[2010] revisiting lefebvre final draft
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Revisiting Complexification, Technology and Urban Form in Lefebvre
Stephen Read
Faculty of Architecture
Delft University of TechnologyJulianalaan 134
2628 BL Delft
The Netherlands
[email protected] (corresponding author)
Martine Lukkassen
Yacht
Charlotte van Pallandtlaan 12
2272 TR Voorburg
The Netherlands
Tadas Jonauskis
Spoorsingel 18
2613 BE, Delft
The Netherlands
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Revisiting Complexification, Technology and Urban Form in Lefebvre
Abstract
Henri Lefebvre gave suggestive hints at a theory of urban form that have inspired
those involved in the design and planning disciplines. His search was for an urbanpraxis that opened potentials for new forms of social relations and to this end he
proposed a metaphilosophy designed to engage with the open-ended material
relations of cities and societies. This contradicted however his Marxist commitment
to a finality of man and society and his association of technology with alienation. We
try here to rethink technology as intrinsic to human and social life: not as means to
realise thought in the materialisation of spaces and societies, but as medium and
source, in processes of historical realisation, of orders that comes before thought in
human practice. We relate this to worlds of practice which are the technically and
historically constructed metaphilosophical totalities within which we are enabled
and act. This pluralises and technologises world, and Lefebvres urban form
becomes a construction of multiple material-technological worlds, each perceived,
conceived and lived as wholes. These articulate with one another and evolve
historically. It is the articulations and interfaces between spaces rather than the
spaces themselves which locate the places of productivity and vitality in the city. The
question of an open urban shifts subtly from one of resistance to the abstract
rationalities of planning or an authoritarian state to one of the maintenance of open
relations between different spaces each with their necessary technical or abstract
rationalities.
Keywords
Lefebvre; urban form; metaphilosophy; complexity; technology; material
hermeneutics; technoconstruction.
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Introduction
Henri Lefebvre has inspired urban planners and designers with the vivid sense
his writing gives of a vital and dynamic city implicated with its historical and social
dimensions. Urban form, which began for Lefebvre with the marking out of an
abstractspace, religious and political in character, ... evolved [as] a space whichwas relativised and historical (Lefebvre 1991: 48). These spaces were aligned with
forms of the social through an idea of spatialised praxis so that, for Lefebvre, the city
and urban life were formed together in an on-going relation and necessary tension
between the political and the historical. It was this evolved urban space that was the
source of the vitality and sociability he invoked.
He emphasised the political dimensions of this production, setting himself
against the homogenisation and concentrations of power of new abstract, non-
relativised spaces that he associated in the mid twentieth century with modern
planning. For him, abstract space negates all differences, those that come from
nature and history as well as those that come from the body, ages, sexes, and
ethnicities (Lefebvre 1979: 289). He outlined a critique of the modern urbanism in
which such spaces were conceived and implemented, but offered only some rather
obscure hints at how we could turn this critique into a forward thinking urban
practice. We can however see quite quickly the broad dimensions of what such a
practice might entail in some of the methods he used. Such a practice would
certainly not be about the integration of the categories of city and space ... into an
overarching social theory (Schmid 2006:165); it would lead us rather away from
general solutions and towards situated processes in which city and society emerged
together. His concern was that this should happen in ways that enabled people tocreatively form their own existences.
It is these processes of the production of simultaneously urban and social life
and power whose intensities and differences are at the same time obscured by the
normalising and regularising procedures that are an equal part of urban processes
that we would like to try to begin here to address. We can, we believe, extract from
Lefebvres ideas suggestive indications of how we might further his project, and
move positively beyond what was essentially an adventure of the twentieth century
(Kipfer et al 2008: 2) guided by some very nineteenth century ideas, into one of the
twenty-first guided by some ideas of the twentieth, ideas Lefebvre in any case
would have been well aware of. But Lefebvre was a man of his time as much as he
was ahead of it. His Marxist habits and commitments meant he could not easily
abandon his critical orientation to a finality of human and societal completion. This
orientation was made problematic however by his own attempts to open Marxist
thinking in what he called a metaphilosophy, which involved a concerted
engagement with the realities of events and developments in a combination of theory
and praxis. We will identify parallel commitments to materiality and an openness of
becoming in a hermeneutical philosophy of science and in a contemporary science
of complexity and use these to understand the shift implied from a dualist
metaphysics which started with philosophy or theory and regarded thought asoriginary, to an originary logic of inhabitation involving human technique and world.
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Lefebvre struggled in particular with a Marxist vision of an alienating
technology. We will identify another technology that makes it a foundation of all
social praxis and enablement. This is an idea that suggests also an essential
historicity and contingency of real-world implementations of technologies.
Technology here would be neither category nor form in its own right, rathertechnologies would be contingently and strategically enrolled in forms of human and
social praxis, even while the praxes themselves would be inconceivable without the
technologies. The concepts we use to represent these forms are those of
differential and world. We aim to demonstrate how these adjustments to Lefebvres
thinking may lead relatively seamlessly into, and support his theory of urban form.
Such a theory will see the urban as a construction of multiple spaces produced in
different historical moments, formed as differentials of objects, subjects and
practices, and creating, in their articulations with each other, the characteristic and
vital places of cities.
Beyond philosophy
Lefebvre never intended his writing as a guide for urban planners and
designers. His was a critical writing, carried out in an open version of Marxism
(Charnock 2010). There was at the same time however a strong creative or
constructive theme running through it tied to his conception of space and its
production. His view of the city was founded around a conception of urban society
and spatial developments he called mondialisation. He saw changes occurring in
the conditions of our inhabitation of our planet and saw these developments as tied
to changes in social and urban relations. He tried to think these issues beyondphilosophy and its speculative abstractions and in relation to an urban society
embodied in its own material relations (Lefebvre 2003: 64). Urban reality was for him
something more than a social or political-economic product, it was a productive force
in its own right, producing social relations as well as expressing them (Lefebvre
2003: 15).
Lefebvre criticised structuralist Marxism for its determinism and denial of the
openings of history and becoming (Elden 2004: 24). He well understood the
problems of escaping closure and achieving an open praxis in existing models:
philosophy would, according to Lefebvre, always aim for totality and synthesis,
attempting to detach its concepts from the contexts and philosophical architectures
in which they arose (Lefebvre 2003: 63-64). His metaphilosophy on the other hand
refused a disembodied synthesis and sought to enter into a relationship with the real.
His method was to get back from the object (product or work) to the activity that
produced and/or created it. It is the only way ... to illuminate the objects nature, or, if
you will the objects relationship to nature, and reconstitute the process of its genesis
and the development of its meaning. All other ways of proceeding can succeed only
in constructing an abstract objecta model (Lefebvre 1991: 113). His aim was to
undermine dualisms of structure and agency, theory and practice, and go beyond
them. Philosophy was no help here. It had, according to Lefebvre, not resolved thecontradictions around the gap between the conceived and the lived.[1] In place of
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the analytical procedures of geography, demography, history, psychology and
sociology, he proposed we consider the city as a differential, or complex of real
relations. The differential space Lefebvre proposed was pure form: a place of
encounter, assembly, simultaneity. This form has no specific content, but is a centre
of attraction and life. It is an abstraction, but unlike a metaphysical entity, the urbanis a concrete abstraction, associated with practice (Lefebvre 2003: 118-119). This
form absorbs ... contents ... combines them actively in a totality or virtual synthesis,
which does not need philosophy for its fulfilment but can simply be recognised as a
channel (strategy) for action (Lefebvre 2003: 122).
For Lefebvre any closure of the social portended a marginalisation of civil
society and its domination by what he called absolute politics, where powerwas
drained out of everyday sociality and its situations and surrendered to an
increasingly abstract and authoritarian state and its knowledge institutions. Lefebvre
refused this imposition of a universal rationality over life, recognising instead the
autonomy of the practical and material constellations that constituted life. He aimed
to go also beyond urbanism, which was forhim an ideology that failed to grasp the
urban because it understood it as a closed system of coded oppositions like public
and private or work and residence that denied historical becoming and its promise
of an open sociality. He was concerned with the complexification (Lefebvre 2003:
45) of an urban social order by which he meant something other than the simple
complication of things already defined. Rather his concern was the reintegration of
the perceptual, conceptual and practical dimensions of social life and space.
Lefebvres call for a right to the city was not just about a right to housing and
sustenance but the right to the open city and its streets with their spontaneity,sociability and extended networks as means to the open possibilities of life (Lefebvre
1996). The task of metaphilosophy was to find the instruments to make the urban ...
more or less the oeuvreof its citizens instead of imposing itself upon them as a
system, as an already closed book (Lefebvre 1996: 117).
The totality of his other order was different to the synthesis of theory; it was
characterised by virtuality, or the way it incorporated the potential of the as yet
unmade. It was radically open to diverse outcomes constrained only by its material
and spatiotemporal conditions. With this open-endedness he attempted to break with
the Marxist-Hegelian progress to societal completion, but also with any social
construction of reality that makes the social a category already defined. It was the
social itself, its forms and content, that was the open and uncertain outcome of this
progress in a spatiotemporal process of urbanisation. However, it was in the
orientation of his critical thinking to a necessary telos that Lefebvre could not avoid
closure. He was a political thinker before anything else and his politics was driven by
the finality of the total or dealienated man (Jay 1984: 295-298), as the end of
social theory. In fact, in order to open up a view on the productivity of the urban and
the life of the city, this orientation to a political end the assumption in fact of any
social or political good before the fact must be necessarily subsumed to this other
concern of the open urban. There is no open city which guarantees the rights andwell-being of its citizens. Openness and this open right is also openness to failure,
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and to unexpected mishap or disaster. But it is this open productivity that is also
capable of opening up multifarious types of sociability and action while resisting
domination. It is with this productivitythat we are concerned. But here, distinctions
between the lived and the thought, the abstract and the concrete are erased. Spaces
are not just perceived, they are perceived as moments of practical sense; they arenot just conceived, they are conceived in practice and experience. Osborne and
Rose are correct to say spaces and the entities they incorporate are experienced as
much as conceptualised, lived as much as represented. These spaces have a
materiality which is not merely imagined but is realised (Osborne and Rose 2004:
212).
An urban biology
Lefebvre saw everyday life as the connective tissue that [gave] the totality its
structure and coherence (Gardiner 2000: 70). This seems from the above to be
intended to be more than idle metaphor and hints at a discourse around the complex
sciences of life, of which Lefebvre would have been well aware.[2] Perhaps the
closest Lefebvre came to a readily recognisable complexity view of the city was in
his and Rguliers ideas of the polyrhythmy of the city (Lefebvre 2004). Nevertheless
a sense of an order intrinsic to the materiality and dynamism of the urban world
pervades his writings and there could be some mileage in looking at him as some
sort of urban biologist.
It is, we argue, his concern with a practical engagement with the limits of
philosophy that Lefebvre shares with a science of complexity, and where we may
find a convergence with some contemporary biological thinking in which issues ofopenness, construction and technique come to the fore. What the scientist in biology
deals with are not sciences authoritarian doctrines (Elden 2004: 23) but cases on
the dissecting table or in the field in an integral and practical process of enquiry that
involves at once perceiving, conceiving and doing. He or she actively seeks out and
constructs descriptions of the aspect of reality under investigation. Scientists no
longer address a system as explained by what they know about it, even if they know
it perfectly well ... Their questions imply an open situation: what will it be able to
produce? What kind of behaviour will emerge? And the question must be asked
each time, with each new situation (Stengers 2004: 96). The scientist finds him or
herself having to be attentive, tracking, manipulating and describing detailed and
material processes. He or she is in a situation where models are descriptive and
provisional, where they change with changing determinations of significance and
purpose, and where they produce rather than deduce results.
This sort of biological science recognises both history and the relational nature
of reality.[3] Isabelle Stengers argues that complexity science is characterised not by
new theory, but simply by a commitment to asking the questions a reductive science
cannot answer. These involve the investigator no longer as a detached observer of
events subject to universal theory, but in involved and open-ended explorations of
the event spaces of phenomena. This, according to Stengers, implies a newunderstanding of what theory itself means: instead of a theory that limits and defines
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the shape and scope of the problem, and commands it from above or outside the
action, what is implied here is theory capable of taking on the singular particularities
of things, and of answering specific questions complex realities impose on us.
The biological scientist is working with and observing things that already work
on their own terms. The material under study is already organised and functional at avisceral level and the scientist stands in an interpretive relationship with it. A different
science recognises complex working arrangements not as representatives of genera
or abstractions, and their behaviours do not depend at least in the first instance
on the values human scientists confer upon them. It is the arrangements themselves
to which our definitions need to be fitted. This is often quite literally a matter of life
and death as the objects of the science may not be indifferent to their own functions
and structures. Science is thus a confrontation between human language, which is
also to say human devices, and non-human creation ... and it is a speculative
confrontation because it is not life, it is our human languages and devices which are
put to the test (Stengers 2000: 93-94).
While in classical science, theory establishes the frame within which effects
and predictable results are produced, this other science is one where what will
happen is by its nature uncertain detail matters, and may induce critical variation
and in general the expectation of the scientist is that events will set the terms of their
own outcomes in the conditions under which they are investigated.[4] Complexity
science is, according to Stengers, characterised by interventions and negotiations: it
is a science of a practical staying in touch with reality through our situated
constructions and manipulations of it. Reality here is not a product of our categories
but of a negotiation with our categories and language, which is to say with ourtechniques. Science must, according to Stengers, side with creation (Stengers
2000: 96); what complexity scientists do is create effects through technique rather
than affirm invariable laws of nature; this involves them as constructorsrather than
receivers of nature.
This involves also a different kind of subject-object relationship: instead of the
disembodied Cartesian subject, standing apart from an object framed in universal
laws and an absolute space and time, we have living subjects embedded in
situations with the objects they are involved with in relations of interpretation. It is the
embodied formof this enquiry the relation of the scientist with the reality of the
situation under investigation that Stengers holds up as the frame: the totality of
perceiving, conceiving and doing that involves subject, object and equipment
(Stengers 2004: 97). Procedures, models and equipment are means of embodying
enquiry and realising it and modifying at the same time both subject and object.
What made this realignment of science around its practice possible what in
effect allowed us to escape the dualist metaphysics embedded in classical science
was firstly the realisation that there was no direct or unmediated observation.[5] In a
hermeneutical philosophy of science, Patrick Heelan collapsed perception and
conception and proposed there was no substantive distinction between observational
and theoretical entities (Heelan 1977: 29-30). He proposed further that it is thetechnics (the languages and devices), which define what the scientist sees. The
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observer is in an intentional orientation to highly synthetic local conditions. He or she
manipulates those conditions, shifting the subject or intention side of the subject-
object divide into the technical and material conditions in which scientific results
including practical understanding and observed objects are produced. The scientist
performs a hermeneutical shift (Heelan 1977: 11) of subjective intention intoobjective equipment so that equipment embodies the intentionality of the
observational act, and observables are produced.
Material here does not stand against thought but rather participates practically
in, and even enables, it. Heelan calls this material structured to intentionality non-
objective. Model, system and structure are quite different here to the abstractions
Lefebvre warns against: models do not substitute for reality; rather reality is
understood through the appropriate use of models (Heelan 1977: 37). We will take
this material non-objective structuring to be equivalent to space, and note it is a
product of a metaphilosophy similar to that of Lefebvre.
Non-objective worlds
There is a practical holism here of whole situations of technically constructed
and manipulated material relations creating the conditions for knowledge. One way
of linking this practical condition of totality back to Lefebvre is through Lefebvres
notion of world. Lefebvre was not primarily interested in the question of the world as
a scale of global geopolitics, he was interested in the process of comprehending the
world as a totality in thought and practice (Elden 2008: 80). A source of this
emphasis is Marxs concern with realisation but it originates also in Heideggers idea
that the world ... worlds (Heidegger 1998: 126). This is the world in which thehuman and the world are not related as two separate things, but are both enclosed
and disclosed together (Fink 1960: 47; 210-211; 232-233; quoted in Elden
2008a: 51; 53). Elden proposes that globalisation comes after and is made possible
by this more primitive disclosure of the world, which, following Lefebvre, he calls
mondialisation. He quotes Kostas Axelos: Globalisation names a process which
universalises technology, economy, politics, and even civilisation and culture. But it
remains somewhat empty. The world, as an opening is missing. The world is not the
physical and historical totality, it is not the more or less empirical ensemble of
theoretical and practical ensembles. It deploys itself. The thing that is called
globalisation is a kind of mondialisationwithout the world. (Axelos 2005:27)
Lefebvres view on technology depends on Marx but it depends also on the
critique of the alienating power of technology of Axelos (Axelos 1976). In Marx
technology is a mode of human labour which develops in the context of our
interactions with nature. Technology is the factor we use to meet our needs and
further our projects, transforming both nature and ourselves in the process. Our
increasing knowledge and skills are embedded in tools and machinery which we
then use to further change and control nature and shape human culture and
understanding. Man externalises nature in this ongoing development of technique
and the direction of technical civilization is an accelerating rationalisation andinstrumentalisation with ever more of human society in the service of this production.
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Axelos, in a reflection of Heideggers latertechnological thinking, argues that this
technologically driven history implies the eventual complete technification of nature
and makes Marxist history the history of the development of technique (Axelos
2005: 27). The world becomes what technology (as a category, in the singular and
embodying a technological, calculative rationality) presents and produces. ForAxelos it is technique itself that is alienating and the history of technology is coeval
with the history of alienation.
At the same time production in thought in Marx is more primitive than the
material output that proceeds from thought. This is the significance of Marxs well-
known axiom about architects and bees in which the architect does what the bee
cannot: constructs edifices in thought before they are constructed in material. For
Axelos and Lefebvre, the world is an object of thought in its own terms (Elden
2008: 83). But the idealised thought implied here is at odds with the materiality of
situated knowing implied by Stengers and Heelan. In their thinking, what is brought
to or disclosed in thought will emerge in activity in the material-technical conditions
which pertain. A practical knowing involves equipment and a questioning of how
exactly and under what material conditions something is known. It is here our
metaphysics shifts decisively as technology returns in a different, less categorical
and more contingent guise. The non-objective structures in which we know and do
things are brought to existence locally and maintained through technique: these
structures are technoconstructions(Ihde 1997): totalities constructed and embodied
in equipment (while being modified and adjusted in time), and never simply thought
(or theory) embodied or disembodied. This radically pluralises world because the
world disclosed, in which we are disclosed-enclosed, depends on the particularequipment and technique practically absorbed in particular actions. Here we see
worlds worlding(becoming world)through technique and equipment, as
perceiving, conceiving and doing are mediated in practical, synthetic situations. We
introduce in fact a metaphilosophical basis to the thinking of worlds and the things
they reveal. It is also clear there is no pre-technological mondialisation it would be
like suggesting Europeans could have known China before ships and camel-trains!
We can begin to enrich this view of worlds, and their spaces and times, by
looking at another concept from biology. In a previous paper (Read 2012) one of us
argued that the view we outlined earlier of the shifting of intentional structures into
material has an affinity with Stuart Kauffmans idea of biosphere (Kauffman 2000).
Researchers in biosemiotics freely mix theory of language and the kind of material
hermeneutics we have been describing to reconnect communication means and
meaning through a hermeneutics of the living (Marko et al 2009: 8). Biospheres
are spaces manipulated and adjusted by the actions of involved beings. They are, in
Heelans terms, non-objective spaces moulded historically by the collective habits,
actions and interactions of whole groups or populations of living beings to whom life
and being matters. This commonly shared field allows mutual games of
understanding, misunderstanding, cheating and imitation at all levels of the
biosphere (Marko et al2007: 237). And it is only after habits have beennegotiated, rules settled and artefacts produced, that one can point with the index
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finger and distinguish this and that, to recognise rules, habits, or even objects
(241). The environment becomes a negotiated creationof the beings environed, who
shift material (and materially shift) into structures meaningful and usually
advantageous at individual, group and species levels. What is this shifting if not
technique? What is it if not culture?It is this pathway of exploration of the adjacent possible (Kauffman 2000) in
whole worlds that is the key to understanding living beings as participants as well as
factors in an historical process of constructive inhabitation, and even as the driving
force of habitat development. Biospheres become totalities integrated across
different levels of organisation, and the oeuvresof their inhabitants. They are
worlds of inhabitation, not as reflections of preconceived social or subjective form,
but as non-objective structures that support internally practices of perceiving,
conceiving and doing. They are also differentials:pure form ... centre[s] of
attraction and life (Lefebvre 2003: 118-119). We see also how these spaces are at
the same time complete and multiple. Each species, each population, each culture,
each practice, develops its own internal world of inhabitation, which will have
relations externally with other worlds. We share with other creatures the character
of living in non-objective worlds of communication and significance and acting and
reacting within them, choosing for the most part life over death, wellbeing over
degeneration, and configuring and reconfiguring worlds in the process.
What does this mean for the body and its relation to worlds? Maurice Merleau-
Ponty used the examples of the blind mans cane and that of the feather in the ladys
hat to demonstrate how we engage the world through everyday objects which
become part of our body-awareness (Merleau-Ponty 1962). We notice these objectsonly when we engage them directly as objects, the rest of the time they are just part
of us. Is the blind man and his cane a unit as Merleau-Ponty suggests? When the
blind man and his cane get on the tram are these a unit? If we say yes to both
these questions the consequence would be again to problematise a mind-centred
(and spaced see Lefebvre 1991: 172-174) notion of subjectivity and displace action
and intelligence from the mind to the body and thence to body-technology and body-
world conjunctions. This seems also to be not foreign to Lefebvre who located the
spiders intelligence in its unity with its web. This already begins to clarify what a
metaphilosophical production of space might entail; in particular it suggests the roles
of technologies and worlds need more detailed, careful and even case by case
appraisal. Technology is generalised and reduced to a singular rationality in Lefebvre
in his dependence for these concepts on Marx and Axelos. The different take we
propose particularisestechnologies and places them at a more strategic and
contingent level in enabling us as actors and producers of worlds integrated in
common languages and techniques.
We could then start to tackle these multiple worlds and the languages and
techniques internal to them through the semiotics of Greimas. In fact both Lefebvre
and the biosemioticians Anton Marko and his colleagues do just this. Differential
spaces produce particularised differences through the indexing of individuals inrelation to each other and to whole communities of individuals. Lefebvre used the
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term isotopy to describe the internal relations affecting mutually indexed individuals.
Isotopy refers to the fact that elements and their differences are mutually
contextualised as part of the establishment of a rationale of sense or coherence in
the whole: it refers ... to constancy in going in a direction that a text exhibits when
submitted to rules of interpretive coherence (Eco 1986: 201). The classic example isthe words in a sentence which are all different, all contextualised by each other, and
all contribute through their internal relations to the sense of the individual words and
of the sentence as a whole.
Urban form as non-objective worlds
The urban form Lefebvre somewhat tentatively sets out can be understood
quite straightforwardly from this point. He speculates on the original city, built as a
political and dominated space. Political spaces were purposefully constructed and
abstract, a founding violence (Lefebvre 1991: 280), a positive imposition of order
against a disordered world. The political city instituted and enforced social order
(Lefebvre 1991: 285-287). It achieved and sustained a particular view on the world,
administered, protected and exploited a territory, organised drainage, irrigation and
the clearing of land for agriculture. It was a place of writing: documents, laws,
inventories, tax collection but also of procurement and work to support the activities
of political power (Lefebvre 2003: 8). It constructed spaces that internalised and
made routine particular practices, languages and techniques and embedded and
embodied power through these enablements. But dominated spaces were only
homogeneous and devoid of differences in the first instance (Lefebvre 1991: 240;
285). They were spaces without life, vulnerable to their own need to be sustained bywhat they excluded and what they dominated. Something irregular always escaped
domination: against the isotopy of the city was the heterotopy of the border. Space
... then ... reintroduces itself subversively through the effects of peripheries, the
margins, the regions (Lefebvre 1976-78 vol 4: 164-165; quoted in Brenner & Elden
2009: 360).
Exchange and trade were initially irregular activities, carried out by itinerants,
suspicious individuals, ... strangers who acted outside political space. The
eventual renewal of the city as something more differentiated and complex was
facilitated and eventually made inevitable by the increasing power of the other
spaces of the traders and travellers (Lefebvre 2003: 9). These other spaces
themselves became regularised and affirmed as spaces: the overland, river and sea
routes of the strangers and itinerants became political spaces on their own account
by early modern times in Europe, organising, protecting and furthering their own
activities and interests. The power of the itinerants was transformed as they
distributed and organised their activities across networks of cities. Cities related
strategically with one another in an increasingly regularised fashion as new levels of
political order emerged, each with their own isotopies of related languages,
techniques and practices, and each with their heterotopies of objects and practices
standing outside that order, belonging to other spaces. The points of articulation of
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different spaces became heterotopic: in the best cases, places of negotiation and
exchange between different spaces.
Political spaces were clearly not constrained by any universalrationality: they
emerged in different times, and were constructed to specific internalaims, orders
and rationalities. Political spaces then overlapped and articulated with one anotherand relations between them came to reflect not so much a conflict between the
regular and the irregular as a negotiation or struggle between different internalised
orders. This negotiation between levels and spaces of political power resulted in the
rise of merchant cities in Italy and in Western Europe and the Baltic in early modern
Europe. It marked, in Lefebvres analysis, a shift in powerfrom the city to the larger
intercity network as merchants and their spaces of regularised and regulated trade
moved from the marginal spaces and gateways of cities to take over their most
central spaces as well (Lefebvre 2003: 10). The trader and his network became
essential to the growing complexification and productivity of the city. The city leagues
established networks of trade but also of economic, educational, cultural and other
practices, including banking systems with credit and exchange norms, exchanges of
artistic, technological and production practices, and divisions of labour and
interdependencies across networks of cities. This heralded the emergence of an
abstract space of capitalist accumulation (Lefebvre 1991: 277-278).
There are some important spatial mechanisms implied here which make
problematic our tendency to see space as flat and cartographic. Elements exist in
relations of isotopy with other elements within a field while they exist in relations of
heterotopy with elements outside of that field. Sets of elements in isotopic relations
with one another form fields that are bounded only in the sense that their relationsare internal. There is no necessary literal boundary. An element that was part of a
trading network in the early modern city was heterotopic with respect to the
municipal relations of the city, even though that part of the trading network may have
been geographically inside the city. In this sense heterotopic elements may be both
inside and outside a city at the same time. This is less strange than it sounds if we
remember that what defines an element is its relations rather than its position on a
map. At the same time however cartographic position matters profoundly because
these places of articulation between spaces are characterised by exchange and
negotiation and tend to be the most visible and vital parts of cities. An element in a
city (a harbour for example) may be in isotopic relations with other elements
(harbours) in other cities and be heterotopic with respect to strictly municipal
elements and interests in that city. The municipality will exact taxes and levies, and
will otherwise benefit through the services it provides to ships and sailors. The
municipality will also host other networks, like that of banking for example. Cities
become differentiated into layers of practices and politics without being segmented,
and it is the crossingsof different languages, techniques and practices which define
places of heterotopic productivity.
Abstract spaces reduce all intensities to internally calculable quantities, which
is why from within them the task of understanding the creative and living qualities ofspace becomes difficult or impossible. In fact, isotopy demands that particular
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abstract spaces consistently embed particular rationales. These rationales are not
universal however; their limits are also the limits of the spaces themselves. Places of
productive conflict and exchange exist at the interfaces between spaces. It is in
these heterotopies that we maintain the openness of action and evade the closure of
rationalities that make claims for universality within their own spaces. The exchangebetween different spaces also establishes however the vivid and identifiable places
that political power then co-opts to its own interests. It is this organisation and
articulation of spaces with their creative heterotopies of vivid places that defines
cities and their forms.
Insert Figure 1 about here.
Isotopy and heterotopy in the industrial city
The construction of isotopic, internally ordered political spaces and their
consequent heterotopic relations with one another has been the basis of the
relativised and historical urban form Lefebvre cites (Lefebvre 1991: 48). In more
recent times the imposition of another political space, produced under the conditions
of a modern alliance of capitalist industrialisation and social democracy, produced
the extensions of European cities of the 19th and early 20th centuries. A new space
was built out from the centres of European centres founded on new normative
models of social neighbourhood and modern commercial city (van der Woud, 2001:
194). The city was the site of industrialisation and a growing consumerism which
introduced different forms of urban life and produced new spaces (Harvey 2006).The new internal rationale of the city facilitated industrial production and
consumerism. New telephone, electrical, water and sewage systems were
introduced, and technical systems like public transportation were used to integrate
city space and organise relations between city and neighbourhood spaces. The
neighbourhood meanwhile was integrated around grids of public facilities and
neighbourhood streets while it internalised a new rationale of social community and
ideals of social welfare and public health. It was in the meeting of spaces of
industrial-consumerist city and social neighbourhood that new heterotopic centralities
emerged in linear patterns of shopping streets simultaneously connecting and
centring neighbourhoods.
These streets of communal life were the spaces of passing strangers as well as
the central places of neighbourhoods, of catching the tram and of everyday shopping
and conviviality. Though the specific contents of neighbourhood and city have
changed in the hundred or so years since their building, the characteristic pattern is
still readily recognisable today in Rotterdam, in the bustling streets that trace paths
through these areas. These still provide a focus for everyday life and display a
characteristic urban sociability.
Insert Figure 2 about here.
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The imposition of new spaces over existing ones has been the way cities have
changed and grown in Europe since early modernity. The rapid urbanisation which
marked industrialisation saw also the arrival of the railway and steam shipping. New
technical infrastructures connected cities to organise the inter-city logistics of
industrialisation, while they organised at the same time the locations of industrialsites in or on the edges of cities. This was also a time of nation-building and a first
globalisation and the new infrastructures saw the consolidation of urban centres as
national and global places. More recent post-industrial and post-socialist
developments have been characterised by the rise of private transportation
supported by new regional (publically-funded) infrastructures. The city has been
reconfigured into a metropolitan pattern of residential suburbs and commercial,
business, industrial and recreational centres organised around new motorway
networks (Bruyns and Read 2008). At each stage of this process new urban objects
have been enrolled into new political spaces along with new practices and
technologies. The new spaces themselves defined normativities like modern city,
social neighbourhood, metropolitan region that represented massive, and mostly
public, investment in infrastructures and buildings, and were celebrated as planning
achievements in their own times. Each opened new conditions and opportunities for
the definition or redefinition of social life and the expansion of capitalism (Harvey
2001).
One of the most basic organisational logics of these new normative worlds is
revealed in the way they presented places to us abstracted and systematised as
stops in tram, metro or rail systems, airline destinations, turn-offs on motorways, etc.
These new normative worlds have been integrated in and with transportationsystems so that our relationships with places and with the social and cultural lives
they embed are mediated through transportation technologies. The European
historical centre, a place lived in for hundreds of years, has become abstracted to a
destination in municipal tram, regional bus and national rail systems. It has become
abstracted as a business and tourist destination in continental and global airline
systems with shuttle trains and busses completing the link between centre and
airport. Places are presented to us in place-disclosing equipment and it is through
this equipment we perceivethe places we act in and towards and even conceive
what it is they are. The equipment abstracts and acts as model, revealing objects
and places to us and explicating their logics.
But there is also nothing particularly new about this: the historical centre in the
sixteenth century was lived in in much the sense a neighbourhood is lived in today,
and for anything beyond that this abstraction was a necessary part of the way
perception, conception and action towards distant places was enabled. Place
abstraction was a character of the destinations in early modern trading networks,
and abstraction into particular and regularised times (that of the church bell for
example, or the train schedule) is a feature of all urban spaces. It is through the way
perception and conception is mediated as a technologically supported abstraction
that these worlds present us not only with the means to get from place to place butalso with the practical knowledge that these places exist and they are available to us.
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These abstractions are very concrete achievements; reality here is not a concrete
reflection of an abstract network (Lefebvre 1991: 266), it is the network itself,
technologically achieved. And at each stage of the development of these concrete
abstractions new opportunities for heterotopic crossings of spaces occur which have
precipitated serial changes of use and fortune for centres and other significantplaces in cities over time.
Insert Figure 3 about here.
Contemporary isotopy and heterotopy
Not all these abstract-technological worlds are based around such readily
recognisable forms. New global information systems are designed to a logic which
seems at first quite foreign to urban space. The Technical Analysis financial trading
style for example quite literally collapses space and time into one simultaneous
global place in order to present the objects of the global financial market real-time to
traders wherever they are (and have access to a terminal) (Knorr Cetina & Bruegger
2002: 179-181). In a powerful evocation of Heelans experimental situation, financial
traders do and see things in a non-objective system acutely tuned to the
perceptions and conceptions of those accredited to use it. This abstraction is again
concrete, requiring wires and cables, the appropriate hardware and software, and
regular updating and maintenance. There is little here that can be glossed or written
off as an effect of a generalised technology; the space is a specific, highly
designed, highly secured and technically realised differential. This system and others
like it also express themselves clearly enough in the heterotopic effects they produce like the clusters of glass-clad towers that soar above their surroundings in the
downtowns or on the edges of contemporary cities. We see however how the rights
to the city places produced in these effects are today vigorously and scrupulously
controlled. The spaces of the electronic networks require highly secured portals and
interfaces with the spaces of buildings, streets, public transportation systems, hotel,
entertainment and shopping districts, and so on. Adjoining spaces are carefully
designed and supervised as issues of security and image and the control of public
space for dominant interests take precedence over the interests of diversity and
sociality.
Conflicts over the right to the city have played themselves out historically at
strategic locations in the city, and today, as the occupy movement has shown, the
key places of resistance to the dispossession of this right are global places, right
there amongst the glass towers. It is difficult to see at this point in time however how
this knowledge will lead to direct proposals for the permanent reoccupation of the
city. However, strategic gains will eventually be won through a better understanding
of the possibilities of technological spaces themselves and strategic modifications of
their relations. The mechanisms of power and enablement exist at multiple scales
and in multiple spaces so that there are multiple locations at which rights can be
fought for and won. In order to achieve this better understanding we need especiallyto question interpretations of contemporary developments that miss both the
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historical depth and the situated and visceral materiality of processes of power,
enablement and urbanisation. The generalised global space that is a feature of
much contemporary discussion, is again a product of a generalised technology in
this case one that is new, high-tech and virtual (Wellman 2001; Castells 1989;
1996). What we have suggested instead is that technologies have a hand in thedifferential and virtual nature of all spaces and that we are enabled and emplaced,
through these spaces. Access to spaces of enablement is a vital factor of power
while opportunities for escaping the closure of these spaces come from the ways
they articulate with other spaces. We have suggested that we inhabit, and always
have, a layered construction of technological spacesworlds that articulate with
each other, and that it is these located articulations and interfaces rather than the
spaces themselves which underpin the places of open creativity and vitality of the
city.
This knowledge also allows us to critique what Don Mitchell calls the
annihilation of space by law (Mitchell 2002) the managers of the spaces of the new
economy have turned to in order to make urban centres attractive to footloose
capital. As Mitchell points out, the ideology of globalisation is a way of masking the
degree to which capital must be located. It masks, whats more, the dependency of
any urban function and indeed any human action on spaces inherited from deep in
human and urban history. The rights to this human patrimony is a matter of simple
justice; the good sense of maintaining its openness lies in recognising that
exclusionary and sanitised spaces limit social possibilities and repertoires and
engender fearful and unimaginative citizens and societies. A clearer understanding
of the urban form Lefebvres methods suggest, puts us in a position to critique someof these developments and propose alternative urbanisms that promote no particular
space or rationality but find productive articulations between different spaces and
rationales, in open engagements with the future.
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Notes
1. In his work these dichotomies were tactical devices, the task of which was to
demonstrate their limitations and to transcend them (Lefebvre 1991: 405-6).
2. He would have been familiar for example with the ideas of Edgar Morin.
3. He would have been familiar for example with the ideas of Edgar Morin.4. This problematises our assumptions about transformation: both Eldredge and
Gould and Kauffman have argued against gradualism as a mode of biological or
ecological change, arguing instead for punctuated equilibrium (Eldredge and Gould
1985) and a holism (Kauffman 1995) in which changes require shifts from one whole
differential form to another adjacent possible form, the whole forms themselves
tending towards stability.
5. Mediation becomes synonymous with knowledge there is no knowledge without
a mediating world and it is the world (and the subjects intentional stance towards
it) that mediates. The historical dimension leaves knowledge open through new
worlds and stances.
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Figure 1.
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Figure 2.
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Figure 3.
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Figure 1. Fragment of: Cornelis Anthonisz. Bird's eye view of Amsterdam. 1544.
Woodcut. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. The gate at the centre of the drawing, the
Nieuwmarkt, was and remains one of the major market places of the city. The
markets at the city gates in 16th century Amsterdam marked the points of articulation
of regional networks and internal city space. The harbour marked the point ofcrossing of Baltic and North Sea trading networks and city space. Within a century
the Nieuwmarkt would be immersed in the fabric of the expanding city while it
continued orchestrating activity around itself, retaining its market function and a
vitality and vividness as a place in the city. The harbour area has likewise continued
to orchestrate relations between the city and the larger networks of which the city is
a part.
Figure 2. 3 neighbourhoods in Rotterdam mapped for everyday events (red dots).
The patterns of the heterotopic main streets, interfacing the spaces of
neighbourhood and city, are clear to see.
Figure 3. Kaunas, Lithuania: a. 1915 b. 1990 c. 2010. At each of these dates a
different technological space was dominant (a neighbourhood scale grid of walking in
the main; a state-sponsored public transportation network; a regional motorway
network) and the city was configured around these worlds. No world ever
completely disappears unless it is literally erased so a. was still operating vestigially
in b. while a. and b. were operating vestigially in c. But relatively high-tech examples
replace lower-technologies that allowed us to use and know the city in different
ways. There is a process of innovation and replacement in the making human of theplanet which sees camels replaced by airlines and railways and the carvel and fluit
by the container ship. Networks and places already made are taken into new
dominant spaces while being reconfigured and transformed. At each stage of
innovation previous heterotopic places (as the most vivid and activity and
opportunity-rich places will usually be appropriated into the new spaces.