Henri Lefebvre

“The city can be defined as a place where differences encounter, acknowledge, and explore one another, and affirm or cancel out one another. Distances in space and time are replaced with opposites, contrasts, and superimpositions, and with the coexistence of multiple realities.”



-Christian Schmid, interpreting Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of the urban (from: The Urban Revolution, De l'État, tome IV: lec contradictions de l'État moderne, The Production of Space), In: Cities for People, Not For Profit - Critical urban theory and the right to the city, 2012, New York: Routledge.

But following Lefebvre’s reasoning, there is no fixed definition, and never will be:

“The concept of the city no longer corresponds to a social object […] However, the city has a historical existence that is impossible to ignore. Small and midsize cities will be around for some time. An image or representation of the city can perpetuate itself, survive its conditions, inspire an ideology and urbanist projects. In other words, the "real” sociological “object” is an image and an ideology!“

-Henri Lefebvre (in: The Urban Revolution, p. 57)

Christian Schmid (2012) responds:

”Actually, Lefebvre derives his understanding of urbanization as a reshaping and colonization of rural areas by an urban fabric as well as a fundamental transformation of urban cities. The consequence of this transformation is the dissolution of the city itself: for Lefebvre, the city can no longer be understood as an object or as a definable unit. It is instead a historical category that is disappearing as urbanization progresses. This also means that the term city becomes problematic. How can the urban still be theoretically grasped under conditions in which society as a whole has been urbanized?“

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This is part of a series of definitions of cities featured on City Breaths. The aim is to collect definitions from different perspectives. The definitions will tell us something about what the role of urban space is in sustaining human life, the way we experience and perceive urban space and the sensations it creates in us. You are welcome to add more definitions. The other definitions can be read here.