Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2014, volume 32, pages 203 – 205

doi:10.1068/d3202tra

Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis †

Henri Lefebvre
Translated by Laurent Corroyer, Marianne Potvin, Neil Brenner

Several decades ago, the urban—viewed as the sum of productive practices and historical
experiences—was seen as the vehicle for new values and an alternative civilization. Such
hopes are fading concurrently with the last illusions of modernity. Today it is impossible to
write with the lyricism and modernist ecstasy embraced by Apollinaire:
Paris nights are drunk with gin
And blaze with electricity
Green fires, flashing along their spines
Tramways up and down their rails
Shed tunes of mechanical folly.(1)
Eventually the critique of the modern city dovetails with the critique of everyday life in
the contemporary world. And yet, this conclusion leads immediately to several paradoxes.
The first is that the more the city is extended, the more its social relations deteriorate.
Since the end of the 19th century, cities in most developed countries have experienced an
extraordinary growth, kindling considerable hopes. But, in reality, city life has not produced
entirely new social relations.
Everything occurs as if the expansion of older cities and the establishment of new
ones served to preserve and protect relations of dependence, domination, exclusion, and
exploitation. In short, the framework of everydayness was slightly modified, but its contents
were not transformed. And due to the expansion of urban forms on the one hand and the
explosion of traditional forms of productive labor on the other, it is plausible to claim that
the condition of city dwellers (citadins) was degraded even further. These consequences
are intertwined. The appearance of new technologies leads simultaneously to new ways of
organizing production and to new ways of organizing urban space. The latter interact in ways
that are mutually detrimental rather than beneficial.
There was a time when city centers were active and productive, and thus belonged to
the workers (populaire). In this epoch, moreover, the City (cité) operated primarily through
its center. The dislocation of this urban form began in the late 19th century, resulting in
the deportation of all that the population considered active and productive into suburbs
(banlieues), which were being located ever further away. The ruling class can be blamed for
this, but it was simply making skillful use of an urban trend and a requirement of the relations
of production. Could factories and polluting industries be maintained in the urban cores?
Nevertheless, the political benefit for the dominant classes is clear: the gentrification
(embourgeoisement) of city centers, the replacement of the earlier productive centrality with
a center for decision making and services. The urban center is not only transformed into a
site of consumption; it also becomes an object of consumption, and is valued as such. The
producers, who had earlier been exported—or more accurately deported—to the suburbs,
† Originally published as: “Quand la ville se perd dans une métamorphose planétaire”, in Le Monde
diplomatique May 1989; republished in Manière de voir 114, Le Monde diplomatique, December
2010/January 2011, pages 20–23.
(1)
 Guillaume Apollinaire, “The Song of the Poorly Loved”, Alcools, translated by Anne Hyde Greet
(University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1965, page 37).
204 Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis

now return as tourists to the center from which they had been dispossessed and expropriated.
Peripheral populations are today reclaiming urban centers as places of leisure, of empty and
unscheduled time. In this way the urban phenomenon is profoundly transformed. The historic
center has disappeared as such. All that remains are, on the one hand, centers for power and
decision making and, on the other, fake and artificial spaces. It is true, of course, that the city
endures, but only as museum and as spectacle. The urban, conceived and lived as a social
practice, is in the process of deteriorating and perhaps disappearing.
All this produces a specific dialecticization of social relations, revealing a second
paradox: centers and peripheries presuppose and oppose one another. This phenomenon,
which has deep roots and infamous historical precedents, is currently intensifying to such
a degree that it encompasses the entire planet—as illustrated for example in North–South
relations. Hence emerges a crucial question that exceeds that of the urban. Are new forms
arising in the entire world and imposing themselves upon the city? Or, on the contrary, is an
urban model gradually expanding to the worldwide scale? A third hypothesis suggests that
we are currently in a transitory period of mutations in which the urban and the global crosscut
and reciprocally disrupt each other.
Let us continue this critical assessment. Towards the end of the 19th century, scientific
knowledge began to address the city. Urban sociology, understood as a scientific discipline,
was inaugurated in Germany by, among others, Max Weber. But this science of the city
has not kept its promises. It brought forth what we today term ‘urbanism’ (l’urbanisme),
which amounts to extremely rigid guidelines for architectural design and extremely vague
information for the authorities and bureaucrats. Despite a few meritorious efforts, urbanism
has not attained the status of a theory (pensée) of the city. What is worse, it has gradually
shrunk to become a kind of gospel for technocrats.
How and why have so many investigations and evaluations failed to produce a living and
livable City? It is easy to blame capitalism and the pursuit of profitability and social control.
This response seems all the more inadequate since the socialist world has encountered the
same difficulties and the same failures in that domain. Shouldn’t we therefore interrogate and
call into question the Western mode of thought? After so many centuries, our way of thinking
still hinges upon its earthbound (terriennes) origins. It has not yet become completely urbane
(citadine) and has been able to produce only a strictly instrumental conception of the urban
(l’urbain). This conception has prevailed since the Greeks and grounded their thinking. For
them, the City was an instrument of political and military organization. It became a religious
environment in the Middle Ages before subsequently, with the arrival of the industrial
bourgeoisie, acquiring the status of an instrument for the reproduction of labor power. Until
this time, only poets have understood the city as the dwelling place (demeure) of humans.
It is here that an astonishing fact may be explained: the socialist world has only slowly and
belatedly become aware of the immensity of urban questions and of their decisive nature for
building a new society. This represents a third paradox.
Yet, serious dangers weigh upon the city in general and upon each city in particular.
These dangers are aggravated daily. Cities are made doubly dependent upon technocracy
and bureaucracy—in a word, upon institutions. Indeed, the institutional is the enemy of
urban life (la vie urbaine), whose fate it freezes. In the new towns the signs of technocracy
are all too evident, indelible stains that illustrate the impotence of all efforts to promote
urban stimulation, be it through architectural innovation, information, cultural initiatives,
or associational life. Everyone can see that the municipalities are subsumed under a statist
framework (le modéle étatique); they reproduce at a small scale the customs of management
and domination associated with the State’s bureaucratic hierarchy. City dwellers (citadins)
see their formal rights as citizens (citoyen) reduced, along with the opportunity to exercise
Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis 205

such rights. There is much talk about decisions and the powers of decision making, but in fact
these powers remain in the authorities’ hands. There is even more talk about information and
information technologies at the municipal scale.
But if such technologies, such as computer cabling and communication networks,
provide a new right to consume information, they fail to grant a right to produce the latter. At
most, this happens only through the contemptible charade of communication that is labeled
‘interactivity’. The consumer of information does not produce any information, and the
citizen is separated from the producer. Yet again, the forms of communication have been
changed in the urban milieu, but not its contents.
Another threat: the planetarization of the urban. It will span all of space during the third
millennium if nothing manages to control its movement. This worldwide expansion entails
the major risk that space will be homogenized and that diversities will be annihilated. But
homogenization is accompanied by fragmentation. Space is divided into plots that can be
bought and sold. Their prices depend on a hierarchy. In this way, even as it is homogenized,
social space is also fragmented among spaces of work, leisure, material production, and
diverse services. During this process of differentiation, a further paradox appears: social
classes are hierarchized as they are inscribed into space—this tendency is increasing rather
than, as is often claimed, diminishing. Soon, only islands of agricultural production and
concrete deserts will remain at the Earth’s surface. Hence the importance of ecological
questions: it is correct to assert that the milieu of life and the quality of the environment
have acquired an urgent, politically central status. Inasmuch as one accepts such an analysis,
the prospects for action are profoundly transformed. Several well-known but somewhat
neglected forms—such as associative life or grassroots democracy (autogestion)—must be
reinstated as key priorities; they assume new meanings when applied to the urban. The
question then is to know if social and political action can be formulated and rearticulated
in relation to specific problems that, even if they are concrete, concern all dimensions of
everyday life.
At first glance, everydayness appears quite simple. It is strongly imprinted by the
repetitive. The analyst of everydayness quickly discovers its complexity and its multiple
dimensions: physiological, biological, psychic, ethical, social, aesthetic, sexual, etc. None
of these dimensions is fixed once and for all, and each of them can become the object of
multiple claims insofar as everyday life represents the busiest crossroads (le lieu le plus
traversé) for the contradictions of social practice. These contradictions are themselves
revealed only incrementally. For example, those between play and gravity, use and exchange,
the commodity and the commons, the local and the worldwide, and so forth. In the city,
notably, play and gravity are at once opposed and merged; dwelling, going down the street,
communicating, and talking—they are both serious and fun.
The citizen (citoyen) and the city dweller (citadin) have been dissociated. Being a citizen
used to mean remaining for a long period of time in a territory. But in the modern city, the
city dweller is in perpetual movement—constantly circulating and settling again, eventually
being extricated from place entirely, or seeking to do so. Moreover, in the large modern city,
social relations tend to become international, not only due to migration processes but also,
and especially, due to the multiplicity of communication technologies, not to mention the
becoming worldwide (mondialisation) of knowledge. Given such trends, isn’t it necessary to
reformulate the framework for citizenship (la citoyenneté)? The city dweller and the citizen
must be linked but not conflated. The right to the city implies nothing less than a revolutionary
concept of citizenship.