsolescence of consumer goods, ironically known as
‘durables’. The ideal city would involve the obsolescence of space: an
accelerated change of abode, emplacements and prepared spaces. It
would be the <em>ephemeral city,</em> the perpetual <em>oeuvre</em> of the inhabitants,
themselves mobile and mobilized for and by this <em>oeuvre.</em> Time comes
first. There is no doubt that technology makes possible the ephemeral
city, the apogee of play and supreme <em>oeuvre</em> and luxury. One can
cite the world exhibition in Montreal among other examples! In
Montreal.

To put art at the service of the urban does not mean to prettify urban
space with works of arc. This parody of the possible is a caricature.
Rather, this means that time-spaces become works of art and that
former art reconsiders itself as source and model of <em>appropriation</em> of
space and rime. Art brings cases and examples of appropriate ‘topics’:
of temporal qualities inscribed in spaces. Music shows how expression
and lyricism uses numbering, order and measure. fr shows that time,
tragic or serious, can absorb and reabsorb calculation. With less force
but more precision than music, this is the same for sculpture and
painting. Let us not forget that gardens, parks, and landscapes were
part of urban life as much as the fine arts, or that the landscape around
cities were the works of art of these cities. For example, the Tuscan
landscape around Florence, inseparable from its architecture, plays an
immense role in Renaissance arts. Leaving aside representation, ornamentation
and decoration, art can become <em>praxis</em> and <em>poiesis</em> on a
social scale: the art of living in the city as work of art. Coming back to
style and m the <em>oeuvre,</em> that is, to the meaning of the monument and
the space appropriated in the <em>fête,</em> art can create ‘structures of enchantment’.
Architecture taken separately and on its own, could
neither restrict nor create possibilities. Something more, something
better, something else, is needed. Architecture as art and technique
also needs an orientation. Although necessary, it could not suffice.
Nor could architecture set and define its own aims and strategy. In
other words, the future of art is not artistic, but urban, because the
future of ‘man’ is not discovered in the cosmos, or in the people, or in
production, but in urban society. In the same way art and philosophy
must reconsider itself in relation to this perspective. The problematic
of the <em>urban</em> renews the problematic of philosophy, its categories and
methods. Without a need to break or reject them, these categories
<em>accept</em> something else new: a meaning.

The right to the city manifests itself as a superior form of rights: right to
freedom, to individualization in socialization, to habitat and to inhabit.
The right to the <em>oeuvre,</em> to participation and <em>appropriation</em> (clearly
distinct from the right to property), are implied in the right to the city.

With regards to philosophy, three periods are identifiable. This is a
periodization which is particular among those which mark the continuum
of becoming. In the first stage, philosophy meditates on the city
as partial whole at the heart of totality, world and cosmos. In the
second, philosophy reflects on a transcending totality of the city:
history, ‘man’, society, State. It accepts and even confirms several
separations in the name of totalicy. It sanctions the analytical hold by
believing it is refuting or overcoming it. In the third period philosophy
competes for the promotion of a rationality and a practice which
transform themselves into urban rationality and planning practice.

** The Realization of Philosophy

Let us take up again the thread of the argument and show its continuity
to its conclusions. Knowledge is in an untenable situation. Philosophy
wanted to reach the total but passed by it, unable to grasp it and even
less to realize it. By giving it a representation which was systematized,
speculative and contemplative, in its own way it mutilated totality.
And yet, only philosophy had and still has the sense of the total.
Partial and fragmentary knowledge claimed to have achieved certainties
and realities, but have only delivered fragments. They cannot go
without synthesis, yet cannot legitimize their right to it.

From its beginnings Greek philosophy linked itself to greatness, and
also the miseries and limitations of the Greek city — slavery and the
subordination of the individual to the <em>Polis.</em> Two thousand years later,
Hegel declared the realization of philosophical rationality released by
centuries of reflection and meditation, but in and by the State. How to
get our of these quandaries? How to resolve contradictions?
<em>Industrial production</em> has upset notions concerning the social capacity
to act, to create anew, and to master material nature. Philosophy
could no longer sustain its traditional mission, nor the philosopher his
vocation, to define man, the human, society and the world while
taking charge of the creation of man by his effort, his will, his struggle
against determinisms and hazards. Science and the sciences, technology,
the organization and rationalization of industry were coming
onto the scene. Were 2,000 years of philosophy to go to the grave?
No. Industry contributes new means but has no purpose or meaning
in itself. it throws <em>products</em> into the world. Philosophy (with art and
works of art), a supreme <em>oeuvre,</em> says what is <em>appropriation,</em> nor the
technical mastery of material nature which produces products and
exchange values. Therefore, the philosopher must speak, <em>say the meaning</em> of industrial production, as long as he does not speculate on
it and use it as a theme to prolong the old manner of philosophizing.
Instead he must take it as <em>means of realizing philosophy,</em> that is,
the <em>philosophical project</em> of man in the world: desire and reason,
spontaneity and reflection, vitality and containment, domination and
appropriation, determinisms and liberties. Philosophy cannot realize
itself without art (as model of appropriation of time and space),
accomplishing itself fully in social practice and without science and
technology, as means, not being fully used, without the proletarian
condition being overcome.

This theoretical revolution begun by Marx was later obscured,
industrial production, economic growth, organizational rationality,
the consumption of products, becoming ends rather than means,
subordinated to a superior end. Today, the <em>realization of philosophy</em>
can take up again its meaning, that is, give a meaning as much to
history as to actuality. The thread interrupted for a century is
renewed. The theoretical situation is released and the gulf is filled
between the total and the partial or fragmentary, between the uncertain
whole and the all too certain fragments. From the moment that
urban society reveals the meaning of industrialization, these concepts
play a new role. Theoretical revolution continues and urban revolution
(the revolutionary side of urban reform and urban strategy),
comes to the fore. Theoretical revolution and political change go
together.

Theoretical thought aims at the realization of humanity ocher than
that of a society of low productivity (chat of the epochs of non-abundance,
or rather, of the non-possibility of abundance), and that of a
productivist society. In a society and an urban life delivered from its
ancient limitations, those of rarity and economism, technologies, art
and knowledge come to the service of daily life so as to metamorphose
it. Thus can be defined the realization of philosophy. It is no longer a
question of a philosophy of the city and of an historico-social philosophy alongside a science of the city. The realization of philosophy
gives a meaning to the sciences of social reality. At the outset, it refutes
the accusation of ‘sociologism’ which will no doubt be made against
the hypotheses and theses expressed here. Neither philosophism, nor
scienticism, nor pragmatism nor sociologism, nor psychologism, nor
economism. Something else is proclaimed.

** Theses on the City, the Urban and Planning

(1) Two groups of questions and two orders of urgency have disguised
the problems of the city and urban society: questions of housing and
the ‘habitat’ (related to a housing policy and architectural technologies)
and those of industrial organization and global planning. The
first from below, the second from above, have produced, hidden from
attention, a rupture of the traditional morphology of cities, while the
urbanization of society was taking place. Hence, a new contradiction
adding to other unresolved contradictions of existing society, aggravating
them and giving them another meaning.

(2) These two groups of problems have been and are posed by
economic growth and industrial production. Practical experience
shows that there can be growth without social development (that is,
quantitative growth without qualitative development). In these conditions,
changes in society are more apparent than real. ·Fetishism and
ideology of change (in other words, the ideology of modernity) conceal
the stagnation of essential social relations. The development of
society can only be conceived in urban life, by the realization of urban
society.

(3) The double process of industrialization and urbanization loses all
meaning if one does not conceive urban society as aim and finality of
industrialization, and if urban life is subordinated to industrial
growth. The latter provides the conditions and the means of urban
society. To proclaim industrial rationality as necessary and sufficient
is to destroy the sense (the orientation, the goal) of the process. At first
industrialization produces urbanization negatively (the breakup of the
traditional city, of its morphology, of its practico-material reality) and
then is ready to get down to work. Urban society begins on the ruins
of the ancient city and its agrarian environment. During these changes,
the relation between industrialization and urbanization is transformed.
The city ceases to be the container the passive receptacle of
products and of production. What subsists and is strengthened of
urban reality in its dislocation, the <em>centre of decision-making,</em> henceforth
enters into the <em>means of production and the systems of exploitation of social labour</em> by those who control information, culture and
the powers of decision-making themselves. Only one theory enables
the use of these practical facts and the effective realization of urban
society.

(4) For this realization, neither the organization of private enterprise,
nor global planning, although necessary, suffice. A leap forward of
rationality is accomplished. Neither the State, nor private enterprise
can provide indispensable models of rationality and reality.

(5) The realization of urban society calls for a planning oriented
towards social needs, chose of urban society. It necessitates a science
of the city (of relations and correlations in urban life). Although
necessary, these conditions are not sufficient. A social and political
force capable of putting these means into <em>oeuvres</em> is equally indispensable.

(6) The working class suffers the consequences of the rupture of
ancient morphologies. It is victim of a segregation, a class strategy
licensed by this rupture. Such is the present form of the negative
situation of the proletariat. In the major industrial countries the old
proletarian immiseration declines and tends to disappear. But a new
misery spreads, which mainly affects the proletariat without sparing
other social strata and classes: the poverty of the habitat that of the
inhabitant submitted to a daily life organized (in and by a bureaucratized
society of organized consumption). To those who would still
doubt its existence as class, what identifies the working class on the
ground is segregation and the misery of its ‘to inhabit’ .

(7) In these difficult conditions, at the heart of a society which cannot
completely oppose them and yet obstructs them, rights which define
civilization (in, but often <em>against</em> society — <em>by,</em> but often <em>against</em>
culture) find their way. These rights which are not well recognized,
progressively become customary before being inscribed into formalized
codes. They would change reality if they entered into social
practice: right to work, to training and education, to health, housing,
leisure, to life. Among these rights in the making features the <em>right to the city</em> (not to the ancient city, but to urban life, to renewed centrality,
to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses,
enabling the full and complete <em>usage</em> of these moments and places,
etc.). The proclamation and realization of urban life as the rule of use
(of exchange and encounter disengaged from exchange value) insist on
the mastery of the economic (of exchange value, the market, and
commodities) and consequently is inscribed within the perspectives of
the revolution under the hegemony of the working class.

(8) For the working class, rejected from the centres towards the
peripheries, dispossessed of the city, expropriated thus from the best
outcomes of its activity, this right has a particular bearing and significance.
It represents for it at one and the same time a means and an
end, a way and a horizon: but this virtual action of the working class
also represents the general interests of civilization and the particular
interests of all social groups of ‘inhabitants’, for whom integration
and participation become obsessional without making their obsession
effective.

(9) The revolutionary transformation of society has industrial production
as ground and lever. This is why it had to be shown that the urban
centre of decision-making can no longer consider itself in the present
society (of neo-capitalism or of monopoly capilaism associated to the
State), outside the means of production, their property and their
management. Only the taking in charge by the working class of
planning and its political agenda can profoundly modify social life and
open another era: that of socialism in neo-capitalist countries. Until
then transformations remain superficial, at the level of signs and the
consumption of signs, language and metalanguage, a secondary discourse,
a discourse on previous discourses. Therefore, it is not without
reservations that one can speak of urban revolution. Nevertheless, the
orientation of industrial production on social needs is not a secondary
fact. The finality thus brought to plans transforms them. In this way
urban reform has a revolutionary bearing. As in the twentieth century
agrarian reform gradually disappears from the horizon, urban reform
becomes a revolutionary reform. It gives rise to a strategy which
opposes itself to class strategy dominant today.

(10) Only the proletariat can invest its social and political activity in
the realization of urban society. Equally, only it can renew the
meaning of productive and creative activity by destroying the ideology
of consumption. It therefore has the capacity to produce a new
humanism, different from the old liberal humanism which is ending its course — of <em>urban man</em> for whom and by whom the city and his own
daily life in it become <em>oeuvre, appropriation,</em> use value (and not
exchange value), by using all the means of science, art, technology and
the domination over material nature.

(11) Nevertheless, difference persists between <em>product</em> and <em>oeuvre.</em> To
the meaning of the production of products (of the scientific and
technical mastery of material nature) must be added, to later predominate,
the meaning of the <em>oeuvre,</em> of <em>appropriation</em> (of time, space, the
body and desire). And this in and by urban society which is beginning.
Now, the working class does not spontaneously have the sense of the
<em>oeuvre.</em> It is dimmed, having almost disappeared along with crafts and
skills and ‘quality’. Where can be found this precious deposit, this
sense of the <em>oeuvre?</em> From where can the working class receive it to
carry it to a superior degree by uniting it with productive intelligence
and dialectic practical reason? Philosophy and the whole of
philosophical tradition on one hand, and on the other all of art
(not without
a radical critique of their gifts and presents) contain the sense of the
<em>oeuvre.</em>

(12) This calls for, apart from the economic and political revolution
(planning oriented towards social needs and democratic control of the
State and self-management), a permanent cultural revolution.

There is no incompatibility between these levels of total revolution,
no more than between urban strategy (revolutionary reform aiming at
the realization of urban society on the basis of an advanced and
planned industrialization) and strategy aiming at the transformation
of traditional peasant life by industrialization. Moreover in most
countries today the realization of urban society goes through the
agrarian form and industrialization. There is no doubt that a world
front is possible, and equally that it is impossible today. This utopia
projects as it often does on the horizon a ‘possible-impossible’. Happily,
or otherwise, rime, that of history and social practice, differs
from the time of philosophies. Even if it does not produce the irreversible,
it can produce the difficult to repair. Marx wrote that
humanity does not only ask itself problems that it can resolve. Some
today believe chat men now only ask themselves insoluble problems.
They deny reason. None the less, there are perhaps problems which
are easy to resolve, whose solutions are near, very near, and that
people do not ask themselves.

<right>
Paris 1967 — centenary of <em>Capital</em>
</right>