Table Of ContentThe Urban Revolution
The Urban Revolution
Henri Lefebvre
Translated by Robert Bononno
Foreword by Neil Smith
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial
assistance provided for the translation of this book by the French
Ministry of Culture.
Copyright 2003 by Robert Bononno
Foreword copyright 2003 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Originally published in French under the title La Revolution urbaine,
copyright 1970 Editions Gallimard.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other
wise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lefebvre, Henri, 1901-1991
[Revolution urbaine. English)
The urban revolution I Henri Lefebvre ; translated by Robert
Bononno ; foreword by Neil Smith.
p. em.
Translation of: La Revolution urbaine.
ISBN 0-8166-4159-5 (HC: alk. paper)-ISBN 0-8166-4160-9
(PB: alk. paper)
1. Cities and towns. I. Title.
HT151 .L375 2003
307.76-dc21
2002015036
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and
employer.
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Foreword vii
Neil Smith
(i.:
1. From the City to Urban Society
2. Blind Field 23
3. The Urban Phenomenon 45
~-
_4. levels and Dimensions i 71)
'_/
.. ····~
5. Urban Myths and Ideologies ~,~
/~
6. Urban Form ~
7. Toward an Urban Strategy 135
8. The Urban Illusion 151
9. Urban Society 165
Conclusion 181
Notes 189
Foreword
Neil Smith
This translation into English of Henri Lefebvre's classic if
contested text is long overdue. La Revolution urbaine first ap
peared in 1970, in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprising in
Paris. Cities around the world from Detroit to Tokyo, Prague
to Mexico City, were the scene of major revolts, connected
less through any organizational affiliation than through po
litical empathy linking highly diverse struggles, and as the
1960s culminated in worldwide challenges to capitalism, war,
racism, patriarchy, imperialism, and the alienation of mod
ern urban life, the book was inevitably received as a political
testament to the possibilities for fundamental political and
social change. Although the "revolution" of 1968, as it has
come to be seen, ultimately failed, the appeal to ~rban revo
lution captured the aspirations of the period, and nowhere
more than in Paris; it was as realistic as it was anticipatory,
and the book became a pivotal if controversial intellectual
text on the European and Latin American left. Along with
some of Lefebvre's earlier work, it put the urban on the agen
da as an explicit locus and target of political organizing.
Most surprising, perhaps, is that despite the turbulent
vii
viii II Foreword
circumstances of its writing and publication, and especially
despite Lefebvre's direct involvement in the events of the
time, La Revolution urbaine is remarkably sober, politically
if not always philosophically, avoiding both the wild effer
vescence of "the moment;' as Lefebvre would have put it, and
the suicidal agony of defeat. It expresses an inveterate hope
fulness and openness toward the future that has often been
hard to sustain in the three decades since its publication but
which characterizes Lefebvre's philosophically induced intel
lectual and political optimism. At the same time, as an ex
amination of this careful translation attests, this is no mere
historical document. In some ways even more than when it
was first published, it bears a strong sense of political im
mediacy and contemporary relevance. Lefebvre was seeing
things at the end of the 1960s that many of us, often with his
help, came to see clearly only in more recent years and now
are still discovering. It is worth highlighting some of these is
sues by way of providing a few signposts to the text.
But first some biographical context. Born at the turn of
the twentieth century in a small Pyrenean village in south
ern France, Henri Lefebvre came to political consciousness
amid the horrors of World War I and the promises of the
Russian Revolution. In the early 1920s he moved to Paris to
study at the Sorbonne and became engulfed in an extraordi
nary creative, political, cultural, and intellectual ferment that
mixed avant-garde artists with communists and a new breed
of young radical philosophers. The eclectic range of influ
ences on Lefebvre's political and intellectual development
derived first and foremost from this period as he devoured
Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, among others, as well as the
emerging work of Heidegger. He joined the Communist
Party in 1928, combining political activism with intense writ
ing that, across the span of his ninety years, would eventually
yield an astonishing string of book-length philosophical, po
litical, and sociological studies. An emerging intellectual fig-
Foreword II ix
ure by the eve of World War II, he was forced from Paris and
from his university post following the Nazi invasion and he
lived out the war as a Resistance fighter in southern France.
Despite becoming one of its most heralded intellectu
als, Lefebvre's relationship with the Communist Party was
testy at best, and, as the party's Stalinism retrenched with
the cold war closing in, he chafed more and more at the lines
it took. As with so many others, his end came after the 1956
Khrushchev report unveiled the authoritarian violence and
corruption of Stalin's regime; after an unsuccessful attempt
to reform a recalcitrant party he was expelled in 1958. Over
the next few years he published two books on Marx and two
selections of Marx's work, but he also turned his attention
to a series of questions that interested him deeply but on
which the Communist Party leadership had often frowned.
Via the themes of ideology, alienation, and everyday life, he
returned to a long-standing concern with rural sociology
and also picked up an earlier, broader, critical analysis of the
quotidian in an effort to explore the political fabric and fab
rication of the everyday. Although the rural focus continued,
by the mid-1960s he turned his attention to the urban every
a
day, announced by Le Droit Ia ville (The right to the city),
still untranslated in its entirety into English. Between 1966
and 1974 he produced, in addition to several other titles, no
fewer than eight books devoted to understanding the urban
and, more broadly, the production of space (as he put it).
"From Heraclitus to Hegel to Marx," Lefebvre once ob
served, "dialectical thinking has been bound up with time,"
and although his effort was most focused in this period, a
central theme of Lefebvre's lifework involved the attempt to
rethink the dialectic in terms of space. If, as Foucault once
commented, the nineteenth-century obsession with histo
ry brought a "menacing glaciation of the world,:' Lefebvre
sought to reinvigorate our grasp of modern capitalism b~
~~eezing it through the neglected sieve of space. Along with
