Estudante: Jakob Sparn

Curso: Espao, Economia e Cultura

Semestre: 2015/1
Prof: Roberto Monte-Mor

Resenha: Lefebvre Writings on Cities / Espao e Cultura

The first chapter of the book Writings on Cities, which offers a broad overview on
the work of Lefebvre on the urban space, is called Lost in Transposition (instead of
translation) as the authors want to emphasize the sense of changing places and
contexts. And lost because Lefebvre (and other French Marxist sociologists) has
until recently been widely ignored in the English literature, in spite of being one of the
most translated intellectuals in the 1960ies in other languages. In this chapter the
editors try to outline the evolution of Lefebvres work on time, spaces, the everyday
and the city.
In his analysis Lefebvre uses a quite interesting approach, his method of regressionprogession, which combines genealogical (returning to the origins of a concept) and
historico-genetic procedures (linked to the general history of society) with the
opposite move, that is progression (evaluating from the present what is possible or
impossible in the future). This seems to offer a very integrated vision of a given
concept and it apparently fits quite nicely into the idea of postmodernism. Another
intriguing vision is the one of the urban as a moment, a new form of sociability
(abolishing town and country) that revealed the contradictions of society. But his in
my opinion most impressive work is on the Right to the City, which in Lefebvres
eyes meant basically inclusion into the centrality of the urban space (not necessarily
to center of power) and to participate in the decision-making process. In todays
urbanized (in the sense of urban agglomerations) and post-democratic world this
right to the city seems farther away than in the 1970ies, making its demands even
more important to discuss. Especially the objective of participation (oeuvre), which
has been nearly destroyed by capitalism and modern statism, seems a necessary
requirement for some of the very practical current urban problems.

In the interview on No salvation from the Center Lefebvre rises an important point,
the paradoxical situation of the modern city. Our view of the city is stuck between two
opposing vision of this space. On the one hand a long tradition of anti-urbanism in
Judaism, Protestantism and even Marxism that tends to condemn or simply ignore
the city. On the other hand the Greek vision of the city as a place of civilization and
culture. The modern cities are not thought out well, because we have not resolved
the contradictions of these two traditions and furthermore the cities are divided
spaces (suburbs, peripheries, rings, etc). So there is a need according to Lefebvre to
make these paradoxical, divided spaces more interesting and not only the centers.

Question for discussion: Unfortunately the editors decided not to further elaborate on
the idea of the urban as a moment (thus a time and NOT a space), which makes me
wonder what Lefebvre actually meant as he was more concerned with space than
time? Is it the moment of destruction of the city and the expansion of the urban?