From the City to Urban Society - Henri Lefebvre

From the city to urban society was written in the 1970s and has acted as a fundamental piece of text in circles of urban theory. Lefebvre was a french socialist and considered a neo marxist, he also was involved in the french resistance.

In the text he talks of the hypothesis of society being a completely urbanized one.

This can be defined as when all of the earth has been brought to complete control buy the city and it serves society alone.

This can already be seen in agriculture, much of the worlds agriculture is fast becoming run like a efficient machine to feed society a wide ranging pallet of food. it is seen that the unification of agriculture as a industry bring economic advantages for society and the farmer. it is thus under control of the economy which means under the control of urban societies unified or not.

The subject of industrial and postindustrial is raised. what happens in a postindustrial society?points like consumer society and leisure society can be appointed to a postindustrial society, be that as it may they can still be considered part of the global industry, the industry has just taken on a different form and the capital centre of the world are just a different cog in the machine, the also rely on the smaller suburbs surrounding them so they to become significant in the global industry. A town that once many have had a thriving industry but is now just housing and shops still has some significance to the labour pull or it would not be there or survive, some places might also have such a tangle of different purposes and connections that it is impossible assign them a name. This is a major problem that some local councils in the U.K are facing, always looking for a identity or sense of place and sometimes wrongly emphasizing something that was not really culturally significant. Contrary to this even places that have strong historical significance and have turned to tourism as a identity and this is there means of survival and integration with the global network. canterbury alone is a fine example of this.

Once society as a whole has reached complete urbanization Lefebvre describes it as the critical point. He describes it in the following diagram:

0------------------------------------------------100%

Lefebvre describes pure nature as being 0%. Pure nature before humans took dominance of any material is quite hard to perceive. 100% the critical point is when complete urbanization has occurred. In-between the two poles can be described as the transition from agrarian to urban.

This critical point of complete urbanization could be thought of as Lefebvre describes a virtual model. and something that can become a common goal of which a urban epistemology could grow. This could prove of fundamental importance to globalization and could withhold possible social collapse or regression on a grand scale.

Towards the end of the text he makes two for and against arguments for the street and the monument, this is a toll to illustrate the complexity of the critical phase. It leads to the conclusion that there is a variety of ever changing fundamental components which form urbanization (such as streets and monuments), and how these are deployed and used buy society as a whole will have substantial effects on the perception of complete urbanization.

This again may be where architecture’s job lies.

All Quotes taken from From the City to Urban Society