Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory

388 Pages·2011·12.19 MB·English

by  Lukasz Stanek

Henri Lefebvre on Space

Henri Lefebvre on Space
Architecture, Urban Research,
and the Production of Theory
Łukasz Stanek
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
MINNEAPOLIS | LONDON
THIS BOOK IS SUPPORTED BY A GRANT FROM THE
GRAHAM FOUNDATION FOR ADVANCED STUDIES IN THE FINE ARTS.
Portions of the text were published in Łukasz Stanek, “Lessons from Nanterre,” in
“Aftershocks: Generation(s) since 1968,” a special issue of Log 13/14 (Fall 2008); in
Łukasz Stanek, “Productive Crisis: Henri Lefebvre and the European City after the
Welfare State,” Quarterly Architecture Essay (QAE) 3, no. 3 (Spring 2008), http://
www.haecceityinc.com; and in Łukasz Stanek, “Collective Luxury: Architecture and
Populism in Charles Fourier,” Hunch 14, ed. Salomon Frausto (NAi Publishers/Berlage
Institute, 2010). A version of chapter 3 appeared previously as Łukasz Stanek, “Space
as Concrete Abstraction: Hegel, Marx, and Modern Urbanism in Henri Lefebvre,” in
Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, Kanishka Goonewardena, and Christian Schmid, eds.,
Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (London: Routledge, 2008).
Copyright 2011 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
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photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stanek, Łukasz.
Henri Lefebvre on space : architecture, urban research, and the production of theory
/ Łukasz Stanek.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-6616-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8166-6617-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Social sciences—Philosophy. 2. Space and time. 3. Lefebvre, Henri, 1901–1991.
I. Title. II. Title: Architecture, urban research, and the production of theory.
H61.15.S73 2011
304.2'3—dc22 2011011284
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction | vii
1. Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Theory | 1
2. Research: From Practices of Dwelling to the
Production of Space | 81
3. Critique: Space as Concrete Abstraction | 133
4. Project: Urban Society and Its Architecture | 165
Afterword: Toward an Architecture of Jouissance | 249
Acknowledgments | 253
Notes | 255
Bibliography | 305
Index | 349
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vii
Introduction
This book addresses the encounter among sociology, architecture, urban-
ism, and philosophy in 1960s and early 1970s France in view of the shifts in the
postwar processes of urbanization at every scale of the social reality, from that
of the neighborhood to the global level. The work of Henri Lefebvre (1901–91)
was central to this encounter, and his theory of production of space, published
between 1968 and 1974, contributed both to an understanding of these processes
that have staked out the tendencies of the global urban condition until today and
to a redefi nition of the identities of the disciplines involved, their subject matters,
and their conceptual frameworks, but also their social obligations and political
ambitions.
To argue that Lefebvre’s theory was formulated from within an engagement
with sociology, architecture, and urbanism is at odds with the prevailing view on
the theory of production of space as a projection of his philosophical positions.
“He developed a very interesting refl ection about the city,” wrote Paul-Henry
Chombart de Lauwe, one of the pioneers of French postwar urban sociol-
ogy, about Lefebvre, “but, no doubt, he lacked a fi eldwork experience, a direct
knowledge of the terrain and suffi ciently deep exchange with architects.”1 More
recently, Manuel Castells stressed the weakness of Lefebvre’s La production de
l’espace (The Production of Space) on the level of empirical research: “Frankly,
I do not believe that it is possible to offer a theory of production of space on a
strictly philosophical basis, without a profound knowledge of the economic and
technological data about the processes of urbanization and about their social and
political organization.”2
The statements of Chombart and Castells are symptomatic of much of urban
sociology still today, which appreciates Lefebvre as an inspiring philosopher,
that is to say, accepts his writings on the condition of their relegation beyond
viii Introduction
the realm of sociology proper. Yet while Lefebvre’s theory cannot be understood
without accounting for his philosophical readings, I argue in this book that nei-
ther can it be grasped without acknowledging what was largely forgotten in his
work: a number of empirical studies he carried out and supervised within a range
of French research institutions, as well as his intense exchanges with architects,
urbanists, and planners. The focus on these studies and on Lefebvre’s engage-
ment with French architectural culture is intended not to diminish the relevance
of philosophy in his thinking but to argue that it cannot be understood from a
single disciplinary perspective, including a philosophical reading, which, even if
most sympathetic, tends to reverse the gesture of Chombart in order to celebrate
Lefebvre as an inspiring sociologist.3 This is why in this book I discuss the pro-
duction of Lefebvre’s theory by juxtaposing, bringing together, and pulling apart
his critical refl ections on the general condition of modernity, his research on the
processes of urbanization, and his project of spaces for a transforming society.
These are three voices in Lefebvre’s writings: research, critique, and project.
They were developed in a dialogue with the voices distinguished by Maurice
Blanchot in the work of Marx—the scientifi c discourse, the words of the philo-
sophical logos, and the political speech—which Blanchot described as constantly
breaking itself into multiple forms, heterogeneous, divergent, noncontemporane-
ous; being always and at once tacit and violent, political and scholarly, direct and
indirect, total and fragmentary, lengthy and almost instantaneous.4 The attention
to this polyphony governed Lefebvre’s readings of Marx’s work, which opposed,
more often than not, its dominant interpretations, whether the offi cial doctrine
of the Stalinist Soviet Union adopted by the French Communist Party (PCF) dur-
ing the immediate postwar period or the structuralist Marxism of the 1960s. At
the same time Lefebvre’s research, critique, and project are embedded in specifi c
French discussions in 1960s and 1970s philosophy, urban sociology, architecture,
and urbanism while also refl ecting an international ferment of ideas, includ-
ing Anglo-American sociology and planning, German philosophy, Italian archi-
tectural theory, and dissident revisions of Marxism, both Western and Central
European.
These debates reverberate in the empirical studies Lefebvre was involved
in, or rather in his “concrete” research—the term that he preferred and that the
authors of the comprehensive Méthodes des sciences sociales (Methods of Social
Sciences, 1964) defi ned as aiming at either a “practical application” or a “theo-
retical discovery” but distinguished from a “theoretical and abstract refl ection.”5
This included his studies on the Pyrenean communities commissioned by the
Musée national des arts et traditions populaires (MNATP) during the Second
World War; his research in rural and urban sociology at the Centre d’études
sociologiques (CES) from the 1940s until the early 1960s; the interdisciplin-
ary research projects headed by him as a professor in Strasbourg (1961–65) and
Introduction ix
Nanterre (1965–73); and the studies on practices of dwelling carried out by the
Institut de sociologie urbaine (ISU), which Lefebvre cofounded in 1962 and over
which he presided until 1973.
It is from within these engagements that his understanding of space was devel-
oped by means of three main theoretical decisions: the shift of the research focus
from space to processes of its production; the embrace of the multiplicity of social
practices that produce space and make it socially productive; and the focus on the
contradictory, confl ictual, and, ultimately, political character of the processes of
production of space. While dwelling on a range of empirical and historical stud-
ies, this understanding of space was formulated in opposition to much of French
sociology of the 1950s and early 1960s and its quantitative and statistical meth-
ods. Rather, Lefebvre aimed at a qualitative approach with particular attention
to the irreducible and singular lived experience: an approach that not only posed
the question of generalization as a major theoretical challenge for his theory but
also prevented him from formulating a fully operative method of sociological
research. This resulted, until very recently, in the scarcity of empirical studies
developed along the lines of his theory, in France as much as elsewhere.6
Examining the relationships among the three voices making up Lefebvre’s
work allows us to distinguish it from the discourse of what he identifi ed as his
main ideological opponents: the planning state and postwar functionalist urban-
ism. Lefebvre’s theory needs to be contextualized within the efforts of the French
state since the 1960s to refound the procedures of urban planning on a new type
of knowledge about processes of urbanization, a knowledge that is not only oper-
ative but also self-critical. With the introduction of procedures of inhabitants’
participation in urban planning, an increasing politicization of its operations,
and an active stimulation of critical urban research, including Marxist research,
French planning institutions embarked on a process of institutionalization of cri-
tique: the very condition that Michel Foucault began to examine at the end of the
1970s in his genealogy of liberalism.7
This book shows that these processes not only paralleled the formulation of
Lefebvre’s theory of space, published in six books between 1968 (Le droit à la ville,
The Right to the City) and 1974 (The Production of Space), but also constituted both
its condition and its target: its condition because Lefebvre’s courses and seminars
in urban sociology during his professorships in Strasbourg and Nanterre contrib-
uted to the academization of urban sociology in France and because almost all of
the urban empirical studies he was involved in were commissioned by state insti-
tutions aiming at developing alternatives to the postwar functionalist urbanism;
its target because much of his work addressed the incorporation of critical con-
cepts into the increasingly self-critical French state planning discourse, includ-
ing Lefebvre’s concepts as well, such as the postulate to grant the “right to the
city” and “centrality” to the inhabitants by accounting for their “everyday life”