Narrating the Organic City: A Lefebvrian Approach to City Planning, the Novel, and Urban Theory in Spain

Abstract

concept for the urban planners of the 1800s and 1900s to justify their large-scale city plans, a few twentieth-century writers appropriate it as a key tool in the contestation of the overly rational design of city-space. For these writers, the city is neither a simple coherent system nor an abstract totality, but an evolving totality constituted through difference and the same inner contradictions recounted in Marx’s 1867 critique Capital. The famous anti-urbanist Jane Jacobs delivers a succinct commentary from this perspective in her watershed work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), where she defines the city as a living entity ruled not by geometrical or algebraic principle but rather by irreducible complexity: Cities happen to be problems in complexity, like the life sciences. They present situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways. Cities, again like the life sciences, do not exhibit one problem in organized complexity, which if understood explains all. They can be analyzed into many such problems or segments which, as in the case of the life sciences, are also related with one another. The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are “interrelated into an organic whole.” (433, original emphasis) The city poses not merely one problem that can be subjected to a univocal or planar logic, as the planning practices of Haussmann and Cerda suggest, but instead a number of problems that cohabit with each other. These problems must be understood relationally, each according to the terms of the next—which presents an obstacle to simplistic methodological postures. Narratives can sometimes attain this understanding. In Spain, the ambitious works of both Martin-Santos (Tiempo de silencio, 1961) and Gopegui (La escala de los mapas, 1993) problematize a simplistic approach to the urban by employing a complex narrative style that portrays the city of Madrid not as a unified whole but as a living organism structured by internal difference. Tiempo de silencio is undoubtedly one of the most important literary renderings of an alternative twentieth-century Narrating the Organic City 377