See Stefan Kipfer's most recent Society & Space contribution: Fanon and Space: Colonization, Urbanization, and Liberation from the Colonial to the Global City

Henri Lefebvre’s “Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis” is noteworthy because it rearticulates various problems Lefebvre tackled in the decades before 1989. One of his last texts, the article certainly does, as David Wachsmuth and Neil Brenner point out, serve as an intriguing link to current debates on comparative urbanization. However, the article also reminds us how Lefebvre’s work is punctuated with missed opportunities. To make this point, we need to place the (re-)publications of “Dissolving city” in historical context.

1989

After regaining its double Presidential and Parliamentary majorities in 1988, the Socialist government continued its course to contain popular aspirations, first, by keeping its earlier left-Keynesian pretensions on the shelf, and second, by reigning in the political threat posed by autonomously organized immigrant movements. In 1989, the French state’s place-based urban policy moved from experimentation to institutionalization. One such experiment, Banlieues 89 – an inter-ministerial project to re-model postwar housing estates – entered the evaluation phase in 1989, preparing the ground for the subsequent creation of the Ministry of Urban Affairs (Ministère de la Ville) and anticipating more recent, systematic policies of redeveloping housing estates (Guillot, 2009). Initiated by Michel Cantal-Dupart and Roland Castro, Banlieues 89 referenced Lefebvre but replaced his clarion call the right to the city with a an architectural “right to urbanity¨ based on a simplistic critique of postwar modernism and an environmentally determinist strategy to introduce “the city” into housing estates. The goal: ward off “barbarism” (perceived social pathologies on these sites) and save “urban civilization” (the secular Republic) (Castro, 1994). Lefebvre’s “Dissolving city” does not confront Banlieues 89 directly. His explicit references are central city embourgeoisement and the new town projects of the 1960s and 1970s. He is also silent about his own relationship to Socialist urbanism and refrains from specifying the socio-political context of French urban interventions in the 1980s, which were, in part, directed against the movements that originated in stigmatized housing estates. His remarks do clash with the thrust of French urbanism at the time, however. He is clear that re-designing the forms of the urban explosion by means of “architectural innovation” and “cultural initiatives” will re-inscribe, not change the content of social relations (of dependence, domination, exploitation, exclusion…). “Dissolving city” thus reaffirms Lefebvre’s commitment to democratic planning rooted in self-management.

2006

Le Monde Diplomatique first republished ¨Dissolving city¨ in a special issue devoted to the “Banlieues” after the 2005 riots in France. Why? The editors do not say. Certainly, we can link the text’s allusions to migration and citizenship to the slightly more expansive comments in Du contrat de citoyenneté to reflect on Lefebvre’s relevance for the study of urban citizenship, as Gilbert and Dikeç pointed out some time ago (2008). But these sparse references to migration pale in comparison to other contributions in the 2006 special issue. And they disappoint in light of the intellectual agenda Lefebvre himself set between the late 1960s and the late 1970s. At the time, he suggested promisingly that struggles in ¨near peripheries¨ (the factories, student dormitories and immigrant shantytowns of suburban France) be articulated with struggles in ¨far peripheries¨ (such as the African-American struggles in the U.S.A. and the urban guerillas of Latin America) (Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2013). Shaped by the mass marches for migrant justice and the riots against segregation, racism and police brutality, the 1980s presented ample opportunities for Lefebvre to expand upon these earlier, tentative attempts to understand the neo-colonial aspects of urbanization. Lefebvre did not seize these opportunities. As much as his work remains key to analyse urban uprisings, “Dissolving city” is also symptomatic of what Olivier Masclet has called, also in the 2006 special issue, a ‘rendez-vous manqué’: the failure of the French left to meet on their own terms the segregated suburban inhabitants. The 2014 municipal elections in France attest to the tragic consequences of this failure: right-populist hegemony and the implosion of the ‘red’ suburbs (Ramadan, 2014).

2014

The English translation of “Dissolving city” in this volume dovetails with the French re-publication of 2011. Both aim at mobilizing Lefebvre’s article to understand the world-wide character of urbanization. For this purpose, Lefebvre warns us of the ravages of untrammeled urbanization by raising at least three crucial questions. What are the environmental implications of the global urban explosion, which threatens to leave us with a homogenized and fragmented world of concrete interspersed with islands of agricultural production? How do we think about deterritorialization and reterritorialization in the urbanization process, both analytically (which respect to the territorial centralities of power and the North-South divides of global capitalism) and strategically (to facilitate the exercise of genuine democratic citizenship with a measure of spatial fixity in a sea of flux)? And, how do we do all this without the pitfalls of Euro-centrism, neo-Weberian urbanism included? Neither Lefebvre nor current debates on global urbanism provide ready-made answers to these old but extremely vital questions (Kipfer, 2014). We could do worse, however, to search for answers through a perspective towards which Lefebvre merely gestured: a form of internationalism tied to both near and far peripheries of struggle.  

References

Castro R (1994) Civilisation Urbaine ou Barbarie. Paris: Plon.

Lefebvre H (2006) Métamorphose planétaire. Manière de Voir – Le Monde Diplomatique 89: 54-56.

Gilbert L and M Dikeç (2008) Right to the City, Politics of Citizenship. In: K Goonewardena, S Kipfer, R Milgrom and C Schmid (eds) Space, Difference and Everyday Life. London: Routledge, pp. 250-263.

Guillot P (2009) A propos de Banlieues 89: entretien avec l’architecte Roland Castro. Cahiers d’histoire109: 95-97.

Kipfer S (2014) Worldwide urbanization and neocolonial fractures: insights from the literary world. In: N Brenner (ed) Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, pp. 342-359.

Kipfer S and K Goonewardena (2013) Urban Marxism and the post-colonial question: Henri Lefebvre and ‘colonization.’ Historical Materialism 21.2: 76-117.

Masclet O (2006) La gauche et les cités, un rendez-vous manqué. Manière de voir – Le Monde Diplomatique 89: 30-33.

Ramadan A (2014) ‘Bobigny 2014 : quand les Arabes et les Noirs font campagne pour la droite blanche.’