Introduction to Henri Lefebvre's “Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis”

Abstract

Henri Lefebvre published this short, enigmatic essay in Le Monde diplomatique in 1989, two years before his death, presumably having written it at his family home in Navarrenx. At time he was working with his circle of younger collaborators in Groupe de Navarrenx on volume subsequently published as Du contrat de citoyennete (Lefebvre and Groupe de Navarrenx, 1990). (1) Although Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis is brief and intended for a broad readership, it is a rich document, both as a retrospective on Lefebvre's urban thought and as an intellectual and political reference point for contemporary debates on planetary urbanization. The essay was discussed at length in a provocative recent article by Andy Merrifield (2011); it likewise serves a framing role in a newly published volume on planetary urbanization (Brenner, 2013). Within our research group on urban theory, a small team translated piece for internal circulation and discussion; we have now obtained permission from French copyright holder to publish translated text here. We are grateful to Stuart Elden for supporting this project and for offering us a venue for release of this brief but suggestive text, which is among Lefebvre's final publications. As a historical document, Dissolving is an intriguing counterpoint to Lefebvre's classic urban books from earlier decades, especially The Right to City (1996 [1968]) and The Urban Revolution (2003 [1970]). In some ways, Dissolving reaffirms themes explored at length in these earlier works: disjuncture between actually existing technocratic 'urbanism' of neocapitalism and a possibly more liberatory, humanistic urban practice of future; changing relations between centers and peripheries within urban, regional, and global spaces, mediated through destructive urban planning interventions and ineffectual strategies of state management; and uncertain fate--if not obliteration--of city as oeuvre while urban form is generalized onto world scale. But, at same time, contrast between energetic, pugnacious, and often hopeful pronouncements of The Urban Revolution and gloomy assessments of Dissolving nearly two decades later will be striking, if not disconcerting, for readers familiar with Lefebvre's previous urban writings. Indeed, Dissolving is in some ways a melancholy retrospective on Lefebvre's own previous urban work, recasting familiar themes in a grim, fin-de-siecle tone. (2) What is meaning of an urbanized planet, Lefebvre asks, if it fails to provide urbanity for its inhabitants? No longer does city appear to be the vehicle for new values and an alternative civilization (page 203); it is instead simultaneously disappearing and being generalized, as an urban fabric is extended across world, with destructive social and environmental consequences. The social relations of city are deteriorating, Lefebvre argues; urban infrastructures are being degraded; and rolling out of new information and transportation technologies is increasingly detrimental to urban life. Today, Lefebvre declares, generalization--or planetarization (page 205)--of urban has become a threat and a danger to all of humanity rather than holding promise that was celebrated ecstatically by modernist poets of previous fin-de-siecle. It is hard to escape a sense of nostalgia in Lefebvre's discussion of traditional European industrial city. When city had a strong, productive center, he declares, it belonged to workers (page 203), but suburbanization, deindustrialization, and gentrification have more recently deported working class into peripheries while destroying densely woven sociospatial fabric of working class districts (pages 203-204). Today, consequently, city's historic center persists only as a museum--an ideological projection in a world of persistent spatial commodification; it is now dominated by fake and artificial (page 204) spaces of tourism, elite consumption, staged spectacle, and property speculation. …