Preface
Great things must be silenced or talked about with grandeur, that is, with cynicism and innocence...
I would claim as property and product of man all the beauty, nobility, which we have given to real or imaginary things...— Frederic Nietzsche
This work will take an offensive form (that some will perhaps findoffending). Why?
Because conceivably each reader will already have in mind a set ofideas 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 andlanguage.
Now all systems tend to close off reflection, to block off horizon.This work wants to break up systems, not to substitute anothersystem, bur to open up through thought and action towards possibilities by showing the horizon and the road. Against a form ofreflection which tends towards formalism, a thought which tendstowards an opening leads the struggle.
Urbanism, almost as much as the system, is fashionable. Urbanisticquestions 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 writingsof diverse import and ambitions. At one and the same time urbanismbecomes ideology and practice. Meanwhile, questions relative to thecity and to urban reality are not fully known and recognized, theyhave not yet acquired politically the importance and the meaning thatthey have in thought (in ideology) and in practice (we shall show anurban strategy already at work and in action). This little book doesnot only propose to critically analyse thoughts and activities related tourbanism. It’s aim is to allow its problems to enter into consciousnessand political policies.
From the theoretical and practical situation of problems (from theproblematic) 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 ofdeparture must be the process of industrialization. Beyond any doubtthis process has been the dynamic of transformations in society for thelast century and a half. If one distinguishes between the inductor andthe induced, one can say that the process of industrialization is inductiveand that one can count among the induced, problems related togrowth and planning, questions concerning the city and the developmentof the urban reality, without omitting the growing importance ofleisure activities and questions related in ‘culture’. Industrializationcharacterizes modern society. This does not inevitably carry with itterms of ‘industrial society’, if we want to define it. Although urbanizationand the problematic of the urban figure among the induced effectsand not among the causes or inductive reason, the preoccupation thesewords signify accentuate themselves in such a way that one can defineas an urban society the social reality which arises around us. Thisdefinition retains a feature which becomes capital.
Industrialization provides the point of departure for reflection uponour time. Now the city existed prior to industrialization. A remarkbanal in itself but whose implications have not been fully formulated.The most eminent urban creations, the most ‘beautiful’ oeuvres ofurban life (we say ‘beautiful,’ because they are oeuvres rather thanproducts) 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 ofslaves) and then the medieval city (in a complex situation embeddedin feudal relations but struggling against a landed feudalism). Theoriental 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 previouslybeen quasi nomadic and relegated outside the city.
When industrialization begins, and capitalism in competition with aspecifically industrial bourgeoisie is born, the city is already a powerfulreality. In Western Europe, after the virtual disappearance of theantique city, the decay of Roman influence, the city took off again.More or less nomadic merchants elected as centre of their activitieswhat remained of the antique urban cores. Conversely, one can supposethat these degraded cores functioned as accelerators for whatremained of exchange economies maintained by wandering merchants.From the growing surplus product of agriculture, to thedetriment of feudal lords, cities accumulate riches: objects, treasures,virtual capitals. There already existed in these urban centres a greatmonetary wealth, acquired through usury and and commerce. Craftsprosper there, a production clearly distinct from agriculture. Citiessupport peasant communities and the enfranchisement of the peasants,not without benefit for themselves. In short, they are centres ofsocial and political life where not only wealth is accumulated, butknowledge (connaissances), techniques, and oeuvres (works of art,monuments). This city is itself ‘oeuvre’, a feature which contrasts withthe irreversible tendency towards money and commerce, towardsexchange and products. Indeed the oeuvre is use value and the the product is exchange value. The eminent use of the city, that is, of itsstreets and squares, edifices and monuments, is la fête (a celebrationwhich consumes unproductively, without other advantage but pleasureand prestige and enormous riches in money and objects).
A complex, but contradictory, reality. Medieval cities at the heightof their development centralize wealth: powerful groups invest unproductivelya large part of their wealth in the cities they dominate. At thesame time, banking and commercial capital have already made wealthmobile and has established exchange networks enabling the transferof money. When industrialization begins with the pre-eminence of aspecific bourgeoisie (the entrepreneurs), wealth has ceased to bemainly in real estate. Agricultural production is no longer dominantand nor is landed property. Estates are lost to the feudal lords and passinto 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 toconstitute themselves as a network of cities, with a certain division oflabour (technically, socially, politically) between cities linked togetherby road, river and seaways and by commercial and banking relations.One can think that the division of labour between cities was neithersufficiently advanced nor sufficiently aware to determine stable associationsand put an end to to rivalries and competition. This urbansystem was not able to establish itself. What is erected on chis base isthe State, or centralized power. Cause and effect of this particularcentrality, 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 predominatesand yet it is no longer the City-State of antiquity. There are threedifferent terms: society, State and city. In this urban system each citytends to constitute itself as an enclosed self-contained, self-functioningsystem. The city preserves the organic character of community whichcomes from the village and which translates itself into a corporateorganization (or guild). Community life (comprising general or partialassemblies) does not prohibit class struggle. On the contrary. Violentcontrasts between wealth and poverty, conflicts between the powerfuland the oppressed, do not prevent either attachment to the city nor anactive contribution to the beauty of the oeuvre. In the urban context,struggles between fractions, groups and classes strengthen the feelingof belonging. Political confrontations between the ‘minuto popolo’ the‘popolo grosso’, the aristocracy and the oligarchy, have the city astheir battle ground, their stake. These groups are rivals in their love ofthe city. As for the rich and powerful, they always feel threatened.They justify their privilege in the community by somptuously spendingtheir fortune: buildings, foundations, palaces, embellishments, festivities.It is important to emphasize this paradox, for it is not a wellunderstood historical fact: very oppressive societies were very creativeand rich in producing oeuvres. Later, the production of productsreplaced the production of oeuvres and the social relations attached tothem, notably the city. When exploitation replaces oppression, creativecapacity disappears. The very notion of ‘creation’ is blurred ordegenerates by miniaturizing itself into ‘making’ and ‘creativity’ (the‘do-it-yourself,’ etc.). Which brings forth arguments to back up athesis: 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 which arerefuges of use value, the origins of a virtual predominance and revalorizationof use.
In the urban system we are attempting to analyse, action is exercizedover specific conflicts: between use value and exchange value, betweenmobilization of wealth (in silver and in money) and unproductiveinvestment in the city, between accumulation of capital and its squanderingon festivities, between the extension of the dominated territoryand the demands of a strict organization of this territory around thedominating city. The latter protects itself against all eventualities by acorporate organization which paralyses the initiatives of banking andcommercial capitalism. The coporarion does not only regulate a craft.Each enters into an organic whole: the corporate system regulates thedistribution of actions and activities over urban space (streets andneighbourhoods) and urban time (timetables and festivities). Thiswhole tends to congeal itself into an immutable structure. The outcomeof which is that industrialization supposes the destructurationof existing structures. Historians (since Marx) have showed thefixed nature of guilds. What perhaps remains to be shown is thetendency of the whole urban system towards a sort of crystallizationand fixation. Where this system consolidated itself, capitalism andindustrialization came late: in Germany, in Italy, a delay full ofconsequences.
There is therefore a certain discontinuity between an emergingindustry and its historical conditions. They are neither the same thingnor the same people. The prodigious growth of exchanges, of amonetary economy, of merchant production, of the ‘world of commodities’which will result from industrialization, implies a radicalchange. The passage of commercial and banking capitalism as well ascraft production to industrial production and competitive capitalismis accompanied by a gigantic crisis, well studied by historians, exceptfor what relates to the city and the ‘urban system’.
Emerging industry tends to establish itself outside cities. Not that itis an absolute law. No law can be totally general and absolute. Thissetting up of industrial enterprises, at first sporadic and dispersed,depended on multiple local regional and national circumstances. Forexample, printing seems to have been able in an urban context to gofrom a craft to the private enterprise stage. It was, otherwise for thetextile industry, for mining, for metallurgy. The new industry establishesitself near energy sources (rivers, woods then charcoal), meansof transport (rivers and canals, then railways), raw materials (minerals),pools of labour power (peasant crahmen, weavers and blacksmithsalready providing skilled labour).
There still exist today in France numerous small textile centres(valleys in Normandy and the Vosges, etc.) which survive sometimeswith difficulty. Is it not remarkable that a part of the heavy metallurgicalindustry was established in the valley of the Moselle, betweentwo old cities, Nancy and Metz, the only real urban centres of thisindustrial region? At the same time old cities are markets, sources ofavailable 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’ asMarx calls it, which weighs on wages and enables the growth ofsurplus value). Moreover, the city, as workshop, allows the concentrationover a limited space of the means of production: cools, rawmaterials, 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 (inparticular, it enables the rapid growth of productivity). The city hastherefore played an important role in the take-off of industry. AsMarx explained, urban concentrations have accompanied the concentrationof capital. Industry was to produce its own urban centres,sometimes small cities and industrial agglomerations (le Creusot), attimes medium-sized (Saint-Etienne) or gigantic (the Ruhr, consideredas a ‘conurbation’). We shall come back to the deterioration of thecentrality and urban character in these cities.
This process appears, in analysis, in all its complexity, which theword ‘industrialization’ represents badly. This complexity becomesapparent as soon as one ceases to think in terms of private enterpriseon the one hand and global production statistics (so many tons of coal,steel) on the other — as soon as one reflects upon the distinctionbetween the inductor and the induced, by observing the importance ofthe phenomena induced and their interaction with the inductors.Industry can do without the old city (pre-industrial, precapitalist) butdoes so by constituting agglomerations in which urban features aredeteriorating. Is this not the case in North America where ‘cities’ in theway they are understood in France and in Europe, are few: New York,Montreal, San Francisco? Nevertheless, where there is a pre-existentnetwork of old cities, industry assails it. It appropriates this networkand refashions it according to its needs. It also attacks the city (eachcity), assaults it, takes it, ravages it. It tends to break up the old coresby taking them over. This does not prevent the extension of urbanphenomena, cities and agglomerations, industrial towns and suburbs(with the addition of shanty towns where industrialization is unableto employ and fix available labour).
We have before us a double process or more precisely, a process withtwo aspects: industrialization and urbanization, growth and development,economic production and social life. The two ‘aspects’ of thisinseparable process have a unity, and yet it is a conflictual process.Historically there is a violent clash between urban reality and industrialreality. As for the complexity of the process, it reveals itself moreand more difficult to grasp, given that industrialization does not onlyproduce firms (workers and leaders of private enterprises), but variousoffices — banking, financial, technical and political.
This dialectical process, far from being clear, is also far from over.Today it still provokes ‘problematic’ situations. A few exampleswould be sufficient here. In Venice, the active population leaves thecity for the industrial agglomeration which parallels it on the mainland:Mestre. This city among the most beautiful cities bequeathed tous from pre-industrial times is threatened not so much by physicaldeterioration due to the sea or to its subsidence, as by the exodus ofits inhabitants. In Athens a quite considerable industrialization hasattracted to the capital people from small towns and peasants. ModernAthens has nothing more in common with the antique city coveredover, absorbed, extended beyond measure. The monuments and sites(agora, Acropolis) which enable to locate ancient Greece are onlyplaces of tourist consumption and aesthetic pilgrimage. Yet the organizationalcore of the city remains very strong. Its surroundings of newneighbourhoods and semi-shanty towns inhabited by uprooted anddisorganized people confer it an exorbitant power. This almost shapelessgigantic agglomeration enables the holders of decision-makingcentres to carry out the worst political ventures. All the more so thatthe economy of the country closely depends on this network: propertyspeculation, the ‘creation’ of capitals by this means, investments ofthese capitals into construction and so on and so forth. It is this fragilenetwork, always in danger of breaking, which defines a type ofurbanization, without or with a weak industrialization, but with arapid extension of the agglomeration, of property and speculation; aprosperity falsely maintained by the network.
We could in France cite many cities which have been recentlysubmerged by industrialization: Grenoble, Dunkirk, etc. In othercases, such as Toulouse, there has been a massive extension of the cityand urbanization (understood in the widest sense of the term) withlittle industrialization. Such is also the general case of Latin Americanand African cities encircled by shanty towns. In these regions andcountries old agrarian structures are dissolving: dispossessed or ruinedpeasants crowd into these cities to find work and subsistence. Nowthese peasants come from farms destined to disappear because ofworld commodity prices, these being closely linked to industrializedcountries and ‘growth poles’. These phenomena are still dependent onindustrialization.
An induced process which one could call the ‘implosion-explosion’of the city is at present deepening. The urban phenomenon extendsitself over a very large part of the territory of great industrial countries.It happily crosses national boundaries: the Megalopolis ofNorthern Europe extends from the Ruhr to the sea and even to Englishcities, and from the Paris region to the Scandinavian countries. Theurban fabric of this territory becomes increasingly tight, although notwithout its local differentiations and extension of the (technical andsocial) division of labour to the regions, agglomerations and cities. Atthe same time, there and even elsewhere, urban concentrationsbecome gigantic: populations are heaped together reaching worryingdensities (in surface and housing units). Again at the same time manyold urban cores are deteriorating or exploding. People move to distantresidential or productive peripheries. Offices replace housing in urbancentres. Sometimes (in the United States) these centres are abandonedto the ‘poor’ and become ghettos for the underprivileged. Sometimeson the contrary, the most affluent people retain their strong positionsat the heart of the city (around Central Park in New York, the Maraisin Paris).
Let us now examine the urban fabric. This metaphor is not clear.More than a fabric thrown over a territory, these words designate akind of biological proliferation of a net of uneven mesh, allowingmore or less extended sectors to escape: hamlets or villages, entireregions. If these phenomena are placed into the perspective of thecountryside and old agrarian structures, one can analyse a generalmovement of concentration: from populations in boroughs and smalland large towns — of property and exploitation — of the organizationof transports and commercial exchanges, etc. This leads at the sametime to the depopulation and the ‘loss of the peasantry’ from thevillages which remain rural while losing what was peasant life: crafts,small local shops. Old ‘ways of life’ become folklore. If the samephenomena are analysed from the perspective of cities, one can observenot only the extension of highly populated peripheries but alsoof banking, commercial and industrial networks and of housing (secondhomes, places and spaces of leisure, etc.).
The urban fabric can be described by using the concept of ecosystem,a coherent unity constituted around one or several cities, old andrecent. Such a description may lose what is essential. Indeed, thesignificance of the urban fabric is not limited to its morphology. It isthe support of a more or less intense, more or less degraded, ‘way oflife’: urban society. On the economic base of the urban fabric appearphenomena of another order, that of social and ‘cultural’ life. Carriedby the urban fabric, urban society and life penetrate the countryside.Such a way of living entails systems of objects and of values. The bestknown elements of the urban system of objects include water, electricity,gas (butane in the countryside), not to mention the car, thetelevision, plastic utensils, ‘modern’ furniture, which entail new demandswith regard to ‘services’. Among the elements of the system ofvalues we can note urban leisure (dance and song), suits, the rapidadoption of fashions from the city. And also, preoccupations withsecurity, the need to predict the future, in brief, a rationality communicatedby the city. Generally youth, as an age group, actively contributesto this rapid assimilation of things and representationscoming from the city. These are sociological trivialities which areuseful to remember to show their implications. Within the mesh of theurban fabric survive islets and islands of ‘pure’ rurality, often (but notalways) poor areas peopled with ageing peasants, badly ‘integrated’,stripped of what had been the nobility of peasant life in times ofgreatest misery and of oppression. The ‘urban-rural’ relation does notdisappear. On the contrary, it intensifies itself down to the mostindustrialized countries. It interferes with other representations andother real relations: town and country, nature and artifice, etc. Hereand there tensions become conflicts, latent conflicts are accentuated,and then what was hidden under the urban fabric appears in the open.
Moreover, urban cores do not disappear. The fabric erodes them orintegrates them to its web. These cores survive by transforming themselves.There are still centres of intense urban life such as the LatinQuarter in Paris. The aesthetic qualities of these urban cores play animportant role in their maintenance. They do not only contain monumentsand institutional headquarters, but also spaces appropriatedfor entertainments, parades, promenades, festivities. In this waythe urban core becomes a high quality consumption product for foreigners,tourists, people from the outskirts and suburbanites. It survivesbecause of this double role: as place of consumption andconsumption of place. Thus centres enter more completely into exchangeand exchange value, not without retaining their use value dueto spaces provided for specific activities. They become centres ofconsumption. The architectural and urbanistic resurgence of the commercialcentre only gives a dull and mutilated version of what was thecore of the old city, at one and the same time commercial, religious,intellectual, political and economic (productive). The notion andimage of the commercial centre in fact date from the Middle Ages.It corresponds to the small and medium-sized medieval city. But todayexchange value is so dominant over use and use value that it moreor less suppresses it. There is nothing original in this notion. Thecreation which corresponds to our times, to their tendencies and(threatening) horizons is it not the centre of decision-making? Thiscentre, gathering together training and information, capacities oforganization and institutional decision-making, appears as a project inthe making of a new centrality, chat of power. The greatest attentionmust be paid to this concept, the practice which it denotes andjustifies.
We have in fact a number of terms (at least three) in complexrelations with each other, definable by oppositions each on their ownterms, although not exhausted by these oppositions. There is the ruraland the urban (urban society). There is the urban fabric which carriesthis ‘urbanness’ and centrality, old, renovated, new. Hence a disquietingproblematic, particularly if one wishes to go from analysis tosynthesis, from observations to a project (the ‘normative’). Must oneallow the urban fabric (what does this word mean?) to proliferatespontaneously? Is it appropriate to capture this force, direct thisstrange life, savage and artificial at the same time? How can onestrengthen the centres? Is it useful or necessary? And which centres,which centralities? Finally, what is to be done about islands of ruralism?
Thus the crisis of the city can be perceived through distinct problemsand problematical whole. This is a theoretical and practical crisis. Intheory, the concept of the city (of urban reality) is made up of facts,representations and images borrowed from the ancient pre-industrialand precapitalist city, but in a process of transformation and newelaboration. In practice the urban core (an essential part of the imageand the concept of the city) splits open and yet maintains itself:overrun, often deteriorated, sometimes rotting, the urban core doesnot disappear. If someone proclaims its end and its reabsorption intothe fabric, this is a postulate, a statement without proof. In the sameway, if someone proclaims the urgency of a restitution or reconstitutionof 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 beending. Unless it asserts itself again even more strongly as centre ofpower...
Until now we have shown how the city has been attacked byindustrialization, giving a dramatic and globally considered picture ofthis process. This analytical attempt could lead us to believe that it isa natural process, without intentions or volitions. There is somethinglike this, but that vision would be truncated. The ruling classes orfractions of the ruling classes intervene actively and voluntarily in thisprocess, possessing capital (the means of production) and managingnot only the economic use of capital and productive investments, butalso the whole society, using part of the wealth produced in ‘culture’,art, knowledge, ideology. Beside, or rather, in opposition to, dominantsocial groups (classes and class fractions), there is the workingclass: the proletariat, itself divided into strata, partial groups, varioustendencies, according to industrial sectors and local and nationaltraditions.
In the middle of the nineteenth century in Paris the situation wassomewhat like this. The ruling bourgeoisie, a non-homogenous class,after a hard-fought struggle, has conquered the capital. Today theMarais is still a visible witness to this: before the Revolution it is anaristocratic quarter (despite the tendency of the capital and thewealthy to drift towards the west), an area of gardens and privatemansions. It took but a few years, during the 1830s, for the ThirdEstate to appropriate it. A number of magnificem houses disappear,workshops and shops occupy others, tenements, stores, depots andwarehouses, firms replace parks and gardens. Bourgeois ugliness, thegreed for gain visible and legible in the streets takes the place of asomewhat cold beauty and aristocratic luxury. On the walls of theMarais can be read class struggle and the hatred between classes, avictorious meanness. It is impossible to make more perceptible thisparadox of history which partially escaped Marx. The ‘progressive’bourgeoisie taking charge of economic growth, endowed with ideologicalinstruments suited to rational growth, moves towards democracyand replaces oppression by exploitation, this class as such nolonger creates — it replaces the oeuvre, by the product. Those whoretain this sense of the oeuvre, including writers and painters, thinkand see themselves as ‘non bourgeois’. As for oppressors, the mastersof societies previous to the democratic bourgeoisie — princes, kings,lords, emperors — they had a sense and a taste of the oeuvre, especiallyin architecture and urban design. In fact the oeuvre is more closelyrelated 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 bythe working class. Peasants flock in, settling around the ‘barriers’ andentrances of the fortifications, the immediate periphery. Former craftsmenand new proletarians penetrate right up to the heart of the city.They live in slums but also in tenements, where the better-off live onthe ground floors and the workers on the upper ones. In this ‘disorder’the workers threaten the ‘parvenus’, a danger which became obviousduring the days of June 1848 and which the Commune was toconfirm. A class strategy is elaborated, aimed at the replanning of thecity, without any regard for reality, for its own life.
The life of Paris reaches its greatest intensity between 1848 and theHaussmann period — not what is understood by ‘la vie parisienne’, butthe urban life of the capital. It engages itself into literature and poetrywith great vigour and power. Then it will be over. Urban life suggestsmeetings, the confrontation of differences, reciprocal knowledge andacknowledgement (including ideological and political confrontation),ways of living, ‘patterns’ which coexist in the city. During the nineteenthcentury, a democracy of peasant origins which drove therevolutionaries could have transformed itself into an urban democracy.It was and it is still for history one of the beliefs of theCommune. As urban democracy threatened the privileges of the newruling class, that class prevented it from being born. How? By expellingfrom the urban centre and the city itself the proletariat, bydestroying ‘urbanity’.
Act One. Baron Haussmann, man of this Bonapartist State whicherects itself over society to treat it cynically as the booty (and not onlythe stake) of the struggles for power. Haussmann replaces winding butlively streets by long avenues, sordid but animated ‘quartiers’ bybourgeois ones. If he forces through boulevards and plans openspaces, it is not for the beauty of views. It is to ‘comb Paris withmachine guns’. The famous Baron makes no secret of it. Later we willbe greateful to him for having opened up Paris to traffic. This was notthe aim, the finality of Haussmann ‘planning’. The voids have ameaning: they cry out loud and dear the glory and power of the Statewhich plans them, the violence which could occur. Later transferstowards other finalities take place which justify in another way thesegashes into urban life. It should be noted that Haussmann did notachieve his goal. One strong aspect of the Paris Commune (1871) isthe strength of the return towards the urban centre of workers pushedout towards the outskirts and peripheries, their reconquest of the city,this belonging among other belongings, this value, this oeuvre whichhad been torn from them.
Act Two. The goal was to be attained by a much vaster manoeuvreand 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 andProtestant), sometimes informed politicians (belonging to the centreright) and who moreover do not constitute a coherent and uniquegroup, in brief, a few notables, discover a new notion. The ThirdRepublic will insure its fortune, that is, its realization on the ground.It will conceive the notion of habitat. Until then, ‘to inhabit’ meant totake part in a social life, a community, village or city. Urban life had,among other qualities, this attribute. It gave the right to inhabit, itallowed townsmen-citizens to inhabit. It is thus that ‘mortals inhabitwhile they save the earth, while they wait for the gods ... while theyconduct their lives in preservation and use’. Thus speaks the poet andphilosopher Heidegger of the concept to inhabit. Outside philosophyand poetry the same things have been said sociologically in prose. Atthe 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 inthis manner the society for which they provide an ideology and apractice. Certainly suburbs were created under the pressure of circumstancesto respond to the blind (although motivated and directed)growth of industrialization, the massive arrival of peasants led to theurban centres by ‘rural exodus’. The process has none the less beenoriented by a strategy.
A typical class strategy, does that mean a series of concerted actions,planned with a single aim? No. Class character seems that much deeperthan several concerted actions, centered around several objectives, hasnevertheless converged towards a final result. It goes without sayingthat all these notables were not proposing to open up a means tospeculation: some of them, men of good will, philanthropists, humanists,seem even to wish the opposite. They have none the less mobilizedproperty wealth around the city, the entrance without restriction intoexchange and exchange value of the ground and housing. This hadspeculative implications. They were not proposing to demoralize theworking classes, but on the contrary, to moralize it. They considered itbeneficial to involve the workers (individuals and families) into ahierarchy clearly distinct from that which rules in the firm, that ofproperty and landlords, houses and neighbourhoods. They wanted togive them another function, another status, other roles than thoseattached to the condition of the salaried producers. They meant in thisway to give them a better everyday life than that of work. In this waythey conceived the role of owner-occupied housing. A remarkablysuccessful operation (although its political consequences were notalways those anticipated by its promoters). Nevertheless, a result wasachieved, predicted or otherwise, conscious or unconscious. Societyorients itself ideologically and practically towards other problems thanthat of production. Little by little social consciousness ceased to referto 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 oeuvre.Isolated from places of production, available from a sector of habitationfor scattered firms, the proletariat will allow its creative capacityto diminish in its conscience. Urban consciousness will vanish.
In France the beginnings of the suburb are also the beginnings ofa violently anti-urban planning approach; a singular paradox. Fordecades during the Third Republic appeared documents authorizingand regulating owner-occupied suburbs and plots. What could bemore accurately referred to here is the banlieue pavillonaire, a type ofsuburbanization begun in this period in France characterized by smallowner-occupied houing whose nearest Anglo-Saxon equivalent interms of typology and social relations is the ‘bungalow’.
A de-urbanized, yet dependent periphery is established around thecity. Effectively, these new suburban dwellers are still urban eventhough they are unaware of it and believe themselves to be close tonature, to the sun and to greenery. One could call it a de-urbanizingand de-urbanized urbanization to emphasize the paradox.
Its excesses will slow this extension down. The movement it engenderswill carry along the bourgeoisie and the well-off who will establishresidential suburbs. City centres empty themselves for offices. The wholethen begins to struggle with the inextricable. But it is not finished.
Act Three. After the Second World War it becomes evident that thepicture changes according to various emergencies and constraintsrelated to demographic and industrial growth and the influx of peoplefrom the provinces to Paris. The housing crisis, acknowledged andproven, turns into a catastrophe and threatens to worsen the politicalsituation which is still unstable. ‘Emergencies’ overwhelm the initiativesof capitalism and ‘private’ enterprise, especially as the latter is notinterested in construction, considered to be insufficiently profitable.The State can no longer be content with simply regulating land plotsand the construction of informal suburban housing or fighting (badly)property speculation. By means of intermediary organisms it takescharge of housing construction and an era of ‘nouveaux ensembles’(large-scale housing estates) and ‘new towns’ begins.
It could be said that public powers take charge of what hitherto waspart of a market economy. Undoubtedly. But housing does not necessarilybecome a public service. It surfaces into social consciousness asa right. It is acknowledged in fact by the indignation raised bydramatic cases and by the discontent engendered by the crisis. Yet it isnot formally or practically acknowledged except as an appendix to the‘rights of man’. Construction taken in charge by the State does notchange 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 onthe Left will be satisfied with demanding ‘more housing’. Moreover,what guides public and semi-public initiatives is not a conception ofurban planning, it is simply the goal of providing as quickly as possibleat the least cost, the greatest possible number of housing units. Thenew housing estates will be characterized by an abstract and functionalcharacter: the concept of habitat brought to its purest form bya State bureaucracy.
This notion of habitat is still somewhat ‘uncertain’. Individualowner-occupation will enable variations, particular or individual interpretationsof habitat. There is a sort of plasticity which allows formodifications and appropriations. The space of the house — fence,garden, various and available corners — leaves a margin of initiativeand freedom to inhabit, limited but real. State rationality is pushed tothe limit. In the new housing estate habitat is established in its purestform, as a burden of constraints. Certain philosophers will say thatlarge housing estates achieve the concept of habitat by excluding thenotion of inhabit, that is, the plasticity of space, its modelling and theappropriation by groups and individuals of the conditions of theirexistence. It is also a complete way of living (functions, prescriptions,daily routine) which is inscribed and signifies itself in this habitat.
The villa habitat has proliferated in the suburban communes aroundParis, by extending the built environment in a disorderly fashion. Thisurban, and at the same time non-urban, growth has only one law:speculation on plots and property. The interstices !eh by this growthhave been filled by large social housing estates. To the speculation onplots, badly opposed, was added speculation in apartments whenthese were in to-ownership. Thus housing entered into propertywealth and urban land into exchange value. Restrictions were disappearing.
If one defines urban reality by dependency vis-a-vis 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 housingestates has literally set itself against the city and the urban to eradicatethem. All perceptible, legible urban reality has disappeared: streets,squares, monuments, meeting places. Even the cafe (the bistro) hasencountered the resentment of the builders of those large housingestates, their taste for asceticism, the reduction of ‘to inhabit’ tohabitat. They had to go to the end of their destruction of palpableurban 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 ofurban reality.
Urban order thus decomposes into two stages: individual andowner-occupied houses and housing estates. But there is no societywithout order, signified, perceptible, legible on the ground. Suburbandisorder harbours an order: a glaring opposition of individuallyowner-occupied detached houses and housing estates. This oppositiontends to constitute a system of significations still urban even intode-urbanization. Each sector defines itself (by and in the consciousnessof the inhabitants) in relation to the other, against the ocher. Theinhabitants themselves have little consciousness of the internal order oftheir sector, but the people from the housing estates see and perceivethemselves as not being villa dwellers. This is reciprocal. At the heart ofthis opposition the people of the housing estates entrench themselvesinto the logic of the habitat and the people of owner-occupied housesentrench themselves into the make-believe of habitat. For some it is therational organization (in appearance) of space. For others it is thepresence of the dream, of nature, health, apart from the bad andunhealthy city. But the logic of the habitat is only perceived in relationto make-believe, and make-believe in relation to logic. People representthemselves to themselves by what they are lacking or believe to belacking. In this relationship, the imaginary has more power. It overdetermineslogic: the fact of inhabiting is perceived by reference to theowner-occupation of detached dwellings. These dwellers regret theabsence of a spatial logic while the people of the housing estates regretnot knowing the joys of living in a detached house. Hence the surprisingresults of surveys. More than 80 per cent of French people aspire tobe owner-occupiers of a house, while a strong majority also declarethemselves to be ‘satisfied’ with social housing estates. The outcome isnot important here. What should be noted is that consciousness of the city and of urban reality is dulled for one or the other, so as todisappear. The practical and theoretical (ideological) destruction of thecity cannot but leave an enormous emptiness, not including administrativeand other problems increasingly difficult to resolve. This emptinessis less important for a critical analysis than the source of conflictexpressed by the end of the city and by the extension of a mutilatedand deteriorated, but real, urban society. The suburbs are urban,within a dissociated morphology, the empire of separation andscission between the elements of what had been created as unity andsimultaneity.
Within this perspective critical analysis can distinguish three periods(which do not exactly correspond to the distinctions previously madein three acts of the drama of the city).
First period. Industry and the process of industrialization assaultand ravage pre-existing urban reality, destroying it through practiceand ideology, to the point of extirpating it from reality and consciousness.Led by a class strategy, industrialization acts as a negative forceover urban reality: the urban social is denied by the industrial economic.
Second period (in part juxtaposed to the first). Urbanization spreadsand urban society becomes general. Urban reality, in and by its owndestruction makes itself acknowledged as socio-economic reality. Onediscovers that the whole society is liable to fall apart if it lacks the cityand centrality: an essential means for the planned organization ofproduction and consumption has disappeared.
Third period. One finds or reinvents urban reality, but not withoutsuffering from its destruction in practice or in thinking. One attemptsto restitute centrality. Would this suggest that class strategy hasdisappeared? 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 urbanismwithout thought. The masters of old had no need for an urban theoryto embellish their cities. What sufficed was the pressure exercised bythe people on their masters and the presence of a civilization and stylewhich enabled the wealth derived from the labour of the people to beinvested into ‘oeuvres’. The bourgeois period puts an end to thisage-old tradition. At the same time this period brings a new rationality,different from the rationality elaborated by philosophers sinceancient Greece.
Philosophical Reason proposed definitions of man, the world, historyand society which were questionable but also underpinned byreasonings which had been given shape. Its democratic generalizationslater gave way to a rationalism of opinions and attitudes. Each citizenwas expected to have a reasoned opinion on every fact and problemconcerning him, this wisdom spurning the irrational. From the confrontationof ideas and opinions, a superior reason was to emerge, ageneral wisdom inciting the general will. It is fruitless to insist uponthe difficulties of this classical rationalism, linked to the political difficultiesof democracy, and to the practical difficulties of humanism. Inthe nineteenth and especially in the twentieth century, organizingrationality, operation at various levels of social reality, takes shape. Isit coming from the capitalist firm and the management of units ofproduction? Is it born at the level of the State and planning? What isimportant is that it is an analytical reason pushed to its extremeconsequences. It begins from a most detailed methodical analysis ofelements — 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 stipulatesit? How and why? This is the gap and the failure of this operationalrationalism. Its tenets purport to extract finality from the sequence ofoperations. Now, this is not so. Finality, that is, the whole and theorientation of the whole, decides itself. To say that it comes from theoperations themselves, is to be locked into a vicious circle: the analysisgiving itself as its own aim, for its own meaning. Finality is an objectof decision. It is a strategy, more or less justified by an ideology.Rationalism which purports to extract from its own analyses the aimpursued by these analyses is itself an ideology. The notion of systemoverlays that of strategy. To critical analysis the system reveals itselfas strategy, is unveiled as decision, that is, as decided finality. It hasbeen shown above how a class strategy has oriented the analysis anddivision of urban reality, its destruction and restitution; and projectionson the society where such strategic decisions have been taken.
However, from the point of view of a technicist rationalism, theresults on the ground of the processes examined above represent onlychaos. In the ‘reality’, which they critically observe — suburbs, urbanfabric and surviving cores — these rationalists do not recognize theconditions of their own existence. What is before them is only contradictionand disorder. Only, in fact, dialectical reason can master (byreflective thought, by practice) multiple and paradoxically contradictoryprocesses.
How to impose order in this chaotic confusion? It is in this way thatorganizational rationalism poses its problem. This is not a normaldisorder. How can it be established as norm and normality? This isunconceivable. This disorder is unhealthy. The physician of modernsociety see himself as the physician of a sick social space. Finality? Thecure? It is coherence. The rationalist will establish or re-establishcoherence into a chaotic reality which he observes and which offersitself up to his action. This rationalist may not realize that coherenceis a form, therefore a means rather than an end, and that he willsystematize the logic of the habitat underlying the disorder and apparentincoherence, that he will take as point of departure towards thecoherence of the real, his coherent approaches. There is in fact nosingle or unitary approach in planning thought, but several tendenciesidentifiable according to this operational rationalism. Among thesetendencies, some assert themselves against, others for rationalism byleading it to extreme formulations. What interferes with the generaltendencies of those involved with planning is understanding only whatthey can translate in terms of graphic operations: seeing, feeling at theend of a pencil, drawing.
One can therefore identify the following:
(1) The planning of men of good will (architects and writers). Theirthinking and projects imply a certain philosophy. Generally they associatethemselves to an old classical and liberal humanism. This not withouta good dose of nostalgia. One wishes to build to the ‘human scale’, for‘people’. These humanists present themselves at one and the same time asdoctors of society and creators of new social relations. Their ideology, orrather, their idealism often come from agrarian models, adopted withoutreflection: the village, the community, the neighbourhood, the townsman-citizen who will be endowed with civic buildings, etc. They want tobuild buildings and cities to the ‘human scale’, ‘to its measure’, withoutconceiving that in the modern world ‘man’ has changed scale and themeasure of yesteryear (village and city) has been transformed beyondmeasure. At best, this tradition leads to a formalism (the adoption ofmodels which had neither content or meaning), or to an aestheticism,that is, the adoption for their beauty of ancient models which are thenthrown 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 formsof operational rationalism, tends to neglect the so-called ‘humanfactor’. 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. Oneextrapolates from a science, from a fragmentary analysis of the realityconsidered. One optimizes information and communication into amodel. This technocratic and systematized planning, with its mythsand its ideology (namely, the primacy of technique), would not hesitateto 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 eradicatingfrom social existence the very ruins of what was the city.
Sometimes, on the contrary, information and analytical knowledgecoming from different sciences are oriented towards a synthetic finality.For all that, one should not conceive an urban life having at its disposal information provided by the sciences of society. These twoaspects are confounded in the conception of centres of decision-making,a global vision, planning already unitary in its own way, linked toa philosophy, to a conception of society, a political strategy, that is, aglobal and total system.
(3) The planning of developers. They conceive and realize withouthiding it, for the market, with profit in mind. What is new and recentis that they are no longer selling housing or buildings, but planning.With or without ideology, planning becomes an exchange value. Theproject of developers presents itself as opportunity and place of privilege:the place of happiness in a daily life miraculously and marvellouslytransformed. The make-believe world of habitat is inscribed inthe logic of habitat and their unity provides a social practice whichdoes not need a system. Hence these advertisements, which are alreadyfamous and which deserve posterity because publicity itself becomesideology. Parly II (a new development) ‘gives birth to a new an ofliving’, a ‘new lifestyle’. Daily life resembles a fairy tale. ‘Leave yourcoat in the cloakroom and feeling lighter, do your shopping afterhaving left the children in the nurseries of the shopping mall, meetyour friends, have a drink together at the drugstore ...’ Here is thefulfilled make-believe of the joy of living. Consumer society is expressedby orders: the order of these elements on the ground, the orderto be happy. Here is the context, the setting, the means of yourhappiness. If you do not know how to grasp the happiness offered soas to make it your own — don’t insist!
A global strategy, that is, what is already an unitary system and totalplanning, is outlined through these various tendencies. Some will putinto practice and will concertize a directed consumer society. They willbuild not only commercial centres, but also centres of privilegedconsumption: the renewed city. They will by making ‘legible’ anideology of happiness through consumption, joy by planning adaptedto its new mission. This planning programmes a daily life generatingsatisfactions — (especially for receptive and participating women). Aprogrammed and computerized consumption will become the rule andnorm for the whole society. Others will erect decision-making centres,concentrating the means of power: information, training, organization,operation. And still: repression (constraints, including violence)and persuasion (ideology and advertising). Around these centres willbe apportioned on the ground, in a dispersed order, according to thenorms 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 greatestdangers, for it raises politically the problem of urban society. Itis possible that new contradictions will arise from these projects,impeding convergence. If a unitary strategy was to be successfullyconstituted, 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 nowbe emphasized. In order to take up a radically critical analysis and todeepen the urban problematic, philosophy will be the starting point.This will come as a surprise. And yet, has not frequent reference tophilosophy been made in the preceding pages? The purpose is not topresent a philosophy of the city, but on the contrary, to refute such anapproach by giving back to the whole of philosophy its place inhistory: that of a project of synthesis and totality which philosophy assuch cannot accomplish. After which the analytical will be examined,that is, the ways fragmentary sciences have highlighted or partitionedurban reality. The rejection of the synthetic propositions of thesespecialized, fragmentary, and particular sciences will enable us — topose better — in political terms — the problem of synthesis. During thecourse of this progress one will find again features and problemswhich will reappear more dearly. In particular, the opposition betweenuse value (the city and urban life) and exchange value (spacesbought and sold, the consumption of products, goods, places andsigns) will be highlighted.
For philosophical meditation aiming at a totality through speculativesystematization, that is, classical philosophy from Plato to Hegel, the citywas much more than a secondary theme, an object among others. Thelinks between philosophical thought and urban life appear clearly uponreflection, although they need to be made explicit. The city and the townwere not for philosophers and philosophy a simple objective condition, asociological context, an exterior element. Philosophers have thought thecity: they have brought to language and concept urban life.
Let us leave aside questions posed by the oriental city, the Asiaticmode of production, ‘town and country’ relations in this mode ofproduction, and lastly the formation of ideologies (philosophies) onthis base. Only the Greek and Roman antique city from which arederived societies and civilizations known as ‘Western’ will be considered.This city is generally the outcome of a synoecism, the comingtogether of several villages and tribes established on this territory. Thisunit 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 theheart of which is a minority of free citizens who exercise power overother members of the city: women, children, slaves, foreigners. Thecity links its elements associated with the form of the communalproperty (‘common private property’, or ‘privatized appropriation’)of the active citizens, who are in opposition to the slaves. This form ofassociation constitutes a democracy, the elements, of which are strictlyhierarchical and submitted to the demands of the oneness of the cityitself. It is the democracy of non-freedom (Marx). During the courseof the history of the antique city, private property pure and simple (ofmoney, land and slaves) hardens, concentrates, without abolishing therights of the city over its territory.
The separation between town and country takes place among thefirst and fundamental divisions of labour, with the distribution oftasks according to age and sex (the biological division of labour), withthe organization of labour according to tools and skills (technicaldivision). The social division of labour between town and countrycorresponds to the separation between material and intellectual labour,and consequently, between the natural and the spiritual. Intellectuallabour is incumbent upon the city: functions of organizationand direction, political and military activities, elaboration of theoreticalknowledge (philosophy and sciences). The whole divides itself,separations are established, including the separation between thePhysics and the Logos, between theory and practice, and in practice,the separations between between praxis (action on human groups),poiesis (creation of ‘oeuvres’), techne (activities endowed with techniquesand directed towards product). The countryside, both practicalreality and representation, will carry images of nature, of being, of theinnate. The city will carry images of effort, of will, of subjectivity, ofcontemplation, without these representations becoming disjointedfrom real activities. From these images confronted against each othergreat symbolisms will emerge. Around the Greek city, above it, thereis the cosmos, luminous and ordered spaces, the apogee of place. Thecity has as centre a hole which is sacred and damned, inhabited by theforces of death and life, times dark with effort and ordeals, the world.The Apollonian spirit triumphs in the Greek city, although not withoutstruggle, as the luminous symbol of reason which regulates, whilein the Etruscan-Roman city what governs is the demonic side of theurban. But the philosopher and philosophy attempt to reclaim orcreate totality. The philosopher does not acknowledge separation, hedoes 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 andmultiple modalities. It becomes itself a specialized activity in its ownright. But it does not become fragmentary, for otherwise it wouldblend 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, whichis recovered or created by the system, that is, the oneness of thoughtand being, of discourse and act, of nature and contemplation, of theworld (or the cosmos) and human reality. This does not exclude butincludes meditation on differences (between Being and thought, betweenwhat comes from nature and what comes from the city, etc.). AsHeidegger expressed it, the logos (element, context, mediation andend for philosophers and urban life) was simultaneously the following:to put forward, gather together and collect, then to recollect andcollect oneself, speak and say, disclose. This gathering is the harvestand even its conclusion. ‘One goes to collect things and brings themback. Here sheltering dominates and with it in turn dominates thewish to preserve ... The harvest is in itself a choice of what needs ashelter.’ Thus, the harvest is already thought out. That which isgathered is put in reserve. To say is the act of collection which gatherstogether. This assumes the presence of ‘somebody’ before which, forwhom 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 inits logos the wealth of the territory, dispersed activities and people, thespoken and the written (of which each assumes already its collectionand recollection). It makes simultaneous what in the countryside andaccording to nature takes place and passes, and is distributed accordingto cycles and rhythms. It grasps and defends ‘everything’. Ifphilosophy and the city are thus associated in the dawning logos(reason), it is not within a subjectivity akin to the Cartesian ‘cogito’.If they constitute a system, it is not in the usual way and in the currentmeaning of the term.
To the organization of the city itself can be linked the primordialwhole of urban form and its content, of philosophical form and itsmeaning: a privileged centre, the core of a political space, the seat ofthe logos governed by the logos before which citizens are ‘equal’, theregions and distributions of space having a rationality justified beforethe logos (for it and by it).
The logos of the Greek city cannot be separated from the philosophicallogos. The oeuvre of the city continues and is focused in the workof philosophers, who gather opinions and viewpoints, various oeuvres,and think them simultaneously and collect differences into a totality:urban places in the cosmos, times and rhythms of the city and that ofthe world (and inversely). It is therefore only for a superficial historicitythat philosophy brings to language and concept urban life, that of thecity. In truth, the city as emergence, language, meditation comes totheoretical light by means of the philosopher and philosophy.
After this first interpretation of the internal link between the city andphilosophy, let us go to the European Middle Ages. It begins from the countryside. The Roman city and the Empire have been destroyed byGermanic tribes which are both primitive communities and militaryorganizations. The feudal property of land is the outcome of thedissolution of this sovereignty (city, property, relations of production).Serfs replace slaves. With the rebirth of cities there is on the onehand the feudal organization of property and possession of land(peasant communities having a customary possession and lords havingan ‘eminent’ domain as it will later be called), and on the other hand,a corporate organization of crafts and urban property. Although atthe beginning seigneurial tenure of land dominates it, this doublehierarchy contains the demise of this form of property and the supremacyof wealth in urban property from which arises a deep conflict,basic to medieval society. ‘The necessity to ally themselves against theplunderer lords associated themselves together; the need for commonmarket halls at a time when industry was craft, when serfs in breachof their bondage and in competition with each other were flooding tothe increasingly rich cities, the whole of feudal organization was givingbirth to the corporations (or guilds). Small capitals, slowly saved byisolated craftsmen, their numbers stable in the middle of a growingpopulation, developed a system of journeymen and apprentices whichestablished in the cities a hierarchy similar to that of the countryside’(Marx). In these conditions theology subordinates philosophy. Thelatter no longer meditates on the city. The philosopher (the theologian)deliberates upon the double hierarchy. He gives it shape, with orwithout raking conflicts into account. The symbols and notionsrelative to the cosmos (spaces, the hierarchy of matter in that space)and to the world (the actualization of finished matter, hierarchies intime, descent or fall, ascension and redemption) erase the consciousnessof the city. From the moment when there are not two but threehierarchies (feudal landed property, guild organization, the king andhis State apparatus), thought takes again a critical dimension. Thephilosopher and philosophy find themselves again, no longer havingto choose between the Devil and the Lord. Philosophy will not howeverrecognize its link to the city, although the rise of rationalismaccompanies the rise of capitalism (commercial and banking, thenindustrial), and the development of cities. This rationalism is attachedeither to the State or to the individual.
For Hegel, at the height of speculative, systematic and contemplativephilosophy, the unity between the perfect Thing, chat is, the Greekcity, and the Idea, which animates society and the State, this admirablewhole, has been irremediably broken by historic becoming. In modernsociety, the State subordinates these elements and materials, includingthe city. The latter, however remains as a sort of subsystem in the totalphilosophico-political system, with the system of needs, that of rightsand 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, orrather, are no longer external to each other. Separations disappear.Philosophy is not satisfied to meditate upon the real, to attempt thelink 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 therational tend towards each other; each from their own side movestowards an identity thus acknowledged. The rational is basicallyphilosophy, the philosophical system. The real is society and law andthe State which cements the edifice by crowning it. Consequently, inthe modern State, the philosophical system, becomes real: in Hegel’sphilosophy, the real acknowledge the rational. The system has adouble side, philosophical and political. Hegel discovers the historicalmoment of this shift from the rational into the real and vice versa. Hebrings to light identity at the moment when history produces it.Philosophy achieves itself There is for Hegel, as Marx will articulateit, at one and the same time a becoming of a philosophy of the worldand 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 philosopherno longer has independence: he accomplishes a public function, as doother officials. Philosophy and the philosopher integrate themselves(by mediation of the body of civil servants and the middle class) in thisrational reality of the State — no longer in the city, which was only athing (perfect, it is true, but only thing), denied by a higher and moreinclusive rationality.
One knows that Marx neither refuted nor refused the essentialHegelian affirmation: Philosophy achieves itself. The philosopher nolonger has a right to independence vis-a-vis social practice. Philosophyinserts itself into it. There is indeed a simultaneous becoming-philosophyof the world and a becoming-world of philosophy, andtherefore a tendency towards wholeness (knowledge and acknowledgementof non-separation). And yet Marx thrusts Hegelianismaside. History does not achieve itself. Wholeness is not reached, norare contradictions resolved. It is not by and in the State, with bureaucracyas social support, that philosophy can be realized. The proletariathas this historic mission: only it can put an end to separations(alienations). Its mission has a double facet: to destroy bourgeoissociety by building another society — abolish philosophical speculationand abstraction, the alienating contemplation and systematization, toaccomplish the philosophical project of the human being. It is fromindustry, from industrial production, from its relation with productiveforces and labour, not from a moral or philosophical judgement, thatthe working class gets its possibilities. One must tum this worldupside down: the meeting of the rational and the real will happen inanother society.
The history of philosophy in relation to the city is far from beingaccomplished within this perspective. Indeed, this history would alsosuggest the analysis of themes whose emergence are linked to therepresentation of nature and the earth, to agriculture, to the sacralizationof the land (and to its desacralization). Such themes, once born,are displaced and represented sometimes far from their starting pointsin time and space. The points of imputation and impact, conditions,implications, consequences do not coincide. The themes are enunciatedand inserted into social contexts and categories different fromthose which distinguish their emergence, inasmuch as one can speakof ‘categories’. The urban problematic, for example that which refersto 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 cyclicalbecoming or of the hidden immobility of the human being. Thepurpose of these remarks is to show that the relation considered hasyet to receive an explicit formulation.
What relation is there today between philosophy and the city? Anambiguous one. The most emminent contemporary philosophers donot borrow their themes from the city. Bachelard has left wonderfulpages on the house. Heidegger has meditated on the Greek city and thelogos, and on the Greek temple. Nevertheless the metaphors whichresume Heideggerian thought do not come from the city but from aprimary and earlier life: the ‘shepherds of being’, the ‘forest paths’. Itseems that it is from the Dwelling and the opposition between Dwellingand Wandering that Heidegger borrows his themes. As for so-called‘existential’ thought, it is based on individual consciousness, onthe 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 onthe city. For example, one can perfectly conceive of a phenomenologicaldescription of urban life. Or construct a semiology of urbanreality which would correspond for the present city to what was thelogos in the Greek city. Only philosophy and the philosopher proposea totality, the search for a global conception or vision. To consider ‘thecity’ is it not already to extend philosophy, to reintroduce philosophyinto the city or the city into philosophy? It is true that the concept oftotality is in danger of remaining empty if it is only philosophical.Thus is formulated a problematic which does not reduce itself to thecity but which concerns the world, history, ‘man’.
Moreover, a certain number of contemporary thinkers have ponderedon the city. They see themselves, more or less clearly, as philosophersof the city. For this reason these thinkers want to inspirearchitects and planners, and make the link between urban preoccupationsand the old humanism. But these philosophers lack breadth. Thephilosophers who claim to think the city and put forward a philosophyof the city by extending traditional philosophy, discourse on the‘essence’ of the city or on the city as ‘spirit’, as ‘life’ or ‘life force’, asbeing or ‘organic whole’. In brief, sometime as subject, sometime asabstract system. This leads to nothing, thus a double conclusion.Firstly, the history of philosophical thought can and must reclaimitself from its relation with the city (the condition and content of thisthought). 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 ofthis context, a strategy to envisage). Philosophical concepts are notoperative and yet they situate the city and the urban — and the wholeof society — as a totality, over and above analytical fragmentations.What is proclaimed here of philosophy and its history could equallybe asserted for art and its history.
Fragmentary Sciences and Urban Reality
During the course of the nineteenth century, the sciences of socialreality are constituted against philosophy which strives to grasp theglobal (by enclosing a real totality into a rational systematization).These sciences fragment reality in order to analyse it, each having theirmethod or methods, their sector or domain. After a century, it is stillunder discussion whether these sciences bring distinct enlightenmentto a unitary reality, or whether the analytical fragmemation chat theyuse corresponds to objective differences, articulations, levels anddimensions.
One cannot claim that the city has escaped the researches of historians,economists, demographers and sociologists. Each of thesespecialities contributes to a science of the city. It has already beenascertained and corroborated that history elucidates better the genesisof the city, and especially identifies better than any other science, theproblematic of urban sociecy. Inversely, there is also no doubt that theknowledge 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 builda commercial or cultural centre, taking into account functional andfunctioning needs, the economist has his word to say. In the analysisof urban reality, the geographer, the climatologist, the botanist alsointervene. The environment, global and confused concept, fragmentsitself according to these specialities. In relation to the future and theconditions of the future, mathematical calculations provide essentialevidence. Yet, what gathers these facts together? A project, or in otherwords, a strategy. On the other hand, a doubt remains and is evenconfirmed. Is the city the sum of indices and facts, of variables andparameters, of correlations, this collection of facts, of descriptions, offragmentary analyses, because it is fragmentary? These analyticaldivisions do not lack rigour, but as has already been said, rigour isuninhabitable. The problem coincides with the general questioning ofthe specialist sciences. On the one hand, the only approach whichseeks to find the global reminds us strangely of philosophy when it isnot openly philosophical. On the ocher hand, the partial offers morepositive but scattered facts. Is it possible to extract from fragmentarysciences a science of the city? No more than a holistic science ofsociety, or of ‘man’, or of human and social reality. On the one hand,a concept without content, on the other, content or contents withoutconcept. Either one declares that the ‘city’, the urban reality as such,does not exist but is only a series of correlations. The ‘subject’ issuppressed. Or the continues to assert the existence of the global: oneapproaches and locates it, either by extrapolations in the name of adiscipline, or by wagering on an ‘interdisciplinary’ tactic. One doesnot grasp it except by an approach which transcends divisions.
Upon closer examination, one realizes that specialists who havestudied urban reality have almost always (except in the case of alogically extremist positivism) introduced a global representation.They can hardly go without a synthesis, settling for a quantity ofknowledge, of dividing and splitting urban reality. As specialists, theythen claim to be able to go legitimately from their analyses to a finalsynthesis whose principle is borrowed from their speciality. By meansof a discipline or interdisciplinary endeavour, they see themselves as‘men of synthesis’. More often, they conceptualize the city (and society)as an organism. Historians have frequently linked these entitiesto an ‘evolution’ or to an ‘historical development’: cities. Sociologistshave conceptualized them as a ‘collective being’, as a ‘social organism’.Organicism, evolutionism, continuism, have therefore dominated representationsof the city elaborated by specialists who believed themselvesto be scholars and only scholars. Philosophers without knowingit, they leapt, without legitimizing their approach, from the partial tothe global as well as from fact to right.
Is there a dilemma? An impasse? Yes and no. Yes, there is anobstacle, or if one wants another metaphor, a hole is dug. No. Oneshould be able to cross the obstacle because there is a quite recentpractice which already spills over the speculative problem, or thepartial facts of the real problem, and which tends to become global bygathering all the facts of experience and knowledge, namely, planning.What is involved here is nor a philosophical view on praxis, but theface that so-called planning thought becomes practice at a global level.For a few years now planning has gone beyond partial techniques andapplications (regulation and administration of built space) to becomea social practice concerning and of interest to the whole of society. 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.
As social practice, planning (which it becomes without havingreached a level of elaboration and action, which indeed it can onlyreach through confrontation with political strategies) has alreadycrossed the initial stage, namely, the confrontation and communicationof experts, and the gathering of fragmentary analyses, in brief,what is called the interdisciplinary. Either the planner is inspired bythe practice of partial knowledge which he applies, or he puts intoaction hypotheses or projects at the level of a global reality. In the firstcase, the application of partial knowledge gives results which candetermine the relative importance of this knowledge: these results,experimentally revealing absences and lacunae, enable us to specify onthe 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 iseffectively involved is a critical examination of the activity called‘planning’, and not a belief in the word of planners or the unchallengedacceptance 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 insteadof being hidden. As does the questioning over use and users.
Philosophy of the City and Planning Ideology
In order to formulate the problematic of the city (to articulate problemsby linking them), the following must be clearly distinguished:
The philosophers and philosophies of the city who define itspeculatively as whole by defining the ‘homo urbanicus’ asman in general, the world or the cosmos, society, history.
Partial knowledge concerning the city (its elements, functions,structures).
The technical application of this knowledge (in a particularcontext defined by strategic and political decisions).
Planning as doctrine, that is, as ideology, interpreting partialknowledge, justifying its application and raising these (byextrapolation) to a poorly based or legitimated totality.
The aspects or elements which this analysis distinguishes do notappear separately in various works; they interest, reiforcing or neutralizing each other. Plato proposes a concept of the city and ideal townin Critias. In The Republic and The Laws, Platonic utopia is temperedby very concrete analyses. It is the same for Aristode’s politicalwritings which study the constitution of Athens and other Greekcities.
Today, Lewis Mumford and G. Bardet among others still imagine acity made up not of townspeople, but of free citizens, free from thedivision of labour, social classes and class struggles, making up acommunity, freely associated for the management of this community.As philosophers, they make up a model of the ideal city. They conceivefreedom in the twentieth century according to the freedom ofthe Greek city (this is an ideological travesty: only the city as suchpossessed freedom and not individuals and groups). Thus they thinkof the modern city according to a model of the antique city, which isat the same time identified with the ideal and rational city. The agora,place and symbol of a democracy limited to its citizens, and excludingwomen, slaves and foreigners, remains for a particular philosophy ofthe city the symbol of urban society in general. This is a typicallyideological extrapolation. To this ideology these philosophers addpartial knowledge, this purely ideological operation consisting in apassage (a leap), from the partial to the whole, from the elementary tothe total, from the relative to the absolute. As for Le Corbusier, asphilosopher of the city he describes the relationship between the urbandweller and dwelling with nature, air, sun, and trees, with cyclical timeand the rhythms of the cosmos. To this metaphysical vision, he addsan 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 afew predictable and prescribed functions laid out on the ground by thearchitecture. Such an architect sees himself as a ‘man of synthesis’,thinker and practitioner. He believes in and wants to create humanrelations by defining them, by clearing their environment and decor.Within this well-worn perspective, the architect perceives and imagineshimself as architect of the world, human image of God the Creator.
Philosophy of the city (or if one wanes, urban ideology), was born asa superstructure of society into which structures entered a certain typeof city. This philosophy, precious heritage of the past, extends itselfinto speculations which often are travesties of science just because theyintegrate 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 andinformation in the great modern city, leads to real knowledge and totechnical applications. To claim that the city is defined as a network ofcirculation and communication, as a centre of information and decision-making, is an absolute ideology; this ideology proceeding from aparticularly arbitrary and dangerous reduction-extrapolation andusing terrorist means, see itself as total truth and dogma. It leads to aplanning of pipes, of roadworks and accounting, which one claims toimpose 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 whoseexpression date from around 1910, a transformation in contemporarysociety (characterized by the beginning of a deep crisis and attempts toresolve it by organizational methods, firstly the scale of the firm, andthen on a global scale). It is then that socially the notion of spacecomes to the fore, relegating into shadow time and becoming. Planning as ideology formulates all the problems of society into questionsof space and transposes all that comes from history and consciousnessinto spatial terms. It is an ideology which immediately divides up.Since society does not function in a satisfactory manner, could therenot be a pathology of space? Within this perspective, the virtuallyofficial recognition of the priority of space over time is not conceivedof as indication of social pathology, as symptom among others of areality which engenders social disease. On the contrary, what arerepresented are healthy and diseased spaces. The planner should beable to distinguish between sick spaces and spaces linked to mentaland social health which are generators of this health. As physician ofspace, he should have the capacity to conceive of an harmonious socialspace, normal and normalizing. Its function would then be to grant tothis space (perchance identical to geometrical space, that of abstracttopologies) preexisting social realities.
The radical critique of philosophies of the city as well as of ideologyis vital, as much on the theoretical as on the practical level. It can bemade in the name of public health. However, it cannot be carried outwithout extensive research, rigorous analyses and the patient study oftexts and contexts.
The Specificity of the City
A philosophy of the city answered questions raised by social practicein precapiralisr societies (or if one prefers this terminology, in pre-industrialsocieties). Planning as technique and ideology responds todemands arising from this vast crisis of the city already referred to,which starts with the rise of competitive and industrial capitalism andwhich has never stopped getting deeper. This world crisis gives rise tonew aspects of urban reality. It sheds light on what was little or poorlyunderstood; it unveils what had been badly perceived. It forces thereconsideration of not only the history of the city and knowledge of thecity, 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 awhole among others, and this in the best of cases when it was not beingreduced to a partial phenomenon, to a secondary, elementary or accidentalaspect, of evolution and history. One would elms see in it a simpleresult, a local effect reflecting purely and simply general history. Theserepresentations, 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 leadto this knowledge; moreover, they blocked at a quite basic level theenquiry; they were ideologies rather than concepts and theories.
Only now are we beginning to grasp the specificity of the city (ofurban phenomena). The city always had relations with society as awhole, with its constituting elements (countryside and agriculture,offensive and defensive force, political power, States, etc.), and withits history. it changes when society as a whole changes. Yet, the city’stransformations are not the passive outcomes of changes in the socialwhole. 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 isnot reduced to the organization of these immediate and direct relations,nor its metamorphoses to their changes. It is situated at aninterface, half-way between what is called the near order(relations ofindividuals in groups of variable size, more or less organized andstructured and the relations of these groups among themselves), andthe far order, 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 whichthe far order projects itself at this ‘higher’ level and imposes itself.Abstract, formal, supra-sensible and transcending in appearances, it isnot conceptualized beyond ideologies (religious and political). It includesmoral and legal principles. This far order projects itself into thepractico-material reality and becomes visible by writing itself withinthis reality. It persuades through and by the near order, which confirmsits compelling power. It becomes apparent by and in immediacy.The city is a mediation among mediations. Containing the near order,it supports it; it maintains relations of production and property; it isthe place of their reproduction. Contained in the far order, it supportsit; it incarnates it; it projects it over a terrain (the site) and on a plan,that of immediate life; it inscribes it, prescribes it, writes it. A text in acontext so vast and ungraspable as such except by reflection.
And thus the city is an oeuvre, closer to a work of art than to asimple material product. If there is production of the city, and socialrelations in the city, it is a production and reproduction of humanbeings by human beings, rather than a production of objects. The cityhas a history; it is the work of a history, chat is, of dearly definedpeople and groups who accomplish this oeuvre, in historical conditions.Conditions which simultaneously enable and limit possibilities,are never sufficient to explain what was born of them, in them, bythem. It was in this way that the city created by the Western MiddleAges was animated and dominated by merchants and bankers, thiscity was their oeuvre. Can the historian consider it as a simple objectof commerce, a simple opportunity for lucre? Absolutely not, preciselynot. These merchants and bankers acted to promote exchange andgeneralize it, to extend the domain of exchange value; and yet for themthe city was much more use value than exchange value. These merchantsof Italian, Flemish, English and French cities loved their citieslike a work of art and adorned them with every kind of works of an. Sothat, paradoxically, the city of merchants and bankers remains for us thetype and model of an urban real icy whereby use (pleasure, beauty, ornamentationof meeting places) still wins over lucre and profit, exchangevalue, the requirements and constraints of markets. At the same time,wealth arising from commerce in goods and money, the power of gold, thecynicism of this power, are also inscribed in this city and in it prescribe anorder. So that, as such it still remains for some model and prototype.
By taking ‘production’ in its widest sense (the production of oeuvresand of social relations), there has been in history the production ofcities as there has been production of knowledge, culture, works of artand civilization, and there also has been, of course, production ofmaterial goods and practico-material objects. These modalities ofproduction cannot be disjointed unless one has the right to confusethem by reducing differences. The city was and remains object, but notin the way of particular, pliable and instrumental object: such as apencil or a sheet of paper. Its objectivity, or ‘objectality’, might ratherbe closer to that of the language which individuals and groups receivebefore modifying it, or of language (a particular language, the work ofa particular society, spoken by particular groups). One could alsocompare this ‘objectality’ to that of a cultural reality, such as thewritten book, instead of old abstract object of the philosophers orthe immediate and everyday object. Moreover, one must take precautions.If I compare the city to a book, to a writing (a semiologicalsystem), I do not have the right to forget the aspect of mediation. I canseparate it neither from what it contains nor from what contains it, byisolating it as a complete system. Moreover, at best, the city constitutes a sub-system, a sub-whole. On this book, with this writing, areprojected mental and social forms and structures. Now, analysis canachieve this context from the text, but it is not given. Intellectualoperations and reflective approaches are necessary to achieve it (deduction,induction, translation and transduction). The whole is notimmediately present in this wrinen text, the city. There are other levelsof reality which do not become transparent by definition. The citywrites and assigns, that is, it signifies, orders, stipulates. What? Thatis to be discovered by reflection. This text has passed through idealogies, as it also ‘reflects’ them. The far order projects itself in/on thenear order. However, the near order does not reflect transparently thefar order. The later subordinates the immediate through mediations.it does not yield itself up. Moreover, it hides itself without discoveringitself. This is how it acts without one having the right to speak of atranscendence of order, the Global or the Total.
If one considers the city as oeuvre 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 nooeuvre without a regulated succession of acts and actions, of decisionsand conduces, messages and codes. Nor can an oeuvre exist withoutthings, 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 reducedto this sensible world, and yet they do not float in air, they do notdisappear 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, withoutattachment to objects and things. We must insist on this methodologicallyand theoretically important point. There is cause and reason todistinguish between material and social morphologies. We shouldperhaps here introduce a distinction between the city, a present andimmediate reality, a practico-material and architectural fact, and theurban, a social reality made up of relations which are to be conceivedof, conscructed or reconstructed by thought. This distinction none theless reveals itself to be dangerous and the designation proposed cannotbe handled without risk. Thus designated, the urban seems not to needland and material morphology and is outlined according to a speculativemode of existence of entities, spirits and souls, freed from attachmentsand inscriptions; a kind of imaginary transcendence. If oneadopts this terminology, the relations between the city and the urbanwill have to be determined with the greatest care, by avoiding separationas well as confusion, and metaphysics as well as reduction to theimmediate and tangible. Urban life, urban sociecy, in a word, theurban, 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 urban andurban society are conceived without this basis, it is that they areperceived as possibilities, it is chat the virtualities of actual society areseeking, so to speak, their incorporation and incarnation throughknowledge and planning thought: through our ‘reflections’. If they donot find them, these possibilities go into decline and are bound todisappear. The urban is not a soul, a spirit, a philosophical entity.
Continuities and Discontinuities
Organicism and its implications, namely the simplifying evolutionismof many historians and the naive continuism of many sociologists, hasdisguised the specific features of urban reality. The acts or events‘producers’ of this reality as formation and social oeuvre escapedknowledge. In this sense, to produce is to create: to bring into being‘something’ which did nor exist before the productive activity. For along time knowledge has hesitated in the face of creation. Eithercreation appears to be irrational, spontaneity swelling up from theunknown and the unknowable. Or else it is denied and what comes tobe is reduced to what was already existing. Science wants itself to bea science of determinisms, a knowledge of constraints. It abandons tophilosophers the exploration of births, of decline, transitions, disappearances.In this, those who challenge philosophy abandon the ideaof creation. The study of urban phenomena is linked to overcomingthese obstacles and dilemmas, to the solution of these internal conflictsby reason which knows.
As much in the past as now, history and sociology conceived as anorganicist model have not known better how to apprehend differences.Abusive reductions take place to the detriment of these differencesand to the detriment of creation. It is quite easy to grasp the linkbetween these reductive operations. The specific flees before simplifyingschematas. In the rather troubled light shed by many confusedcrises (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 entirelywritten page, analysis can now perceive why and how global processes(economic, social, political, cultural) have formed urban space andshaped the city, without creative action arising instantaneously anddeductively from these processes. Indeed, if they have influencedurban rhythms and spaces, it is by enabling groups to insert themselves,to cake charge of them, to appropriate them; and this byinventing, by sculpting space (to use a metaphor), by giving themselvesrhythms. Such groups have also been innovative in how to live, to havea family, to raise and educate children, to leave a greater or lesser placeto women, to use and transmit wealth. These transformations ofeveryday life modified urban reality, not without having from it theirmotivations. The city was at one and the same rime the place and themilieu, the theatre and the stake of these complex interactions.
The introduction of temporal and spatial discontinuities in thetheory of the city (and the urban), in history and sociology, does notgive one the right to abuse it. Separations must not be substituted fororganicism and continuism by consecrating them by theory. If the cityappears as a specific level of social reality, general processes (of whichthe most important and accessible were the generalization of commercialexchanges, industrialization in such a global context, the formationof competitive capitalism), did not take place above this specificmediation. Moreover, the level of immediate relations, personal andinterpersonal (the family, the neighbourhood, crafts and guilds, thedivision of labour between crafts, etc.) is only separated from urbanreality through an abstraction: the correct approach of knowledgecannot change this abstraction into separation. Reflection emphasizesarticulations so that delineations do not disarticulate the real butfollow articulations. The methodological rule is to avoid confusion inan illusory continuity as well as separations or absolute discontinuities.Consequently, the study of articulations between the levels of realityenables us to demonstrate the distortions and discrepancies betweenlevels 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 along period of time with its consequences for exchanges, or thedevelopment of rationality) but also in relation to profound transformationsin the mode of production, in the relations between •town andcountry’, in the relations of class and property. The correct approachconsists in going from the most general knowledge to that whichconcerns historical processes and discontinuities, their projection orrefraction onto the city and conversely, particular and specific knowledgeof urban reality to its global context.
The city and the urban cannot be understood without institutionsspringing from relations of class and property. The city itself, perpetualoeuvre and act, gives rise to specific institutions: that is, municipalinstitutions. The most general institutions, those which belong to theState, to the dominant religion and ideology have their seat in thepolitical, military and religious city. They coexist with properly urban,administrative, and cultural institutions. Hence a number of remarkablecontinuities through changes in society.
One knows that there was and there still is the oriental city, expressionand projection on the ground, effect and cause, of the Asiaticmode of production; in this mode of production State power, restingon the city, organizes economically a more or less extensive agrarianzone, regulates and controls water, irrigation and drainage, the use ofland, in brief, agricultural production. There was in the era of slavery,a city which organized its agricultural zone through violence and byjuridical rationality, but which undermined its own base by replacingfree peasants (landowners) with latifundial type properties. In theWest there was also the medieval city, rooted in a feudal mode ofproduction where agriculture was predominant, but which was alsoplace of commerce, theatre of class struggle between an emergingbourgeoisie and territorial feudalism, the point of impact and lever ofroyal State action. Finally, in the West, and in North America, therehas been the capitalist, commercial and industrial city, more or lessdelimited by the political State whose formation accompanied the riseof capitalism and whose bourgeoisie knew how to appropriate themanagement of the whole of society.
Discontinuities are not only situated between urban formations, butalso between the most general of social relations, and the immediaterelations of individuals and groups (between codes and sub-codes).The medieval city has however lasted for almost eight centuries. Therupture of the big city tends to disintegrate urban cores of medievalorigins, 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 veryancient origins. This can explain without inasmuch legitimizing theillusion of continuism and evolutionary ideology. This illusion andthis ideology have disguised the dialectical movement in the metamorphosesof cities and the urban, and particularly in the relations of‘continuity-discontinuity’. In the course of development some formschange themselves into functions and enter structures which take them back and transform them. Thus the extension of commercial exchanges from the European Middle Ages onwards, contributes to thisextraordinary formation, the merchant city (integrating completelythe merchants established around the market square and market hall).Since industrialization these local and localized markets have only onefunction in urban life, in the relations of the city with the surroundingcountryside. A form which has become function enters into new structures. And yet, planners have recently come to believe that theyhave invented the commercial centre. Their thinking progressed fromthat of a denuded space, reduced to a residential function, to that of acommercial centrality which brought a difference, an enrichment. Butplanners were only rediscovering the medieval city laid bare of itshistorical relation to the countryside, of the struggle between thebourgeoisie and feudalism, of the political relation with a royal anddespotic State, and as a consequence reduced to the unifunctionalityof local exchanges.
Forms, structures, urban functions (in the city, in the relations of thecity to the territory influenced or managed by it, in the relations withsociety and State) acted upon each other modifying themselves, amovement which thought can now reconstruct and master. Eachurban formation knew an ascent, an apogee, a decline. Its fragmentsand debris were later used for/in other formations. Considered in itshistorical movement, at its specific level (above and beyond globaltransformations, hut above immediate and locally rooted relations,often linked to the consecration of the ground, and therefore durableand quasi-permanent in appearance), the city has gone through criticalperiods. Destructurations and restructurations are followed in timeand space, always translated on the ground, inscribed in the practico-material,written in the urban text, but coming from elsewhere: fromhistory and becoming. Not from the supersensible, but from anotherlevel. Local acts and agents left their mark on cities, but also impersonalrelations of production and property, and consequently, ofclasses and class struggles, that is, ideologies (religious and philosophical,that is, ethical, a esthetical, legal, etc.). The projection of theglobal on the ground and on the specific plane of the city wereaccomplished only through mediations. In itself mediation, the citywas 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 transcribedby ideologies, interpreted by tendencies and politicalstrategies. It is this difficulty upon which one must now insist, that ofconceiving the city as a semantic system, semiotic or semiologicalsystem arising from linguistics, urban language or urban reality consideredas grouping of signs. In the course of its projection on aspecific level, the general code of society is modified: the specific codeof the urban is an incomprehensible modulation, a version, a translationwithout the original or origins. Yes, the city can be read becauseit writes, because it was writing. However, it is not enough to examinethis without recourse to context. To write on this writing or language,to elaborate the metalanguage of the city is not to know the city andthe urban. The context, what is below the text to decipher (daily life,immediate relations, the unconscious of the urban, what is little saidand of which even less is written), hides itself in the inhabited spaces— sexual and family life — and rarely confronts itself, and what is abovethis urban text (institutions, ideologies), cannot be neglected in thedeciphering. 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 ofit, even better. It asks from knowledge questions such as ‘who andwhat? how? why? for whom?’ These questions announce and demandthe restitution of the context. The city cannot therefore be conceivedas a signifying system, determined and closed as a system. The takinginto consideration the levels of reality forbids, here as elsewhere, thissytematization. None the less, the city has this singular capacity ofappropriating all significations for saying them, for writing them (tostipulate and to ‘signify’ them), including those from the countryside,immediate life, religion and political ideology. In the cities, monumentsand festivities had this meaning.
During each critical period, when the spontaneous growth of the citystagnates and when urban development oriented and characterized byhitherto dominant social relations ends, then appears a planningthought. This is more a symptom of change than of a continuouslymounting rationality or of an internal harmony (although illusions onthese points regularly reproduce themselves), as this thinking mergesthe philosophy of the city in search of a with the divisive schemes forurban space. To confuse this anxiety with rationality and organizationit is the ideology previously denounced. Concepts and theories makea difficult path through this ideology.
At this point the city should be defined. If it is true that the conceptemerges little by little from these ideologies which convey it, it must beconceived during this progress. We therefore here propose a firstdefinition of the city as a projection of society on the ground, chat is,not only on the actual site, but at a specific level, perceived andconceived 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 isnot only a far order, a social whole, a mode of production, a generalcode, it is also a time, or rather, times, rhythms. The city is heard asmuch as music as it is read as a discursive writing. Secondly, thedefinition calls for supplements. It brings to light certain historicaland generic or genetic differences, but leaves aside other real differences:between the cypes of cities resulting from history, between theeffects of the division of labour in the cities, between the persistent‘city-territory’ relations. Hence another definition which perhaps doesnot destroy the first: the city as the ensemble of differences betweencities. In turn, this definition reveals itself to be insufficient, as it placesemphasis on particularities rather than on generalities, neglecting thesingularities of urban life, the ways of living of the city, more properlyunderstood as to inhabit. Hence another definition, of plurality, coexistenceand simultaneity in the urban of patterns, ways of living urbanlife (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 inthemselves exhaustive and do not exclude other definitions. If a theoreticiansees in the city the place of confrontations and of (conflictual)relations between desire and need, between satisfactions and dissatisfactions,if he goes as far as to describe the city as ‘site of desire’, thesedeterminations will be examined and taken into consideration. It is notcertain that they have a meaning limited to the fragmentary science ofpsychology. Moreover, there would be the need to emphasize thehistorical role of the city: the quickening of processes (exchange and themarket, the accumulation of knowledge and capitals, the concentrationof these capitals) and site of revolutions.Today, by becoming a centre of decision-making, or rather, bygrouping centres of decision-making, the modern city intensifies byorganizing the exploitation of the whole society (not only the workingclasses, but also other non-dominant social classes). This is not thepassive place of production or the concentration of capitals, but thatof the urban intervening as such in production (in the means ofproduction).
Levels of Reality and Analysis
The preceding considerations are sufficient to show that the analysisof urban phenomena (the physical and social morphology of the city,or if one prefers, the city, the urban and their connexion) requires theuse 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 rigorouspurity, be defined without ambiguity, or escape multiple meaning.Thus the word form takes on various meanings for the logician, forthe literary critic, for the aesthetician, and for the linguist.
The theoretician of the city and the urban will say that these termsare defined as form of simultaneity, as field of encounters and exchanges.This acceptance of the word form must be clarified. Let usagain consider the term function. The analysis distinguishes the functionsinternal to the city, the functions of the city in relation toterritory (countryside, agriculture, villages and hamlets, smaller townssubordinated within a network), and lastly, the functions of the city —each city — in the social whole (the technical and social division oflabour between cities, various networks of relations, administrativeand political hierarchies). It is the same for structures. There is thestructure of the city (of each city, morphologically, socially, topologicallyand topically), then the urban structure of society, and finally thesocial structure of town-country relations. Hence a muddle of analyticaland partial determinations and the difficulties of a global conception.Here as elsewhere three terms most often meet, whose conflictual and(dialectical) relations are hidden under term by term oppositions.There is the countryside, and the city and society with the State whichmanages and dominates it (in its relations with the class structure ofthat society). There is also as we have attempted to show, general (andglobal) processes, the city as specificity and intermediary level, thenrelations of immediacy (linked to a way of life, to inhabiting, and toregulating daily life). This requires therefore more precise definitionsof each level, which we will not be able to separate or confuse, but ofwhich we shall have to show the articulations and disarticulations, theprojections of one upon the other, and the different connections.
The highest level is found at the same time above and in the city.This does not simplify the analysis. The social structure exists in thecity, makes itself apparent, signifies an order. Inversely, the city is apart of the social whole; it reveals, because contains and incorporatesthem within sentient matter, institutions and ideologies. Royal, imperialand presidential buildings are a part of the city: the political part(the capital). These buildings do not coincide with institutions, withdominant social relations. And yet, these relations act upon them, byrepresenting social efficacy and ‘presence’. At its specific level, the cityalso contains the projection of these relations. To elucidate this analysisby a particular case, social order in Paris is represented at thehighest level in/by the Ministry of the Interior, and at the specific levelby the prefecture of police and also by neighbourhood police stations,without forgetting various police agencies acting either at a globallevel, or in the subterranean shadow. Religious ideology is signified atthe highest level by the cathedral, by seats of large religious organizationsof the Church, and also by neighbourhood churches and presbyteries,various local investments of institutionalized religiouspractice.
At this level, the city manifests itself as a group of groups, with iudouble morphology (practico-sensible or material, on the one hand,social on the other), It has a code of functioning focused aroundparticular institutions, such as the municipality with its services and itsproblems, with its channels of information, its networks, its powers ofdecision-making. The social structure is projected on this plane, butthis does not exclude phenomena unique to the city, to a particularcity, and the most diverse manifestations of urban life. Paradoxically,taken at this level, the city is made up of uninhabited and evenuninhabitable spaces: public buildings, monuments, squares, streets,large or small voids. It is so true that ‘habitat’ does not make up thecity and that it cannot be defined by this isolated function.
At the ecological level, habitation becomes essential. The city envelopsit; it is form, enveloping chis space of ‘private’ life, arrival anddeparture of networks of information and the communication oforders (imposing the far order to the near order).
Two approaches arc possible. The first goes from the most generalto the most specific (from institutions to daily life) and then uncoversthe city as specific and (relatively) privileged mediation. The secondstarts from this plan and constructs the general by identifying theelements and significations of what is observable in the urban. Itproceeds in this manner to reach, from the observable, ‘private’, theconcealed daily life: its rhythms, its occupations, its spatio-temporalorganization, its clandestine ‘culture’, its underground life.
Isotopies are defined at each level: political, religious, commercial, etc.space. In relation to these isotopies, other levels are uncovered asheterotopies. Meanwhile, at each level spatial oppositions are uncoveredwhich enter in chis relationship of isotopy-heterotopy. Forexample, the opposition between social and owner-occupied housing.Spaces at the specific level can also be classified according to thecriterion of isotopy-heterotopy, the city as a whole being the mostexpanded isotopy, embracing others, or rather, superimposing itselfover others (over the spatial sub-wholes which are at one and the sametime subordinated and constitutive). Such a classification by oppositionshould not exclude the analysis of levels, nor that of the movement ofthe whole with its conflictual aspects (class relations among others), Atthe ecological level, that of inhabiting, are constituted significant ensembles,partial systems of signs, of which the ‘world of the detachedhouse’ offers a particularly interesting case. The distinction betweenlevels (each level implying in tum secondary levels) has the greatest usein the analysis of essential relations, for example in understanding howthe ‘values of detached housing’ in France become the reference pointof social consciousness and the ‘values’ of other types of housing. Onlythe analysis of relations of inclusion-exclusion, of belonging or non-belongingto a particular space of the city enables us to approach thesephenomena 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, toexpose them by means — or through the voice — of buildings, monuments,and also by streets and squares, by voids, by the spontaneoustheatricalization of encounters which take place in it, not forgettingfestivities and ceremonies (with their appropriate and designatedplaces). Beside the writing, there is also the even more importantutterance of the urban, these utterances speaking of life and death, joyor sorrow. The city has this capacity which makes of it a significantwhole. None the less, to stress a previous remark, the city does notaccomplish this task gracefully or freely. One does not ask it. Aestheticism,phenomenon of decline, comes later. Such as planning! In theform of meaning, in the form of simultaneity and encounters, in theform, finally of an ‘urban’ language and writing, the city dispatchesorders. The far order is projected into the near order. This far order isnever 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, orrather, a syncretism. It dissimulates and veils their rivalries and conflictsby making them imperative. It translates them as instructions foraction, as time management. It stipulates (signifies) with the managementof time a meticulous hierarchy of place, moments, occupations,people. Moreover, it refracts these imperatives in a style, inasmuch asthere is a genuine urban life. This style characterizes itself as architecturaland is associated to art and the study of art objects.
Therefore the semiology of the city is of greatest theoretical andpractical interest. The city receives and emits messages. These messagesare or are not understood (that is, are or are not coded ordecoded). Therefore, it can be apprehended from concepts derivedfrom linguistics: signifier and signified, signification and meaning.Nevertheless, it is not without the greatest reservation or withoutprecautions that one can consider the city as a system, as a uniquesystem of significations and meanings and therefore of values. Hereas elsewhere, there are several systems (or if one prefers, severalsub-systems). Moreover, semiology does not exhaust the practical andideological reality of the city. The theory of the city as system ofsignifications tends towards an ideology; it separates the urban fromits morphological basis and from social practice, by reducing it to a‘signifier-signified’ relation and by extrapolating from actually perceivedsignifications. This is not without a great naivety. If it is truethat a Bororo village signifies, and that the Greek city is full ofmeaning, are we to build vast Bororo villages full of signs of Modernity?Or restore the agora with its meaning at the centre of the newtown?
The fetishization of the formal ‘signifier-signified’ relationship entailsmore serious inconveniences. It passively accepts the ideology oforganised consumption. Or rather, it contributes to it. In the ideologyof consumption and in ‘real’ consumption (in quotations), the consumptionof signs plays an increasing role. It does not repress theconsumption of ‘pure’ spectacles, without activity and participation,without oeuvre or product. It adds to it and superimposes itself uponit as a determination. It is thus that advertising of consumer goodsbecomes the principal means of consumption; it tends to incorporateart, 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 ofconsumption. 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 productionand plays a major integrative role in relation to other productive andorganizing social activities. The sign is bought and sold; languagebecomes exchange value. Under the appearance of signs and significationsin general, it is the significations of this society which are handedover to consumption. Consequently, he who conceives the city andurban reality as system of signs implicitly hands them over to consumptionas integrally consumable: as exchange value in its pure state.Changing sites into signs and values, the practice — material into formalsignifications, this theory also changes into pure consumer of signs hewho receives them. Would not the Paris bis or ter conceived bydevelopers be the centres of consumption promoted to a superior levelby the intensity of the consumption of signs? Urban semiology is indanger of placing itself at their service if it loses its naivety.
In truth, semiological analysis must distinguish between multiplelevels and dimensions. There is the utterance of the city: what happensand takes place in the street, in the squares, in the voids, what is saidthere. There is the language of the city: particularities specific to eachcity which are expressed in discourses, gestures, clothing, in the wordsand use of words by the inhabitants. There is urban language, whichone can consider as language of connotations, a secondary system andderived within the denotative system (to use here Hjemslev and Greimas’sterminology). Finally, there is the writing of the city: what isinscribed and prescribed on its walls, in the layout of places and theirlinkages, in brief, the use of time in the city by its inhabitants.
Semiological analysis must also distinguish between levels, that ofsemantemes or signifying elements (straight or cured lines, writing,elementary forms of entry, doors and windows, corners, angles, etc.),morphemes 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 power),how the city is signified (that is the properly urban semiology) andhow are signified ways of living and inhabiting (that is the semiology of daily life, of to inhabit and habitat). One cannot confuse the city asit apprehends and exposes significations coming from nature, thecountry and the landscape (the tree for example) and the city as placeof consumption of signs. That would be to confuse festivities withordinary consumption.
Let us not forget dimensions. The city has a symbolic dimension;monuments but also voids, squares and avenues, symbolizing thecosmos, the world, society, or simply the State. It has a paradigmaticaldimension; it implies and shows oppositions, the inside and the outside,the centre and the periphery, the integrated and non-integrated tourban society. Finally, it also possesses the syntagmatic dimension: theconnection of elements, the ariculation of isotopies and heterotopies.At its specific level, the city presents itself as a privileged sub-systembecause it is able to reflect and expose the other sub-systems and topresent itself as a ‘world’, a unique whole, within the illusion of theimmediate and the lived. In this capacity resides precisely the charm,the tonicity, and the tonality specific to urban life. But analysis dissipatesthis impression and unveils a number of systems hidden in theillusion of oneness. The analyst has no right to share this illusion andto consolidate it by maintaining himself at an urban level. He mustuncover 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 anunderstanding of the city and the urban. If we consider the sector ofowner-occupation and that of new social housing estates, we alreadyknow that each of them constitutes a (partial) system of significations,and that another system which overdetermines each of them is establishedfrom their opposition. This is how the owner-occupiers of smallhouses perceive and conceive themselves in the make-believe of habitat,and in turn, the estates establish the logic of habitat and perceivethemselves according to this coercive rationality. At the same time andat the same stroke, the sector of owner-occupation becomes thereference by which habitat and daily life are appreciated; that practiceis cloaked in make-believe and signs.
Among systems of significations, those of architects deserve thegreatest critical attention. It often happens that talented men believethemselves to be at the centre of knowledge and experience whereasthey remain at the centre of systems of writing, projections on paper,visualizations. Architects tending on their part towards a system ofsignifications which they often call ‘planning’, it is not impossible foranalysts of urban reality, grouping together their piecemeal facts, toconstitute a somewhat different system of significations that they canalso 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 planedisappear. It exists — as a book. Who reads this open book? Whocrosses over its writing? It is not a well-defined subject and yet asuccession of acts and encounters constitute on this plane itself urbanlife, the urban. This urban life tends to turn against themselves themessages, orders and constraints coming from above. It attempts toappropriate time and space by foiling dominations, by diverting themfrom their goal, by deceit. It also intervenes more or less at the level ofthe city and the way of inhabiting. In this way the urban is more orless the oeuvre of its citizens instead of imposing itself upon them as asystem, 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 betweentown and country and deflects it. There are three terms in thisrelation. In the same way, there are three terminologies in existing reality(rurality, urban fabric, centrality) whose dialectical relations are hiddenbeneath term to term oppositions, but also come to reveal themselves inthem. Nature as such escapes the hold of rationally pursued action, aswell as from domination and appropriation. More precisely, it remainsoutside 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 depthsof the world. The countryside is the place of production and oeuvres.Agricultural production gives birth to products: the landscape is anoeuvre. This oeuvre emerges from the earth slowly moulded, linkedoriginally to the groups which occupy it by a reciprocal consecration,later to be desecrated by the city and urban life (which capture thisconsecration, condense it, then dissolve it over through the ages byabsorbing it into rationalicy). Where does this ancient consecration of theground to the tribes, peoples and nations come from? From the obscureand menacing presence/absence of nature? From the occupation of theground which excludes strangers from this possessed ground? From thesocial pyramid, which has its basis on this ground and which exacts manysacrifices for the maintenance of a threatened edifice? One does notprevent the other. What is important is the complex movement by whichthe political city uses this sacred-damned character of the ground, so thatthe economic (commercial) city can desecrate it.
Urban life includes original mediations between town, country andnature. As the village, whose relationship with the city, in history andin actuality, is far from being well known. As are parks, gardens,channelled waters. These mediations cannot be understood as such bycity dwellers without symbolisms and representations (ideological andimaginary) of nature and the countryside.
The town and country relation has changed deeply during the courseof history, according to different periods and to modes of production.It has been sometimes profoundly conflictual, and at other timesappeased and close to an association. Moreover, during the sameperiod, very different kinds of relations are manifested. Thus in Westernfeudalism, the territorial lord threatens the re-emerging city, wherethe merchants find their meeting place, their homebase, the place oftheir strategy. The city responds to this action of landed power, and aclass struggle ensues, sometimes quiescent, sometimes violent. The cityliberates itself, not by integrating itself by becoming an aristocracy ofcommoners, but by integraring itself with the monarchic State (forwhich it provided an essential condition). On the other hand, duringthe 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 tosparse and insignificant cultivations. In such a relationship, there isneither the kernel nor the possibility of a class struggle. From theoutset this takes away any historical dynamism and future from thissocial structure, although not without conferring upon it othercharms, those of an exquisite urbanism. The class struggle, creative,productive of oeuvres and new relations, takes place with a certainbarbarism which characterizes the West (including the most ‘beautiful’of its cities).
Today, the town and country relation is changing, an importantaspect of a general transformation. In industrial countries, the oldexploitation by the city, centre of capital accumulation, of the surroundingcountryside, gives way to more subtle forms of dominationand exploitation, the city becoming centre of decision-making andapparently also of association. However that may be, the expandingcity attacks the countryside, corrodes and dissolves it. This is notwithout the paradoxical effects already mentioned. Urban life penetratespeasant 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 byfiercely keeping themselves to themselves.
Will the urban fabric, with its greater or lesser meshes, catch in itsnets all the territory of industrialized countries? Is this how the oldopposition between town and country is overcome? One can assumeit, but not without some critical reservations. If a generalized confusionis thus perceived, the countryside losing itself into the heart of thecity, and the city absorbing the countryside and losing itself in it, thisconfusion can be theoretically challenged. Theory can refute allstrategies resting on this conception of the urban fabric. Geographershave coined to name this confusion an ugly but meaningful neologism:the rurban. Within this hypothesis, the expansion of the city andurbanization would cause the urban (the urban life) to disappear. Thisseems inadmissible. In other words, the overcoming of oppositioncannot be conceived as a reciprocal neutralization. There is no theoreticalreason to accept the disappearance of centrality in the course ofthe fusion of urban society with the countryside. The ‘urbanity-rurality’opposition is accentuated rather than dissipated, while thetown and country opposition is lessened. There is a shifting of oppositionand conflict. What is more, we all know that worldwide, thetown and country conflict is far from being resolved. If it is true thatthe town and country separation and contradiction (which envelopswithout reducing to itself the opposition of the two terms) is part ofthe social division of labour, it must be acknowledged that thisdivision is neither overcome nor mastered. Far from it. No more thanthe separation of nature and society, and that of the material and theintellectual (spiritual). Overcoming this today cannot not take placefrom the opposition between urban fabric and centrality. It presupposesthe invention of new urban forms.
As far as industrial countries are concerned, one can conceivepolycentric cities, differentiated and renovated centralities, evenmobile centralities (cultural ones for example). The critique of planningas ideology can be about such and such a conception of centrality(for example, the distinction between the urban and the centres ofinformation and decision-making). Neither traditional city (separatedfrom the countryside to better dominate it), nor the Megalopoliswithout form or fabric, without woof or warp, would be the guidingidea. The disappearance of centrality is neither called for theoreticallynor practically. The only question that can be asked is this one: ‘Whatsocial and political forms, what theory will one entrust with therealization on the ground of a renovated centrality and fabric, freedfrom their degradations?’
Around the Critical Point
Let us trace hypothetically from left to right an axis going from zeropoint in urbanization (the non-existence of the city, the completepredominance of agrarian life, agricultural production and thecountryside) to full urbanization (the absorption of the countryside bythe city and the total predominance of industrial production, includingagriculture). This abstract picture momentarily places the discontinuitiesin parentheses. To a certain extent it will enable us to locatethe critical points, that is, the breaks and discontinuities themselves.Quite quickly on the axis, quite near to the beginning, let us mark thepolitical city (in effect achieved and maintained in the Asiatic mode ofproduction) which organizes an agrarian environment by dominatingit. A little further, let us mark the appearance of the commercial city,which begins by relegating commerce to its periphery (a heterotopy ofoutlying areas, fairs and markets, places assigned to foreigners, tostrangers specialized in exchanges) and which later integrates themarket by integrating itself to a social structure based on exchanges,expanded communications, money and movable wealth. There thencomes a decisive critical point, where the importance of agriculrureretreats before the importance of craft and industrial production, ofthe market, exchange value and a rising capitalism. This critical pointis located in Western Europe around the sixteenth century. Soon it isthe arrival of the industrial city, with its implications (emigration ofdispossed and disaggregated peasant populations cowards the city — aperiod of great urban concentration). Urban society is heralded longafter society as a whole has tilted towards the urban. Then there is theperiod when the expanding city proliferates, produces far-flung peripheries(suburbs), and invades the countryside. Paradoxically, in thisperiod when the city expands inordinately, the form (the practicomaterialmorphology, the form of urban life) of the traditional cityexplodes. This double process (industrialization-urbanization) producesthe double movement: explosion-implosion, condensation-dispersion(the explosion already mentioned). It is therefore around thiscritical point that can be found the present problematic of the city andurban reality.
The phenomena which unfold around the situation of crisis are norless complex than the physical phenomena which accompany thebreaking of the sound barrier (to use a simple metaphor). It is to thisend — the analysis in the proximity of the critical point — that we havepreviously attempted to assemble the essential conceptual tools.Knowledge which would dissociate itself from this situation would fallback into blind speculation or myopic specialization.
Too badly placed, the critical points, breaks and lacunae canhave as serious consequences as organicist, evolutionist or continuistnegligence. Today, sociological thinking and political strategy, andso-called planning thought, tend to jump from the level of habitat andto inhabit (ecological level, housing, buildings, neighbourhood andthus the domain of the architect), to the general level (scale of land useplanning, planned industrial production, global urbanization), passingover the city and the urban. Mediation is placed into parenthesesand the specific level is omitted. Why? For significant reasons relatedfirstly to the disregard of the critical point.
The rational planning of production, land use planning, globalindustrialization and urbanization are essential aspects of the “socializationof society”. Let us pause for a moment on these words. AMarxist tradition with reformist inflections uses them to designate thecomplexification of society and social relations, the rupture of cornpartimentalization,the growing multiplicity of connexions, communicationsand information, the fact that an accentuated technical andsocial division of labour implies a stronger unity in branches ofindustry, market functions and production itself. This approach insistson exchanges and places of exchange: it emphasizes the quantity ofeconomic exchanges and leaves aside quality, the essential differencebetween use value and exchange value. In this perspective, the exchangesof merchandise and of consumer goods level and align directexchanges to themselves, that is, communications which do not gothrough existing networks, and through institutions (namely at the‘inferior’ level, the immediate relations, and at the ‘superior’ level, thepolitical relations resulting from knowledge). The answer given toreformist continuism is the thesis of disconrinuism and radical revolutionaryvoluntarism: a rupture, a break, are essential for the socialcharacter of productive labour to abolish relations of productionlinked to private ownership of these means of production. However,the thesis of the ‘socialization of society’, an evolutionist, continuistand reformist interpretation, takes on another meaning if one observesthat these words refer to, badly and incompletely, the urbanization of society. The multiplication and complexification of exchanges in thewidest sense of the term cannot take place without the existence ofprivileged places and moments, without these places and moments ofmeeting freeing themselves from the constraints of the market, withoutthe law of exchange value being mastered, and without therelations 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 onetrap. Until now a revolutionary interpretation has not taken intoaccount these new elements. Would it not be possible that the morerigorous definition of the relations between industrialization andurbanization, in the situation of crisis, and around the critical point,will help to overcome the contradiction of absolute continuism anddiscontinuism, of reformist evolutionism and total revolution? If onewants to go beyond the market, the law of exchange value, money andprofit, is it not necessary to define the place of this possibility: urbansociety, the city as use value?
The paradox of this critical situation, a crucial element of theproblem, is that the crisis of the city is world-wide. It presents itself asa dominant aspect of universality in progress as do technology and therational organization of industry. Yet, the practical causes and ideologicalreasons of this crisis vary according to political regimes, thesocieties, and even the countries concerned. A critical analysis of thesephenomena could only be legitimated by comparison, but many elementsof this comparison are missing. In underdeveloped countries,highly industrialized capitalist countries, socialist countries unevenlydeveloped, everywhere the city explodes. The traditional form ofagrarian society is transforming itself, but differently. In a number ofpoor countries, shanty towns are a characteristic phenomenon, whilein highly industrialized countries, the proliferation of the city into‘urban fabric’, suburbs, residential areas, and its relation with urbanlife is what causes the problem.
How gather together the elements of such a comparison? In theUnited States, the difficulties of Federal administration, its conflictswith local authorities, the terms of reference of ‘urban government’,divided among the manager, the political boss and the mayor and hismunicipality, cannot be explained in the same way as the powerconflicts (administrative and juridical) in Europe and in France, wherethe consequences of industrialization besiege and explode urban coresdating from precapitalist or pre-industrial times. In the United States,the urban core hardly exists except in some privileged cities, yer localauthorities have greater legal guarantees and more extensive powersthan in France where monarchical centralization attacked these urban‘freedoms’ very early on. In Europe, as elsewhere, one cannot attributeonly to the growth of cities, or only to problems of traffic, difficultieswhich are both different and comparable. Here and there, from onepart or another, the whole society is questioned one way or another.As it is preoccupied (through ideologues and statesmen) to principallyplan industry and organize enterprise, modern society appears littleable to give solutions to the urban problematic and to act otherwisethan by small technical measures which only protract the current stateof affairs. Everywhere the relation between the three levels analysedabove becomes confused and conflictual, the dynamic element of thecontradiction changing according to the social and political context.In so-called developing countries, the breakdown of agrarian structurepushes dispossessed peasants, ruined and eager for change, towardsthe cities. The shanty town welcomes them and becomes the (inadequate)mediator between town and country, agricultural and industrialproduction. It often consolidates itself and offers a substitute of urbanlife, miserable and yet intense, to those which it shelters. In othercountries, particularly in socialist countries, planned urban growthattracts labour to the cities recruited from the countryside resulting inovercrowding, the construction of neighbourhoods or residential sectorswhose 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 traditionalcity. This is a change on a planetary scale. The old rural animal andurban animal (Marx), disappear together. Do they leave room to‘man’? That is the basic problem. The major theoretical and practicaldifficulty comes from the fact that the urbanization of industrialsociety does not happen without the breakup of what we still call ‘thecity’. Given that urban society is built on the ruins of the city, howcan we grasp the breadth and manifold contradictions of these phenomena?That is the critical point. The distinction between the threelevels (global process of industrialization and urbanization — urbansociety, the specific scale of the city-ways of living and conditions ofdaily life in the urban) tends to become blurred as does the distinctionbetween town and country. And yet, this difference between the threelevels is more than ever crucial to avoid confusion and misunderstandings,to combat strategies which find in this conjuncture an opportunityto disintegrate the urban into industrial and or residentialplanning.
Yes, this city which has gone through so much adversity and somany metamorphoses, since its archaic cores so dose to the village,this admirable social form, this exquisite oeuvre of praxis and civilization,unmakes and remakes itself under our very eyes. The urgency ofthe housing question in conditions of industrial growth has concealedand still conceals the problems of the city. Political strategists, moreattentive to the immediate, perceived and still perceive only theseissues. When these overall problems emerged, under the name ofplanning, they have been subordinated to the general organization ofindustry. Attacked both from above and below, the city is associatedto industrial enterprise: it figures in planning as a cog: it becomes thematerial device apt to organize production, control the daily life of theproducers and the consumption of products. Having been reduced tothe status of device, it extends this management to the consumers andconsumption; it serves to regulate, to lay one over the other, theproduction of goods and the destruction of products with that devouringactivity, ‘consumption’. It did not have, it has no meaning but asan oeuvre, as an end, as place of free enjoyment, as domain of usevalue. Or, it is subjugated to constraints, to the imperatives of an‘equilibrium’ within narrowly restrictive conditions; it is no more thanthe instrument of an organization which moreover is unable to consolidateitself by determining its conditions of stability and equilibrium,an organization according to whose catalogue and teleguideindividual needs are satisfied by annihilating catalogued objects whoseprobability of durability (obsolescence) is itself a scientific field. In thepast, reason had its place of birth, its seat, its home in the city. Inthe face of rurality, and of peasant life gripped by nature and thesacralized earth full of obscure powers, urbanity asserted itself asreasonable. Today, rationality seems to be (or appears to be, orpretends to be) far from the city, above it, on a national or continentalscale. It refuses the city as a moment, as an element, as a condition; itacknowledges it only as an instrument and a means. In France andelsewhere, State bureaucratic rationalism and that of industrial organizationsupported by the demands of large private enterprises, aregoing the same way. Simultaneously there is enforced a simplifyingfunctionalism and social groups which go beyond the urban. Theorganism disappears under the guise of organization, so that organicismcoming from the philosophers appears as an ideal model. Thestatutes of urban ‘zones’ and ‘areas’ are reduced to a juxtaposition ofspaces, of functions, of elements on the ground. Sectors and functionsare tightly subordinated to centres of decision-making. Homogeneityoverwhelms the differences originating from nature (the site), frompeasant surroundings (territory and the soil), from history. The city,or what remains of it, is built or is rearranged, in the likeness of a sumor combination of elements. Now, as soon as the combination isconceived, perceived and anticipated as such, combinations are noteasily recognizable; the differences fall into the perception of theirwhole. So chat while one may rationally look for diversity, a feeling ofmonotony covers these diversities and prevails, whether housing,buildings, alleged urban centres, organized areas are concerned. Theurban, not conceived as such but attacked face on and from the side,corroded and gnawed, has lost the features and characteristics of theoeuvre, 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 siteand 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 geometricisotopy, full of instructions and signals, where qualitative differencesof places and moments no longer matter. Certainly these are inevitableprocesses of dissolution of ancient forms, but which produce contempt,mental and social misery. There is a poverty of daily life as soonas nothing has replaced the symbols, the appropriations, the styles, themonuments, the times and rhythms, the different and qualified spacesof the traditional city. Urban society, because of the dissolution of thiscity submitted to pressures which it cannot withstand, tends on theone hand to blend with the planned land use of the territory intothe ‘urban fabric’ determined by the constraints of traffic, and on theother hand, into dwelling units such as those of the detached houseand the housing estates. The extension of the city produced suburbs,then the suburb engulfed the urban core. The problems have beeninversed, when they are not misunderstood. Would it not be morecoherent, more rational and agreeable to work in the suburbs and livein the city rather than work in the city while living in a hardlyhabitable suburb? The centralized management of ‘things’ and of‘culture’ tries to avoid this intermediary tier, the city. And more: theState, centres of decision-making, the ideological, economic and politicalpowers, can only consider with a growing suspicion this socialform 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 citydweller. Since the last century, what is the essence of the city forpower? It ferments, full of suspect activities, of delinquence, a hotbedof agitation. State powers and powerful economic interests can thinkonly of one strategy: to devalorize, degrade, destroy, urban society. Inthe course of these processes, there are determinisms, there arestrategies, spontaneities and concened acts. Subjective and ideologicalcontradictions, ‘humanist’ worries impede but do not halt thesestrategic actions. The city prevents the powers that be from manipulatingat will the citizen-city dweller, individuals, groups, bodies. As aresult, the crisis of the city is linked not to rationality as such,definable from a philosophical tradition, it relates to explicit forms ofrationality: state, bureaucratic, economic, or rather, ‘economistic’,economism being an ideology endowed with an apparatus. This crisisof the city is accompanied here and there with a crisis of urbaninstitutions (municipal) due to the double pressure from the State andindustrial enterprise. Sometimes the State, sometimes private enterprise,sometimes both (rivals in competition, but often associates) tendto commandeer the functions, duties, and prerogatives of urban society.In certain capitalist countries, does ‘private’ enterprise leave tothe State, to institutions, and ‘public’ bodies any other thing than whatit refuses to assume because it is too costly?
And yet, it is on this shaky foundation that urban society and theurban persist and even intensify. Social relations continue to becomemore complex, to multiply and intensify through the most painfulcontradictions. The form of the urban, its supreme reason, namelysimultaneity and encounter, cannot disappear. Urban reality, at thevery heart of its dislocation, persists and becomes more dense in thecentres of decision-making and information. The inhabitants (whichones? — it’s up to research and researchers to find them!) reconstitutecentres, using places to restitute even derisory encounters. The use (usevalue) of places, monuments, differences, escape the demands ofexchange, of exchange value. A big game is played before us, withvarious episodes whose meaning is not always evident. The satisfactionof basic needs is unable to kill the disaffectation of fundamentaldesires (or of the fundamental desire). As a place of encounters, focusof communication and information, the urban becomes what it alwayswas: place of desire, permanent disequilibrium, seat of the dissolutionof normalities and constraints, the moment of play and of the unpredictable.This moment includes the implosion-explosion of latentviolence under the terrible constraints of a rationality which identifiesitself with the absurd. From this situation is born a critical contradiction:a tendency towards destruction of the city, as well as a tendencytowards the intensification of the urban and the urban problematic.
This critical analysis calls for a decisive addition. To attribute thecrisis of the city to a confining rationality, productivism and economism,and to a planning centralization first and foremost concernedwith growth, to the bureaucracy of State and enterprise is not incorrect.Yet, this viewpoint does not go much beyond the horizon of themost classical philosophical rationalism, that of liberal humanism. Hewho wishes to propose the form of a new urban society by strengtheningthis kernel, the urban, which survives in the fissures of planned andprogrammed order, must go further. If one wants to conceive an‘urban man’ no longer in the image of classical humanism, theoreticalelaboration owes it to itself to refine concepts. Until now, in theory asin practice, the double process of industrialization and of urbanizationhas not been mastered. The incomplete teachings of Marx and Marxistthought have been misunderstood. For Marx himself, industrializationcontained its finality and meaning, later giving rise to thedissociation of Marxist thought into economism and philosophism.Marx did not show (and in his time he could not) that urbanizationand the urban contain the meaning of industrialization. He did not seethat industrial production implied the urbanization of society, andthat the mastery of industrial potentials required specific knowledgeconcerning urbanization. Industrial production, after a certaingrowth, produces urbanization, providing it with conditions, andpossibilities. The problematic is displaced and becomes that of urbandevelopment. The works of Marx (notably Capital) containedprecious indications on the city and particularly on the historicalrelations between town and country. They do not pose the urbanproblem. In Marx’s time, only the housing problem was raised andstudied by Engels. Now, the problem of the city is immensely greaterthan that of housing. The limits of Marxist thought have not beenreally understood. Supporters as well as adversaries have sownedtrouble, by poorly assimilating the methodological and theoreticalprinciples of this thought. Neither criticism from the right, nor criticismfrom the left have assessed the contributions and the limits. Theselimits have not yet been overtaken by an approach which does notreject, but deepens acquired knowledge. The implicit sense of industrializationhas therefore been badly clarified. In theoretical reflectionchis process has not acquired its meaning. Moreover, one has lookedfor meaning elsewhere, or one has abandoned the meaning and theresearch of meaning.
The ‘socialization of society’, misunderstood by reformists hasprevented urban transformation (in, by, for, the city). It has not beenunderstood chat this socialization has urbanization as its essence.What has been ‘socialized’? By turning them over to consumption,signs. Signs of the city, of urban life, as the signs of nature and thecountryside, as those of joy and happiness, delivered to consumptionwithout an effective social practice enabling the urban to enter dailylife. Urban life faces needs only reluctantly, through the poverty ofsocial needs of ‘socialized society’, through daily consumption and itsown signs in advertising, fashion, aestheticism. At this new moment ofanalysis, is thus conceived the dialectical movement which carries theforms, the contours, the determinisms and the constraints, the servitudesand the appropriations towards a troubled horizon.
Urban life, urban society and the urban, detached by a particularsocial practice (whose analysis will continue) from their half ruinedmorphological base, and searching for a new base, these are thecontexts of the critical point. The urban cannot be defined eitheras attached to a material morphology (on the ground, in the practicomaterial),or as being able to detach itself from it. It is not anintemporal essence, nor a system among ocher systems or above othersystems. It is a mental and social form, that of simultaneity, ofgathering, of convergence, of encounter (or rather, encounters). It is aquality born from quantities (spaces, objects, products). It is a difference,or rather, an ensemble of differences. The urban contains themeaning of industrial production, as appropriation contains the senseof technical domination over nature, the latter becoming absurd withoutthe former. It is a field of relations including notably the relationof time (or of times; cyclical rhythms and linear durations) with space(or spaces: isotopics and heterotopies). As place of desire and bond oftimes, the urban could present itself as signifiers whose signified weare presently looking for (that is, practico-material ‘realities’ whichwould enable, with an adequate morphological and material base, torealize 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 anddialectical rationality, conceived in its duality and contradictions, thisprocess could not leave the urban aside. On the contrary: it understands it. Therefore, what should be incriminated is not reason, but aparticular rationalism, a constricted rationality, and its limits. Theworld of merchandise has its immanent logic of money and exchangevalue generalized without limits. Such a form, that of exchange andequivalence, is indifferent towards urban form; it reduces simultaneityand encounters to those of the exchanges and the meeting place towhere the contract or quasi-contract of equivalent exchange is concluded:the market. Urban society, a collection of acts taking place intime, privileging a space (site, place) and privileged by it, in turnsignifiers and signified, has a logic different from that of merchandise.It is another world. The urban is based on use value. This conflictcannot be avoided. At most, economic and productivist rationalityseeks to push beyond all limits the production of products (exchangeableobjects of exchange value) by suppressing the oeuvre, this productivistrationality makes itself out to be knowledge, whilecontaining an ideological component tied to its very essence. Maybe itis only ideology, valorizing constraints, those which come from existingdeterminisms, those of industrial production and the market ofproducts, those coming from its fetishism of policy. Ideology presentsthese real constraints as rational. Such a rationality is not innocuous.The worse danger which it harbours comes from it wanting itself andcalling itself synthetical. 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 right of synthesis? Certainly not a civil servant ofsynthesis, accomplishing this function in a way guaranteed by institutions.Certainly not he who extrapolates from an analysis or severalanalyses. Only the practical capacity of realization has the right tocollect the theoretical elements of synthesis, by doing it. Is it the roleof political power? Maybe, but not any political force: not the politicalState as an institution or sum of institutions, not statesmen as such.Only the critical examination of strategies enables us to give an answerto this questioning. The urban can only be confined to a strategyprioritizing 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 polysemy or plurality ofmeanings, of this term, ‘form’, has already been remarked upon. It wasnot really necessary, being obvious. The same goes for the polysemyof the terms ‘function’, ‘structure’ etc. None the less we cannot restthere and accept the situation. How many people believe they havesaid and resolved everything when they use one of these fetish words!The plurality and confusion of the meanings serve an absence ofthought and poverty which takes itself for wealth.
The only way to clarify the meaning of the term is to begin fromits most abstract acceptance. Only scientific abstraction without contents,distinguished from verbal abstraction and opposed to speculativeabstraction, enables transparent definitions. Therefore, to defineform, one must begin from formal logic and logico-mathematicalstructures. Not so as to isolate or fetishize them, but, on the contrary,to catch their relation to the ‘real’. This is not without some difficultiesand disadvantages. The transparency and clarity of ‘pure’ abstractionare not accessible to all. Most people are either myopic or blindto it. A ‘culture’ is necessary not only to understand the abstract,but far more to attain the disturbing frontiers which at one andthe same time distinguish and unite the concrete and the abstract,knowledge and art, mathematics and poetry. To elucidate the meaningof the word ‘form’, one will have to refer to a very general, veryabstract theory, the theory of forms. It is dose to a philosophicaltheory of knowledge, extending it and yet very different, sinceon the one hand it designates its own historical and ‘cultural’ conditionsand on the other it rests upon difficult logico-mathematicalconsiderations.
Proceeding by stages a socially recognized ‘form’ will be examined;for example, the contract. There are many kinds of contracts: themarriage contract, the work contract, the sales contract, etc. Thecontents of social acts defined as contractual are therefore very different. Sometimes they relate to the regulation of relations between twoindividuals of different sexes (the sexual relationship taking secondplace in the social regulation of assets and their transmission asthey relate to children and inheritance). Sometimes they relate to theregulation of relations between two individuals of different socialand even class status: employer and employee, boss and worker.Sometimes what is involved is the submission to a social regularityof the relationship between seller and buyer, etc. These particularsituations have none the less a common feature: reciprocity in asocially constituted and instituted engagement. Each engages himselfvis-a-vis the other to accomplish a certain sort of action explicitlyor implicitly stipulated. Moreover, one knows that this reciprocityentails some fiction, or rather, that as soon as it is concluded, it revealsitself to be fictional, inasmuch as it does not fall into contractualstipulation and under the rule of law. Sexual reciprocity betweenspouses becomes social and moral fiction (the ‘conjugal duty’). Thereciprocity of engagement between boss and worker establishesthem on the same level only fictionally. And so on and so forth.Nevertheless, these fictions have a social existence and influence. Theyare the various contents of a general juridical form with which juristsoperate and which become the codification of social relations: the civilcode.
It is the same for reflective thought which has extremely diversecontents: objects, situations, activities. From this diversity emergemore or less fictional or real domains: science, philosophy, art, etc.These many objects, these domains somewhat small in number, relateto a logical formulation. Reflection is codified by a form common toall 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 intelligibleas decanted from content, ‘purer’. Bte here is the paradox. Assuch, in its purity, it has no existence. It is not real, it is not. Bydetaching itself from its content, form detaches itself from the concrete.The summit, the crest of the real, the key to the real (of itspenetration by knowledge and the action which changes it), it placesitself outside the real. Philosophers have tried to understand for twothousand years.
None the less, philosophy brings the theoretical elements to thisknowledge. The approach is in several stages and has a strategicobjective. That is to grasp through the movement of reflection whichpurifies forms and its own form, and which codifies and formalizes theinherent and hidden movement of the relation between form andcontent. There is no form without content. No content without form.What offers itself to analysis is always a unity of form and content.Analysis breaks this unity. It allows the purity of form to appear, andform refers back to content. Yet, this indissoluble unity, broken byanalysis, is conflictual (dialectical). By turns thought goes from transparentform to the opacity of contents, of the substantiality of thesecontents to the inexistence of ‘pure’ form, in a ceaseless if not momentarymovement. Nevertheless, on the one hand, reflection tends todissociate forms (and its own logical form) from contents, by constitutingabsolute ‘essences’, by establishing the reign of essences. And on theother hand, practice and empiricism tend to ascertain contents, to besatisfied with such certitude, to sojourn in the opacity of variouscontents, accepted in their differences. For dialectical reason, contentsoverflow form and form gives access to contents. Thus form has adouble ‘existence’. It is and is not. It has reality only in contents, andyet 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 evenvalorizes them, including as form an evaluation and involving a‘consensus’. As for the logico-mathematical form, its mental existenceis obvious. What is less obvious is that it involves a fiction: the purelyreflective disembodied theoretical man. As for its social existence, itshould be shown at length. Indeed, to this form are attached multitudinoussocial 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 theproblematic of philosophers, can elaborate a scheme of forms. It is asort of analytical grid to decipher the relations between the real andthought. This (provisional and modifiable) grid moves from the mostabstract to the most concrete, and therefore from the least to themost immediate. Each form presents itself in its double existence asmental and social.
I. Logical form
Mentally: it is the principle of identity: A=A. It is void essence withoutcontent. In its absolute purity it is supreme transparency (difficult tograsp, for reflection can neither hold it or keep itself within it and yetit has tautology as its point of departure and return). Indeed, thistautology is what all propositions have in common which otherwisehave nothing in common with each other by content, or the designated(designatum, denoted). As Wittgenstein has shown, this tautologyA=A is the centre, emptied of substance of all enunciated, of allpropositions.
Socially: understanding and the conventions of understandingover and above misunderstandings. The impossible possibility tomake effective stopping, to define everything, to say everything andto agree on the rules of understanding. But also, verbalism, verbiage,repetitions, pure talk. But again pleonasms, vicious circles (includingthe great social pleonasms, for bureaucracy whichengenders bureacracy to maintain the bureaucratic form — social logicswhich tend towards their pure maintenance to the extent ofdestroying their content and thus themselves, showing their emptiness).
II. Mathematical form
Mentally: identity and difference, equality in difference. Enumeration(of the elements of a whole, etc). Order and measure.
Socially: distributions and classifications (in space, generally privilegedas such, but also in time). Scheduling. Quantification andquantitative rationality. Order and measure subordinating to themselvesdesires and desire, quality and qualities.
III. Form of language
Mentally: coherence, the capacity to articulate distinct elements, toconfer to them significations and meanings, to emit and deciphermessages according to their coded conventions.
Socially: the cohesion of relations, their subordination to the demandsand constraints of cohesion, the ritualization of relations, their formalizationand codification.
IV. Form of exchange
Mentally: confrontation and discussion, comparison and adjustmentsof activities, needs, produces of labour, etc., that is, equivalence.
Socially: exchange value, the commodity form (as identified, formulatedand formalized by Marx in chapter I of Capital, with an implicitreference to formal logic and to logico-mathemacical formalism).
V. Contractual form
Mentally: reciprocity.
Socially: the codification of social relations based on murual engagement.
VI. Form of the practico-material object
Mentally: incernal equilibrium perceived and conceived as ‘objective’(or ‘objectal’) property. Symmetry.
Socially: the anticipation of this equilibrium and this symmetry, demandedby objects or denied (including among living and thinking ‘being;’), as wellas social objects such as houses, buildings, utensils and instruments, etc.
VII. Written form
Mentally: recurrence, synchronic fixation of what has occurred overtime, going backwards and returning along a fixed becoming.
Socially: the accumulation in time on the basis of fixation and theconversation of what is acquired, the constraint of writing and writings,terror before the written and the scruggle of the spirit against theletter, the power of speech against the inscribed and the prescribed, thebecoming against the immutable and the reified.
VIII. Urban form
Mentally: simultaneity (of events, perceptions, and elements of awhole in the ‘real’).
Socially: 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 meaningof productive and consuming activities, as meeting between the oeuvreand the product.
We will leave aside repetition which some (among them Nietzsche), haveconsidered to be the supreme form, existential form, or form of existence.
It is almost evident that in so~called modern society, simultaneity isintensified and becomes more dense, that the capacities for encounterand assembly become strengthened. Communications speed up toquasi-instantaneity. Ascendent or descendent circuits of informationflow and are diffused from this centrality. This aspect of the ‘socializationof society’ has already been emphasized (reservations havingbeen made about the ‘reformist’ nature of this well-known formulation).
It is just as evident that under the same conditions dispersionincreases: the division of labour is pushed to the extreme segregationof social groups and material and spiritual separations. These dispersionscan only be conceived or appreciated by reference to the form ofsimultaneity. Without this form, dispersion and separation are purelyand simply glimpsed, accepted, confirmed as facts. Thus form enablesus to designate the content, or rather, contents. Movement in itsemergence reveals a hidden movement, the dialectical (conflictual)movement of content and urban form: the problematic. The form inwhich is inscribed this problematic asks questions which are a part ofit. Before whom and for whom is simultaneity established, the contentsof urban life assembled?
Spectral Analysis
In fact, the rationality we see used in practice (including appliedplanning), this limited rationality is exercised especially according tothe modalities of a very advanced and prepared analytical intelligence,endowed with great means of pressure. This analytical intellect endowsitself with the privileges and prestige of synthesis. In this way ithides what it conceals: strategies. One could impute it with the peremptoryconcern of the functional, or rather, the unifunctional, aswell as the subordination of details minutely inventoried for therepresentation of a social globality. Thus disappear mediations betweenan ideological ensemble assumed to be rational (technologicallyor economically) and detailed measures, objects of tactics and prediction.This placing in parenthesis of theoretical, practical, social andmental mediations does not lack black humour in a society whereintermediaries (shopkeepers, financiers, publicists, etc.) have immenseprivileges. One covers the other! Thus a gulf is dug between the global(which hovers over the void) and the manipulated and repressedpartial, upon which institutions weigh.
What is questioned here is not an uncertain ‘globality’, it is anideology and the class strategy which uses and supports this ideology.After a sort of ‘spectral’ analysis of social elements, the alreadymentioned use of analytical intelligence is related as much to extremefragmentation of work and specialization pushed to the limits (includingspecialized planning studies), as projection on the ground. Segregationmust be highlighted, with its three aspects, sometimessimultaneous, sometimes successive: spontaneous (coming fromrevenues and ideologies) — voluntary (establishing separate spaces) —programmed: under the guise of planning and the plan).
There are unquestionably strong tendencies in all countries opposingsegregationist tendencies. One cannot state that the segregation ofgroups, ethnic groups, social strata and classes comes from a constantand uniform strategy of the powers, nor that one should see in it theefficient projection of institutions or the will of political leaders.Moreover, there exist the will and organized actions to combat it. Andyet, even where separation of social groups does not seem to bepatently evident on the ground, such a pressure and traces of segregationappear under examination. The extreme case, the last instance,the ghetto. We can observe that there are several types of ghetto: thoseof Jews and the blacks, and also those of intellectuals or workers. Intheir own way residential areas are also ghettos; high status peoplebecause of wealth or power isolate themselves in ghettos of wealth.Leisure has its ghettos. Wherever an organized action has attemptedto mix social strata and classes, a spontaneous decantation soonfollows. The phenomenon of segregation must be analysed accordingto various indices and criteria: ecological (shanty towns, slums, the rotin the heart of the city), formal (the deterioration of signs andmeanings of the city, the degradation of the urban by the dislocationof its architectural elements), and sociological (standards of living andlife 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 philosophyof the city considered as ‘subject’ (as a community or socialorganism). Despite good humanist intentions and philosophical goodwill,practice tends towards segregation. Why? For theoretical reasonsand by virtue of social and political causes. At the theoretical level,analytical thought separates and delineates. It fails when it wants toreach a synthesis. Socially and politically (conscious or unconscious)class strategies aim for segregation.
In democratic countries public powers cannot overtly decree segregationas such. Therefore they often adopt a humanist ideology whichin the most old-fashioned sense becomes a utopia, when it does notbecome a demagogy. Segregation always wins over, even in thoseparts of social life more or less easily and more or less thoroughlycontrolled by public powers. Let us say that the State and privateenterprise strive to absorb and suppress the city as such. The Stateproceeds rather from above and private enterprise from below (byensuring housing and the function of inhabiting in workers’ towns andhousing estates, which depending on a ‘society’ and also assuringleisure, even culture and social promotion). Despite their differencesand sometimes their conflicts, the State and private enterprise bothconverge towards segregation.
Let us leave open the issue of knowing whether the political formsof the State (capitalist, socialist or in transition, etc.), engender differentstrategies cowards the city. Let us not attempt for the time being toknow where or how, at whom and with whom these strategies aredeveloped. We substantiate strategies by observing them as significantorientations. Segregations which morphologically destroyed the cityand threaten urban life cannot be passed off as the effect of hazards orlocal conjunctures. Let us be contented with the notion that thedemocratic 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 ofthe most important? It is fundamental in what concerns the city andits problematic. Nevertheless one must distinguish between politicalpower and social pressures which can annihilate the effects of (goodor bad) will of politicians. With regards to private enterprise, let usalso leave this an open question. What are the relations between(ideological and practical) rationality in general, between (general andurban) planning on the one hand, and on the other the rationalmanagement of large firms? We can nevertheless put forward a hypothesisand research direction. Rationality in the firm always implies ananalysis pushed to the extreme of tasks, operations and sequences. Inaddition, the reasons and causes of class strategy are fully played outin the capitalist firm. It is therefore highly probable that the firm assuch favours the extreme segregation, acts accordingly and appliessocial pressure when this is not a decision.
The State and the firm seek to appropriate urban functions and toassume and ensure them by destroying the form of the urban. Canthey? Do not these strategic objectives exceed their strengths, combinedor not? It would be most interesting to investigate this point.The conditions and modalities of the crisis of the city are graduallyuncovered and accompanied by a city-wide institutional crisis ofurban jurisdiction and administration. What was specific to the city(the municipality, local expenditures and investments, schools andeducational programmes, universities, etc.) fall increasingly under thecontrol of the State, and by institutionalizing itself in a global context,the city tends to disappear as a specific institution. This abolishes it asan oeuvre of original groups which were themselves specific. However,can the powers and institutions at the top dispense with thisrelay, this mediation, the city? This, of course, would need to beshown by researches into juridical, economic, cultural and administrative sociology. Can they abolish the urban? It is at this level that dailylife, governed by institutions which regulate it from above, consolidatedand set up according to multiple constraints, constitutes itself.Productivist rationality which tends to suppress the city at the level ofgeneral planning rediscovers it in the controlled and organized consumptionof a supervised market. After having been kept away fromthe global level of decision-making, the city is reconstituted at the levelof 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). Thefunctioning of bureaucratic rationality becomes confused with its ownpresuppositions and consequences which overcome and elude it. Conflictsand contradictions resurface, giving rise to ‘structuring’ activitiesand ‘concerted’ actions aimed at their revocation. It is here on theground that the absurdity of a limited rationality of bureaucracy andtechnocracy becomes evident. Here is grasped the falsehood of anillusory identification between the rational and the real in the State,and the true identity between the absurd and a certain authoritarianrationalism.
On our horizon, the city and the urban are outlined as virtualobjects, as projects of a synthetic reconstitution. Critical analysisconfirms the failure of an analytical but uncritical thought. What doeschis analytical practice retain of the city and the urban whose resultsone can detect on the ground? Aspects, elements and fragments. Itplaces before our eyes the spectre, the spectral analysis of the city.When we speak of spectral analysis, its meaning is almost literal andnot metaphorical. Before our eyes, under our gaze, we have the‘spectre’ of the city, that of urban society and perhaps simply ofsociety. If the spectre of Communism no longer haunts Europe, theshadow 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 inthe making is not less fascinating, and people rush cowards the ruinsof ancient cities to consume them touristically, in the belief that theywill heal their nostalgia. Before us, as a spectacle (for spectators‘unconscious’ of what is before their ‘conscience’) are the dissociatedand inert elements of social life and the urban. Here are ‘social housingestates’ without teenagers or old people. Here are women dozingwhile the men work far away and come home exhausted. Here areprivate housing developments which form a microcosm and yet remainurban because they depend on centres of decision-making andeach house has a television. Here is a daily life well divided intofragments: work, transport, private life, leisure. Analytical separationhas isolated them as ingredients and chemical elements, as raw materials(whereas they are the outcome of a long history and imply anappropriation of materiality). It is not finished. Here is the dismemberedand dissociated human being. Here are the senses of smell, taste,sight, touch, hearing — some atrophied, some hypertrophied. Here isfunctioning separately perception, intelligence and reason. Hereis speech, discourse and writing. Here is daily life and celebration, thelatter moribund. It is obvious, urgently. Synthesis then becomes anitem on the order of the day, the order of the century. But thissynthesis, with its analytical intellect, appears only as a combinationof separate elements. But combination is not and can never be synthesis.The city and the urban cannot be recomposed from the signs ofthe city, the semanthemes of the urban, although the city is a signifyingwhole. The city is not only a language, but also a practice.Nobody therefore, and we have no fear to repeat it, is entitled to pronounceor announce this synthesis. No more is the sociologist or communityworker than the architect, the economist, the demographer, the linguistor semiologist. Nobody has the power or the right. Only thephilosopher might perhaps have the right, if philosophy in the courseof the centuries had not demonstrated its incapacity to attain concentratetotalities (although it has always aimed at totality and has posedglobal and general questions). Only a praxis, under conditions to bedetermined, can take charge of the possibility and demand of asynthesis this objective: the gathering together of what gives itself asdispersed, dissociated, separated, and this in the form of simultaneityand encounters.
We have here therefore before us, projected separately on theground, groups, ethnic groups, ages and sexes, activities, tasks andfunctions, knowledge. Here is all that is necessary to create a world,an urban society, or the developed urban. But this world is absent, thissociety is before us only in a state of virtuality. It may perish in thebud. Under existing conditions, it dies before being born. The conditionswhich give rise to possibilities can also sustain them in a virtualstate, in presence-absence. Would this not be the root of this drama,the point of emergence of nostalgia? The urban obsesses those wholive in need, in poverty, in the frustration of possibilities which remainonly possibilities. Thus the integration and participation obsess thenon-participants, the non-integrated, those who survive among thefragments of a possible society and the ruins of the past: excludedfrom the city, at the gates of the urban. The road travelled is stakedout 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 social practice, that of society today (in France, in the second half of thetwentieth century) offers to critical analysis a double character whichcannot be reduced to a significant opposition, although it signifies.
On the one hand, chis social practice is integrative. It attempts tointegrate its elements and aspects into a coherent whole. Integration isaccomplished at different levels and according to various modalities. Themarket, the ‘world of commodities’, that is, by consumption and ideologyof consumption, by ‘culture’, put forward as unitary and global; by‘values’, including art; by the actions of the State, including nationalconsciousness and the political options and strategies at national level.This integration is firstly aimed at the working class, but also theintelligentsia and intellectuals, and critical thought (not excluding Marxism).Planning could well become essential to this integrative practice.
At the same time this society practices segregation. This same rationalitywhich sees itself as global (organizing, planning, unitary andunifying) concretizes itself at the analytical level. On the ground itprojects separation. It tends (as in the United States), to form ghettosor 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 andghetto in time. In planning, the term ‘zoning’ already implies separation,segregation, isolation in planned ghettos. The fact becomesrationality in the project.
This society wants itself and sees itself as coherent. It seeks coherence,linked to rationality both as feature of efficient organizationalaction, and as value and criterion. Under examination theideology of coherence reveals a hidden but none the less blatantincoherence. Would coherence not be the obsession of an incoherentsociety, which searches the way towards coherence by wishing to stopin a conflictual situation denied as such?
This is not the only obsession. Integration also becomes an obsessionaltheme, an aimless aspiration. The term ‘integration’ used in allits meanings, appears in texts (newspapers, books, and speeches) withsuch frequency that it must reveal something. On the one hand, thisterm designates a concept concerning and enclosing social practicedivulging a strategy. On the other, it is a social connotator, withoutconcept, objective or objectivity, revealing an obsession with integrating(to this or that, to a group, an ensemble or a whole). How could itbe 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 thisconstitutive duality with its conflictual content. What results fromthis? Without a doubt paradoxical phenomena of disintegrating integrationwhich refer particularly to urban reality.
This does not mean that this society is disintegrating and fallingapart. No. It is functionning. How? Why? That creates a problem. Itmust also mean that this functioning is not without an enormousmalaise — its obsession.Another obsessional theme is participation, linked to integration.This is not a simple obsession. In practice, the ideology of participation enables us to have the acquiescence of interested and concernedpeople at a small price. After a more or less elaborate pretence atinformation and social activity, they return to their tranquil passivityand retirement. Is it not clear that real and active participation alreadyhas a name? It is called self-management. Which poses other problems.
Very powerful forces tend to destroy the city. A particular kind ofplanning projects on the ideological terrain a practice whose aim is thedeath of the city. These social and political forces ravage the urban inthe making. This kernel, so powerful, in its own way, can it grow inthe cracks which still subsist between these masses? Does science, orrather, scientificity, which puts itself at the service of existing rationality,legitimize these masses of the State, private enterprise, culturewhich allow the city to perish while offering its images and “oeuvres”for consumption sentence. ‘Does science ... legitimize these masses ...for consumption?’ Construction is? Could urban life recover andstrengthen its capacities of integration and participation of the city,which are almost entirely lost, and which cannot be stimulated eitherby authoritarian means or by administrative prescription, or by theintervention of specialists? The foremost theoretical problem can beformulated thus. The political meaning of class segregation is clear,whether it is a ‘subject’ for analysis, whether it is the end result of aseries of unplanned actions, or whether it is the effect of a will. For theworking class, victim of segregation and expelled from the traditionalcity, deprived of a present or possible urban life, there is a practicaland therefore political problem even if it is not posed politically andeven if until now the housing question has for it and its representativesconcealed the problematic of the city and the urban.
The Right to the City
Theoretical thought sees itself compelled to redefine the forms, functionsand structures of the city (economic, political, cultural, etc.) aswell as the social needs inherent to urban society. Until now, onlythose individual needs, motivated by the so-called society of consumption(a bureaucratic society of managed consumption) have beenprospected, and moreover manipulated rather than effectively knownand recognized. Social needs have an anthropological foundation.Opposed and complimentary, they include the need for security andopening, the need for certainty and adventure, that of organization ofwork and of play, the needs for the predictable and the unpredictable,of similarity and difference, of isolation and encounter, exchange andinvestments, of independence (even solitude) and communication, ofimmediate and long-term prospects. The human being has the need toaccumulate energies and to spend them, even waste them in play. Hehas a need to see, to hear, to touch, to taste and the need to gatherthese perceptions in a ‘world’. To theseanthropological needs whichare socially elaborated (that is, sometimes separated, sometimes joinedtogether, here compressed and there hypertrophied), can be addedspecific needs which are not satisfied by those commercial and culturalinfrastructures which are somewhat parsimoniously taken into accountby planners. This refers to the need for creative activity, for theoeuvre (not only of products and consumable material goods), of theneed for information, symbolism, the imaginary and play. Throughthese specified needs lives and survives a fundamental desire of whichplay, sexuality, physical activities such as sport, creative activity, artand knowledge are particular expressions and moments, which canmore or less overcome the fragmentary division of tasks. Finally, theneed of the city and urban life can only be freely expressed within aperspective which here attempts to become clearer and to open up thehorizon. Would not specific urban needs be those of qualified places,places of simultaneity and encounters, places where exchange wouldnot go through exchange value, commerce and profit? Would therenot also be the need for a time for these encounters, these exchanges?
At present, an analytical science of the city, which is necessary, is onlyat the outline stage. At the beginning of their elaboration, concepts andtheories can only move forward with urban reality in the making, withthe praxis (social practice) of urban society. Now, not without effort,the ideologies and practices which blocked the horizon and which wereonly bottlenecks of knowledge and action, are being overcome.
The science of the city has the city as object. This science borrows itsmethods, approaches and concepts from the fragmentary sciences, butsynthesis escapes it in two ways. Firstly, because this synthesis whichwould wish itself as total, starting from the analytic, can only bestrategic systematization and programming. Secondly, because theobject,the city, as consummate reality is falling apart.Knowledgeholds in front of itself the historic city already modified, to cut it upand put it together again from fragments. As social text, this historiccity no longer has a coherent set of prescriptions, of use of time linkedto symbols and to a style. This text is moving away. It takes the formof a document, or an exhibition, or a museum. The city histocicallyconstructed 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 seekto understand it with warmth, it is gone. Yet, the urban remains in astate of dispersed and alienated actuality, as kernel and virtuality.What the eyes and analysis perceive on the ground can at best pass forthe shadow of a future object in the light of a rising sun. It isimpossible to envisage the reconstitution of the old city, only theconstruction of a new one on new foundations, on another scale andin other conditions, in another society. The prescription is: therecannot be a going back (towards the traditional city), nor a headlongflight, towards a colossal and shapeless agglomeration. In otherwords, for what concerns the city the object of science is not given.The past, the present, the possible cannot be separated. What is beingstudied is a virtual object, which thought studies, which calls for newapproaches.
The career of the old classical humanism ended long ago and badly.It is dead. Its mummified and embalmed corpse weighs heavily anddoes 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 newtowns and planning procedures. Trivialities and platitudes are wrappedup in this ‘human scale’, as they say, whereas what we should take chargeof are the excesses and create ‘something’ to the scale of the universe.
This old humanism died during the World Wars, during the demographicgrowth which accompanied great massacres, and before thebrutal demands of economic growth and competition and the pressureof poorly controlled techniques. It is not even an ideology, barely atheme for official speeches.
Recently there have been great cries of ‘God is dead, man too’ as ifthe death of classical humanism was that of man. These formulaespread in best-sellers, and taken in by a publicity not really responsible,are nothing new. Nietzschean meditation, a dark presage forEurope’s culture and civilization, began a hundred years ago duringthe 1870–1 Franco-Prussian war. When Nietzsche announced thedeath of God and man, he did not leave a gaping hole, or fill this voidwith makeshift material, language or linguistics. He was also announcingthe Superhuman which he thought was to come. He wasovercoming the nihilism he was identifying. Authors transacting thesetheoretical and poetic treasures, but with a delay of a century, plungeus back into nihilism. Since Nietzsche, the dangers of the Superhumanhave been cruelly evident. Moreover, this ‘new man’ emerging fromindustrial production and planning rationality has been more thandisappointing. There is still another way, that of urban society and thehuman as oeuvre in this society which would be an oeuvre and not aproduct. There is also the simultaneous overcoming of the old ‘socialanimal’ and man of the ancient city, the urban animal, towards apolyvalent, polysensorial, urban man capable of complex and transparentrelations with the world (the environment and himself). Orthere is nihilism. If man is dead, for whom will we build? How will webuild? It does not matter that the city has or has not disappeared, thatit must be thought anew, reconstructed on new foundations or overcome.It does not matter whether terror reigns, that the atomic bombis dropped or that Planet Earth explodes. What is important? Whothinks? Who acts? Who still speaks and for whom? If meaning andfinality 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 asautonomous powers, and that reflective thought is satisfied with thisassessment, the absence of a ‘subject’, what to reply? What to do?
Old humanism moves away and disappears. Nostalgia lessens andwe 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 Latinquotes sprinkled with Judeo-Christianity, which bent over the peopleand human sufferings and which covered and supported the rhetoricof the clear consciences of noble feelings and of the sensitive souls. Adreadful 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 Dionysiacsor 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 avoidthose myths which threaten this will, destroy those ideologies whichhinder this project and those strategies which divert this trajectory.Urban life has yet to begin. What we are doing now is to completean inventory of the remains of a millenarian society where thecountryside dominated the city, and whose ideas, values, taboos andprescriptions were largely agrarian, with rural and ‘natural’ dominantfeatures. A few sporadic cities hardly emerged from a rustic ocean.Rural society was (still is), a society of scarcity and penury, of wantaccepted or rejected, of prohibitions managing and regulating privations.It was also the society of the fête, of festivities. But that aspect,the best, has been lost and instead of myths and limitations, this iswhat must be revitalized! A decisive remark: for the crisis of thetraditional 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. Revolutionarysocieties (among which the USSR ten or fifteen years after theOctober Revolution), intimated the development of society based onindustry. But they only intimated.
The use of ‘we’ in the sentences above has only the impact of ametaphor to mean those concerned. The architect, the planner, thesociologist, the economist, the philosopher or the politician cannotout of nothingness create new forms and relations. More precisely, thearchitect is no more a miracle-worker than the sociologist. Neither cancreate social relations, although under certain favourable conditionsthey help trends to be formulated (to take shape). Only social life(praxis) in its global capacity possesses such powers — or does notpossess them. The people mentioned above can individually or inteams 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 givebirth to the possible.
At the point we have arrived there is an urgent need to changeintellectual approaches and tools. It would be indispensable to take upideas and approaches from elsewhere and which are still not veryfamiliar.
Transduction. This is an intellectual operation which can be methodicallycarried out and which differs from classical induction, deduction,the construction of ‘models’, simulation as well as the simplestatement of hypothesis. Transduction elaborates and constructs atheoretical object, a possible object from information related to realityand a problematic posed by this reality. Transduction assumes anincessant feed back between the conceptual framework used andempirical observations. Its theory (methodology), gives shape to certainspontaneous mental operations of the planner, the architect, thesociologist, the politician and the philosopher. It introduces rigour ininvention and knowledge in utopia.
Experimental utopia. Who is not a utopian today? Only narrowlyspecialized practitioners working to order without the slightest criticalexamination of stipulated norms and constraints, only these not veryinteresting people escape utopianism. All are utopians, including thosefuturists and planners who project Paris in the year 2,000 and thoseengineers who have made Brasilia! But there are several utopianisms.Would not the worst be that utopianism which does not utter itsname, covers itself with positivism and on this basis imposes theharshest constraints and the most derisory absence of technicity?
Utopia is to be considered experimentally by studying its implicationsand consequences on the ground. These can surprise. What areand what would be the most successful places? How can they bediscovered? According to which criteria? What are the times andrhythms 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 identifywithout dissociating them the three fundamental theoretical conceptsof structure, function and form, and to know their import, the spheresof their validity, their limits and their reciprocal relations. To knowthat they make a whole bur that the elements of this whole have acertain independence and relative autonomy. To not privilege oneover the other, otherwise this gives an ideology, that is, a closed anddogmatic system of significations: structuralism, formalism, functionalism.To be used equally and in turn for the analysis of the real (ananalysis which is never exhaustive or without residue), as well as forthat operation known as ‘transduction’. It is important to understandchat a function can be accomplished by means of different structures,and that there is no unequivocal link between the terms. That is, thatfunctions and structures clothe themselves with forms which revealand veil them — chat the triplicity of these aspects make a whole whichis more than these aspects, elements and parts.
We have among our intellectual tools one which deserves neitherdisdain nor privilege of the absolute: that of system (or rather sub-systemof significations.
Policies have their systems of significations — ideologies — whichenable them to subordinate to their strategies social acts and eventsinfluenced by them. Ac the ecological level, the humble inhabitanthas his system (or rather, his sub-system) of significations. The factof living here or there involves the reception, adoption and transmissionof such a system, for example that of owner-occupied housing.The system of significations of the inhabitant cells of his passivitiesand activities: he is received but changed by practice. He isperceived.
Architects seem to have established and dogmatized an ensemble ofsignifications, as such poorly developed and variously labelled as‘function’, ‘form’, ‘structure’, or rather, functionalism, formalism, andstructuralism. They elaborate them not from the significations perceivedand lived by those who inhabit, but from their interpretation ofinhabiting. It is graphic and visual, tending towards metalanguage. Itis graphism and visualization. Given that these architects form a socialbody, they attach themselves to institutions, their system tends to closeitself off, impose itself and elude all criticism. There is cause toformulate this system, often put forward without any other procedureor precaution, as planning by extrapolation.
This theory which one could legitimately call planning. dose to themeanings of that old practice of to to inhabit (that is, the human) whichwould add to these partial facts a general theory of urban time-spaces,which would reveal a new practice emerging from this elaboration canbe envisaged only as the practical application of a comprehensivetheory of the city and the urban which could go beyond currentscissions and separations, particularly those existing between philosophyand the sciences of the city, the global and the partial. Currentplanning projects could figure in this development — but only withinan unwavering critique of their ideological and strategic implications.Inasmuch as we can define it, our object — the urban — will never todaybe entirely present in our reflections. More than any another object, itpossesses a very complex quality of totality in act and potential theobject of research gradually uncovered, and which will be eitherslowly or never exhausted. To take this object as a given truth isoperate a mythifying ideology. Knowledge must envisage a considerablenumber of methods to grasp this object, and cannot fasten itselfonto a particular approach. Analytical configurations will follow asclosely as possible the internal articulations of this ‘thing’ which is nota thing; they will be accompanied by reconstructions which will neverbe realized. Descriptions, analyses and attempts at synthesis can neverbe passed off as being exhaustive or definitive. All these notions, allthese 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 thanelsewhere, the residue reveals itself to be most precious. Each ‘object’constructed will in turn be submitted to critical examination. Withinthe possible, this will be accomplished and submitted to experimentalverification. 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 limitsat the same time as its necessity. Planning thought proposes theestablishment or reconstitution of highly localized, highly particularizedand centralized social units whose linkages and tensions wouldre-establish an urban unity endowed with a complex interior order,with its hierarchy and a supple structure. More specifically, sociologicalthought seeks an understanding and reconstitution of the integrativecapacities of the urban as well as the conditions of practicalparticipation. Why not? But only under one condition: never toprotect these fragmented and therefore partial attempts from criticism,practical assessment and global preoccupation.
Knowledge can therefore construct and propose models. In thissense each object is but a model of urban reality. Nevertheless, such areality will never become manageable as a thing and will never becomeinstrumental even for the most operational knowledge. Who wouldnot hope that the city becomes again what it was — the act and oeuvreof a complex thought? But it cannot remain at the level of wishes andaspirations and an urban strategy is not defined. An urban strategycannot cake into account existing strategies and acquired knowledge:science of the city, with its disposition towards the planning of growthand the control of development. Whoever says ‘strategies’ says thehierarchy of ‘variables’ to be considered, some having a strategiccapacity and others remaining at the tactical level — and says also thepower to realize these strategies on the ground. Only groups, socialclasses and class fractions capable of revolutionary initiative can takeover and realize to fruition solutions to urban problems. It is from thesesocial and political forces that the renewed city will become the oeuvre.The first thing to do is to defeat currently dominant strategies andideologies. In the present society that there exist many divergent groupsand strategies (for example between the State and the private) does notalter the situation. From questions of landed property to problems ofsegregation, each project of urban reform questions the structures, theimmediate (individual) and daily relations of existing society, but alsothose that one purports to impose by the coercive and institutional meansof 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 ofthe city needs a social support and political forces to be effective. Itcannot act on its own. It cannot but depend on the presence and actionof theworking class, the only one able to put an end to a segregationdirected essentially against it. Only this class, as a class, can decisivelycontribute to the reconstruction of centrality destroyed by a strategy ofsegregation and found again in the menacing form of centres of decision-making.This does not mean that the working class will make urbansociety all on its own, but that without it nothing is possible. Without itintegration has no meaning and disintegration will continue under theguise of nostalgia and integration. There is there not only an option butan horizon which opens or doses. When the working class is silent, whenit 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 toconsider two series of propositions:
1. A political programme of urban reform not defined by the frameworkand 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 programmewill therefore have a singular and even paradoxical character. It willbe established to be proposed to political forces, parties. One couldeven add that preferentially it would be presented to ‘left’ parties,political formations representing or wishing to represent the workingclass. But it would not be established as a function of these forces andformations. It will have in relation to them a specific character whichcomes from knowledge, a scientific part. It will be proposed (free to bealtered) by those who take control of it. Let political forces take theirresponsibilities. In this domain which engages the future of modernsociety and that of producers, ignorance and misunderstanding entailresponsibilities before history.
2. Mature planning projects which consist of models and spatialforms and urban times without concern for their current feasibility ortheir utopian aspect. It does not seem possible that these models resulteither from a simple study of existing cities and urban typologies, orfrom 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 evasionwhich conveys ideologies, but the imaginary which invests itselfin appropriation (of time, space, physiolocal life and desire). Why notoppose ephemeral cities to the eternal city, and movable centrality tostable centres? All audacities can be premissed. Why limit these propositionsonly to the morphology of time and space? They could alsoinclude the way of living in the city and the development of the urbanon this basis.
In these two series there will also be long, medium and short-termpropositions constituting urban strategy understood as such.
The society in which we live appears to tend towards plenitude — orat least towards fullness (durable goods and objects, quantity, satisfactionand rationality). In face it allows a colossal gulf to be dug intowhich ideologies agitate themselves and the fog of rhetoric spreads.Having left speculation and contemplation, incomplete knowledgeand fragmentary divisions, one of the greatest projects active thoughtcan propose for itself is to fill this lacuna — and not only with language.
In a period during which ideologists pronounce abundantly onstructures, the destructuration of the city manifests the depth ofphenomena, of social and cultural disintegration. Considered as awhole, this society finds itself incomplete. Between the sub-systemsand the structures consolidated by various means (compulsion, terror,and ideological persuasion), there are holes and chasms. These voidsare not there due to chance. They are the places of the possible. Theycontain the floating and dispersed elements of the possible, but not thepower which could assemble them. Moreover, structuring actions andthe power of the social void tend to prohibit action and the verypresence of such a power. The conditions of the possible can only berealized in the course of a radical metamorphosis.
In this conjuncture, ideology claims to provide an absolute qualityto ‘scientificity’, science appertaining to the real, dissecting it, reconstitutingit, and by this fact isolating it from the possible and closingthe way. Now, in such a conjuncture science which is fragmentaryscience can only have a programmatic impact. It brings elements to aprogramme. If one concedes that these elements already constitute atotality, and one wishes to execute this programme literally, one treatsthe virtual object as a pre-existent technical object. A project is accomplishedwithout criticism and this project fulfills an ideology by projectingit 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 througha long political experience, can take charge of the realization of aprogramme concerning urban society. Conversely, the science of thecity 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 inpure policy. Here the dialectical movement presents itself as a relationbetween science and political power, as a dialogue which actualizesrelations of ‘theory-practice’ and ‘critical positive-negative’.
As necessary as science, but not sufficient, art brings to the realizationof urban society its long meditation on life as drama andpleasure. In addition and especially, art resticutes the meaning of theoeuvre, giving it multiple facets of appropriated time and space;neither endured nor accepted by a passive resignation, metamorphosedas oeuvre. Music shows the appropriation of time, paintingand sculpture that of space. If the sciences discover partial determinisms,art and philosophy show how a totality grows out of partialdeterminisms. It is incumbent on the social force capable of creatingurban society to make efficient and effective the unity of art, techniqueand knowledge. As much the science of the city, art and the history ofart are part of a meditation on the urban which wants to makeefficient the images which proclaim it. By overcoming this opposition,chis meditation striving for action would thus be both utopian andrealistic. One could even assert that the maximum of utopianism couldunite with the optimum of realism.
Among the contradictions characteristic of our time there are those(particularly difficult ones) between the realities of society and thefacts of civilization. On the one hand, genocide, and on the other,medical and other interventions which enable a child to be saved or anagony prolonged. One of the latest but not lease contradictions hasbeen shown in this essay: between the socialization of society andgeneralized segregation. There are many others, for example, thecontradiction between the label of revolutionary and the attachmentto an obsolete productivist rationalism. The individual, at the centreof social forces due to the pressure of the masses, asserts himself anddoes not die. Rights appear and become customs or prescriptions,usually followed by enactments. And we know how, through giganticdestructions, World Wars, and the terror of nuclear threats, that theseconcrete rights come to complete the abstract rights of man and thecitizen inscribed on the front of buildings by democracy during itsrevolutionary beginnings: the rights of ages and sexes (the woman, thechild and the elderly), rights of conditions (the proletarian, the peasant),rights to training and education, to work, to culture, to rest, tohealth, to housing. The pressure of the working class has been andremains necessary (but not sufficient) for the recognition of theserights, for their entry into customs, for their inscription into codeswhich are still incomplete.
Over the last few years and rather strangely, the right to natureentered into social practice thanks to leisure, having made its waythrough 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 andcommodities, to be bought and sold. This ‘naturality’ which iscounterfeited and traded in, is destroyed by commercialized, industrializedand institutionally organized leisure pursuits. ‘Nature’, orwhat passes for it, and survives of it, becomes the ghetto of leisurepursuits, the separate place of pleasure and the retreat of ‘creativity’.Urban dwellers carry the urban with them, even if they do not bringplanning with them! Colonized by them, the countryside has lost thequalities, features and charms of peasant life. The urban ravages thecountryside: this urbanized countryside opposes itself to a dispossessedrurality, 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 right to the city is like a cry anda demand. This right slowly meanders through the surprising detoursof nostalgia and tourism, the return to the heart of the traditional city,and the Call of existent or recently developed centralities. The claim tonature, and the desire to enjoy it displace the right to the city. Thislatest claim expresses itself indirectly as a tendency to flee the deterioratedand unrenovated city, alienated urban life before at last, ‘really’living. The need and the ‘right’ to nature contradict the right to the citywithout being able to evade it. (This does not mean that it is notnecessary to preserve vase ‘natural’ spaces).
The right to the city cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting rightor as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as atransformed and renewed right to urban life. It does not matterwhether the urban fabric encloses the countryside and what survivesof peasant life, as long as the ‘urban’, place of encounter, priority ofuse value, inscription in space of a time promoted to the rank of asupreme resource among all resources, finds its morphological baseand its practico-material realization. Which presumes an integratedtheory of the city and urban society, using the resources of science andart. Only the working class can become the agent, the social carrier orsupport of this realization. Here again, as a century ago, it denies andcontests, by its very existence, the class strategy directed against it. Asa hundred years ago, although under new conditions, it gathers theinterests (overcoming the immediate and the superficial) of the wholesociety and firstly of all those who inhabit. Who can ignore that theOlympians of the new bourgeois aristocracy no longer inhabit. Theygo from grand hotel to grand hotel, or from castle to castle, commandinga fleet or a country from a yacht. They are everywhere andnowhere. That is how they fascinate people immersed into everydaylife. They transcend everyday life, possess nature and leave it up to thecops to contrive culture. Is it essential to describe at length, besides thecondition of youth, students and intellectuals, armies of workers withor without white collars, people from the provinces, the colonized andsemi-colonized of all sorts, all those who endure a well-organized dailylife, is it here necessary to exhibit the derisory and untragic misery ofthe inhabitant, of the suburban dweller and of the people who stay inresidential ghettos, in the mouldering centres of old cities and in theproliferations lost beyond them? One only has to open one’s eyes tounderstand the daily life of the one who runs from his dwelling to thestation, near or far away, to the packed underground train, the officeor the factory, to return the same way in the evening and come hometo recuperate enough to start again the next day. The picture of thisgeneralized misery would not go without a picture of ‘satisfactions’which hides it and becomes the means to elude it and break free fromit.
Perspective or Prospective?
Since its beginnings, classical philosophy, which has had as social baseand theoretical foundation the city, thought the city, and endeavoursto determine the image of the ideal city. The Critias of Plato sees in thecity an image of the world, or rather of the cosmos, a microcosm.Urban time and space reproduce on earth the configuration of theuniverse as the philosopher discovers it.
If today one wants a representation of the ‘ideal’ city and of itsrelations to the universe, one will not find this image with the philosophersand even less in an analytical vision which divides urbanreality into fractions, sectors, relations and correlations. One has tofind it among the writers of science fiction. In science fiction novels,every possible and impossible variation of future urban society hasbeen foreseen. Sometimes the old urban cores agonize, covered withan urban fabric more or less thick, more or less sclerosed or cancerous,which proliferates and spreads over the planet. In these cores destinedto disappearance after a long decline, live or vegetate failures, artists,intellectuals and gangsters. Sometimes colossal cities reconstitutethemselves and carry onto a higher level former struggles for power.In Azimov’s magistral work, The Foundation, an entire planet iscovered by a giant city, Tremor, which has all the means of knowledgeand power with which it dominates, as a centre of decision·making, awhole galaxy. After many gigantic episodes, Trentor saves theuniverse and brings it to its end, that is, to the ‘reign of endings’, joyand happiness, for excesses are finally overcome and the time of theworld finally appropriated in a cosmic space. Between these twoextremes, the visionaries of science fiction have also their intermediaryversions: the city ruled by a powerful computer, the city of a highlyspecialized and vital production which moves among planetary systemsand galaxies, etc.
Is it necessary to explore so far ahead the horizon of horizons? Theideal city, the New Athens, is already there to be seen in the imagewhich Paris and New York and some other cities project. The centreof decision-making and the centre of consumption meet. Their allianceon the ground based on a strategic convergence creates an inordinatecentrality. We already know that this decision-making centre includesall the channels of information and means of cultural and scientificdevelopment. Coercion and persuasion converge with the power ofdecision-making and the capacity to consume. Strongly occupied andinhabited by these new Masters, this centre is held by them. Withoutnecessarily owning it all, they possess this privileged space, axis of astrict 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 thisState solidly established on the city. These Masters have around forthem every cultural and other pleasure, from nightclubs to the splendoursof the opera — not excluding remote controlled amusements.Could this not be the true New Athens, with its minority of freecitizens, possessing and enjoying social spaces, dominating an enormousmass of subjugated people, in principle free, genuinely andperhaps voluntarily servants, treated and manipulated according torational methods? Are not the scholars, sociologists leading, in thisvery different from ancient philosophers, not themselves the servantsof State and Order, under the pretence of empiricism and rigour, ofscientificity? The possibilities can even be assessed. Directors, heads,presidents of this and that, elites, leading writers and artists, well-knownentertainers and media people, make up one per cent, or justunder half a million of the new notables in France in the twenty-firstcentury, each with their family and their following, and their own‘firm’. The domination of and by centrality in no way denies thepossession 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, engineersand scholars. After selection, the most eminent of these are admittedinto the heart of the city. For this selection, incomes and society ritualsmight be sufficient. State capitalism has carefully organized for otherprivileged subordinates domains distributed according to a rationalplan. Before reaching this goal State capitalism has carefully preparedit. Without omitting the realization of several urban ghettos, it hasorganized for scholars and for science a severely competitive sector: inthe universities and laboratories, scholars and intellectuals have confrontedeach other on a purely competitive basis, with a zeal worthyof a better job, for the best interest of the Masters, the economic andpolitical, for the glory and joy of the Olympians. Indeed, these secondaryelites are assigned to residence in science parks, university campuses— ghettos for intellectuals. The mass, under pressure from manyconstraints, spontaneously houses itself in satellite cities, plannedsuburbs, and other more or less residential ghettos. There is for it onlycarefully measured space. Time eludes it. It leads it daily life bound(perhaps unwittingly), to the requirement of the concentration ofpowers. But this is not a concentrationary universe. All this can quitedo without the ideology of freedom under the pretence of rationality,organization, and programming. These masses who do not deserve thename of people, or popular classes, or working class live relativelywell. Apart from the fact that their daily life is remote-controlled andthe permanent threat of unemployment weighs heavily on them, contributingto 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. Howdo 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 ofvariance analysis, or the precise charms of linguistics?
Since the Middle Ages, each epoch of European civilization has had itsimage of the possible, its dream, its fantasies of hell and paradise. Eachperiod, and perhaps each generation has had its representation of the bestof all possible worlds, or of a new life, an important, if not essential partof all ideologies. In order to accomplish this function, the eighteenthcentury, seemingly so rich, had only the rather feeble image of the noblesavage and exotic islands. To this exoticism, some men of that centuryadded a closer but somewhat prettified representation of England. Inrelation to them, we are richly endowed. By we is meant a poorly definedcrowd, generally intellectuals, living and thinking in France at the beginningof the second half of the twentieth-century. We have many models,horizons, and avenues which do not converge to imagine the future: theUSSR and the United States, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Israel, evenSweden or Switzerland — and without forgetting the Bororos.
While French society is becoming urbanized and Paris is beingtransformed, and certain powers, if not State power, are modellingFrance of the year 2,000, nobody is thinking about the ideal cityor 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 theabsences and lacunae which cruelly puncture surrounding reality. Thegaze turns away, leaves the horizon, loses itself in the clouds, elsewhere. Such is the power of diversion of ideologies, at the exactmoment when we no longer believe in ideology, but in realism andrationalism!
Previously, by refuting partial disciplines and their interdisciplinaryattempts, one was also asserting that synthesis belongs to the political(that is, that all synthesis of analytical faces about urban realityconceals under philosophy or an ideology a strategy). Statesmen,experts and specialists should certainly not be given control of decision-making. The term political is not here used so narrowly. Such aproposition must be understood in the opposite way to what has beenexpressed here. The capacity of synthesis belongs to political forceswhich are in fact social forces (classes and fractions of classes, groupingsor class alliances). They exist or not, they manifest and expressthemselves or not. They speak or do not speak. It is up to them toindicate social needs, to influence existing institutions, to open thehorizon and lay claims to a future which will be their oeuvre. If theinhabitants of various categories and strata allow themselves to bemanoeuvred and manipulated, displaced anywhere under the pretextof social mobility, if they accept the conditions of an exploitationmore refined and extensive than before, too bad for them. If theworking class is silent, if it does not act, either spontaneously or by themediation of its institutional representatives and mandatories, segregationwill continue resulting again in a vicious circle. Segregation isinclined to prohibit protest, contest, action, by dispersing those whoprotest, contest, and act. In this perspective political life will eitherchallenge or reaffirm the centre of political decision-making. Forparties and men, this option is the criterion of democracy.
The politician needs a theory to help him determine its course butthis presents some great difficulties. How can there be a theory ofurban society, the city and the urban, of realities and possibilities,without synthesis?
Two dogmatic disciplines, philosophical systematization and systematizationfrom partial analyses under the pretence of such disciplinesor of so-called interdisciplinary research have already been rejected.There can be no possibility of an analysis accomplished in the contextof knowledge. The unity outlined is defined by a convergence whichonly practice can actualize between:
the goals, spread over time of political action, from thepossible to the impossible, that is, what is possible here andnow, to what is impossible today, but will become possibletomorrow in the course of this very action
the theoretical elements brought to the analysis of urban reality,that is, the ensemble of knowledge brought into playduring the course of political action, ordered, used and dominatedby this action
the theoretical elements contributed by philosophy, which appearin a new light, as its history inscribes itself in anotherperspective — philosophical meditation transforming itself accordingto reality or rather, the realization to accomplish.
the theoretical elements brought by art, conceived as a capacityto transform reality, to appropriate at the highest level the factsof the ‘lived’, of time, space, the body and desire.
From this convergence, one can define the preceding conditions. It isessential to consider no longer industrialization and urbanization separately,but to perceive in urbanization the meaning, the goal and thefinality of industrialization. In other words, it is essential to aim no longerfor economic growth for its own sake, and economistic ideology whichentails strategic objectives, namely, superprofit and capitalist overexploitation,the control of the economic (which fails precisely because ofthis) to the advantage of the State. Concepts of economic equilibrium,harmonious growth, structural maintenance (structured–structuring relationsbeing existing relations of production and property) must besubordinated to more powerful concepts potentially of development, andof concrete rationality emerging from conflicts.
In other words, growth must be guided. Very common formulationswhich pass for democratic (growth, well-being for all, the generalinterest) lose their meaning and this applies to liberalism as economisticideology as much as to centralized State planning. Such an ideology,whether or not prospective, reduces the outlook on such issuesas the increase of wages and the better distribution of nationalrevenue, or even on the review and adjustment of the capital-labourrelation.
To direct growth towards development, therefore towards urban society, means firstly to prospect new needs, knowing chat such needsare discovered in the course of their emergence and are revealed in thecourse of their prospection. They do not pre-exist as objects. They donot feature in the ‘real’ described by market studies and studies of‘individual’ motivation. Consequently, this means substituting socialplanning whose theory is hardly elaborated. Social needs lead to theproduction of new ‘goods’ which are not this or that object, but socialobjects in space and time. Man of urban society is already a man richin needs: the man of rich needs awaiting their objectification andrealization. Urban society overtakes the old and the new poverty, asmuch the destitution of isolated subjectivity as that humdrum old needfor 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 aconvergence, a virtuality which is outlined but realized only at thelimit. This limit is not somewhere in the infinite, and yet it be canreached by successive leaps and bounds. It is impossible to settle in itand to establish it as an accomplished reality. Hence this is theessential feature of the method already considered and named ‘transduction’,the construction of a virtual object approached from experimentalfacts. The horizon opens up and calls for actualization.
The orientation reacts upon researched facts. In this way researchceases to be either indeterminate, that is, empiricist, or a simpleconfirmation of a thesis, that is, dogmatist. In this light, philosophyand its history, art and its metamorphoses appear transformed.
As for the analytical aspect of urban research, it modifies itself bythe fact that research has already found ‘something’ at the outset andthat the direction or orientation influences the hypothesis. There is nomore question of isolating the points of space and time, of consideringseparately activities and functions, or of studying apart from eachother behaviours or images, distributions and relations. These variousaspects of social production, that of the city and urban society, aresituated in relation to a framework of explanation and forecasting.Since method consists as much in overcoming ecological description asstructural and functional analysis, in order to reach out to the concreteof urban drama, formal evidence could be provided by the generaltheory of forms. According to this theory, there is a form of the city:assembly, simultaneity, encounter. Transduction is the intellectualapproach linked to these operations which codifies them or supportsthem methodologically.
Scientifically speaking, the distinction between strategic variablesand tactical variables seems fundamental. The first ones, as soon asthey are identified, subordinate the second. Increase of wages? Betterdistribution of national revenue? Nationalization of this or that? Verywell. But these are tactical variables. In the same way the suppressionof urban related constraints would affect the municipalization, nationalizationor socialization of building plots. Fine and well. But for whatpurpose? The increase of rates and rhythms of growth betweenstrategic variables, given that quantitative growth already poses qualitativeproblems of finality and development. The issue is not only ratesof growth, production and revenues, bur distribution. Which part ofincreased production and global revenue will be attributed to socialneeds, to ‘culture’, to urban reality? Is not the transformation of dailylife part of strategic variables? One could think it so. To take anexample, flexible working hours are of interest. This is only a minusculetactical action. The creation of new networks concerning the lifeof children and adolescents (crèches, playing fields and sports, etc.),the constitution of a very simple apparatus of social pedagogy, whichwould inform as much social life itself as sexual life, the art of livingand art tout court. Such an institution would have much more impact:it would mark the passage from the tactical to the strategic in thisfield.
The variables of projects elaborated by economists also depend ongenerally poorly defined strategies. Against class strategies whichoften use very powerful scientific instruments and which tend to abusescience (no: scientificity — a rigid and coercive ideological apparatus)as means to persuade and impose, what is needed is to turn knowledgearound 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 thedefinition of this society by the planned organization of productionenough? No. Socialism today can only be conceived as productionoriented towards social needs, and consequently, towards the needs ofurban society. The goals borrowed from simple industrialization arebeing overtaken and transformed. Such is the thesis or hypothesisformulated here. Conditions and preconditions? We know them: ahigh level of production and productivity (by breaking with an exploitationreinforced by a relatively decreasing minority of highly productivemanual and intellectual workers), and a high technical and culturallevel. In addition, the institution of new social relations, especiallybetween governing and governed, between ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ ofdecision-making. These conditions have virtually been realized inadvanced industrial countries. Their formulation does not arise fromthe possible, even if this possible seems far from real and is really faraway.
Possibilities relate to a double examination: the scientific (projectand projection, variations of projects, predictions) and the imaginary(at the limit, science fiction). Why should the imaginary enter onlyoutside the real instead of nurturing reality? When there is a loss ofthought in and by the imaginary, it is being manipulated. The imaginaryis also a social fact. Do not specialists claim for themselves theintervention 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 agrarianand urban structures. It has enabled the virtually unlimited extensionof exchange value. It has shown how merchandise is not only a wayof putting people in relation to each other, but also a logic, a language,and a world. Commodities have swept away barriers. And this processis not over: the car, the current pilot-object in the world of commodities,is overcoming this last barrier — the city. It was therefore thetime of political economy and the two variations of its rule: liberal andstate economis. Today the overtaking of economism is being outlined.Towards what? Towards an ethic or an aesthetic, a moralism or anaestheticism? Towards new ‘values’? No. What is at stake is anovertaking by and in practice of a change in social practice. Use value,subordinated for centuries to exchange value, can now come firstagain. How? By and in urban society, from this reality which stillresists and preserves for us use value, the city. A weakened but truevision of this truth is an urban reality for ‘users’ and not for capitalistspeculators, builders and technicians.
Here we can envisage a strategic variable: to limit the importance ofthe 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 arather simple and trivial example but demonstrates the subordinationof the ‘real’ to a strategy.
The problem of leisure forces one to think even more dearly of astrategy. To define it in its full scope, it is important to firstly destroya few fantasies mixed up with ideology. The social imaginary furnishedby ideology and advertising, as well as the sad reality of‘hobbies’ and miniaturized ‘creativity’ blocks the horizon. Neitherholidays, nor industrialized cultural production, nor leisure in oroutside daily life resolve this problem. Their images prevent it frombeing posed. The problem is to put an end to the separations of ‘dailylife — leisure’ or ‘daily life — festivity’. It is to restitute the fête bychanging daily life. The city was a space occupied at one and the sametime by productive labour, by oeuvres, and by festivities. It should findagain this function beyond functions, in a metamorphosed urbansociety. One of the strategic aims can be formulated in this way,although it is only a formulation of what is happening today withoutgrace or splendour in cities which attempt to recreate the fête withfestivities and festivals.
Each type of society and each mode of production has had its typeof city. The relative discontinuity of modes of production defines thehistory of urban reality, although this is not exclusive and otherperiodization are possible. Another periodization resting on a specificcentrality would show more closely the succession of urban types butwould 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. Armieswhich protect and oppress the agricultural territories administered bythe city leave and return through chis way on which are deployedmilitary parades and religious processions. The palace of the prince,the umbilical, the omphalos, is the centre of the world, the point ofdeparture and arrival. The sacred enclosure captures and condensessacredness diffused over the whole of the territory. It manifests theeminent 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 aregathered guards, caravaneers, vagrants and robbers. The tribunal sitshere and gathers the inhabitants for spontaneous assemblies. It is theplace of urban order and disorder, of revolts and repressions.
In the Greek and Roman antique city, centrality is attached to anempty space, the agora and the forum. It is a place for assembly. Thereis 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 disjointedfrom the centre of the world: the hole, the sacred–damned mundus,the place from which souls leave, where the condemned and unwantedchildren are thrown. The Greeks did not put emphasis on horror, onthe links between urban centrality and the underworld of the dead andthe souls. Their thought of their city is related to the Cosmos, aluminous 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 commoditiesand established them in its centre; the market-place. A commercialcentre characterized by the proximity of the church and the exclusionof the enclosure — a heterotopy of territory. The symbolism and thefunctions of this enclosure are different from that of the oriental orantique city. The territory belongs to the lords, peasants, vagrants andplunderers. Urban centrality welcomes produce and people. It forbids itsaccess to those who threaten its essential and economic function, thusheralding and preparing capitalism. Nevertheless, centrality thus functionalizedand structured remains the object of all attentions. It is embellished.The smallest hamlet, the smallest barbican have their arcades, thepossibly sumptuous monumental hall and municipal buildings which areplaces of pleasure. The church blesses commerce and gives a goodconscience to the busy citizens. Within the limits of commercial rationality,gatherings which are part of this double feature of the religious andthe rational take place in the square, between the church and the market.How these two features associate by colliding together in combination orin conflict, is another story.
The capitalist city has created the centre of consumption. Industrialproduction did not constitute centrality as such, except in the specialcases — if one can say that — of big enterprise around which a workers’city was erected. We already know the double character of the capitalistcity: place of consumption and consumption of place. Businessesdensify in the centre, and attract expensive shops, luxury foodstuffsand products. The establishment of this centraliry is partial to the oldcores, the spaces appropriated during the course of a previous history.It cannot go without it. In these privileged sites, the consumer alsocomes to consume space; the collection of objects in the windows ofboutiques becomes the reason and the pretext for the gathering ofpeople. They look, they see, they talk and talk with each other. And itis the place of encounters amongst the collection of things. What issaid and written, comes before everything else: it is the world ofcommodities, of the language of commodities, of the glory and theextension of exchange value. It tends to absorb use value in exchangeand exchange value. Yet, use and use value resist irreducibly. Thisirreducibility of the urban centre plays an essential role in this argument.
It is neo-capitalism which superimposes, without denying or destroyingit, the centre of consumption upon the centre of decision-makingIt no longer gathers together people and things, but dataand knowledge. It inscribes in an eminently elaborated form of simultaneitythe conception of the whole incorporated into an electronicbrain, using the quasi-instantaneity of communications, thus overcomingobstacles such as the loss of information, the meaninglessaccumulations of elements, redundancies, etc. With a disinterestedaim? Certainly not. Since the problem is political, those who constitutespecific centrality aim for power or are its instruments. The issue is notsimply to ‘master technique’ in general, but to master clearly definedtechniques with socio-political implications. What is at stake is tocontrol the potential masters: those whose power appropriates allpossibilities.
The controversy has been taken up again and pushed towards newconclusions to propose and defend another centrality. The possibilityof an urban society here outlined cannot be satisfied with centralitiesof the past, although it does not destroy them and appropriates themby altering them. What to project? There is something barren aboutcultural centrality. It easily allows itself to be organized, institutionalized,and later, bureaucratized. There is nothing more derisive thanthe bureaucrat of culture. The educational is attractive, but neitherseduces nor enchants. Pedagogy implies localized practices, not socializedcentrality. Moreover, there is nothing to prove chat there is‘one’ or ‘a’ culture. Subordinated to this entity, ‘culture’ and itsideology, ‘culturalism’, theatre, the greatest of games, is threatenedwith boredom. The elements of a superior unit, the fragments andaspects of ‘culture’, the educational, the formative and the informational,can be collected together. But from where can the contents ofthe principle of assembly be derived? From play, ludo, a term whichmuse be understood here in its broadest and deepest meaning. Sport isplay and so is the theatre, in a way more involving than the cinema.Fairs, collective games of all sorts, survive at the interfaces of anorganized consumer society, in the holes of a serious society whichperceives itself as structured and systematical and which claims to betechnical. As for the old places of assembly, they are largely devoid ofmeaning: the fête dies or leaves it. That they should find a meaningagain does not preclude the creation of places appropriate to arenewed fête fundamentally linked to play.
No doubt that so-called consumer society suggests this direction.Leisure centres, leisure societies, cities of luxury and pleasures, holidayplaces, show this eloquently with the particular rhetoric of advertising.Therefore, all that is needed is to give form to this tendency whichis still subordinated to the industrial and commercial production ofculture in this society. The proposition of this project is to gathertogether by subordinating to play rather than to subordinate play tothe ‘seriousness’ of culturalism and scientificism, although this doesnot exclude ‘cultural’ elements. On the contrary. It collects themtogether by restoring them in their truth. Only relatively recently andthrough institutions has the theatre become ‘cultural’, while playhas lost its place and value in society. Would culture not be the accommodationof the oeuvre and style to exchange value, thus allowing forits commercialization, its production and consumption as specificproduct?
There are implications to the centrality of play which is the restorationof the meaning of the oeuvre that philosophy and art can bring soas to prioritize time over space, not forgetting that time comes toinscribe itself and to be written in a space — and thus replace dominationby appropriation.
The space of play has coexisted and still coexists with spaces ofexchange and circulation, political space and cultural space. Projectswithin quantified and accounted ‘social space’ which lose their qualitativeand differentiated spaces relate to a schizophrenia which isconcealed under the veils of precision, scientificity and rationality. Wehave shown above the inevitable outcome of an analytical thoughtwhich without safeguards perceives itself as global. This globality isthe formalized space of social pathology. There is a continuous pathfrom the concept of habitat to schizophrenic space projected as socialmodel. The orientation envisaged here does not consist in suppressingqualified spaces as existing historical differences. On the contrary.These already complex spaces can be further articulated, by emphasizingdifferences and contrasts, and by stressing quality which impliesand overdetermines quantities. To these spaces, one can apply formalizedprinciples of differences and articulation, of superimpositionsof contrasts. Thus conceived, social spaces are related to social timesand rhythms which are prioritized. One understands more clearly howand up to what point in urban reality elements distribute themselvesover a period of time. It is the truth of urban time which lucidlyreclaims this role. To inhabit finds again its place over habitat. Thequality which is promoted presents and represents as playful. Byplaying with words, one can say that there will be play between theparts of the social whole (plasticity) — to the extent that play isproclaimed as supreme value, eminently solemn, if not serious, overtakinguse and exchange by gathering them together. And if someonecries out that this utopia has nothing in common with socialism, theanswer is that today only the working class still knows how to reallyplay, feels like playing, over and above the claims and programmes, ofeconomism, and political philosophy. How is this shown? Sport andthe interest shown in sport and games, including, in television andelsewhere, the degraded forms of ludic life. Already, to city people theurban 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, itcould be defined by imagining the reversal of the current situation, bypushing to its limits this inverted image of the world upside down.There are currently attempts to establish fixed structures, ‘equilibriumstructures’, stabilities submitted to systematization, and therefore toexisting power, At the same time there is a tactical wager on theaccelerated obsolescence of consumer goods, ironically known as‘durables’. The ideal city would involve the obsolescence of space: anaccelerated change of abode, emplacements and prepared spaces. Itwould be the ephemeral city, the perpetual oeuvre of the inhabitants,themselves mobile and mobilized for and by this oeuvre. Time comesfirst. There is no doubt that technology makes possible the ephemeralcity, the apogee of play and supreme oeuvre and luxury. One cancite the world exhibition in Montreal among other examples! InMontreal.
To put art at the service of the urban does not mean to prettify urbanspace with works of arc. This parody of the possible is a caricature.Rather, this means that time-spaces become works of art and thatformer art reconsiders itself as source and model of appropriation ofspace and rime. Art brings cases and examples of appropriate ‘topics’:of temporal qualities inscribed in spaces. Music shows how expressionand lyricism uses numbering, order and measure. fr shows that time,tragic or serious, can absorb and reabsorb calculation. With less forcebut more precision than music, this is the same for sculpture andpainting. Let us not forget that gardens, parks, and landscapes werepart of urban life as much as the fine arts, or that the landscape aroundcities were the works of art of these cities. For example, the Tuscanlandscape around Florence, inseparable from its architecture, plays animmense role in Renaissance arts. Leaving aside representation, ornamentationand decoration, art can become praxis and poiesis on asocial scale: the art of living in the city as work of art. Coming back tostyle and m the oeuvre, that is, to the meaning of the monument andthe space appropriated in the fête, art can create ‘structures of enchantment’.Architecture taken separately and on its own, couldneither restrict nor create possibilities. Something more, somethingbetter, something else, is needed. Architecture as art and techniquealso needs an orientation. Although necessary, it could not suffice.Nor could architecture set and define its own aims and strategy. Inother words, the future of art is not artistic, but urban, because thefuture of ‘man’ is not discovered in the cosmos, or in the people, or inproduction, but in urban society. In the same way art and philosophymust reconsider itself in relation to this perspective. The problematicof the urban renews the problematic of philosophy, its categories andmethods. Without a need to break or reject them, these categoriesaccept something else new: a meaning.
The right to the city manifests itself as a superior form of rights: right tofreedom, to individualization in socialization, to habitat and to inhabit.The right to the oeuvre, to participation and appropriation (clearlydistinct from the right to property), are implied in the right to the city.
With regards to philosophy, three periods are identifiable. This is aperiodization which is particular among those which mark the continuumof becoming. In the first stage, philosophy meditates on the cityas partial whole at the heart of totality, world and cosmos. In thesecond, philosophy reflects on a transcending totality of the city:history, ‘man’, society, State. It accepts and even confirms severalseparations in the name of totalicy. It sanctions the analytical hold bybelieving it is refuting or overcoming it. In the third period philosophycompetes for the promotion of a rationality and a practice whichtransform themselves into urban rationality and planning practice.
The Realization of Philosophy
Let us take up again the thread of the argument and show its continuityto its conclusions. Knowledge is in an untenable situation. Philosophywanted to reach the total but passed by it, unable to grasp it and evenless 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 certaintiesand realities, but have only delivered fragments. They cannot gowithout synthesis, yet cannot legitimize their right to it.
From its beginnings Greek philosophy linked itself to greatness, andalso the miseries and limitations of the Greek city — slavery and thesubordination of the individual to the Polis. Two thousand years later,Hegel declared the realization of philosophical rationality released bycenturies of reflection and meditation, but in and by the State. How toget our of these quandaries? How to resolve contradictions?Industrial production has upset notions concerning the social capacityto act, to create anew, and to master material nature. Philosophycould no longer sustain its traditional mission, nor the philosopher hisvocation, to define man, the human, society and the world whiletaking charge of the creation of man by his effort, his will, his struggleagainst determinisms and hazards. Science and the sciences, technology,the organization and rationalization of industry were comingonto the scene. Were 2,000 years of philosophy to go to the grave?No. Industry contributes new means but has no purpose or meaningin itself. it throws products into the world. Philosophy (with art andworks of art), a supreme oeuvre, says what is appropriation, nor thetechnical mastery of material nature which produces products andexchange values. Therefore, the philosopher must speak, say the meaning of industrial production, as long as he does not speculate onit and use it as a theme to prolong the old manner of philosophizing.Instead he must take it as means of realizing philosophy, that is,the philosophical project of man in the world: desire and reason,spontaneity and reflection, vitality and containment, domination andappropriation, determinisms and liberties. Philosophy cannot realizeitself without art (as model of appropriation of time and space),accomplishing itself fully in social practice and without science andtechnology, as means, not being fully used, without the proletariancondition 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 realization of philosophycan take up again its meaning, that is, give a meaning as much tohistory as to actuality. The thread interrupted for a century isrenewed. The theoretical situation is released and the gulf is filledbetween the total and the partial or fragmentary, between the uncertainwhole and the all too certain fragments. From the moment thaturban society reveals the meaning of industrialization, these conceptsplay 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 gotogether.
Theoretical thought aims at the realization of humanity ocher thanthat of a society of low productivity (chat of the epochs of non-abundance,or rather, of the non-possibility of abundance), and that of aproductivist society. In a society and an urban life delivered from itsancient limitations, those of rarity and economism, technologies, artand knowledge come to the service of daily life so as to metamorphoseit. Thus can be defined the realization of philosophy. It is no longer aquestion of a philosophy of the city and of an historico-social philosophy alongside a science of the city. The realization of philosophygives a meaning to the sciences of social reality. At the outset, it refutesthe accusation of ‘sociologism’ which will no doubt be made againstthe hypotheses and theses expressed here. Neither philosophism, norscienticism, nor pragmatism nor sociologism, nor psychologism, noreconomism. Something else is proclaimed.
Theses on the City, the Urban and Planning
(1) Two groups of questions and two orders of urgency have disguisedthe problems of the city and urban society: questions of housing andthe ‘habitat’ (related to a housing policy and architectural technologies)and those of industrial organization and global planning. Thefirst from below, the second from above, have produced, hidden fromattention, a rupture of the traditional morphology of cities, while theurbanization of society was taking place. Hence, a new contradictionadding to other unresolved contradictions of existing society, aggravatingthem and giving them another meaning.
(2) These two groups of problems have been and are posed byeconomic growth and industrial production. Practical experienceshows 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 andideology of change (in other words, the ideology of modernity) concealthe stagnation of essential social relations. The development ofsociety can only be conceived in urban life, by the realization of urbansociety.
(3) The double process of industrialization and urbanization loses allmeaning if one does not conceive urban society as aim and finality ofindustrialization, and if urban life is subordinated to industrialgrowth. The latter provides the conditions and the means of urbansociety. To proclaim industrial rationality as necessary and sufficientis to destroy the sense (the orientation, the goal) of the process. At firstindustrialization produces urbanization negatively (the breakup of thetraditional city, of its morphology, of its practico-material reality) andthen is ready to get down to work. Urban society begins on the ruinsof 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 ofproducts and of production. What subsists and is strengthened ofurban reality in its dislocation, the centre of decision-making, henceforthenters into the means of production and the systems of exploitation of social labour by those who control information, culture andthe powers of decision-making themselves. Only one theory enablesthe use of these practical facts and the effective realization of urbansociety.
(4) For this realization, neither the organization of private enterprise,nor global planning, although necessary, suffice. A leap forward ofrationality is accomplished. Neither the State, nor private enterprisecan provide indispensable models of rationality and reality.
(5) The realization of urban society calls for a planning orientedtowards social needs, chose of urban society. It necessitates a scienceof the city (of relations and correlations in urban life). Althoughnecessary, these conditions are not sufficient. A social and politicalforce capable of putting these means into oeuvres is equally indispensable.
(6) The working class suffers the consequences of the rupture ofancient morphologies. It is victim of a segregation, a class strategylicensed by this rupture. Such is the present form of the negativesituation of the proletariat. In the major industrial countries the oldproletarian immiseration declines and tends to disappear. But a newmisery spreads, which mainly affects the proletariat without sparingother social strata and classes: the poverty of the habitat that of theinhabitant submitted to a daily life organized (in and by a bureaucratizedsociety of organized consumption). To those who would stilldoubt its existence as class, what identifies the working class on theground is segregation and the misery of its ‘to inhabit’ .
(7) In these difficult conditions, at the heart of a society which cannotcompletely oppose them and yet obstructs them, rights which definecivilization (in, but often against society — by, but often againstculture) find their way. These rights which are not well recognized,progressively become customary before being inscribed into formalizedcodes. They would change reality if they entered into socialpractice: right to work, to training and education, to health, housing,leisure, to life. Among these rights in the making features the right to the city (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 usage 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 onthe mastery of the economic (of exchange value, the market, andcommodities) and consequently is inscribed within the perspectives ofthe revolution under the hegemony of the working class.
(8) For the working class, rejected from the centres towards theperipheries, dispossessed of the city, expropriated thus from the bestoutcomes of its activity, this right has a particular bearing and significance.It represents for it at one and the same time a means and anend, a way and a horizon: but this virtual action of the working classalso represents the general interests of civilization and the particularinterests of all social groups of ‘inhabitants’, for whom integrationand participation become obsessional without making their obsessioneffective.
(9) The revolutionary transformation of society has industrial productionas ground and lever. This is why it had to be shown that the urbancentre of decision-making can no longer consider itself in the presentsociety (of neo-capitalism or of monopoly capilaism associated to theState), outside the means of production, their property and theirmanagement. Only the taking in charge by the working class ofplanning and its political agenda can profoundly modify social life andopen another era: that of socialism in neo-capitalist countries. Untilthen transformations remain superficial, at the level of signs and theconsumption of signs, language and metalanguage, a secondary discourse,a discourse on previous discourses. Therefore, it is not withoutreservations that one can speak of urban revolution. Nevertheless, theorientation of industrial production on social needs is not a secondaryfact. The finality thus brought to plans transforms them. In this wayurban reform has a revolutionary bearing. As in the twentieth centuryagrarian reform gradually disappears from the horizon, urban reformbecomes a revolutionary reform. It gives rise to a strategy whichopposes itself to class strategy dominant today.
(10) Only the proletariat can invest its social and political activity inthe realization of urban society. Equally, only it can renew themeaning of productive and creative activity by destroying the ideologyof consumption. It therefore has the capacity to produce a newhumanism, different from the old liberal humanism which is ending its course — of urban man for whom and by whom the city and his owndaily life in it become oeuvre, appropriation, use value (and notexchange value), by using all the means of science, art, technology andthe domination over material nature.
(11) Nevertheless, difference persists between product and oeuvre. Tothe meaning of the production of products (of the scientific andtechnical mastery of material nature) must be added, to later predominate,the meaning of the oeuvre, of appropriation (of time, space, thebody and desire). And this in and by urban society which is beginning.Now, the working class does not spontaneously have the sense of theoeuvre. It is dimmed, having almost disappeared along with crafts andskills and ‘quality’. Where can be found this precious deposit, thissense of the oeuvre? From where can the working class receive it tocarry it to a superior degree by uniting it with productive intelligenceand dialectic practical reason? Philosophy and the whole ofphilosophical tradition on one hand, and on the other all of art(not withouta radical critique of their gifts and presents) contain the sense of theoeuvre.
(12) This calls for, apart from the economic and political revolution(planning oriented towards social needs and democratic control of theState 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 atthe realization of urban society on the basis of an advanced andplanned industrialization) and strategy aiming at the transformationof traditional peasant life by industrialization. Moreover in mostcountries today the realization of urban society goes through theagrarian form and industrialization. There is no doubt that a worldfront is possible, and equally that it is impossible today. This utopiaprojects as it often does on the horizon a ‘possible-impossible’. Happily,or otherwise, rime, that of history and social practice, differsfrom the time of philosophies. Even if it does not produce the irreversible,it can produce the difficult to repair. Marx wrote thathumanity does not only ask itself problems that it can resolve. Sometoday believe chat men now only ask themselves insoluble problems.They deny reason. None the less, there are perhaps problems whichare easy to resolve, whose solutions are near, very near, and thatpeople do not ask themselves.
Paris 1967 — centenary of Capital
