Space, Form, and Urbanity

88 Space, Form, and Urbanity Greig Charnock (Social) space is a (social) product. (Lefebvre, 1991: 26) By its actions, this society no longer accepts space as a container, but produces it; we do not live, act and work ‘in’ space so much as by living, acting, and working we produce space. (Smith, 2008: 116) In its most general sense, Critical Theory aims to critique existing society as well as ‘traditional’ theories of that society: more precisely, it aims to ‘penetrate the world of things to show the underlying relations between persons’ (Aronowitz, 2015: 106) – to reveal the ‘human bottom of nonhuman things’ (Horkheimer, 2002: 142). Critical Theory thus attaches to ‘critique’ a very specific meaning (Bonefeld, 2001). Given that in a capitalistically constituted society, social reproduction is regulated by the production and exchange of ‘things’ by (formally) ‘free’ and ‘equal’ commodity producers, a good deal of Critical Theory’s critique has justifiably focused upon the social constitution of economic forms, and upon demystifying BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp88.indd 1450 common consciousness of economic relations on a human basis (Backhaus 2005; Bellofiore and Redolfi Riva, 2015; Reichelt, 2005). Following Marx and Adorno, Bonefeld (2014: 3) argues for instance that ‘the critique of political economy amounts to a critique of ontological conceptions of economic categories, including the category of labour as a transhistorically conceived category that defines the human metabolism with nature in abstraction from society’. A critical theory of capitalist society, in other words, should aim to demystify not only the market as a form of social reproduction based upon fundamental relations of un-freedom and in-equality, but also to expose traditional conceptions of that society as being rooted in unfounded ontological assumptions about humans’ relation with nature that are appropriate to the functioning of that society, but which can be shown to be in the service of the ongoing reproduction of definite social relations, and a debasing and destructive social-ecological condition. 5/11/18 4:37 PM SPACE, FORM, AND URBANITY The remit of critique in this sense extends to cover social forms and ideologies that are often not considered to be of central, categorical importance to the critique of political economy, per se (see Adorno, 2001). As this chapter shows, there is already a well established body of critical social theory that has sought to critique spatial or geographical forms of social organisation – especially the agglomeration and networking of people and productive and consumptive economic activities in cities or urban centres – and those traditional urban theories that reduce such spatial or geographical forms to mere containers or conduits seemingly devoid of a ‘human bottom’.1 For Neil Brenner, a leading contemporary urban theorist, any properly critical urban theory has to ‘differ fundamentally from what might be termed “mainstream” urban theory – for example, the approaches inherited from the Chicago School of urban sociology, or those deployed within technocratic or neoliberal forms of policy science’ (2009: 198). Calling for ‘a much more systematic integration of urban questions into the analytical framework of critical social theory as a whole’ (2009: 205), Brenner envisions a critical-theoretical project inspired by the Frankfurt School, among others, but appropriate to ‘conditions of increasingly generalised, worldwide urbanisation’ in the early twenty-first century: Rather than affirming the current condition of cities as the expression of transhistorical laws of social organisation, bureaucratic rationality or economic efficiency, critical urban theory emphasizes the politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested and therefore malleable character of urban space – that is, its continual (re)construction as a site, medium, and outcome of historically specific relations of social power … In short, critical urban theory involves the critique of ideology (including social-scientific ideologies) and the critique of power, inequality, injustice and exploitation, at once within and among cities. (2009: 198) The purpose of this chapter is to establish the basis for a critical theory of space; that is, for an appreciation of how, to paraphrase Neil BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp88.indd 1451 1451 Smith, modern society does not exist in space but actively produces space ‘in its own image’. It expands on the premise of there being a ‘human bottom’ to space and geography that has emerged out of an alienating and contradictory process of social-ecological metabolism, and in so doing expounds the basis for the critique of traditional Western epistemological conceptions and theories of urbanity. As has been recently underlined, [if] it is no longer remarkable to speak of space, nature, and landscapes as socially produced, it is largely a reflection of the extent to which contemporary spatial and geographical thought has been transformed … in particular with the ideas – or at least the language – of the French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. (Kirsch, 2012: 1042) In the absence of any definitive Frankfurt School Critical Theory of space and urbanity, the bulk of this chapter therefore consists of an exposition and critical evaluation of Lefebvre’s critical theory of the production of space. Before visiting Lefebvre, however, the chapter first follows the late Marxist geographer Neil Smith in looking for a properly critical-theoretical basis for deciphering spatial forms on a human basis in society’s metabolic relation with nature, and in dialogue with Alfred Schmidt’s pioneering work on a critical theory of the relationship between human labour and nature. This is a necessary detour since the notion of the production of nature, which Smith advances as a result of his engagement with Schmidt’s critical theory, is largely homologous to that of the production of space as originally theorised by Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s contribution is explained with a focus, first, on his critique of philosophico-epistemologies that fetishise space, and therefore make possible the representation of space and the instrumentalisation of spatial modelling that, in Lefebvre’s view, mediates the survival of capitalism and the reproduction of capitalist social relations in and through the urban form. The chapter then explains Lefebvre’s method of spatial 5/11/18 4:37 PM 1452 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITICAL THEORY analysis, paying close attention to the contradictory nature of the process of the production of space and therefore to the emancipatory political possibilities inherent to it. The fourth section of the chapter returns to Smith to subject Lefebvre’s own ‘respatialised critical social theory’ to critique on the grounds that it proceeds from unfounded or indefensible assumptions regarding the relations between time, space, nature, and therefore politics. The chapter concludes by reviewing how Lefebvre has nonetheless influenced more recent attempts to develop a critical theory of space under conditions of so-called ‘planetary urbanisation’ characteristic of the early twenty-first century. FROM THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE TO THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE Within just a couple of years of one another, the British geographer David Harvey and his former student Neil Smith published two books that were to very rapidly transform the discipline of human geography as well as to make an enduringly significant impact on the broader social sciences. With The Limits to Capital (Harvey, 2007), first published in 1982, and 1984’s Uneven Development (Smith, 2008), both authors eyed similar goals insofar as they each sought to challenge basic notions of space characteristic of traditional Western thought and common parlance – that of ‘space as field, as a container, or as simple emptiness’ (Smith, 2008: 92) – and to advance instead a systematic, Marxian understanding of how capital creates space in its own image. Both hold that geographical space itself becomes an active moment in the production and reproduction of a physical landscape bearing the hallmarks of alienation, exploitation, contradiction, and therefore politics. In Uneven Development, Smith surveys a canon of traditional Western thought about nature and space before outlining an original, critical theory of uneven BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp88.indd 1452 development in the last two chapters. Harvey’s Limits, on the other hand, represents his ‘explanatory-diagnostic’ (Castree, 2006) – allegedly ‘neo-classical’ (Kipfer et al., 2008: 7) – Marxism, insofar as it consists of a more parsimonious attempt to provide an exposé of the crisis tendencies of the ‘capitalist space economy’ drawing almost exclusively on Marx’s writings on value, production, exchange, and the circulation of capital. On the assumption that Harvey’s contribution to the critical theory tradition is demonstrably limited, therefore, I concentrate on Smith in this first section, as providing an appropriate introduction to conceptualising the relation between society and space in terms of distinctively critical, non-traditional theory. For Smith, an essential preliminary step in the appreciation of how capital produces space at various interrelational scales – from the local to the world market – is to first examine the production of nature in capitalist society. This, he underlines, is a reflexively critical endeavour since it must penetrate the ‘delusive appearance of things’ (Marx, quoted in Smith, 2008: 49), and must question a core tenet of traditional Western thought in which ‘nature is generally seen as precisely that which cannot be produced; it is the antithesis of human productive activity’ (Smith, 2008: 32). With this in mind, Smith mounts his construction of a theory of the production of nature on the basis of a critical reading of the Frankfurt School and a close reading of Alfred Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx (1971), in particular. Ultimately, Smith is unconvinced by Schmidt’s dualistic positing of two coterminous natures (one the external object of labour, the other a universal unity of nature and society), and of a resulting thesis he finds at the same time both utopian and, in ‘characteristic’ Frankfurt School fashion, despairing of ‘the inexorable necessity of human domination over nature’ (2008: 47; see also Foster, 2000: 245). Yet, Smith also finds much to commend in Schmidt’s book. For instance, Schmidt alerts us to the 5/11/18 4:37 PM SPACE, FORM, AND URBANITY central importance of the concept of socioecological metabolism in Marx’s own work: the key point being that ‘the whole of nature is socially mediated and, inversely, society is mediated through nature as a component of the total reality’ (Schmidt, 1971: 79).2 Smith also picks up on Schmidt’s ‘useful distinction between “first nature” and a “second nature”’ (Smith, 2008: 33), which he subsequently re-fashions in Uneven Development so as to claim that ‘we must now consider there to be a social priority of nature; nature is nothing but social’ (2008: 47), and that ‘instead of the domination of nature, therefore, we must consider the more complex process of the production of nature’ (2008: 48). For Smith, the term ‘second nature’ captures the result of the historical generalisation of production for exchange characteristic of capitalism, and subsequently – as part-andparcel of the completion of the world market – the result of the ‘real subsumption of nature to capital’ (Smith, 2006). With the development of capitalism as a genuinely worldwide form of social production, ‘nature is progressively produced from within and as part of the so-called second nature’ (Smith, 2008: 77). While it is true that any physical commodity produced remains subject to the laws of gravity and physics that apply in first nature, that commodity is at the same time an exchange-value subject to the abstract laws of the market and therefore, for Smith, ‘travels in second nature’ (2008: 79). In search of profit, capital ‘attaches a price tag to everything it sees and from then on, it is this price tag which determines the fate of nature’ (2008: 78); ‘no part of the earth’s surface, the atmosphere, the oceans, the geological substratum, or the biological substratum are immune from transformation by capital’ (2008: 79). Indeed, for Smith, such was the degree to which capital had subsumed nature in this manner that the distinction between first and second nature was, by the late twentieth century, practically obsolete. While this universalising tendency of capital to produce second nature on a world BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp88.indd 1453 1453 scale carries with it important homogenising tendencies (and Smith here discusses wagelabour, globalised production, the privatised and gendered form of the reproduction of labour-power, and bourgeois consciousness), it is nevertheless one that is rooted in the specifically capitalistic production process and specifically capitalist relations of production. As such, the production of nature on a universal scale is rife with internal contradictions that are manifest in barriers to ‘capital’s own nature’ (to paraphrase Marx, 1993: 410), both in terms of the production of scarcity and ‘natural’ crises (such as climate change), and in terms of the production of a specific barrier to capital in the form of a global working class which confronts the unity of society and nature in alienated forms on a daily basis – the labour market, the labour process, the wage-form, and so on (Smith, 2008: 84–5). Having laid out a theory of the production of nature, Smith then turns his attention to the question of space, and the core problematic of Uneven Development: namely, how to explain the ongoing production of a highly variegated and dynamic geographical landscape in capital’s own image – that is, to decipher produced space as means and end of capital’s socio-ecological metabolism.3 Smith’s line of argument is unequivocal: ‘Unless space is conceptualised as a quite separate reality from nature, the production of space is a logical corollary of the production of nature’ (2008: 92). His own theory of the uneven development of capitalism therefore builds upon the argument that the produced space, or socio-ecological landscape, of capitalist ‘second nature’ emerges out of a determined, incessant ‘dialectic of equalisation and differentiation’ of the development of capital’s productive forces. As capital extends its reach over the whole globe, the landscape is wholly subsumed within and therefore produced by the production of nature and capital’s pricetagging of everything, yet consists of myriad particularised spaces/places – at a variety of spatial scales – whose relative past, present and future development is conditioned by 5/11/18 4:37 PM 1454 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITICAL THEORY geographically specific degrees of the concentration and centralisation of capital, the agglomeration and socialisation of labourpower, and differing degrees of resilience to the perpetual rhythms of accumulation that periodically threaten the devaluation of geographically concentrated fixed capital and localised working classes bearing specific productive and cost attributes. As Smith explains, the drive towards universality in capitalism brings only a limited equalisation of levels and conditions of development. Capital produces distinct spatial scales – absolute spaces – within which the drive towards equalisation is concentrated. But it can do this only by an acute differentiation and continued redifferentiation of relative space both within and between scales. The scales themselves are not fixed but develop (growing pangs and all) within the development of capitalism itself. They are not impervious; the urban and national scales are products of world capital and continue to be shaped by it. But the necessity of discrete scales and of their internal differentiation is fixed. (2008: 196) ‘Uneven development’, he concludes, ‘is the product and geographical premise of capitalist development’. HENRI LEFEBVRE’S CRITIQUE OF FORMALISM AND OF URBAN FORM4 Smith’s arrival at a general theory of uneven development as a necessary premise and product of capitalist development owes a significant debt to the work of Henri Lefebvre, who first coined the term ‘the production of space’ and theorised spatial forms in largely homologous terms to the production of nature thesis. For Stanley Aronowitz (2015: 133), the Anglo-American academy’s ignorance of Henri Lefebvre while he was alive amounts to ‘a classic case of mis-recognition’, insofar as most failed to appreciate his significance as the ecophilosopher of the 21st century, for he made the connection between the massive BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp88.indd 1454 despoiling of the global ecosystems, the new shape of social time and space and the struggle for the transformation of everyday life which, he claims, is the key to the project of changing life and repairing our collective relationship to nature.5 Yet, in recent years, Lefebvre’s work has become incredibly influential in its own right, and his ideas and concepts have become common currency among critical urban theorists.6 Prior to the posthumous discovery of the works of Henri Lefebvre by Anglophone scholars since the 1990s,7 and of his popularisation by Marxists such as Smith, on the one hand, and cultural theorists of ‘postmodernism’ on the other (see Kipfer et al., 2008: 6–10), his reception in France and elsewhere was primarily as someone who wrote about dialectical method and Marx in the Hegelian, humanist tradition common to much ‘Western Marxism’ (Shields, 1999: 109; also Jay, 1984).8 A hallmark of Lefebvre’s writings is the extent to which they are consistently methodologically minded, the dialectic being the thread that runs through his prolific and thematically varied output over several decades. This is certainly the case with his writings on space, originally published in France between 1968 and 1974. In these, and in addition to arguing persuasively that space should be thought of in dialectical terms of its social production – rather than in purely Cartesian and Euclidean terms9 – one of Lefebvre’s signal criticaltheoretical contributions is to highlight the anti-representational orientation of Hegelian Marxism. That is, his critique of formal logic and epistemology emphasised at once the dialectic’s ability to reconcile social analysis with flux, internal relations, determinate negation, mediation and Becoming, while also exposing the violence or ‘terrorism’ inherent to dominant, representational norms of analysis based upon purely formal epistemologies and methods of formal abstraction. For Lefebvre, representational knowledge about the world is an abstraction from concrete, lived experience [du vécu] and as such 5/11/18 4:37 PM SPACE, FORM, AND URBANITY ideological (for instance, Lefebvre, 1991: 230). In various works, Lefebvre reveals the limits to formal epistemology, but also at the level of serviceable representations that have a ‘real’ and violent effect in the hands of planning agencies and policymakers. In his work on space and urbanism, Lefebvre therefore railed against ‘models’ – abstract but concretely applicable representations of a projected, planned society in which some kinds of social and spatial practice are condoned and others dismissed as pathological or dysfunctional. Lefebvre is highly critical of the intellectual division of labour characteristic of the modern university system, as well as of the social role of ‘techniques, technicians, technocrats, epistemology, and the research of a purely technical or epistemological order’ (Lefebvre, 2009: 175) that serve to dissect the total movement of human social praxis, compartmentalise various spheres or activities of everyday life (paradigmatically, in the circuit … production … consumption … production …), and mould concrete space according to the logic of pure form, recurrence and coherence. To deny particularity and difference, for Lefebvre, is to be dogmatic, and to aim to reduce differences and close the circuit of everyday life is to be implicated in the generalised ‘terrorism’ of the bourgeoisie (Lefebvre, 2000). He writes ‘the physician of modern society sees himself as the physician of a sick social space … The cure? It is coherence … he will systematise the logic of the habitat underlying the disorder and apparent incoherence’ (Lefebvre, 1996: 82–3).10 There is violence intrinsic to such abstraction: ‘the “plan” … does not remain innocently on paper. On the ground, the bulldozer realizes “plans”’ (Lefebvre, 1996: 191). In terms of critique, then, Lefebvre is certain that ‘to clear a path, we have to destroy the models’ (Lefebvre, 2003: 163). Lefebvre’s antidote to traditional epistemologies of urbanity, formal logic, speculative philosophies, Althusserian structuralism, Sartre’s existentialism, and Soviet Diamat BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp88.indd 1455 1455 was what he repeatedly calls ‘metaphilosophy’ (see Lefebvre, 2016). At root, metaphilosophy is concerned with praxis: ‘Production produces man. So-called “world history” or the “history of the world” is nothing but the history of man producing himself, of man producing both the human world and the other man, the (alienated) man of otherness, and his self (his self-consciousness)’ [sic] (Lefebvre, 2008: 237). The purpose of critique, for Lefebvre, is therefore to illuminate and decipher human alienation on the basis of praxis (2008: 137); it is to ask: ‘How can men [sic] live as they are living, and how can they accept it?’ (2008: 30). Lefebvre’s own exploration of this question led him to develop his critique of everyday life over the course of four decades, and to his work on the production of space. The continuities of thought from Hegel and Marx to Lefebvre are evident in the latter’s long-term preoccupation with everyday life [la vie quotidienne], the practical problem of alienation that arises out of human social practice in the historical form of bourgeois society, and an investigation into the potential for realising an as yet only possible dis-alienated society through praxis. The consideration of the broadest possible notion of production (to include signs, writing, culture, space, etc.) as well as the problem of re-production of the mode of production and its associated forms of alienation, is central to understanding Lefebvre’s long-term project as best represented by the three volumes of his Critique of Everyday Life, published between 1947 and 1981. As Lefebvre writes, According to Marx’s early works … production is not merely the making of products … it also signifies the self-production of the ‘human being’ in the process of historical self-development, which involves the production of social relations. Finally, in its fullest sense, the term embraces re-production … [this] being the outcome of a complex impulse rather than of inertia or passivity; this impulse … this praxis and poiesis does not take place in the higher spheres of a society (state, scholarship, ‘culture’) but in everyday life. (Lefebvre, 2000: 30–1) 5/11/18 4:37 PM 1456 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITICAL THEORY This project yielded the substance of Lefebvre’s lasting contribution to critical social theory – a theory of social (re-)production in which ‘everyday life has become an object of consideration and is the province of organisation; the space–time of voluntary programmed self-regulation, because when properly organised it provides a closed circuit (production–consumption–production), where demands are foreseen because they are induced and desires are run to earth’ (Lefebvre, 2000: 72). In recognising this, the dialectic of everyday life builds upon the Marxian critique of alienation, yet, in Lefebvre’s view, broadens its parameters beyond the critique of political economy which hinges too narrowly on the question of linear time. ‘Workers do not only have a life in the workplace’, explains Lefebvre (1988: 78), ‘they have a social life, family life, political life; they have experiences outside the domain of labour’, and this would suggest, for Lefebvre, a closer examination of how urban form guarantees the everyday domination of the linear time of labour and accumulation over the rhythmic time of biology, ecology, and art (Aronowitz, 2015). The idea that the sphere of everyday life can explain the survival of capitalism into the late twentieth century – as well as illuminate the role of formal logic, modelling, and social planning as ideology, as we explain later – leads Lefebvre (1976: 21) to his now well-known thesis: that ‘capitalism has found itself able to attenuate (if not resolve) its internal contradictions for a century … by occupying space, by producing a space’. Lefebvre reveals that capitalism produces its own (urban) space and, in so doing, creates the permissive conditions for the reproduction of the totality of bourgeois society (an argument that implicated the former communist bloc as much as the West). Time, understood in the abstract as concerning work, the production of commodities and of surplus value, has been ‘reduced to constraints of space’ – circumscribed and suppressed within the urban form. The process BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp88.indd 1456 of mediation that re-produces the social relations of production in a contradictory form, according to Lefebvre, is therefore that of urbanisation. In The Urban Revolution (2003), Lefebvre explains how the growth of industry and of the forces of production on an increasingly global scale has come to be subsumed by the more encompassing process of urbanisation. In and through the urban-form, capitalism is able to reproduce itself by relativising all particularities – a dialectical necessity Marx identified in terms of the division of labour, the factory system, and so on, but into which Lefebvre introduces spatial determinations and in so doing offers an explanation of the survival of the capitalist mode of production to date. The urban form totalises all particular labour and space in an internal and ‘centralising’ relationship: ‘piles of objects and products in warehouses, mounds of fruit in the marketplace, crowds, pedestrians, goods of various kinds, juxtaposed, superimposed, accumulated – this is what makes the urban urban’ (Lefebvre, 2003: 116). There is, according to Lefebvre, ‘no urban reality without a centre, without a gathering together of all that can be born into space and that can be produced in it, without an encounter, actual or possible, of all “objects” and “subjects”’ (Lefebvre, 1996: 195). Yet despite this intrinsic centralisation, and despite the urban being a creation of socio-ecological metabolism, the urban-form is determined as a ‘product’ (corresponding to exchangeability and price signals) rather than an ‘ouvre’ – a place of dwelling and of playful, poetic, and artistic sociality and imagination. Perversely, urbanised ‘citizens’ are concentrated together in bodily proximity like never before, yet they have never been more segregated, alienated, and atomised in their everyday lives. For Lefebvre, nowhere was this constraining and alienated mode of everyday life within the urban habitat more evident than in the state-planned new towns and housing projects erected in many European cities in the post-war period. Here, ‘humiliation and the lack of freedom resulting from the presence (and absence) of the centres 5/11/18 4:37 PM SPACE, FORM, AND URBANITY of decision-making and social life are keenly felt’ (Lefebvre, 1969: 99). Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life places emphasis upon the extent to which, by the 1970s, time had become dominated by space, the growth of the forces of production by the development of the social relations of production,11 and in the urban-form. Moreover, this reproduction occurs by means of the totalising drive by capital to subsume the entire world to abstract space (Lefebvre, 1991; Stanek, 2008), which is ‘abstract inasmuch as it has no existence save by virtue of the exchangeability of all its component parts, and concrete inasmuch as it is socially real and as such localised’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 341–2). Lefebvre termed this process of global subsumption [mondialisation], that of the self-realisation of a spatial totality – of the world ‘becoming worldwide’, of ‘planetary urbanisation’ (Lefebvre, 2009). THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE As a dialectical theorist, Lefebvre is adamant that the urbanisation process also provides clues as to the possibility of a dis-alienated totality that already exists, albeit in the mode of being denied. Analytically, this poses the question of form and content. The key here is to recognise that ‘urban space–time, as soon as we stop defining it in terms of industrial rationality – its project of homogenisation – appears as differential’ (Lefebvre, 2003: 37). That is, ‘abstract space is not homogenous; it simply has homogeneity as its goal, its orientation, its “lens”’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 287). For Lefebvre the Marxist, the identification of the potentially revolutionary content of the analysis of the production of space and critique of everyday life follows from the insight that the production of space can only proceed via a relational process of homogenisation-differentiation (Lefebvre, 1991: 308, 342; Stanek, 2008: 71–2). Urbanisation BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp88.indd 1457 1457 brings human subjects together in space in such a way that is necessary for the reproduction of the social relations of production, but which also exacerbates the contradictions of this abstract space – for example, it creates centres in which ‘once groups and classes succeed in meeting face to face, once they come to grips, a free dialogue explodes under the dialectical impetus’ (Lefebvre, 2000: 185). Homogenising abstract space is therefore constituted by social relations that simultaneously constitute a ‘differential space’, which ‘is different because it celebrates particularity – both bodily and experiential’ (Merrifield, 2000: 176). So, while Lefebvre explains the necessity of urbanisation from the point of view of capital, he also identifies ‘the existence of irreducibles, contradictions and objections that intervene and hinder the closing of the circuit [of everyday life], that split the structure’ (Lefebvre, 2000: 75). For Lefebvre, there is some residuum of human subjectivity and style that capital has been unable to subsume, invert or control,12 and it is this insight which holds the key to understanding the limits to the production of abstract space in an urban-form. Everyday life is, according to Lefebvre, the sphere in which such irreducibles are to be found. It is ‘the sociological point of feedback’ (Lefebvre, 2000: 32); ‘the ill-defined, cutting edge where the accumulative and the nonaccumulative intersect’ (Lefebvre, 2008: 335); and ‘the point of delicate balance and that where imbalance threatens’ (Lefebvre, 2000: 32). And, critically, it is the sphere that holds the key to revolutionary action: ‘a revolution takes place when and only when, in such a society, people can no longer lead their everyday lives’.13 ‘Urbanisation’ is for Lefebvre a determined, dialectical, systematic theoretical category and not simply an empirical, immediate product. In general terms, it is a process in which the determinations ‘centrality’ (homogeneity) and ‘polycentrality’ (fragmentation, difference) are mediated, (un-) fixed within the urban-form (Lefebvre, 2003: 5/11/18 4:37 PM 1458 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITICAL THEORY 119; Rui Martins, 1982: 171). The means of critically analysing urban form as a mediating space which attains a ‘certain cohesiveness, if not a logical coherence’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 378) is laid out by Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1991). Lefebvre outlines a unitary ‘spatial triad’ consisting of three relational moments, or conceptions of space, which allow the analyst to grasp both the generative, diachronic constitution of urban space as well as to behold, synchronically, the material appearance of socio-physical space at a given time. As one exponent of such a Lefebvrean urbanist methodology summarises, this theory ‘has at its core a three-level process of production: first, material production; second, the production of knowledge; and third, the production of meaning’ (Schmid, 2006: 169) – corresponding to the three-fold determination of space out of practical, mental, and symbolic dimensions. Lefebvre termed these dimensions; first, the ‘perceived space’ [espace perçu] of ‘spatial practice’ based in the concrete and networked social and physical infrastructures of production, exchange and social reproduction that materialise under urbanisation. Second, the ‘conceived space’ [espace conçu] of ‘representations of space’, comprised of ‘scientific’ and ‘official’ knowledge that reduces space in functionalist terms – diagnosing its utility and pathology and prescribing models to remould space. Third, the ‘spaces of representation’, or ‘lived space’ [espace veçu], in which inhabitants and users of the city inscribe their own symbolic content and meaning to space in the course of their everyday lives – producing an elusive space of art, play, imagery, incoherence, inconsistency, and everything that is surplus or residual once the dissection of space by traditional epistemological means has been exhausted (Schmid, 2006: 168–9; see also Merrifield, 1993: 522–5). Put another way, Urban space is, first of all, material, perceivable space. As such, it is a space of material interaction and of physical meeting that is opened up by networks and information flows … BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp88.indd 1458 Second, … [w]hat we understand of the city is dependent on the social definition of the urban and thus on the image of the city, on the blueprint of the map, but also on the plan that tries to define and pin down the urban.… Depending on one’s perspective – scientific, planning, media, or political – the city is understood to mean different units. All these various definitions are specific representations of space. They describe discursive demarcations of the content of the urban and entail corresponding strategies of inclusion and exclusion. Definitions of the city become a field in which a variety of strategies and interests are employed. Third, the city is always a lived space as well, a place of residents who use it and appropriate it for their practices. The urban identifies the place of difference: the specific quality of urban space results from the simultaneous presence of quite distinct worlds and concepts of value, of ethnic, cultural, and social groups, of activities, functions, and knowledge. (Schmid, 2006: 169–70) Lefebvre’s analysis of urbanisation, and of the production of abstract yet differential space inherent to this process, points towards a virtual, or possible, urban society – one in which cyclical time is no longer subordinated to space, and which is ‘based upon the elimination of antagonisms that find their expression in segregation; it must involve differences and be defined by these differences’ (Lefebvre, 2000: 190).14 Lefebvre concluded the means and end of revolutionary praxis in an urbanised world to be ‘generalised selfmanagement’ [autogestion] and the ‘withering away of the state’ (Lefebvre, 2009: 149): in short, ‘the end of politics’ (Lefebvre, 1970: 8). Lefebvre (2009: 246) considers the logicians and modellers of space to be ‘agents of the state’ precisely because they persist despite the fact that the production of space is a contradictory process in which difference cannot be wholly reduced. Chief responsibility for suppressing the realisation of a disalienated urban society through the concretisation of abstract space lies in the Modern State (‘the quintessential limiter’ for Lefebvre, 2003: 163). The state has, for Lefebvre, assumed ever-increasing responsibility for circumscribing and cohering the 5/11/18 4:37 PM SPACE, FORM, AND URBANITY process of urbanisation and sustaining the alienation inherent to programmed everyday life (Lefebvre, 2008: 124–5). For Lefebvre (2009: 174), then, ‘there is a politics of space because space is political’. Lefebvre’s general critique of the process of urbanisation carries along with it a politically focused critique of reductive forms of knowledge, instrumental representations of space – and of their social and political function on an increasingly global (or worldwide) scale. By identifying autogestion as ‘orienting’ us to a path towards dis-alienation by means of the end of politics (Lefebvre, 1978: 295), Lefebvre envisions a possible future beyond capitalism (Lefebvre, 1968: 183) – a posture which Aronowitz (2015: 154) claims distinguishes Lefebvre from the Frankfurt School’s pessimistic stance arising out of its refusal of the ideology of progress. What distinguishes Lefebvre’s critical philosophy from Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School is that it understands that categories such as the ‘totally administered society’ and the ‘eclipse of reason’ are accurate as tendencies, but when taken as a new totality, are one-sided. Lefebvre’s most urgent goal is to recapture genuine experience and free the concrete from its subsumption under the abstract, represented most powerfully by technology and its companion, administration. (2015: 154) Aronowitz concludes that: Lefebvre’s philosophy refuses the thesis that the defeats of the past century are permanent and justify the refusal of the intellectual to engage in social and political practice; in this respect, Lefebvre stands with Sartre who insisted that the intellectual must commit oneself to an historical standpoint, even as one recognises the pitfalls. (2015: 154) QUESTIONING LEFEBVRE’S CRITICAL THEORY OF SPACE Kanishka Goonewardena (2008: 131) incisively surmises that Lefebvre’s ‘basic contribution to Marxism’, was to make ‘the simple point that there can be no revolution without BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp88.indd 1459 1459 an urban revolution, no urban revolution without a revolution, and neither without a revolution of everyday life’. The pre-eminent critical geographer Edward W. Soja (1980: 215) agreed: ‘[Lefebvre] argues that no social revolution can succeed without being at the same time a conscious, spatial revolution’. Yet Lefebvre’s critique of space, and of his faith in the emancipatory potentialities inherent to the production of spatialities that are saturated with contradiction and therefore political, has been subjected to scrutiny and rejected by some on fundamental theoretical grounds.15 As noted earlier, Neil Smith was very much influenced by Lefebvre’s work. He confessed that he remained ‘convinced by the brilliance of his proposal of “the production of space”’ (Smith, 1998: 56), and later maintains in his Foreword to The Urban Revolution that ‘Lefebvre was seeing things at the end of the 1960s that many of us, often with his help, came to see clearly only in more recent years and now are still recovering’ (Smith, 2003: viii). Yet Smith also expressed deep-seated reservations about Lefebvre’s version of a ‘respatialised social theory’ (Smith, 1998: 51). In short, Smith accuses Lefebvre of operating with precisely the kind of bifurcation between space and nature that his own work warns against. In Smith’s reading, Lefebvre ‘leaves nature largely unreconstructed’ (1998: 59), much as one of his influences Martin Heidegger did, and such that ‘nature is reduced to a substratum’ (1998: 60). Space takes priority over an external nature, and in Lefebvre’s somewhat bucolic and romanticist vision is lost to time as the production of abstract space proceeds with greater intensity and extensity. For Smith, on the other hand – and as noted earlier, ‘the production of space is integral to the production of nature and fashioned within it. It is the corollary of the production of nature rather than the other way round’ (1998: 61). Ironically, then, Lefebvre’s treatment of nature bears all the hallmarks of the same fetishisms that pervade the traditional 5/11/18 4:37 PM 1460 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITICAL THEORY social and environmental sciences insofar as he is apparently unable to comprehend the production of second nature (and beyond, to the extent that ‘the ongoing history of physical intervention … has already socialised – in beautiful or grotesque form – what there is to be apprehended’, 1998: 62). Smith then questions the very necessity for respatialised social theory in the first place: ‘Why, to put it most simply, is politics now a question of space?’ (Smith, 1998: 52). In Smith’s reading, Lefebvre mounts a formidable ‘anti-philosophical’ critique of traditional philosophico-epistemological thought and its fetishisation of space, but only to then himself assert dogmatically that space ought to be the ontological centre of properly critical theory of societal development. ‘Lefebvre leans to Hegel’s “end of history” and takes his stand there, on “space” as the product and residue of “historical time”’ (1998: 55). ‘History’ as Marx, Bergson, Husserl, or Lukács knew it therefore disappears in Lefebvre’s theory, to be replaced by a strikingly teleological ‘spatial history’ (see Lefebvre, 1991) in which ‘the history of society is indeed the story of class struggle, … but of class struggle for space’ (Smith, 1998: 57). Smith’s concerns here chime with those of Derek Kerr, writing in the now defunct journal Common Sense just a few years earlier. He surmises of Lefebvre’s works (1976 and 1991) that: Class struggle and history are reduced to abstract time and exist in the container of abstract space, while this space has contradictions of its own which can then externally ‘envelop historical contradictions’. But by separating out contradictions of space from those in space and by reducing class struggle and history to the latter, it is not clear what constitutes the contradictions of space (Kerr, 1994: 32). Against Lefebvre, he argues: ‘If social relations are inherently spatial and temporal then there can be no separation in/of dualism’ (1994: 32); furthermore, to ‘displace time by space merely obscures the dynamic and contradictory nature of the capital relation and the ways in which this expresses itself in a BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp88.indd 1460 spatially uneven way through … “the production of space in its own image”’ (1994: 34). For Kerr, then: Marx was not limiting himself to time, but to uncovering the contradictory constitution of the capital relation (see Bonefeld, 1993) as it attempts to transform and express itself through spatial and temporal modalities of existence. It is the capital relation that continually attempts to subordinate the whole (space) of society to the abstract logic of linear time, the ticking of the factory clock. This abstract time is not the concrete history of capitalism, but rather is the dominant and contradictory tendency through which that history expresses itself, one which continually attempts to reduce the internally related and qualitative nature of both space and time to the quantitative metric of value. As such the form, nature and very existence of ‘capitalist space’ expresses and adheres in and through the contradictory presence of labour in capital. This is the dialectic, not one of time nor of space but … a negative dialectic, a dialectic of negation with no certain synthesis … The history of capitalism is, therefore, none other than the struggle over and through space as capital attempts to transform the entire spatial existence of society into a machine for the production and quantitative expansion of surplus value in terms of the metric of socially necessary labour time. (1994: 32) Finally, Smith begs of Lefebvre’s work the more practical political question of providing some insight into what an alternative, spatialised politics would look like. In addition to proposing that any viable emancipatory project would have to be based upon a more convincing dialectic of nature than that with which Lefebvre operates, Smith also highlights the inadequacy of Lefebvre’s ‘reproductionism’ – that is, the insistence that whatever crisis might confront the capitalist system and bring an urban politics of difference to the fore would be a crisis of the reproduction of the social relations of production in and through space, rather than a crisis of capital’s necessity to self-valorise on the basis of the exploitation of living labour and its metabolic relation with nature. In the last instance, even if one accepts a reproductionist posture such as Lefebvre’s, it is unclear exactly how space per se – rather than the contradictory socio-ecological nature of 5/11/18 4:37 PM SPACE, FORM, AND URBANITY capital, however mediated – will determine substantive political change. As Smith puts it, ‘where Lefebvre closes in on the political conclusions of his analysis, … space seems to fall entirely out of the picture … it is nowhere to be seen. The dualism of space and society lingers on’ (Smith, 2008: 125). LEFEBVRE’S LEGACY: FROM THE RIGHT TO THE CITY TO PLANETARY URBANISATION Notwithstanding the criticisms levelled at his work on space, Lefebvre retains significant influence in debates surrounding urban development, governance, and politics – and his theories and concepts have had a demonstrably enduring impact on critical social and urban theory.16 For instance, in the wake of urban social mobilisations in 2010 – ranging from the Arab Spring, to the Occupy! movement – commentators and activists sought to make sense of what was happening with recourse to familiar Lefebvrean concepts. David Harvey paid homage to ‘Lefebvre’s vision’ (2012: ix), concluding that: ‘Perhaps, after all, Lefebvre was right, more than forty years ago, to insist that the revolution in our times has to be urban – or nothing’ (2012: 25). Harvey, like many others,17 attaches great political importance to the notion of the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre, 1996) – which Harvey reinterprets as ‘to claim some kind of shaping power over the processes of urbanisation, over the ways in which our cities are made and remade, and to do so in a fundamental and radical way’. Andy Merrifield similarly builds his own theory of urban theory and protest around this Lefebvrean concept, but also argues that Lefebvre forewarned us of the degree to which the substantive realisation of the right to the city – ‘a new form of centrality and citizenship’ (2013: 34, italics in original) – would become a pressing need for the majority of humanity under the socio-ecological condition of BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp88.indd 1461 1461 ‘planetary urbanisation’. ‘Planetary urbanisation is creating a whole new spatial world (dis)order’, he writes (2013: 3). ‘The more the city grows, develops, extends itself, and spreads its tentacles everywhere, [Lefebvre] says, the more social relations get degraded and the more sociability is torn apart at the seams’ (2013: 15). It would appear, then, that Lefebvre has bequeathed a politically effective lexicon of urbanity to the contemporary scholar-activist. But while Merrifield himself is open to a more experimental, perhaps less systematic, approach to urban theory and politics (see also Merrifield, 2011), others have picked up on Lefebvre’s methodological relevance for research in a world that is, as many suggest, more urbanised than ever before. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid (2014, 2015), for example, have in recent years sought to subvert accepted ‘mainstream’ definitions and epistemologies of the so-called ‘urban age’ (e.g. UN-Habitat, 2007) in accordance with Lefebvre’s metaphilosophy (Brenner, 2013a: 95; see also Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015). They posit, as but one of seven theses on an epistemology of ‘the urban’, that: No longer conceived as a form, type or bounded unit, the urban must now be retheorised as a process that, even while continually reinscribing patterns of agglomeration across the earth’s terrestrial landscape, simultaneously transgresses, explodes and reworks inherited geographies (of social interaction, settlement, land use, circulation and sociometabolic organisation), both within and beyond large-scale metropolitan centres. (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 166) The critical intent of such a critique of existing, ‘methodologically cityist’ (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015), epistemologies of ‘the urban’ is to ‘illuminate the manifold ways in which the users of urbanizing spaces produce and transform their own urban worlds through everyday practices, discourses, and struggles, leading to the formation not only of new urban spatial configurations, but of new visions of the potentials being produced and claimed through their activities’ (Brenner and 5/11/18 4:37 PM 1462 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITICAL THEORY Schmid, 2015: 178). For Brenner (2013a: 89), and others, Lefebvre’s critical theory remains hugely influential as a ‘rallying cry’ for many wishing to play an active role in reshaping ‘the future of capitalism, politics, and the planetary ecosystem’, since it posits that ‘the urban is thus no longer a site or arena of contentious politics, but has become one of its primary stakes. Reorganising urban conditions is increasingly seen as a means to transform the broader political-economic structures and spatial formations of early twenty-first century world capitalism as a whole’. Foundational work by Brenner and others18 is already yielding fresh research producing new cartographies and politico-economic accounts of planetary urbanisation – and which seek to subvert the methodological cityism inherent to traditional urban theory (see e.g. Arboleda, 2015; Brenner, 2013b; Kanai, 2014; Wilson and Bayón, 2015). CONCLUSION In the absence of a definitive Frankfurt School theory of space, form and urbanity, this chapter has focused on the theory of the production of space developed by the French contemporary of Adorno and Horkheimer, Henri Lefebvre. Initially by means of a detour to the work of the geographer Neil Smith – who insisted that the production of space is a corollary of the production of nature – the chapter expounded the dialectical relation between humans, nature and space, as developed by Smith in dialogue with Alfred Schmidt’s work on human labour and nature, before moving on to Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space – itself spun out of a longer-term preoccupation with everyday life in mid-twentieth-century capitalism – was shown to parallel the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School insofar as it subjected traditional theories of space to critique in accordance with Marx’s insistence that it is the definite social relations between humans that BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp88.indd 1462 manifest themselves in social forms, and not nature or history abstractly conceived. The chapter then outlined Lefebvre’s contribution to the analysis of space as a social product, his theory of urbanisation, and his writings on the politics of space, before reviewing significant criticisms of that contribution – not least by Smith, who identified weaknesses that can be traced back to Lefebvre’s inadequate dialectic of nature and space. Regardless of such issues, the chapter concluded by acknowledging Lefebvre’s lasting legacy; first, in terms of the longevity of his key terms and concepts, such as the production of space and the right to the city, but also in his role as a key interlocutor in an emergent literature on planetary urbanisation. By questioning the methodological cityism of traditional urban theory and policy, such work illuminates the degree to which even the ostensibly ‘non-urban’ world is today subsumed to the destructive process of capital accumulation, rendering the traditional urban– rural distinction problematic in epistemological but also political terms (Arboleda, 2016; Brenner, 2016). As such, it echoes Lefebvre’s concern to develop a critique of space and of urbanity that is not reducible to a concern with ‘the city’ as a mere container, or form of human settlement that poses certain governance problems (such as overcrowding or sanitation and infrastructure) to which technocratic, market-based fixes might be found. Rather, this emergent literature seeks to build upon the theorising of Lefebvre and others so as to highlight the dangers of traditional urban theory’s formal methods of abstraction so as to open up more substantive and subversive debate about urbanity, citizenship and social nature beyond the city and on a biospheric, planetary scale. Notes 1 2 See e.g. the important appeal to consider the violence of real geographical abstractions by Loftus (2015). For useful discussion of the concept of ‘metabolism’ [Stoffwechsel] in Marx’s writings, see Foster (2000: chapter 5); and for further discussion of 5/11/18 4:37 PM SPACE, FORM, AND URBANITY 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 the concept in the work of Adorno, Schmidt, and Foster, see Cook (2014). Smith’s more empirical interest in the 1980s was in advancing a Marxian explanation for how and why localised instances of ‘gentriication’ were becoming common to many ‘postindustrial’ inner-cities in the United States and Western Europe. This and the subsequent sections draw upon my earlier work on Lefebvre (Charnock, 2010, 2014; Charnock and Ribera-Fumaz, 2011). Lefebvre’s life story makes for fascinating reading. It is often remarked that he ‘lived the adventure of the twentieth century’ (Hess, 1988; Kipfer et al., 2008: 2). For accounts of Lefebvre’s life and work in English, see Elden (2004), Merriield (2006), and Shields (1999); and for the deinitive account of his interest in space and urbanity in particular, see Stanek (2011). See e.g. Peter Marcuse (2009), son of Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse. This surge in interest in Henri Lefebvre in Anglophone social science followed, and encouraged, the irst publication of several of his major works in English: notably, The Production of Space (1991), The Right to the City (published in Writings on Cities (1996)), Everyday Life in the Modern World (2000), The Urban Revolution (2003), three volumes of Critique of Everyday Life (2008), and the collection of essays in State, Space, World (2009). Stanek (2011: 63, 272) notes how Lefebvre was in various instances engaged in personal dialogue with Georg Lukács in the 1940s and 1950s, and participated in events with the likes of Kostas Axelos, Ernst Bloch, Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, and Alfred Sohn Rethel among others in the 1960s. What Dimendberg (1998: 19) terms the paradigm of ‘containerism’, with its roots in ‘the Aristotelian category of topos, the res extensa of Descartes, Newton’s void, and the absolute of Leibniz’, and which presupposes that ‘space is essentially empty and static, a passive and inert vessel’. See Elden (2004) on Martin Heidegger’s inluence upon Lefebvre’s argument that ‘inhabiting [habiter] has been reduced to the notion of habitat [habitat]’. For Lefebvre’s own clariication of these Marxian categories, see The Sociology of Marx (1968: 19–20). See Kouvelakis (2008: 711) on Lefebvre and ‘modernity’: ‘the “shadow” cast over bourgeois society by the failure of revolution, at once a compensatory substitute and the ineliminable trace of vanquished hopes’. Such instances are theorised by Lefebvre in terms of ‘moments’. ‘The moment is a philosophical anticoncept’, writes Merriield (2009: 939), ‘an afirmation of residue, or remainders, of marginal leftovers, of the power and radicality of the ragged and the irreducible’. BK-SAGE-BEST_ET_AL_V3-180084-Chp88.indd 1463 1463 14 This conclusion is rendered politically programmatic in Lefebvre’s (1970) Le manifeste différentialiste. In this, Lefebvre champions a politics of maximal difference (‘total subversion of the mental and social totality’), and juxtaposes this with the minimal difference characteristic of programmed everyday life (which ensures ‘the cohesion of a society divided into sectors, levels, aspects, groups and classes of unequal development and in conlict’). 15 The concerns of Critical Theory aside, there are several possible objections to Lefebvre’s arguments. One might justiiably criticise Lefebvre for merely asserting, and never substantively accounting for, both the salience of the urban problematique and the obsolescence of the critique of political economy (Harvey, 1974: 239). One might also raise concerns about the ‘contextual boundedness’ of aspects of Lefebvre’s work (Brenner, 2008: 242), insofar as his work is of its time (steeped in frustration with everyday life in Gaullist France) and failed to anticipate so-called ‘neoliberal globalisation’ and the transition to ‘post-Fordism’. Alternatively, Lefebvre has been dismissed on Deleuzian grounds as but another Marxist whose ‘social critique’ has been rendered obsolete by the transformation to lexible capitalism and the transformation of the ‘subaltern subjectivity’ of the ‘liberated individual’ (Ronneberger, 2008). Perhaps Lefebvre’s most vehement critic, however, was Manuel Castells – a still prominent sociologist – who rejected Lefebvre’s thesis on urbanity on Althusserian, structuralist grounds in The Urban Question (1979). For an instructive comparison of the urban theories of Castells and Lefebvre, see Gottdiener (1994: chapter 4). 16 For example, see the discussions of how Lefebvre’s ideas were appropriated into mainstream urban planning discourse from the 1970s onwards in Gilbert and Dikeç (2008) and Stanek (2011). 17 See e.g. Boyer (2014) and Purcell (2013). 18 For examples of other research in these areas, see the website of the Urban Theory Lab at www. urbantheorylab.net (accessed 31 August 2016). REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor W. (2001) The Culture Industry. London: Routledge (1st edn, 1991). 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