The late Herbert Muschamp, onetime columnist at the New York Times, once suggested my and Henri Lefebvre’s work on the city sprang from a variation of what psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called “the depressive position.” Muschamp was one of America’s most influential (and controversial) architectural critics, a brilliant, exuberant urban commentator, a chip off Lefebvre’s own block. He and I became friends in 2002, around the time of the publication of my books Metromarxism and Dialectical Urbanism, although after I’d relocated to France it was more often a fellow-traveler kind of thing, a friendship across a divide of water, ideology, and time. When I asked Muschamp to write a foreword to my book on Lefebvre, he happily complied. It was in that foreword that he embarrassingly threw me into the same bag as our greatest philosopher of the city, the French Marxist Lefebvre.
Muschamp died from lung cancer in 2007. He was fifty-nine. His death created a gaping hole in U.S. urbanism. A rare voice was silenced, a cosmopolitan and romantic voice for whom the city meant, above all, freedom—political and sexual freedom.1 Muschamp was pained whenever he saw those freedoms taken away. He loved New York yet wasn’t afraid to condemn the city, to correct popular misconceptions: that it was an island off an island, imagining itself a liberal stronghold when, Muschamp insisted, the record strongly indicated the reverse. New York had given us Rudolph Giuliani’s chronic hostility toward the First Amendment; fake premodern architecture and other monstrosities “designed” to make land pay; new magazines featuring cover stories on assorted religious crazies; and a host of other Red State (Republican) backlashes against 1960s sensibilities. Muschamp never got over the jingoistic (and bottom-line) fiascoes of post-9/11 Ground Zero or the idiocies of the Bush years.
His loss was personal for me as well, a loss of a supporter and source of inspiration. Yet when Muschamp was alive I’d never reflected too much on his allusion to Melanie Klein. I’d likely smiled or laughed when I first read it. Muschamp’s writing could be fun as well as instructive in its humor, lighter touch, depth, and profundity. With hindsight and age, now that he’s gone, I can see he was right on both counts—right about me and Lefebvre. The city we hate is also the city we love. A sort of negative attachment gets played out; it is the business of the city, Muschamp said, to offer something for everyone to hate, “even to present itself as completely hateful to some people most of the time.”2 He’d spotted it in me, and he’d spotted it in Henri Lefebvre. Muschamp knew, as I did, that biography and criticism often meant disguised forms of autobiography, indirect ways to voice your own opinions through other people, through “authority figures.” My book Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction had been written in a Savoyard mountain village next to a huge slither of rock called Le Vuache in the pre-Alps. I’d quit New York a few years earlier, fled and downsized to the countryside where I thought I needed to be, where I thought I could draw breath and gather myself up again. I’d been pushed, of course, because of New York’s exorbitant cost of living, but I’d jumped, too, out of the city and even out of academia, making the leap by my own volition.
Henri Lefebvre himself had spent his last years in a small Medieval town at the foot of the Pyrenees where he’d stomped around as a kid. Guy Debord likewise eloped from Paris, settling in a lost and lonely Auvergne, where he lived like a reclusive monk behind a high stone wall; he even developed a penchant for wearing traditional smock blouses. (I’d been fascinated by Debord’s wall and his fleeing from Paris in the 1970s, and I wrote a book about it that mirrored my own urban flight.) Lefebvre and Debord penned some of the most beautiful lines ever written about Paris; but they also laid into the city, its politicians and planners, its bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, doing so with a spleen that made Baudelaire seem mild-mannered. Here, then, was Klein’s (and Muschamp’s) depressive position thesis getting worked through, channeling itself dialectically.
That depressive position was most personally articulated in The Wisdom of Donkeys (2008), my attempt to evoke the delights of rural life, of going slow and appreciating nature, of returning to tradition and going backward toward some saner, calmer antiquity—with my long-eared companion (donkey) in tow, or leading the way. At the time, the Bush administration was in full force; the world was at war and I wanted no part of it; I was with an animal who was the epitome of peace. The world was obsessively high-tech and moving nowhere very fast; here was a low-tech beast who dawdled and made steady progress. Urbanization was carpeting over the whole world with concrete, polluting our atmosphere, bombarding everybody with endless noise; here I breathed in clean air on quiet pastures of tender green. Politicians and financial bigwigs pushed everybody about; this animal took no shit from anyone.
So, for almost eight years, I lived out a surreal French rural idyll, and capped it off with a book about donkeys, trying to convince myself I could make peace and quiet work. I was wrong: going backward, or moving forward very slowly, doing it noiselessly, was really slow death, a death of the creative spirit. After finishing The Wisdom of Donkeys, I recognized pretty soon that I needed speed, a fast life, a noisy life again; I needed to move forward headlong to embrace the future. I needed the magic potion of being among people again, lots of people, of being out on busy streets somewhere. What emerged from that desire was Magical Marxism (2011), my attempt to conjure a spell-like potion and to somehow tap it politically. Almost all of Magical Marxism was written in São Paulo, Brazil, in the Dom José cafe in Jardim Paulistano, at the junction of ruas Arthur de Azevedo and Oscar Friere near the city’s Hospital das Clinicas. Whenever I lifted my head out of the text, I could watch a vast metropolitan world go by. During that Brazilian sojourn, I joked how I once lived in a village of nineteen people (summer population!); here there were some nineteen million people and yet I felt more at home, was more existentially at ease, had a more intimate sense of belonging.
There was another reason I went to São Paulo: I’d hoped to find firsthand the crazy Latin American intensity I’d imbibed within the pages of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. (True, this wasn’t Caribbean Colombia, but then García Márquez always said there was only one other place on the South American continent that felt and thought like his native coastal region: Brazil.) After a while, I knew this magic existed nowhere in the objective reality of São Paulo, with its gridlocked streets, crumbling infrastructure, and grinding poverty that afflicted the bulk of its millionfold denizens. The only magic I could find was the subjective magic I mustered inside my own head, in occasional mad leaps of the imagination. This wasn’t so much idealism as really making the mind work, making it come to life, putting it into practice. (A lot of people in São Paulo, and in the world, did just that, hence Magical Marxism’s subtitle: Subversive Politics and the Imagination.) Nonetheless, there was something subtle at play, too: somehow, somewhere, actually being in a city, being “big urban” again, helped that magic come, helped it incubate and gurgle in a giant melting pot. Its vaporous gases wafted over me amid the throng as I universally communed with the glorious turmoil of the crowd.
Strangely, Magical Marxism makes short shrift of the city and its problems. It isn’t an urban book, and it tackles the link between politics and the city only sketchily, only in its conclusion, via the “Right to the City” (RTTC) movement. Moreover, with hindsight now, what little I said there—between Magical Marxism’s drafting and its eventual publication—seems ill-conceived and problematic. But why does the city as an explicit object of political analysis figure so little, and so problematically, in a book written almost entirely in one of the world’s largest metropolises? A decade prior, I’d feted a distinctively Metro-marxism, an unashamedly urban Marxism, suggesting that some of the most innovative Marxism had been carried out by certain urbanists and that some of the most innovative urban studies had been done, and continues to be done, by certain Marxists. Now, circa 2011–2012, just as statisticians tell us that for the first time in human history the balance has tilted, that the majority of the world’s population now lives in cities (not in the countryside), I’d somehow made a bizarre ontological leap. I’d gone from the metro to the magical; from a jazzy, speeding Forty-second Street cityscape to a spooky, ostensibly bucolic scene straight out of As You Like It (one of Shakespeare’s most unsettling political comedies), replete with fairytale fawns and donkeys, fluttering butterflies, and Nietzschean night owls in broad daylight.3
Why the shift in context? And just what is the context of magical Marxism? How and where, if anywhere, does the city fit in? At first, I wasn’t sure, and began thinking that maybe it didn’t fit in, that global Marxist politics would have to move beyond a city politics—that the city wasn’t, in fact, necessarily a privileged terrain for political struggle, especially given new social media like Twitter and Facebook. I know now—or think I know—that this isn’t the case: the city, somehow, is important, virtually and materially, for progressive politics. And yet, how so? And what, precisely, is this “somehow”? Searching for answers to these questions is what prompted the present book. I had a hunch that the answers would take me beyond the “depressive position,” beyond my own urban ambivalence—who isn’t ambivalent about cities, anyway?—and that it would involve a whole problematization of the concept of “the right to the city.” Intellectually, I needed to be back in the city, needed to reclaim it personally; I also needed to reclaim that terrain politically. Near the end of Magical Marxism, I’d written loosely, over-rhetorically, about the right to the city as a global “cry and demand.” (The phrase is Lefebvre’s, from Le droit à la ville.) Lately, I’d said, the right to the city bore the acronym “RTTC,” an unofficial planetary charter, proclaiming the right to the global city, the right to any city, and the right to every city for its citizens. RTTC, I reckoned, are the “normative letters”—after James Joyce, one of my heroes—of a potentially revitalized Left that might equally mean Here Comes Everybody (HCE). Again, the term is Joyce’s,4 because this is the banner now taken up everywhere around the world, wherever people come or wherever the effects of a decomposition of work and a decomposition of living space strike. RTTC are the normative letters of planet urban, our planet, the social environment to which everybody is coming and that everybody is somehow shaping.
As a political manifesto, though, what does the right to the city really signify? What would it actually look like? Would it resemble the Paris Commune, a great festival of merriment, of people storming into the center of town (when there was still a clear center), occupying it, tearing down significant statues, abolishing rents for a while? If so, how would this deal with the problem Marx identified? How would it deal with the central banks and all those flows of capital and commodities? And why should taking over the city necessarily prevent these transactions, this trade, anyway? Right to what city? Does it mean the right to the metropolitan region, to the whole urban agglomeration, or just the right to the city’s downtown? And if power—particularly financial power—is global, does this not render any singular demand hopelessly archaic? Does it still make any sense to talk about right to the city, as if this was something monocentric and clear-cut? These thoughts had occurred to me more than once while wandering around São Paulo, around its grungy old downtown near Praça de Sé, near São Paulo Cathedral, or around its new glitzy, Manhattanized downtown along Avenida Paulista, which feels like midtown Park Avenue. (Miesian Seagram buildings are everywhere.) In São Paulo, centers are all over the place and move about at speculators’ whims. If there is a center to reclaim, it’s hard to know which one.
São Paulo’s streets, like many in burgeoning, developing-world megacities, are brimming with both life and death, with under-and overworked bodies; they’re full of unemployed, subemployed, and multiemployed attendants, people cut off from a “traditional” rural past yet excluded from the trappings of a “modern” future, too. For these urban dwellers, “the right to the city” serves no purpose either as a working concept or a political program. It remains at a too-high level of abstraction to be anything that is existentially meaningful in everyday life. Put a little differently: The right to the city politicizes something that is too vast and at the same time too narrow, too restrictive and unfulfilling, too empty a signifier to inspire collective retribution. At least this is my working hypothesis, the thesis I want to explore in the discussion that follows.
The other thing that’s become evident is how “the right to this and that” has been proclaimed so frequently by leftists, in so many different walks of life, in so many arenas, that the concept is now pretty much a political banality. For rightists, the “rights” issue undergirds a lot of conservative thinking about personal responsibility and individual freedom. Be it Tea Party or Tory Party, the Right on both sides of the Atlantic now defiantly champions rights, peddling the right of (wealthy) citizens to challenge public service providers and to contest, opt out, and attack any state action that isn’t in some way geared toward bolstering private enterprise. Even Lefebvre’s sacred urban right now figures in the mainstream’s arsenal, reappropriated and defanged as it is in the UN-Habitat’s 2010 Charter and World Bank’s manifesto for addressing the global poverty trap.
Before long, I began to think the unthinkable, or at least began to probe the unthinkable: maybe, just maybe, “rights” isn’t the right clarion call for progressives. Maybe the right to the city isn’t the right right that needs articulating? Saying this in no way denies the role of people fighting to maintain affordable rents in cities, to keep their neighborhoods mixed and relatively democratic, and to ensure that public spaces stay open and that gentrification doesn’t displace all but the superwealthy. But what it does mean is that to bundle these multiple struggles together, and then to file them under the rubric “RTTC,” is to render them as somehow vacuously abstract, suggesting far too vast a political understanding and far too narrow an existential need. It’s too vast because the scale of the city is out of reach for most people living at street level; it’s too narrow because when people do protest, when they do take to the streets en masse, their existential desires frequently reach out beyond the scale of the city itself and revolve around a common and collective humanity, a pure democratic yearning.
Soon I began saying the unthinkable. I began to air publicly the problems I had with the right to the city; soon I began participating again in academic conferences and professional colloquiums. Gradually, ideas for this book took shape and were worked through orally with criticism and debate. Meanwhile, dramatic things were happening in the world, from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, from Athens’s Syntagma Square to street riots in Tottenham, London, from occupations near Wall Street to those outside St. Paul’s Cathedral—the city had seemingly become the critical zone in which a new social protest was, and still is, unfolding. Right to the city or something else? And if something else, what else? Either way, the global sway of Wall Street’s and the City of London’s decision makers has, at last, been called into question, contested by collective bodies in the public realm. This has come at a time when an inexorable shift of the human population into urban agglomerations has occurred and the city-region is now viewed as the fundamental unit of economic development and potential environmental collapse. It is all politically stimulating, yet theoretically tricky to unravel or figure out.
Soon, too, the problematization of the right to the city, both intellectually and politically, led me to believe that a similar problematization of the city and “urban question” was necessary, an interrogation of the whole role of the city as a theoretical and political object, the site and stake of global social struggle. And here, unsurprisingly, staple reading once again (once again!) seemed to point me, lead me back, to Henri Lefebvre—back only in order to go forward. But beyond mere prescience, what is the real relevance, the real application, of Lefebvre’s work? Does it help us unravel the sociospatial complexities of planetary urbanization (planétarisation de l’urbain, Lefebvre’s term) and help us tackle the political exigencies of urban society? Do his insights let us puzzle our way through the practical and abstract geographical problematic of urbanization?
The present book applies itself to such questions, taking leave from where Lefebvre left off, working through the man while trying to move beyond the man. In particular, I want to rethink urban theory in the light of what’s unfolded across planet Earth since The Urban Revolution and to reconceive urban politics, especially as it relates to the right to the city. I want to mobilize Lefebvre’s specifically urban writings, to use and apply him, and maybe sometimes even to abuse him, but always propelling him beyond himself, into the realm that he’d mischievously termed the “virtual object,” which is to say, our real world today, two decades on since his death.
There are two interrelated themes in this book that warrant spelling out; Lefebvre can only propel us part of the way along this analytical and political highway. The first is a shift from the question of cities to a prioritization of urban society and, especially, of planetary urbanization. This spells more, I hope, than mere semantics. Indeed, it’s an appeal to open up our perceptual parameters, to stretch them out, to initiate a perspectival shift from how we’ve traditionally seen cities. In fact, it marks a call to abandon the term “city” itself, to give up the ghost of thinking in terms of absolutes—of entities with borders and clear demarcations between what’s inside and what’s outside. It suggests, instead, something new, something futuristic, something that embraces urban becoming. It suggests something akin to Fredric Jameson’s advocacy for a new “cognitive mapping,” a new way to reposition how we look at ourselves and our world, one that helps us come to terms with the “hyperspace” of late capitalism on the global stage.5 Jameson invoked city planner Kevin Lynch, whose Image of the City (1960), Jameson reckoned, limited itself to the problems of city form, of city imageability, especially lack of it. Yet, for Jameson, this idea of imageability, of cognitive mapping, of finding one’s sensory and perceptual bearings, becomes “extraordinarily suggestive” when projected onto some larger conceptual and political terrain, and maybe—though Jameson never says so—projected onto the plane of planetary urbanization. Perhaps a new cognitive map is more pressing than ever before, offering a new way to conceive a theoretical object that is no longer a physical object, and a new way of reclaiming a nonobject as a political object. How to give form to a reality that is now seemingly formless? And how to recenter oneself on a planet in which urbanization creates a decentered polycentricity?
In a way, Lefebvre proposed the like in The Urban Revolution, a position dramatized by his appeal in the first chapter to move “From the City to Urban Society.” The shift is profound and disconcerting in equal measure; one, I will argue, on a par with what Einstein did in the physical sciences, and one that requires daring to come to terms with its analytical and political implications. In this respect, my friend Herbert Muschamp still proves helpful in any conceptual reframing. In the foreword he wrote to my book, Muschamp thought Lefebvre in The Urban Revolution had “pulled the plug on formalism.”6 “That was his decisive contribution,” Muschamp said, “to those who regard buildings primarily as pieces of the city, not as autonomous works of art.” Muschamp hastened to add that this disconnect represented an expansion of aesthetic values, not a denial of them. “What Lefebvre rescinded,” said Muschamp, “was the equation of aesthetics with the simplistic brand of formalism promoted by New York’s Museum of Modern Art.” Muschamp had in mind the doyen of American high-modernism, Philip Johnson, who espoused such a brand of architecture, one that was about the moving and shaping of geometric forms in two or three dimensions. All else was sociology, not architecture, said Johnson. Because Muschamp had abandoned formalism, his writing, Johnson concluded, with typical certitude, “isn’t about architecture, of course.”7
But Lefebvre’s rejection of this sort of formalism—of the specific credence that a work’s artistic value (be it a painting, a building, or even a whole city) is determined by its form—could only give rise to another sort of formalism whose critical test is whether it emphasizes an aspect of the truth or whether it can create a new truth. We might remember that there’s nothing formless as such about Lefebvre’s conception of space; he was keen to emphasize that space is global, fragmented, and hierarchal in one fell swoop. Its mosaic is stunningly complex, punctuated and textured by centers and peripheries all over the place, yet it is a mosaic in which the “commodity-form” gives this patterning its determining definition. The “commodity-form” of space is thus bounded, even if its “value-form” is somehow boundless. The “commodity-form” vis-à-vis the “value-form” is the key distinction Marx makes at the beginning of Capital. It was one way, after all, in which he could talk about how things have particularity and generality at the same time; they have intrinsic form yet are also extrinsically formless. Although Marx applies these analytical and methodological insights to understand time, to figure out the link between labor-time and “the immense accumulation of commodities,” Lefebvre raises the stakes of the game to talk about the immense accumulation of space, about how space, too, is Janus-faced, both in form and formlessness.
In a text like Le droit à la ville [The Right to the City], Lefebvre recognizes how the city takes on the form of a supreme work of art, a supreme oeuvre, perhaps our greatest to date; its form is there before us and is made by us. From this standpoint, the city is at once an artistic “object” and a “nonobject,” since its “content” comprises social and spatial relations; sociological, political, and economic phenomena, in other words, whose form is characterized by an apparent formlessness. Of course, form and content are part and parcel of Lefebvre’s belief in dialectical logic as opposed to formal logic, even if the latter is the basis of the former.8 Yet when Lefebvre in his opening salvo to The Urban Revolution moves from “the city” to “the urban society,” he’s urging us to abandon not form but the standard formal frame, to reposition ourselves and redescribe what we see the way a Cubist artist might have seen it. There, to be sure, formalism plays a key role in creating shapes and forms, images and movements that let us glimpse new contents or contents that we were never able to fully grasp. (Think of Picasso’s Guernica.) Lefebvre’s shift from “cities” to “urban society” marks, too, a shift from the concrete to the abstract—and from the absolute to the relative—toward the theorization of what both Marx and Lefebvre call a concrete abstraction. Such is the shift I plan to mimic, to shed light on, in my journey from the city question to the question of planetary urbanization. In short, I will try to develop another kind of formalism, another way of seeing, derived from abstract expressionism.
Pulling the plug on a certain kind of formalism opens the doors—or stretches the perimeters—for us to invent a different formalism, to conceive and cognitively map the process (read: content) of contemporary urbanization, to see it analytically as a form of abstract expressionism, as fractal geography. What I suggest here is that radical politics must likewise open up its horizons, understand itself through its own formalism, through its abstract expressionism becoming one day concrete. Hence the second major theme of the book, really the major theme (as its title implies), is a shift in political priority from the right to the city to the politics of the encounter. I want to suggest that “the encounter” can inspire another way of conceiving political engagement within the urbanization of the world. Lefebvre himself, remember, said the city is the supreme site of encounters, often chance encounters, especially chance political encounters. But why not posit the power of encounters as the stuff that percolates through the whole social-urban fabric, through the entire zone of possible militant praxis? This is the sense in which I will try to move Lefebvre beyond Lefebvre, staking out the contours of the encounter and showing how encounters happen when an affinity “takes hold”; when a common enemy is identified; when common notions cohere and collectivities are formed; and when solidarity takes shape, shapes up.9
Consequently, if the urban process is a form that is formlessly open-ended—as I will posit it here—any transformative politics presumably needs to be likewise. If one loses the right to the city, then one might gain a capacity to forge a politics based upon the encounter; a more free-floating, dynamic, and relational militancy, to be sure, “horizontal” in its reach and organization, yet one more apt for our age of diffusive metropolitanization, one more attuned to a political landscape in which new social media have become subversive weaponry. I still like to think that this present offering has something in common with Metro-marxism: both are pro-urban books, and both endorse the coming of urban society—even if this latest text expresses more reservations about the reality of an undemocratic urbanization of the planet. Like Marx’s analysis in the Communist Manifesto, the logic of this capitalist urban expansion has positive and negative implications and is both progressive and retrogressive for life on Earth, the best and worst of times. In the Manifesto, Marx welcomed the technological and social development of the productive forces and the rise of urbanization for its “civilizing” tendencies and cosmopolitan ambitions, for its ability to rescue people from the “idiocy of rural life.” Marx was correct to see urbanization in this perversely positive light, even if there have been a few twists and turns in the capitalist drama since his heyday. This book will delve into a few of them, emphasizing the things Marx saw as well as those he was never quite able to see.
Perhaps above all else, The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization is a book that tries to move forward, tries to be futuristic, and tries to trace out the method Lefebvre himself called transduction. Transduction isn’t fact-filled empiricism nor is it induction; it is a theoretical hypothesis that’s more than deduction as well, since it supposes an incessant to and fro between concepts and empirical observation, between what is and what might be, between what is already here and what might be here more in the future—for better and for worse. My intention isn’t to brandish lots of empirical data to prove my case; it’s more to develop another “structure of feeling” for coming to terms with planetary urbanization, for representing it in the mind’s eye, and for seeking at the same time to establish political representation. What I hope to offer is a book of ideas—ideas that I’ll draw not only from Lefebvre but also from art and science, from politics and literature. These ideas may help us crystallize what a practical and dynamic politics of the urban can do against the blinding glare of twenty-first-century capitalist urbanization.
My futuristic thinking in The Politics of the Encounter has been partly energized by science fiction, including the sci-fi imaginary of one of the maestros of the genre, Isaac Asimov. Lefebvre got me going with Asimov; he made an almost throwaway comment in The Right to the City, alluding to Asimov’s Foundation series, and a giant planet completely urbanized, Trantor, whose whole surface was a single city, with forty billion inhabitants. Here we are 22,500 years into the future; yet, Lefebvre wonders, “Is there any need to explore so far in advance?” Isn’t this profile unfolding “before our very eyes”?10 I became absorbed by Asimov’s Foundation saga and some of his brilliant ideas around “psychohistory,” and I wanted to bring these ideas into dialogue with Lefebvre around planetary urbanization. I first tested them out at a conference on Lefebvre in September 2011, at his old university, the University of Paris X Nanterre, now the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. These ideas were politely received, if not altogether understood by the French contingent, who sometimes had a hard time lifting their heads out of their texts and even greater difficulty moving Lefebvre along, doing something with him, mobilizing him, moving beyond the great man himself. It was as if they were paralyzed by his indomitable authority, by his maître status, terrified to move beyond anything but exegesis, beyond what Lefebvre said, beyond what Lefebvre meant. (It’s not only a French defect: the Anglo-Saxon Lefebvrian cottage industry is almost as culpable.)
Somehow it was all un-Lefebvrian. He, remember, had once grumbled about the great interpreter of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, because the latter was happy just to know what Hegel said, happy just to explain Hegel’s contradictions, happy to explain Hegel’s unhappy consciousness. But Kojève did nothing with these contradictions, Lefebvre said, didn’t bring them to bear on current contradictions, on what is happening now, in the present, and on what might happen in the future. Ditto the French Lefebvrian Left, who seemed not only trapped within Lefebvre but also trapped within a politics and urbanism that smacked of a past Golden Age when soixante-huitards took to the streets and reclaimed the center—when there still was a center to reclaim. Long ago, Lefebvre warned about the pitfalls of the same old same old, about a business-as-usual Marxism, about business-as-usual beliefs in the hallowed “working class” coming to our rescue. Lefebvre was a perpetual invoker of the new, a kind of Miles Davis of social theory, who refused to stand still or play those old notes—that old kind of blue.
During the 1970s Lefebvre invoked a conceptual opening up and rethinking of politics and urbanism because this was the only way to confront a concurrent opening up and opening out of the world. He saw this in motion in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, especially under Pompidou’s post-1968 regime (1969–1974), where policies of decentralization, modernization, and recentering the old urban core became de rigueur. (Much of this urban transformation took place under Lefebvre’s nose when he was teaching at Nanterre; the campus itself was gouged out of Paris’s western periphery, behind La Défense. If you wanted to figure out what was happening to cities, Lefebvre said back then, “you had only to look outside the faculty window.”11) By the time he’d visited Los Angeles in the 1980s, Lefebvre knew that the future of the urban was more like the reviled Californian metropolis than the glorious City of Light: inevitably polycentric, centers here and there, stretched and torn up, sprawled and ghettoized. Urban processes were decoupling from their traditional city forms, from internally coherent historical cities with cores that went back to the Middle Ages. The fastest-growing cities now bear no relationship to cities of old and have no concern for quaint historical continuity.
And speaking of quaint old Paris, during the Nanterre conference the organizers put me up in a miserable hotel in the Latin Quarter, along rue Cujas, close to a tiny cinema that, in the early 1970s, Gérard Lebovici had bought exclusively for the replaying of Guy Debord’s obscure movies. But that was another age, one I’d once labeled a sentimental age, an age of sentimental urbanism.12 For a while, I’d thought this might be the way to go, an urban equivalent of walking with a donkey; but, again, I was wrong, and I still am wrong, this isn’t the way to go; it’s an age best forgotten, one that we should leave behind, rebuilt with something newer and fresher, with something more open, airier, and brighter. This is the urbanism and politics of the future: embracing the future, embracing full-on its perils as well as its possibilities, knowing all the while there is no going back, no search for lost time, no quest for lost space, no fleeing from the giant megacities, no breaking them up into smaller units as Marx and Engels implied a Communism of the future should achieve.
In a weird kind of way, this dangerous embrace of the future was something I’d seen and heard on French TV the evening after my presentation at Nanterre. Returning to my hotel room in the evening, merry from a few coups, on Canal+ was Murray Lerner’s 2004 documentary about Miles Davis, Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue. The subject matter was the legendary jazz trumpeter’s electric phase from the late 1960s to the early/mid-1970s and his passionate embrace of electricity, of electric guitars and synthesizers, of Fender Rhodes pianos and electric trumpets. It was Miles moving with the times, Miles shaping the musical and historical times, dialoguing with rock and roll, with Sly Stone and James Brown, with Jimi Hendrix, appearing at rock concerts like the 1970 Isle of Wight festival, bringing to the world brilliant, innovative masterpieces like Bitches Brew (still one of the biggest-selling jazz albums on record). “This was everything I imagined a future music could be,” said arranger Paul Buckmaster of Bitches Brew. Here were formless notes, long pieces that seemed to be going nowhere (critic Stanley Crouch thought this was “bullshit”). Formless just like contemporary urbanization, but somehow just like any contemporary politics of urbanization should be, too: long notes being blown, spreading horizontally, diffusing across the planet, perhaps not even going anywhere at first, yet drifting toward a future fusion, embracing electronics and electricity, letting them light up and connect our world, letting them play a different kind of blue.…
This book was no solo flight, even if the bulk of it was written alone in Bean café at Liverpool’s Brunswick Dock. I’ve had a lot of help along the way, and I’ve done a lot of talking as well as, I hope, my fair share of listening. Much of the text was spoken before being written, and the written form has been tailored and tweaked after its oral public airings. Special thanks go to Louis Moreno, whose ongoing dialogue with me around these themes continues to prove inspirational and good fun. Bob Catterall, too, at CITY journal has been unfailing in his friendship and support for my work, even if sometimes we’ve fought over its meaning. Hats off to Derek Krissoff for initially commissioning this project for the University of Georgia Press and to Regan Huff for most ably seeing it through to fruition. Mazen Labban and Nik Heynan did brilliant jobs reading and evaluating an earlier version of the manuscript, proffering pages of generous comment and incisive criticism; the present text bears their talented stamp. Thanks must likewise be extended to a whole host of others who, in their differing ways, perhaps not even realizing it, somehow, somewhere, contributed toward this book: Pushpa Arabindoo, John Berger, Marshall Berman, Neil Brenner, Andrew Harris, David Harvey, Corinna Hawkes, Maria Kaika, Roger Keil, Esther Leslie, Peter Marcuse, Diana Mitlin, Daniel Niles, Miguel Roblas-Duran, Christian Schmidt, Ed Soja, Erik Swyngedouw, Jane Wills, and the “Open Space” crew at the University of Manchester, especially Lazaros Karaliotas, Brian Rosa, and Ioanna Tananasi. I am also grateful to the editorial board of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) for inviting me to give the 2011 Association of American Geographers Annual Lecture at Seattle, where ideas for this book were initially tested. Finally, my gratitude goes to the Leverhulme Trust for giving me the freedom and money to shape up the many words that follow.