Henri Lefebvre on Space

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 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 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 This page intentionally left blank vii Introduction This book addresses the encounter among sociology, architecture, urbanism, 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 sociology, 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 engagement 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 production 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 philosophical 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) during 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, including Anglo-American sociology and planning, German philosophy, Italian architectural 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 “theoretical 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 developed 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 studies, this understanding of space was formulated in opposition to much of French sociology of the 1950s and early 1960s and its quantitative and statistical methods. 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 urbanism. 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

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